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As the property management industry continues to evolve, it's important to stay up to date on the latest innovations in technology. In this episode of the #DoorGrowShow, property management growth expert Jason Hull sits down with David Normand from Vendoroo to talk about AI's role in the future of property management. You'll Learn [01:29] The AI Revolution [08:47] The Importance of Empathy and Human Touch [22:21] Decreasing the Cost of Maintenance Coordination [32:29] New Features Coming to Vendoroo Quotables “As any property manager believes, we know how to do it the best.” “If you're not reading articles and studying up on this, I think that's going to catch you by surprise pretty quickly.” “Empathy is the magic lubrication that makes everything better.” “Empathetic reflection and empathy is a magical ingredient.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive Transcript [00:00:00] David: If you're not building AI tools from working with your partners, from being on the ground floor with them and using the data and building tools based upon the data and their pain points and their failures, buyer beware. If somebody's coming to you and saying, Hey, we figured this all out in the lab. [00:00:14] David: Come use it. Yeah. Right. Buyer beware. [00:00:18] Jason: All right. Welcome property management entrepreneurs to the DoorGrow Show or the Property Management Growth podcast. I'm Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive group coaching mastermind for residential property management entrepreneurs. We've been doing this for over a decade and a half. [00:00:39] Jason: I've brought innovative strategies and optimizations to the property management industry. I have spoken to thousands of property management companies. I've coached over 600 businesses. I've rebranded over 300 companies like Bar Rescue for property managers, cleaning up their businesses, and we would love to help coach you and support you and your growth. [00:01:01] Jason: We have innovative strategies for building out growth engines, for building out your operational challenges, for helping you figure out how to get to the next level in your business and one of the cool tools that I'm excited to showcase today with my guest here, David Norman, is Vendoroo. We've had you on the show before. [00:01:19] Jason: Welcome back David.  [00:01:20] David: Yeah. Thank you for having me. It felt like years ago, it was only about, I think eight months ago since we did this, so much has changed over the time, so it's great to be back. Yeah, it's great to be back.  [00:01:29] Jason: Good to have you. I know you're in the middle of this AI revolution, which AI is just innovating and changing so rapidly. It probably does feel like years ago, so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's been crazy. You guys have made a lot of changes too, so, you even changed your brand name from the last time we had you on the show. Yeah. Which was I think Tulu. Yeah. Right. And so, yeah. So why don't you get us caught up on what's going on 'cause, you know, there's been a lot.  [00:01:55] David: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you first of all for having me here today, Jason, and from the entire Vendoroo group of us, which, you know, the team has grown 10 x over the past eight months, which has been awesome. And I just also wanted to start in thanking everybody from what we call our client partners who have jumped in into this great unknown that is AI and is going to be like, how is this going to work in our industry? And so that's really what we've been focusing on the past eight months. You know, it's been a unbelievable journey of both failures, successes learnings and insights. And ultimately we're getting excited here at the NARPM broker owner which is in Denver to unveil Vendoroo. Like this is the coming out party. And so we're super excited if you're going to be there. We have a massive booth that we have set up that we have the ai alliance with other people that are working in the AI space, and I really hope that you guys come over and check it out. I promise this. [00:02:53] David: You'll never see a booth or a display like we have set up. At the NARPM broker owner. So.  [00:02:58] Jason: Now I want to go attend it. Yeah. Just so I can see your booth.  [00:03:01] David: So, let me put it this way. You may see the robot from the Jetsons walking around the booth walking around the NARPM broker owner, so, okay. [00:03:07] David: Yeah. Rosie? Yeah. You may see something like that. So she'll be vacuuming with her apron? Yeah. She'll be doing a little social engagement. It'll be cool. So, okay. Okay.  [00:03:17] Jason: Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, so catch us up on what, like, let's get into the kind of the background and the overview for people that have never heard about Vendoroo and what you guys do and how you got into this. [00:03:29] Jason: Yeah. Give people kind of the backstory. Yeah.  [00:03:31] David: Yeah. Thank you for that. So really the backstory is that, you know, we know of this AI economy that's coming, right? And there was a few of us, you know, I've been in this industry for 18 years. You know, I've managed you know, portfolios of 40,000 doors. [00:03:47] David: I've managed them for governments. You know, I started off with our own property management. Much like you guys. We started off with 80 doors. We grew to 550 doors in four years. So it was exciting to know that technology that was coming that promised duplication because, you know, as any property manager believes, we know how to do it the best, right. [00:04:05] David: And so what we decided to do is to come together and say, Hey, if AI's coming, there's two things that we need to figure out. Number one is how is this going to help us show value in this new industry to this new generation of property owners that is here, that is coming, that has been raised in the technology world too, right? [00:04:25] David: And two, can it actually duplicate our efforts? Can it actually be an employee for us? Right? And I don't care what people are promising about ai, you don't know until you get into what we call like, you know, get into the weeds, you got to get into the trenches. And so that's what we did, right? We went out and we were the guys that grabbed the torch and we said, we are going to take all the risk. [00:04:46] David: We are going to jump into the mix. We're going to ask people to jump onto the bandwagon with us and we're going to figure this out. And oh my gosh, what an unbelievable eight months it has been in learning and insights. And I can't wait to get into all the things that we've learned about the property management industry. [00:05:01] David: But that's really what we've been focusing on here the past eight months, right? So we started off with well hey, can the AI assist the va? Can it turn them into a super va? Is that what it's going to be? And, you know, some people were like, yay. And some people were like nay, you know? And so, and you know, because that human failure still was there, right? [00:05:21] David: And you know, what happens if they left? There was that inconsistency. And then it was like, all right, well what can the AI own? Right? What can it do? What can it perfect? And you know, can AI actually be the last employee that I ever hire? Right. That's really, that's a really cool thing to do. [00:05:39] David: But the property managing community had some really specific demands that they said that if this is going to be the last employee that I've had, it has to do this. And that's what I'm excited about our new technology 'cause it's doing those things. You know? [00:05:52] Jason: Yeah. And now you guys have made some big moves. I know, like I've, I have clients that we've sent over to you and they've shared some incredible stories. Like one client, I think he had 154 units or something like under management, and he said in the first day you're of turning on Vendoroo, like it closed out like 80 something work orders. [00:06:12] Jason: Yeah, like, it was crazy. Another client, they had a little more doors. They said it was like 50 something work orders were closed out in the first day of turning it on. And so, I mean, you're creating some dramatic stuff. Like this is a very different thing than what people are used to in maintenance. [00:06:27] David: Yeah. Yeah. And really what the exciting part about this, Jason, is that maintenance is actually really easy. And I know people laugh when I say that it's managing communications that is extremely difficult. Okay. Okay. Right, because you have, you know what AI told us about our industry over the last eight months is when we dove in with it and it took a step back and it said, whoa, you guys don't have a data problem here. [00:06:51] David: You guys have a emotion problem here. There's very specific categories of emotion that are in this space, right? Like, how do you build a technology that senses something? And I know this relates with property managers, 'cause I know this for myself. A property manager can walk into their office, sit down at their desk, and their spidey senses go off and they know something's wrong. [00:07:15] David: There's no screen that's telling them anything. There's no spreadsheet. They know something's off. Right. And so the AI is like, well, the statuses really don't matter that much to me based upon the feedback that I'm seeing from the property managers. Because the status and the communication all seem to be in order, but there's a disruption somewhere. [00:07:35] David: So I need to know about people's emotions. I need to understand about is the resident happy? Does the owner feel supported? Is the vendor being directed? And does the property manager believe that I can own the outcome for this? And it was really cool to start seeing its learning and understanding and picking up on these cues where, you know, people say that this is a data-driven industry. [00:07:55] David: It's really in an emotion driven industry.  [00:07:57] Jason: Oh yeah. It's a relationship and emotion industry for sure. Yeah. Yeah, big time.  [00:08:01] David: And it's really cool to see, and it's really started happening over this past last 60 days, the amount of residents, I was actually just looking at one before I jumped on here, that are like thanking the system, right? [00:08:15] David: Imagine that, like think of all of us that actually worked with the chat bot at like Verizon. I've never thanked that chatbot at Verizon for being their customer service. Right.  [00:08:25] Jason: And how do I get a representative? Representative. Representative!  [00:08:28] David: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Versus you seeing people, you know, seeing individuals saying to the, you know, saying to the Vendoroo maintenance coordinator, Hey, I really appreciate feeling supported and how fast you acted because you know, there's empathy that's inside of its law and learning. So I don't want to get too much into the details on there. But yeah, these are some of the exciting things that we're working on.  [00:08:47] Jason: I mean, empathy is the magic lubrication that makes everything better. [00:08:52] David: Yeah,  [00:08:52] Jason: I mean they, they've done studies. Teams, even in working in warehouses, are more productive if the team has a higher level of empathy. Yeah. And doctors perform better. Yeah. If there's a higher level of empathy, there's less malpractice suits, like empathetic reflection and empathy is a magical ingredient. [00:09:10] Jason: I coach clients to add that in during sales. Yeah. 'cause their close rate goes up dramatically. Yeah. Right. So yeah. So leveraging and like getting the AI to actually be empathetic in its communication. Yeah. When that's probably not a natural skill for a lot of maintenance coordinators to be empathetic. [00:09:26] David: It's not, it's not a natural skill for a lot of people in the maintenance industry. Right? Yes. Especially when you talk about burnout. People begin developing views of the rental community, right? Like, oh my gosh, they're calling again, and that empathy meter goes lower and lower and lower. [00:09:41] David: Yeah. As people have been in the industry longer. But isn't it great that you have an employee now that knows that, yeah, it's my duty, rain or shine, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 a year to always operate at the highest level of empathy? I never have a bad day. I never take a day off. [00:09:57] David: I'm never upset. I'm never short with somebody on the phone, never tired, never like, oh my gosh, Susan is calling me again. I'm going to let the phone just ring because I'm annoyed of talking to her. And it just is constantly hitting that same level of standard. And this is what's exciting to me, is that there are people that that have played around with this and have been a part of what I call the pain phase, right? [00:10:20] David: The pain phase is that understanding the way that agentic AI works, right? It's input in output. Input, output, right? The more that you're putting into it, the better the results are that you're going to get out of it, okay? Right. It's just like training an employee. So over the last eight months, what we've seen is that the community has trained this to be the level of a person that has now been working in the industry for five years. [00:10:46] David: In eight months. It's got five years of learning in eight months. Okay. Wow. In the next six to 12 months, we're probably looking at somebody that has 10 to 15 years understanding in the next six to 12 months and understand the level of type of tasks that it can do, especially getting into estimates and getting some other work. [00:11:04] David: And again, just you know, having empathy in my own life towards the people that jumped in that are like, what is this all about? Like, how does AI fail? Like, you know, there's still people that are involved and it was like this big like momentous train of like, you know, all these people were jumping on and giving ideas and people are in the loop and now it's weeding everything out and the AI stepping in and saying. [00:11:27] David: Hey, I appreciate all the input that you've given me. Thank you for all your effort. I'm now ready to step up to the plate and to own the outcome. Right. And that's what we're seeing at the NARPM show that's coming out. There's five AI tools. There's a master agent, five AI tools. And you know, I'll give you a couple of pieces here that, you know, we had feedback from our property managers like number one across the board. [00:11:50] David: A property manager said, if I'm hiring AI as my last employee, that has to work in my system. Yeah. Okay. Right. Like I don't want another, I don't want another technology. Yeah.  [00:11:59] Jason: I don't want a new system I got to get every vendor to use or a new system I got to get my team to use or figure out. We don't need another tool to make our lives more difficult. [00:12:08] Jason: No. They've got to use our stuff.  [00:12:09] David: They got to use, we have our existing stack. Yeah. So now the AI is fully integrated into all the most common PMS systems. You know, you have a cool chrome extension that you can download and there's a little yellow kangaroo right right there. And it's actually reading the work order that you're working on, and you can literally just ask it a question now and just being like, Hey, did anybody express frustration or concern on this work order? [00:12:32] David: Right? Because that's the emotion behind the status that you need to know. And it's like, yeah, two days ago Sally said that, you know, she was actually really frustrated about the multiple reschedules by this vendor. And it's like, great, that's a person I should be reaching out to and that's what I should be knowing that a status is never going to tell you. [00:12:47] David: Right? Yeah. It's in your slack, right? So if I have, if I'm on my phone, I'm talking to my employee and I'm laying in bed and I have a panic attack as a property manager, and I'm like, oh my gosh, did we take care of John's refrigerator and the office is closed? I can't get ahold of my employee. Yeah, you can. [00:13:03] David: Your employee works 24 7 now. Hey, can you give me an update on the refrigerator replacement at John's place? Yeah, it was scheduled this day. I contacted John. Everything's good to go. You know, go to sleep. You know, like, like that's the power. Full audit. Full syncing. So it's in your platform. That's really cool. [00:13:21] David: The other thing, it's got to be branded, right? This is a thing that we really learned about, like how important branding is to the community of property managers, right? Yeah. So the communications that go out have to be from your area code that's done. The emails that go out have to have like, you know, your company name and your logo on it. [00:13:39] David: The AI is doing that as well too. So that's being sent out, which is really cool. So people are feeling like, you know, that loyalty to brand is super important. And also do you know now that the AI can ask the residents to give a Google Review and we can link to the Google reviews and give you instant Google reviews to your page through the ai, which is cool, like how it's, it will know that if the success of a Google review is high on the way that the work order was done, that it's probably best to ask this person and it will send them a little thing. [00:14:11] David: Hey, can we get a feedback from you? And we link up to your Google review. And it posts that Google review to generate those 'cause we know those are super, super valuable to property managers. So that's actually going out today. That's kind of a little teaser there. That's the emails out now. [00:14:23] Jason: Nice. We'll have to get you to also connect it to our gather kudos links for clients 'cause then people can pick which review sites. So it diversifies the review profile.  [00:14:32] David: Love it. Love that. I'm going to hook you up with our guy Dotan. He's running that. He's one of our head of product. He's, actually out of Israel. [00:14:39] David: He's a amazing guy. I'd love to get you connected with him. Yeah. Cool. Let's do it. Cool. And then the biggest one too is like, I need a single point of contact. Right. And we knew that before there was a lot of people were still involved. There was a lot of oversight that was going on there, having that confusion and single point of contact. [00:14:56] David: Now it's in your phone, it's in your Slack, it's in your phone extension. It doesn't matter what's going on. You have one point of contact. It's your employee. You ask the question, get the answer, Jason, you can even ask for a change. You can even say, Hey, I want to change a vendor on a job and you'll see that the vendor gets changed for you in the system. [00:15:17] David: You can even say to your ai, and this is the big one: hey how do you triage this work order? And I want you to do this, or I want you to do that. And you just do it right through Slack or right through your PM chat and it makes the change for you. And now you have custom triage and all property managers have the ability to train their own AI for their company. [00:15:36] David: Think how cool that is. A person with 75 doors now, and the product that's being released has their own AI agent customized for their company, right? Yeah. Like, that's what happened over the last eight months, so you can see my excitement. There's been a lot of hard work in this. [00:15:54] David: Yeah, that's amazing. But this has been all the effort and a huge thank you out to everybody who's tried us, you know, even said that this wasn't for them at that point in time because those learnings went into what's going to make this product the best product in the property management space and is going to help people leverage sales and leverage efficiencies and blow their owners' minds away in ways that, that we have never thought about. [00:16:15] David: Oh yeah.  [00:16:16] Jason: Yeah. So I know like initially when you rolled this out, a lot of people were nervous about AI and you guys had kind of a human layer in between the AI and any communication Yeah, initially. Yeah. And so there was like, they had like a reps and a lot of people associated, oh, I've got this rep. [00:16:33] Jason: Yeah. You know, Steven or whatever is my rep or Pedro and I've got Pedro and like, oh no, what if Pedro leaves? And they were associating with that while the AI is really doing the crux of the work. Right. And so you guys have shifted away from even that now the AI is directly communicating with people. [00:16:52] Jason: Correct? Yeah.  [00:16:53] David: Yeah. So let's talk about that. So, definitely, so in the beginning there was like, we all had like lack of trust. We believed what it was going to do, but it was like we had a ton of people still trying, like, you know, using qualified VAs, training them. Like, you know, like, you know, if it fails, like, you know, you have to have a person stepped in and so let's talk about that. [00:17:12] David: So, you know, it was definitely that human layer. And let's talk about where we're at today. It is very clear to us, and the one thing that separates us from everybody is we still believe that humans are super important in this process. Okay? Yeah. And where humans are very important in this process are going to be when the AI says, Hey, I need you to make a phone call to this person for me, right? [00:17:35] David: Hey, I've reached out to this vendor three times and they haven't responded yet. I need you to give a phone call to see what's going on. Right? Hey, I need you to recruit a vendor for me. I need you to reach out and do a recruitment for the vendor. For me. Hey, this owner is asking questions about this estimate. [00:17:51] David: I need you to give a call for me. So the AI is basically able, on a standard work order, the AI can handle 95% of the workflow, no problem. Work order comes in, gets assigned to the resident. It gets out to the vendor. It's under the NTE not to exceed. It's great. The work gets done, the resident uploads its photos, the AI says to the resident, are you happy? [00:18:14] David: Everyone's good. It closes the work order out. Cool. Right. And then if a human...  [00:18:19] Jason: and how is it communicating with the tenant and with the vendor typically? [00:18:24] David: Yep. So, it's very clear that and this isn't a surprise to anybody. Everybody loves text messages, right? Yeah. I mean, that's just, it's just what it is. [00:18:32] David: You literally, like, people will get a phone call and they won't pick up and the text will come back and like text back. Yeah, text me. What do you need? Yeah. Text me here. But, so here's the things that people don't see behind the scenes that we'll talk about. So the complexity that went into. [00:18:51] David: Mapping out how to allow vendors... so a vendor could have like 20 jobs, right? And we don't want to send him like a code that he has to text for every work order so that it links to the right work order. Like what guy wants to do that? Okay. Like that's not how he works. So we figured out how to allow a vendor through AI just to use his regular phone and text anything about this thing. And it's understanding it and it's mapping it, it's routing it to all those work orders because we knew that in order for this to be the last employee somebody would have to handle, it also means that the vendor has to be happy and the same for the resident. [00:19:30] David: They can just text that they have multiple work orders. It understands what work order it's going to. If it's not quite sure, I would ask them, Hey, is this question about this work order? And they say, yeah. And so there's not like, again, codes and links and things that they have to do. It has to be seamless if they're working with a person. [00:19:46] David: So yeah, text message is massive. Email is second, and then phone is third for sure.  [00:19:51] Jason: Got it. So is your AI system calling people yet or you or telling the property manager to make the phone call?  [00:19:58] David: Yeah. People are okay with. If they're calling in like our new front desk agent, which if a person calls in and they want to get information about a listing or if they want to get information about a work order or something like that, or, you know, they're okay with getting that type of information. [00:20:13] David: Yeah. But they are, it is very clear that they are not okay with AI calling them when they're asking for an update on a work order like that. Like that line in the sand very clear. Yeah. And so we have people on on the team. That are constantly monitoring into ai, giving feedback, hitting improvement. [00:20:31] David: I want everybody to know there is not a work order that is taking place that is not touched by a human at least twice.  [00:20:38] Jason: Okay.  [00:20:39] David: Okay. Right.  [00:20:40] Jason: So there's a little, there's some oversight there. There there's, you're watching this, there are humans involved  [00:20:45] David: And then the ai will when it hits certain fail points, right? [00:20:51] David: It then escalates those things up to what we call the human in the loop, right? So there's an AI assistant, we there's people now that we're training a whole new generation of people that are no longer going to be maintenance coordinators. They're AI assistants now, right? And so when the AI says, Hey, this work order is not going down the path that I think it should go to be successful. [00:21:12] David: I'm escalating this up to a human, and so now as a property manager, not only am I getting this AI agent workflow that's standardizing the empathy and the workflows and all the stuff that we talked about in the communications, I also now get a fractional employee that when the AI says, Hey, I need help, I already have an employee that it can reach out to that can make that phone call or call the vendor. [00:21:36] David: But it's also monitoring the AI for me on top of it. So yes, there is, and that's one of the big thing that separates us apart is that the platform comes with what we call a human in the loop, an expert in the loop and so we're training the first generation of AI assistants in the property management industry. [00:21:55] David: Yep.  [00:21:56] Jason: Got it. So the AI maintenance coordinator. Has human assistance. Yep. Underneath it.  [00:22:02] David: And before it was the other way around where Yeah. The AI was assisting the human right. And now the humans are assisting the ai. That's what's happened in the last...  [00:22:11] Jason: that may be the future of all of our roles. [00:22:12] Jason: So,  [00:22:13] David: If you're not reading articles and studying up on this I think that's going to catch you by surprise pretty quickly. Yeah. Learn how to write prompts. I'll tell everybody right now. Yes.  [00:22:21] Jason: Yeah. Interesting. So, now what about this, you know, there's the uncanny, you know, sort of stage where people get a little bit nervous about AI and what do they call it? The uncanny valley or something like this, or right where it gets, it's so close to human that it becomes creepy. And there's some people that have fear about this, that are concerned. You're going to have a lot of late, you know, adopters that are like resistant. "I'll never do ai." [00:22:49] Jason: What would you say to somebody when you get on a sales call and they're like, well, I'm really nervous about this AI stuff, you know, and they just, they don't get it.  [00:22:57] David: Yeah.  [00:22:58] Jason: I'm sure there's people listening right now. They're like, oh man, AI is going to kill us all and it's going to take over the world and it's going to take our jobs. [00:23:05] Jason: And they think it's evil.  [00:23:06] David: Yeah. Yeah. I, and you know, I really want to hear that fear and I want to like, again, have empathy towards that. 'cause I do understand that fear of change causes people to get... Change in general. Yes. Right. It's like, whoa, I like everything the way it's going to be. Right. And we are historically in one of those phases of like, you know, the industrial revolution, the renaissance, like the automobile from horse. [00:23:34] David: Like, this is what is taking place. This is, this will be written down in history. It's massive change. It's a massive change. Massive. So what I would say to them, and not to, not from a way of fear. But to inspire them is there are a lot of hungry entrepreneurs out there that are embracing this head on. [00:23:57] David: Yeah. That are pushing the boundaries and the limits to be able to bring insights and customer service to their clients at a much higher level. And if you want to compete in this new AI economy. I would definitely encourage you to understand and get in and start investing in yourself now. But understand that investing in AI means having some pain threshold. [00:24:21] David: Like you got to get in, like you, you need to be able to give the feedback. You need to understand that if it falls short, do you have to be able to give it the time and the energy and the reward and the payoff of what I'm seeing for property managers who've embraced that when they're sitting there and they're going, I don't touch maintenance at all anymore. Yeah, it's wild. Right? And those are the people that in the beginning of this relationship, and there's a few that come to my head, are the ones that were sending me emails constantly saying, David, this is failing me. I believe in this, but this is failing me. And as my technology partner, I know that you're going to help us get this better. [00:24:58] David: And there is, you know, I have this word down that struggle equals great con conversation, right? Like, and so they had a struggle and that opened up a great conversation and because of that, their technology and the technology is getting better. So yeah, I think that from a personal point of view in this industry, one thing that I want to solve with AI is I think that we can all say that over the past 15 years, we've probably yelled at a lot of vendors or yelled at a lot of VAs or yelled at a lot of people. Let's start yelling at the ai. And then hopefully that the AI will actually eliminate the need for us to ever have to yell at anybody again because it knows us. [00:25:36] David: Yeah. It never fails us.  [00:25:38] Jason: You know? It really is amazing. I mean, your company is creating freedom for the business owner from being involved in maintenance. Yeah. Really?  [00:25:46] David: Yeah.  [00:25:47] Jason: And it just, and they get used to that pretty quickly. Like maintenance is just running and they're like, yeah. It frees up so much head space for them to focus on growth. [00:25:56] Jason: It gives them a whole bunch of like just greater capacity. Yeah. So they feel like, yeah, we could handle adding any number of doors now and we know we can still fulfill and do a good job.  [00:26:07] David: Yeah. Fixed cost scaling. Right? That's a term that we came up with is now that you know that I have a price per door that will cover all my maintenance. So if I went in and brought on 75 doors, I know that I don't have to go out and hire another employee. The system just grows with it and I know exactly what my margin is for all those doors. Right. And as we know previous, before fixed cost scaling a property managers is like, I have enough people. [00:26:32] David: I don't have enough people. Someone quit, someone didn't quit. My profit margins are good. My profit margins are bad. Yeah. And now with these AI tools. You know, you have your front desk employee, you have your maintenance coordinator, you have these fixed cost scales, and now somebody calls you up and says, Hey, I want you to take on 25 doors, and you're like, I have the resource resources for maintenance, which is, we know is 80% of the workload already. I don't have to go out and hire another maintenance coordinator 'cause the system just grows with me, which is cool.  [00:27:00] Jason: So one of the things you shared at DoorGrow Live and you're our top sponsor for the upcoming... Can't wait for DoorGrow Live, can't wait to, so we're really excited to have you back so. [00:27:10] Jason: Everybody make sure you're at DoorGrow Live if you want. Our theme this year is innovating the future of property management. And we're bringing, we're going to be showcasing, innovating pricing structures that are different than how property managers have typically historically priced, that allow you to lower your operational costs and close more deals more easily at a higher price point. [00:27:30] Jason: We're, we'll be showcasing a three tier hybrid pricing model that we've innovated here at DoorGrow, and we've got clients using it. It's been a game changer. We're going to be sharing other cool things about the future hiring systems, et cetera. Right. So you guys will also be there showcasing the future. [00:27:46] Jason: One of the things you shared previously that really kind of struck me as you showed, you did some research and you showed the typical cost. Per unit that most companies had just to cover and deal with maintenance. Yeah. And and then what you were able to get it down to.  [00:28:03] David: Yeah.  [00:28:04] Jason: And that alone was just like a bit of a mind blowing. [00:28:07] Jason: Could you just share a little bit of numbers here?  [00:28:09] David: Yeah. So one of the first things that we had to do when we started way back in the day is figure out well. Like, like what's the impact of AI going to be us from like a cost perspective, right? Is it a huge change? And so we went out on a big survey mission and we were surveying property managers and asking them, what's your cost per door for managing maintenance? [00:28:30] David: How much do you spend every door to manage maintenance? Now the first thing is less than 1% of property managers knew what that cost was. Sure.  [00:28:37] Jason: Oh, sure. Right. Because, but then they got to figure out, oh, we got a maintenance coordinator and we've got these people doing phone calls and they cost this, and yeah, it's complicated. [00:28:45] David: It's complicated. So we built a calculator. Okay. And then people could start adding in that information out into the calculator, and the average person was around $13 and 50 cents a door.  [00:28:56] Jason: Okay. Okay.  [00:28:57] David: Wow. Right, right. So that was where the average person was, somewhere in the low twenties. Yeah. [00:29:01] David: And others were actually pretty good. Like, I'd say like, you know, some of the good ones that we saw were maybe around like, you know, 10, $11 a door or something along that line.  [00:29:09] Jason: They probably had a large portfolio would be my guess.  [00:29:12] David: Yeah. And also I think a lot of it's just like, you know, I don't know if they were still accounting for all their software and everything that they had. [00:29:19] David: Maybe they're not factoring everything. Yeah. No, I think if we really dug in, it'd be different. So now we know that, you know, the base package of what people are getting in. The average cost of what people are paying for 24 7 services that's emergencies around the clock is about $7 and 50 cents a door, right? [00:29:37] David: So right off the bat in AI's first swing, it said we cut the cost in half. Yeah. Okay. Right. So 50% reduction. I mean, to me as an owner, a 50% reduction in cost. That's like. You know, alarms and celebration going off, you know? For sure. And then, yeah.  [00:29:55] Jason: And that's, if everything just stayed the same, like it was still the same level of quality, cutting in half would be a solid win right there. [00:30:03] Jason: Yeah.  [00:30:03] David: Yeah. That's just like status quo stuff. And now what, with the release of the new Vendoroo product that, that's actually being announced here today. The email's going out to all of our existing clients of all the new features that are coming out now, we're starting to see that. You know that quality is now increasing to where if you were to go out and hire that person, you may have to be spending, you know, 55,000 or $65,000 a year. [00:30:29] David: Right? So now it's like saying, okay, if we can get as good as what these people are using for their VAs right, and we know what that cost is, and they're saying that's, you know, that's what their factors is. Well, what happens in the next six to 12 months when this is a seasoned person that you would've to pay $85,000 a year to? [00:30:45] David: Right. Yeah. And right, because they have knowledge of. Estimates and knowledge of vendor routing and knowledge of, you know, it can handle...  [00:30:53] Jason: you've invested so much time into them, so much attention. They know your properties and know your portfolio. They know the vendors. Like you've invested so much into this person that now they sort of have you by the balls so that they're like, Hey, I want 80 k or I walk.  [00:31:06] David: Yeah.  [00:31:06] Jason: You're like, you've got to come up with it.  [00:31:08] David: Yeah.  [00:31:09] Jason: Right. You've got to do it.  [00:31:10] David: Yeah.  [00:31:10] Jason: And you know, because that's not easy to create. And a lot of people, in order to have a good maintenance coordinator, they need a veteran of the industry. Veteran of industry. [00:31:19] Jason: They need somebody that's been doing this a long time.  [00:31:21] David: Yeah.  [00:31:22] Jason: And that's really hard to find.  [00:31:24] David: Yes. It's extremely hard to find as we know. One of the things that I think that we're doing for this industry is we're actually preserving knowledge that I don't think is necessary getting passed down. [00:31:33] David: Yeah. You know, there's a lot less people that I think are as handy as they once were in the Americas and so we have a lot of that knowledge. Like, you know, we know that the average age of an electrician is in the sixties, the average age of a plumber's in the sixties. And these guys, you know, they have wealth of knowledge that it can troubleshoot anything that's going on in a house. [00:31:54] David: And so to be able to try to preserve some of that, so maybe if a person does come in, you know, maybe there's some knowledge sharing along the lines. But let's take it even in another step forward Jason that in the future, you know, the AI is going to know the location of the hot water tank in that house. [00:32:10] David: It's going to then add it automatically to the system, like. It's going to know more knowledge than they will because it's going to have maps of every single property that's all currently sitting inside of, you know, that maintenance coordinator's head, right? And so it's going to, it's going to actually know more than them, you know. [00:32:26] Jason: Yeah. That's wild. Yeah, it is. Absolutely. It's the future. Cool. Well, you're rolling out a bunch of new features. You're announcing these today. You've told me a little bit, but why don't you tell the listeners what's changing, what's new, what innovations have come out? What are you guys launching? [00:32:41] David: Yeah. Exciting. Yeah. So, the biggest one I think is, which is the most exciting is, is Resiroo, which is the first one that actually handles all the communications with the resident and does the triage and troubleshooting. First one of what are you talking about? So we have our products. [00:32:57] David: So you have these AI tools, right? These agents. Right.  [00:33:00] Jason: And so, you know, every, so think of them like different sort of people?  [00:33:04] David: Skill sets. Yeah. Different person. Okay. Exactly. And so that's when you come and see our display at the NARPM conference, you'll actually will see these five agents kind of in their work desk and in their environments, kind of cool. [00:33:15] David: Okay. Able to see them right. So the coolest part about that one is we're doing a major product you know, update on that for not only the knowledge base, but we're actually turning that over to the company. We were talking about this a little bit before, and now they own their own AI agent and they can customize it into how they want it to ask questions or the type of questions and the mindsets when it's triaging stuff. [00:33:41] David: Triaging work orders for their portfolio. Like super cool. So fully customizable to your company, right?  [00:33:49] Jason: So now sometimes the more humans get involved, the more they mess stuff up.  [00:33:54] David: Yes. We make sure they don't mess it up. So everyone's going to learn how to write prompts and they'll submit it into us. [00:33:59] David: And we have a great team of AI engineers that when that knowledge base is written or what they're doing. We will ensure that it is put in so that it actually produces the desire outcome, right? Yeah. Yeah. So that's a very exciting one. The second one that I'm that I think is so cool, do you know that only 10% of all estimates get approved by the owner without one or multiple questions? [00:34:23] David: Because owners really struggle with trust when it comes to estimates. Like 10%. Like, that's a really bad number, I felt as the industry that owners only believe us one out of 10 times. Like that's the way I took that. Yeah. Right. And so, Owneroo is what I coined inside, is the estimate of the future. [00:34:41] David: That really was looking in understanding like what was, what questions was the owner asking when they were rejecting a bid that that we could proactively ask the answer for them to help guide them to understanding the value in this estimate that they're looking at in historical context of the property. [00:35:00] David: How many other people have experienced this issue? Like, like there's a whole bunch of factors that should go into an estimate and an estimate should no longer be like, here's a cost from Frank. Right? Like, like that was like, like that was...  [00:35:14] Jason: here's what Frank said it is. Yeah. Like that was like from the 1940s. [00:35:17] Jason: That's good. How do I trust that?  [00:35:18] David: How do I trust that? That was from the forties and we're still...  [00:35:21] Jason: how much went into this decision? Was this just out of the blue, like pulled out of your ass or is this like legit?  [00:35:27] David: Yeah. Yeah. What's the, you know, we live in a data-driven world, so what's the intellect behind this estimate? [00:35:33] David: And so I'm really excited about Owneroo, which is going to be the new standard for the way the estimates are created. We have the front desk agent which is coming out. So, that one is going to handle phone calls that are coming in, be able to talk about available listings, actual general questions about leases route phone calls over to property managers for you. [00:35:54] David: So again. Very human-like interaction, great AI voice. Actually. We feel it's going to be the best in the industry. So a person's calling in, just like they're calling your office able to handle all those front desk things. We, we have the PM chat, which is now the employee which is fully integrated into all of your systems. [00:36:14] David: It's in Slack. That's your employee that you get to talk to. We believe that if you're going to hire somebody, they should be inside of your communication channels. You have the Google Chrome extension that it's on right inside your AppFolio or your buildium or your Rentvine software that you can ask and talk to it. [00:36:31] David: So, yeah, so we have a lot of exciting products that have come out. And then of course the backbone of all of them in the middle is Vendoroo, which handles all the scheduling, all the communications. You know, a resident asks for an update, responds to them, an owner asks for an update, it responds to them. [00:36:48] David: And you know, it handles actually the body of the work order. So you have those five tools, we believe are what the property management industry said. If you are going to give me an employee, this is what the employee has to be. This is what makes up that employee. So we say that these tools, these agents were actually built by the property management industry. [00:37:08] David: And that excites me because if you're not building AI tools from working with your partners, from being on the ground floor with them and using the data and building tools based upon the data and their pain points and their failures, buyer beware. If somebody's coming to you and saying, Hey, we figured this all out in the lab. [00:37:25] David: Come use it. Yeah. Right. Buyer beware.  [00:37:29] Jason: Yeah. So you guys connect with Slack. They can communicate through Slack, but it slack's a paid tool. Have you guys considered Telegram? I love Telegram Messenger.  [00:37:37] Jason: Alright. Could you do that? Write it down. Telegram Messenger is like the iMessage tool that works on every device. [00:37:44] Jason: It's free. It's one of the most secure, it's not owned or controlled by Facebook. Like, WhatsApp, like, yeah. But WhatsApp might be a close second, but we use Telegram internally, so I love Telegram.  [00:37:58] David: We'll definitely take that into, into consideration for sure. Yeah, check it  [00:38:02] Jason: out. Because I, what I love is the voice message feature and I can just listen to my team and others at like high speed, but internal communications and it's free for everybody, which is great. [00:38:12] Jason: So, yeah.  [00:38:13] David: Yeah. I think a lot, for a lot of people it was like you know, who was Vendoroo in the beginning and Vendoroo was like the team of like people that were trying to figure out like how is AI going to work in this industry? [00:38:26] David: How is it going to solve the needs of our property management partners? And this is why I say to everybody, if you thought about Vendoroo, if you came in and the experience wasn't great with Vendoroo, if you're one of our existing clients that has been with us and you're and you're still moving forward, and we thank you so much for your dedication to this, the Vendoroo product, everything that we've done, everything that we worked at is being showcased at the NARPM broker owner. The email's going out today. This is who Vendoroo is. We are a team that is a technology partner for the property management industry that is helping building meaningful AI tools, specifically by demand, by our industry to help us show value and to preserve this great industry. [00:39:09] David: For the future in this new AI economy, right? Like we need to step up. We have clients that are adding doors left and right because they're showing their clients that they use an AI maintenance system and their clients are like, this is what I expect from a property management in this community. [00:39:24] David: Right? And again, Owneroo, that estimate, we believe that in the future. Like, like owners are going to say like, I'm not approving an estimate unless it's like the estimate of the future, right? Like, like that's the new standard. So you got to know what the new standards are and you got to get technology that are going to help you compete with those new standards that will be in your community and are will be in your community in the next week, the next two weeks. [00:39:46] David: And definitely some really cool products in the next six months.  [00:39:49] Jason: All right. Well, yeah, I'm really excited to see what you guys have been able to create so far. So yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah. All right. Well David, it's been awesome having you on the show. Sounds like you guys are really innovating the future. Everybody come to DoorGrow Live. David, are you going to be at that one? I will be there. All right, so you can come meet David in person. [00:40:08] Jason: We've got some amazing people that are going to be at this. We've got technology people. There's a gentleman there, one of the vendors they created another really cool tool, but he had a hundred million dollars exit, you know, in a previous business, like there's really amazing entrepreneurs and people at this event, so come to DoorGrow Live, get your tickets, and if you do, we have just decided that we're going to give out to anybody that registers. [00:40:34] Jason: You can pick from one of our free bonuses that are well worth the price of the ticket. Or coming or anything in and of itself, including our pricing secrets training that goes over a three tier hybrid pricing model or our sales secrets training, which goes over how we're helping property managers crush it and closing more deals more easily at a higher price point. [00:40:55] Jason: And reputation secrets, which are helping our clients get way more positive reviews by leveraging the psychology and the law of reciprocity and getting the majority of their tenants in order to give them positive feedback online. Maybe some others. So you'll be able to pick from these bonuses one of these that you might like and that's our free, most incredible free gift ever that we'll give to each person that registers for DoorGrow Live. [00:41:19] Jason: So.  [00:41:20] David: Cool. Awesome man. Always great to see you. Looking forward to seeing you at DoorGrow Live and love that you guys are working on pricing because AI is going to make people think different about pricing. It's going to be way more efficient, so you guys are ahead of the curve on that. Great job, Jason. [00:41:33] Jason: Awesome. All right, so how can they check out Vendoroo, David?  [00:41:36] David: Just visit, Vendoroo.ai, go to the website, request a demo with one of our great sales reps, and yeah they'd love to help you out. See all the new products, see how far it's come. And again, we thank everybody from the bottom of our hearts for all their effort, people who've tried us out. [00:41:52] David: Come back and see what you built and yeah. Come check us out at Vendoroo.  [00:41:57] Jason: Got it. Go check out Vendoroo, it's vendor. If you know how to spell that, V-E-N-D-O-R-O-O dot A-I, go check it out. All right? And if you're a property management entrepreneur, you want to add doors, you want to make your business scalable, you want to get out of the day to day, you want to increase the capacity so your company could easily handle another 200 plus doors without having to make any significant systems changes, reach out to us at DoorGrow. We will help you figure it out. So until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. 

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The health care sector has long struck me as having environments and dynamics that would benefit a lot from using digital signage technology. Accurate information is critically important, and things change quickly and often - in ways that make paper and dry erase marker board solutions seem antiquated and silly. But it is a tough sector to work in and crack - because of the layers of bureaucracy, tight regulations and the simple reality that medical facilities go up over several years, not months. People often talk about the digital signage solution sales cycle being something like 18 months on average. With healthcare, it can be double or triple that. The other challenge is that it is highly specialized and there are well-established companies referred to as patient engagement providers. So any digital signage software or solutions company thinking about going after health care business will be competing with companies that already know the industry and its technologies, like medical records, and have very established ties. LG has been active in the healthcare sector for decades, and sells specific displays and a platform used by patient engagement providers that the electronics giant has as business partners. I had a really insightful chat with Tom Mottlau, LG's director of healthcare sales. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Tom, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what your role is at LG?  Tom Mottlau: I am the Director of Healthcare Sales for LG. I've been in this role for some time now; I joined the company in 1999 and have been selling quite a bit into the patient room for some time.  David: Has most of your focus through those years all been on healthcare? Tom Mottlau: Well, actually, when I started, I was a trainer when we were going through the digital rollout when we were bringing high-definition television into living rooms. My house was actually the beta site for WXIA for a time there until we got our language codes right. But soon after, I moved over to the commercial side and healthcare, around 2001-2002.  David: Oh, wow. So yeah, you've been at it a long time then. Much has changed!  Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir.  David: And I guess in some cases, nothing has changed.  Tom Mottlau: Yep. David: Healthcare is an interesting vertical market for me because it seems so opportune, but I tend to think it's both terrifying and very grinding in that they're quite often very large institutions, sometimes government-associated or university-associated, and very few things happen quickly. Is that a fair assessment?  Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. There's a lot of oversight in the patient room. It's a very litigation-rich environment, and so there's a bit of bureaucracy to cut through to make sure that you're bringing in something that's both safe for patients and protects their privacy but also performs a useful function.  David: I guess the other big challenge is the build-time. You can get word of an opportunity for a medical center that's going up in a particular city, and realistically, it's probably 5-7 years out before it actually opens its doors, right? Tom Mottlau: That's true. Not only that but very often, capital projects go through a gestation period that can be a year or two from the time you actually start talking about the opportunity.  David: And when it comes to patient engagement displays and related displays around the patient care areas, is that something that engineers and architects scheme in early on, or is it something that we start talking about 3-4 years into the design and build process?  Tom Mottlau: Well, the part that's schemed in is often what size displays we're going to need. So, for example, if somebody is looking to deploy maybe a two-screen approach or a large-format approach, that's the type of thing that is discussed early on, but then when they come up on trying to decide between the patient engagement providers in the market, they do their full assessment at that time because things evolve and also needs change in that whole period that may take a couple of years you may go as we did from an environment that absolutely wanted no cameras to an environment that kind of wanted cameras after COVID. You know, so things change. So they're constantly having those discussions.  David: Why switch to wanting cameras because of COVID?  Tom Mottlau: Really, because the hospitals were locked down. You couldn't go in and see your loved one. There was a thought that if we could limit the in-person contact, maybe we could save lives, and so there was a lot of thought around using technology to overcome the challenges of contagion, and so there was even funding dedicated towards it and a number of companies focused on it  David: That's interesting because I wondered whether, in the healthcare sector, business opportunities just flat dried up because the organizations were so focused on dealing with COVID or whether it actually opened up new opportunities or diverted budgets to things that maybe weren't thought about before, like video? Tom Mottlau: True, I mean, the video focus was definitely because of COVID, but then again, you had facilities where all of their outpatient procedures had dried up. So they were strained from a budget standpoint, and so they had to be very picky about where they spent their dollars.  Now the equipment is in the patient room, but at the end of the day, we're still going to get the same flow of patients. People don't choose when to be sick. If it's gonna be either the same or higher because of those with COVID, so they still need to supply those rooms with displays, even though they were going through a crisis, they still had to budget and still had to go through their day-to-day buying of that product.  David: Is this a specialty application and solution as opposed to something that a more generic digital signage, proAV company could offer? My gut tells me that in order to be successful, you really need to know the healthcare environment. You can't just say, we've got these screens, we've got the software, what do you need?  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Everything we do on our end is driven by VOC (voice of customer). We partner with the top patient engagement providers in the country. There are a handful that are what we call tier one. We actually provide them with products that they vet out before we go into production.  We go to them to ask them, what do you need? What products do you need for that patient? I mean, and that's where the patient engagement boards, the idea of patient engagement boards came from was we had to provide them a display that met, at the time, 60065 UL, which is now 62368-1, so that they can meet NFPA 99 fire code.  David: I love it when you talk dirty. Tom Mottlau: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that.  David: What the hell is he talking about?  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, I know enough to be dangerous. Basically, what it boils down to is we want to make sure that our products are vetted by a third party. UL is considered a respectable testing agency, and that's why you find most electronics are vetted by them and so they test them in the patient room. It's a high-oxygen environment with folks who are debilitated and life-sustaining equipment so the product has to be tested.  We knew that we had to provide a product for our SIs that would meet those specs as well as other specs that they had like they wanted something that could be POE-powered because it takes an act of Congress to add a 110-amp outlet to a patient room. It's just a lot of bureaucracy for that. So we decided to roll out two units: one of 32, which is POE, and one that's 43. Taking all those things I just mentioned into consideration, as well as things like lighting.  Folks didn't want a big night light so we had to spend a little extra attention on the ambient light sensor and that type of thing. This is our first offering. David: So for doofuses like me who don't spend a lot of time thinking about underwriter lab, certifications, and so on, just about any monitor, well, I assume any monitor that is marketed by credible companies in North America is UL-certified, but these are different grades of UL, I'm guessing?  Tom Mottlau: They are. Going back in the day of CRTs, if you take it all the way back then when you put a product into a room that has a high-powered cathode ray tube and there's oxygen floating around, safety is always of concern. So, going way back, probably driven by product liability and that type of thing. We all wanted to produce a safe product, and that's why we turned to those companies. The way that works is we design a product, we throw it over to them, and they come back and say, okay, this is great, but you got to change this, and this could be anything. And then we go back and forth until we arrive at a product that's safe for that environment, with that low level of oxygen, with everything else into consideration in that room.  David: Is it different when you get out into the hallways and the nursing stations and so on? Do you still need that level, like within a certain proximity of oxygen or other gases, do you need to have that?  Tom Mottlau: It depends on the facility's tolerance because there is no federal law per se, and it could vary based on how they feel about it. I know that Florida tends to be very strict, but as a company, we had to find a place to draw that line, like where can we be safe and provide general products and where can we provide something that specialized?  And that's usually oxygenated patient room is usually the guideline. If there's oxygen in the walls and that type of thing, that's usually the guideline and the use of a pillow speaker. Outside into the hallways, not so much, but it depends on the facility. We just lay out the facts and let them decide. We sell both.  David: Is it a big additional cost to have that additional protection or whatever you want to call it, the engineering aspects?  Tom Mottlau: Yes.  David: So it's not like 10 percent more; it can be quite a bit more? Tom Mottlau: I'm not sure of the percentage, but there's a noticeable amount. Keep in mind it's typically not just achieving those ratings; it's some of the other design aspects that go into it. I mean, the fact that you have pillow speaker circuitry to begin with, there's a cost basis for that. There's a cost basis for maintaining an installer menu of 117+ items. There's a cost basis for maintaining a Pro:Centric webOS platform. You do tend to find it because of those things, not just any one of them, but because of all of them collectively, yeah, the cost is higher. I would also say that the warranties tend to be more encompassing. It's not like you have to drive it down to Ted's TV. Somebody comes and actually remedies on-site. So yeah, all of that carries a cost basis. That's why you're paying for that value.  David: You mentioned that you sell or partner with patient engagement providers. Could you describe what those companies do and offer? Tom Mottlau: Yeah, and there's a number of them. Really, just to be objective, I'll give you some of the tier ones, the ones that have taken our product over the years and tested and provided back, and the ones that have participated in our development summit. I'll touch on that in a moment after this. So companies like Aceso, you have Uniguest who were part of TVR who offers the pCare solutions. You have Get Well, Sonify, those types of companies; they've been at this for years, and as I mentioned, we have a development summit where we, for years, have piled these guys on a plane. The CTOs went off to Korea and the way I describe it is we all come into a room, and I say, we're about to enter Festivus. We want you to tell us all the ways we've disappointed you with our platform, and we sit in that room, we get tomatoes thrown at us, and then we make changes to the platform to accommodate what they need. And then that way, they're confident that they're deploying a product that we've done all we can to improve the functionality of their patient engagement systems. After all, we're a platform provider, which is what we are.  David: When you define patient engagement, what would be the technology mix that you would typically find in a modernized or newly opened patient care area? Tom Mottlau: So that would be going back years ago. I guess it started more with patient education. If Mrs. Jones is having a procedure on her kidney, they want her to be educated on what she can eat or not eat, so they found a way to bring that patient education to the patient room over the TVs. But then they also wanted to confirm she watched it, and then it went on from there.  It's not only the entertainment, but it's also things that help improve workflows, maybe even the filling out of surveys and whatnot on the platform, Being able to order your culinary, just knowing who your doctor is, questions, educational videos, all of those things and then link up with EMR. David: What's that?  Tom Mottlau: Electronic medical records. Over the years, healthcare has wanted to move away from paper, to put it very simply. They didn't want somebody's vitals in different aspects of their health stored on a hand-scribbled note in several different doctor's offices. So there's been an effort to create electronic medical records, and now that has kind of been something that our patient engagement providers have tied into those solutions into the group.  David: So, is the hub, so to speak, the visual hub in a patient care room just a TV, or is there other display technology in there, almost like a status board that tells them who their primary provider is and all the other stuff?  Tom Mottlau: So it started as the smart TV, the Pro:Centric webOS smart TV. But then, as time went on, we kept getting those requests for, say, a vertically mounted solution, where somebody can actually walk in the room, see who their doctor is, see who their nurse is, maybe the physician can come in and understand certain vitals of the patient, and so that's why we developed those patient engagement boards that separately. They started out as non-touch upon request, we went with the consensus, and the consensus was we really need controlled information. We don't want to; we've had enough issues with dry-erase boards. We want something where there's more control in entering that information, and interesting enough, we're now getting the opposite demand. We're getting demand now to incorporate touch on the future models, and that's how things start. As you know, to your point earlier, folks are initially hesitant to breach any type of rules with all the bureaucracy. Now, once they cut through all that and feel comfortable with a start, they're willing to explore more technologies within those rooms. That's why we always start out with one, and then over the years, it evolves.  David: I assume that there's a bit of a battle, but it takes some work to get at least some of the medical care facilities to budget and approve these patient engagement displays or status displays just because there's an additional cost. It's different from the way they've always done things, and it involves integration with, as you said, the EMR records and all that stuff. So, is there a lot of work to talk them into it?  Tom Mottlau: Well, you have to look at us like consultants, where we avoid just talking folks into things. Really, what it has to do with is going back to VOC, voice of the customer, the way we were doing this years ago or just re-upping until these boards were launched was to provide a larger format, and ESIs were dividing up the screen. That was the way we always recommended. But then, once we started getting that VOC, they were coming to us saying, well, we need to get these other displays in the room. You know, certain facilities were saying, Hey, we absolutely need this, and we were saying, well, we don't want to put something that's not rated for that room. Then we realized we had to really start developing a product that suits that app, that environment, and so our job is to make folks aware of what we have and let them decide which path they're going to take because, to be honest, there are two different ways of approaching it. You can use one screen of 75”, divide it, or have two screens like Moffitt did. Moffitt added the patient engagement boards, which is what they wanted.  David: I have the benefit, at least so far, of being kind of at retirement age and spending very little time, thank God, in any kind of patient care facility. Maybe that'll change. Hopefully not.  But when I have, I've still seen dry-erase marker boards at the nursing stations, in rooms, in hallways, and everywhere else. Why is it still like that? Why haven't they cut over? Is it still the prevalent way of doing things, or are you seeing quite a bit of adoption of these technologies? Tom Mottlau: Well, it is, I would say, just because we're very early in all this. That is the prevalent way, no doubt.  It's really those tech-forward, future-forward facilities that are wanting to kind of go beyond that and not only that, there's a lot of facilities that want to bring all that in and, maybe just the nature of that facility is a lot more conservative, and we have to respect that. Because ultimately they're having to maintain it. We wouldn't want to give somebody something that they can't maintain or not have the budget for. I mean, at the end of the day, they're going to come back to us, and whether or not they trust us is going to be based upon whether we advise them correctly or incorrectly. If we advise them incorrectly, they're not going to trust us. They're not going to buy from us ten years from now.  David: For your business partners, the companies that are developing patient engagement solutions, how difficult is it to work with their patient record systems, building ops systems, and so on to make these dynamic displays truly dynamic? Is it a big chore, or is there enough commonality that they can make that happen relatively quickly? Tom Mottlau: That's a very good question, and that's exactly why we're very careful about who's tier one and who we may advise folks to approach. Those companies I mentioned earlier are very skilled at what they do, and so they're taking our product as one piece of an entire system that involves many other components, and I have full faith in their ability to do that because we sit in on those meetings.  Once a year, we hear feedback, we hear positive feedback from facilities. We see it but it really couldn't happen without those partners, I would say. We made that choice years ago to be that platform provider that supports those partners and doesn't compete with them. In hindsight, I think that was a great choice because it provides more options to the market utilizing our platform.  David: Well, and being sector experts in everything that LG tries to touch would be nightmarish. If you're far better off, I suspect I will be with partners who wake up in the morning thinking about that stuff. Tom Mottlau: Yeah. I mean, we know our core competencies. We're never going to bite off more than we can chew. Now granted, we understand more and more these days, there's a lot of development supporting things like telehealth, patient engagement, EMR and whatnot. But we're also going to make sure that at the end of the day, we're tying in the right folks to provide the best solution we can to patients. David: How much discussion has to happen around network security and operating system security?  I mean, if you're running these on smart TVs, they're then running web OS, which is probably to the medical facility's I.T. team or not terribly familiar to them.  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Facilities, hospitals, and anything that involves network security bring them an acute case of indigestion, more so than other areas in the business world. So these folks, a lot of times, there's exhaustive paperwork whenever you have something that links up to the internet or something that's going to open up those vulnerabilities. So, Pro:Centric webOS is actually a walled garden. It is not something that is easily hacked when you have a walled garden approach and something that's controlled with a local server. That's why we took that approach. Now, we can offer them a VPN if there is something that they want to do externally, but these systems were decided upon years ago and built with security in mind because we knew we were going to deploy in very sensitive commercial environments. And so not so much a concern. You don't need to pull our TV out and link up with some foreign server as you might with a laptop that you buy that demands updates. It's not anything like that because, of course, that would open us up to vulnerability. So we don't take that approach. It's typically a local server and there is the ability to do some control of the server if you want a VPN, but other than that, there is no access.  David: Do you touch on other areas of what we would know as digital signage within a medical facility?  Like I'm thinking of wayfinding, directories, donor recognition, video walls, and those sorts of things. Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. I mean, we see everything. Wayfinding needs have been for years and years now, and those are only expanding. and we start to see some that require outdoor displays for wave finding. So we do have solutions for that.  Beyond displays, we actually have robots now that we're testing in medical facilities and have had a couple of certifications on some of those. David: What would they do?  Tom Mottlau: Well, the robots would be used primarily to deliver some type of nonsensitive product. I know there's some work down the road, or let's just say there's some demand for medication delivery.  But obviously, LG's approach to any demand like that is to vet it out and make sure we're designing it properly. Then, we can make announcements later on about that type of stuff. For now, we're taking those same robots that we're currently using, say, in the hotel industry, and we're getting demand for that type of technology to be used in a medical facility.  David: So surgical masks or some sort of cleaning solutions or whatever that need to be brought up to a certain area, you could send in orderly, but staffing may be tight and so you get a robot to do it. Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. And that is a very liquid situation. There's a lot of focus and a lot of development. I'm sure there'll be a lot to announce on that front, but it's all very fluid, and it's all finding its way into that environment with our company.  All these future-forward needs, not only with the robots but EV chargers for the vast amount of electric vehicles, we find ourselves involved in discussions on all these fronts with our medical facilities these days.  David: It's interesting. Obviously, AI is going to have a role in all kinds of aspects of medical research and diagnosis and all those super important things.  But I suspect there's probably a role as well, right down at the lobby level of a hospital, where somebody comes in where English isn't their first language, and they need to find the oncology clinic or whatever, and there's no translator available. If you can use AI to guide them, that would be very helpful and powerful.  Tom Mottlau: Let me write that down as a product idea. Actually, AI is something that is discussed in the company, I would say, on a weekly basis, and again, I'm sure there'll be plenty to showcase in the future. But yes, I'd say we have a good head start in that area that we're exploring different use cases in the medical environment.  David: It's interesting. I write about digital signage every day and look at emerging markets, and I've been saying that healthcare seems like a greenfield opportunity for a lot of companies, but based on this conversation, I would say it is, and it isn't because if you are a more generalized digital signage software platform, yes, you could theoretically do a lot of what's required, but there's so much insight and experience and business ties that you really need to compete with these patient engagement providers, and I think it would be awfully tough for just a more generalized company to crack, wouldn't it?  Tom Mottlau: I believe so. I mean, we've seen many come and go. You know, we have certain terms internally, like the medicine show, Wizard of Oz. there's a lot out there; you really just have to vet them out to see who's legit and who isn't, and I'm sure there are some perfectly legitimate companies that we haven't worked with yet, probably in areas outside of patient education we, we have these discussions every week, and it's, it can be difficult because there are companies that you might not have heard of and you're always trying to assess, how valid is this? And, yeah, that's a tough one.  David: Last question. Is there a next big thing that you expect to emerge with patient engagement over the next couple of years, two-three years that you can talk about?  Tom Mottlau: You hit the nail on the head, AI. But you know, keep in mind that's something in relative terms. It has been relatively just the last few years, and it has been something that's come up a lot. It seems there's a five-year span where something is a focus going way back, it was going from analog to digital.  When I first came here, it was going from wood-clad CRT televisions to flat panels, and now we have OLED right in front of us. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of progression in this market. And I would say AI is one of them, and Telehealth is another; I guess we'll find out for sure which one sticks that always happens that way, but we don't ignore them.  David: Yeah, certainly, I think AI is one of those foundational things. It's kind of like networking. It's going to be fundamental. It's not a passing fancy or something that'll be used for five years and then move on to something else. Tom Mottlau: Yeah, true. But then again, also, it's kind of like when everybody was talking about, okay, we're not going to pull RF cable that went on for years and years because they were all going to pull CAT5, and then next thing, you know, they're saying, well, we have to go back and add CAT5 because they got ahead of themselves, right? So I think the challenge for any company is nobody wants to develop the next Betamax. Everybody wants to develop something that's going to be longstanding and useful, and so it's incumbent upon us to vet out those different solutions and actually see real practical ways of using it in the patient room and trusting our partners and watching them grow. A lot of times, they're the test beds, and so that's the benefit of our approach.  By providing that platform and supporting those partners, we get to see which tree is really going to take off.  David: Betamax, you just showed your age.  Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir. That made eight tracks, right?  David: For the kiddies listening, that's VCRs. All right. Thanks, Tom. That was terrific.  Tom Mottlau: Thank you very much, sir.  David: Nice to speak with you. 

Once you outperform your competitors in terms of the way that you do things, the way that you make your presentations, the way that you interact with your clients, the way that you follow up and service them -- when you're already outperforming your other competitors in that area, then the only thing you can really do is focus on how can I outperform my previous performance? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co host Bianca Istvan and I will be discussing the topic of outperforming your top competitor. Welcome back, Bianca. Bianca: Thanks so much, David. So happy to be here with you. And what are we talking about? And what does that mean to outperform your top competitor? David: Yeah, great question. For a lot of people, we kind of feel like we need to do it. We want to do it, but we're not quite sure how or what or even who they are. So, what it means to me is that we are doing a better job at the things that need to be done to be able to deliver a positive result for our clients. So outperforming a top competitor means that we're doing it better. We're doing it differently. And we're able to convey that to people in a way where they understand it. They understand that there's a difference between the way that we deliver things and the way that other people deliver things. Bianca: Wow, that's absolutely fantastic. And, you know, thanks for bringing so much awareness because yeah, it's a lot of confusion around this topic. And you mentioned something about who our competitor is. So how do you even determine who that is? David: For a lot of people, when you're out there in the market and you're talking to people about buying your products and services, they'll say, Oh, well, I deal with this person or I deal with that person. So that's a good way to find out who your top competitors are. Because if you keep hearing the same names over and over again, that's a pretty good indication that they're a top competitor. Also, very often when we're starting out in a market, we may be aware of sort of the big dog in the market, the person who is already recognized as a leader. So, you may just know when you're going in the person who does the most advertising or who seems to be the best known in the marketplace. That's also a good way to determine, okay, this might be one of my top competitors. Ultimately, we need to decide who we see as our top competitors. But that's really just the starting point. Because I think that people make a big mistake when they focus on outperforming other people as their top competitors versus getting to the point where they ultimately have to outperform themselves, right? So I think ultimately we want to get to a point where we are our own top competitor that we're trying to outperform. Because once you've outperformed your other competitors in terms of the way that you do things, the way that you make your presentations, the way that you interact with your clients, the way that you follow up and service them. When you're already outperforming your other competitors in that area, then the only thing you can really do is focus on how can I outperform my previous performance? Bianca: Wow, that's absolutely a great answer. And I heard there a lot of hows. So how do you really outperform your top competitor? David: Well, a lot of it has to do with determining what is it that we're saying to people. How are we saying it? How often are we saying it? So it really boils down to a lot of our interactions with our clients. How often we're communicating with them, the very specific things that we're saying. The way that we're performing. Are we able to deliver what they're looking for in a timely manner? Can we provide better quality products than our competitors? So a lot of it is really looking at the specifics of the job itself that needs to get done, and the way that we do those things. So,

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Set top boxes have long been looked at, theoretically at least, as single-purpose devices that would do nicely as digital signage media players, but it's fair to say a lot of software company developer and support teams have painful memories of trying to use consumer devices from China as Android-based players. They weren't reliable in terms of performance, or even in terms of what showed up from shipment to shipment. So what if a company that was expressly in the business of commercial-grade set top boxes for the pay TV and cable markets got into digital signage? That's the deal with a UK company called Amino, which now has two lines of business - pay TV and pro AV applications like digital signage. These are devices that are engineered to last for five or six years, and in a lot of cases, they are happily ticking away for a decade and longer. High reliability and remote management are inherent in the product design, so meeting that common pro AV demand was largely automatic. I had a good chat with Rowan Brunger, Amino's UK-based Sales Director, about the hardware, how the company goes to market, and what's involved if software companies and solutions providers want to add Amino devices as a hardware option. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Rowan, thank you for joining me. I bumped into you last year and basically said, what do you guys do? Cause I'd never heard of you and we'd intended to do a podcast and finally got around to it. So for those people who don't know the company, what are you all about?  Rowan Brunger: Thanks, David. Thanks for having me on. So yeah, great to be here. We are a company called Amino and we've been around for about 25 years. So we have two sides to our business. Primarily, we've been a set top box manufacturer within the pay TV world and in the last few years, we've made a move to expand our enterprise TV and digital signage side of the business which is rapidly growing some momentum in terms of those 25 years we've been around, we've probably got 25 million devices in circulation and we've got quite a compelling device management system that we've tweaked from our experience in the pay TV world brought over to the pro AV arena for managing the states of media devices.  David: So when you say pay TV, you basically in the context of what North Americans would understand that basically means cable TV.   Rowan Brunger: Yeah, cable TV. So tier one, tier two, satellite providers where we would typically either have an Amino box or we'd OEM a box for the actual operator. So we're used to selling in big numbers to operators and what really differentiated us in that market which we're using in this one is the remote device management. So as you can imagine, if we're sending hundreds of thousands of boxes out, we want it to be relatively zero touch from the consumer's environment. We want them to plug the cables in and we do the rest remotely. So that's really what spawn orchestrate products, which is our device management platform that we've tweaked and made more applicable to the pro IV market to manage our media players. David: When you opened up the digital signage/enterprise TV market, was that based on inbound requests, Hey, we would really like to use a set top box. Do you support this market or there may be multiple answers but I'm curious if you kind of looked at where linear TV or cable TV was going, given streaming and the way that was bubbling up and realized, okay, we needed to, we need to open up a new market.  Rowan Brunger: I guess a combination of the various different scenarios you've given there. I mean, it's key to say we've always had a foot within the digital signage and enterprise video world. There's amino products that have been out there for sort of 10 years plus. I guess one of the main alliances partners we had in the past was Triple Play. So we manufactured a lot of the endpoints for Triple Play, Vitech and some of the IPTV streaming guys. So we've got loads of boxes out there in circulation and they're coming up for renewal or people wanting to upgrade to 4k, et cetera.  So that gives us a natural pull off. Okay, let's look at this market in isolation rather than just bolting onto our existing business. And then there's actually looking at the experience that we've gained in the pay TV world which has become a very competitive environment to be in. We can take a lot of that experience and truly add some value within the pro AV space with the gravitas of products and devices that we've managed previously and importantly, bringing over our video expertise onto the media player, rather than just looking at signage. We've done well where we integrate the two and we're finding a lot of customers are wanting both of them to run side by side on one device. So we can pull the huge expertise we have in enterprise video and actually put it on the same device next to, for instance, the CMS platform,  David: The markets and the use cases are, in some respects, very similar in terms of both needing very high quality of service. Like the stuff can't go down, right? Rowan Brunger: Sure. Yeah. We look at that from a number of different angles in terms of the physical player itself is truly enterprise grade, steel case designed to work in all environments 24 seven and some would argue we've even over engineered it. I mean, we've literally got boxes that have been running 24 seven in the field for 10 or 12 years solid and they're still displaying every single hour of the day.  But then there's the actual total robustness of the system and that's the inevitably when something does go wrong and things obviously do go wrong, the ability to fix that very quickly and also the ability to make sure the ongoing security and updates of that device are easy to get onto it, is as important as it running really. David: Yeah, I would say any number of CMS software companies in the industry have only in the last few years sort of realized the importance of remote device management, whereas it would have been inherent in what you do right from the start, right?  Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it's absolutely an upfront thought in where we've come from. And inevitably like a lot of things, you only realize how much you need something when you don't have it and when there's a problem. So certainly a lot of the signage projects that were involved with it, it's not their first signage project at all. They're learning from the deployments they've already made and what the pinch points were and what the really painful bits about it. And I think we're in a world now where people are taking their signage a lot more seriously with a big emphasis and cost push to get people back to the high street. For instance, when we're looking at retail, it's not just a tick box, we have a signage system in place. It's got to be absolutely robust. You've got to be able to rely on it and certainly, in times where people are paying to have their content advertised within the stores or the settings, they want to know it's actually been on the screen.  David: So you're competing in a few ways with different kinds of companies. You've got the consumer/prosumer android set top boxes that have come over from Shenzhen or whatever. You've got special purpose media play out boxes like a bright sign box and then you've got companies like SPINX who have their own box and other companies that have their own boxes and then you have PCs. So how do you kind of position yourself?  Rowan Brunger: It's a really good question. So, if I cover the first section early on, I'll probably include system on chip in that as well. So we've got a system on chip users, people have realized that there's value in having a player but maybe not as necessarily selected. One that hits all their objectives, I'm sure we say and then we've got the likes of the guys that do really high end boxes with multiple outputs. We've liked to keep this really simple, we have two products in our portfolio, for instance, we have a POE model and we have a Wifi model. So we keep it really simple. It's at a price point where we're stretching the people from the cheap consumer devices and the system on chip operators but add enough value to make that extra investment to move towards an enterprise grade player but we're underneath a lot of our true competitors that you know do fit for purpose signage players because we don't try and do everything. So I'll give you an example of that. We like to partner with specialists in areas that aren't familiar to us. So if somebody needs a four output player, we've got a partnership with the likes of Matrox to give you that. So those guys specialize in multiple output play, cards and players, we feed into it. But what that gives the customer is one platform for pretty much whatever they want to do. So our device management and the reliability is right up there with the top end competitors. But we've got a really simplistic view and what our customers like is no matter what they're displaying or what they're using the player for, it's the same player that does it all. So we've got one customer that has probably six use cases for our player within their stores. So a large rollout of about 650-700 stores in the UK and they're doing multiple things with it but they know it's a H 200 player,  that is just programmed in different ways for those different use cases and they really liked that from a maintenance point of view. So we've kept things really simple. We are definitely a step up and a professional grade player to challenge the lower end operators in the market and in terms of the higher end guys, I think we're hitting a price point. They can't, so we can get mass adoption from our product and we've got the right partnerships in place to cover all use cases with the guys that lead the industry in those areas. David: So for the age 200 player. If I'm buying, like 10 of them, what roughly in U. S. dollars would be the cost?  Rowan Brunger: So well, I'm doing a conversion in my head.  David: Well, give me, EU or sterling.  Rowan Brunger: Yeah, so we've got a package to trade within Europe that's about 240 pounds. Okay. What are we at? Just over 300 and that's a full two year package of enhanced support, premium device management software on the player itself. The player itself is around 200 on its own with various different options. So it hits a price point if you want to power four screens; for instance, in a video wall, it actually becomes price. It prices itself well enough that you could actually put a player on each of those screens, run it as a video wall, or run them individually and have that flexibility. So you're not just doing one or the other, yet you're still coming in at probably less than a quad head player that would powerful screens,  David: Yeah, and it's interesting. By standardizing on just one box for a whole bunch of different use cases, you could keep a spares pool without having to think, okay, I need two spares of these and two spares of those, and so on. You just have five on the shelf that you can pull off if you need to. Rowan Brunger: Exactly that. I mean the scenario I just gave you before, they're even looking at running just some simple audio or some simple HTML pages, just because they like the simplicity that everything is powered by exactly the same thing.  David: You mentioned that you've had stuff in the field for 10 years. Do you have a rated operating life?  Rowan Brunger: Well, the chipset has changed, which has sort of adapted that slightly, and then you've obviously got the provisions of using flash memory but the products that we have in the field have normally been programmed to do one thing, from the offset. So, quite often, decoding video streams, so they haven't really been updated, and that's why they've been running for 10 or 12 years plus. They're designed and warranted to run for, you know, the standard sort of five or six years, but they've become so robust that people have just left them in cause they're working.  We've got an airport with 2000 of the units in, and it's only because they want to change to full grade that they even thought about upgrading them. They've been running in excess of 10 years in that airport. David: So with the build for these units, if I have 500 of them and I decide, okay, I'm expanding, I'm an airport, I'm expanding a new terminal. I need 500 more. Is it going to be a different box at this point, or would that even matter? Rowan Brunger: The H200 has been around for about two years now, it really depends on when those proxies were deployed but the older boxes that we have in the sort of thousands out there, aren't supported anymore because they're well over 10 years old, but we've got a very easy upgrade path to swap those boxes out for the new range of products. And in doing that, they're all on the same platform for managing them then as well. David: I asked this because one of the complaints, among probably quite a few complaints with buying little Android boxes from Shenzhen or elsewhere is that if you order a hundred of them and then you order another hundred that second batch of one hundred might have different operating systems or different versions of the operating system, different electronics inside and everything else. So every time they show up, you're starting from scratch. Rowan Brunger: Absolutely. Welcome to buying consumer products. But we manage our chipsets and our components very strictly, and you can imagine the volumes we make them in because there's a lot of crossover from the set-top box side of the business but more importantly, we operate Android AOSP. So, we actually control and write the firmware for the product ourselves. So, in terms of updating the products, we're putting our own firmware on there. We're not relying on Google or Android updates for anything; in fact, much the opposite, because we want to be in control of it. So for instance, when you boot one of our boxes up, there's no app store. There's no standard Google browser on there, it's exactly what we choose to put on there, which makes it very fit for purpose because it's not running a million things in the background. We give it some very clear parameters and control exactly what middleware or APK that we put on there that's monitored centrally and all the versions and updates are controlled centrally as well. So you know exactly what's on there and you're the master of your own destiny.  David: Are you having to worry about security, well, I guess everybody worries about security, but because, as you just described, does that kind of greatly reduce the risks? Rowan Brunger: Yeah, it does, and again, this is something we've pulled over from our knowledge of the Pay TV market. So working with Android, we adhere to some pretty strict guidelines from Google in terms of security patches and timely updates, et cetera, and we actually think that's really very relevant in the pro AV market as well. So we've actually pulled over the standards that we adhere to on the Pay TV market, within the digital signage space. So as a result of that, we do at least four firmware updates a year that contain all the relevant security patches because there's nothing else on there in terms of an app store, et cetera, we're cleared in very highly secure environments. So we do a lot of work with the government. We've got a really interesting project going on, within a prison. So somebody's made their own middleware that they're using on the box and actually running entertainment within prison cells using the H200, which you can imagine is a super secure environment. So because we're in complete control of it, we can make it as secure as we like. And we're seeing that more and more prevalent with even retail rollouts now, with things like 802.1X authentication on networks, which I've never heard asked for but have been asked quite a lot for recently. So we quite got an agile development team. We're able to add functions like that and drop them in the latest firmware, and get them out of the boxes very quickly.  David: So because you're shipping a lot of units, do you get some sense of what the marketplace demand is?  For the longest time, people were saying, yes, it would be nice if we went to 4k, but nobody actually needs it yet, and for signage applications, it's probably never needed. Certainly, 8k, which is being marketed, is something that is probably years away if it ever comes. What is the marketplace actually using? Rowan Brunger: We are being asked for 4k a lot more. You're right in the signage space; it's less applicable, although a lot of the CMS providers don't even output in 4k, which, obviously, is a stumbling block. But for those that do, we're just testing a build for 4k content at the moment, and we've got out with some beta testers, and that's going very well. Obviously, 4k video is pretty much a must when people are looking at video, and that's very much our expertise, how we can stream that and what protocols we use to stream it and transport streams and encryption, is all around 4k and in particular, low latency is something that we specialize in quite a lot. So that takes us down certain vertical markets such as sporting and gaming where latency is an absolute deal breaker.  So we're seeing for our players and going back to your question about market trends, I'd say 50% of our opportunities are video-led, and the other 50% are signage-led, but with an element of video, a lot of them are with an element of video as well. So I think our expertise in video is really setting us apart here, and that, down the 4k route. POE has been requested more and more so that's why it's standard on our H200s. David: For retail more than anything I would imagine? Rowan Brunger: Actually, no, and I thought it would be, but what we're seeing is the requests for Wi-Fi is actually coming through retail more than anywhere else because when people are doing a retrofit of a store or they want to have quite an agile space within the store and be creative with where they're putting the screens, there's not normally a network point there. So we're actually finding some of our big retail rollouts are actually going down the Wi-Fi route, which I didn't expect, to be honest, but we've done a separate Wi-Fi unit for that marketplace because leading back to the security, a lot of our government and military deployments require us not to even have the ability to have Wi-Fi in the box altogether, which is why we didn't just add Wi-Fi to the existing H200. We've actually done it as two separate products. But yeah, interestingly, we've just launched our, or we're just in the process of launching our Wi-Fi unit, and the inquiries that are coming in are predominantly retail, and also the leisure industry as well as people want to put more screens and things in bars and pubs that typically have terrible infrastructure. Wi-Fi seems to be the easiest route to go with that as well.  David: You mentioned streaming, I'm a little curious about that because most of the set-top boxes that are on the market have onboard storage and digital signage most typically is forward and stored and played off of a hard drive locally.  Are your boxes doing that, or is it all streaming? Rowan Brunger: No, it's all streaming. We can digest the number of transport streams such as multicast, unicast, low latency dash, and low latency HLS because that's what our bread and butter are on the set-top box side of the world. So we're finding a lot of people for instance, within the betting industry where low latency is an absolute must, we're working with specific middleware vendors that provide the streams on an OTT basis, and we decode them locally on the box with various different levels of encryption and it's enabling people to reduce the amount of head end hardware that they've got. Even down to sort of office builds, government buildings where there's an element of wanting just some basic news channels alongside the signage, the ability to switch between the two. So typically, you'd have a big head end, consumer set-top box with aerial on the roof, bringing those streams down, we're able to bring them in completely OTT. So we remove the need for all of that hardware, and just, bring it on an OTT basis straight to the box, which is game-changing for somebody that's, maybe, got a larger state and they have to rent aerial space on the roof of all their stores, have a big server unit within there, consuming a lot of power, needing managing, and obviously bringing those streams down locally, we literally just pop the addresses into the box, into a JSON file and we pull them down through our player that's on board within the software stack. David: Are there worries at all about the quality of service and reliability of service for connectivity? Because God knows that used to be an issue, but maybe it's gone away.  Rowan Brunger: It's becoming less of an issue because with different encryptions and transport streams, they require a lot less bandwidth. It still needs assessing, obviously, when you're looking at a sign. But you can tweak the bitrate frames between the different encryption levels to get to a happy medium of a quality that you want alongside a bandwidth that you're willing to play with. So, it's becoming less of an issue. We can still obviously decode on-prem feeds as well when it's absolutely paramount that the feeds have got to be on-premises but the bandwidth is becoming less and less of an issue now.  David: You mentioned enterprise TV at the front end of our chat. How do you define that?  Rowan Brunger: So it's really whether it's TV-led, and what I mean by enterprise TV is, anything that's not residential, and not, hospitality so retail, office environments, sports stadium, things like that. That's where we'd class as enterprise TV. So it's the enterprise-grade of the box, but it's primarily streaming IPTV rather than just signage.  David: Do you sell direct or do you kind of go through a channel or, through software partners? Rowan Brunger: So we sell purely through a channel. We sell through distributors around the globe, trade only, through the channel directly to our system integrators, and onto the end users. So yeah, we're a channel-focused business, and that's something that we've recently sort of redesigned because that model is very different from what Amino is used to in the Pay TV market where they may deal directly with operators. We've decided that within this marketplace, a channel-only focus is the best way to go. It ensures our partner's protection on pricing and margin, et cetera, and also gives us scalability that we've got partners out there promoting the product for us. David: When you started Looking at the digital signage market, was it a little baffling when you realized how many software companies there are? Rowan Brunger: Yes, there does seem to be an ever ending amount of CMS partners to play with. We've worked with a couple that we've got a history with and onboarded those guys. We've now got an accreditation process. So when we do onboard a partner, we truly onboard them as a partnership rather than just saying, okay, we've tested that version of the APK, and that works fine. Let's call it accredited.  We actually onboard them and make a commitment that CMS will work ongoing with Amino and we go into a partnership with the CMS so we get beta releases of each other's software so we can truly test it in advance, which is why it takes a little bit of time to onboard, although we have quite an impressive list of CMS vendors on the list to go through accreditation, so it is definitely a nice route to market. We want to play with as many people as we can. At the same time, not overloading ourselves.  I think what's helping us there is the fact that a lot of CMSs seem to develop their APK before the platforms, so we do tend to be able to onboard people fairly quickly. And if there is any integration work that needs doing, it's fairly straightforward, and we've seen it before on somebody else's application. So yeah, onboarding and partnering are absolutely key for us over the next 12 months. We don't want what CMS somebody uses to be a barrier to sell, and it's not just a CMS, we work very closely with a number of streaming middleware companies as well that are specific in certain vertical markets as well.  David: So you're at a stand at some trade show and a CMS, digital signage CMS software company walks up and says, “Hi, I'm aware of you guys, and would like to be involved.” What's that thing you tell them when they say, “What do we need or how do we need to be set up in order for this to work?”  Rowan Brunger: Initially, we would ask for a version of their application and log in to their system, and we deliberately ask for no more than that because we want to test it as a virgin user if you like. So we put it through a first round of testing, which is: Does this go onto the box? Does it behave as if I would expect it to behave as a user? And that's our first round of testing. Normally, if that goes okay, we put it forward towards a full Q.A. test with our Hong Kong development team, which is a 400-point Q.A. test, which literally tests every element of the software and the integration, and at that point, we give a report back to the CMS provider to say, “Yes, it's all gone smoothly” or “It works, but can we suggest we do this and this integration together to make it a better experience?” And then, we go into the commercials of the partnership and make sure that we're sharing best practices with each other in terms of updates and things. We also have a lot of APIs that are available through our remote management software that we're finding a lot more of the CMS partners want to integrate into their CMS platform to give the end users, that one pane of glass, whether they're managing content or the device that they can do it in one place. So we have completely open APIs for the CMS partners to be able to do that and put a lot of the functionality that we have in our device management, actually in their front-end system that the customer is using every day for the content.  David: Does your platform support IP streaming or multicast or that sort of thing? Is there a foundational thing they have to have?  Rowan Brunger: No, not at all. We are dealing with some partners to put our video play technology within their CMS but it's not these guys' expertise. So, actually, the value to them of working with Amino is you can run their CMS software and switch seamlessly into an IPTV solution alongside their CMS. So, all of a sudden, they can speak to their customers about IPTV streaming solutions alongside pretty much any CMS rather than having to have a specialized solution incorporated into their roadmap.  How many times have we provided screens to somebody and you get the call, maybe two, two weeks later, two years later, “Can we put some TV streams through this for us?” For us, that's just a service we can turn on without having to ship any hardware. So it gives a lot of flexibility to these existing CMS deployments.  David: You mentioned the Hong Kong software team, is that where the company is based?  Rowan Brunger: No, we're based in Cambridge in the UK. So we are a UK-based company and have been for our existence. We have a couple of support teams. One is in Portugal, level one support is in Portugal, and we have a level two support team in Hong Kong. So we've got to follow the sun kind of coverage on support.  David: And manufacturing is done in China like everybody else? Rowan Brunger: Some manufacturing is done in China. There's a whole host of countries that we're manufacturing in. We've got stuff coming out of Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong. It depends on the product or the chipset, but yeah, a fairly well-diverse manufacturing plant. We're not stationed all in one place. David: What's the next AV trade show that you guys will have a stand at or a presence at?  Rowan Brunger: So Infocomm is coming up. We've got a presence there, and we've just done ISE, as you know, and then we've got some presence at NAB as well because we do see some crossover from some of the broadcasting shows that are looking at enterprise video or signage. So our trade show calendar is still split between Pay TV, but with a much larger emphasis than we have done on the AV world.  David: If people want to know more about Amino, where do they find you online? Rowan Brunger: Sure, just go to Amino.tv.  David: Clever! All right, Rowan, thank you very much for your time. Rowan Brunger: Thank you, David. Pleasure as always.

Sharing a rather special episode on The Leadership In Insurance Podcast this week, with one of our favourite podcasting guests. It's not often that we invite people back on pod, so when we do you know it's a good one…This week we welcome back Bryan Falchuk for a conversation all about #collaboration, to celebrate the release of his new book, ‘The Future of Insurance : Volume III. The Collaborators'.Bryan is one of the thought leaders I truly admire in this space. Inspired by the findings of the Insurance Collaboration Index, Bryan and David Gritz of InsurTech NY collaborated on this project to help the industry as we strive to innovate and evolve.In this episode we touch on some of the broader themes explored in the book...

Welcome to the second conversation in the new Portals series “Current Openings — What the World Doesn't Quite Get Yet.” It's a different approach to exploring what's appearing in the “current,” or flow, of new intelligence and evolutionary possibility washing across humanity and the planet.David Price Francis, author, spiritual teacher and co - founder of Energy Worlds , joins Aviv Shahar in the Current series, this time for a new perspective on natural laws — the universal principles and forces at play in every level o f life on this planet and throughout the cosmos. Natural laws are the invisible infrastructure and core energies that support and influence all human activity and future possibility.Consider duality: the law of opposites. Positive and negative; inhale and exhale; the planet's two poles. How do we embody the balance but also rise above it? Move forward while also escaping the pull of polarity. It's the same with all the laws: finding the harmony and consciousness that will liberate more of our innate capacity.With awareness of natural laws and their connection to universal processes, we are able to accelerate our personal development and become conscious contributors in the unfolding future of humanity and the planet.This wide - ranging conversation unveils new insights about living in harmony with the natural laws and their effect on human capacity for refinement and personal growth, including:We want to align with the natural laws to become conscious in our life and get better results in whatever space we operate in"Trinity consciousness" is the smart person who is neither red nor blue, conservative nor liberal, but moves from being bipolar to the third vector and works with bothThe ability to turn our back on something is a powerful part of life and dev elopment. The exhaustion of our negation capacity is a trigger for mental disordersThere's a natural law that governs how the planet receives and expresses universal energy through a seven - fold system; just look at a rainbowBeing conscious of the natural laws that govern our life enables us to participate in pulling the levers of our development rather than being played by the lawsEvery domain in life has an essence core that is surrounded by many layers and enclosures we must first penetrate to be admit ted to the coreBeing in harmony with the natural laws enables the esoteric musician to create music that can heal the pain of people in grief or inspire spiritual upliftThe alchemists were expressing a system of universal laws with what they called the a ngels: earth, water, air, and fire, and the fifth, essenceHumans have something special, like a superpower — the depth of the power we can access inside ourselves. The world might hypnotize the conscious brain, but our unconscious connects to the natural laws, which are universal in originThis conversation is part of the continuing Portals discovery into what is emerging on the frontiers of human experience in this time of profound change. Information about upcom ing special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES “I think with the esoteric comes another unders tanding, which is that we can only develop as human beings in accordance and in alignment with the workings of natural laws and principles. ” ( David )“So, humans have a certain perimeter within which we can gather and within which we can operate. If we choose to try and fly on our own using our own kind of equipment, unlike birds, we're not able. Now, we're clever. We have use of a very advanced brain, more so than anything else on the planet, I believe, and that therefore means that we can manipulate the laws. We can operate inside the laws to create machinery to then enable ourselves to operate within those laws.” ( David )“For every creation, there's a reaction; for every positive action, there's a reaction coming the other way. So, right now, if we look at, say, the realm of politics, we can see the same natural law, universal law, playing out mostly unconsciously. And this to me is the big feature, which is that human development works by becoming increasingly conscious of these laws and therefore being able to use them towards the development and growth purpose.” ( David )“So, being able to position oneself inside understanding that law of human life that we have the power of positive and negative, we could say we have the ability to accept things with one hand and deny them with the other.” ( David )“Yes, so in relationships there are definite laws by which relationships work. It seems to be like this random, do I love him or her? Do I not? Are we soulmates? Are we twin flames? You get it, all this stuff. And I tell folks, psychology usually governs astrology these days for multiple reasons I won't go into too much. But it's the wish at the end of the story instead of, they lived happily ever after. It should be, “...and then the work really started.” (David) RESOURCES MENTIONED Portals of Perception WebsiteAviv's LinkedIn Aviv's TwitterAviv's Websitehttps://energyworlds.com/https://portalsofperception.org/portals/current-openings-series/

With Sleep Medicine Specialist Dr. David Gessert   What's your idea of the perfect vacation getaway? Imagine if money were no object and you could go anywhere, would you choose to sightsee in an exotic, glamorous location? Or, is your idea of the perfect getaway a sunny beach somewhere? Although our concept of the ideal vacation may vary, rarely do we book a trip with the idea of getting away from home simply for a good night's sleep. Instead, we return home filled with wonderful memories but feeling like we may need a vacation after our amazing trip just to recover!    Well, that might be about to change. One of the hottest wellness trends for 2023 is booking a vacation with the primary goal of getting a proper night's rest. According to a recent article in “Pure Wow,” several well-known luxury hotels are now offering wellness travel packages that prioritize the perfect night's sleep. These days, new hotels are being designed specifically to promote sleep, health, and well-being with features such as sound-deadening materials in the doors, walls, and floors to ensure a quiet night's rest along with air purifiers and soft lighting.   Taking it one step further, the Hotel Cadogan in London features a Sleep Concierge service where you can book a session with leading hypnotherapist and sleep expert, Malminder Gill. The service also includes sleep-inducing meditation recordings by Gill along with a “Pillow menu” that allows you to select your choice of pillow firmness, weighted blankets, a bedtime tea, and a scented pillow mist, all designed to support the best possible sleep. But you don't have to travel to London to get the perfect night's sleep. Right here in the U.S., numerous hotels are also offering sleep packages. For example, the Westin Hotel chain is famous for the sleep amenities they provide, including Lavender Balms, White Tea body lotions, and scented candles along with their luxurious Heavenly Bedding. The Park Hyatt in New York provides sleep masks along with their Sleep Suites which feature the Bryte Restorative Bed that dynamically adjusts to the guest's sleep stages throughout the night to relieve pressure points and control the climate and temperature of the bed. Finally, the new Fairmont Century Plaza offers a combination of infrared technology, compression therapy, and healing sound waves on a specially designed anti-gravity bed. Additional amenities include CBD bath bombs, oversized soaking tubs, and black-out curtains.   If a “sleep destination” trip isn't an option right now, there are still simple things you can do to get a better night's sleep. For example, establish a nightly routine by going to bed at the same time every night and rising at the same time every morning. Exercise early in the morning rather than late at night so you don't get overstimulated and find it hard to fall asleep. Spending just fifteen minutes outside in the sunlight, even during the winter, could help reduce insomnia. Finally, don't bring your phones, iPads, and laptops into your bedroom because the blue screen light can trick your brain into thinking it's still daytime.   But if these helpful suggestions don't result in a better night's sleep, you may wish to consult a doctor. And in the meantime, check out my 2021 interview with Sleep Medicine Physician, Dr. David Gessert from Henry Ford Health.   What You'll Hear in This Episode: How did David get involved in sleep medicine? Can we break up our sleep instead of getting it all at once? What is sleep deprivation? What is “microsleep” and why is it dangerous? How much sleep should adults aim to get every night? Why is sleep deprivation linked to triggering anxiety and depression? What role does a good night's sleep play in balancing our hormones? How much sleep do children and teenagers need? What are the five categories of sleep disorders? What is sleep apnea and why do people snore? How can some people function on very little sleep? Is it possible to catch up on lost sleep? What is included in healthy sleep hygiene? Does lack of sleep cause weight gain? Is there such a thing as getting too much sleep? How does the loss of sleep affect your immune system and mental health? What about sleeping pills like Ambien? How can you combat chronic sleep deprivation? What is involved in sleep apnea testing and treatments? How can you contact Dr. David Gessert to schedule an appointment?   Today's Takeaway: A chronic lack of sleep is not only exhausting and leaves us feeling tired and irritable, but it also can be extremely damaging to our health. It's not just our physical health that can be affected. A chronic lack of sleep can also trigger bouts of extreme anxiety and depression. But the good news is that there are ways to make up for lost sleep. Practicing good sleep hygiene can be the first step toward getting a better night's sleep. Making positive changes to your nightly regimen by creating a healthy bedtime routine might help you sleep better at night. Identify the factors that are preventing you from getting your best night's sleep. Eliminating caffeine and power drinks after mid-day, reducing your alcohol consumption, practicing meditation or deep breathing, and avoiding heavy meals before bedtime are all ways in which we can improve our chances for a good night's sleep. By providing our body with the adequate rest it needs, we not only give ourselves the chance to perform at our best the following day, but we're able to be there for our loved ones as well. Remember that every day is a gift and the gift of a good night's sleep is a gift we need to give ourselves. I'm Florine Mark and that's “Today's Takeaway.”   Quotes: “A lot of the really good quality sleep comes at the end of a long stretch of sleep.” — David   “Anybody's going to be irritable if you don't get enough sleep. And so that can make it tougher for the kids to behave during school.” — David   “You know, the heavier you are, the more likely you are to snore, and the more likely you are to develop sleep apnea.” — David    “If you're under six hours, you're not getting enough sleep.” — David   “For people who continuously don't get enough sleep, their performance continues to decline.” — David   “It's not really possible to catch up on sleep. You have to maintain getting adequate sleep each night.” — David   “Simple fixes can have a very large difference in your sleep quality.” — David   Brought to You By: Florine Mark   Mentioned in This Episode: David Gessert, MD Make an appointment with Dr. Gessert or call 313-916-4417

“I have exquisite wanderlust” Libby DeLana is an executive creative director, founder of This Morning Walk and co-host of the podcast This Morning Walk with Alex Elle. She spoke at the 2022 Do Lectures with Cheryl Strayed about the transformative power of a walk. Libby spent her career in advertising. She was the Director of Design at MullenLowe for 15 years, then went on to co-found the boutique agency Mechanica. Libby's work has won many industry awards and been featured in publications including PRINT Design Annual, Fast Company, Graphis and Communication Arts. She has been profiled by the BBC Radio 4 series The Chain in which 'leading figures name the woman who has inspired their success'. She is an advocate for female leadership, an aspiring pilot, rookie fly fisher, fan of a strong cup of tea and mum to two tall, smart, kind men. Do Walk is her first published book. https://linktr.ee/DavidPearl Timeline 00.00 - 00.46 The Wanderful Theme 00.47 - 05.55 Introducing Libby DeLana 05.57 - 11.18 Libby talks about ‘wandering': The back story - How ‘This Morning Walk' began: What did Libby need to nourish her? Missing the outdoors - the space between Walking every day for the last 11 years The ‘Practice' is not about mileage Treating the walk as a ‘practice' in the same way as a seated meditation or a yoga sequence. Even a 3 minute walk can have a profound effect Libby's mission to share this knowledge with all 11.19 - 14.30 Learning new lessons through every walk Loving the fidelity of the practice: Keeping a commitment to herself The ‘practice' as a ‘radical act of love': Attentiveness and mindfulness - taking a walk for ‘me' Libby learns the most on the days she doesn't want to go 14.31 - 21.08 What Libby learn's from the practice and what's the magic state? Learning to tap into the inherent wisdom of what goes on in the chest (heart) and the gut (intuition), rather than ‘thinking' Walking allowed Libby to put ideas down into heart and gut - what was embodied in that? Libby holds a thought - takes it for a walk and it softens and she begins to understand it. 21.10 - 27.48 Walking the same loop: Focusing on each step and each breath Submitting to the routine Flipping the ‘inquiry' from external to internal Seeing the world feet first rather than head first Not just walking through the streets - you were walking through yourself: what you find beautiful out there - resides in you. Finding the internal beauty - is the ultimate self-care: By doing that - we are caring for our community Walking with others - the walk-pod 27.50 - 31.10 Libby's navigation system: trusting gut / age Inquiry & Curiosity - what's going to show up each day? Things change all the time - embrace and lean into change? The ‘Beginners Mind' 31.11 - 35.49 Waking up with the grumps - curiosity about the deep dark depths. One of the most challenging walks Libby did. Do I crawl into bed and pour a bourbon or do I need / want to get outside and walk? Did the loop? And repeated the loop? After each loop - ask self - how are you doing? Loops - Stomping / Screaming / Beyonce Lemonade / Crying - the best therapist and loving friend was the walk. Needing to know ‘what would come up'? Not all walks are beautiful but there are lessons in it. Libby loves her partnership with the walk and cannot imagine her life without it. 35.50 - 38.30 Moving through grief and sadness Being curious about whats in the heart and in the gut. Taking your ‘discomfort' for a walk. 38.32 - 45.03 The ‘Wanderful' Exercise: Holding your discomfort and taking it for a walk 45.04 - 46.04 End credits Quotations “Walking is an equivalent practice to one of meditation or yoga. It has become a place of quiet, of nourishment, sanctuary, healing of inspiration. I find it's my most creative part of the day.” (Libby) “Even a three minute walk can have a profound effect.” (Libby) “I just love the fidelity of the (walking) practice - it feels like fidelity for myself. It's not about steps and miles. It's about keeping that commitment to myself. It's a radical act of love.” (Libby) “It's about an attentiveness and a consciousness, about taking a walk for ‘me'.” (Libby) “As I walked with a thought in my head… slowly it would come down into my heart and then down to my belly… it's a way of me understanding my ancient knowing.” (Libby) “As I walk, that ‘ball of string' softens and loosens and I can become to see the individual thread.” “(Walking) enables me to know more, feel more… and trust my heart and gut, versus everything I'm telling myself up in my head.” (Libby) “I'm seeing the feet first and changing my gaze from external to internal.” (Libby) “You're not just walking through the street, you were walking through yourself. The thing you find beautiful out there is a reflection of the thing you find beautiful within.” (David) “For me it's constant curiosity and inquiry - what is going to show up each day. Who is going to show up? What kind of conversations are we going to have? Those are my navigation tools.” (Libby) Links Libby DeLana Web: https://libbydelana.com/ Twitter: @parkhere Instagram: @parkhere This Morning Walk: https://www.thismorningwalk.com/   David Pearl (host) Twitter @DavidPearlHere Instagram @davidpearl_here Website www.davidpearl.net   Andrew Paine (Producer & Audio Engineer) Twitter @ItPainesMe  

He's here, he's there; Dr. Hillman brings drug safety everywhere! So given the rules and regulations he needs to follow, the title “vigilante” could be nothing but ironic.We chart David's progress through choosing pharmacology as a subject to study, and settling on pharmacovigilance as a career to pursue. Listen: The Bollywood beats come courtesy of Cambridge-based artist Anish Kumar whose music you can also find on Bandcamp: anishkumarmusic.bandcamp.com, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter.Watch:Subscribe to our YouTube channel now for all future recordings. Episode transcript[Background intro music playing is "Nazia" by Anish Kumar]Parmvir: Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of the 2Scientists podcast, where inspiring scientists share their work with you, wherever you like to listen. Today we come to you from a rather unique spot, rather than a cafe or bar we are camped out in Kensington Gardens in London, because it's a glorious day and our podcasting equipment allows us to do that. But enough about me and us, we are here today, of course I am your host Parmvir Bahia here and we're here with David Basanta, but we also have with us another David who is very special to me, he is an old friend of mine from my PhD program, and we shared much time and much swearing over experiments together at University college London. How are you David Hillman? David: I'm doing well. Thank you. It's, as you say, it's a, it's a lovely day and, it's nice to be back with old friends. Parmvir: Yes, yes. Of course everything rotates background to COVID and whereas we would normally see each other once a year. It's been three, four, possibly? David: Three, I think that's yeah.Parmvir: Miserable. David: Yeah. Sad times we shall have to make up for it. Parmvir: We will, we will. There's a bottle of Cava with our name on it. Once we've done with this. David: And onion rings. Parmvir: And onion rings. Yes. Fancy Marks and Spencer's one's though. So let's start at the beginning. I'm not talking about like, where were you born kind of thing. Although you can mention Kidderminster if you'd like. So as I understand it, we had a relatively similar track as undergraduates. So you did a bachelor's in pharmacology, correct? David: Yeah, that's right. Parmvir: So tell us why, why pharmacology? David: So this is gonna age me, age us.So I, for my A levels, so for my senior school exams, I, studied chemistry, biology, and maths, and I wanted to study something at university that combined chemistry and biology. And so this is the bit that will age us. So back in the day, if you remember, you would go to the, career advice department who were trying to help people to steer people towards what options they might want to pick at university.And they had this huge telephone directory effectively, which, mapped together people's different, combinations of A level courses and then gave you a list of options that you could, study at university. So I was sat in this little tiny room with this career advisor person, and they were basically running through this list of different courses.And when they came to pharmacology, they'd already mentioned pharmacy, which, you know, most people know what it is, but then they said pharmacology and I stopped them and said, well, what's, what's the difference? And they actually gave a pretty good summary. They said, it's more the biology of medicine. It's more the, the research and development of new medicines. They said it's potentially a controversial topic because it's the pharmaceutical industry is itself sometimes controversial and there's other aspects to the industry, which are, challenging sometimes. But yeah, that's how it started. So I picked a few different pharmacology courses, one of which was King's College London. I was always very practical, so I liked the idea of doing a year in industry at some point. So I chose a sandwich course like you and yeah, so that took me to KCL all that time ago. Parmvir: Mm. So I didn't realize how similar our tracks had been, because I also did biology, chemistry and maths, and I wanted to do something with the chemistry and the biology.And I got put in that direction by David: did you pick it out of the phone book as well? Parmvir: I did. What was it called? There was a name for it. David: It was pretty like a UCAS publication. Parmvir: Yes. It was just, it was enormous. David: Yeah. Parmvir: But yeah, in any case, I also, I did a sandwich year and I got to go and hang out in Germany for a year, which was fun.But yeah. So obviously after that you came to do a PhD at UCL where we were, well, I was a year ahead of you, I think. David: Yeah. You were. Parmvir: Why? Why did you do a PhD? David: So well for the reasons that I guess a lot of people do them, which is that I wasn't sure what to do next [both laugh] and a PhD seemed like a good way to string it out for another few years before I figured that out.But the reason I landed on UCL was that when I did go and do my year in industry, which like you was for a large pharma company, I worked in a lab looking at some non-clinical safety models. And we were using electrophysiology techniques at the time that was sharp electrode electrophysiology.Parmvir: You're gonna have to explain what electrophysiology means. David: Oh, don't make me do that. It's been 20 years [Parmvir laughs]. Oh, it's basically where you take either isolated cells or tissues and you put tiny, tiny electrodes into them and measure the changing currents across cell membranes. And as you put different drugs on, you can look at different effects of those drugs how they affect the electrical signals that you can measure.And really it's ions moving back and forward across membranes by little things called ion channels. So yeah, so I'd done sharp electrode electrophysiology there. I went back to university to finish my last year, and then the question came up about what to pick for a PhD. And I thought, well, although I hadn't enjoyed electrophysiology, it's something that I had started to, I guess, gain an interest in. Plus I had some skills that in that area. So, yeah, so I found a course, rather a PhD studentship at UCL, which seemed to fit the bill. It was looking at using a slightly different electrophysiology technique, so patch, clamping in a different area, but I thought it was something that I could use what I'd learnt in my year in industry Parmvir: I gave you some of these questions beforehand. David: Yes, because I'm incapable of spontaneous reaction to questions [Parmvir laughs]. Parmvir: Actually, I loved it so much that I have to read out your description of what your memory is like. David: I was quite proud of that. I coined that yesterday. I used to think of my memory as a lobster pot. Parmvir: All right. So you said I've just come up with a good analogy for my recall memory. It's like a reference library. You have to put in a request and then go away for a bit. When you come back, I'll have retrieved something from the vaults. Hopefully. David: Yeah, exactly. Parmvir: But aside from that I wanted to say this might be something of a loaded question, but what did you think of your PhD experience?David: You know, I really, I look back on those years with fond memory. Now it's partly because looking back, you edit out all of the stress and anxiety associated with doing a research project like that. I remember at the time when I first started UCL ran some induction courses where they pulled together PhD students and other postgraduate students from all sorts of backgrounds and John Foreman who you'll remember who was the Dean of students at the time, he gave a little introduction to UCL, but also gave some interesting advice let's say and pointers.And one of the things he pointed out in that session was the high degree of mental illness that is encountered by students in general taking these types of courses because they are stressful. And you often feel like you are kind of on your own. Driving your own research project forward. Sometimes through difficult times. So I do remember that in particular, but you know, what I remember mostly is just how impressed I was with all of the people that surrounded me because our department was not particularly flashy in its kind of presentation, but there were some seriously impressive people there.So I always like to think of our lab in the sense of, you know, it was run by effectively by Dennis and, and Guy when we got there. But before then it had been run by Don and before then it had been run by Bernard Katz who was a Nobel laureate. So it felt like we were the either grandchildren or great grandchildren of a Nobel Laureate and the whole department was a bit like that. It had a lot of very understated people who were world experts in their, in their field. And I always felt like the dumbest person in the department. But that didn't bother me too much because you know, being surrounded by all this greatness and even just, you know, the little glimpses of things you would see at the kind of coffee breaks and in the corridors, some of those memories still live with me, you know. Bearing in mind, this was back in what, between 2001 and 2005.So very, very early days of smartphones, things like trios and things like that, which seem antiquated now. But I remember coming across two old professors, so probably in their seventies or eighties comparing their smartphones and that like little microcosm, are the things that I loved about the department.Parmvir: Actually, I mean, I think you're, you're definitely selling yourself short. Like nobody would say that you weren't smart enough to be there. And I think one of the things that kind of ties into the, the mental health aspect is that we all felt that way. David: Yeah. Parmvir: Except we didn't express it to anyone else. It's, it's utterly ridiculous. How can we all be the least smart person in the room that's just not possible. David: Yeah. Parmvir: And after that, we all got our PhDs anyway, so, you know yeah. David: I certainly have no regrets about it. And I look back on those times with, with very fond memories, for sure. Parmvir: Yeah. Just talk briefly about what you did for your project and what the difficulties were.David: So the lab that I joined, so which, which you were a part of as well, their specialty was calcium activated potassium channels. And over time, the lab had looked at these ion channels in various different settings. The project that I was given was looking at these channels in vascular endothelial cells, which was a cell type that no one in the lab had ever studied before.Parmvir: Mm. David: So one of the biggest challenges that we were hit with straight away was that no one in the lab could really help that much with firsthand experience of how to obtain these cells, how to isolate them, how to culture them, how to grow them and really how to manage those cell types. So you might well remember that, the first, probably nine months of my PhD was just spent trying to culture these cells. Parmvir: Mm-hmm David: and it started with you know, available tissue from rats and other small mammals.But then eventually we were not having success with culturing cells from those models. So I switched onto pigs and, you know, I'd done a bit of reading that, you know, these vessels, because they were much larger the blood vessels, it was easier effectively to culture cells from, so I looked in the phone book and I found the address of an abattoir out in the middle of Essex.And there began my weekly trip for getting on for two and a half years to the deepest, darkest corners of Essex to go and retrieve pig, coronary artery cells once a week. Parmvir: Yeah. And essentially you suffered because these things were so flat. [David laughs] And when you're trying to, so you, for anyone who's listening, you have to picture trying to get a very, very fine tube onto something that is incredibly flat, and essentially you need this thing to form a vacuum seal and that just wasn't gonna happen. David: No, so, you know, vascular endothelial cells, they're the cells that line blood vessels, which is why they're, they're very flat. They're like tiles almost on the inside of veins and arteries.And you know, with other cells in the lab that were being looked at like the ones that you were looking at, like DRGs and like neurons and things like that, you know, you were basically putting the, the electrode down onto like a ball. Parmvir: Yeah. David: So the gap between the bottom of the dish and the top of the cell was who knows, 10, 20 microns, something like that. The cells that we were looking at, they flattened themselves out so much, they were about one micron, I think we estimated and therefore the tiniest vibration in the room would destroy the cell. And yeah, so the first stage was trying to culture, the damn things, and that was extremely challenging. It took a long time, but nine months of the way through managed it, and then began the whole pain of trying to get electrical recordings from them, which turned out to be as difficult. Parmvir: Yeah. So one of the things, I don't know if we ever talked about this, but what did you aspire to do after you'd done your PhD originally?Like, did you have any kind of idea? David: I mean, I think I was always headed into the pharmaceutical industry, which is where I landed up. In my undergrad degree in, I think my either first or second year, I did a very nice course, which was a kind of practical introduction to the pharmaceutical industry and from very top level, how drugs are developed and how pharma companies are organized internally and how the research progresses. And that, I'd always found that interesting. I mean, I find the entire pharmaceutical industry absolutely fascinating. And still do to this day. It's such an amazingly complex industry. And so, yeah, so I think I'd always been heading in that direction. Sure enough, the PhD certainly made me decide I was done with bench science [Parmvir laughs]. So, you know, by the time you've spent three plus years plodding along with these experiments that have a success rate of one in 50 sometimes. Parmvir: Yeah. David: You know, days and weeks without getting any data, and towards the end, still being in the lab at three o'clock in the morning, trying to get something to work and breaking more and more glassware as time goes on [Parmvir laughs]Yeah, I decided I was done with bench science, although I loved being in the labs, I loved playing in the labs. But I was never that into the kind of reading of the scientific papers and that sort of thing. Once it came down to maths and things like that, I wasn't so engaged. I needed to see practical things. Parmvir: Yeah. I feel like at some point we realized we were both some kind of engineer at heart rather than David: Yeah. Maybe Parmvir: scientist, David: maybe. Parmvir: It's more like, how does this work rather than trying to answer a bigger scientific question. David: Yeah. Parmvir: But obviously you were, you were a little bit scarred by your experience there, and you ended up going off in, I guess, a very different track from what the standard academic education leads you towards. So I think at this point this might be a good place to put your disclaimer in. David: Yes. So I work in the pharmaceutical industry and over time I've worked for, and with a variety of different companies.Any of the content that I describe today are my opinions and my opinions alone, and often they're really based off things which are in the public domain. In fact it's all based off things that were in the public domain and also some of the education that I've received, because actually, even after I finished my PhD, I then years later went on to study a, another academic course specifically in pharmacovigilance and pharmacoepidemiology.Parmvir: Oh, where did you do that? David: London school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Parmvir: Oh. David: And it's interesting because it's a short course and I felt was a very valuable course. It's a course where regulatory authorities also send their people to learn too. Parmvir: So there's a lot of questions I can ask next.But one of the things that your job description throws up is this word "pharmacovigilance". What does that mean? David: Okay. So somewhere because I'm not gonna do it justice from memory, I'm going to read out the WHO definition of pharmacovigilance. It doesn't roll off the tongue, unfortunately, which is why it's never quite there in my head.So per the WHO: pharmacovigilance is the science and activities relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects, or any other medicine, or vaccine-related problem. So essentially it is the process and the science relating to drug side effects. Now as you'll remember from pharmacology days, very early on, you're taught that all pharmacologically active substances, if it applies to the human body have side effects. The same side effects are not encountered by every person.And you know, some of the side effects might have obvious clinical manifestations. Some might not, you might get side effects, never know you've had them. And of course they vary massively in severity. So when you are looking at a medicine, particularly one that you're introducing to kind of general use in humans, you have a trade-off to make because you have an expected therapeutic benefit, but you also have to be mindful of potential side effects, particularly serious side effects and how much tolerance you have for those versus the good that the drug is supposed to do.And achieving that balance is one of the big challenges that's faced in drug development.Parmvir: So what you do really, it kind of comes at the end of the whole process of clinical trials and so on for given products, right? David: It actually starts right at the beginning of clinical development.So. Parmvir: Oh, hang on, I have to ask David's question: does that make you a Pharmacovigilante? David: [David and Parmvir laugh] I've often wondered the same thing myself. But yeah, so pharmacovigilance takes off really where toxicology leaves. So before you can put a drug into clinical development, by which I mean development in humans, drugs first have to go through preclinical development and that's where all the various toxicology studies are run.Parmvir: Can you quickly define toxicology for us? David: Sure. It is really focusing on the well, the potentially toxic side of medicines. So before you put a drug anywhere near a human, you want to be absolutely certain that it doesn't cause various catastrophic side effects in humans.So, for example, you need to be confident that it doesn't cause cancer. You need to be confident that it's not gonna cause a heart attack immediately, or cause a stroke immediately or things like that. So as per regulations in pretty much every country in the world, before you put a drug anywhere near a human in a clinical trial, it has to go through a standard set of tests.And there's various ways to achieve that. You know, sometimes those are tests using computer simulated models. Sometimes they are using individual cells or cultured cells or tissues. And sometimes as is well known in the industry they're using animal models and these are legally required tests.So every drug that goes through the process has to go through these. So that's done before it gets to clinical development. And then you start with phase one clinical trials which are studies on, usually on healthy volunteers and they're very small trials. They involve perhaps a few tens of patients. And the only purpose of those trials is to look at the safety and tolerability of the drug. So this is the first time you're putting the drug into humans. There is a bit of an exception to that. So although these are usually conducted on healthy volunteers, for some drugs, including, for example oncology drugs. Those drugs are usually along the more kind of toxic end of agents, so it's not ethical to put those into healthy volunteers. So sometimes those studies are conducted in a patient population. So once a drug moves into human studies into phase one, from that point, really for the rest of the lifetime of that drug as a human medicine pharmacovigilance is involved. So all the way through the phase one, two and three studies and then once the drug goes onto the market, pharmacovigilance continues.So the companies or the pharmaceutical or biotech companies that are developing these assets have a legal requirement to collect and analyze this data on an ongoing basis pretty much forever. Until that drug is eventually, perhaps if it's lucky enough to get to the market, until it's withdrawn from the market, perhaps many decades later.Parmvir: Very good. And I think that there are probably some very topical things that have come up recently as a result of COVID 19, which is important to consider when we're talking about these things, in that we are not just relying on these clinical trials that have gone out to ensure that these things are safe, but once they're out there that you have to continue to get feedback from people who are taking these to ensure that they continue to be safe in the long term, right?David: That's true. So, you know, ordinarily in clinical development, once you get through phase 1, 2, 3, and if you are lucky enough to have a drug, which is sufficiently efficacious, tolerable to go to market, then yes, you know, the drug's released to market and you continue to monitor for this stuff.Vaccines are in a particularly special category because they are drugs that are given to healthy people. Mm yes. And so therefore the benefit risk balance is more complicated in some ways, because , you know, it's, it's hard to consider the benefit to the individual of taking a product when they don't yet have that disease.So now there are other drugs that are in a similar category, other drugs that are given to healthy people. This is where I can ask you some questions. So what, what do you think those other drugs include? Parmvir: Oh, goodness. Um, I'm trying to think off the top of my head, what they might be. David: Yeah. It's very unfair. Parmvir: All I can think of at the moment are the other vaccines. David: Okay. So, Parmvir: but there are lots of prophylactic things. Yeah. Yeah. I can't think of anything David: Contraceptives. Parmvir: The obvious prophylactic. Yes. David: Drugs used for travel. So things like anti-malaria tablets. Parmvir: Oh yeah. David: Drugs used for things like smoking cessation Parmvir: mm-hmmDavid: stuff like that.So again, these are all drugs that are generally given to healthy people. So, you know, and this is where benefit risk balance comes into sharp focus, because if you have a drug that has been developed to treat a very hard to treat cancer, let's say, then when you consider benefit risk balance you know, if these patients are effectively going to die without a treatment, and this is the only treatment available, you might be able to accept that a drug has a one in a hundred chance of causing a fatal stroke. Particularly if that drug is given in hospital and these things can be, can be managed. If however, you are developing a cough medicine, then your tolerance for any type of dangerous side effects is basically zero, and of course, many drugs elsewhere on that scale. So yeah, benefit risk balance is a key part of what has to be looked at during drug development. And yeah, as we say, vaccines are particularly challenging. Often these days when a new drug is developed the clinical development and the studies don't stop necessarily when the drug is released for marketing. So, often as a condition of the marketing authorizations that are granted for these drugs, there have to be continuing studies to look at safety. These are called post-authorization safety studies. And so there's ongoing collection of data in a rigorous way to keep monitoring for various things. Either new things that we didn't know about the drug before, because of course when you're in clinical development, your number of patients is normally quite small Parmvir: mm-hmm David: so you're less likely to spot very rare side effects. You wouldn't usually detect a one in 50,000 probability side effect in a clinical trial cohort. Parmvir: Yeah. David: But sometimes these post authorization safety studies allow you to pick up more of that and enable you to characterize some of the side effects that you do know about more in detail.Parmvir: Yeah. So David B here asks essentially how long do these things go on after the drug's been on the market? For example, is there still pharmacovigilance for aspirin? David: Yes. Every single drug that has a marketing authorization out there it is the law in pretty much every country in the world that all safety data that becomes available to the marketing authorization holders, that's the company that owns the rights to the drug and effectively sells the drug, they're required by law to collect process, analyze and report this data. Now as drugs age, the natural reporting rate for some of these drugs drops so the probability of a physician or a pharmacist or a nurse, or even a patient reporting a side effect probably drops over time because theses are not new medicines anymore, but even so, any data that is collected has to go through that process, which is the pharmacovigilance that we were referring to earlier. In addition to that, all companies with marketing authorizations have to look at scientific and medical literature. It all has to be reviewed, so in European requirements, including the UK on a weekly basis, companies have to trawl some of the big literature databases, such as PubMed and M base, they have to trawl that information for any articles on their drugs. And any indication of side effects or other similar challenges. Parmvir: So how is this information collected and processed? Cause you've said obviously doctors, nurses, patients, they will all report certain things. Mm-hmm how do you kind of get them to a central place and cataloged and how do you decide what are actual side effects versus David: So if we think about the front end of the process, most pharma companies out there will have medical information help lines. So these are help lines that are set out there so that healthcare professionals. So that's the physicians, the, the pharmacists, the nurses and others but also consumers can contact the company for more information about the medicine and also potentially report adverse events, side effects. In parallel to that the same thing's going on with the regulators. So in the UK, for example, we have the yellow card scheme, which these days is a web portal system where anyone can go in and report side effects of medicines they're taking. In the us, you have the MedWatch scheme, which is very similar. Most companies around the world have similar things. Plus you've also got ongoing clinical trials, clinical studies, so data is coming in that way too. We've got data coming in from literature that I've mentioned. The regulators, when they receive stuff directly, they often pass that information over to the pharma company.So essentially all this information is coming towards the pharma company. It all gets directed to a pharmacovigilance department. And then we go through the process of processing that data. And so that data comes in from everywhere around the world where the drug is available for patients to take both in clinical trials and on the market.So the process basically consists of firstly translating the data, if it needs to be translated that gets captured into a safety database and there are various commercial safe databases out there. This is where companies collate all the information received on their drugs. And it goes through a process whereby data is kind of standardized it's put into standard terminology in a way that is compatible with the regulatory requirements. A narrative is constructed. So we write a story of what's happened to the patient from beginning to end. We look at various things like if the information is available to us, you know, what other medications were the patients taking? What's their medical history? What was the sequence of events? So what was the time to onset if possible, if we have that information between the patient taking the drug and them reporting the side effect, what the clinical course of the side effect was, so did the patient recover? Was any adjustment made to the the, the dosing or any treatments given? And so all that gets written up, we then decide what other information do we need to know?And then there's a feedback loop to go and ask the reporter if they'll provide additional information. Usually we ask for more information on more serious adverse events. We don't wanna overburden the reporters. Now reporters in clinical trials, so physicians involved in those, they're legally obliged to help with that process. Spontaneous reporters that we refer to, which is just where any healthcare professional or consumer contacts, the company, that's a voluntary reporting system, so we can ask them for additional information, they don't have to provide it, but we have to ask the questions anyway. So the information gets pulled together. It then goes, usually goes through a medical review, so we have kind of scientists pulling the data together. And then we have physicians reviewing the case, making sure it makes medical sense. And then depending on the seriousness of the case and other attributes, that case might have to be reported out to regulators worldwide.And a lot of the reports which are serious, have to be reported out within 15 days of what we call day zero, which is the first day anyone in the company became aware of the report. Parmvir: Mm-hmm. David: But to give you an idea, the large pharma companies are dealing with potentially tens of thousands of reports a week that are coming in on all of their products. So these are vast systems that are set up and they have to be set up to be able to meet all of the regulatory requirements in terms of timelines, for reporting. So the data's coming in, the expedited reports are going out in the format that the regulators require. We also have to pull together what we call aggregate reports. So these aggregated analyses of data over time for newer drugs, for example, those are submitted in Europe every six months. And then over time as the drug gets older, the gap between reports gets longer. And then also we're doing something, what we call signal section, which is where we are analyzing the data. And we're looking for trends in the data. Where we think we've got patterns we're starting to then look into researching those patterns a little bit more, you know, if we start to see, for example that I don't know that we are getting what appears to be a disproportionate number of nose bleeds, let's say, in a patient cohort, we would, you know, do background research on, well, you know, is there a plausible biological mechanism that we know about through the development of the drug? Was there stuff seen in the animal studies or even the human studies that might indicate that there's a, there's a root cause here.We'll look into confounding effects. Are all these patients on other drugs, which actually are likely causing that? And yeah, so kind of an appraisal is done: what's going on? Is it likely to be caused by something else? And if not, you know, we, keep on looking and those conversations then have to be shared with the regulatory authorities.And over time, what you'll see is the labeling of the product, the professional labeling which in Europe, including the UK, is the SMPC, the summary of product characteristics, which is a bit like the instruction manual for the product, which is available to healthcare professionals and the simplified version of that PIL those little leaflets you find inside of packs, those eventually get revised on an ongoing basis to accommodate the new knowledge that we are gaining on the side effect profile of the drug. So this is an ongoing process and it happens throughout the entire lifetime of the, of the drug. Parmvir: But yeah, so here's a subject that no one's talked about for a little while. COVID 19 David: mm-hmm Parmvir: [laughs] Obviously I know there's probably a collective groan from people listening right now, but it seems like a relevant subject, given the conversations around safety that people are having with regard to the vaccine. So do you know if there's been like a major uptick in these reports by individuals, of side effects from the vaccines, or do you take account of the fact that so many billions of people essentially at this point have received at least one shot of the vaccine versus how many reports you get coming in?David: Yeah. So this is one of the big challenges, and one of the things I should have said about drugs like vaccines is because they're given to such vast numbers of people, it becomes a particular challenge to differentiate between things which are being caused potentially by the vaccine and other things, which unfortunately are just bad luck of being a human being.And by that, I mean, so years ago when I was doing one of the academic courses we were being taught about the vast amounts of research that had to be done in terms of epidemiology before the HPV vaccines were released. So these vaccines were being released for use in teenage girls, and at the time it was felt that there was perhaps an insufficient understanding of the general health of that population, including things like what is the probability of a freak occurrence that a teenage girl is going to have a stroke or something like that? Things which we think of as of course, they're exceptionally rare, but they do happen.Parmvir: Mm-hmm David: and I'm talking about in untreated populations. Parmvir: Yep. David: But of course, you know, some of these patients are also on birth control and things like that, that also have other risk factors associated with them so my understanding is before the HPV vaccines were released, a huge amount of epidemiology research was done so that when the new vaccines were released, we knew that we would expect, and I'm just gonna make up a number here that, you know, one in 500,000 teenage girls would have, I don't know, some kind of fatal event which would just naturally occur, you know, even without them having the vaccine. And so that's similar for other vaccine rollouts as well. There has to be a good understanding of the background events of other things that, people will have happen to them, which have nothing to do with the medicine that you are giving.So, you know, that data is kept available and kept an eye on by the regulatory authorities and also the pharma companies. We don't have background rates for everything, so being prepared for what might come and then, you know, there perhaps isn't so much panic when the first case comes in of a patient that has one of these catastrophic events but if you start to see more than that, that's when you start to perhaps get more interested in: is this really being caused by the vaccine or the drug of interest. So, yeah, a lot of upfront work has to be done before you even put the drug out there. I mean, in terms of the COVID vaccines and the treatments, because of the high degree of public interest and scrutiny a lot of these drugs when they were first given and the vaccines were first given, so adverse events, side effects were tracked through post-authorization safety studies. So actually a lot of people, when they got their first doses, consented to have maybe a follow up call from an investigator who would ask them about various side effects that happened. So in addition to all of the natural spontaneous reporting that was coming in, there were very large cohorts of past study data coming in which is a robust way to look at these things. I know as well, there were legitimate questions about, you know, the COVID vaccines in particular were produced fairly quickly compared to the usual 10 to 15 years in development of, of a product. But you know, there are various reasons for this. So vaccines are perhaps one of the medicines where it's more possible to template out the product and therefore switch out components. But they still have a product which is similar to other products that have previously been used. But also, the COVID era in terms of vaccine development and treatment development was, in my opinion at least a completely unique event in terms of drug development so far. If you think of drug development as a kind of universe, or I'm gonna use some wonky analogies here, but let's say as galaxies, which have solar systems within them that have planets within them.So if you think of the galaxy of drug development you have all of these different stakeholders involved. You have the pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies and the service companies that support them, that's one area. You have the regulatory authorities but you have many other stakeholders.You have patients, of course they're the most important. For chronic diseases you might have patient advocacy groups. But also, you know, you guys are part of this universe as well, because you are the ones doing basic research, which is the foundation on which all, you know, all of this is, is ultimately built. So you have universities and other research organizations. You have the funding bodies that sit behind those that decide where the research money goes. And then out the other end of the process you have ethics committees that are involved in approving clinical trials. You have payers. So these are the organizations that ultimately pay for medicinal products in the UK, for example, that's the NHS. Parmvir: Yep. David: In the US, that would be insurance companies. Parmvir: Yeah. David: You have many other stakeholders. So you have obviously healthcare professionals at the end of the day, new drugs have to be woven into the fabric of medicine. And so you have to bring HCPs along with you. There are the learning bodies as well in relation to HCPs, the kind of professional bodies.So that's really at a kind of galaxy level, these are all the different solar systems. And then within them, if you look at the pharmaceutical biotechnology and service provider solar system, within those you have an incredibly complicated set of different skills departments, functions, you have the functions that are doing discovery.So these are the early days of, development where, you know, biologists and chemists are working out, you know, what are the new therapeutic targets we can look at? Then you have the clinical development division. You have the patent divisions, you have the regulatory affairs functions. You have the pharmacovigilance functions. You have the medical affairs functions, you have the medical information functions [Parmvir cackles]. There are, and I'm going to miss out many, many. You have the, the bio stats folks, you have the medical writers. And then of course you have the manufacturing, which is in itself a completely different, you know, specialized world.So yeah, you're dealing with a very complicated process with lots of things which are interlinked. But for me, if you think of all these things, like if you use layout or different compass, let's say, and I'm talking about the compass you use to check direction, not the ones you used to draw circles [Parmvir laughs] and if you scatter them all out they'll all be pointing at different directions. You know, all of these different entities have their own priorities. Because of course the industry as a whole is developing many different medicinal products for different reasons. I think when COVID came along, it was like drawing a magnet across the top of all those compasses and it got all the needles to point in the same direction.So you had governments who had a clear incentive to try and support the development of treatments. So you had governments putting up money, which was perhaps slightly unusual. They were putting money into basic research, such as the type of stuff that you guys do. They were putting money into diagnostics, which are critical for things like COVID.They were putting money into the development of vaccines and into treatments. And then of course, you know, you have the pharma companies where there was a scramble to try and develop something, to help humanity in its hour of need. You had the regulators with a lot of focus on them you know, and everyone watching their, every move and trying to ensure that you know, as many processes that often might take months, or perhaps even years were made as efficient as possible.Parmvir: Mm-hmm David: And it was a unique point in time because everyone was lined up with the same objective. So it meant, for example, that, you know, parts of the industry, which are normally a nine to five job, became a 24/7 job. Parmvir: Yeah. David: For a short period of time.And there was a huge amount of collaboration, which happened between the different stakeholder groups, you know regulatory authorities offered perhaps free scientific advice to companies that were developing this stuff. They met very regularly with companies that were in development. They gave a lot of advice as to what their expectations were when the data was received by them. They shortened some administrative pathways let's say which usually take a lot of time. They prioritized resource. So there's resource specifically waiting for this data to come in. And so, yeah, a lot of normal processes were adapted so that things could be done as efficiently as possible.And the outcome was that, you know, these drugs went through the entire process in a much more efficient way than would usually be encountered. I think another thing as well is with things like vaccines, the side effects that we anticipate to see, including the rare unusual ones ordinarily these manifest within, you know, days or weeks.It's not something that usually we anticipate things to occur years later. So there was that aspect too, but yeah, it was a, it was a unique time. Parmvir: Yeah. And actually this is a good throwback to Dr. Carina Rodriguez's podcast because she ran one of the clinical trials for the vaccine in children at USF where I work.David: Oh, fascinating. Parmvir: Yeah, so she talked about some of the things that you mentioned as well. David: I should say I was not involved sadly in any of the COVID vaccine development, but you know, it was fascinating to watch and actually to see my profession become a talking point in the news every day. Parmvir: Yes. David: It was very interesting to see all of this play out.Parmvir: Yeah. So actually, that's probably a good point to pause and ask you, what do you actually do? David: Okay. So [everyone laughs]. So as I've kind of indicated the process of pulling in adverse event data of coding it, which is the term we use for tidying up all of the data, putting it into a safety database, writing those narratives, getting the medical review, getting the important cases out the other end to the regulators, writing the reports, doing the signal section.These are very complicated processes and every company will develop them slightly differently. You know, small biotech companies, they might only have one product. It might only be approved in one or two countries. A top five pharma company will have hundreds of products authorized in many countries around the world. But all of these processes are put together in compliance with extremely strict regulations. Regulations that as I said exist in almost every country in the world and actually the regulations kind of cross over in the sense of, if you have a product that's authorized for marketing in the UK and the US, for example you know, the UK requires you to collect all the data and analyze it as does the US.They also require you to collect the data from each other's territories so companies are in the middle of the very complicated regulatory framework, which is a little bit different in each country, but fortunately is harmonized through some international bodies and international terminology. But building pharmacovigilance systems is complicated and it has to be done right. Firstly, for the obvious reason that we want to protect patients it's in no one's interest that that that patients are not protected. But also, you know, the penalties for not complying with these complex regulatory requirements are severe. And so my job really, as a, let's say senior leader within a pharmacovigilance department is to make sure that we build the right structures.And for these companies that we that we keep an eye out on all the areas, which are potential challenges and that companies are being compliant with the legislation to which we're all held. And so, so yeah, so building pharmacovigilance systems, I think is the simplest way I can describe it.Parmvir: It sounds pretty heavy and pretty complicated. David: Yeah. I mean, if you look at the larger pharma companies, if you add up all of the resource that they put into pharmacovigilance that they're legally required to put into pharmacovigilance, to service the needs of their products. A lot of things are outsourced these days, if you the count everything that comes from the outsourcing organizations as well, the big pharma companies have thousands of people like me involved in the processing and analysis of this data. So it is a big area, and that is all we do. You know, we are not involved in any other aspect of the drug. Not involved in the sales and marketing, for example, with the product, that's almost the complete opposite side of the company to us, all we do is you know, work in this very professionalized, very standardized discipline, which is pharmacovigilance. Parmvir: So David has a couple of questions. So first one should be relatively quick, which is that, is there a regulatory authority that is the gold standard? David: [David laughs] This is a very politically sensitive one.There are certainly some regulatory authorities who, particularly in some of the larger markets who are let's say more prominent. So examples would be the US FDA, the food and drug administration that is the drug regulatory authority for the United States. In the UK, we also have an extremely prominent regulator, the MHRA they're one of the oldest regulators, I believe in the world. So that's the UK medicines and healthcare products, regulatory agency. But you know, every country has its own regulator and whilst there are some who put themselves out there, perhaps as world leading regulators, there are just as many others that are doing the same important job for their countries. The European Union and European Economic Area has a slightly more complicated system because they have a coordinating regulatory authority, which is the European Medicines agency, the EMA, who many of you all have heard about in news reports, particularly during the COVID situation. But at a national level, you also have all of the national regulators who are working in tandem with the EMA. Parmvir: Okay. So this sounds quite different from, obviously it's very different from what you were doing during your PhD. David: Yes. Parmvir: He also wants to know, how did your PhD work, prepare you to do what you do now. David: If I could sum it up in one phrase, and this is a phrase which is overused, but I think in this case, it is really true: problem solving.Parmvir: Mm-hmm David: because it's interesting, you mentioned earlier that you and I we're almost engineers. Well, I went from becoming a physical engineer, at least in a lab environment to a process engineer. And, you know, I always used to think very naively when I was doing the basic research with you, I used to think, look, we are solving problems that no one knows the answer to. This must be the hardest job in the world. [Parmvir laughs] We're not solving manmade problems. Manmade problems must be so easy to solve. But no manmade problems [Parmvir laughs] are also particularly challenging. And when I say manmade problems, you know, I'm not talking about problems that someone is deliberately created, it's just, you know, logistical challenges, and just the challenges caused by working in, you know, different regulatory envionments with different sets of requirements and how to build processes that meet all of the requirements at the same time. And react to events, of course, because it might well be that you've had a product that has been ticking along nicely for a long time. And then suddenly there is a safety concern with the product. And if that safety concern is in the public domain, you will be deluged with reports in relation to that product called stimulated reporting. And you know, of course sometimes companies will be subject to class action lawsuits particularly in the US. So they might also receive large volumes of reports all in one go. All of those reports have to meet the same legal timelines, but now suddenly you've got 10,000 reports landed on your desk. Each one takes four hours to process and they're all due to the regulators in 15 days. So yeah, it is challenging working in a hyper regulated environment. Parmvir: Essentially these are problems that come about because we are humans. David: Exactly. Yeah. Parmvir: And we have to somehow live together. David: Yeah. Parmvir: So I had a couple of questions from my little sister and these might not be directly related to your work, but they are related to the fact that you work within an environment that involves clinical trials and patients and so on.And so Sukhy wants to know are side effects from drugs, usually the same for healthy people versus patients. David: This is a great question and cause me a little bit of head scratching. I think, I mean, the answer is it depends, I think by and large. Yes. But there will be some exceptions and those exceptions include things like some of the oncology treatments, because obviously there is an interaction often between the drug and the tumor, for example, so in a healthy person you can't emulate that because there is no tumor. So an example would be a phenomenon called tumorlysis syndrome which can only occur when there's a tumor to react to the particular drug. But by and large, yes, we extrapolate safety data from healthy individuals initially, which is why the earlier phases of studies are done often in healthy volunteers with some exceptions. But yeah. Then when we move on to phase two and then phase three, phase two and three are conducted in patients that have the indication of interest, I have the disease that we're trying to treat.Parmvir: So another question she had: how do you know people who are not healthy will be able to tolerate the drugs given that initially that they're tested on healthy people?David: So the first thing I would say is I'm not an expert in the design of clinical trials, but as I said, as you go through phase one which are the trials that are normally on healthy patients, you actually start out with a tiny, tiny dose. So you have an idea of dosing from your animal studies, but the data isn't always transferrable. But you take the maximum tolerable dose in animals, including in the most sensitive animals. And you then cut that by huge factor by perhaps 500 fold. Parmvir: Right. David: So you start out with a tiny amount and then you escalate up the doses to see how the patients are tolerating the drug, not the patients subject, I should say. So these are healthy volunteers usually. Parmvir: Yep. David: So that's phase one, but yeah, then of course, when you go into phase two, you're dealing with a different patient population. I don't know exactly how that's always done, but of course, you know, trials are put together by experts in the field. And they involve, you clinicians whose expertise is this particular area of medicine.Parmvir: Yeah. David: And of course it's not just the physicians at the pharmaceutical company and the biopharma company and the scientists, I should say as well. Also, this stuff is going to regulatory authorities, it's going to ethics committees, all of whom will have their own areas of expertise. So, you know, protocols are designed around the patient and to ensure the patients are not put at unnecessary risk.Parmvir: Ah, sometimes David sends me one of those questions that really makes me giggle. And this is if regulations are so important and onerous, how do I start my own biotech in the garage? David: [David laughs] Well, it's interesting, you know, companies don't necessarily have to be that big themselves to get started, but what they will need is a lot of help.Parmvir: Yeah. David: So what you'll see these days is you know, new biotechs starting up. But they rely very heavily on outsourcing. So they will partner with service providers with contract research organizations, with contract manufacturing organizations, all sorts of other parties that have the expertise that perhaps they aren't able to pull together themselves.But yeah, there are some companies out there, particularly smaller companies in earlier development that are, you know, pretty small might have 20 people in the company. Parmvir: Yeah. David: But they will need to rely on the help of many others, because going back to the kind of universe description that I gave, you know, there are so many specialized areas that you need to have covered in order to pull together everything you need, both to run a clinical trial. and also to submit a marketing authorization application. And then also keep your product compliant with all of the legal requirements that are out there.Parmvir: It's a lot.David: It is a lot, and you know this is why drug development is so costly because it needs a truly vast number of specialists involved. And, you know, quite a lot of physicians as well. And also, you know, most drugs that enter drug development don't make it all the way through the other end, so the end costs of medicinal products also have to cover the cost of the drugs that didn't make it.And plus companies only have a certain period of exclusivity before their drug becomes generic, i.e., other companies can start making it. Parmvir: So this is purely from a personal perspective, from your point of view: what do you think about the fact that obviously you have these companies who have put so much money developing these things, which were designed to treat a global pandemic. And yet we found that for example, like entire continents, like Africa still don't have a lot of people vaccinated against COVID 19, and those companies will refuse to open up the patents to allow them to be able to get people to stay healthy. David: Yeah, it's an area that really I'm not really sufficiently qualified to talk on. And I'm not just saying that, you know, through not wanting to put my foot in my mouth, but particularly with some of the vaccine technologies that were used, they were not simple medicines to manufacture. So not simple to manufacture, not simple to store, not simple to distribute. And sometimes I guess, it is perhaps a legitimate concern of a company that if other companies start making their same drug to a lower quality, that can have ramifications elsewhere. Now I'm not saying that that was the reason behind some of what you mentioned. Now there was a vaccine that was developed the UK vaccine which was specifically developed from the outset to be made available in developing world countries, let's say, and specifically to be made available at cost. And even the way that product was designed, it can be manufactured and stored at fridge temperature Parmvir: mm-hmm, which is a big deal. David: Exactly. It is a big deal, you know, those are all very important components to consider. A vaccine that could be used in those environments. But even, I remember because I vacuumed up all of the documentaries I think on television, Netflix, everywhere else about all of the challenges that were being faced. And, you know, there were even things that you just wouldn't think about, which was, you know, because the mRNA vaccines had to be stored at -80 [degrees Celsius], there wasn't enough minus 80 freezers in the developed countries, let alone figuring out how to develop and ship these to other countries with different climatic conditions.And so you even had the manufacturers of that type of equipment, having to up their game and suddenly churn out much more equipment than they previously had. So, yeah, there's no simple answer. I mean, historically there've been other challenges in the past with other types of drugs, such as the HIV medications. In the end access to those drugs was resolved through very careful dialogue between companies, regulators others. Access issues, I believe to those drugs, and again, this is just basically what I see on documentaries and other things; where are access problems these days, they're not in relation to the drug supply chain they're in relation to other things like people not wanting to come forward and receive treatment because of the stigma associated with things like that.Parmvir: So in short, do you enjoy your work? David: I do. I mean, I can honestly say that in my work every day is different. I'm very privileged in my job to support a number of different companies that are developing different products with a very wide variety of indications. And also, you know, just when you think you've seen it all worked with a wide variety of medicinal products, suddenly something completely new will come along. For example, we are now on the precipice of many commercial gene therapies coming out. Parmvir: Ooh. David: And you know, those products have some different considerations. Perhaps some of these interventions are irreversible Parmvir: mm-hmm.David: So, you know, what happens if patients do start developing something rare and unexpected. You have patients surviving a lot longer than was originally envisaged so, you know, are there other things which come about you know, as a result of the underlying disease that just no one had ever seen before. And yeah, many other types of technologies and the regulations are always having to evolve to take into account of these new therapies and the challenges associated with them.Parmvir: Well, it sounds like you will continue to live in interesting times. David: Yeah. I don't think I'm going anywhere anytime soon . Parmvir: Well, thank you so much for your time today, David. That was fantastic. And yeah, as I say, we kind of thought of you as soon as we started thinking about the safety surrounding things like COVID vaccines and knew that was your jam.So yes, we very much appreciate your time today. David: Okay. Thank you very much. [musical interlude]David: So I mentioned earlier that at an early point in my PhD, I switched to studying vascular endothelial cells that were harvested from pigs. So essentially these were pigs that were being slaughtered for the meat industry. And so I had to look through a phone book and identify an abattoir that I could go to and get the tissue that I needed to do my experiments so obviously this all had to start somewhere. So I put in a call to an abattoir in deepest, darkest Essex. And I gingerly made my way on the train to this place, which of course was in the middle of rural nowhere. And unfortunately the first day that I picked to go, it was snowing. Now we don't get vast amounts of snow in Southern England, but this was a decent sprinkling of snow. So I arrived in this quiet rural destination and I walked across various fields. I think I'd perhaps just got GPS on my phone, but it was very early days. And I was lost in fields of white in no time at all. So I ended up putting in a call to, the guys, to, come and pick me up, which they very kindly did. So then, you know, at that time I really didn't know what a coronary artery looked like so what I decided to do for that first trip was I just collected the fresh hearts that they were able to bring out the processing facility. So these were kind of warm pig hearts, freshly harvested from animals. I think I had three hearts or something like that. And so I had a large polystyrene box with me with some ice in it. And I think they were kind enough to give me the ice, as I put these hearts inside bags and put them in the box and then started making my way back to London. And of course, you know, this being a cold day, the heating was on, on the train, and so as I was sat on the train, in fact, I think it was when I got onto the tube, I suddenly became horrified that my polystyrene box was starting to leak water. And of course I knew, but no one else knew on the tube that within that water were bags, perhaps not secured, very tightly containing hearts and containing probably a fair amount of blood.And I suddenly started sweating that this puddle that was starting to pull around my polystyrene box on the floor of the tube would suddenly start to go pink and then red. And then before I knew it, I would be in serious trouble. So it was just one of those situations where the tube journey seemed to get longer and longer, and I was sweating more and more and then it got to the point where I felt that I couldn't wait any longer, so I kind of dashed outta the tube at the next station went up what was perhaps one of the longest escalators on the underground and managed to just get out the other side before I caused perhaps a fake terrorist incident or something like that. I was trying to think about how I would explain that I'd got three hearts in my polystyrene box and a set of scalpels bearing in mind that pig's hearts are very similar size to human hearts as well. So, yes, I managed just about to get to the lab. I clearly looked quite distressed, I suppose when I got back to the lab. So I started telling this story to my PhD supervisor, Dennis, and uh a retired professor that had come into the department, Don. And before too long, the two of them were crying with laughter at my story.So, um, so yeah, so that was my very first trip and yes, never, never forgotten.[musical outro]David: Our lab, when we first joined, it was quite old and a bit dog eared. And there was one particular chair in the office, which was, I mean, it was like a typical office swivel chair, but it had definitely seen better days and it was extremely uncomfortable. And when we had lab meetings, no one wanted to sit on this chair. And so Parmvir and I nicknamed it, Beelzebub's stool.

Our perceptions create our reality.  You're going to love Episode 30 of the 'Transformation Starts Today' podcast with my friend and brother, a Husband, Father, Coach, and Adventurer, Mr. David Weaver.  Here's some background about David: For over 15 years, David has been coaching and training individuals, small groups and companies to create a life and business they love.  He teaches them how to drastically reduce stress, intentionally design their life to align with their highest values, identify the most important thing to move the business forward, and create a fulfilling quality of life. As a result, his clients feel happy and healthy, make more money, and create FREEDOM. Here are some ways to connect with David: Website: davidweavercoach.com Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-weaver-a5b950181/ Dr. Jamil Sayegh – Life, Business, and Relationship Coach, Licensed Naturopathic Doctor, Energy-Healer Learn more about if or how I can help you: https://jamilsayegh.com/lets-connect/

How might we receive & grow in understanding & wisdom? The stories of David & Solomon demonstrate what to do and NOT do. What is the difference between knowledge, understanding & wisdom, how might we work on developing these, and what might it do to better our relationships, personal growth, and world around us? We discuss these and the steps to gaining wisdom & understanding in this episode of Like a Watered Garden (a "Come Follow Me" podcast).Highlights include:00:00-04:44     “QOTW: How do I receive understanding & wisdom & overcome foolishness?”04:45-10:45     “Personal Growth—How we may ‘grow great' with the Lord”10:46-15:52     “The difference between Knowledge, Understanding & Wisdom”15:53-24:17     “We don't need to ‘steady the ark,' Survival mode, & how the Lord gives us REST”24:18-34:00     “Life's tutorials & Divine Tutoring enable us to GROW & gain wisdom”34:01-45:26     “Steps for gaining understanding, wisdom, & ‘largeness of heart'”45:27-END        “How to avoid the foolishness of Solomon & David”For this episode's study guide, visit:  http://www.likeawateredgarden.com About this podcast:Welcome to Like a Watered Garden, a Come Follow Me-based podcast that shows you how to personalize the holy scriptures (starting w the Old Testament), to help you “overcome, become, and flourish” in physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual health & wellness, so you may feel, as Isaiah writes, “...like a watered garden and a spring whose waters fail not.”I'm your host, Dr. Christina Hibbert, clinical psychologist, author, wife & mom, and member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.For our first season, we'll be  following along with the Come Follow Me study manual and learning in The Old Testament (& a few lessons in The Pearl of Great Price). Yes, that's right—we begin where it all began, and we will draw closer to Christ, who is everywhere in the Old Testament, as Jehovah! To learn more about Dr. Christina Hibbert, please visit http://www.drchristinahibbert.com  or http://www.instagram.com/drchristinahibbert or http://www.facebook.com/DrCHibbertTo learn more about this podcast, find bonus materials, handouts, transcripts and videos, visit http://www.likeawateredgarden.com and/or find us on Instagram, http://www.instagram.com/likeawatered.garden .Join our "Like a Watered Garden Podcast FB Discussion Group," by visiting  http://www.facebook.com/groups/likeawateredgarden and be  sure to share your insights and takeaways, as well as your questions and concerns!And please be sure to "subscribe" to, rate, & review this podcast (It helps us a lot!).You can find videos of each episode on our YouTube channel, GrowWithScriptures, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZaD3sggdkUpiFfLgUwiAWwOriginal music written & performed by Braxton Hibbert.

Overview David and I discuss making sure your brand and book align and how they support each other. Even though David writes non-fiction, the advice applies to fiction and non-fiction. David also offers any listeners of Discovered Wordsmith a free copy of his book - Better by Design. Contact him at his website: https://davidbsavage.com YouTube Transcript [00:01:27] Stephen: So let's move on to some author stuff and discuss a little bit about the process of writing and publishing. So you've written a whole series of books. What are some things that you have learned? That you're doing different than you used to do? [00:01:41] David: One of the things that I've found is I'm writing anyways, I'm a writer, I've always been a writer. So obviously one of the common things that you probably hear from your guests is just make the commitment. And for me that means sit down at my laptop at five 30 every morning. And whether brilliance [00:02:00] comes out or not, you're committing. To that you're committing to your purpose. The other part of it is that while it's, you're either a writer or a pretender and to be a better writer, I look at the outcome that I want. So it's actually not the book. It's not having, seven books to others and then three to come. It's actually a, what's my purpose. What's my. When people reach out to David B. Savage, who do they think they're reaching out to? So that's the bigger lesson that I've learned in the last, eight years as a publishing more often is that writing books helps me clarify. My thoughts helps me bringing in other wisdom helps me learn. But it also. Really helps me to understand that I'm creating a promise to my readers. No, I haven't made a million dollars who got that big cash advance from, whomever. But [00:03:00] when people come to me for a coaching or consulting or a conflict resolution or helping them design new projects, they know what they're getting. So it is really a stream of offerings where the books as a writer is only a part of it. So for example many of us just like the right, but we really don't like to stand in front of a podium or standing between two company presidents that are fighting. If that's the case, But for me, it's the full meal deal. And I need to present myself and write consistently as somebody that really encourages and supports and provides proof of collaborative leadership. So they, I guess on the on the ego side, I think a lot of people. And orphan their books. Oh, I wrote a book now I can stop all of this challenge and pain for the last two years I've been through in developing this [00:04:00] masterpiece. So now I can get back to my real life. No, it can't work that way. That, that is truly just an ego thing. If we know why we're writing who we are, the services we offer to our clients and to our grandchild. It all flows together and it has to flow together. So I really encourage other writers to be your brand. What your book is, needs to be aligned with what your purpose is and what your, what you offer to the world. [00:04:27] Stephen: And that's what we're going to talk a bit about is be your brand. Elaborate on that a little bit more. What are you trying to tell authors about be your brand and how their book is their brand that they are there? [00:04:39] David: For me the the influence and my bank account is filled. Because I can offer workshops, I can offer conflict resolution. I can coach executives, all of that stuff, but it's a chain that comes from all the books and the talks and the articles, et cetera. But in fact they, I guess the real point is [00:05:00] we by learning together by being consistent, Not spending two torturous years, getting your baby out there and then orphaned in it. I while I'm writing three future books, I'm constantly referring in my coaching and my clients in my articles online referring to the quotes from the books tools in the books,

Foamy & the Gang talk Elden Ring! Easy modes, & a Weird Al movie that cries for wokeness intervention! (Not really, 'cause honestly I don't care. Just a point of consistency). Thank You Joe, James & David For the support! :) illwillpress.com All the Links, 1 spot: https://wlo.link/@illwillpress J.i.M. on Twitch! https://www.twitch.tv/jimathers Dawn on Twitch : https://www.twitch.tv/dawnoftimebc Art Prints on DBH! Design By Humans Shop: http://www.designbyhumans.com/shop/illwillpress/new/ Foamy on Itch.io https://illwillpress.itch.io/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jimathers/support

 Discover how you can connect your brand and business through sounds Find out how the human voice is the most influential form factor that can help bring you in new clients Understand why representation matters in your audio branding and how it can Resources/Links: Wanting to Bring the Voice Out of Your Brand? Find out how you can connect with your audience, market your products or services, and increase your profit through the power of the right voice: voices.com Summary Have you been wanting to know how to give a voice to your business but just don't know how to do it? Do you want to know how audio branding can help give your business a bit more authenticity and connection with your clients? Are you ready to find out the magic of defining your audio brand? David Ciccarelli is an entrepreneur at heart. For the last decade, David, with the help of his team, has grown Voices.com from the ground up to become the leader in the voice industry. In this episode, David talks about what an audio brand is and how you can define it to attract more clients, connect with your audience, expand your platforms and gain more profit. He also shares his insights and tips on how you can make the most out of your audio brand. Check out these episode highlights: 01:50 – David's ideal client: “Our ideal client would be a creative producer. They might work at a corporate brand marketing department or marketing department.” 02:08 – Problem David helps solve: “Brand marketers really have a story to tell. They want to educate, inform and entertain their audience. And they've discovered that the human voice is one of the most influential, you know, form factors that can take to tell that story.” 02:51 – Typical symptoms that clients experience before reaching out to David: “For them, it could be a matter of capacity. You know, a lot of us have, you know, creative talent, like graphic designers that we work with full time. Others, such as voiceover, or voice acting.” 04:18 – Common mistakes that people make before they find David's solution: “One of the most common mistakes is just lacking creative direction. And I would even go a little step further before that, lacking, you know, Sonic brand or audio brand guidelines.” 05:39 – David's Valuable Free Action (VFA): “It really just kind of picking up from the previous question is, you know, we run a lot of clients through this exercise of translating the visual identity into the audio identity. Now, their visual identity might imbue certain values.” 07:07 – David's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out David's Website: voices.com 08:17 – Q: If they're looking to get a hold of me or anyone from our team? A: Simply visit voices.com Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “People buy from people who sound like them.” -David CiccarelliClick To TweetTranscript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 00:10 Greetings, everyone, and a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. My name is Tom Poland beaming out to you from little Castaways Beach in Queensland, Australia, joined today by David Ciccarelli. David, good day. Sir, a very warm welcome from down under. Where are you hanging out? David Ciccarelli 00:25 I'm hanging out just outside of Toronto, Canada. So pretty much the polar opposite from where you are, but great to be here together! Tom Poland 00:31 Talking about polar, you probably are sliding into fall. Are you? David Ciccarelli 00:36 Before you know it. Absolutely! And that's kind of synonymous with Canadians. People think it's all frigid here, but we have plenty of land. It's actually further south, believe it or not, than much of the United States. But happy to be here, nonetheless, despite what season it might be outside. Tom Poland 00:51 Thank you, sir. Thanks for being here, too. David, folks, if you don't know him, he's got this really, really interesting niche, his service niche that he provides, but we'll get to that in a moment. Background though, he's an entrepreneur at heart for the last decade with the help of his team, he has grown Voices.com from the ground up to become the leader in the voice industry. And that's the clue to the specialty I referenced. The title is, “How to Define Your Audio Brand and Where to be Heard Online”. A lot of us used protocols around our visual brand, but our audio brand, now online, with the videos and the live streaming of podcasts, etc. is right up there in terms of determining the quality of your reputation and brand consistency, which, hopefully, is going to be a reflection of the quality of your product and services and consistency. So, again, “How to Define Your Audio Brand and Where to be Heard Online”. David, our seven minutes starts now. Sir, question number one, who is your ideal client? David Ciccarelli 01:50 Well, our ideal client would be a creative producer. They might work at a corporate brand marketing department or marketing department. They might work at an advertising agency, but somebody who's creating content– could be on video, could be on audio, but that's our ideal client. Tom Poland 02:04 Perfect! Thank you, sir. Question two, six and a half minutes left, what's the problem you solve for them? David Ciccarelli 02:08 Well, brand marketers really have a story to tell. They want to educate, inform and entertain their audience. And they've discovered that the human voice is one of the most influential, you know, form factors that can take to tell that story. But the challenge becomes, “Where do I go to get that done?”, “What is the kind of the rules of engagement?” And so that's the problem that we're trying to solve both the finding of talent and helping them complete it in a fast, easy way. Tom Poland 02:37 So tell me- thank you for that. Question three, we've got six minutes left, doing well for the time. What are some of the symptoms? So if you've got this ideal client out there, somewhere, how do they know they need to dive more into your specialty? What's going on? David Ciccarelli 02:51 Well, for them, it could be a matter of capacity. You know, a lot of us have, you know, creative talent, like graphic designers that we work with full time. Others, such as voiceover, or voice acting. You're not necessarily going to have that type of work on all the time. So that's kind of capacity and being able to hire someone on a freelance basis, easily. That's certainly something that's going on. But even if you were to choose, you know, a project comes onto your plate, or you, as a marketing leader, decide to move into a new channel that is heavily reliant on voice. Now, one of the challenges is just lacking that lexicon. “How do I describe a voice?” We all have these references for describing the visual identity– space, color, shape? But how do you describe the voice? So we try to guide people through that type of creative direction when looking for that perfect voice for your project on the platform. Tom Poland 03:44 So, folks, we're talking about getting the voice that people are hearing and influencing them towards choosing your services or products or engaging with them, talking about having consistency in that and applying the same sort of protocols you might have visual appearances. So there is consistency and brand recognition and so on. David, what would you say- this is question number four. We've got four and a half minutes left. What would you say are some of the common mistakes that people make when, other than not even being aware of that as a significant problem or potential opportunity, what would you say are some of the mistakes you see people making before they find your service? David Ciccarelli 04:18 One of the most common mistakes is just lacking creative direction. And I would even go a little step further before that, lacking, you know, Sonic brand or audio brand guidelines. Now, the way you might overcome that is, you know, if you could picture your brand, walk into a room or speak. You know, if you had a mascot, it's a little bit easier. But if your brand was personified, what would they sound like? And what's often missing is we see the creative direction where someone says, “Oh, I want somebody professional.” Well, is that more indicative of the quality of the recording? Or are you actually looking for a career professional, a corporate executive, if you will? So I would challenge, you know, again, marketers, creative producers out there to actually describe the role, who it is that you want to be kind of narrating, and the style. How is that performed? Those two things will help you overcome the lack of creative direction and actually provide the voice talent out there with clear direction to deliver you that read that you go, “Yes! That's the person that represents or personifies my brand.” Tom Poland 05:26 Perfect! Thank you, sir. Question number five, we've got three minutes left, one valuable free action or item, a top tip, if you'd like, that someone listening to this could take. May not solve the whole problem, but it might take them a step in the right direction? David Ciccarelli 05:39 Well, you know, it really just kind of picking up from the previous question is, you know, we run a lot of clients through this exercise of translating the visual identity into the audio identity. Now, their visual identity might imbue certain values. Well, what are the equivalent audio terms that can do that? And an example was, “Oh, our brand is purple.” Okay, does that mean that it's passionate? And is that the kind of read that you're looking for? Or, you know, “Our brand, you know, we think of who we're selling to or people who are, you know, very smart and witty.” Okay, well, then that should be- you know, if that's kind of the target market, that should be the same attributes that you would provide a voice actor to perform. So people buy from people that sound like them, so that's a really key takeaway. So think about who your ideal customer persona would be. Tom Poland 06:36 That's so smart! David Ciccarelli 06:36 And then, how white they sound. And then that's kind of the artistic direction that you would provide. So if you sell predominantly to a particular gender, or age range, or demographic, that's probably the persona that you want to hire to become your audio ambassador, because people buy from people who sound like them. Tom Poland 06:54 Right. That's fascinating! A whole new world of marketing influence opens up. Question six, we've got 90 seconds left, one valuable free resource. Where can we direct people to go to get even more value? David Ciccarelli 07:07 Sure. Well, one of the tools that we've developed is what we call “sonic brand or audio brand guidelines”. Most organizations have, you know, visual identity guidelines. But I would encourage those who just want to see, “Well, what does a sonic logo look like and sound like?”, “What do the audio guidelines look like?” You can actually go to voices.com, our homepage, and if you scroll to the very bottom in the press section, you'll get a link to our media kit. And in there, there's actually a link where you can listen to our sonic logo. So again, it's just a three-second musical clip that we put at the beginning of our phone system, at the end of our YouTube videos. That is that constant reminder. It's just a sing-songy voice that's what it says, but then there are the audio guidelines of when and where you might use that. What's the kind of musical genre that we might be using as well too? Are there sound effects? Yes or no? So that's a great PDF resource that hopefully inspires people to use. Tom Poland 08:03 Thank you, sir. So go to voices.com. Scroll down, look for the company page, go to “press” and then media kit. Question number seven, sir, we've got 12 seconds left. The one question I should have asked you but didn't? And we've got 10 seconds for it. David Ciccarelli 08:17 Well, I hope people will find some value. If they're looking to get a hold of me or anyone from our team, just simply visit voices.com. Tom Poland 08:29 Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we're doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It's very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.

 Discover how you can connect your brand and business through sounds Find out how the human voice is the most influential form factor that can help bring you in new clients Understand why representation matters in your audio branding and how it can Resources/Links: Wanting to Bring the Voice Out of Your Brand? Find out how you can connect with your audience, market your products or services, and increase your profit through the power of the right voice: voices.com Summary Have you been wanting to know how to give a voice to your business but just don't know how to do it? Do you want to know how audio branding can help give your business a bit more authenticity and connection with your clients? Are you ready to find out the magic of defining your audio brand? David Ciccarelli is an entrepreneur at heart. For the last decade, David, with the help of his team, has grown Voices.com from the ground up to become the leader in the voice industry. In this episode, David talks about what an audio brand is and how you can define it to attract more clients, connect with your audience, expand your platforms and gain more profit. He also shares his insights and tips on how you can make the most out of your audio brand. Check out these episode highlights: 01:50 - David's ideal client: “Our ideal client would be a creative producer. They might work at a corporate brand marketing department or marketing department.” 02:08 - Problem David helps solve: “Brand marketers really have a story to tell. They want to educate, inform and entertain their audience. And they've discovered that the human voice is one of the most influential, you know, form factors that can take to tell that story.” 02:51 - Typical symptoms that clients experience before reaching out to David: “For them, it could be a matter of capacity. You know, a lot of us have, you know, creative talent, like graphic designers that we work with full time. Others, such as voiceover, or voice acting.” 04:18 - Common mistakes that people make before they find David's solution: “One of the most common mistakes is just lacking creative direction. And I would even go a little step further before that, lacking, you know, Sonic brand or audio brand guidelines.” 05:39 - David's Valuable Free Action (VFA): “It really just kind of picking up from the previous question is, you know, we run a lot of clients through this exercise of translating the visual identity into the audio identity. Now, their visual identity might imbue certain values.” 07:07 - David's Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out David's Website: voices.com 08:17 - Q: If they're looking to get a hold of me or anyone from our team? A: Simply visit voices.com Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “People buy from people who sound like them.” -David CiccarelliClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland 00:10 Greetings, everyone, and a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. My name is Tom Poland beaming out to you from little Castaways Beach in Queensland, Australia, joined today by David Ciccarelli. David, good day. Sir, a very warm welcome from down under. Where are you hanging out? David Ciccarelli 00:25 I'm hanging out just outside of Toronto, Canada. So pretty much the polar opposite from where you are, but great to be here together! Tom Poland 00:31 Talking about polar, you probably are sliding into fall. Are you? David Ciccarelli 00:36 Before you know it. Absolutely! And that's kind of synonymous with Canadians. People think it's all frigid here, but we have plenty of land. It's actually further south, believe it or not, than much of the United States. But happy to be here,

02:15 - David’s Superpower: Being Confused * Norms of Excellence (https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2020-05-31-09:20.html) * The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance (https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314) 11:56 - Daily Writing * David’s Newsletter: Overthinking Everything (https://drmaciver.substack.com/) * Unfuck Your Habitat (https://www.unfuckyourhabitat.com/) 15:47 - Learning to Be Better at Emotions 23:22 - Achievement and Joy as Aspirational Goals * [Homeostasis vs Homeorhesis](https://wikidiff.com/homeostasis/homeorhesis#:~:text=is%20that%20homeostasis%20is%20(physiology,to%20a%20trajectory%2C%20as%20opposed) * Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming by Agnes Callard (https://www.amazon.com/Aspiration-Agency-Becoming-Agnes-Callard/dp/0190639482) * Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott (https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153/ref=sr_1_2?crid=HEYGC212F6SG&dchild=1&keywords=seeing+like+a+state+by+james+c+scott&qid=1613057768&s=books&sprefix=seeing+like+a+state%2Cstripbooks%2C164&sr=1-2) * Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Investigations-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/1405159286/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1JRUU030WBCWQ&dchild=1&keywords=philosophical+investigations&qid=1613058025&s=books&sprefix=philos%2Cstripbooks%2C209&sr=1-1) Reflections: Jessica: Trying not knowing yourself. Rein: You shouldn’t be the owner of all your desires. Instead, you should measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values. Jacob: Thinking of yourself as the sum of all of the habits you maintain or don’t. David: The [Homeostasis vs Homeorhesis](https://wikidiff.com/homeostasis/homeorhesis#:~:text=is%20that%20homeostasis%20is%20(physiology,to%20a%20trajectory%2C%20as%20opposed) distinction, and cleaning a home as an ongoing process. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Transcript: SPONSORED AD: Whether you're working on a personal project or managing enterprise infrastructure, you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level. Simplify your cloud infrastructure with Linode's Linux virtual machines and develop, deploy, and scale your modern applications faster and easier. Get started on Linode today with $100 in free credit for listeners of Greater Than Code. You can find all the details at linode.com/greaterthancode. Linode has 11 global data centers and provides 24/7/365 human support with no tiers or hand-offs regardless of your plan size. In addition to shared and dedicated compute instances, you can use your $100 in credit on S3-compatible object storage, Managed Kubernetes, and more. Visit linode.com/greaterthancode and click on the "Create Free Account" button to get started. JACOB: Hello and welcome to Greater Than Code, Episode 223. My name is Jacob Stoebel and I'm joined with my co-host, Rein Henrichs. REIN: Thanks, Jacob and I'm here with my friend and also stranger because we haven't done this together in months, Jessica Kerr. JESSICA: Thank you, Rein! And Iím really excited today because our guest is David MacIver. Twitter handle, @DRMacIver. David MacIver is best known as the developer of Hypothesis, the property-based testing library for Python, and is currently doing a Ph.D. based on some of that work. But he also writes extensively about emotions, life, and society and sometimes coaches people on an eclectic mix of software development, intellectual, and emotional skills. As you can probably tell, David hasn't entirely decided what he wants to do when he grows u and that's the best because if you had decided well, then so few possibilities would be open. David, hello! DAVID: Hi, Jessica! Great to be here. JESSICA: All right. I'm going to ask the obligatory question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it? DAVID: So as you saw me complaining about on Twitter, this question doesn't translate very well outside of the United States. JESSICA: Yeah, which is fascinating for me. DAVID: I'm a bit too British to say nice things about myself without sounding like I'm being self-deprecating. JESSICA: Self-depreciating it is! DAVID: [laughs] So I thought about this one for a while and I decided that the answer is that I'm really good at being confused and in particular, I have a much more productive response to being confused than it seems like most people do because basically, the world is super confusing and I think I never know what's going on, but then I notice that I know what's going on and I look at it and I'm just like, ìHmm, this is weird, right?î And then I read a book about it, or I sort of poke at it a bit and then I'm not less confused, but I'm less confused about that like, one little facet of the world and have found ten new things to be confused about. [laughter] JESSICA: Nice. DAVID: Usually, I can then turn this into being slightly better at the thing I was previously confused about, or writing about it and making everyone else differently confused than they started with. JESSICA: Definitely confused. That is a win. That's called learning. DAVID: Yeah, exactly. [laughter] This is where a lot of the writing you were talking about comes from and essentially, about 2 years ago, I just started turning these skills less on software development and more just going like, ìLife, it doesn't make sense, right?î [laughter] And noticing a whole bunch of things, I needed to work on and then that a lot of these were shared common problems. So I am, if anything, far more confused about all of it than I was 2 years ago, but I'm less confused about the things I was confused about that and seem to be gradually becoming a more functional human being as a result of the process. So yay, confusion. JESSICA: That superpower, the productive response to confusion, ties in with your reaction to the superpower question in general, which is as Americans, we're supposed to be ñ we want to have power. We want to be special. We want to be unique. We want to make our unique contribution to the world! And as part of that, we're not comfortable being confused because we need to know things! We need to be smart! We need to convey strength and competence and be the best! I hate the superlatives. [laughter] I hate the implied competition there, but instead, we could open our hearts to our own confusion and embrace that. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. DAVID: One of the things that often comes up for me is it's a thing that I think is slightly intentioned with this American tendency youíre pointing at, which is that I kind of want to be the best, but I don't really want to be better than other people. I just want to be better than I am now. I wrote a post a while ago about neuromas of excellence like, what would a community look like, which helped everyone be the best version of themselves and one of the top lists was basically that everyone has to be comfortable with not being good at things, but another is just that you have to not want to be better to the other people. You just need want to be better. Again, this is where a lot of the writing comes from. I've just gone, ìWell, this was helpful to me. It's probably helpful to other people.î That's not as sense of wanting to change the world and wanting to put my own stamp on things and it does require a certain amount to self-importance to go, ìYes, my writing is important and other people will like to read it,î but then other people like to read it so, that's fine and if they don't, that's fine, too. JESSICA: Well, you didn't make anyone read it, but you did start a newsletter and let people read it. JACOB: Is this weird thinking reflect a journey that you took in your life? Because I think about my company and my team and how incredibly generous everybody is and even still, I just find it's natural to compare myself to everyone else and needing to not be on the bottom. Part of me wonders if that's just like a natural human tendency, but just because it's natural doesn't make it so. JESSICA: Way natural American. JACOB: Yeah, basically I'm asking how do I stop doing that? [laughter] DAVID: It's definitely not something I've always been perfectly good at. But I think the thing that helped me figure out how to do this was essentially being simultaneously at the bottom of the social rung, but also super arrogant. So it's your classic nerd kit thing, right? It's completely failing at people, but also going, ìBut I'm better than all of you because I'm smart,î and then essentially, gradually having the rough edges filed off the second part and realizing how much I had to learn off the first part. I think sometimes my attitude is due to a lot of this is basically, to imagine I was a time traveler and basically going back in time and telling little David all the things that it was really frustrating that nobody could explain to me and I sadly haven't yet managed to perfect my time machine, but I can still pay it forward. If nobody was able to explain this to me and I'm able to explain it to other people, then surely, the world is a better place with me freely handing out this information. I don't think it's possible, or even entirely desirable to completely eliminate the comparing yourself to others and in fact, I'd go as far as to say, comparing yourself to others is good, but I think theÖ JESSICA: Itís how do we have a productive response to compare ourselves to others? DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. There's a great section in The Inner Game of Tennis, which is a book that I have very mixed feelings about, but it has some great bits where he talks about competition. If you think of a mountain climber, a mountain climber is basically pitting themselves against the mountain, right? They're trying to climb the mountain because it is hard and you could absolutely take a helicopter to the top of the mountain, but that wouldn't be the point. It's you're improving yourself by trying a hard thing. I mean, you're improving yourself in the sense that you're getting better at climbing mountains. You might not be improving yourself in any sort of fully generalizable way. JESSICA: Okay. [laughter] DAVID: When you are playing tennisóbecause this is a book about tennisóyou are engaged in competition with each other and you're each trying to be better than the other. In this context, essentially, what you are doing is you are being the mountain for each other. So you are creating the obstacles that the other people overcome and improve themselves that way and in doing this, you're not just being a dick about it. You're not doing this in order to crush them. You're doing this in order to provide them with the challenge that lets them grow. When you think about it this way, other people being better than you is great because there's this mountain there and you can climb it and by climbing the mountain, you can improve yourself. The thing that stops everyone becoming great is feeling threatened by the being better rather than treating it as an opportunity for learning. JESSICA: Yeah, trying to dynamite the mountain instead of climbing it. Whereas, when you are the mountain for someone else, you can also provide them footholds. Rein, do you have an example of this? REIN: I sure do, Jess. Thanks for asking. So I was just [laughs] thinking while you were talking about this, about the speed running and speed running communities. Because speed running is about testing yourself against a video game, which in this case, serves the purpose of the mountain, but it's also about competing against other speed runners. If it was purely competitive, you wouldn't see the behaviors, the reciprocity in the communities like sharing speed running strats, being really happy when other people break your record. I think it's really interesting that that community is both competitive, but there's also a lot of reciprocity, a lot of sharing. JACOB: And it's like the way the science community should work. It's like, ìOh, you made this new discovery because of this discovery I shared with you and now I'm proud that my discovery is this foundation for all these other little things that now people can be by themselves in 10 seconds instead of 30.î JESSICA: Yeah. Give other people a head start on the confusion you've already had so that they can start resolving new confusions. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely one of my hopes with all of this writing is to encourage other people to do it themselves. Earlier this year, I was getting people very into daily writing practices and just trying to get people to write as much as possible. I now think that was slightly a mistake because I think daily writing is a great thing to do for about a month and then it just gets too much. So I will probably see if I can figure out other ways of encouraging people to notice their confusion, as you say, and share what they've learned from edge. But sadly, can't quite get into do it daily. JESSICA: This morningís newsletter you talked about. Okay, okay, I can do daily writing, but now I want to get better at writing. I've got to go do something I'm worse at. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think daily writing is still a really good transitional stage for most people. To give them more context for this newsletter for people listening. Basically, most of my writing to date, I just write in a 1- or 2-hour sitting from start to finish. I don't really edit it. I just click publish and I've gotten very good at writing like that. I think that most people are ñ I mean, sometimes it's a bit obvious that I haven't edited it because they're obvious typos and the like. But by and large, I think it is a reasonably high standard of writing and I'm not embarrassed to be putting it out in that quality, but the fact that I'm not editing is just starting to be sort of the limiter on growth for me. It's never going to really get better than it currently is. It's certainly not going to allow me to tackle larger projects that I can currently tackle without that editing skill. JESSICA: [laughs] I just pictured you trying to sit down and write a book in one session. [laughter] And then you'd be tired. DAVID: Yeah. I've tried to doing that with papers even and it doesn't really work. I mean, I do edit papers, but Iím very visibly really bad at editing papers and it's one of my weaknesses as a academic is that I still haven't really got the hang of paper writing. JESSICA: Do you edit other people's papers? DAVID: I don't edit other people's papers, but I provide feedback on other people's writing and say, ìThis is what worked for me. This is what didn't work for me. Here are some typos you made.î It's not reading as providing good feedback on things, that is the difficult part of editing for me. It is much more ñ honestly, it's an emotional problem more than anything else. It's not really that I'm bad at editing at a technical level. I'm okay at editing at a technical level. I just hate doing it. [laughs] JESSICA: That is most problems we have, right? DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: In the end, itís an emotional problem. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think that is definitely one of the interesting things I've been figuring out in my last 2 years of working on learning more about emotions and the various skills around them is just going, ìOh, right. It's not this abstract thing where you are learning to be better at emotions and then nothing will change in your life because you're just going to be happier about everything.î I mean, some people do approach it that way, but for me, it's very much been, ìOh, I'm learning to be good at emotions because this really concrete problem that I don't understand, it turns out that that's just feelings.î [laughter] It's like, for example, the literature on how to have a clean home, turns out that's mostly anxiety management and guilt management. It's like fundamentally cleaning your home is not a hard problem. Not procrastinating on cleaning your home is a hard problem. Not feeling intensely guilty and aversive about the dirty dishes in the sink and is putting them off for a week. I don't do that. But just as a hypothetical example. [laughter] I mean, not a hypothetical example, I think a specific example that comes from the book, Unfuck Your Habitat, which is a great example of essentially, it's a book that's about it contains tips, like fill the spray bottle with water and white vinegar and also, tips about how to manage your time and how to deal with the fact that you're mostly not cleaning because of shame, that sort of thing. Writing books are another great example where 80% about managing the feelings associated with writing; it turns out practical problems pretty much all come down to emotionsóat least practical life problems. REIN: Sorry, I was just buying Unfuck Your Habitat real quick. [laughter] DAVID: It's a good book. I recommend it. JESSICA: Our internal like emotional habitat and our external habitat are very linked. You said something earlier about learning to be at emotions is not just you're magically happier at other things in your life change. DAVID: Yes. I mean, I think there are a couple of ways in which it manifests. One of them is just that emotions often are the internal force that maintains our life habits. It's you live in a particular way because moving outside of those trained habits is scary or aversive in some way. Like the cleaning example of how, if your home is a mess, it's not necessarily because you don't know how to make your home not a mess. Although, cleaning is a much harder skill than most people treat it as speaking as someone who is bad at the practical skills of cleaning, as well as the emotional side of cleaning. But primarily, if it were just a matter of scale, you could just do it and get better at it, right? The thing that is holding you in place is the emotional reaction to the idea of changing your habits. So the specific reason why I started on all of this process was essentially relationship stuff. I'd started a new major relationship. My previous one hadn't gone so well for reasons that were somewhere between emotional and communication issues, for the same reason basically every relationship doesn't go so well, if it doesn't go so ñ Oh, that's not quite true. Like there are actual ñ JESSICA: Some people have actual problems. [chuckles] But these things are. I mean, our emotions really, as sometimes we treat them as if they're flaws. As if our emotions are getting in our way is some sort of judgment about us as not being good people, but no, it just makes us people. DAVID: For sure. JESSICA: So you started on this journey because of the external motivation of helping someone you're in a relationship with, because it's really hard to do these things just for ourselves. DAVID: It is incredibly hard to do things just for ourselves. I guess, that is exactly an example of this problem, right? It's that there is a particular habit of life that I was in and what I needed to break out of that habit of life was the skills for dealing with it and then figuring out these emotional reactions. But unfortunately, the thing that the habits were maintaining, it was me not having the skills and so having the external prompts of a problem that was in the world rather than in my life, as it was, was what was needed to essentially kick me out of that. Fortunately, it turns out that my standard approach of reading a thousand books now was one that worked for me, in this case. I probably haven't read a thousand books on this, but that certainly worked. JESSICA: It wouldnít surprise me. [laughs] DAVID: I read fewer books than people think I do. I may well have read more than a hundred books about emotions and therapy and the like. But I probably haven't, unless I cast that brush really broadly, because I mean, everything's a book about emotions and therapy, if you look at your right. REIN: Have you read any books by average Virginia Satir? [laughter] DAVID: I don't know who that is, I'm afraid. JACOB: Drink! REIN: Excellent! Excellent news. [laughter] JESSICA: Itís about Virginia Satir, right? REIN: Virginia was a family therapist who wrote a lot about processing emotions and I have been a huge fan of her work and it's made a huge difference in my life and my career. So I highly recommend it. DAVID: Okay. I will definitely hear recommendations on books. What's the book title, or what's your favorite book title by? REIN: I think I would start with The Satir Model, which is S-A-T-I-R M-O-D-E-L. The Satir Model, which is about her family therapy model. JESSICA: Chances are good, you've read books based on her work. I was reading Gerry Weinberg's Quality Software Management: Volume Two the other day, which is entirely based on The Satir Model. REIN: Yeah. He was a student of hers. One of the things that she likes to say is that the problem is never the problem, how we cope is the problem. JESSICA: Can we have a productive response to the problem? DAVID: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. I think often, the problem is also the problem. [laughter] JESSICA: It's often self-sustaining like the habits you're talking about. Our life habits form a self-sustaining system and then it took that external stimulus. It's not like an external stimulus somehow kicked you in the butt and changed you, it let you change yourself. DAVID: Yes, absolutely. I guess what I mean is ñ so let's continue with the cleaning example. The problem is that your flat is messy and your flat is messy because of these life habits, because your emotional reactions to all these things. If you do the appropriate emotional work, you unblock yourself on shame and anxiety around a messy flat, and you look around and you've saw you've processed all these emotions. You fixed how you respond to the problem and it turns out your flat is still messy and you still have to clean it. I think emotional reactions are what either ñ Iím making it sound like emotional reactions are all negative and I really don't mean that. I mean, that way is just ñ JESSICA: Oh, right because once you've dealt with all that shame and the anxiety and stuff, and maybe you've picked up your flat some, and then you come in and you have groceries and you stop and you immediately put them away and you get a positive, emotional feeling from that as you're in the process of keeping your flat tidy. The emotions can reinforce a clean flat as well. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is something that has always been one of my goals more than it is what am I active? JESSICA: No, I love this distinction that you're making here. Is it a goal or is it something I'm activelyÖ? The word goal is [inaudible]. DAVID: Yeah. So I think for me, one of the other problems, other than the relationships it starts, was me essentially realizing that my emotional experience, it wasn't bad. I mean, it wasn't great, but I wasn't actively miserable most of the time, but it also just didn't have very many positive features, which it turns out is also a form of depression. It's very easy to treat depression as just like you're incredibly sad all the time, but that doesn't have to what it can be like flatness is. So I think very much from early on in my mind was that the getting better at emotions wasn't just about not being anxious. It was also about experiencing things like joy, it was about being happier and I think having this as sort of an aspirational goal is very, very motivating in terms of a lot of this work and in terms of a lot of trying to understand all of this, because I think I don't want to be miserableóit only gets you so far. If you have a problem that you're trying to solve, and that turns out to be an emotional block, you have to actually wants to solve the problem. It's like, I think if you don't want to clean the flat, then it doesn't matter how much you sort of fix your anxiety around that. You're still just going to go, ìOkay. I'm no longer anxious about this messy flat. That's great,î and your flat is going to stay messy because you don't actually want it not to be and that's fine. JESSICA: Itís just fine, yeah. Who cares? Especially now. DAVID: Unless it becomes a health hazard, but yeah. [laughter] DAVID: Certainly like thereís ñ JESSICA: If you're affecting the neighboring flats with your roaches, thatís fine. DAVID: [laughs] Yeah. JESSICA: So you were talking about joy as an aspirational goal, but it's not the kind of goal where you check the box at the end of the year and declare yourself worthy of a 2% raise. DAVID: [laughs] No, absolutely not and I think for all big goals, really, I find that I want to be very clichÈ and say, it's the journey, not the destination. JESSICA: But it is! No, it totally is! DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: See, the word goal really irks me because people often use it to mean something that you should actually reach. Like write every day per month, that's a goal that you find benefits from hitting, but feelings of joy are, as you said, aspirational. I call it a quest, personally. Some people call it a North Star. It is a direction that can help you make decisions that will move you in that direction, but if you ever get thereÖ No, that doesn't make sense. You wouldn't want to exist in a perpetual state of joy. That would also be flat. [laughs] DAVID: No, absolutely. And I think even with big but achievable goals, it still is still quite helpful to treat them in this way. So for one, quite close to my heart right now, a goal of doing a Ph.D. I think you've got a 3-, 4-year long project in the States, I think it's more like 5 or 6 and if you treat the Ph.D. as it's pass/fail, like either you get the Ph.D. or those 3 or 4 years have been wasted, then that's not very motivating and also will result in, I think, worst quality results in work. Like the thing to do is ñ JESSICA: Like anxiety, stress, and shame. DAVID: Yeah. Yeah, very much so. [chuckles] So just thinking in terms of there's this big goal that you're trying to achieve of the Ph.D., but the goal doesn't just define a pass/fail; it defines a direction. Like if you get better at paper writing in order to get your Ph.D., then even if you don't get your Ph.D., you got better at paper writing and that's good, too. JESSICA: Because the other outcome is the next version of you. DAVID: Yes, exactly. JESSICA: Itís about who does this aspirational goal prompt you to become? REIN: This reminds me of the difference between homeostasis and homeorhesis. Homeostasis is about maintaining a state; homeorhesis is about maintaining a trajectory DAVID: That makes sense. Yes, very much that distinction and also, one of the nice things about this focus on a trajectory is that even if a third of the way through the trajectory, you decide you don't want to maintain it anymore and actually you're fine where you are. This goal was a bad idea or you've got different priorities now, possibly because a global pandemic has arrived and has changed all of your priorities. Then you still come all that way. It's like the trajectory doesn't just disappear backwards in time because you're no longer going in that direction. You've still made all that progress. Youíve still got to drive some of the benefits from it. JESSICA: Yeah. There's another thing that maybe it's an American thing, or maybe it's wider than that of if it doesn't last forever, then it was never real, or if you don't achieve the stated goal, then all your effort was wasted. DAVID: Yeah. I don't think itís purely an American thing. It's hard to tell with how much American pop culture permeates everything and also, I shouldn't say that although I'm quite British, I am also half American. So Iím a weird third culture kid where my background doesn't quite make sense to anyone. But yeah, no, I very much feel that. This idea that permanence is required for importance and it's something that every time I sort of catch myself there, I'm just like, ìYeah, David, you're doing the thing again. Have you tried not doing the thing?î [chuckles] But it's hard. It's very internalized. JESSICA: If you clean your flat and a week later, it's dirty again. Well, it was clean for a week. That's not nothing. DAVID: Yeah. I do genuinely think that one of the emotions that people struggle with cleaning. Certainly, it is for me. JESSICA: Oh, because it's a process. It is not a destination. Nothing is ever clean! DAVID: Yeah. JACOB: I think of myself sometimes as I want to be the kind of person that always has a clean home, as opposed to, I like it when my house is clean. JESSICA: Yeah. Is it about you or is it about some real effect you want? JACOB: Yeah. Is it about like the story that that I imagine I could project if I could project on Instagram because I'm taking pictures of my pristine house all the time, or is it just like, I like to look around and see things where they belong? DAVID: Yeah. I'm curious, does this result in your home being clean? JACOB: No, it doesnít and thatís sort of the issue that I'm just realizing is it's not actually a powerful motivator because it's just not possible trying to imagine that I could maintain homeostasis about it. It's not a possible goal and so yeah, it's not going to happen. REIN: Yeah. The metaphor here is it changes motion, but it's always happening so it's more like the flow of time than motion through space. JESSICA: Itís not motion, too. REIN: Actually staying the same is very hard to do and very expensive. DAVID: Absolutely. JESSICA: No wonder it takes all of our feelings to help us achieve it. [chuckles] DAVID: So the reason I was asking by the way about whether this idea of being the sort of person who has a clean home is effective is that this ties in a little bit to what today's newsletter was about. There's this problem where when you have self-images that are constructed around being good at particular things, being bad at those things is very much, it's a shame trigger. It's essentially, you experienced the world as clashing with your conception of yourself and we get really good at not noticing those things. You see this a lot with procrastination, for example, where you are putting off doing a thing because it does force you to confront this sort of conflict between identity and reality. I think sometimes, the way out of it is just to identify less with the things that we want to achieve in the world and just try and go, ìI'm doing this because I want to and if I didn't want to, that would be fine, too.î Essentially, becoming fine with both an outcome and failing to achieve that outcome is often the best way to achieve the outcome. JESSICA: So practicing editing in order to practice editing, whether you achieve writing a book or not, whether you're good at it or not, and it does come back to the journey. If what you're doing is a means to an end and yet not in line with that end, it often backfires because the means are the end. In the end, they become it. So having a clean house is stupid. That's not a thing. Picking up is a thing. That's something you can do and what I am picking up. True fact! [laughs] You don't have to worry about whether you can, are you doing it? All right then, you can! Whereas, having a clean house is not a thing. DAVID: Very much. This kind of ties into the comments about books earlier, where you were talking about how many books I read, and one of the things that I think very much stops people from reading books is the idea that oh God, there are so many books to read, I'll never get through all of them. JESSICA: If I started, I have to finish it. DAVID: Oh, yeah. I mean, people definitely shouldn't do that; books are there to be abandoned if they're bad. JESSICA: I read a lot of chapter ones. DAVID: Yeah. I have a slightly bad habit of buying books speculatively because they seem good and as a result, I think my shelf of books that I'm probably never going to get around to read, but might do someday and might not and either is fine is probably like a hundred plus books now. JESSICA: I love that shelf. I have big piles everywhere. [laughs] There's always something to read wherever I sit and most of it, I will never read, but it's beautiful. DAVID: I'm currently in a very weird experience where I write, for possibly the first time in my life, I have more bookshelf space than books. JESSICA: Huh, that's not a stable state. DAVID: No, no. This will be fixed by the time I leave this flat. The piles will return. JESSICA: You will maintain the trajectory. DAVID: Yeah. [laughs] Because I'm just reading. I can read these as many books because I just sit down and read and at some point, I will finish a book or I will abandon the book and both are fine. But I think if you treat this as a goal where your goal is to read all the books, then that's not the thing and also, I think people go, ìMy goal is to read a hundred books a year,î or I don't know how normal people guesstimates are. JESSICA: Itís like, is it really or itís their goal to learn something. DAVID: Yeah, exactly. JESSICA: And the means is reading books. DAVID: Yeah. I think if one instead just goes, ìI like reading and it's useful so I'm going to read books,î you'll probably end up reading a lot more than setting some specific numerical goal. Also, you run into sort of Goodhart's law things where if your goal is to read a hundred books in a year, great buy the Mr. Men set. But wait, it's not a thing in ñ the Mr. Men are a series of kidsí books which tells ñ JESSICA: With the big smiley face? DAVID: Yeah. Exactly, that's the one. [laughter] You can read a hundred of those in a weekóI assume there are hundred Mr. Men books, I don't actually knowóand youíll probably learn something. JESSICA: Then again, you might choose Dynamics in Action, never get through it, and then feel bad about it, and that would be pointless because you learned more from the introduction than you did from the Mr. Men series. DAVID: I don't think I've even opened my copy of Dynamics in Action. I think you recommended on Twitter or something and I was just like, ìThat does sound interesting. I will speculatively buy this book.î JESSICA: It's a hard book. DAVID: Yeah. It's far from the hardest book on my shelves, but it's definitely in the top. I'm going to confidently say top 20, but it might be harder than that. I just haven't done a comparative analysis and I don't want to overpromise. [laughter] JESSICA: The point being read books because you want to know. DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: Or sometimes because you want to have read them. That's the thing. There's a lot of things I may not want to pick up, but I do want to have picked up and I can use that to motivate me. DAVID: Yeah, and even then, there are two versions of that and both are good, actually. I think one of them sounds bad. One version is you want to have read it because you want to understand the material in it and the other one is just, you want to be able to say that you have read it and thus, you ñ and probably for the status game and also, just sort of as a box ticking, like I think ñ JESSICA: Oh, itís not completely wrong. DAVID: No, it's not completely wrong. JESSICA: You still get something out of it. DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: On the other hand, if you want to read it because you want to be the kind of person who would read it. I don't know about that one. DAVID: Yeah, I agree. I thinkÖ JESSICA: Then again, life habits. Sometimes, if you want to be the kind of person who picks up and so you fake it long enough to form the habit, then you are. DAVID: Yeah, absolutely and I read a book recentlyóof course, I didóby Agnes Callard called Aspiration, which I'm glad I read it. I cannot really recommend it to people who aren't philosophers, because there's a thing that often happens with reading analytic philosophy, where the author clearly has a keen insight into an important problem that you, as the reader, lack and the way they express that insight is through an entire bookís worth of slightly pedantic arguments with other analytic philosophers who have wrong opinions about the subjects. JESSICA: Half of Dynamics in Action is like that. DAVID: Yeah, I think it very complicated. REIN: Was it written as a thesis? DAVID: I don't think so. I'm not certain about that, but it might've been. It ended up being quite an influential book and I think she was mentioning that there's going to be a special issue of a journal coming out to recently about essentially, its impact and responses to it. But I think it's just genuinely that analytic philosophers had a lot of really wrong opinions about this subject. So the relevance of this is the idea she introduces the book is that of a proleptic value where ñ JESSICA: Proleptic, more words. DAVID: Proleptic basically, I think originally comes from grammar and it means something that stands in place for another thing. A proleptic value is what you do when you're engaged in a process of aspiration, which is trying to acquire values that you don't currently have. So she uses the example of a music student who wants to learn to appreciate the genre of music that they do not currently appreciate and they find a teacher who does appreciate that genre and they basically use their respect for that teacher as a proleptic value. They basically say, ìI don't currently value this genre of music, but I trust your judgment and I value your opinion and I will use your feedback and that respect for you as a value that stands in place of the future value of appreciating this genre of music that I hope to acquire.î So I think this thing of reading a book because you want to be the sort of person who reads that kind of book can have a similar function where even though, you don't really wants to read the book, that process of aspiration gives you a hook into becoming the sort of person who does want to read the book. JESSICA: That's like being the mountain for each other. DAVID: Yeah. JESSICA: In some ways. You're not going to get a view yet. You're only 10 feet off the ground, but meanwhile, just climb to climb because it's here. DAVID: Yeah. I'm not necessarily very good at being the sort of person reading books for this reason. Partly because there are so many books, I have so many other reasons to read, but yeah. JESSICA: Yeah, you're fine. You don't need more reasons to read a book. DAVID: [laughs] But I think two books that I have read mostly to have read them rather than necessarily because I was having an amazing time and learning lots of things reading them are Seeing Like a State by James Scott, which it's a good book. I don't think it's a bad book, but it is very much a history book that also has a big idea and there are like 70,000 blog posts about the big idea. So if you're going and wanting just the big idea, read one of the blog posts, but I'd seen a reference so many times and I was just like, ìYou know, this seems like a book that I should rate,î and my opinion is now basically that like, if you like history books and if you want lots of detail, then yeah, it's a great book to read. If you just want the big idea, donít. JESSICA: Right, because other people have presented it more succinctly, which probably happens with your Aspiration book that you talked about. DAVID: I would like it to happen with the Aspiration book. The Aspiration book is only a few years old. JESSICA: You've written a ñ oh, okay, so it's too soon for that. So you'll write about it, if you haven't yet. DAVID: Yeah, I havenít yet. Looking at it, it was published in 2018 and you have the paperback from 2019. So this is really cutting-edge philosophy to the degree that there is such a thing. [chuckles] JESSICA: Yeah. Oh no, what do you mean? [inaudible]. REIN: Seeing Like a State is. DAVID: Well, I've had this argument with philosopher friends where I was arguing that it was a thing and the philosopher friend was just like, ìIs it a thing, though?î Because the interesting thing about philosophy is just that it never goes out to date. People are sort of engaging with the entire historical cannon so the question is not does new philosophy get done? The question is more, I think is this less ñ? JESSICA: This isnít really a cutting edge. DAVID: Yeah, exactly. JESSICA: Itís more kind of a gentle nuzzling. DAVID: [laughs] Yeah. But also, is this more cutting edge than, I don't know, reading Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics? I don't know. JESSICA: Philosophy [inaudible]. DAVID: Yeah, I personally think that there is cutting-edge and this is on it, but plenty of room for philosophical dialogue on that subject if you can sort of dig Socrates up and ask him about it. [laughter] Yeah, and speaking of philosophy, the other book that I have read essentially to have read it rather than because I was getting a lot out of it was Wittgensteinís Philosophical Investigations where I essentially read it in order to confirm to myself that I had already picked up enough Wittgenstein by osmosis that I didn't really need to read it, which largely true. JACOB: This is the part of the show where we like to reflect on what we took from everything and just wrap things up a little bit. JESSICA: I have one thing written down. We talked a bit about who you are and who you want to be as a person, and how sometimes what you want to do is in conflict with how you think of yourself. Like, when you think of yourself as good at something, it's hard to be bad at it, long enough to learn better. It occurs to me that in our society, we're all about getting to know yourself and then expressing your true self, which is very much a homeostasis more than a homerhesis. But what have we tried not knowing yourself? What if we tried just like, I don't know who I am and then I can surprise myself and have more possibilities. That's my reflection. REIN: All of this discussion about happiness and pleasure, and diversion and striving reminds me a lot of Buddhist philosophy, or what I should say is, it reminds me a lot of my very limited understanding of Buddhist philosophy. Specifically, this idea that you shouldn't judge your life by the outcome of your preferences; that you shouldn't identify yourself with your wants and cling to the outcome of things. You can acknowledge that these things have happened and you can avoid unpleasant things, but you shouldn't be the owner of all of your desires. Instead, what you should do is measure your life by how well you follow the intentions that arise out of your values. JACOB: Yeah. Maybe to put another way, I'm starting to think maybe I could think of myself as the sum of all of the habits I maintain or don't, and try to think of outcome of those habits as what a lagging indicator, I guess, or as a secondary and think more of myself like, ìWell, what are the things that I find I am naturally doing and if I'm not, what can I do to just try to enforce it for myself that I'm going to do that more?î Or maybe I don't care. DAVID: So I'm not finding myself with sort of a single cohesive summation of the conversation, but I've really enjoyed it and there's been a couple of things I'm going to take away from it and mull over a bit more. I really liked the homeostasis versus homeorhesis distinction. I'd obviously heard the first word, but not the second word and so, I'm going to think about that a bit more. Sort of tying onto that, I very much liked Jessica's point of how a clean home isn't really a thing, you can only do cleaning and thinking much more in terms of the ongoing process than trying to think of it as a static goal that you are perfectly maintaining at all times. Slightly orthogonal in relation to that, but I'm also just going to look up Satir as an author and maybe read some of her books. [chuckles] REIN: Yay! DAVID: Because as we have established, always up for more reading. [laughs] JACOB: That should wrap up our Episode 223. I'd like to thank David for joining us and weíll see you next time. Special Guest: David MacIver.

Kole, Ben, Dennis, and David talk about the Dread X Collection, For the King, and we ask you which video games should be made into board games. The Grind: Dennis: For the King. Valorant. Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. David: For the King. Just Cause 4. Dead Rising 4. Ben: Deep Rock Galactic. Picross. Kole: Dread X Collection. The Multiplayer: Which video games should be made into board games, and vice versa? The End Boss: PS5 event happened in the future in the past! Devotion is getting a physical release in Taiwan.

Preston owns Jensen Air in North Dakota, working primarily in a seasonal real estate   David: “Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your business and what you do? Preston started his drone business on the side. He defined himself as different than other drone business owners because his customer base was already in place. His brother—a real estate broker for Remax—needed someone to do commercial drone footage. Preston did a little research, figured he could do it and “pulled the trigger” on studying to fly a drone. Preston’s first drone was a Mavic Air, and has since upgraded to a Mavic Zoom, which handles the wind in North Dakota much better. Preston has a YouTube channel and recently aired a video on the remote ID—a big topic for drone pilots these days. Preston understands needing to keep the sky safe but believes it's making the playing field uneven for a small drone operators. David: “When did you first get started in drones? Two years ago, he started strictly doing drone photography for real estate for his brother. Once he got his license, he thought he may as well turn it into a business. He created a Facebook page and website. He’s continued to put out content, and his business has been getting more attention: “You've got to put out a little free content so people can see what you're capable of. You have to differentiate yourself from the rest of the crowd. The more you spread your work around, the more people will find out about you and hire you.” Now, Preston has premiere customers, including a local university and a development company. However, when he first put together some footage, he had to figure out what video editing software to use, how to get videos to customers, etc. These things were big learning experiences. He began just taking video clips and photos and giving real estate agents raw footage to make their own videos, although he would still make sure the clips were very cinematic. He likes to see how creative people can get with his shots. David: “Up in your neck of the woods, what would you charge for a typical real estate shoot where you're doing photos and video clips without any editing?” Preston charges $200, which is about ½ hour of shooting but editing and color grading afterward is what takes all the time. He uses Canva, Photoshop and Lightroom as his main editing tools. If he’s doing just photos, he charges about $150, but if it's multiple photos or panoramas, he'll charge $200. For a single photo or refresh on a house, he’ll usually charge $50. If he has travel out to rural areas, he’ll also charge a travel fee. Lastly, before he sends his drone up to shoot, he scans the yard to make everything look nice, which realtors appreciate. David: “Do you stay pretty busy—especially in wintertime or freezing conditions, which are not ideal drone or real estate selling weather?” Preston says the busy season is spring to fall; most of the activities slow down in the wintertime because the cold weather is hard on the equipment, specifically the battery. Also, realtors have better luck selling with photos that have lush green grass and trees—not snow pictures. David: “Have you found real estate to be successful? Have you expanded into other areas or are you sticking with that niche for now?” Although Preston says he’s sticking with the niche of real estate because it’s given him so much business over the past couple of years, he’s still willing to expand. For example, he’s interested in mapping, because he’s always nervous about the accuracy of the drone mapping. He’s also been talking to a local radio station trying to get into radio tower inspections. However, right now, he says, he costs a lot of money for them. David: “During your busy season—and only on the real estate side—how busy do you get? How many jobs are you getting per month?” Sometimes he may be swamped and doing a drone job over his lunch hour, sometimes not. He’s always taking photos and putting content up on Instagram and Facebook. His town flooded a little bit this past fall and he took pictures and posted it to a “What's Happening?” page in Valley City. The last time he checked, the site had 19,000 views, so it was an easy way to get great exposure. Sometimes he gets random calls – like someone wanting to borrow a clip for a promotional video, which was free advertising. David: “You’re doing this on the side of your regular job. You said you work as an office manager during the day—how has that helped you on the business side of drones?” It has really helped him save money. He can't just buy the most expensive video editing software. He has to take that into consideration, especially if just doing it as a side gig. Drone insurance was also difficult to find around where he lives. He now pays monthly for Skywatch so when it's cold or nasty outside, he doesn't have to pay for insurance. He pays for extra coverage with DJI and has liability insurance through the company. He used Squarespace to build his website and pays only $15-20 bucks per month for the site. He’s also taken advantage of Fiverr for design work. “I keep dumping all the money that I've made from my drone business back into the company—I keep improving software and equipment. I keep building myself up and making it better. If everybody else is improving what they're doing, you're gonna get left behind.” David: “For people at the beginning or just interested in listening to what others are doing— what would you recommend if they want a drone business but aren’t sure where to start.” Preston says the first thing to do is start studying for the Part 107. He says that will open doors—but it's not going to guarantee business. You have to go out and get that. “Be optimistic because there are many different avenues to make money with drones—mapping agricultural, public safety, all sorts of things. There's new technology coming out every day to make money from.” Another thing he says to do is to set up an artist's gallery on your website and throw up photos that people can order—HD, metal prints, canvases, any professional printing options. David: “Are people reaching out to you asking to be able to use footage that you already have?” Yes, I've had people contact me about using photos for their website, or as a background for Facebook. I said to go ahead and use it because it’s free advertising. Preston says most of his traction comes from Facebook and Instagram. Connect with Preston: Website: http://www.jensenairllc.com/ Facebook: @jensenairllc Instagram: @jensenairllc Have a Drone Business? Want to be Interviewed for Season 3? Complete this questionnaire: Drone to 1K Business Owner Application Training from Drone Launch Academy Part 107 Exam Prep Course ($50 off) Aerial Photo Pro Course ($50 off) Aerial Video A to Z Course ($100 off) Aerial Roof Inspection Pro Course ($100 off) Drones 101 Course ($20 off) Other Places to Listen iTunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify TuneIn

Mike Jensen, from Jensen Films, has been in business for almost 30 years doing wedding and event videos and corporate videography. Mike always offered unique services to clients, such as 8mm film, 360 VR panoramas and aerial shots of wedding venues. In the mid-90s, he did his first aerial by renting an airplane and continued to get aerial footage by renting helicopters. At $400/hr, it was very expensive, but he gathered a reusable library of about 30 to 40 of the most popular wedding venues in town and says, “Before the drone revolution, my competitors weren't offering that.” In 2006, I created and produced the world record wedding video event in Sacramento, setting a new world record of 100 cameras to professionally film a wedding. David: “So when did you get into flying a traditional kind of quad copter setup?" When drones started to become reliable in the early 2000s, Mike didn't feel comfortable flying them himself, so he found a drone pilot online that was flying a lot over water. Finally in 2014, Mike got his license and purchased his first drone—a DJI Phantom 2. I started flying it for events and later upgraded it to the Autel X-star then to the Mavic Pro. Today although he flies an Autel EVO, his favorite drone to fly is the Mavic 2 Pro Zoom. David: “Do you use drones right now mostly as a supplement to your film business or have you gotten into any drone services?” Mike had an advantage of having a videography company first. At some point, his videography clients also need drone services, which made it an easy sell. One of Mike’s biggest clients is a local major construction company. They've hired him to go out every week and do visual updates--flying for 1-2 hrs, shooting 3-4 one-minute videos, 20-40 stills and a top down shot. Mike stitches all those together in Photoshop and delivers a megapixel image of the entire property from 400 feet looking down. He saves them a lot of money by providing that documentation, their project manager meets with corporate every week and needs to show them progress. David: “For a construction job where you'll shoot once a week and these projects take months, what do you typically charge for a job like that?” Mike is hired to fly once a week for 30 weeks and charges them $300 a flight. That includes 1-1 1/2 hrs of flying, culling images, making sure his videos look good, uploading and then sending them the link. This is an ongoing client, often bringing him onto another project as they’re finishing one up. David: “Were you actively reaching out to those types of clients or did they find you? How did that work come about?” I shot for many years for a large West Coast healthcare provider. They were building a medical office building where Mike lives in Sacramento and the construction company brought him on for their own projects. One job led to another. Most of my business at this point in my career is word of mouth. David: “Looking back to when you were first starting, can you think of tactics that might work in today's environment? For example, if you were starting in the drone business, didn't have history with Jensen Films, and wanted a drone only business, what do you think you would do first to get it going?” Mike says he’s expanded his video company and doing a lot of different things—drones are just one of them. For example, when he started doing photo booths, he got on Facebook and let everybody know by creating and posting short videos. Similarly, for 360VR work, they just started shooting some footage unpaid, posted it and let his friends know. A photographer friend knew about a huge condo project that was going up and needed 360 video. “What really helped me was letting the world know what I was doing and doing it well. I needed to WOW the first client I got and then over-deliver on the promises I’d made. It’s also important to continue to up my game. I’m always looking for ways to increase my skills. If you start standing still, that's a prescription to fail.” David: “So tell me a little bit about the VR stuff. When did you guys start doing that...what's that like?” One night when he was editing late, Mike stumbled on the website of a 360 videographer who’d created gorgeous 360 images of the Royal Danish wedding. Mike realized he needed to do that with his brides, so he bought the equipment and started marketing it. Since then, he’s made custom rigs for his drones and included Live 360 and Ground 360 in virtual wedding movies for his brides. Clients can link to it on Vimeo or Facebook from their desktop, laptop or phones, or use goggles. David: “How much do you charge for VR video?” Mike began charging $750 for VR wedding video, but with every new VR video, he’s raised the price to $1,000, $1,250 or $1500. It’s an add-on to a basic package for the day. An exciting thing he’s been using is the new Insta 360-1R, which is two cameras that mount on the top and bottom of the Mavic 2Pro and can shoot stills or video without that dead spot on top (see link at bottom for website for Insta 360-1R) David: “In the last five years or so, as drones have become much more affordable and the technology has gotten a lot better, how has that impacted your business, if at all?” Mike says he’s always been an early adopter because it's given him the advantage of being able to market something that no one else has. With the wedding 360s, there may be only five other people in the country that offer that for wedding packages. He tells his brides, “it's the only shot of your wedding day where you'll be able to see everyone in your wedding in one shot.” Mike says, “I’m never satisfied with where my business is. I'm always looking for different ways to help my clients put the dream and the goal of what they need and want into images.” David: “So you have corporate and weddings, you're doing construction stuff, some VR stuff and the photo booth stuff. Is there anything else that you have going on that you're excited about?” Jensen Films is contracted with a real estate company that brings in actors to stand-in inside luxury homes while Mike films them. It’s a type of lifestyle video that’s simple to do. Mike brings in the actors and, now that he’s been licensed for a number of years, he flies the drone himself.  It’s also in the contract that when the house sells, they’ll pay him an extra $750 to $1,000. He also helps them by posting to his social media and giving them a little bit of advertising from his end. David: “If you had some advice to give somebody who's just starting a drone business—whether it's video, documenting construction sites, or mapping—what direction would you provide to get started?" 1-Always deliver more than you promise. Clients have come back to him again and again because he always delivers more. 2-Don't get into this industry unless you have a passion, not only for the drone work, but for the business end as well. The drone is the backend of the business. 3-Continue to improve on not only your technical flight skills, but on your creative photo and video skills, composition, movement, lighting. Whenever Mike flies for a client, he’s looking for that epic shot that will wow his clients. Connect with Mike: Website: www.jensenfilms.com Some samples of Mike’s 360VR wedding work: https://vimeo.com/262143827 https://vimeo.com/256345801 Insta360 One R: https://www.insta360.com/product/insta360-oner_twin-edition Have a Drone Business? Want to be Interviewed for Season 3? Complete this questionnaire: Drone to 1K Business Owner Application Training from Drone Launch Academy Part 107 Exam Prep Course ($50 off) Aerial Photo Pro Course ($50 off) Aerial Video A to Z Course ($100 off) Aerial Roof Inspection Pro Course ($100 off) Drones 101 Course ($20 off) Other Places to Listen iTunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify  

Dustin’s company is Full Scope Inspections, a home inspection company in Citrus, FL specializing in roofs made of metal, tile, slate (or anything that shouldn’t be walked on or is too steep or elevated.) David: “When did you first start getting into drones and when did you fly your first drone?” Dustin was using drone before starting his drone business. He noticed people weren’t using drones for inspections and his residential construction background told him there could be a big market—it just all made sense. Dustin says that when paying for a home inspection, the roof is a key component—but you don’t have to walk on it. With a drone, Dustin found he could see deficiencies another inspector wouldn’t because they're not getting a full view. Dustin’s clients call him because they know it’s important that their roof be inspected closely. Dustin says the drone is a differentiator, but he doesn’t charge more for it. By using it when necessary, he can take pictures around things that may typically be blocking a view. He also uses the drone also to sell his services through his report.   David: “For the homes that you do use a drone for, what’s the approximate revenue the drone has brought you—in busy and slow months?” For a typical home inspection, Dustin may charge $300-$400, but it depends on the square footage. He does 4-8 inspections/week. Dustin also does some imaging for realtors, charging $75 to shoot 10-12 photos. He also does a lot of promotion through that group. For example, he raffled 10 to 12 drone shots—a $75 value as a gift basket entry at a tailgate party he had for realtors. Nice pictures potentially make or break a deal, Dustin says, and good camera shots sell property. According to Dustin, “I'm building a business that's going to be here long-term and the first couple of years are definitely crucial. I'm getting really good feedback, some really good reviews. It’s pretty exciting.”   David: “Talk us through when you first started your inspection business, and no one knew who you were. How did you start building the business?” Dustin had a vision that was different than most... he says he could see everything before he ever put it into place. “In this business, the only way it would fail was if I let it. There are enough opportunities and so many different outlets that if you put yourself in the right places, then the only person that's gonna allow you to fail is yourself.” He looked up a local home inspector whose online setup was blah and then he built everything around the image of what he lacked. Through reviews requests from customers, and a small amount of Google Ads, he is driven to the top of a Google search. He also uses a software called HomeGage to send tips once he finishes a report. Three days later, HomeGage sends an auto-generated email asking them to leave a review. Two months later, another email is auto-generated asking for referrals.   David: “Did your first customer come through networking or did someone stumble across your stuff? How did you get that first client?” Dustin’s hit the ground running. His first client came from Google.  From there, he started meeting with different realtors and the Realtors Association. He also joined a networking group which has helped him tremendously. “It all boils down to you building relationships with realtors. Get your name out there. If you can be on a realtor's top three list, it will pay off.” Dustin was building all of this while working and studying for the test. He knew how many jobs he should expect to do, how many he needed to do survive each week/month. He said, “If I commit to it and set my mind to it, this is what's going to happen. A lot of people have one little setback or somebody tells them No, and they say, ‘Maybe I shouldn't do this’. Second-guessing yourself is common. That's what you do. If I didn't pass the exam, I was going to take it again. I wrote it down and I could see it all the way through.”   David: “What's your favorite part of having your own business/working for yourself? What's your favorite part and what's the part you like the least?” Dustin’s favorite part is having time for his kids and their sports—he likes the flexibility and freedom. Dustin says he has a hard time letting go, he can’t let someone do things so that he can focus on the business. Because customers tell him the reason they booked an inspection was because they felt comfortable with his knowledge, he has a hard time turning that over to somebody else...it's a strain. However, Dustin says, “I’m not going to grow if I'm doing the same things I did last year.”   David: “For someone who's starting out from scratch and wants to build a drone business, what's one of the most important lessons you've learned? What’s your advice? Dustin says having a vision and a plan of how to pursue that vision. “We live in the land of the free, the United States, and you can do whatever you want to do right here. You just have to put your mind to it, go out to the right places and meet the right people and, and just know that you're not going to accept no for an answer.” Website :www. Fullscopeinspecdtions.com FB: fullscopeinspections Connect with Dustin: Website: www.fullscopeinspections.com Facebook www.facebook.com Have a Drone Business? Want to be Interviewed for Season 3? Complete this questionnaire: Drone to 1K Business Owner Application Training from Drone Launch Academy Part 107 Exam Prep Course ($50 off) Aerial Photo Pro Course ($50 off) Aerial Video A to Z Course ($100 off) Aerial Roof Inspection Pro Course ($100 off) Drones 101 Course ($20 off) Other Places to Listen iTunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify TuneIn

Introduction to Andrew: Although Andrew started flying drones 5 years ago, about a year ago, he decided to build a business to make some extra money. Andrew says, “Aerial photography isn’t so big in winter so I didn’t start to get business the summer. But this winter, I’ve lined up clients through spring of next year.” By the way, Andrew is a senior in high school. Andrew bought his first drone for $50 when he was 13. He then got a Parrot Bebop2 which he loved but wasn’t pleased with the pictures. He later bought, and still uses, a Maverick2 Pro.” David agreed “Cheaper drones can get you interested and lead to more. My first drone was a Syma X5C so when someone wants my advice on their first drone, I say, ‘Get a Syma X5Cs on Amazon for $40. They're super light and when you need to land, you just cut the power and it flows to the ground’.” David: “What was it that sparked you to say, ‘I need to make some money doing this’? Did you target realtors when you started? Tell us about your original business plan starting out.” When Andrew could get his Part 107 license at 16, he got a nicer drone for taking pictures and videos. He thought, “Why not get a license, work and bring in some extra money to travel and save for college?” Andrew agreed to take pictures for a golf course in return for them putting it on their social media and tagging him. The job was unpaid, but got him clients and followers—basically, they advertised for him. Last summer, the most impactful thing he did was message a drone company in Chicago to ask for advice about getting clients. They told him to find a local real estate photographer and offer aerial photography to them. So that’s what he did. David: “Are you just doing photography or are you doing video too? Do you charge separately for videos? Do you also edit?” Andrew says he takes as many pictures or videos as he can in 30-45’ to give clients a lot to choose from. If he has to fly from one spot to another, that’s a video. He does some editing but outsources most of it to a company in Vietnam for a very affordable price. For pictures with some videos and no editing he charges $100, slightly more for editing and/or any location farther than 30’ from home. David: “Regarding your approach to the golf course, did you say, ‘I'm going to get my name out there’, and then Googled ‘golf courses in my area’ and contacted them? How did you specifically start to make that happen?” While flying one day, Andrew took pictures of a golf course across the road from his school which he posted to IG and tagged. When they responded that they loved his pictures through Instagram, he requested a contact. He sent them an EM saying, “I'm starting this company, I'm insured and licensed. Can I come to your golf course and take pictures for your social media?” They agreed, so Andrew took and edited pictures and sent them over (They still post his pictures). Since then, Andrew’s process has become simple...he finds contact information online and reaches out. At this point, though, he has a whole portfolio so he’s not offering his services for free. David: “Tell us more about the paying clients that you got from free work. Were they members of the golf course or people from the neighborhood who saw it on social media and reached out?” Andrew got two clients from the first golf course who were from the neighborhood. At first, they followed the golf course on IG. Then, they followed Andrew, reaching out to him later through there. They wanted pictures of the golf course for their home; he charged them $125 for 4x2 & 5x7 pictures. With printing costing $30, he made $95 from each job.  David: “So after getting paying clients from the golf course, how did you expand into real estate? Did you try and fail and then reach out to that company in Chicago or is that the first thing you did? Walk us through when you started shifting to real estate.” Andrew replied, “The first real estate job I had was in July before I reached out to that company in Chicago. I brought business cards to my school’s career day, and went up to a broker from a large commercial real estate firm who spoke and said, ‘I just started doing aerial photography for real estate. Here's my card.’ He said thank you—nothing more. In July he reached out to ask me to do a 500-acre farm. I was so excited because I thought they would give me more work if I did good.” The work took four hours and he charged $585: $400 for the time, $185 for editing and a 5-minute video (at that point, he had no idea what to charge so he made it up). Now, Andrew gets one $200-$500 real estate job per month. During busy months, Andrew averages 5-10 jobs a week, which is $2000 to $4,000 a month. During slow months, he often has 2 jobs a week, making $1,200 a month. David: “How much detail do you add to videos...Music? Narration? Overlay text?” He uses Litchi to map out his flight 10 minutes beforehand and then creates automated flight video going around the property for 40 minutes, taking video clips and pictures of the house. For video, he starts off with a title/address and puts it to music. David: “What other ways have you found effective to get clients? I know you also reached out to a real estate photographer. Talk about that a little bit.” Essentially, Andrew Googled “real estate photographer, Frederick, MD,” and found one company to email, saying “I do aerial photography, and I would love to be the person you hire.” When he sent his portfolio, they’d said other people had charged a lot more than him and their work wasn’t as good, so he was hired! Later when Andrew posted/tagged pics of big hotel chains, when they said “This is amazing. We love this”, he said it was a big confidence booster. David: “For your company, did you set up the SkyPix name as an LLC with a bank account or is that just kind of a name you chose to?” Since he’s under 18, the name is a trade name. When 18, he’ll create an LLC. Andrew keeps track of all payments, using Square for invoices and a Google spreadsheet to keep track of everything he spends. David: “Where do you see things headed? Will you stay in real estate, or with golf courses, or try to expand into other things? Will you build a team? What does the future look like for you?” Andrew wants to start a drone pilot network, like drone ERs. He’ll be working with a development team to develop the platform and do his marketing. He’s moving to Orlando, so right now he’s training somebody in Maryland to keep doing work there (right now, this person is studying to get their Part 107 license with Drone Launch Academy). Once he moves to Orlando, Andrew will reach out to real estate agents. He’d eventually like to get into mapping and infrared, but doesn't have the money saved up right now to put towards something like an Inspire 2 with a special camera.” Connect with Martin Instagram: www.instagram.com Website: www.skypixap.com Have a Drone Business? Want to be Interviewed for Season 3? Complete this questionnaire: Drone to 1K Business Owner Application Training from Drone Launch Academy Part 107 Exam Prep Course ($50 off) Aerial Video A to Z Course (20% off) Other Places to Listen iTunes Stitcher Google Play Spotify TuneIn

BJNN's Marny Nesher sits down to chat with David For, of Visual Technologies in the 8th video of this season's The Interview with BJNN. For more videos, visit www.cnybj.com/theinterview

In the last episode, we spoke a lot about the "why?" behind microstates. This time we wanted to cover how ideas in Microstates map to different patterns used to build JavaScript applications using frameworks like React, Ember, Vue and Angular. We discussed what you need to know about Microstates if you prefer component state architecture or global store architecture like Redux, as well as how setState in React can be refactored to use Microstates. We closed off with the comments about the trade offs that component heavy frameworks make by overemphasizing the view layer at expense of other aspects of the MVC pattern. This show was produced by Mandy Moore, aka @therubyrep of DevReps, LLC. Upcoming Conference Talks: Manhattan.js - August 8th (Taras) ReactJS Austin August 6th (Charles) Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #107. My name is Charles Lowell and we are going to be following up with our Episode 106 with the exciting conclusion of 'Microstates, the Podcast.' With me today to wrap this subject up, at least for the near term, obviously we're going to be talking about it a lot in the days and months to come, are David and Taras, also co-developers here at Frontside. Hello guys. TARAS: Hello, hello. DAVID: Hi everyone. CHARLES: Before we get into that, we'll just make a few quick announcements. First off is here at Frontside, we are going to be having some availability at the end of August. If you or anyone on your team is looking to level up in the area of testing, especially testing single page applications, acceptance testing single page applications or if you need React or general JavaScript consulting, please get in touch. We would love to work with you and love to do some of the great things together. Second, we finally released this and this is germane to the topic at hand. We released a major version of microstates this week that's based on a new and simpler architecture. That's really exciting. It doesn't really change the content of the conversation because the API hasn't changed that much. It just means that the library, which was already very small is even smaller. I think we shaved almost 40% of the size off and it's just much simpler and it's much more harmonious with the underlying JavaScript runtime. It's even more just simple JavaScript objects. Unless there's any other news that you want to cover, we'll jump right into it. TARAS: All right. Let's do it then. Let's do microstates. CHARLES: I Love to talk about microstates. This is obviously the second podcast that we're doing on microstates, just because we ended up, I think it was two weeks ago and we'd been speaking for almost an hour and really, we're just laying out the problems that microstates solve -- the problems of state management and why you often run up against complexity when you have a single state management tool that doesn't account for a bunch of different use cases. We got into microstates a little bit but we left it as kind of a cliffhanger. We talked about transactionality and laziness and immutability, ease of composition, simplicity of API, performance, memory footprint, things like this. Those were all the problems and then we're like, "Yeah, microstates. It's awesome." We're going to talk a little bit more about actual microstates proper and what is involved like the adjustments in mindset that you need to make or don't need to make when adopting a tool like microstates. TARAS: Actually, it's been really interesting for me because I just gave a talk at Toronto JS on microstates and it was pretty cool to see. There was a panel at the end. I think the people that are representing just using component state as a way of architect implication. It was managing state and application and it's representing redux. It's really interesting to see, first of all, like how curious people were. Most of questions were directed to the discussion around microstate, simply because it is a new tool but it was also just interesting to see how curious people who really loves redux, he was like, "I really love redux but I really like that fact that you guys have types," so I was like, "Oh, that's cool." Even though you really liked your solution, you actually found something in microstates interesting but at the same time, I think he was kind of missing that what aspects of Microstates overlap with redux. I think one of the things that we can do today is talk about what microstates has and what API does microstates provides and how similar they are to what people already know. I think that's one of the things that I was thinking about this conversation is that there are some things around microstates API like how to use microstates but the architectural concepts that power a microstates, they are already part of the development process and development architectures for most people that building single page applications. I think we can do is try to map these ideas not what people really know and patterns that they use to ideas in microstates, just to show how close we actually are. I think that's a good way for us to go. CHARLES: I guess we can start with, maybe one particular mode of managing state and then, how that maps to uses with microstates. TARAS: Let's start with components state because that was kind of our starting point. One of the original starting points for microstates because so much of our work was in Ember and component state is where most of Ember development happens. I think that's a good place to start. If you're someone who uses components state, if you're using Ember or Vue without something that is redux-ish which is pretty common these days, if you use components state, then one of the features of -- CHARLES: And also, if you're using React, right? Ember, Vue and React pretty much are all the same in this regard. TARAS: Yeah. Well, Ember and Vue are a little bit different in that behalf. Their particular pattern is you have data coming into the component, then you're doing some work with the data so that in Ember and Vue, you might use computed properties to derive state on that and then you might pass that state further down into other components. In React, you would do something a little bit different because there is no memorized computed properties by default, so you, a lot of times, write your computations that you pass into other computers that are written as expressions in JSX. If you're using this pattern, then one of the challenges around using this pattern is the process of lifting state becomes quite complicated. Because if you have like a bunch of state that lives in the component, it's attached to your derivation of state and the properties that you can invoke are attached to a component object. In React world, it's called lifting state. In Ember world, it'd be essential refactoring it into the parent component and passing that state in. in microstates, you're essentially moving this state into the microstate and now, what you have is this object that instead of having the state live on the component, the state now lives on the microstate object and in all frameworks, when you do that in microstates, you can use the getters to get the memorized computed properties behavior on the microstate. If you use your computed properties, computed properties are available for you on the microstate. You can do it the same way. CHARLES: It's kind of like a wrap up of that idea, not a wrap up but a summary of that idea is that the microstate essentially is a substitute for your component properties. If you're working with a component, a component has state associated with it, so you're setting properties on a component and then using the computed properties of that component. Microstates is you have all those benefits where you can set properties directly. You can define methods that like set properties as part of a transaction and you can then have simple JavaScript getters, which are just like computed properties except there's no enumeration of dependent keys. It's just, that's all they do for you. TARAS: Then the next question that arises is like, "Do I make like one huge microstate or a bunch of smaller microstates?" I think the question is really depends on the role of your component and what's nice thing about microstate is in microstates, there's two things that are kind of cool. One is when you represent your status in microstate, it makes it very easy. If you need to lift that state from the component up into the parent, you can lift that type. You can take that type and you can compose that type into the parent's microstate, if you have to and in that case, you would pass this new object that's created from that type. You'd pass the state for that component to the component that would otherwise have its own state. Essentially now, the parent has the state that would otherwise be in a child component and now, the parent is passing a state from the parent to the child. There's two kind of benefits to that. One is it gives a parent a way to control the state of the child and it also gives you a really easy way to serialize and deserialize state. You start off with having ability to serialize state for a particular component and all of his children, now you can represent that serialized state as part of the components state, so you have an easy way to restore the state of the component tree at the parent component. CHARLES: Right and that's possible because a microstate is really just encapsulating a value within a type but the value is just a simple serializable plain old JavaScript object, right? TARAS: Yeah. CHARLES: I'm just not trying to say like this is the feature that microstate provide, so when you're creating a microstate, you just pass it a POJO and it off to the races with that POJO and you can access that POJO at any single point. TARAS: Yeah. This is part of the architecture that I think are helpful for people that are using components. Is there anything else for people who are using components state that we think would be helpful? CHARLES: I think we're just realizing that you get the benefit of the laziness and immutability and the transactionality and all kind of things that we talked about last time but actually, the mental model is very similar. I think the thing to realize is that if that's the way that you used to working with state, the bridge is not too far. It's actually quite a short one. TARAS: Yeah, that's good. CHARLES: It feels very natural. It's not a huge mental shift. It's just more about a very small mental shift, a very small shift in mechanics for a very large payoff. DAVID: For instance, say you're in an Ember application using component state, what I'm used to is you're going to be passing actions around between components. Whenever you're trading that out for microstates, is it more that these actions are just bundle in with the microstate as the transition? TARAS: Yeah. One nice thing with the microstate, because the transitions that you can perform on any data type are intrinsic to the actual data type, the part of the data type, when you instantiate a microstate, you get these transitions for free. When you pass the object into a component, you can now invoke transitions on that object, that are part of that object's type. It's hard to imagine how awesome that really is because the closest pattern that you would see for that would be like, for example, if you're using Ember, you have Ember object or Ember model that you pass into a component and then, you can work a transition and because it goes through the Ember data store, your component is going to update. With microstates, there's no observation of any kind but what you're doing is when you are invoking the transition, transitions going up to the top of the root and gives you the next microstate, which updates your component tree. You get that functionality of 'data-down, actions-up'' built into the entire system of the microstates and all of that is hooked into these transitions that you can invoke on the objects that you pass into your components. CHARLES: Right, maybe David and Taras, you all could provide a concrete example of what that looks like. Because I think it is something that when I was giving talks on microstates at Ember meetups, one of the first things I like to show is you've got all these actions that you're writing either on your router or your controller but they're really actions manipulating the same type of data. It really comes down to like you're pushing and popping things off of arrays, you're toggling Booleans, you're incrementing counters, you're setting this property on this object. These are actions that we're writing and in the kind of microstates world, that's boilerplate. Because the transitions are intrinsic to the data type of the microstate that you're working with, maybe we could provide an example, like what's an action that you describe that you would pass around. TARAS: I think an easier one would be like if you have a model for example, you're composing a model into your application state or you're compose a model into your components state, so you have this model type that gets instantiated and you pass it into component that represents a model. Off that model, you might have open status like is it open or not that gets consumed by the model component, to know whether the model should be visible. Then along with that is model is open state, there is a toggle transition that you can find inside your component that is going to automatically flip the visibility of open. What will happen when you bind that transition to some kind of action handler that you invoke inside your component, when you invoke that action, it will then trigger transition at the top of that microstates and then, it will create the next state, push it through which will cause your model to change the visibility. David, that does answer the question? DAVID: Yeah, it does and that's actually the example that I have come up with whenever asked. A very simple sort of Boolean toggle. CHARLES: In a couple of my earlier demos, I should dust off that talk that I gave to the Austin Ember meetup where I was able to create an input with a dropdown menu with basically, some pretty advanced mouse behavior, all without having any component state or like storing it all in microstates and a lot of pushback was, "Aren't you putting logic in the template?" and the answer is, "Absolutely not." The logic is in the models but what I'm doing is I'm composing the actions that operate on those models inside the templates but at the template level, the action is data. If you're thinking about, we always want to have, we always want to lift state and then push that state down to the application, what this is really saying is that the actions are part of the data. It is implicit to the value that you've got. TARAS: I think that's really powerful because we do think about actions as being something that you can invoke. Like with closures, it's an action that you can invoke but considering that operation, that piece of data that invokes a transition in microstates and is derived from the type of the data, I think it's a cool concept. That's probably, one of the things that is kind of new for microstates but how you use it in your application should feel pretty much the same as you would if you were creating action handlers on your components. CHARLES: Yeah, just like kind of bundled action handlers for free. TARAS: Right. CHARLES: Maybe the way that you wrap up on this one when talking about kind of what microstates has to offer for the Ember developer, the Vue developer is really, I would say someone who's used to working with like MobX. Would be another good example is when I first started using Ember back in 2012, Ember Object solved a whole lot of issues in a really profound fundamental way and I really, really was drawn to that as the best API to be working with state. What kind of became apparent was perhaps not the best implementation. This is not like bag on Ember Object. I think it was actually amazing technology for seven years ago when most of it was written and probably, even came from before like SproutCore. It's almost 10 years old, which is incredible but it's still under heavy use in 2018 and it speaks well of how well it was constructed. I actually don't have much of a problem with Ember Object API. I just think that the way in which it's implemented that API means that there are some problems that require a different paradigm, so very much I kind of see microstates as heavily inspired by those types of APIs but with, I want to say a modern implementation but an implementation that is designed to solve the problems that have come to light over the last five years of developing single page JavaScript application. TARAS: I want to add that, when you describe with Ember Object, it exists in every framework that uses immutability. In MobX, the observation introduces the necessity to wait for a bunch of things to resolve. In Angular zones, I saw a similar purpose to ensure that if there are kind of cascading or streams or all of that stuff gets settled in into kind of restful state before you can start to assert on what's going on and with Vue, their computed properties has something similar. I think because of the complexity of having to track lots of objects and then recomputing things based on the result, that complexity in microstates is simplified by the fact that you describe you transitions. When you write them, you describe exactly what changes, so we don't need to wait for things to settle down. When you invoke a transition, that transition is explicit and based on the path of where that transition is invoked, we know exactly what needs to change, so we need to only perform one operation to compute the next state. There is no other things that we need to wait. There's no other side effects that we need to resolve before we know what the final status. I think that simplicity can be applied to all the frameworks that are using immutable APIs and derived computations from those immutable APIs. CHARLES: Uhm-mm [affirmative]. TARAS: Should we jump into talking about what microstates has to offer for people familiar with redux? CHARLES: Yeah, okay. Let's jump right into it. For folks who are familiar with immutable APIs like Ember, like Vue, like other ecosystem using MobX, a shift to microstates might feel like what you can expect. What about people who are just using often React-land and they're just using like set state. TARAS: Set state is a little bit tricky because it does get complicated over time and then you get this kind of funky things going on after a while where you start seeing things like, "I'm going to set state on this component and then once the change happens, I'm going to change some states some other state," so this kind of cascading state changes. The other part that I find particularly more challenging in set state world than it is in, I think in regular components state, like what you have with Vue and Ember. I feel like the way that the transitions, the state change handlers become part of the component, I find that part particularly kind of fragile. When you start doing refactoring, when you need to lift up state, it's like -- CHARLES: What's an example of this? TARAS: When you start off and your component owned old state and now, you need to have that state being controlled by the parent, we get into a situation where like, "What am I going to do? Am I going to do something with props as they're coming into the component or I should probably just flip that state from the child to the parent?" and now, you're refactoring the internals of a component to lift up that state so you can then combined those operation with the parent's state transitions. But then, you have this kind of added complexity of the fact that you're working with immutable data in that place. You've got these three things going on: you're refactoring your child component, you are moving these things into the parent components, you modify a parent component and now, you're also managing the complexity of forming immutable objects. I think the fact that people make it work is kind of a testament to human resilience. The people are able to solve such challenging problems and this is not a super hard one but when a component is complex enough and when stakes are high enough, these changes can become fragile. This is what I think microstates simplifies is that by taking care of the model, it makes components much simpler and makes it possible for you to just render a lot of components that are functional components without their own state. CHARLES: It actually reminds me and like I said, we're talking about what it's like to use them, not so much the implementation but that's the exact same sentiment that the author expressed in his book that was very helpful in writing microstates, which is Brian Marick. He has this book called 'Lenses for Mere Mortals' and he's talking about the practical use cases of using lenses, which microstates leans very heavily on. What he says right in the introduction is it gives you by abstracting the location and compose it the way in which your data structures are composed, it makes them very refactorable. You can say, "I want to change where the state lives. I want to change the structure of this object and I want to move it somewhere else," and it's sounds weird to say this, because the structure of the object is not coupled to the structure of the object, it means that it's very malleable, so you can move and you can say, "You know what? I don't want this address to be embedded in this person. I want this address to be inside this address book and then my person has an address book entry." Being able to make those refactors make those changes is very easy because your method of accessing the data is abstracted. It's something that applies beyond even user interface as a component state but it's something that this is a problem that's very salient when you are authoring complex UIs and compose components. It's something that you can benefit very greatly from. DAVID: Taras, you were telling us earlier about a friend of yours who is learning React for the first time over the past few months and he's mainly been using set state as you would just starting out in this world. You said that he didn't really get why you might have to go and learn some other way to manage your state and I think Charles said it, whenever your application starts to get more complex and you've got a lot of different moving parts, that's really where microstates will come out and shine for you. TARAS: Yeah. My friend kind of feel bad because he's spent the last three months learning how to work with React and how to use set state, "And now, you're telling me, I need to learn something else? Like I'm going to start from scratch?" I kind of reassured him that especially when you're a beginner, when you're learning, you learn how to address very specific challenges but you don't know how complicated these things can get when your UI gets really intricate. In those intricate scenarios is when you have to leverage your experience and you'll be able to solve these problems but if you're learning, you encounter these challenges head on and your tool does not really, like set state. Although it can be used to build really complex UIs very effectively but the complexity that over time increases as you start to manage the state, increases much more later on than does early in the beginning. Basically, with microstates, even if you have some basic proficiency with set state, when you start working with microstate, the things that you can do with microstates, you will be able to do more sophisticated things easier when you need to use them than you might realize when you start. Because microstates API is so consistent, there are a very few concepts to actually learn and they cover a broader range of use cases so when you actually starts using it, you'll encounter these challenges. What you already know it will just work for you and always just continue to work for you. That was part of kind of fundamental design on what Charles and I have spent, a lot of time putting into place from a point when we started two years ago. CHARLES: I think, and you touched on this and this is kind of what I was speaking to earlier is that when you're working with a simple system, it's simple, it's easy to work with and then the complexity starts to grow, it's never a good thing when you have to reach for a more complex tool to manage the complexity. It's a hallmark of a good system and that it can scale with you from a very simple and easy use cases to actually being able to handle very large and complex use cases but your API doesn't have to change and your usage doesn't have to change. If you have a tool that can actually scale with you from a one liner to a hundred thousand liner, that reflects very well on the design of the tool. I think you see that with things like Ruby, you see it with things like Clojure. You see it with, I would say there's even people writing like Haskell, shell scripts now but not so much with like C++. I think the analogy is very similar with microstates in the sense that when I'm looking for evaluating a language, it's not the only thing I look for but I really am looking like how is this going to work for me as a one liner? How's it going to work for me as a hundred thousand liner? If the answer is pretty consistently, then that's something that is going to get a lot of bang for your buck, so to speak. If I invest the time in learning it, I'm actually able to reap the reward of having a tool that's got my back on a whole bunch of different use cases. We talked about, in React, if I'm using set state and that's kind of a sub case of component state because I would say that in the previous systems we talked about -- Ember, Vue -- they have components state but the component state is a little bit more rich in the sense that you've got computed properties and what have you. But if we look at a system that externalize a state like redux, where you have a global state atom in your application, at least that's the way most of the redux applications that I've encountered behave, what does it look like for you? TARAS: I think it's a little bit challenging when talking about redux is redux conflate a few different things together. I think it's helpful to split those things up, so we can talk about them separately. One of the parts is how the state is delivered to components. The way that redux does is the instance is this created so every time you use connect, you essentially wired together. You can connect through the context or... I'm not sure. I think they have an observation mechanism that's internal to redux as well but they essentially connect components to the store and then they view that to deliver the state. It's kind of worth pointing out that for that like microstates bindings for React actually give you something similar out of the box through context. For those who really like the ergonomics of connect, I think it would be pretty easy to make that available for microstates. Usually, we don't even know why they wouldn't be available. CHARLES: But I do think that connect can be problematic like you can encourage you to not make components that are reusable and have isolated state. It's very easy to hitch yourself to the redux store and now, you don't have components that are shareable. TARAS: I think I would personally prefer to pass microstates instances through props because of the stability that's built into microstates and structural sharing, you can get some free optimizations and allow it to use functional components in more cases like out of the box but some people who are really like redux, they really like connect. Although it might be my personal preference, there's no reason why that wouldn't work if somebody wants me to connect function and make it available for people. CHARLES: Right and I think, there's a happy medium there too, right? TARAS: Yeah, I think -- CHARLES: -- You can connect components and then fan out that state to a set of functional components that are not connected. TARAS: There are some places where microstates and redux are very similar. When you're using in redux, you have this dispatch mechanism, where you essential saying, "I'm going to dispatch this action and your action creator is going to create an action for you with the payload," and then you're going to match that action to a reducer. One of the things that I kind of hear redux people really enjoy about redux is the one with data flow that dispatch the action and then, it reduces this next state and pushes that through and you have this kind of ingress point where everything is going through this one point. I think what's really interesting with microstates is you essentially get that. That's exactly how microstates works, in a way. The only difference is that the API is different. Any action that you invoke is going to go through a single entry point, which is going for you. Because we know the structure of the data, we know how to transition that state for you, so you don't need to reducers, so you're just defining your transitions or use the built-in transitions and then when you invoke them, we know the path. We're essentially forming for you. The path where you invoke the transition, conceptually, it kind of forms the name of the action that you are invoking. The path refers to a place where the state is going to be transitioned, then you have your transition, which is the actual reducer for that part but it's contextualize, so you don't have to think about how you need to transition that state in a great, global redux state. CHARLES: There's no matching. The matching is automatic. TARAS: Yeah, the matching is automatic, so you get that same single ingress and one directional dataflow. You get those mechanics except the APIs that you use, instead of writing the actions yourself. Instead of writing, we just use yourself. You get to use microstate types. I've heard some people who use redux who are like, "I really love the fact that microstates has types," but other people don't like types for whatever reason. Microstates comes with 'from,' which allows you to take a POJO and from that POJO, it creates a microstate and then you can invoke transitions the same way as if you had a type microstate. The only thing you don't get is you don't get to create your own transitions. You have to use the transitions that are provided for the primitive types. CHARLES: I think that there's a couple of benefits that you'll realize for free. There's laziness, reducers by default, or eager. When you dispatch an action, it will run against every reducer in the store. If the reducer matches, you're going to run the computation that's associated with that reducer. Microstates by contrast is lazy. Basically, until you try and read the property that is affected by that reducer, the reducer won't run. There's some ways that you can get around this. When you're using redux and first of all, you can actually have your reducers return objects that have getters on them. You can realize some of that laziness but again, it's work that you have to explicitly put in. I think, didn't you actually say that there is a package of plugins? There are plugins. There's basically a set of libraries that you could bundle together, which would give us an experience similar to using microstates. TARAS: Yeah. If you wanted to combine redux and reselect and immutable JS together, you can get some of the benefits, except this benefits are not integrated that well because they're still separate systems that you are essentially using together. Also, like microstates, it's four times smaller than redux and reselect and immutable JS combined together. If size matters to you and ergonomics matter to you, you actually can get a lot of ease out of using microstates while still maintaining the benefits of having redux. CHARLES: But if those things, those packages, like reselect and immutable JS, are things that are familiar and you naturally gravitate for it, then you'll probably absolutely love microstates. Because honestly, one of the ways that I think about microstates is like, what if you could have immutable JS, if there was no cost for composing the types like list and record. Immutable JS has come a long way since I've last used it or it's evolved since I've last used it but I think there's still only about four or five basic types and actually, making your own new immutable structure, your own custom type with its own custom methods that still get the benefits of structural sharing and laziness that you have on immutable JS is not something that you can do. But you could think one way to think about microstates is an immutable JS where you can make any type that you want. You're not just constrained to the record types and to their list types and set types or map types. TARAS: It's worth pointing out that at the moment, microstates doesn't map perfectly to immutable JS simply because immutable JS has certain optimizations for managing lists that kind of a great value of immutable JS and microstates doesn't have some of those pieces but -- CHARLES: They're definitely on the road map. TARAS: Yeah. Because microstates is abstracted high enough, that we can actually change internals and some people who are using microstates now, they will get benefits of ergonomics and there's already performance benefits from the stability that microstates offers but there will be a time when by upgrading to newer versions, you will not basically, need to change anything in your op but you will get the benefit of improvements to performance that we will introduce over time. Some of those improvements might come from what we will learn from immutable JS. CHARLES: Right. I have a couple of thoughts before we wrap up. What are the ramifications no matter who you are? What kind of development background, some of the benefits that you'll experience with microstates that might be a pain point or something you hadn't thought about where you are currently? A couple of things that I have jotted down is first, and this is what brought it to mind is talking about stability. Something that you see in a bunch of frameworks is having to manually track the keys that are associated with data. If I've got a list or I've got an object, being able to say, if that object changes, then I need to actually have some sort of key object, which effectively amounts to a hashing function to say, "Did it really change?" Because no matter what system you're in, you need to know how you're going to re-render. If the reference to this object changes, then the default thing needs to be, "I need to re-render it," right? You see this in Ember, in Vue. In React, there's this ability to pass a key or ask the question, "Should this component actually update?" and with microstates, that's much less of an issue because basically, it keeps the key tracking instability for you. If you are using a model with microstates, if you think of an object as a graph of nodes, no node in the graph will change unless it absolutely has to, at least that's the goal. We still actually have some work to do when you're running queries against the state of a microstate. We can cover that later but that's most largely the way it is now and definitely, the way it's going to be going forward is you don't have to do any extra work as a programmer to figure out what has actually changed. TARAS: That opens up some interesting opportunities. Imagine if you had a rendering engine that did not expect side effects to be significant and you could just say, "If I know whence they'd changes, I will then re-render that." That will be really interesting exercise, seeing like what would that look like for a performance perspective, if you have a very clear picture of what has actually changed and what part of the DOM as a result, need to be updated without having to do diffing. The [inaudible] you could actually do a diffing at much higher up. Actually, [inaudible] to diffing because you know what's changed but you can push a lot of assumptions higher up on the architecture stack. CHARLES: Right. That's actually one of my favorite thing about microstates and one of the unwritten values is like triple equals used to work everywhere and by and large, it does. It's usually simplifying but when you don't have to manually tell the computer what equivalence looks like, you can just say, "Look, are they the same object? They're not the same. If not, then they're not," and keeping that consistent is huge. TARAS: I think this is a good segue for us to kind of bring this conversation to a close and also, kind of set up potentially a third full-on conversation, which we could talk about actual architecture of microstates and design decisions because for people who just want to use microstates, they don't need to know all these details but for people who are curious, they might actually want to understand what are the considerations that remain when we were designing microstates, so maybe in a next conversation about microstates, it could be about architecture and the pieces in microstates today and then where we are going with microstates and what it could give us long term. CHARLES: Yeah, I like that idea. It is a plannable subject that we've been talking about internally for the past two years, so it makes sense that there would be plenty to speak about on the podcast. There is one other thing that I did want to bring up and that is, I think enabling to have a state solution that is composable because it allows you to think about your state first. Because really, if you do have a functional UI, where your view is a pure function of the model, that your view follows the model and so, if the view follows the model, then really, the thing that you should be thinking about first is the model that's going to be required to drive your view. I shouldn't drive. I should say derive your view because that's the primary artifact of which the view is nothing more than a function. It's a reflection onto a surface. I don't think that we have a state management solution yet, that enables that mode of thought, where I'm thinking about my prime artifact first and working forward rather than thinking about my secondary artifact and trying to kind of wishy-washy way, work backwards and reconstruct the primary artifact. I think that we've talked about all the development ergonomics and I think there's a mechanic of thought there that's enabled by this that I hope to see in more and more applications. TARAS: I think that's a really well put. I think that's something that I've been thinking about as well, as how do you convey this shift that microstates allows in terms of how we're thinking about architects and the application. For some people that value, the model, like they'll find that shift easier but regardless, I think that making that shift has a potential of simplifying your view dramatically and I'm very excited about exploring this further and having more conversations about this. CHARLES: Yeah, that's where we really kind of open up the conversation about state machines, which is also central to the conceit of microstates and using state machines as an incredible design tool but anyway, we can all get into that later. You heard it here folks, Episode 3 is coming out, although probably not for a while. We're going to be mixing up and we will be talking about microstates at least for a while. I understand that next time, we actually teased it but we based on how much material there was on microstates, we ended up packing in a second episode. We teased it last time, we're going to be talking next time about running an online conference with Twitch, so definitely look for that. Thank you, Taras. Thank you, David. TARAS: Thank you. DAVID: Yeah, it's been great. CHARLES: This is a wonderful conversation and as always, we are Frontside. As I mentioned at the top of the show, we have availability coming in August, so if working with us is something that you would like to do, we have a range of services, please get in touch. You can get in touch with us at @TheFrontside on Twitter or Contact@Frontside.io. That's it for now. I guess we should also mention that Taras that you are going to be giving a talk on microstates at ManhattanJS. When is that? TARAS: On August 8th. CHARLES: I will be giving a talk on microstates at ReactJS Austin on Monday, the 6th, so that is right around the corner. I'm excited about both of those talks, especially following so closely on the heels of the TorontoJS meetup talk, which I understand is... Is that posted online yet? TARAS: It's recorded but it should be coming out soon. We'll definitely tweet it out. CHARLES: Okay. All right. Look for that and we will see you next time.

David and Blair compare each other's competitiveness, and then offer some specific ways principals can actually collaborate with their competitors as a part of building beneficial business relationships.   TRANSCRIPT BLAIR: David, today we're going to talk about how to crush your competition, is that right? DAVID: Instantly I got very excited about the concept, that's really not what we're going to talk about, but I love that idea. Oh my God, I'm just too competitive, but that's actually the opposite of what we're going to talk about I think, unless you want to switch it at the last minute. BLAIR: No, I was with a bunch of guys the other night, and had this little men's night retreat thing, and maybe more than half of them were entrepreneurs. One guy was winding down a business, and he was saying, "I'm not sure if I'm competitive enough to be in business." I didn't say anything, but I thought, I suppose that's vital for you to be competitive in your nature to succeed in business, would you agree with that? DAVID: Yes, I would, but there's something wrapped around competitiveness that is just as important to me, and that's risk-taking. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: It does seem like the two of those are related, that's why I quit doing a few things outside of work, because I realized I was not as competitive as some of the young fools that were willing to sacrifice their body, and I wasn't. It's not that my body is so precious, it shouldn't be sacrificed, it was more I was allergic to the pain. Yeah, there's something about competitiveness and risk-taking yeah, for sure. I'm competitive, do you think of yourself as competitive? BLAIR: I've measured my competitiveness and your competitiveness, and you're more competitive than I am. I'm as competitive as the average person, but the makeup of that competitiveness is a little bit skewed. You can break down competitiveness into different forms, so I think of myself as average competitiveness. DAVID: Okay, this is more about how do we tame or tamp down some of our competitiveness for our advantage, and for the advantage of the world really. BLAIR: You really want to talk about this idea of collaborating with your competitors, is that correct? DAVID: Right, yeah, and it's something I've learned in my own business life, but I've also tried to coach my clients to do it as well. It's been really interesting, it's a concept that strikes us like, did he really just say you should be more collaborative with your competitors, or did I mishear him? No, that's really what I mean. BLAIR: Okay, so we think of being in business just like my friend said the other night, we think of it as business is highly competitive, and we need to be cutthroat, and we need to always have an eye on our competition. We're trying to best them, I'm fond of saying that positioning is an act of relativity. You position relative to your competition, and in endeavoring to position your firm against your competition, you're trying to kill them. BLAIR: Now that's an overstatement, but that's the prevailing view, right? The competitors are there, people that ... It's your job to beat, it's your job to win against them, and you want to fly in the face of that a little bit, so where did this idea come from? DAVID: Well it's been rooted really in 20 plus years. I did something a little crazy back in the late 90s. I wanted to start an event, and that was obvious to me, I wanted to start an event. Okay, so what kind of an event would it be? Well it needs to be an event that's going to attract a lot of people. How do we do that? Well, the content has to be fantastic, it's like okay, then I just stopped in my tracks, because I'm thinking, well if the content's going to be great, then I've got to invite a lot of my competitors there. DAVID: We don't see eye to eye on everything, but I need to have them there, because they're very smart. People are going to come and want to hear from them as well, like what kind of a stupid conference would it be where I'm the only one speaking? That's not a conference, that's like your own personal platform. I was faced with a decision, do I really want to give my competitors a platform? DAVID: I was nervous about it, other people were a lot more nervous about it than I was, they thought I was crazy to be doing that. I thought, this is a worthwhile experiment, and maybe there's some value in being the person who organizes the conference, and does the programming for it. There turned out to be that value, but it was a wonderful experience. It opened up my eyes entirely to the fact that I don't have to make somebody else lose in order for me to win. DAVID: That I can let my guard down, and it actually translated into the way I run events now. People come to an event for the first time, and they're surprised that within about an hour, an hour and a half of the start of the event, people are starting to share stuff that they would not have thought they'd see themselves sharing at the beginning. They're much more transparent about it, and it's just sort of that style that I like to have, it fits with this notion of competitors. DAVID: Recently what struck me, and then I'll shut up for a minute, because I know I'm taking a long time to answer your question. I was listening to the Dan Patrick daily talk radio sports show, and he was talking about interviewing Kobe Bryant one time. They were talking about how do you get yourself up for a game that doesn't really matter? In other words, maybe you're out of the playoffs already, or you know you're going to beat this team, because they're not good. DAVID: What Kobe Bryant said, was at the end of the game, I want my competitor to question why they even got into the sports game. I want them to question why they even became a basketball player, right? I thought, well that's kind of funny, but it's really not the kind of spirit I want as a collaborator. BLAIR: Even when he's playing in a game that they're almost certain to win in, he's still thinking about crushing the spirit of his competitors. DAVID: Right, yeah, what's the point of that? BLAIR: Do you still have a page on your website that lists your competitors? DAVID: I do, right? I do. BLAIR: Am I on there? DAVID: I don't know, I know you don't want to be, so let's just say you're not. BLAIR: Yeah, I think you had me on there, and I called you out, I said, get me off that list. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: I don't know why that is, okay, so you conceived of this idea, this event, and you had a partner in this event, can we name the event? DAVID: Yeah, it's MYOB, Mind Your Own Business. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: The how people, were the financial partners and the marketing partners, and I did the programming. BLAIR: That's where you and I first met in 2003. I reached out to you when I started my business somewhere in 2002, and you invited me to speak at this thing. DAVID: Yeah, and look at how much good has come from that, right? BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: You and I have become friends, we do a podcast together, we share a lot of clients. Here's the biggest thing, I learned so much by having you there. I mean the very first time I heard you speak, I learned so much. It made me such a better advisor, and the same could be said of the other folks, not everybody, but most of the other folks that I invited. It's like, oh wow, it made me a much better advisor by listening to them in that kind of a setting. BLAIR: Let's walk through how somebody can, once they get their head around this idea, how they can put it into practice. First, I can imagine what the objections are, right? When you're talking to somebody about this idea of be more open to your competitors and collaborative with them, what's the first thing that comes up objection wise? DAVID: Well it comes up a lot too, and it's like, "Oh, that's a good idea, but I can't put that on my website, because what if my competitor's see it?" It may be something like our new focus, that's usually not as big an issue, but things like client criteria, or some unique way we have of going about solving problems for clients, or a case study, or something like that. They envision these competitors in the wee hours of the morning sneaking onto their website and furiously copping things down and grabbing screenshots, and then reinventing their own firm, as if they're really doing that. DAVID: That's the objection, I don't want my competitors to see that. I don't want them to copy me. Do you hear that, or do you see it in other ways? I'm curious if it's just my clients. BLAIR: I'm not sure if I hear it a lot, but I sense it a lot, and I've experienced it myself too. My own experience has been, if you're really carving out a path of leadership in something, it means you're constantly, by the reinventing your business, or coming up with new IP, with new ideas, and by the time somebody's adopted something that you've ... Let's call it stolen, stolen something that you've put on your website and made it their own, you should be somewhere else, right? You should be off into the distance. DAVID: Right, and that's part of your practice, part of my practice, part of what we urge clients to do is to reinvent themselves frequently every couple of years maybe. While this may work beautifully for you now, it's not going to be the thing that you're doing down the road, reinventing. Let's talk about the whole positioning thing, how many competitors does Win Without Pitching have? BLAIR: It really depends on how you frame the question. If you look at sales training for creative professionals, I don't actually know of any other organization that frames their value proposition, the discipline in the market, the combination of discipline in the market that way. That would be ridiculous for me to say there's no direct competitor, so that's at the very narrowest, who else says we just do sales training for creative professionals? DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Our real competition is any new business consultant to the creative professions. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Anybody who's selling sales training. Most sales trainers aren't specific to a market, so anybody in the sales training business, any new business consultant. DAVID: If somebody popped up, let's say you just heard through a client of yours or something, and they said, "Hey, have you seen [inaudible 00:09:14], it looks a lot like yours?" Pretend that you have this conversation with them, and you look at the website. It is the same positioning, sales training for creative professionals, or creative entrepreneurs, what would your reaction be? BLAIR: My reaction would be, I would gird myself for a fight in the most positive sort of way. I love a challenge, if somebody was using that same language, I would just steel myself and whip my team into a frenzy, and run out into the battlefield. DAVID: I'm picturing this movie scene, yelling to this guy. BLAIR: Yeah, Braveheart. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: Somebody would have to be using very specific language, very specific to me. One of the things that I've seen over the last few years, is when I started my business back in 2002, when I was a new business consultant, there were very few new business consultants. Whoever was out there, the Internet was still a relatively new thing, right? Web browsers were about seven or eight years old in 2002. BLAIR: If there was a lot of competitors out there, I wasn't aware of them, I was really aware of two or three. Nowadays there's rarely a week or a two week period that goes by where I'm not made aware of a new business consultant. I made this conscious decision a couple of years ago to just quit thinking about them as competitors, and just to think about them as my future distribution network. BLAIR: I recently put out a call on LinkedIn saying I want to forge a closer relationship with the world's best new business consultants. I know I met a lot of consultants out there who say, "I give your book, the Win Without Pitching Manifesto to all of my clients." What I said in this post on LinkedIn, I had about 30 inquiries from it, is if you're already preaching the principles, and if you're already teaching the Win Without Pitching way, and you're interested in formalizing the relationship, then reach out to me. BLAIR: I had to see somebody else doing that, and somebody else talk about the benefit of it just the way that you're doing it now. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: For me to just have this switch in my mind. You've been very good at this, and you've been a very good role model for me in this, in being a generous competitor, and it hasn't been in my nature. I'm the person who loves a fight, so something has shifted in me in the last couple of years, and I look around at the people I know in business, and some people that you and I both compete with. They are such open, generous, sharing people, even though we are fairly direct competitors. DAVID: Right. BLAIR: I've just decided that these are going to be my role models in that front too. Now, I'm mellowing in my old age or something, because something's definitely changed. DAVID: Yeah, it is really interesting to see. I'm doing an event shortly, and I've invited ... You'll be speaking there, it's really important to me that you speak there to address the whole sales training process. I'm just unqualified to even speak to it, but I feel like the people coming need to hear that. Then, I think four of my competitors will be there. They won't have a platform, but I will introduce them, they're coming for free. DAVID: I invited them, and I plan to put in the work. We're going to split up into groups, and we're going to try to apply these positioning principles to the individual firms. These competitors know what they're doing, and so the evil side of somebody might hear that and say, "Well, wouldn't someone just hire one of these." It's like, well that's fine, because in my mind feeling like you have all these competitors is really misunderstanding the fact that it's not just about what you do, but it's about how you do it. DAVID: I have a very specific style, and whenever I try to cross the line and be somebody that I'm not to a client, like more of a coach or something like that, I am doing a disservice to them, and I'm doing a disservice to me. I find it really wonderful to have these other folks who are very good at what they do, who have a more appropriate style for a certain client. When I think about living in a world where I couldn't recommend other options for my clients, it's a little bit sadder to me, because I do want my clients to get help, even if it's not with me. DAVID: Now what's interesting though, is we have different approaches to this when we're not as busy. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: We tend to be a little bit less generous when our businesses aren't run well, when we don't have a steady stream of opportunity. That's just another argument of 100 arguments to run your firm well, so that you're not paralyzed by not enough work, or thinner margins, or something like that.   BLAIR: I was going to play devils advocate here a little bit, and push back and say, well it's easy for you to be magnanimous this way, you're the worldwide leader in your field. You've got all the work you want, I think most people from the outside looking in would see that, so it's easy for you to just say, "Well there's plenty for everyone." If you're running an independent creative firm, you've got a dozen people, you're not seen as meaningfully different, do you think the principle still applies? DAVID: No, I don't, and I think the solution there is to have a positioning where it's so much clearer to you and to your prospects where you're a perfect fit. If you haven't nailed that positioning equation yet for your firm, then I think this is a very dangerous thing to do, right? Now you could still be generous in some other ways, like you could be generous in sharing contractors with other agencies, or even some employees. In terms of clients, I think that would be a dangerous thing to do, if you haven't ... DAVID: Well, a couple of things, not just positioning, but also having this lead generation process in place. You and I have talked quite a bit about this, how we have a simplified plan that's driven by discipline, so if you don't have the positioning and lead generation in place, then it's a pretty dangerous thing to be this magnanimous. The way to fix that is not to be selfish, the way to fix this is to fix your positioning and lead generation. BLAIR: Do you find that your generosity towards your competitors is returned? Are you referred business or other similar invitations from these competitors? DAVID: In some cases I am for sure. I think about Tim Williams for instance who I think does really good work. I've sent work his way, he's sent work my way for sure. I think about Carl Sachs, I think about the folks at Newfangled. I think about Philip at the Consulting Pipeline podcast. I think about Drew McClellan, I hate mentioning names, because there's going to be a bunch of names I've left off, but in general yes, absolutely. DAVID: Even at the beginning where they're taken aback by the generosity, they'll soften up over a few years, and discover that it's real. I'm really trying to help them, I'm not trying to hurt them. That started years ago, like you write a new book, or you have a new program, tell all your competitors about it in a gracious, respectful way. Hey, this is where I'm headed, just want to let you know, and oh by the way, here's a copy of the book, hope you're doing well. DAVID: You see an article that's really helpful that would benefit them, you send it to them. I tell you, a big one is speaking engagements. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: If I've been on the platform somewhere, and I talk with the program person, I say, "Listen, this was fantastic, I loved this event. I appreciate you inviting me, do you want a couple of suggestions for people who are also would be a really good fit for this?" That's a perfect opportunity to extend that graciousness to one of your competitors. I find that you're not hurting yourself in any way, you're simply helping everybody in the process. DAVID: I've found that to be very effective, and I've had a lot of my competitors do the same for me, where they've introduced me to a speaking opportunity, and it's been very, very much appreciated. BLAIR: A guy I know who does over a million dollars a year in speaking fees said to me, the number one lead source for speaking engagements is other speakers, right? They get approached and say, "Well, I can't do it, but you might want to think of this other person." He said it's important for you to cultivate relationships with these other speakers, and that means you start referring speaking opportunities to them. DAVID: That's interesting. BLAIR: Two weeks later I was invited to speak in Dubai when I was in another part of the world, and I referred to my new friend. DAVID: Yeah, because you didn't want that long travel, yeah, absolutely. BLAIR: Let's talk about some specific ways agency principals can collaborate with their competitors. I think I've got a list here of some things that you've identified. At the top of the list you've got learn how to run your firm from each other. Do you want to unpack ... Oh, I just said the word unpack, do you want to peal that apart? DAVID: That even sounds more pretentious than unpack. BLAIR: Like an orange. DAVID: Let's just say unpack, okay? BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: Yeah, what's the possible benefit in not helping another principal run their firm well? Hoping that they'll fail? Well, that seems pretty evil, right? The one area where it seems like there's the most benefit for everybody, is to learn how to run your business well. You've learned some principles about key metrics you want to look at, or how to hire the right person, or how to run a meeting better, or how to have the best relationship with your bank, or there's 100 things we could list there. DAVID: Those are the kinds of things that I would put at the top the list, because nobody enters this field with the business management training that would really benefit them. They're all starting from some other skill path, not a role path, and so they come into the business, and they have to learn everything either from somebody that they worked for, and often that's the best place to learn it. DAVID: A great example of a principal that you worked for before you started off on your own, or they learn it from maybe an advisor, like a paid advisor, or maybe they learn it from another principal. That would be the first area I would suggest collaboration, it could be informal or formal. I find that most principals have three or four people that they're friendly with, they can just shoot them an email, or get on the phone and say, "Hey, I'm facing this noncompete situation, what have you learned? Can you introduce me to a lawyer?" Something like that. BLAIR: Oh, that's great, including on here help find good employees. I was thinking about there's an agency principal in Australia you and I both know him. I've done a bunch of work with him. He's told me some stories of when he's had to fire people, they don't say fire in Australia or UK, they sack them, which always sounds extra harsh to us in North America. He's told me stories of he'd bring somebody in who isn't working out, and says, "You're not working out, I'm letting you go, but I think you've got great skills in these other areas, so I've lined up two interviews for you today." DAVID: Wow. BLAIR: Yeah, so he's ruthless when it comes to correcting hiring decisions, but he's very kind in how he goes about it, and he recognizes that everybody's got strengths, and he's got good relationships with his competitors. He's very clear about why he's letting that person go, and why he thinks his competitors should think about bringing that person on, and usually in a different role. DAVID: Right, yeah I think that's great, like if it's for the right reasons, there could be something about the style of this firm that wouldn't be true of another firm. It's not like they're a bad person, they're just not a good fit for this particular role. BLAIR: Is there a line that there's the danger of crossing? The first word I wrote down when you sent me notes on this was collusion. DAVID: Yeah. BLAIR: At some point can you get too close to your competitors? Does it cause some sort of problem, or the perception of problems maybe among clients, or maybe even regulators? DAVID: Yeah, well in the US that would fall under the jurisdiction of the FTC, Federal Trade Commission. Where collusion is very clear, and you can get your hand slapped pretty quickly would be around pricing. BLAIR: Yeah. DAVID: Not so much which opportunities to pursue, although you could get in trouble there, like hey, if I don't pursue this one, can you not pursue that one, that would be collusion. The main area would be on pricing, like how about what's your price on this? There have been some specific lawsuits, the handbook of pricing and ethical guidelines was one example that had to get rewritten, because of a lawsuit as I understand it. DAVID: That strikes me as evil, and I don't think we're talking about that so much. It's more like here's an example, so let's say you're going to respond to an RFP, okay? I know, don't shriek on me here Blair. You're going to respond to an RFP, and you know that another agency has been through an RFP process with them. You might just call them up and say, "Hey, what was that like? Is this even worth it?" Most of the time it's not going to be worth it, but that would not be collusion, that would just be simply sharing public information. BLAIR: I hadn't heard the story around pricing, I was doing a talk on pricing about 18 months ago to an industry group slightly tangential to the creative professions. There was a lawyer in the room, and he kept warning about collusion, he did not like the idea that the competitors were in the same room talking about pricing. I thought he was being ridiculous. DAVID: I think he was being ridiculous, where it can be collusion, is if we're talking about a specific instance. It's not about for instance, the labor law allows you to band together against a common enemy so to speak, that's not collusion. Collusion would be a specific instance related to pricing usually. BLAIR: Gotcha, all right, so let's say somebody's listening to this, and they're warming up to the idea of being more collaborative with their competitors, but they don't currently have relationships with those competitors. How do they go about it? Where do they find these people? Maybe they're so highly specialized, or poorly specialized, they're just not sure who their competitors are, how do you go about it? DAVID: Yeah, if you're poorly positioned, most of your competitors are the ones in your locale geographically. You know those, because they're there, and you share employees, and so on. If you're well-positioned, your competitors are more known to you, even though they're not close to you geographically. These are the names that keep coming up when you are competing for work and so on. DAVID: That would be one way to identify them, obviously Google's our friend here. Another way to identify them, is going to trade conferences. Trade conferences are almost always vertical, or they could be more demographic oriented conferences, horizontal conferences, where you keep seeing the same people there, not so much exhibiting, but you just see them there, they're speaking and so on. DAVID: You notice that these are the folks whose articles are appearing in the same places that yours are, so just connecting with them through your contacts, within a particular focus would be a good way to connect with them. Another might be a common mentor, I get this question a lot, like do you know of somebody that's doing this that I could talk with and so on? I don't connect people who aren't clients of mine, but if they are clients of mine, then I'll try to find somebody to connect them with. DAVID: I actually put round tables together, which are specific attempts to do this, that's not really the subject of this podcast, but that's an example of what a paid advisor might do. Sometimes a common mentor, so like if you're getting advice from an older woman or gentleman in your town who's coaching you on running a good creative business, because they've been in that field, and they've slowed down a little bit, they usually are going to know somebody else that would be a good fit for you. DAVID: I am talking about cooperating with folks who are definitely otherwise competitors of yours. I'm not talking about people that you might meet in a YEO, or YO kind of a context, I'm talking about people that you'd compete with normally. BLAIR: Okay, are there instances where this can go wrong? Obviously, I wouldn't ask you to name names, but I'm sure there has to be situations where you started being magnanimous towards a competitor, and then at some point realized this is a one-way relationship where this person is taking and not giving, and your idea about them ended up changing. DAVID: For sure, yeah, I can think of an attorney actually in New York that I was referring lots of work too, and it turned out that not only did they never share generously, but they kept asking, kept asking, and it became annoying. I just basically shut them down, they still do good work, so I haven't done anything to hurt them at all. If somebody is actually out to hurt me, then we come into the Kobe Bryant crush them phase, which is actually the evil side of this, and it's kind of fun. DAVID: You have to do that once or twice a year, right? Otherwise, I was just wondering if people are still listening at this point. Otherwise, it just doesn't happen, because who are the people that are going to hear the worst things about me as an advisor? It's going to be my competitors, right? If my competitors hear about me, but their experience in working with me is not at all matching, they're going to pause the conversation and say, even just to themselves, you must not be a good client, because that's not how I've experienced him. There's so many advantages here to make this work well. BLAIR: Yeah, it strikes me as this is going sound a bit corny, it's a bit like love though, right? The more you give, the more you get, and the more open you are, and more gracious you are with your competitors, the more likely you are to get back. Even if it's not a full reciprocation, there's still that feeling of you helping others, of yourself worth, etc., it's got to escalate. DAVID: Yeah, for sure, and there are many times when somebody does great work, and you've sent them lots of work, but they're not sending you work. That's okay, because they might be at a different place on the referral chain. In other words, by the time they hear of a client, they're past their need for you, whatever you happen to do along that chain. DAVID: It can't be a tit-for-tat thing, it's really just about surrounding yourself with people who are generous in life in many ways. I find that, that's a very satisfying experience, almost regardless of the outcome. BLAIR: Well, you've convinced me, I'm going to start thinking about maybe referring a piece of business to you. DAVID: Yeah, it's about damn time honestly. BLAIR: Thanks David, this has been great. DAVID: Bye Blair.

E. B. Moss: Hey, it's E.B. Moss from MediaVillage and this is Episode 12, basically live from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I’m with MediaVillage Journalist David Polinchock who’s an expert at CES. So... We're mic’d up together and we're going to walk around, enjoy the ambient sounds of CES 2018, and I'm going to tap your brain... a Vulcan mind meld!, appropriately for CES. We're going to ask you to give us some insights. INTRO: Ready for some insights from those inside the media, marketing and advertising industry? Welcome to Insider Insight from MediaVillage. MediaVillage.com is the home for exclusive thought leadership with content by, for and about agencies and networks. From digital experts and add tech providers to CMO's and CRO's. With villages of content focused on everything from Wall Street reports to women in media. Now let's get some insights. David: First stop? We're here at the Google Home gallery. They've put together a kind of cool exhibit of what you can do with Google Home and how it's changing how we all live. E. B. Moss: Wow, great. Google has been sponsoring everything including the city monorail where they even piped in some pretty compelling audio. So when you're a captive audience on the monorail it's instructing you to learn how to utilize Google Home like saying, "Hey Google play me some soothing music" - which is good for when you're trapped on the monorail to hear little bubbling brook sounds. They really have done a good job in their convention sponsorship presence. David: This kind of new audio assistant is what we're getting in homes and in the rest of our lives. One of the AR head manufacturers announced a partnership with Alexa so you get voice control in your heads-up display now so you can see how this is changing how people are really doing things at home. One person on my last tour had one of the voice connection systems all throughout their house and realized they had to take it out of the kids room because the kids were doing their homework by asking it all the questions and just getting all the answers. You know, there's good and bad with everything. But this ability to ask a simple question, or check my schedule works because if I already have "Hey Google" phone I can use it and I get information there but now I can move it around from thing to thing. I think what people are looking for at large is a connection of all their things so it's not "I have this list over here and this list over here". So the fact that I can ask Hey Google on my phone but when I get home at night I can follow up the conversation with my Google Home Assistant because it's all connected. E. B. Moss: Oh, so the connectivity. Got it. David: The other thing they've been working on are ear buds that translate something like 70 languages. It literally is the communicator that we saw for 20 years on Star Trek. E. B. Moss: So, I can date a person who doesn't speak English! David: That's correct. And, if you look over here we also have it in air conditioners and washing machines and a variety of things now. So that's what, to me, becomes really exciting about this: you're seeing Hey Google as you're seeing Alexa and other products leave the single device and being incorporated into all of our lives. E. B. Moss: Google Home really was everywhere at CES; trying to connect the dots with audio and smart speakers and voice assistants. The other thing that was everywhere was Audio. I spoke to Tom Webster of Edison Research, as well as the head of marketing for Audio-Technica who had some unique ways to use headphones. E. B. Moss: Tom Webster was on the panel on the smart speaker research that just came out from Edison Research in conjunction with NPR. So I grabbed him afterwards. ...Hey Tom... That was fascinating. I know that you're going to be sharing some more of this information though MediaVillage in general, but specifically, a couple of things jumped out at me today were the fact that gifting over the 2017 holiday season really should've exponentially upped ownership of smart speakers. So that was good? Tom: Yeah, we've seen the initial adoption of smart speakers grow at a clip more than we saw smart phone adoption grow when we first started tracking. It's certainly both Amazon and Google coming out with $29 units had a lot to do with that but I think eventually we're going to stop caring about the devices themselves because that technology is going to just be baked into everything. E. B. Moss: So, that's an interesting point because Google is all over the show and promoting their digital assistant, Hey Google, but it's still only about 70% in devices own versus Alexa. What do you think it needs to do to compete more? By the way I think you said we're at about 16% ownership in America right now, so there's still plenty of growth opportunity there. What do you see the differences being and how do you see it competing more? Tom: I think, first of all I have no doubt that they're both going to be very competitive devices for a long time to come and for a lot of people it's just learning the use cases. We do know from the previous iterations of Smart Audio Report that we found with NPR 88% of the people who have an Alexa are Amazon Prime members. So there is a natural connection there. They're already being marketed to, in a way that is contextual for them. I think the more that Google educates listeners about what these devices can do and just more devices. Again the technology is just going to start being baked into everything and by the way it's already on your phone. One of the interesting things we found in our research is that 44% of smart speaker users tell us they're using the audio assistants on their phone more as a result of using the smart speaker. So it's just learning education and getting people context. E. B. Moss: And a brand that has good social media followers will do a service to those followers and enhances its own position by teaching them how to use smart speaker skills that they've created, right? Tom: Absolutely. I think we used to ask ten years ago "What's your mobile strategy?" Now I think it's a valid question to ask what your audio strategy is because people want to communicate with brands. They want to communicate with brands that they care about and they want to have those kinds of relationships and those kinds of experiences. E. B. Moss: So last question.... You mentioned a couple of the obstacles that we still have to continue to overcome: the perception of trust and the perception of security. What do you see happening? Tom: Well, those are valid concerns. First of all far be it from me to poo poo them because they are in fact valid concerns and when we interviewed people who don't own a smart speaker but who are interested in the category; three of their top concerns were all related to security, privacy, insuring their data, having the government listen in on their data. These are all valid concerns and all of the makers of this technology are going to have to find ways to address them because it's one thing to say "O.K. Google or Alexa play some Fleetwood Mac" it's another to start reciting your credit card number into it or something and those concerns are going to have to be addressed. E. B. Moss: ...So now I'm heading to Audio-Technica. You might know them for their turntables and headphones. They are giving me a welcome treat of a chair massage...I'm going to put my noise-canceling headphones on right now.... Speaker 5: "Let's begin by centering on the breath. ... slowly exhale and imagine your breath moving out through your ears as well. Cleansing them, forcing out all the toxic noise you've observed from the show floor and setting it a flame to burn off like so much painful gas..." E. B. Moss: That was one of the funnest ideas on the show floor. It was practical and sort of like a forced pre-roll listen in a good way. So I'm speaking to Director of Marketing Communications for Audio-Technica, Jeff Simcox. Jeff: Hi. How are you doing? Are you relaxed? E. B. Moss: I'm so much more relaxed. How did you come up with the idea? Jeff: Well, what's one of the reasons for wearing noise-canceling headphones? You want to relax, knock out all the annoying sounds and get into yourself, into the music. We just thought on the CES show floor we'd add that little extra thing to help you relax and lose yourself and have a massage while you're enjoying the headphones. My boss is like "You've got them in the chair so give them a sales pitch." And I'm like "who wants to lay there and just hear a dry sales pitch"? So it was our way of saying "Okay, you know, [inaudible 00:11:30] in that we can give you a little bit of entertainment, give you a little bit of a laugh. Now feel the tension escape from your ears like so much painful gas." It was one of my favorite lines.  E. B. Moss: As we made our way though CES you couldn't help notice autonomy everywhere. From autonomous cars to the super sonic Hyperloop; also autonomous public transportation helping the lesser abled. E. B. Moss: Initiating autonomous drive. I'm about to experience it, in 90 seconds. What it's like to be on the road and not in control. I'm at the Intel booth right now. Very cool. But I think it might drive me a little bit nuts if I had to hear all of the play by play of the autonomous driver. Pedestrian detected, anomaly detected, slow down. E. B. Moss: Now we're at Hyperloop and I'm talking to the Director of Marketing Ryan Kelly. Ryan, It looks like a long monorail pod from the future. What is it? Ryan: Elon Musk in 2013 had a vision for a new form of transportation. A bunch of VCs at Silicon Valley got together and founded Hyperloop One. Now we are actually Virgin Hyperloop One, three years later, which is very exciting. So now Richard Branson is now our chairman. Ryan: I'll tell you a little bit about the technology. Hyperloop basically the pod that you're looking at just broke a speed record, which is really exciting. We went 240 miles per hour in 300 meters at our test site 40 miles outside of Las Vegas. We're really excited about. So how does that work, how did we get there and why do we think it's the future of transportation? Hyperloop is in a tube so this pod was in a tube, we suck out almost all the air out of the tube to almost zero atmospheric pressure. It's not a full vacuum but very, very close. What that does is it provides frictionless travel. What does that mean? That means we can reach higher speeds than Maglev trains that you might see in Japan, in niche markets. It also means that it's more energy efficient and effective because we're using passive magnetic levitation. So that means once we start and accelerate at that point we're floating. So this actually levitates above a track, which is pretty unbelievable. From a cost perspective that's huge cost saving, not only for energy efficiency but also for building track, et cetera. E. B. Moss: I know the sustainability aspect is very important to Mr. Branson. Ryan: Huge. Yeah, it's absolutely. So sustainability is definitely something that we're looking towards. We'd like to get something up and running by 2021 and if you think about where we're going to be in 2021 with autonomous vehicles, with cleaner energy and we're completely energy agnostic solution, which we're really excited about. Not only going fast but thinking about how the future of transportation works. David: Right, so being both New Yorkers I know you've gotten some approval for New York track, from discussions. Ryan: Well, there's discussions. We are a very ... even though some people might see this as a cry in the sky opportunity a lot of our executives have worked in government before. We know how the system works in the United States. You have to go through a regulatory and safety process. We don't want to be seen as a paperwork company that's going to disappear in two years faking all these different things. Ryan: So we have directors of policy here that are working with the federal government. We've made headway in places like Colorado where legislature has signed a memorandum of understanding to look at these. That's actually started already but you have to remember that we need to make sure that it's safe for passengers and we need to go though our safety process. So we kind of understand that but I think it's really interesting because we kind of have a VC type philosophy and coming and working with government. Those are some of the slowest movers. So kind of working that out, working for structure has historically been or seen as a slower moving process. Merchants of VC digital world and then combining this with structure is a really interesting combination. Not only have we seen progress in the United States, we've seen progress in the UN [inaudible 00:16:52] road and transit authority there, we have a proposal to them. The Netherlands and some Scandinavian countries. Started to talk about the UK as well. So we've made some groundwork. David: So, if I'm inside what's my experience? Ryan: Sure. Actually we're partnering with Here Technologies and this is the booth that we're outside of right now. This is the first time that we're talking about the passenger experience in public. 2017 for us was what we call our kitty hawk moment, prove the technology works. Now 2018 is about lets get real, how do we commercialize, what's the experience going to look like, how we work with regulators, et cetera. In the same way that in the digital space we expect fast on demand and we expect a personalized, customized experience we're trying to bring that into the infrastructure mind frame, which hasn't necessarily been the case because this is one of the first new forms of transportation over 100 years, We're trying to incorporate this thing. Ryan: Let's say I book a ticket for the Hyperloop. I want that experience to be one, for example, where I'm here in Las Vegas I have turn by turn walking directions so if I'm inside this crazy convention center I see yes I know I have to walk down the stairs and to the right of the Starbucks to go get my Uber, which will already be there because they know that it takes ten minutes for me to walk out of this craziness. Take my Uber to the Hyperloop get in the Hyperloop, they know that I'm having a meeting with three other people that I met at CES so they're going to give me a customized pod with meeting table et cetera. Versus I've had enough of CES and I don't want to talk to anyone I know and I just want a silent pod and then when I get off the Hyperloop powered by Here Technologies in the future when we get this thing up and running. My Uber's already there and potentially maybe there are other apps like Seamless, et cetera, that by the time I get home my pizza is there. E. B. Moss: Will this exercise for us also because you just eliminated all of the walking that we do. Ryan: Well, I don't think it's there. All the pieces are there so I don't think it's that far of a stretch to get there. Imagine all the pieces and components are there we just got to put it together. E. B. Moss: Yeah, a much different experience than trying to get on the monorail with 5000 other people all crammed into one car, which took me 40 minutes. Ryan: Let's talk about that because that brings up a really good point. So what we'd like to do with the Hyperloop is have pods leaving, seconds; fast, fast, fast. When you have a train that has certain point A to B stops everyone is crammed on the train and then pushes out at the same time. Here we're aiming for consistency so that the other modes of transportation that we're connecting with create more of a flat traffic environment versus these waves where they're not ready. E. B. Moss: I love it. Ryan, thank you so much. Ryan: Thank you so much. E. B. Moss: So we stopped at the booth called Accessible Olli and I'm speaking with Brittany Stotler of Local Motors. So tell me what the connection is Brittany. Brittany: So we are here to show a new project that was announced last CES with CTA Foundation, IBM, and Local Motors. Talking about what it means for people with disabilities or that may not have the function that everyone else has and then as well as the aging community. Trying to make vehicles that are going to be pulling the drivers and age out of them because they're self driving vehicles. Trying to figure out how these people are going to start interacting with the vehicle, making it easier for them and ideally providing them more freedom. We based this on personaes, such as Eric who, though blind legally, he did not start out blind; he's actually an engineer from IBM and was one of the big people behind trying to help us figure out how to make a vehicle and make an Olli stop accessible for somebody who is visually impaired. Another persona is wheelchair bound but doesn't like to call attention to that aspect. So having the accessible Olli be able to communicate with them and use these vehicles allows them the freedom to be going out without someone else there to continually load them because they would roll onto Olli themselves and it automatically secures their wheelchair. Push a button to release them, they can roll back out of the Olli stop and they're all set to go. So ideally you'll have an app on your phone requesting to get on the next Olli that's coming into the station with your preferences set, so if you are in a wheelchair, if you visually have issues or maybe it's your hearing Olli can actually sign back and forth to you though the stop and through the actual vehicle. We’ve got a couple of different options that we're working with so ultrahaptics - a really neat technology system which, for those who can't see or have limited mobility they can actually ... rather than having to press a button ... can just wave their hand in front of it and you feel it and it creates like a virtual button for them. But there's also extendable to some vibrations that can actually drive them to an open seat so they don't have that awkward moment they maybe have to deal with on a daily basis of maybe actually sitting on somebody that's already there but they couldn't see them. E. B. Moss: What's the revenue model for this? Brittany: We are selling Olli and Ollie stops to cities - master planned communities, which is where a lot of the elderly will come into play - and then into large campuses and theme parks. Everybody across the board is thinking about how to integrate Ollie because it helps pull down costs: they can move people out of a bus driver position and turn them into another position, gives them a few new skill sets hopefully.  E. B. Moss: Is there an opportunity or a plan to take advantage of some of the data capture via the app? Brittany: There is potential. Currently we would own all of that data though our app but depending on the partnership it could potentially be a white label for a city’s Olli. They can wrap it however they want on the exterior. There's potential for glassine products, you can put text, you can have a video playing, and it'll go on any of our windows so it turns into almost mobile advertising. David: For our readers and our listeners in this case, I think, this is an opportunity to reach this new audience in a very compelling way. Brittany: Right. You're just the only [crosstalk 00:24:35]. So you're on a university campus and you have all these students that are getting on, they're going from their parking structures to a certain place on campus but they're going to go by Pete's Coffee every single morning and as they're rolling up or they're getting ready to go up to that stop Pete's Coffee advertising comes up on the app or it comes up within the bus to show come inside tell us you were just on Olli and here's your code and you get a discount. It starts driving traffic and then that's another way that the whoever's purchasing to actually operate the vehicles they can start recuperating and making money on the advertising piece. E. B. Moss: So a traffic driver driving traffic. Brittany: We're trying to get rid of traffic. E. B. Moss: Thank you so much for your time [inaudible 00:25:21] Beautifully stated and a very important application for all members of our community to be able to be more mobile ... Brittany: More freedom for them so thank you to all of our partners. E. B. Moss: For a less autonomous but very elevating experience we spoke to the Head of Marketing for Workhorse. He described their octocoper. E. B. Moss: So what are we officially calling this? This is experimental [crosstalk 00:25:54] Workhorse: That's a good question. We've just been calling it personal electric octocopter. Octocopter, eight things octo. David: What's the range on it? Workhorse: 70 miles. David: That's pretty good, that many miles. Workhorse: Gasoline generator that powers it so once you go 70 miles toward hop you gas up ready for the next hop. Not waiting for the lithium-ion battery for hours to charge up and all that stuff. You can just keep going. Normal helicopter you have to have pedals and those handles. This doesn't have any pedals or any of that stuff. We fly like a drone. So it'd be, you know ... David: You don't fly it like a drone. Workhorse: I mean we had this on display in Paris and all the kids that came in 15 they could jump in there, let's go, let's take it up because they're so familiar with the video game and all that stuff. So that's the way this flies. E. B. Moss: So what's the flying experience like? I mean I've been in a glider and I've been in a helicopter, somewhere in the middle? Workhorse: Yeah, I would say so. It wouldn't be as much as a glider, which is just pretty basic but it is also not as complicated as the helicopter. See this only has a ceiling height of flying of 4000 feet. Okay, so it's just enough that you're up and you're flying. So, it's meant to be like a different method of transportation. In America the helicopter's been here for 78 years, last year in America they sold 1000 of them new, that's not that big of a market. So we're not really planning on taking market share from commission on helicopter. We're kind of planning on creating a new category. So you've got to think of it as a new way of transportation, like we were kidding around about the New York City and all that stuff. David: And what's the price point on it or what will it be? Workhorse: We have price point at 200,000 dollars and at this show we can take your name and ... E. B. Moss: Take Credit Cards? Workhorse: $1,000 and your place is saved in line and then we would probably start delivering them in 2020. E. B. Moss: It looks like a Workhorse experimental aircraft. Workhorse: The name of the craft is Surefly. So it's Surefly with safety and that and background.  E. B. Moss: David and I saw AR, audio, autonomy, everything at CES and we talked about how it all came together. David: So one of the trends we just to look at in general is we just saw with Olli and what they're doing. There's a huge population growing old. E. B. Moss: Yes. David: And it's a key population that has a certain expectation level of service and experience and technology and that's only getting bigger. You're seeing a lot of brands really trying to figure out how do we deal with population that's having vision problems and mobility problems and hearing problems. All the things people my age are starting to think about. E. B. Moss: The 25 year olds. David: The 25 year olds. Again, when ... as we joked ... but when you think about the 25 year olds they are very tech savvy. They're the Hyperloop audience, they don't want to be waiting on the street corner for the M35 without having any idea, in the rain, when it's coming, when was the last time it was here, did I just miss it. You know, the stuff we do every day. So you're seeing mobility things like Olli and transportation systems and whole ecosystems. You're seeing companion bots. You're seeing machine learning, artificial intelligence, computer vision coming into play to do things like my mom lives far away it's hard for me to necessarily be on top of her. And I don't know if she wants me to be on top of her; all that family dynamic. E. B. Moss: So, we actually have a theme here and it kind of wraps things up beautifully because we've seen the connected appliances, connected home. We've seen the connectivity between devices and how to make things easier in life and not having to pick up one device to do one thing and one device to do another. We've seen the continuity between I want to get some place and how do I get there. So everything is connecting us whether it's virtually or physically like with Olli, like with the experimental aircraft, like everything we've seen today is all about connectivity. David: It really is and the big thing is it's connectivity that has value to you and me not connectivity that has value to some corporation. That's where people really get the difference. I'm excited about a technology that will help my life be better and in the course of my life being better the company makes money off of that, that's great. E. B. Moss: Like the last example with Olli. Where there is branding opportunities on and within it but it's giving me something of value. David: That's correct. There equates down when the consumer feels there's no value it's changed for them. Gen Zs might say, "We get that brands trap us every day and we're okay with that, that's the world and we're fine. But what they're not okay with is that you track me every day and then you don't know who I am, if you're going to watch everything I buy you should know what I buy. You should know what I've bought and stop telling me what I've already bought.” E. B. Moss: So if you're going to connect with me, connect in a meaningful way, connect in a valuable way and ... David: Imagine you have a friend who asks you the same question over and over and over again. Right, then eventually you stop hanging out with that friend. So that's where this connectivity has great value to us as human beings. Great value. E. B. Moss: David thank you so much. This was invaluable to have a guide like you. This is Insider Insight live from the Consumer Electronics Show. I'm E. B. Moss, Managing Editor for MediaVillage. Check us out MediaVillage.com and thanks for listening.  

David Bradford and Carole Robins from the Stanford Graduate School of Business course Interpersonal Dynamics talk about improving existing relationships, building new connections and more in this latest episode. They are also the authors of the book ['Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and Colleagues'](https://www.amazon.com/Connect-Building-Exceptional-Relationships-Colleagues/dp/0593237099) Graham, David and Carole start the podcast by talking about the legendary 'Touchy-Feely' program in the Stanford Graduate School of Business course Interpersonal Dynamics. >David: What they discover in this course, almost inevitably, is that the more they are themselves: the more interesting they are, the more attractive there. We frequently have students halfway through the course say to another one: "I thought in finance, you were really obnoxious, but now that I see you and I see that you're human, I like you." So where this translates is that they not only learned that they can be themselves but they learn how to be themselves, they take this elsewhere. >Carole: People do business with people. They don't do business with ideas, or machines or money. So, that's why this course has become so legendary. Graham then asks about the hallmarks of exceptional relationships. > Carole: Relationships exist on a continuum. You can have a functional relationship, a perfectly functional relationship and not have it be exceptional. You can have dysfunctional relationships at the very other end. But an exceptional relationship is one where we both can be ourselves and neither one of us is afraid of what the other one will do, with whatever we share with each other. That's one of the hallmarks. Another hallmark is that we can have productive conflict, and in fact, we see conflict as an opportunity to deepen our relationships. >David: For this high trust, the essence of what you say is what you mean, that I don't have to second guess you. Carole and David share how important rebuilding relationships after disagreements. >David: A key part of what we're talking about is that you don't have to do things perfectly. I mean, we've done things that have screwed up a lot with each other, each of us, with our spouse, with our friends and so on. But you can recover. If you wholeheartedly recover, and not just say: "Well, let's agree to disagree" that doesn't do anything, the relationship gets even stronger. They also share their tips on how to de-escalate conflicts. >Carole: Sometimes you have to take a breath and say: "You know what, I think we're both a little too spun up right now. Let's take 10 minutes or 20 minutes and, you know, take a breath. But let's commit to coming back". That's the key. >David: It's a matter of sticking in there, being persistent, being exploratory, catching yourself and helping the other person to catch themselves. None of this is easy peasy. Graham finishes the podcast by asking David and Carole if there is a downside to being experts at building relationships. > Carole: I'm just as flawed as any other human being. We talk in the book about how it does take two to tango. > David: I find meaningful relationships, where people talk about what's important to them, so rewarding that I don't have patience for the superficial cocktail party stuff. I'm bored by that. I'd rather be by myself. Or I'd rather try to take that conversation and drive it deeper. So when I'm at a cocktail party, rather than going around and see how many people I can meet, I find somebody who's looks a little interesting and then I ask things about them, because I want to find out about them so I'm able to build the sort of relationship, even if it's temporary, that's more meaningful. Graham Allcott is the founder of time-management training company [Think Productive](www.thinkproductive.com). This podcast is produced by [Rizelle Paredes](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rizelleparedes04/) and is ho