Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, your Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism. Right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh king of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Intercontinental Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange are marvels of engineering, engineering really of all types. The building I'm sitting in now was completed in 1904. When it opened, it had the fastest elevators in all of Manhattan. George B. Post, the building's architect skillfully used glass and steel to create massive windows out onto Broad Street, both to illuminate the trading floor and also in a metaphorical sense, to highlight the idea of transparency in the exchange in terms of value, something that had been opaque for centuries. Even the air conditioning system that keeps us cool in summer and warm in winter was revolutionary for its time. A system that has been constantly upgraded, especially important amid pandemic.
Josh King:
And beyond the bricks and mortar of the modern exchange, the imagination that goes into the engineering of our trading systems boggles the mind. At the beginning of the pandemic for example, the systems of the NYSE Group recorded a record of 356 billion electronic messages, orders, quotes and trades in a single day to help keep the global financial system afloat. Keeping things afloat is what ICE is great at. In other words, problem solving.
Josh King:
A system is broken or doesn't work as well as it should, well, how do you fix it, improve it, strengthen it? That's what's kept Jeff Sprecher up at night for just about a quarter of a century since he bought the struggling continental power exchange in 1997 for a dollar and retooled it into ICE, a global network of transparent exchanges in clearing houses and technology and data services business, now with a market cap of nearly 75 billion. So what keeps Jeff up at night now? He's enjoying watching other people solve their problems. No matter how different than running a global exchange, it's the passion, creativity and authenticity in the work that fascinates the engineer and frankly, anyone who loves watching people work tirelessly and with a sense of joy to achieve their dreams.
Josh King:
A few weeks ago, after I'd said that I'd exhausted my favorite offerings on the mainstream entertainment channels, Jeff suggested I watch a few episodes of Odd Life Crafting, the ongoing YouTube journey of Eduardo Duca Cassol and Roberta Becker Montibeller, a pair of young Brazilian engineers for whom there seems to be nothing they can't fix, improve or strengthen as they can craft their left for dead 44 foot steel sailboat into an ocean going home.
Josh King:
As you watch Duca and Roberta work their magic, you're mesmerized into the idea that anything is possible if you put your mind and your muscle into old fashioned problem solving. So today, even though we reserve this show usually for CEOs and captains of industry, we're going to be talking to captains of a different sort, bringing you across the sea and on an adventure to new lands. As Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, and no seafaring duo travel more hopefully than Duca and Roberta. So, hoist this series and enjoy the journey with me, our conversation with Duca and Roberta in their first ever English language podcast is coming up right after this.
Speaker 1:
India has one of the strongest and fastest growing economies in the world with a population of 1.4 billion. Making energy secure, affordable and sustainable is essential in supporting its growth. In response, the Indian government aims to diversify its energy mix increasing its natural gas consumption to 15% by 2030. Efficient to transport, liquified natural gas is critical in supporting countries with developing infrastructure. ICE's West India Marker LNG futures contract compliments our global natural gas complex providing essential risk management, as demand for liquified natural gas in India and the Middle East grows.
Josh King:
Our guests today, Duca Cassol and Roberta Becker Montibeller, we're just going to call them Duca and Roberta from here on in, are the content creators, explorers and engineers behind Odd Life Crafting, a wildly addictive series on YouTube that documents their adventures. Over the course of four seasons so far, we've watched them travel the world, build a home out of a container, breathe life into an old sailboat and set sail along the Brazilian coast, all while documenting and sharing their adventures with there are now more than 240,000 subscribers across the world. Welcome, Duca and Roberta, Inside the ICE House.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Thanks for Having us here.
Duca Cassol:
Thanks so much, our pleasure.
Josh King:
Guys, we are just a few blocks away from the mouth of the Hudson River named for the English Explorer, Henry Hudson, who in 1607 and 1608, sailed his ship, the Half Moon toward Albany in search of a northwest passage to Asia. Is your ship, Odd, ready for such a journey in the next season?
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, that's the main thing we always wanted to have a boat that could take us anywhere. That doesn't mean we are going to go everywhere, but that means that we are free to dream and to reach anywhere. Our boat right now, I would say is not yet prepared to go to Antarctica, but has the foundation to be a boat that goes to Antarctica, and that's the most challenging thing you can do, is basically press the Drake and go to Antarctica. So if we can do that, that means we can go anywhere.
Josh King:
You've got a growing number of subscribers and followers across YouTube, Instagram and Patreon. I mentioned 240,000 in the introduction, but perhaps a quick introduction from the two of you is a good place to start. Who exactly is Roberta and Duca?
Duca Cassol:
I would say we're a curious couple. We are really curious to see different things and to explore, and I think having a YouTube channel and traveling the world is a really nice way to explore, but at the same time, have people to help us explore. Because one thing is to buy a ticket and go to Bali, the other thing is, get your sailboat, sail all the way to Bali and when you get there, there are people that actually know you and that want to show you the island. So the channel is a way of us meeting new people, meeting new stories and experiencing the world because I think the world is such a big place but at the same time, such a small place that the Internet's helping to connect them, all these stories together.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
And with the boat, we are taking our home with us into this journey, so it's a different way of traveling. And I didn't know it was possible until Duca started reading books and sending the books for me to read. So I think it's a new way of traveling that people are getting to know more and more about it.
Josh King:
I've watched a bunch of episodes, Duca with your power drill in your hand, installing for example a power inverter beneath the chart table of Odd. It brought me back 18 years to the Sir Francis Drake Passage aboard of Moorings, Beneteau 50 in the British Virgin Islands, desperate to fix a blown invert, so I could continue work on my laptop in the middle of nowhere. And I was completely helpless. How did you teach yourself to be an electrician?
Duca Cassol:
That's funny, you need to meet the right friends. We don't know anything about what we do, we just keep meeting people and somehow, everyone helps a little bit. For example, electricity, we met on the first week of the boatyard we went for lunch, there's a small cafe on the boatyard and we went for lunch and we met two guys that are still our friends until now, and one of them is the third generation of electrical engineers in his family. And he knows everything about that. So I'm like I just need to become friends with him and he teaches me. So in the beginning, he would do it by himself and then he would show me how to do it. And now we don't really need support anymore. Of course, every now and then, I give him a call and be like, "Hey Fred, how do I do this or how do I do that? Should I do this or that?"
Duca Cassol:
And in a way, if you do it slow, I strongly believe in baby steps. If you take one step a time, you can get anywhere. If you take one step a time, you can learn about electricity, about inverters, chargers. And we also do a lot of partnerships with companies that supplies us equipment. And when we do that, much more than equipment is the consultants. It's someone that I can call, that I can ask. And every time you call them, every time you send an email, you learn something. And I think that's the beauty of what we do, is just we are constantly learning new skills and new things.
Josh King:
Roberta, from a fuse box on the haul of the Odd to the latest GoPro camera that goes out, what do you think about what you've learned over these years so far about what you can actually get done with your hands and your eyes and your brain?
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
I'm also an engineer, I'm a sanitary environmental engineer and I always like it to put my hands on things and to learn instead of just watching something happening. So for me, it's being... it's hard to describe because for me, I never like the regular job to go to an office and to stay in a place 8 to 11 or 12 o'clock and then go home, in the end of the day, you never see the daylight, you are inside some place. And for me, it's a life that I always wanted because actually, I went to university without knowing what I would like to be because there was no course that I would love and I chose the environmental side because I like the sustainability and to live with less. So for me, the boats all together and having a YouTube channel to show these to other people and inspire other people to do the same, for me, it's amazing life.
Josh King:
Let's rewind the clock a bit. You both grew up in Southern Brazil, spent your time in Florianópolis, one of the most dynamic cities in the world, a capital of information, technology, tourism services, the city has more than 60 beaches. And as a second home destination for many Paulistas, Argentines and Europeans, Roberta, what was life growing up in a tropical paradise? And did you both sail and spend a lot of time on the water?
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
I met Duca and he started introducing me to this world that was different for me, but I always love it to go to the beach. So for me, it was a newer that I didn't know it existed and this is our third sailboat. So we started smaller with a 19 foot sailboat and then a 26 foot sailboat, and now it's a 44. So we started growing this and I can't wait to go to warmer places and start enjoying the boat because now, our city is a little bit cold, we are not going inside the water and enjoying the boat and this life.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
And actually, I didn't know Florianópolis was this great until I started traveling. So the first time I went outside the country was when we went to Australia in 2007 and I started doing compilations and I started seeing how beautiful is our city and how clean is our city. And I started doing the compilations and now, I know that our city is beautiful. And I started studying a lot more about our city because we want to show the city for the viewers because we spent two months in our hometown. So I started searching more about the town to show others about the town, it was another world for me.
Duca Cassol:
Basically, we also take things for granted sometimes, I think it's the nature of the human being too. You live in a beautiful place but you don't think about it. You're used to it, you've been there for 38 years. So until you go out and you see other things, sometimes you don't even realize your own backyard is really nice.
Josh King:
I saw you leave your comfort zone in your very first episode, you are in Australia, you have this, what looks like an amazing lecture room for engineering with that video display in the middle and students in the round with all the technology that surrounds them. What is so interesting about both of you is you come from this common love of engineering, different disciplines within engineering, but this idea of problem solving that I talked about earlier, what drew you to the idea of engineering? You could have been into biology, you could have been into English or literature or anything else. You are problem solvers and engineers, why?
Duca Cassol:
Actually engineering is my second degree. When I was 19, I went to business school for six years. And I always thought for some years that if I would go back in time, I would do engineering instead of business. And then when I was 27, I'm like, it's not too late, why don't I start again over again? And then I went to engineering school. The reason why to be honest, is a really simple reason because I wanted to know how you can make a building stand up and not fall. I always wanted to be a structural engineer and that's why we went to Australia, I went to start a master degree in structural engineering because I'm curious about materials, I'm curious about the resistance of materials and how things stand.
Duca Cassol:
And in a way somehow, even though we are not engineers anymore supposedly, what we do has a lot to do with engineering. The materials of the boat and how we design solutions of the boat, we did a lot of modifications on the boat that our knowledge of engineering and the way we can see the forces and understand the stresses of the material help a lot on what we do.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Like the plumbing system.
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, the plumbing but also for example, the sailing system, like the stays and how we change the cables for the sails and we put in a different position and we need to consider the forces and everything in the end is related to engineering.
Josh King:
Roberto, while you were in Australia with Duca, you took this intensive English course and throughout your episodes, we watch you becoming increasingly proficient in English, speaking the language, even correcting his English from time to time. Why was learning English so important and how does learning a new language shape the way you understand other cultures and also your own?
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
When we were in Australia, I was studying just English and we started speaking English between us. The first idea was to stay a little bit more in Australia and English was important to get the resident's visa. So the idea was for me to learn and to feel comfortable with the language, to find a job in there in engineering area, and I think English worldwide is the language that everyone speaks. So it's a way of getting to know other cultures and I think our channel is in English because we want to travel and know people and English is a way of communicating, and I think it's the most important thing to learn a language that you can communicate with others no matter where you go.
Duca Cassol:
It's funny because sometimes if you don't know how to properly communicate, because one thing is to know how to buy a coffee in a language. The other thing is how to maintain a conversation in the language. And I can say but for myself, I've been speaking English I would say for the past 23 years maybe, and it became something that's natural. I'm not saying I'm good at English, I do a lot of mistakes. There's a lot of words that I don't know, but I learned how to have the fluency, I learned how to change the word. If I don't know a word, I just substitute for something else and I can maintain a conversation. And I know how many good experiences that brought to me. One of the reasons why I always wanted to be a channel that is fully in English is because I wanted Roberta to have the same experience as I had already.
Duca Cassol:
And for a while, it was tough because before the channel, we would travel and someone would ask, "So what's your name?" And she would look to me and say, "Can you answer my name?" And then, "Oh, do you have sisters?" And she would look to me, I'm like, "No, you need to have your own legs, and it's important because you are going to have so many more experiences that... you will understand in the future." And now she do understand, and that was like a commitment. In Australia, we spent three months, literally we wouldn't speak Portuguese to each other. But Roberta English's getting much, much better and also because Roberta is responsible for subtitles. We do subtitles in Portuguese, Spanish and English every video.
Josh King:
The output of work is amazing and when you watch from the early episodes on, you realize how things are not always smooth sailing as they say, things can go, you can get in a fight, even the best laid plans can go awry. And about six months into Duca's program in Australia, you realized that it wasn't right for you and again, you packed up your things, but this time, you head to Bali, Thailand and New Zealand for this six month long sabbatical. Why travel to those places and what did you learn along the way?
Duca Cassol:
Indonesia was the cheapest place we could go and we could afford to spend a long time because we were not traveling as tourists, that was like we had a goal. We went on a trip, that was actually four months, and we had a goal, it was literally four months straight like 120 days. We have a mission of finding out, what are we going to do for our lives from the next year on? And in Indonesia, we spent two months in same hotel room because it was cheaper to pay monthly.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
And we took less things because we left some bags in New Zealand with our friends. So we took less things to pay less luggage.
Duca Cassol:
We hadn't anything, basically we had one goal, just one goal. Was not to travel, was not to see places, was to walk on the beach every day and talk in between us. We need to get to an agreement of what we want to do for life because we are already... right now, I'm 37, Roberta is 38 and time's flying. And if we need to do something, nothing happens in one year, it takes a few years for something to happen and we need to commit to a plan. So we were 100% open, if you back then get me a job in Japan, we might be living in Japan right now. We are 100% open to opportunities and for ideas, and that's when I realized that for the past many years, I was doing what I didn't want to do in order to achieve what I really wanted to do that is sail the world on our own boat.
Duca Cassol:
So I'm like, I need to find a way of us getting to our dream using the dream itself to finance the dream. And that's when we created a five years plan to get to where we are right now.
Josh King:
And this brings us to the first season of Odd Life Crafting, it was born I think on March 10th, 2017, if the YouTube posting is right, and compared to what you post now, really this bare bones piece of video with hand drawn credit role and off the shelf music, here's a clip from the first episode.
Duca Cassol:
At this point, we realized that we were studying or working seven days a week and that the dream of an Australian quality of life wasn't happening for us, at least not at that time.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Sometimes in life, we make decisions that can affect us for a long time. So after we make our minds about something, it's always hard to go back and change the plans. Well, but sometimes, that becomes necessary.
Duca Cassol:
This was one of those times and luckily, I was not alone. After weeks and weeks thinking and talking, we finally decided. With the huge economic and political crisis going on in Brazil, there was no point in going back to our country without a plan. So instead of that, we decide to take a few sabbatical months and travel until the end of 2016. To make it short, we took 120 days to travel to some places where we thought it would be relaxing enough or cheap enough for us to stop and take the time to reflect about our own lives and decide what we want to do from 2017 and on, and that's how we moved from Sydney to Bali.
Josh King:
Where did this idea of documenting your lives come from? This initial conversation between the two of you, it could have been in Japan as you said, it turns out to be this life on YouTube.
Duca Cassol:
Actually started a lot before that, and I don't think we mentioned that on the videos yet. But in 2005, I took six months off and I went to live in Europe and somehow, I ended up in Morocco for the film festival of Marrakech. And I met three guys from Morocco that they do documentaries together and I'm like, I know what I want to do for life, I want to do documentaries, and that was 16 years ago. And one of the guys, he was a professor at Columbia University in Chicago and I was an exchange student in high school in Evanston that's right next to Chicago, so we create a really good connection in between us. And I'm like, "I want to go to Chicago to study Columbia, I want to go to a film school."
Duca Cassol:
It never happened, we couldn't afford to go back then, I ended up not going to Chicago but the dream of making documentaries was still on my mind and I think was like maybe a year later or two years later, I thought if I cannot study film, I'm going to make a film. And that's when I tried to do my first documentary back in 2007, and that's when I met Roberta two months earlier and I'm like, "Hey, I'm going to go for a one year trip with a friend to try to do a documentary, do you want to go with us?" And that's how we... that means that the camera and documentaries has been in between us for over 15 years now, since the day one, literally day one. So that's something really natural for us, the dream of even before I had the dream of traveling the world on a sailboat, I had the dream of doing documentaries.
Josh King:
The first episode that I watched, it's only a six minute thing to start, it has about 49, 50,000 views. Now your 200 episodes in, and your viewers are between like 175,000 to 250,000 per episode so far. I see the comments come in, 60 comments, 100 comments, whatever, and you're answering so many of them. What's it like to interact with your fans?
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Actually we read every single comment and for my English is great because I learn with the comments and we actually learn how to do things for the boat with the comments as well. So we read every single comment and we try to answer as many as we can, but lately, it's been hard because we are living the boat, we need to sail, we need to change anchorage, we need to film and we need to write and it's been hard to answer all of them, but we try our best.
Duca Cassol:
But it's really nice because you know names that have been coming for like four years. When you see the name, you see the person. Even though you don't know the person, it's really cool when you see that someone comments something that you see that they understand us, that they can see what we're doing, that they can understand our dream. And it's crazy because for a long time, we dream of something and no one knew about it, no one helped us about it, some didn't believe in it and now seeing so many comments, shows us that we are on the right way, shows us that our dream is possible.
Josh King:
The dream is possible, you're on the right way and people are beginning to follow you so much because no sense of self importance here, but English is such a common language around the world. And let's take a quick listen of just one other segment of the show.
Duca Cassol:
But I know the channel, we have a big enough country to have a channel only in Brazil but I don't think it's fun to meet only people from here, we just want to meet people from all over, from different countries. And there are a lot of people interested on what we are doing in so many different countries. If you see the list of countries that watch the videos, it's just amazing. We never expected that many people from that many countries would watch what we do.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
There is even a country that we never heard about.
Duca Cassol:
Yeah. And sometimes, we see countries that we never heard about and that's really cool.
Josh King:
You've met us here at the New York Stock Exchange, you've earned a big fan in Jeff Sprecher, but tell us about some of the other great friends that you've made along the way.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
We are slowly starting going north in our coast in Brazil, we are on the second stop after our hometown. And on the first one, we anchored the boat and someone sent us a message if we need a mooring because they recognize our boat and they have been following our channel. And we said, "No, we don't need a mooring because we are in the anchors. But do you have a washing machine? Maybe a shower? We would love to meet you."
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, like just want to make friends.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Yeah.
Duca Cassol:
It's crazy because some channels, they want their privacy, so they don't want the boat to be recognized. The reason why we have orange boat is because we don't want to lose opportunities. Sometimes, we might stop in your island, the place you live and the video is going to be two months later. And two months later, you're going to be, "Oh, you were here, I didn't know, I wanted to meet you." So if we have an orange boat, people know it's our boat. This case was exactly the guy, he said that he woke up and his house is on the top of the hill, and he looked to the bay and be like, "That's Roberta and Duca. What are they doing in my bay?" So he messages. And I'm like, "No, we don't need your mooring boat but we need to meet you, that's it." And we spent three days on their house basically, every single day, we went for lunch dinner, we became friends.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
He took us to his stores and we bought fabric, we used their sewing machine, so we had a great time just for having our orange boat and...
Josh King:
You have an orange boat, you're also selling merchandise now with Odd Life Crafting on the show, how are the merchandise sales going?
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Duca's brother, he draws watercolor, so we went to have different t-shirts to sail on the store. So it's one of the next goals, is to improve the store.
Duca Cassol:
It's just so many projects at the same time. The store is something that we do have but it's something that we still need to do our homework, we need to get better at it because we have so many ideas but the day unfortunately we has 24 hours, not 36. But that's what Roberta was saying, we really want to do a line of clothes with watercolors. I think so pretty a boat painted on watercolors just really pretty, and I'm convincing my brother to help us on that because he's a really good watercolor painter. It's something that's nice because sometimes, you go to a different place and you see some one wearing something that you created, the logo of Odd Life we created back in Indonesia and the scene that we showed on episode five, if I recall, that's the real time we came up with the name. That was exactly... well, it's not fake, that's exactly when we created the name and that was exactly when I drew with my hands the logo go. And when I see someone wearing that, it's just cool.
Duca Cassol:
For example in Annapolis, we stayed in another couple's boat at a friend's boat that also has a YouTube channel. And we literally had 15 minutes to pack before we left Brazil because this was a last minute trip. And we didn't bring enough clothes, literally like put something on the bag and let's leave. And we went to the boat showing him like oh, we don't have Odd Life Craft shirt to wear today. And the guy looked at me and said, "But we have because we bought your merchandising." So we went to the show borrowing their shirts from our project.
Josh King:
In the second season after moving back to Brazil, you decided to build a house out of an old shipping container. You found some land surrounded by lush greenery and chicken coops, you spoke in previous videos about being inspired by tiny houses and living this minimalist lifestyle. Why did you embrace that project of looking at a shipping container and saying, this could be home?
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Duca's dream was always to build a boat from scratch and we always like this two boat because it's safe. It's a heavy boat and it's-
Duca Cassol:
Stable.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
... stable and Duca wanted to build a boat from scratch. So the idea was to have a tiny house made out of metal so he could learn how to weld, how to do anything because we didn't have any experience with tools. And the idea was to do something that could not sink before we something that could sink.
Duca Cassol:
Basically, the tiny house was our experiment, was like our university, was a place that we didn't need to pay for the land, it was my dad's land. So we could stay as long as we needed and we would go to work every day and we felt like, what are we going to invent today? What can we experiment? I never used any tool in my life, Roberta never used any tool in her life. We learned how to weld, we learned how to do woodworking and we learned by trying and by making mistakes and just trying again and again and again, and that was a really good school that made a lot easier to repeat a boat because as Roberta said, a boat can sink, a house doesn't sink. So the responsibility of working on a boat is a lot bigger.
Josh King:
I saw you sailing in the middle of the darkness, you have no land anywhere to see this boat cannot fail when either you get your shift overnight or the early dawn wake up, you can't see anything.
Duca Cassol:
No, anything. But somehow, you get prepared for that. You study a lot, six months ago, I did a course to become a captain, so now I'm a lesson captain. So by Brazilian law, I can take the boat anywhere in the world, I have the license for that and that's how I think you make it more safe, it's by studying, it's by preparing yourself for what is to come and what's to come, I have no idea. Basically we have an ongoing project that I have no idea where it's going to take us but I know that we are going to keep doing until we are excited. If we stop being excited, that's the day we'll quit.
Josh King:
What's to come is what we'll be talking about in the second half of the show. But before we get to the break, it's probably a good time to introduced this third character in Odd Life Crafting, which is actually Odd. She's 44 feet galvanized steel sailboat designed by Michel Joubert and Bernard Nivelt in France and built in the Dinieper boatyard in Brazil, ship had been neglected and docked for about 22 years. How did you find her and what led you to believe that this was the vessel that you wanted to spend so much time restoring and living on?
Duca Cassol:
That's a crazy story. I was in love with another design actually and there was one hole, was not finished but there was one for sale. It's a long story but just try to make it short, I tried to buy this boat and on the day we were going to make the offer to buy this boat, the guy gave up, he's like, "No, I cannot sell my dream." So he didn't sell the boat. And for one month, I couldn't sleep. I was sad because we lost our boat. And a friend of ours said, "There is a boat that my friend has a friend that is been on the drive for seven years." Back then, he said seven years, it was actually 22 years. But it's like no, there is this boat that I know a guy that knows the guy that knows the guy that owns the boat. Is not for sale but you can convince him to sell the boat.
Duca Cassol:
So basically, bought a boat that after we started the channel, we received so many emails, like, how could you buy this boat? The owner didn't even let me see the boat. It's crazy because there are two completely different kind of comments. When we bought the boat, YouTube comments would be, oh, no one bought this boat because it's not worth that, there's a reason why this boat's been sitting for 22 years. I'm like, "No, you don't know this story, it's actually for 22 years there because the guy never wanted to sell the boat."
Duca Cassol:
So basically we contacted him, we explained our project, we explained that we were building a house and we explained what we want to do, and the guy decided that we were good future owners of the boat. He believed in what we were doing and according to him, he saw himself 24, 25, 26 years ago on us. His wife and him were our age when they bought the boat. According to him, he had his best eight months of his life living on this boat. And he was like, "I think you guys are the right persons to take the boat over," and we bought the boat.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
And the good part of the boat is that it has a center board, so we can have one meter drift and we can go inside the rivers and we can even stop at the sand, the beach.
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, and the greatest thing is that this boat, during one year, I read around 15 books about circumnavigations and that's how I fell in love with the idea of traveling by boat. And then one of my favorite books I gave to Roberta on our seventh anniversary, I think it was like our seventh anniversary and I wrote behind the cover saying, one day, we are going to sail the word in a boat named Odd. Back then, I had no idea we would have a YouTube channel called Odd, I don't know why. I didn't even remember that I wrote that. So we were buying the boat and I discovered that the boat we're buying is actually the same design as the boat from the book built the same place. So I'm like, I'm going to read again the book. And when I opened the cover, I'm like, wow, I actually predicted that and I didn't remember that.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
And this book was one of the reasons we would love to have a steel boat.
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, it's true. So the book sold us the idea of a steel boat and then we bought the same... It's not exactly the same but it's 99% the same built in the same place, and nowadays we are actually friends with the owner of the boat.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
The former owner and the actual one.
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, the actual owner, now we know him and the former owner that wrote the book, when I saw that, I took a picture of what I wrote and I sent him because I needed to tell the story. And this is a guy that during the retreat, anytime we have a question about the boat, we would contact him because he travel, he did a circumnavigation on the same boat. So he knows about it.
Josh King:
We will continue our circumnavigation of the life of Odd Life Crafting right after this, our conversation with Duca and Roberta continues on Inside the ICE House, stick around.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Duca, Roberta and I were discussing their history, there's sabbatical that led them to become adventurous content creators and how they connect with their viewers around the world. So guys, what has been the toughest part of your journey so far?
Duca Cassol:
To be honest-
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Two videos once a week.
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Because some people think like, oh, to build a house or to refit a boat is really hard. That's easy. The hard thing is to have a new video every Monday 10:00 a.m. because we're really serious about what we do, we really want to have good content every week and it's tough to have a new video every week because you know how it's life. Some weeks are exciting, some weeks are not that exciting, but to guarantee a new video every Monday with something that people want to watch, that's the toughest thing.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
During the refit, we always had something to show because we had something before and after, so it's easy to have a content. But now that we finish the refit, we never finish refit, we abandon the refit and start sailing around and we fix things along the way right now. But now, it's being hard to try to find a content and to try to show something different, so usually nowadays, we go out of our comfort zone, that would be stay on the couch watching Netflix or other YouTube channels. So now, we try our best to experience more things to show different things to the audience and it's been great actually.
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, things are challenging now because we are right now on the turning point, we did two years off a refit. And as Roberta said, the refit, you have beginning, middle, and end for every project. And now we need to relearn how to create content, we need to relearn how to tell the story because it's a different story now. But I think that's the fun of it because if you do the same thing forever, people get tired of watching. I think it's important to reinvent yourself a couple years or every five years or whatever. It's important to challenge you, otherwise it gets boring.
Josh King:
At what point do you start to feel that the YouTube platform is working, that you're actually getting some advertising revenue? Because I watch your episodes now, I see the ads, click in and I watch a little bit of the ads, so-
Duca Cassol:
Thank you.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Thank you.
Josh King:
You're making money for somebody and how does it work for you?
Duca Cassol:
The first videos, we didn't make any money. Until the finish, the end of the house, we were already financing our project, with AdSense and Patreon basically. That was our main revenue, was AdSense and Patreon. But we would not make enough money to do whatever we want, we could finance the house but we need to be really careful on how we're spending money. Back then, to buy a sheet of plywood was really hard. It's like oh, just one sheet, not two, we buy one. You don't buy like three rows of tape, you buy one and roll off tape, was like really more careful. We need to be careful with how much we spend because we were not making much. Back then, we would make like $1,000 a month, that's it.
Josh King:
And then at what point do you attract the interest of people saying look, Duca and Roberta, they're buying plywood or they're using hammers and nails or drills, let sponsors or partners who say you could do it with our equipment come in and create those kinds of relationships.
Duca Cassol:
I always have the theory that 100,000 subscribers would be a magical number. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but I always thought that if we reach 100,000 subscribers, that means we are someone that we are actually a channel that means something. And took us two years to get to 50,000 subscribers, and then when we bought the boat, in six months, we went to 100,000 subscribers and that's when people started trying to find us and companies starting to pay attention to us.
Duca Cassol:
So I think I would say 100,000 subscribers was when things is starting to happen, and when we could start sending emails to companies because in the beginning, they would not listen to us. For example, Bosch the company that makes drills, they never answer my email. Nowadays I didn't even send any more, but in the beginning, I tried many times to contact them and we're just so small that they wouldn't listen to us. Now, things changed a little bit.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Actually the first time, what happened, we reach 100,000 and a company contact us offering a partnership for cables for lines for the boat. It never went through, we never finished the partnership because we have the old mess, we didn't know anything about our sails.
Duca Cassol:
We were not ready for that.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
We were not ready. But it was the start to start looking for companies and we started thinking that if this company has any interest in us, maybe other companies are willing to listen to us. So we started reaching out other companies and it was the beginning of the partnerships.
Duca Cassol:
Basically, these partnerships never happened but opened our eyes that it was possible.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
The first time was naive way of doing. And now, we're... the first time [crosstalk 00:41:02]-
Duca Cassol:
The last one was 100% programed. I told my dad, "Dad, this week, we shot a video," and I said, "We need this product." I give you one week and they will contact us. They did in 48 hours because some subscribers, they see you need that, so they send an email to the company and then the companies need to talk to us because they have no option-
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
But it was organic actually, the idea was we broke our windless. We have a manual windless to pull the anchor up and we broke it. It has 30 years old, the matter Odd is already corroded.
Josh King:
A little over two months ago, you posted a video where you finally took Odd onto the open seas, and I can hear the episode now as you're talking about the first time that you unrolled the main sail with the full reefing, and then the first time that you pulled the genoa out and you're under full sail. Talk to us a little bit about the marvels of our oceans and how you see them. President John F. Kennedy once said this at the 1962 America's Cup Dinner.
John F. Kennedy:
Really I don't know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea except I am. I think it's because in addition to the fact that the sea changes and the light changes and ships change, it's because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean. And therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears, we are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.
Josh King:
Is that how you felt when you finally went out?
Duca Cassol:
Yeah, I think the ocean is a way of going back in time. Nowadays, we are connected to the internet 24/7. And on that trip, we had no cell phone connection. We were maybe 50 nautical miles off the coast, no connection, just ocean water, you won't see land, you just see water. And that's crazy how time flies by in a different speed and how suddenly a lot of different things are more important than ever, just how you need to be awake on your shift, how you need to pay attention, how much deeper you sleep for two hours because on this trip, Roberta never sail a bigger boat before and I'm like, it's the first trip, so we took a friend with us. And me and him would take shifts because we had no autopilot, so we need to be at the helm 24/7. So as two hours went, two hours the other, two hours went, two hours the other.
Duca Cassol:
And it's funny how you want to be racing for your shift because you want to be in alert because it's for security. And when you go to bed, you just sleep so deeply compared to when you are in lane because in lane, you have so many things to worry about that... I'm someone that have trouble with sleeping. I dream too much, I think too much, I think when I lay down in bed is when I create solutions for many of my problems. And it's funny that the only time I can sleep really well is when we are in the crossing because I trust the person on shift. I know he knows what he's doing and I know that I need to be resting for my shift, so that means for two hours, sometimes feels like I had more rest in two hours than a full night of sleep when you're not at the ocean.
Duca Cassol:
So I don't know, it's just going back in time to a time that we have no internet, that we have no cell phones and that all it matters is to keep the boat safe, to see the dolphins jumping sometimes or to expect some winds that are going to change. And just it's funny, you spend two days in a boat with two friends and your wife and you become so much closer than you were before. Time in a sail boat is different. Sometimes you spend one month with one person and it feels like you know them for 10 years. For example right now in the boat show, we stay for a week with three couples and two dogs in a boat.
Duca Cassol:
And our cabin was next to another couple and all it divides was one thing sheet of pie in between us in a vent right next to our head. So, that means anything we whisper, they could hear. And it was basically like sleeping together with plywood in the middle and that's crazy. And we never met them before, we just met them last week. And I'm pretty sure we are friends for life because it brings people together. I don't know, is a kind of experience that is hard to describe and that you will only know when you experience, you know what I mean?
Josh King:
Yeah. One of the most powerful things about your platform and what you see from both of you, this really hard labor that you both put in to do all of the work in terms of the container in the house or the refit of Odd is that you take your fans and your followers along on this journey and they learn the same things that you're learning along with you. You always say that you may not know the answer and that you're both willing to try and you're both upfront and honest about the mistakes that you've made along the way until you finally drop that anchor at the very right spot. Roberta, why do you think your story resonates so much with people who may not have never even seen the ocean or been on a sailboat?
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
We met a lot of people this week that said that our channel is about our relationship and not what we show physically, like something that we did. But our personalities, how we work together and the relationship between us and our positivity, because sometimes, something goes wrong, but we keep positive. Like we need to fix it. No one's going to fix this for us, so we need to fix it. So let's do it, let's learn how to fix it. So people say that what connects them to our channel is the personality and the positivity and not just the content itself, it's not only batteries, maybe it's not about the installation of the batteries, but how we did that.
Josh King:
The positivity is natural, it comes through in every frame of the show.
Duca Cassol:
Basically, we always say that we are not a DIY tutorial channel, we don't want to teach anyone how to do anything because we don't know how to do it.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
We show our mistakes.
Duca Cassol:
We want to show our mistakes, so you don't need to make the same mistakes. Because some channels, they would show just like the beginning, the middle and the end, and it seems so easy but if you wanted to do it, you could not do it. So if we show the reality of how hard was and how many mistakes we did, maybe you learn a little bit at least with our mistakes and makes easier for you to solve your own way of doing, because there are so many different ways to do the same thing. There is no one right way. There is my way, your way, someone else's way.
Josh King:
It feels like there's a bit of a running joke through the series that one of your favorite phrases is finally. And it makes sense, after more than two years, Odd was finally on the water after what was only supposed to be a three month project. When something forces you to attack and change course, how do the two of you go about adjusting and making sure that you're continuing to move forward?
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
I think the communication is the most important thing because we don't do anything, like I don't do anything by myself without asking Duca for his opinion. So I think the communication is the most important thing.
Duca Cassol:
Yeah. I think actually my dream job is not just making videos for YouTube, that's not my dream job. My dream job is to have a job that I love doing it, but at the same time that I'm been to new opportunities because for a long time, I was closing and I saw a lot of people having great opportunities to do things that I couldn't because I had to go back to university or I need to go back to my job. And now we have a job that we can change the direction anytime. For example, we are not supposed to be here today. We literally decide to go to the boat show I would say like 15 hours before we flew out of Brazil. We bought the tickets in like seven hours from the idea, that means we are really open. We want a job that if you say right now, we are supposed to fly back to Brazil tomorrow, but if something happened today, we might not go to Brazil tomorrow and I mean it.
Duca Cassol:
If someone invited us to fly to Alaska now because there's a sailboat there, it would be great content, I would be like, I'll call the Marin and say, sorry, we're not going to go back tomorrow, we're going to go back in a month. When we find out that we were going to come to the New York Stock Exchange, we are not prepared. We had left Brazil already, we were on the way to the airport. I'm like, we cannot go, we don't have clothes to do that. And they were like, no, we can find you a jacket. So you don't need to have anything, you need to know the right people.
Josh King:
On your most recent episode, you finally got your autopilot set up after months of trying to calibrate it with your compass. Homer once said or wrote, "The journey is the thing. And as you continue your adventures, where do you expect to sail to, and "where will the currents and winds take you you think?
Duca Cassol:
At first, we wanted to come to the Caribbean this year, but then we realized that not many international channels explore Brazil. There is only one other channel that in Brazil, we have a long coast. So the idea for the next year or so is to explore our backyard, is to get to know our own country and to share this with the world, because there are so many little fishing villages and so many little rivers and so many places for explore that. I think before we go abroad and we go explore different seas, we need to get to know our place first and hopefully by next year, we will end up in the Caribbean. And from there, we might go to Europe, we might go to the Pacific.
Josh King:
Well guys, I've happened to find you because I was having a conversation with my colleague and boss, Jeff Sprecher and he said... you really ought to watch this. And I found myself hooked along with your 200,000 other subscribers. But as we finish off our conversation, for folks who have not yet seen an episode of Odd Life Crafting, tell us how best they find you, how do you recommend that they dive into the world of Odd Life Crafting and where exactly do they find you?
Duca Cassol:
The perfect way would be to go to youtube.com/oddlifecrafting, really easy, or you just type on the search, Odd Life Crafting. If you want to understand what we do properly, I would go to the first video. It's not the best audio, I like the concept of the video. I think it is not perfect, the microphone was not that good but that's just a way of understanding our motivation. So the first five videos, I think there are key videos to... it's too really understand our story. And then if you're really patient, you can watch 220 videos or if you're not that patient, you can skip and go to the boat straight, that's what we are doing now.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
But in the beginning, there is a mix of Portuguese and English because we didn't know what we were going to do with the channel and what... it was the beginning. It was all certain. And I think also we did a website, we created a website a short while ago like a month ago, two months ago. And we are trying to put things compacted there, so we are trying to... there is the explanation of the beginning of the channel, who we are and the boat. We are trying to create more content for the website.
Duca Cassol:
So the website's oddlifecrafting.com. But do I expect nothing professional but if you go to our YouTube channel, expect something real and made with passion, that's it. It's not professional humid, the audio is not perfect. There's a lot of wind noise but it's real, that's the main thing because we were tired of watching TV and be watch big productions that you don't know what's real and what's not. At least if water channel, you can be sure that that's us. We meet many people along the way and they be like, "oh, so you are just like." Of course we film our daily life, we're just us.
Josh King:
And that's exactly what it is. It is real, it is passionate and sometimes you hear wind noise, but that's what makes Odd Life Crafting so special. Guys, thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Duca Cassol:
Thanks so much for inviting us, they didn't even finish, we're going to spend a few hours here on the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
We still have the market to close at the closing bell this afternoon.
Duca Cassol:
No, that's been awesome experience. We have no words to describe how much grateful we are for the opportunity to sit here in this beautiful library and just talk to you guys.
Josh King:
I can't wait to see the next episode, thank you so much.
Roberta Becker Montibeller:
Thanks for inviting us.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guests were Duca Cassol and Roberta Becker Montibeller of Odd Life Crafting.
Josh King:
If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or question, you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show was produced by Stephan Capriles with production assistance from Pete Asch and Ian Wolff. I'm Josh King, your host signing off from the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening, talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations of warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content here in, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
