Podcast appearances and mentions of David So

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. 

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the GeniusBrain podcast on YouTube go to: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Start your FREE online visit and go to https://www.Hims.com/GENIUSBRAIN today! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the GeniusBrain podcast on YouTube go to: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the GeniusBrain podcast on YouTube go to: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David So, General CQ Brown Jr & Rasin' Caine, Transfiguration & Exile by 2Pastors - Kate and Eulando

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the GeniusBrain podcast on YouTube go to: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Start your FREE online visit today at https://www.Hims.com/GENIUSBRAIN GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to our Korean Thanksgiving with returning guests David So & Peter Kim. We chat The Devirginator, pudge-lords, Korean vampires, cheezy chopsticks, and the nuclear shadow of Joel Kim Booster. DraftKings is offering a warm welcome to new players with ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS INSTANTLY IN CASINO CREDITS with just a ten dollar wager. Plus, EVERYONE can get in on the action with a holiday reward every week! So, sign up with code TIGERBELLY because the holiday cheer is here! Only on DraftKings Casino.

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As we come to the end of the Ladder of Divine Ascent St. John unfolds for us the heights to which we are drawn – the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Love. Hope, often the most neglected of virtues, is the annulment of despair. It allows us to hold on to the promise of Christ to be with us always. Even when faith seems to fail us and all grows dark because of the cross that we carry, our hope in the Lord allows us to be consoled by his mercy and to be drawn forward. It protects us from despondency and doubt. Love when unimpeded allows us to see as God sees; to see the signs of the times and how things will unfold even when all seems chaotic. This divine love yields miracles; the supernatural healing and perfecting the natural. Through it we come to see the things of the kingdom with clarity. This clarity creates a fire within the heart; an urgent longing and thirst for the Lord that only he can quench. It is our movement into eternity. It reveals to us that the kingdom is now, heaven is now, eternity is now! We come to see that this love is not distant but that the kingdom dwells within.  St. John closes the step by calling out to Love Himself to satisfy his desire, to show him the path of the ascent that is most direct. For even though he had received this wisdom from others, St. John understands that it is only Love himself who can guide us. It is the experience of this love alone that moves us from words to reality. Finally, St. John exhorts us along with all those who read his book to ascend eagerly and to be resolved in their hearts to strive for the Lord above all things. He is our life, our salvation, our love! --- Text of chat during the group: 00:01:21 Bob Cihak, AZ: My microphone isn't working again but this is probably for the better, because I have a strong head cold with the virus also giving my voice into a gravelly inflection.   Doreen Stacy, our artist friend's funeral was yesterday. Preparations conflicted with our Monday meeting; I know I'm already excused but wanted to ask for prayers. Doreen only had 3 children but one of her daughters had 11. Who would have guessed that an English Professor could splendidly support a family that size?   00:08:21 Lori Hatala: https://gmail.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c38acab568d650f7ef65f39df&id=3f6ad96818&e=b6af48f1a0   00:12:25 Sr Barbara Jean Mihalchick: What is the title of the St. Isaac book?   00:12:44 Bob Cihak, AZ: P. 179, # I   00:14:52 Bob Cihak, AZ: Oops. Wrong book. Actually p.246, # 30 P. 179, # I   00:15:15 David: Sr. Barbara it is ISBN 978-0-943405-16-2 Holy Transfiguration Monastery my copy is 2011   00:26:39 Rebecca Thérèse: In what specifically are we supposed to hope? And what does lack of hope look like?   00:27:16 Lilly (Toronto, CA): “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” ...It's hard to surrender our weakness or sufferings, but it's in those darkest times that a simple Psalm will be enough to help us persevere   00:30:58 Myles Davidson: Replying to "What is the title of..."   The Ascetical Homilies of St. Isaac the Syrian   00:32:31 Myles Davidson: Replying to "What is the title of..."   https://htmp.org/St-Isaac-Ascetical-Homilies/overview.html   00:58:14 Maureen Cunningham: Hound oh heaven   00:58:41 Joseph: “Love is the progress of eternity” echoes St. Gregory of Nyssa's notion of epektasis, the eternal ‘stretching and straining' of the soul toward God. Each step toward God is both a fulfillment and a new beginning. Our mystical ascent never truly comes to an end, the cup is never entirely full, our love reaches out to God for eternity.   00:59:54 Lilly (Toronto, CA): Who's the author of Flying over the abyss?   01:00:28 Dave Warner | AL: Flying over the Abyss: https://essexmonastery.com/bookshop/flying-over-the-abyss   01:01:26 Lilly (Toronto, CA): Thank you   01:01:41 Dave Warner | AL: Replying to "Who's the author of ..."   Archmandrite Zacharias Zacharou   01:02:18 Dave Warner | AL: Reacted to "Thank you" with

In this episode, we explore findings from a groundbreaking study recently published in Nature which revealed potential targets for bowel cancer prevention and treatment. The study provides the most detailed understanding yet of bowel cancer's genetic makeup. The research, which used data from the 100,000 Genomes Project identified over 250 genes that play a crucial role in the condition, driver genes and potential drug targets. Our guests discuss the potential impact of these findings on patient outcomes, screening for bowel cancer, and future prevention strategies. Helen White, Participant Panel Vice-Chair for Cancer at Genomics England is joined by Professor Ian Tomlinson, Professor of Cancer Genetics at the University of Oxford, Claire Coughlan, Clinical Lead for Bowel Cancer UK and consultant nurse in colorectal cancer, and Dr David Church, a clinical scientist fellow and a medical doctor specialising in oncology at Oxford University. "The people that were kind enough to donate samples to the 100,000 Genomes Project, they did so knowing that they almost certainly wouldn't benefit personally from their donation from their gift and that any benefits would be some way down the line and hopefully benefit others which is what we're seeking to realise now. But, you know, it's not a given when we treat people in the clinic so we're very, very grateful to those individuals." You can read more about the study in our colorectal cancer blog and our study findings news story. You can download the transcript or read it below. Helen: Welcome to Behind the Genes. Ian: One of the great hopes is that some of these new genes that we've found could be useful in preventing cancer and it doesn't necessarily matter that they're rare, even if they're only 1% of cancers, by using those and changing those in the normal individual before they have had cancer then we may be able to reduce that risk. So, there are lots of potential new targets for prevention that are coming through.  My name is Helen White and I'm the Participant Panel Vice-Chair for Cancer at Genomics England. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Ian Tomlinson, Professor of Cancer Genetics at the University of Oxford, Claire Coughlan, Clinical Lead for Bowel Cancer UK and consultant nurse in colorectal cancer, and Dr David Church, a clinical scientist fellow and a medical doctor specialising in oncology at Oxford University.   Today we will be discussing a pioneering colorectal cancer study which using data from the 100,000 Genomes Project has uncovered new insights that could transform diagnosis and treatment for patients with bowel cancer. If you enjoyed today's episode we would love your support, please like, share and rate us on wherever you listen to your podcast.  Thank you for joining me today. We're going to be discussing the findings from a landmark study that has been published in nature. This study used data generously donated by people with bowel cancer who took part in the 100,000 Genomes Project giving us the most detailed look yet at the genetic makeup of colorectal cancer better known as bowel cancer. But before we get into that let's start by hearing from my guests. Could each of you please introduce yourselves.  Ian: I'm Ian Tomlinson, I work at the University of Oxford and most of my work is research into bowel cancer, it's genetic causes, the genes that are involved in actually causing the cancer to grow which may be different from genetic causes and also the use of that data to help patients whether guiding future treatments or potentially helping to prevent bowel cancer which would obviously be our optimum strategy to have the biggest impact on the disease and its incidents.   Claire: So, I'm Claire Coughlan, I'm the clinical lead for Bowel Cancer UK and my remit at the charity is to ensure that everything we do is clinically relevant and that we're providing services that meet the needs of those affected by bowel cancer and the educational needs of those health professionals that work with people affected by bowel cancer. I'm also a nurse consultant in colorectal cancer at Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust and I lead an urgent referral service there and also work with patients with late effects of bowel cancer.  David: I'm David Church, I'm a medical oncologist and Cancer Research UK advanced clinician scientist at the University of Oxford. I treat bowel cancer clinically and do research on bowel cancer and womb cancer including a lot of research using samples and data from Genomics England data service we're discussing today of course.  Helen: Great, thank you. Now let's turn to Claire to learn more about bowel cancer. Claire, can you share with us how common it is, how treatable it is and if there are any trends in terms of which groups of people are affected?  Claire: Of course, bowel cancer is a relatively common cancer, there are about 46,000 people each year in the UK diagnosed with bowel cancer so that is quite a large number. The thing that really drives us forward in bowel cancer is that the earlier stage you're diagnosed at the greater chance of survival. So, the figures for that are quite stark, we stage bowel cancer through stage one to 4 with one being the earliest stage and 4 being the most advanced.   If you are diagnosed with bowel cancer at stage one you have a 9 in 10 chance of being alive and well 5 years after your diagnosis of bowel cancer. And if you're diagnosed at the other end of the spectrum at stage 4 that drops to a 1 in 10 and should people survive after a diagnosis of stage 4, which more people than before do they will have had a lot of treatment for their bowel cancer so the burden of the treatment will also be with them after that. So, it's really important that we diagnose at the earliest possible stage which is why studies such as the one we're going to talk about today are so important.   We have noticed that there has been a slight increase in being diagnosed at a younger age. That said the latest statistic is 2,600 people were diagnosed under the age 50 in the UK last year so it's still a disease of older people, you still have a greater chance of getting bowel cancer as you get older but it's really, really important that we're aware that you can still get bowel cancer as a younger person.   Probably one of the most exciting things that has happened for bowel cancer of recent years is our bowel cancer screening programme and the age for that now has been brought down to 50, we're not quite there all over the country, but in the UK that is the aim that everyone will be screened for bowel cancer at the age of 50. So, yes it's a common disease and staging an early detection is vital. Helen: That's lovely Claire, thank you very much for that. David, turning to you could you please explain to us how bowel cancer typically develops? David: Yes, so we know compared with many cancer types quite a lot about how bowel cancer develops because the bowel is accessible to collect samples by a technique called endoscopy which is putting a camera into the bowel from which you can sample tumours or lumps. And so from genetic research done in the last 10 years we know that, or we've known for many years actually, for much longer, that cancer is a genetic disease, it's a disease caused by alterations in genes and particularly genes that control whether the cells in our bowel grow normally and die normally as they should do. And collectively when there are alterations in genes that regulate those processes you can have a cell or collection of cells which are able to grow without restraint and don't die when they should do which are some of the hallmarks of a cancer and they also require the ability to spread elsewhere in the body which is what kills people with cancer including bowel cancer. We know from research done in the last 10 to 15 years that some of the alterations in genes that can cause bowel cancer in combination occur very early in our life, even in the first and second decade of life, but don't cause cancer. The earliest detectable abnormality is typically a polyp which is a tumour, a lump within the bowel which is detectable and if removed is almost certainly cured by removal alone but if it's not detected then as that grows and acquires more alterations in genes then it can become a cancer and cancers develop the ability to invade the bowel wall, to spread to what we call lymph nodes or glands nearby and also to spread further afield, most commonly to the liver or to the lungs.   And for most people whom bowel cancer has spread to the liver or to the lungs or elsewhere unfortunately we're not able to cure their disease which as Claire has said is why there is such an importance in detecting cancers and pre-cancers as we call them so that the tumours are not actually cancerous but come before bowel cancer as early as possible.  Helen: Thank you David. Moving on to the study, Ian perhaps you can take this, in the study that you carried out my understanding is that the whole genome sequencing was used to investigate the genetic changes that lead to the development and growth of bowel cancer. And for this participants with bowel cancer in the 100,000 Genomes Project donated both a blood sample and a tumour sample while those with rare conditions only provided a blood sample, can you explain why that is?  Ian: As you said the study really looked at 2 quite separate arms albeit with a little bit of overlap as we'll see. So, one very important aim was to look at individuals, both children and adults, who had medical problems or other conditions that were unexplained but which had some features that suggested that they weren't necessarily inherited but there may be some variation in their genes that had caused them, and roughly half of the programme was dedicated to that.   Within that there was a small number of people who had a strong family history of bowel cancer or who had large numbers of polyps in the bowel and they were analysed in a separate part of the project from what we're mostly discussing. Within the cancer arm there was a collection really throughout England of patients who had most of the common types of cancer and a few with less common cancers.   And because when we're looking at genetic and related changes in cancers we need to make sure that those changes have actually occurred in the cancer as it started growing from its earliest stages with a small number of cells in the body that were slightly abnormal and then progressing. We need to look at what genetic variation the patient has in all the cells of their body. We don't want to look at patients and say that looks an interesting change, we may be able to use that if it's present in all of the normal cells in that patient's system.   We want to make sure the change is specific to the cancer itself and therefore we have to sequence both a sample probably taken from blood and a sample taken from the actual cancer. And in a way we subtract out the changes in the blood to identify the changes that have actually occurred in the cancer itself.  Helen: That's a very helpful explanation. Does this research show that there is a role for whole genome sequencing in clinical care?  Ian: I think my own view is it is all a question of cost. I think the advantages it provides it can assess multiple types of genetic change at once. It is relatively consistent across each cancer's genome between cancers, even between centres mean that it is the method of choice. There are undoubtedly developments that will happen in the future, maybe being able to sequence longer stretches of DNA in one go that will help the analysis.   And some of the computational methods are likely to develop to identify some of the slightly difficult to identify genetic changes but it ought to be the standard of choice. There are issues and potential difficulties in collecting the high-quality samples that have been needed from pathology laboratory and that will be difficult going forward with current budges and there are lots of challenges but ultimately it in some form has to be the method of choice. What wasn't done is to look at other molecule tests or essays, looking at RNA wasn't really done on a big scale as well as DNA and other changes to DNA apart from the genetic changes were not looked at.   So, there are certainly ways it could be improved if you had limitless money but I think the project, 100,000 Genomes has shown the whole genomes are. They have a lot of advantages and ultimately probably will be adopted by the NHS and similar organisations.  Helen: David, could you now tell us about the findings of this pioneering study and what impact these findings might have on people with bowel cancer in the future?  David: So, this is the largest study to date to analyse the entire genome of bowel cancer by some margin and the fact that we've done whole genome sequencing and in so many people it has really given us an unprecedented ability to identify the genetic alterations that drive bowel cancer. And within bowel cancer we've known for some time it is not a homogeneous entity that bowel cancer is not all created equal, that there are sub-groups of bowel cancer and we have been able to refine those over previous efforts. And I guess if you were to ask what the biggest take home for me from the study is it's just the complexity of the disease.   So, as we've mentioned we know that cancer is a genetic disease, that it's driven by genetic alterations, alterations in genes which regulate the growth of cells or the death of cells or the spread of cells. And we've known for many years that there is a modest number of genes which are commonly malfunctioning in bowel cancer and they would be in the tens to dozens really. But with this work we've hugely extended our understanding of the genes that drive bowel cancer and in fact we've discovered nearly 250 genes which are altered in bowel cancer and appear to drive the growth of the cancer.   Now we know that not all of those will be validated and by that I mean that there are associations that we find at the moment, not all of which will be biologically relevant but interpreted in the data we know a large number that are previously undiscovered are or we can be fairly confident of that. And one of the take homes from that is that many of these are only altered in a small fraction of bowel cancers.   So, rather than being perhaps half of bowel cancers or a third of bowel cancers there are a good number of genes, a very substantial number of genes, which are altered in say 3 to even 1% of bowel cancers. And if we think about how we go about targeting those and perhaps we'll come onto treatment later that poses really challenges for how we work and we would think about treating patients with bowel cancer who have those particular alterations in their cancers.  Helen: Thank you David, yes we'll come onto treatment shortly, but I think Claire has a question for you.   Claire: Yes, thank you. For me as somebody who works in this every day this is such an exciting and interesting study, particularly in light of what we said earlier about early detection and how critically important that is for improving outcomes in people with bowel cancer. So, in your view do you think this research could help shape future screening programmes or prevention strategies?  David: That's a great question, I suppose in terms of screening at the moment the majority of screening is done in the UK at least by testing for blood in the stool which is relatively non-specific so I'm not sure that that would be directly impacted by this research. But one area of early cancer detection that is perhaps more relevant is quite a lot of work including from Oxford actually in recent years looking at blood tests. So, testing blood samples for early detection of cancer whereby you can test for genetic alterations, fragments of DNA that have alterations from the bowel cancer or any cancer that circulates in the blood and that tends to rely on a small number of common alterations.   And with this data I could see that we might be able to refine those tests and in so doing improve our early detection of cancer but that would need quite some work before we could actually say look that had real potential I think. And in terms of prevention there are, I think Ian may want to come in on this, one or 2 sub-groups which you might think that you could try to prevent but of course that needs a lot of extra work really.   But I think we have some clues of the biology of bowel cancer and particularly some of the sub-groups where you might think well this drug would work better in terms of preventing that sub-group or that sub-group but that will need to be the subject of future study.  Helen: Ian, did you want to come in on that at all?  Ian: So, at the moment prevention is a fairly new way of helping to reduce the number of people with bowel cancer at the level of the whole population which is what we have in the UK above a certain age group as we heard from Claire earlier. The methods used, again as we heard, are screening for occult blood in the stool and then colonoscopy to identify either hopefully early cancers or polyps and remove those. But when we think about the methods that we use for preventing other diseases then normally where they're successful using a more easily delivered and I have to say less expensive method.   So, high blood pressure is treated to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and there are other diseases where those what you might call molecularly-based prevented strategies are coming in. We really lack that for bowel cancer in particular, it does happen for some other cancers, but one of the great hopes is that some of these new genes that we've found could be useful in preventing cancer. And it doesn't necessarily matter that they're rare, even if there are only 1% of cancers, by using those and changing those in a normal individual before they have had cancer then we may be able to reduce that risk.   So, there are lots of potential new targets for prevention that are coming through and as David said it is going to take a lot of work to work out which of those are deliverable and who will benefit. But we have quite a lot of opportunities in that space and although that may not be us that takes that forward, it may be, but it may not be. We think it is a lot of material for those interested in chemo prevention using drugs of cancer that they can work on and with luck deliver some new ways of preventing cancer that may be simply popping a pill every morning to take your risk right down to as close as zero as we can.  Helen: Thank you Ian. David, I think you had something to add here.  David: Thanks Helen. One area of prevention that we're really interested in Oxford and many others are is using the genetic alterations that we find in bowel cancers and other cancers as targets for vaccination. Now we know that gene alterations will cause abnormal proteins which while they might drive the cancer, make it grow or not die, can also be recognised by the immune system so the abnormal proteins can be recognised by the immune system as being foreign and as foreign they can be targeted by the immune system so the immune system will try and kill the cells carrying those alterations. And we know for some sub-sets of bowel cancers those alterations can be relatively predictable actually, they occur in quite a sizeable fraction of some sub-groups of bowel cancers.   And one area that we're particularly interested in at the moment and actively pursuing is using those targets where you need some additional work to demonstrate when they are particularly recognisable by the immune system. But to use these genetic alterations is potential targets for vaccination with the intention ultimately of preventing bowel cancer in at risk individuals or ideally in the full-term time the whole population. And we've received some funding from Cancer Research UK to pursue this line of research and we have a group working on this in Oxford and as I say many others do elsewhere.  Helen: Thank you David, yes I have a vested interest in this because my understanding is this work is aimed primarily at people with a genetic condition called lynch syndrome which predisposes the people who have inherited this gene change alteration to bowel cancer, womb cancer and other cancer. And I had womb cancer, as I think David you know, a few years back and discovered it was due to lynch syndrome and so it's really exciting that you're now looking at vaccinating preventing because yes I take aspirin every day, I have my colonoscopy every 2 years which have some effect on preventing these cancers but it's not 100% guaranteed. And I don't suppose it ever will be but having the vaccination in that armoury would be fantastic I think for future generations, it's very exciting and we look forward to hearing more about it.   Thank you Ian and David. I mean we've heard a lot there about preventing bowel cancer but I think moving back now to potential treatments, you know, we've heard from David how this study has shown a number of actionable findings but what are the next steps towards treatment? How can these findings be turned into real actions that will benefit those people diagnosed with bowel cancer in the future? Ian, perhaps you would like to pick up on this to start.  Ian: That step is one, you know, in which I'm not personally an expert but a lot of the newer treatments are based on the finding of so called driving mutations which are simply genetic changes that occur as the cancer grows and contribute to that growth and ultimately if it's not treated to the spread and dissemination of a cancer. And the fact that we have reported 250 which need validation but of which a large proportion are likely to be true drivers means that anyone of those can be a potential new target.   The criteria to be used for which of those mutations to pursue, which of those driver genes to chase up are quite complicated normally, depend on many things such as the interest of research groups and small and larger drug companies. And the similarity of those genes to other genes that have evolved and the processes that they make to go slightly wrong in the cancer.   So, there is also the issue that because these are uncommon, everybody talks a lot about personalised medicine or precision medicine, this would be truly precision or personalised medicine because a genetic change that was driving the cancer in only 1% of patients is obviously not a huge number of patients although bowel cancer is a common cancer so it's not a tiny number either. But it would mean investment at that level to benefit let's say 1 to 2% potentially of all patients with bowel cancer but I think that's a nettle we have to grasp. And I think our results are showing that most of the really common drug changes either have not yet been successfully targeted in treatment or are too difficult to target.   So, we're going to have to start looking at these less common genetic drivers and design strategies, inhibitors, you know, again that can be delivered to patients relatively straightforwardly in order to see whether they benefit the patients concerned. But there is this problem of getting enough patients enrolled in clinical trials where a change is only present in a relatively small proportion of all the patients with that cancer type.   Helen: Thank you Ian. Presumably if there is a relatively small number of patients the people who are looking at running these trials might be looking at perhaps international trials, would that be one way to go?  Ian: So, I think David can speak with more personal knowledge but there are international trial networks and there are collaborations along these lines already under way. I would hope that those could be made use of even more than they are already. There is, you know, a financial consideration for those developing new anticancer treatments which are, you know, high risk work and also the costs of setting up trials and enrolling people is not a trivial thing. So, I think those are hurdles that can be overcome but it would need a concerted effort to do that. Patients will play a major role in that and patient organisations as well as 100,00 Genomes and other similar projects.  Helen: Yes, thank you, David I don't know if you want to come in on that.  David: Yes, the challenge of testing therapies in small groups is a very real one and there is lots of interest at the moment in exploring alternatives to conventional clinical trials. And as we use more electronic patient records and we have pharmacy records so there is the potential to get those data from routine clinical practice and there is lots of investments and attention on that at the moment so called real world data which is always an interesting term as if patients in clinical trials aren't in the real world which of course they are.   But it's perhaps a little more cost effective sometimes in clinical trials, of course it does pose its own challenges in how you disentangle true treatment effect from other factors because there are many factors impacting on how long people with cancer live. But there is a lot of investment and effort going into that at the moment and it will be interesting to see how that develops over the coming years.  Helen: Turning to you Claire based on your experience how well do you think people with bowel cancer understand how genomes can help with their care and what support is currently available to them in this area?  Claire: I think the answer, as it is so often is, it's dependent on individuals and not just one individual. So, I think some patients are very motivated to know as much about this as possible and to understand and to know what the next steps may be in their own treatment that may be helped by this. Others don't want to have the same knowledge and want to be guided very much by their medical teams but I think oncologists obviously are at the forefront of this and we see at the charity … we have services at the charity that supports patients and we see lots of queries into our ask the nurse service where people have been given variable information about I suppose personalised medicine as Ian alluded to and how their very specific bowel cancer may be treated, so I think it varies from patient to patient.   There is support available so we have the ask the nurse service I alluded to. We have a brilliant patient forum actually and everybody in clinical practice will have seen this, patients often become more expert than anybody and they share advice and they're moderated forums that are a very safe place for people to ask questions where there is a moderator to ensure that it is made really clear that circumstances are individual.   And the same with the ask the nurse service because you don't have all the clinical information so it is about empowering people, so there is support available. I think the other thing that is really important is equipping specialist nurses with the knowledge that they need to support their patients. This is a really exciting area of evolution for bowel cancer particularly I think in all cancers at the moment but for bowel cancer I think things have changed fairly rapidly in recent years and specialist nurses really need support in knowing that they have up-to-date information to give their patients.   So, that's another challenge for us and any specialist nurses that might be listening to this podcast we have online education on genomics for specialist nurses. Just while we're talking about that and you mentioned lynch syndrome earlier, so there has been a lynch syndrome project as I'm sure you're aware where we're trying to get testing for lynch syndrome brought into local hospitals.   So, there was some funding via NHS England so that the testing be done at time of diagnosis, so a pre-test and then a final test if that's appropriate, for everybody diagnosed with bowel cancer to see if they have lynch syndrome. And in some trusts that has been done and in others it hasn't yet and the funding hasn't quite followed in the way that we need it to enable that to happen. It's vitally important, we think there are about 175,000 people in the UK with lynch syndrome and we only know about 5% of them. And this is a gene change that is an inherited gene change so we can do what we call cascade testing where we test family members and we can then employ preventative strategies to prevent people from developing bowel cancer.   So, it's a really important project, so I think as well as supporting patients with the information around the changes that are happening in this area we also need to ensure that we support the workforce and have investment there to enable the support of all the changes and the genomic landscape.  Helen: Absolutely Claire and so much resonates there with what you've said. Having myself had cancer discovered that was due to lynch syndrome, cascade testing offered to my family members so valuable. It turns out I inherited my change from my mum who is 83, has never had cancer, so I think that's a very good example of, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will get cancer but actually on that point that you made about empowering patients I always have a right smile because there is my mum going off to all her other medical appointments because at 83 she sees quite a few people and she is always the one telling them about lynch syndrome and educating them because most of them haven't heard of it, so yes it's really, really important.   And that patient forum, you're probably aware of Lynch Syndrome UK, I don't have any involvement in that other than being a member but that is so valuable for people with a particular condition to go somewhere where they can talk to or listen to other people with a similar condition, really, really valuable.   Right, well I think circling back really to the 100,000 Genomes Project I think you touched on this earlier David but reflecting on what you and Ian have told us about your study what is it about the 100,000 Genomes Project bowel cancer dataset that made this work possible?  David: There are a few things, one of which and not least of which is the sheer size of the effort. So, to have whole genome sequencing for more than 2,000 individuals is previously unprecedented and we'll be seeing more of this now as we scale up our research efforts but at the inception of the project it was very, very ambitious and to be able to deliver that is a huge achievement. And the quality and breadth of the analysis is very strong as well.   And ultimately, you know, the former gives thanks to the people that were kind enough to donate samples to the 100,000 Genomes Project, they did so knowing that they almost certainly wouldn't benefit personally from their donation from their gift and that any benefits would be some way down the line and hopefully benefit others which is what we're seeking to realise now. But, you know, it's not a given when we treat people in the clinic so we're very, very grateful to those individuals.   And I think also to the scientists who worked incredibly hard over the last 5 years to deliver this work actually. So, having been part of the team and being lucky enough to be part of the team along with Ian we've had hugely motivated individuals that really have dedicated a large fraction of their working lives to delivering this project which I think is a fantastic achievement as well.  Helen: Thank you, thank you to all those participants who at a time when their lives probably were turned completely upside down by a cancer diagnosis were offered the chance to join the 100,000 Genomes Project and said yes. As you say most of them will have known that it won't have helped them but by donating their data, you know, it has allowed this work to happen and potentially it could change lots of people's lives in the future, so thank you to them.  Ian: Could I also just emphasise and agree with what David has said, I won't go through all the individuals by name, but if anybody wants to read the published report of the work there are several people on there, Alex Cornish is the first author, but many colleagues from an institute of Cancer Research, The University of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, other universities in London that all contributed, but also colleagues in the NHS and/or universities who recruited patients, collected samples, processed them etc and of course the people who did the preparation of the samples in genetics laboratories and actually did the sequencing and basic analysis too.   So, it is a truly huge effort across particularly all the cancer types which is particularly a complex collection given the fact the tumour is needed and a blood sample. It's quite difficult in a way to find a formal way of thanking them for all of this but without them it wouldn't have happened.  Helen: On that note I think we'll wrap up there. A huge thank you to our guests, Professor Ian Tomlinson, Clare Coughlan and Dr David Church for an enlightening discussion on the groundbreaking study published in nature. This research is set to reshape our understanding of colorectal cancer and pave the way for new possibilities in treatment and patient care.   If you would like to hear more like this please subscribe to Behind the Genes on your favourite podcast app. Thank you for listening. I have been your host, Helen White. This podcast was edited by Bill Griffin at Ventoux Digital and produced by Naimah Callachand. 

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We challenge the notion that high injury rates are punished by market forces, as we dig into this article that posits the opposite: that safety should be a performance driver. Our analysis dives deep into the credibility and methodologies of the article, emphasizing the critical role of peer review and the broader body of knowledge.We'll also scrutinize the use of data as rhetoric versus evidence, focusing on the transparency and rigor of research methods when interviewing executives about safety practices. Is safety merely seen as a compliance issue or a strategic investment? We dissect the methodologies, including participant selection and question framing, to uncover potential biases. Finally, we critique a proposed five-step process aimed at transforming safety into a competitive advantage. From aligning on the meaning of safety to incentivizing employees, we expose significant gaps in academic rigor and alignment with established safety literature. This conversation serves as a powerful critique of superficial analyses by those outside the safety science domain, offering listeners critical insights into the complexity of safety management and its potential alignment with organizational goals.  Discussion Points:Re-examining the role of safety as a value driver for businessComparing contrasting research findings and cautioning about evaluating researchData as rhetoric in safetyTransparency and methodology are crucial in research, especially when interviewing executives about workplace safetyExecutives' perspectives on safety are questioned, research methods are critiquedClarifying claims and performance in business The five-step process for competitive advantage A study on the effectiveness of safety training methods Safety management is complex and requires evidence-based strategies, not superficial analysis or reliance on compliance trainingStrategic value of workplace safetySafety's impact on business success is uncertain, but exploring its alignment with organizational goals is importantTakeaways The answer to our episode's question: “the short answer is we still don't know!” Like and follow, send us your comments and suggestions! Quotes:“The trouble is, then we don't know whether what they're referring to is published research that might be somewhere else that we can look for for the details, or work that they did specifically for this article, or other work that they've done that was just never published.” - Drew“We've got to be really careful…this is using data as rhetoric, not using data as data.” - Drew“I wouldn't be surprised that most people see safety as both a cost and as an outcome.”- Drew“So you've got two-thirds of these companies that don't even have any safety metric, like not even an injury metric or anything that they monitor.” - David“So we kind of assume business performance means financial performance, but that in itself is never clarified.” - DavidResources:The Article: Safety Should Be a Performance DriverEpisode 121: Is Safety Good for Business?The Safety of Work PodcastThe Safety of Work on LinkedInFeedback@safetyofwork

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Go to https//www.GetKikoff.com/GENIUS to get your first month for only $1 and start building your credit, today! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get 25% OFF your subscription or try the app FREE at https://www.Fitbod.me/GENIUS GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Go to https//www.GetKikoff.com/GENIUS to get your first month for only $1 and start building your credit, today! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Go to https//www.GetKikoff.com/GENIUS to get your first month for only $1 and start building your credit, today! GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To get your new unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, and get the plan shipped to your door for FREE, go to https://www.mintmobile.com/genius15 GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Head to https://www.TryFum.com and use code GENIUS to save 10% OFF your order! GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Go to https://www.LectricEbikes.com and be sure to mention that GeniusBrain sent you in the post-checkout survey! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. 

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The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There is a lot of glass in public and commercial spaces, and the pro AV and digital signage industries have been applying all kinds of technologies to turn things like windows and dividers into part-time or full-time displays. In most cases, those jobs have come with compromises. There are films that might start curling at the corners, or discolouring. Mesh systems that look pretty good from the front, but terrible from the rear. And most recently, super-thin foils that need to be adhered to one side of glass panes. So what if the LED display was actually part of architectural-grade glass? That's the premise of a company called Clear Motion Glass - a Pennsylvania-based technology start-up that comes at the business from the angle of commercial glass. Clear Motion is a spin-out from William Penn Performance Glass, which has for many years been making and supplying laminated and tempered glass for commercial buildings. Unlike other products on the market, Clear Motion's LED displays are sandwiched inside sheets of laminated safety glass - so when a building goes up or is being retrofitted, the glass panels that go in are also active, highly-transparent displays. I had a good chat with Todd Stahl, a glass industry veteran who runs both the established and start-up businesses. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Todd, thank you for joining me.  Todd Stahl: Hey Dave. Yeah, I appreciate you having us on. It's going to be a pleasure to talk about some LED glass with you.  David: Yeah, tell me about the company. I saw you guys at DSE back in December. You were busy almost the whole time. So I didn't really have the time or the chance to have any kind of a detailed LED conversation, but I know that the company has not been around that long, but it's grown out of a pretty well-established “performance glass company.” Todd Stahl: Yeah. A little bit about the history there. So, at Clear Motion Glass, we're making the LEDs inside of the glass. I came across the LED glass around June of 2022, so I've had it for just about two years. The parent company is William Penn Performance Glass, and that's another company I started in 2011. We deal with high-end architectural Glass.  So, a cliffnote version: We go to the top architects in the country, and they're like, “Hey, who are you designing for?” And they'll say to us, “Hey, we want some really cool glass to go in the elevators for the Empire State Building.” So we got into the architectural space with glass, and actually, we'll William Penn, who was just voted one of the top 50 glass producers in North of North America. So something that we're definitely pretty proud of around here.  Then I came across LED glass around 2022, I thought it was one of the coolest things I've ever seen put inside a glass, and I wanted to be a part of it. David: So when you say you came across it, what do you mean by that?  Todd Stahl: So, there's another product in glass, another glass product that's been around, I'm going to say right around since 2000. It's a glass that goes frosted to clear from the turn of a switch, Switchable glass. So there's a company called Smart Film Blinds, and they were an applied film company that would actually take that, what we would call switch glass, but they just took the film and applied it to existing glass, and it was owned by Alan and Tracy Ackerman, and then they had this connection with LED Glass they weren't quite sure what to do with it. They knew it was really cool. And it had a chance to be really something big, but they were more of a film company, and then he and I got introduced, through a need that we had for some smart film, the switchable film, and then eventually we had a partnership for a while. Then we decided basically that I'll stick with the glass part, what I'm best at, and he'll stick with the film part, which was what they were best with. But that's how I got introduced to it, right around two years ago.  David: What you're marketing now is Clear Motion Glass. Is that your own product or are you reselling somebody else's manufactured product?  Todd Stahl: We have partners overseas, such as a company called Filmbase. That's where we get the actual LED grid or LED mesh. We bring that to my facility in York, Pennsylvania, which is in the south-central Pennsylvania area, we're 20 minutes south of Hershey, close to Harrisburg, and then we actually fabricate everything as a finished panel here. So we'll make the glass, we'll get the interlayer components. We have a laminating machine that actually works by pulling a vacuum and heating it up to certain temperatures. After that, it comes out, and we have a clear LED glass display.  David: So laminated glass is something that's been around forever. So this is just basically sandwiching the mesh in between sheets of laminated glass?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We're definitely making a sandwich component. We start with a piece of glass, say that's your component number one. Then, we start with the inner layer materials.  In a case like this, we use a couple of different techniques, but we use EVA, which is ethyl vinyl acetate. Then we'll actually put the LED mesh grid on top of that, then we put another piece of EVA, then we go with the finished component of the sandwich, another piece of glass, and we stick them in an oven, we run a certain cycle, and about four hours later, we have a laminated piece of glass, exactly how you described. It's a sandwich makeup for sure.  David: Was there a lot of R&D work involved in it? Because I would imagine if you're putting an LED mesh inside of an oven, then going to a very high temperature and all that, I'm thinking if I didn't know much about this stuff, I'd be wondering, what's all that heat going to do to this thing? Todd Stahl: Yeah. You know, we have to make sure that it can withstand certain temperatures, obviously, and if you don't heat, and just in general, if you don't get laminated glass hot enough, it doesn't bond, it does not bond correctly. What you have to achieve is cross-linking and cross-linking is basically the interlayer material to the glass itself, and that happens at a temperature of around 110 degrees Celsius, so it's not getting hot enough to cook a Turkey in there, so we're not really dealing with extremes. I think a lot of people might think when you're actually making glass out of what we call a batch, you know that's where the glass is heated up to 2000 degrees and you're really dealing with some extreme temperatures. It's not quite the same extremes at all when you're dealing with laminated glass.  David: So tell me what performance glass is, and what high-end performance glass is because I don't know the glass world terribly well.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, sure. So, so what William Penn performance glass is the performance name kind of all started because our glass looks great and it, but it's an all safety rated glass. So that's kind of the performance part of the glass. So, if you're looking at our glass, say that's used for glass handrails, that's a very specific glass that's chosen to withstand the certain load requirements of a structural application, and typically most of our handrails are tempered, and laminated glass. So there are two ways on this planet to make a piece of glass safety-rated. You either temper it or you laminate it. We happen to do both of those things in a lot of our projects, and it's kind of funny like obviously safety-rated glass is strong, but the only thing that's really taken into consideration when you're referring to safety glass are you automatically assume it's going to break and what happens when it breaks, right? So with tempered glass, you put a lot of stress on the glass itself through a heating and cooling process, and whenever that glass breaks, it breaks into small panels that would not be able to potentially cause a life-threatening wound, and then you have the exact opposite with laminated where if a rock hits your car, if that's ever happened to you the rock doesn't come through and the pieces of the glass, the shards don't come through, they stay together. So you got those two things to the requirements when you're thinking about what is safety rated glass.  David: With the Clear Motion product, is it an indoor product only, an outdoor facing product, or what are the use cases?  Todd Stahl: So what's really cool about our LED glass is that almost wherever you're using architectural glass right now, you can now use our LED displays. So it can be used in exterior applications, a building facade, glass canopies, and railings that may be exterior. All of the components are kind of encapsulated inside that glass, and that glass is making a nice, really safe, cozy home for the LED display inside of it. David: And it's bright enough that it can be on a glass curtain wall like an auto dealer?  Todd Stahl: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the really cool applications for it. In fact, you had mentioned at the trade show and boy, were we busy? I think I was just talking about this yesterday. We scanned around 450 people in that short show. Our voices were a little strained by the end of the evening. So, the brightness of our display at the show, Dave, was only running around 4%, and I thought that was one of the more amazing things about the product because it was still kind of bright at 4%. Later we started bringing that up because a few potential clients wanted to see it at 50-60% brightness. So yeah, you can totally use this as an exterior sign and get whatever brightness you need. I think some of the products are well over 10,000 nits depending on the needs, and I think one actually lasted up to 15,000 nits, so plenty bright for the outside.  David: Yeah, once you get to 3,500, you're good.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, exactly. David: On transparency. I see on your website that it says there is up to 90 percent transparency.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so when you get to some of the pixel pitches that are viewed from say, a distance of around a hundred feet, I think the pixel pitch at a 20, I believe that one may allow up to 90 percent of light to come through. It's really cool. I mean, you have this really great display, and then you're just getting all this, and you're not cutting off any spaces so if you have a traditional LED display, you can only view that from one side and I think that's kind of what's really amazing about this product and a lot of times when you're looking at the product, you don't even realize that it's transparent until the image would say it's rotating from one image to the next. And you're like, Oh, wow, that's clear, there are people behind there. So I think, yeah, it's really cool in that application.  David: From what I saw, because it's this mesh material, with super thin wiring in between each of the LED lights.  The challenge I've had with a lot of trans or “transparent products” is that they look good from the front side, particularly at a distance, but when you look at the back end of the things, there's a mesh, like a metallic mesh or something like that, a grid system that kind of makes it look like crap. Todd Stahl: Yeah. With a lot of the applied films that have been out there before, and there's not a whole lot of them, but there are a few, certainly from that backside, it doesn't look at all like the front, and the same thing, with the LED actual metal meshes, again, they look phenomenal from the front, and you get behind, and you're like, man, what am I looking at here? So with our product, what's really cool about that is you get a little bit of the halo effect, from the image that's playing on it, that you can see from, say, the view side of the glass, and then you get a slight reflection off of that front piece of glass that kind of bounces back through. So you see a little bit of a glow or a halo in the background, but it is not an eyesore, and it looks pretty good. You can see out, and you have a very clear picture of the people that you're looking through or whatever object you would be doing from the back of the product. It looks really good. It's a good look from the backside.  David: Yeah, there are numerous products out there that now do this kind of foil mesh effect, and you have to adhere it to the inside of a sheet of glass, which is all fine and everything else, but it doesn't look that good from the inside, does it? Todd Stahl: No, it really doesn't. The concept here, we touched on hockey a little bit, earlier, but you know, we have, you have all these hockey nets in the arena to protect the fans that a puck doesn't hit them, and most of those meshes are black. It's harder for our eyes to kind of pick up the black mesh than it is for white. There are some that have whites, but not many, and the black is blended in a lot easier. I'm a big hockey fan, so I've been to a few arenas, and the white ones are a little harder to, I think it takes away from the image more, and that's why we're using a black LED mesh.  When we first started, it was white, and it just didn't have as good of a; again, I thought it took away from the product from the backside.  David: So presumably there are limits in terms of the size of a glass panel that you can do because you've got a laminate in an oven of some kind and that they're only so big. So if you have, to use the example I mentioned earlier of, an auto dealer's glass curtain wall where the sheet of glass might be pretty darn big. How do you put multiple units together? And what does that look like in terms of cabling and everything?  Todd Stahl: Yeah. So we're always kind of limited in size by a couple of different things. Sometimes it might be the actual raw product glass that we're using. Some sheets are available to us, bigger and smaller, the width of the laminating materials, and then our oven as well. So basically, in our oven here in Pennsylvania, we can laminate an LED panel roughly about 6x10 feet. You know, that's a pretty sizable piece of glass, and then what we can do, if you're doing a glass facade it kind of gets into a little bit more of how the glass is installed, but you're basically stacking the panels. there's a control unit. That attaches to each panel of glass, and then those control units are all tied together and then that gives you one cohesive image plane from one panel to the next.  David: Do you have much of a seam in between them?  Todd Stahl: So, if you remember, at the trade show, I think we had two panels out there and we had a seam in the middle. So I'll see the seam, you'll see the seam, but when the image is playing, you really don't even notice it's there. A lot of times, depending on the application, a glass facade is a little different, because you're going to have all most likely all four edges of the glass covered, but, we have a lot of applications where the panels are being butt jointed together and it's a nice polished edge there. So, yeah, with the image running and stuff, you really don't even see it unless you get within a couple of feet of it.  David: So we're talking millimeters, not inches, in terms of a gap.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. You know, a gap's going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of three, three-sixteenths of an inch, plus or minus. David: So not much at all.  Todd Stahl: Yeah, not much at all. Like I said, it's pretty cool. When that image is going, you're like, it just looks like one big piece of glass.  David: And there are technical limits, like if, let's say, an airport curtain wall that might be like 80 feet high for the side of a terminal or something like that. Can you do that?  Todd Stahl: Absolutely. That can all be tied in. You'd have several zones there, and depending on how you're handling the programming from a laptop, and something like that, you just say zone one's the entire thing, and then you might break it down into individual zones if you want different things playing at different times, but yeah, we this is definitely designed to do entire glass facades or, curtain walls. David: All those little lights generate some heat. How does the heat get out?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we've been working with these products for about two years now, and I always expect when I put my hand on the glass to touch it, that it's going to be nice and warm, but it really isn't. The heat definitely dissipates quickly. There is some energy consumption, and we have charts for that. So once we get into a building design, we can get in there and say, “Hey, this is what you're going to need for your power requirements.” But it has very similar power requirements to current LED displays that have been around for a while. But yeah, it doesn't really create much heat. You would think it creates more, and I'm telling you, whenever anybody sees it, one of the first things that they almost always do is, “Oh, I expected that to be warm” and they touch it, and it really isn't.  David: Well, one of the criticisms or let's say what a naysayer might say about this, is, “All right, if I buy this, glass panel with the LED mesh embedded inside of it, what happens if there's a dead pixel? I'm stuck with that forever. It can't be repaired because it's sandwiched in between two sheets of glass.”  Todd Stahl: You know, it was my biggest concern. We spent a good bit of time.  I think the lifespan of the LED bulbs we're using is right under 11 years. So we found the biggest problem that we've encountered, and this took us a while before we were going to bring it to market because that's by far the biggest concern; anyone looks at that and goes, it's not the first time I've ever seen a bulb, you know? So there's a couple of things. There's been a lot of research and development to make sure when it comes out of lamination that we've already caused any bulbs to fail before those processes, and we actually have a little bit of a protocol we've developed. So, one of the biggest reasons a light bulb is going to fail is the heat and pressure in that vacuum. It's not so much the heat, but the pressure because there's a little bit of movement in there. So if all those connection points aren't just right, you're going to get a bulb that may come out after you've done all of the work, and then you fire it up, and you know, there's a lot of bulbs, and a diode and only one is bad, it's not good. So we actually have a pre-laminating process we run to actually replicate what is going to go through the stressors of the lamination process. And if we find a bulb or a diode that might not be working, we can replace it after that pre-cycle of lamination.  Now, on the flip side, let's say it's out there, it's in the field. If we use annealed glass on the front surface, so, annealed is not tempered, but the backlight would be tempered, so you're still dealing with a, fully safety rated tempered and laminated makeup. We actually have a drilling process where we can drill a core out of the glass, and we can actually replace that LED diode. What our experience is that once they come through lamination so far, with all the panels we've been working on we have not had one go out and we've put them in some areas of our glass production facility near our tempering oven, which is a really cool piece of equipment. It has a 600 horsepower blower that when the tempered glass comes through, it cools it to dissipate the heat, but it draws some dust, there's some heat back there. We've had a panel running there for two years in that condition without any issues. But yes, you can actually replace the bulbs if you need to, if one goes out.  David: So I'm curious when an architect and a general contractor puts a building up, they're thinking in terms of being there for decades, with maybe the exception of football stadiums, which seem to need to be replaced every five years or so. Is 11 years an acceptable operating lifespan for a sheet of glass for a builder or for a building owner?  Todd Stahl: Yeah. I mean, our interlayers, they last 20-30 years. The interlayers and the glass products, yeah, they're going to last a very long time. When we've been bringing this product to market I think, the event back to the switch light is one of the first times you're us glass guys are introducing electricity into the mix. And at first that back in 2000, I mean, it was really cool. It had the wow factor, but it didn't quite last as long for me. I didn't really get into the product until recently. But you know, that product will last around 10 years as well, and we don't get a whole lot of callbacks very often with any of our glass products.  But it seems like most clients are happy with a 10-year usage. That's been pretty good for the Switch Lite product. We talk about a decade out there to the architects and designers now that, that's a number that they all seem to be very happy  David: Let's say a car dealer goes in, they're fine, they're thinking in terms of the glass that they put in is there for 10 years, and they may switch it out anyways?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, I think you know that everybody wants to be fresh and new. So we found a lot of these high-end retail stores that we've designed with, for instance, a high-end jewelry line, and let's say they have started in California with a new design. They take that design and they move it east to New York City. By the time they get to New York City, whether that's been five to eight years, and they redesign the whole thing over again. So there's a cycle and I think, especially with retail, and a lot of these buildings, they always want to have a new, fresh look, and I think a lot of times they're redesigning in under ten years for a lot of applications.  David: I'm guessing I could be wrong here, but I'm guessing that there's hyper-competition from China for, what I would say is conventional LED displays and so on; you're probably going to have less competition for what you're doing because of the sheer weight of, even if they can make glass cheaper over in China, shipping glass panels over here would be just ghastly expensive, right? Todd Stahl: Yeah, definitely. It's pretty heavy to air freight glass, so it's always nice that there's this thing called the ocean between us and China, especially us being we've been a manufacturer forever, and thankfully, it is a little expensive to ship a finished product like that and take some time. So, yeah, and you know, right now, we're kind of pretty far ahead of the curve in how to actually laminate this properly. Our feeling was when we got involved with this, all right, we got the LED technology. Now we'll just throw it in some glass, and we got a home run and it wasn't quite as easy to just throw it in glass and end up with a finished product, you know? There are still some areas. We are not the only ones in the world laminating this product, but there are, from what I know, under five; we're the only ones who can do it with thin and large panels. We're the only ones that I know of that are actually doing some of the very specific things to make sure it's going to perform properly in these laminated glass applications. In our process, we are patent protected in our process where I think we're just like in the first phase, I don't know all the legal terminology, but we're going through the patent process for the way we laminate it.  David: Which will help you over here, won't help you with Chinese products, but again, there's that ocean thing in between. Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. We have a few intellectual properties here and I'm not one to get into too many legal battles, but we would have some type of recourse if someone does come and is trying to laminate in a similar technique the way we do it. David: I suspect you're kind of looking around the corner as to where this is going and the types of technologies that are emerging. Do you kind of see this as, what you have right now is Gen 1, and over time the light emitters will get smaller, the wiring will be even thinner and so on? Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's exactly the way I see it going. I mentioned earlier: I really am a glass guy, and this is a glass company by people who absolutely love glass. Now, that's a Will Penn. Clear Motion, we have that same feeling as well, but this is more of a technology company. And what we're talking about today, like you said, generation one. We're going to revisit this in under five years, and it's going to look, I think, a whole lot different.  David: Who's buying it right now? And are you in the field with this?  Todd Stahl: So we're working on probably over 50 to 60 current projects right now in the design phase. Almost everyone we're working with has signed NDAs. So we can't necessarily say the clients that we're designing with right now. But one's a high-end fast food restaurant. They want one of these in each restaurant and that's actually for an exterior application.  David: Are these proposals or purchase orders?  Todd Stahl: They are proposals right now, so a lot of verbal commitments. We have a project we're working on in the Middle East in the design phase right now, that's 18 months out, the funding has been approved. They're designing it in the UK and then we're working with the audio visual company, I think in Texas. So this is really brand new.  David: You're in startup mode!  Todd Stahl: We really are, and this is the third company I've started literally from scratch, and I think it'll be the last one because boy, it is challenging. It takes a lot of energy. There's this great energy when you're starting it, and this is a little extra challenging because this is brand new. No one has ever seen clear LED glass displays like they just did not exist four years ago.  People might've thought they saw something similar. Like you said, it was a film or a grid that was put behind the glass. But when people are seeing this now, we're creating a new market, we're educating people to that market, and we're educating ourselves.  David: I'm guessing when people come to a stand at a trade show, you're at, the architects and the people who design physical spaces are the ones who are going, this is more like it. They haven't really liked the idea of films or foils and all that because of how they look at the back end or they're worried about a film sort of, particularly if it's exposed to UV light and all that, it's going to yellow and on and on…  Todd Stahl: So what the feedback from the A&D community has been? We did an AIA show in San Francisco last June, and we had one or two clients, say, “Hey Todd, we have the budget for this. We have clients who want this product, and we've been looking for it for years.” Then we start designing the project with them, and that's the thing: once I shake hands with an architect, we might not actually have that project begin production for 24 months to a year. So, depending if the building's coming out of the ground or if it's just a remodel of an existing one, it's a very long cycle until we actually get orders placed, and you know, something I've been dealing with for 30 years. It's kind of the way the industry is.  David: Infrastructure projects are never quick, are they?  Todd Stahl: No, they really aren't, but the A&D world is kind of our background. It's where we've been for a very long time in that space, and we've definitely noticed that companies, individuals in the audio-visual world respond to this entirely differently. This doesn't have as many questions in their minds. They're more educated because we've been used to dealing with LEDs for a very long period of time. So it's kind of interesting how the two markets work together, like the DSE show where we introduced the product, I would say more to the audio-visual world if I'm using the right terminology there, it was received just as with that much energy, a lot of more understanding right away, not as many technical questions. David: It's a variation on stuff they've been seen before, but maybe a better variation. Todd Stahl: Yeah, absolutely, and the architects, like you were saying, and even in general, I think even though LG makes an applied film. The North American President of, I forgot the gentleman's name, he was in my shop a little over a year ago, and we were working with his film, and then we showed him our LED glass, and he was blown away by it. David: “There goes my business”  Todd Stahl: Well, I think he was like, I'm going to make that too. I don't think he was worried about his business, but that applied film that they had been using, again, from a very long viewing distance, the product looks great. It's not yet ready to be viewed in shorter viewing distances, but the fact that it's applied, I do think that there is something like when you're buying a high-end product, you don't want people to be able to come up and pick it off, and I mean that definitely happens with every piece of film, I think I've ever worked with in my life. The first thing people do is take their fingernails, and they try to scrape the edge of it. It's just something that is instinctual about humans. But I think if you take that film now, I always say, if you put a piece of film on glass, it's just film. Once you laminate that film inside of the glass, you now have a glass product that protects it.  It does what you were saying. It prevents it from being yellowed over time because the inner layer blocks out almost 100 percent of the UV rays. So I think it's a great home for the LED mesh.  David: So does William Penn and Clear Motion Glass, do they operate separately, or are you kind of in the same office, the same building, and everything else, it's just different business cards? Todd Stahl: No, actually, we are in the same overall building complex, but we're not connected physically. So Clear Motion, basically has the equivalent of its own social security number, which down here in the business and for business, the IRS wants us to have EIN numbers for our businesses. So Clear Motion has an EIN number. Will Penn has an EIN number, obviously, but they definitely operate as two companies but obviously very close connections.  David: And you are running both?  Todd Stahl: I am running both right now, and spoiler alert: two's a lot harder to run than one.  David: Yes, I bet. If people want to find you online, they just go to ClearMotionGlass.com?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, that's it. They can find us there. There are some emails there. They can shoot an email to us and we'd love to talk to anybody if this product's right for them we're really excited about it and definitely creating a lot of energy with it. David: Are you at a trade show anytime soon?  Todd Stahl: Yeah, so we're doing Infocomm, I believe. It's the middle of June out in Vegas. Are you going to be there?  David: Yes.  Todd Stahl: Awesome, man. We get to meet in person, then. We'll carve out some time for that, Dave.  David: Absolutely, yeah, and that's a good show for you. There are tons of pro-AV people there. Todd Stahl: Yeah, I love that. That's a new space for us. So we're a little extra excited cause that's definitely not like a glass trade show is.  David: All right. Todd, thank you so much for your time.  Todd Stahl: All right. Yeah. I appreciate it, Dave. It was a pleasure.  

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The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The people behind college and pro sports have increasingly focused on making events multimedia experiences that start well before fans put their bums in seats, and we're now starting to see hints of that in the way public spaces are programmed. Screens are sync'd, and content is carefully timed and triggered based on data and all kinds of variables. While most integrators and solutions providers are focused on executing on ideas and needs, the New York company ANC has for years being delivering services and software for what it calls branded entertainment. The work started with collegiate and professional sports, but more recently the company has branched into areas like retail and mass transportation - including the multi-venue, many screens experience that stretches between the Fulton Center in Lower Manhattan and underground to the World Trade Center complex. I had a great chat with Joe Occhipinti, ANC's Chief Operating Officer. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Hey Joe, thank you for joining me. I've chatted with ANC in the past with Mark Stross but that's going back like six years or something like that. I'm curious, first of all, what your company does and maybe we could get into a little bit about the background of basically buying the company back from prior owners that started as a family company and now it's going back as a family-driven company, right? Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  It was a good five or six year run we had with them. And I was with the ANC for a lot of those years. I started back in 2012. So I saw the end of Jerry's initial ownership and then into the Learfield, and then I kind of parted ways with ANC in early 2022 and found my way into a company called C10 with Jerry's son, Jerry Cifarelli Jr. and shortly into 2022, Learfield reached out to us and was interested about looking into a potential acquisition and I think Learfield's business has changed a lot, right? Joe Occhipinti: Yes. So, Mark Stross, yeah, he's obviously still our CTO. So I'm sure you two had a fun-filled conversation. But yeah, a lot has changed in those five or six years that was probably just after, just before, Learfield had purchased ANC from our initial founder, Jerry Cifarelli Sr. who was kind of a pioneer in the signage and TV visible advertisement world. When he started ANC in the late nineties, it evolved the business into a large format, technology integrator for sports and other venues. So when Learfield took over, they obviously wanted to start integrating some of our technologies into all of their properties and universities which was great.  They were in multimedia rights and they've kind of shifted into a data-driven company with all their fans and engagement and I don't think it was core to them any longer and obviously with Jerry's father, having started the business, it was very near and dear to our hearts. We felt that ANC had all the right foundation but due to its success over 25 years, we can kind of take it back and change a few things, get the parts back together, streamline things, and get after it once again to bring the band back together. And that all happened in early 2023. We couldn't be happier to kind of be driving the boat again.  David: So, anybody if you meet at a cocktail party or a neighborhood party or whatever, says, what do you do? And more to the point, what does your company do? What do you tell them? Because it's quite involved. Joe Occhipinti: The loaded question. Hopefully they have like two drinks like one in each hand or something. But basically, the ANC consists of four business lines, we like to call it. So, the kind of the moneymaker, the thing that gets the most press is LED Technology installations and that could be the things that catch everyone's attention is obviously the large format LED displays but we're really a technology integrator, throughout the entire venue. So we have installed IPTV, we've installed TVs, we've installed full control rooms, things of that nature. And those are the apps which have a large format. I keep going back to that but the main video center hungs and arenas, center field boards and baseball. We have a 280 foot display at Westfield world trade center. Some of those marquee kinds of displays that you guys have heard and seen. Then we also have a services department or venue solutions we like to call it. After which all the pretty lights go up, we have to then maintain it and make sure it works for the life of that display or until the next renovation happens. So we actually have a fleet of operators out in the field who are going on pregame off days and making sure that modules are fixed and things are corrected. The proper content's loaded into the software and they're ready for the game presentation or for the next event or for the next change in scheduled content that's going to happen in an out of home venue. So we do a ton of that as well and then we also have our ad agency business. So that goes back to when Jerry started the whole business of TV visible signage, where we are acquiring inventory from teams that we work with or we go out and purchase it and then we also represent brands. So we'll place a discount tire behind home plate at a specific market that they would like to see or a number of different advertisers that we've been working with for years that really want to have that TV visible signage in sports our ad agency is mostly on the sports side we do some and out of home but obviously those are kind of owned by the properties and things like that so it's a little bit different and then what ties it all together is our software business. So It's called LiveSync now. It started as FasciaSoft, VisionSoft, VSoft and now it's LiveSync and it's all in the name. We specialize in syncing all your displays throughout the venue. So, somewhere like Westfield World Trade and Fulton Center, they're kind of one venue to put together. I think they have upwards of 75 or 80 displays between LCDs and LEDs and we have a constant stream of scheduled content. That's looping every 10 or 20 seconds 24*7 and you can sit there and watch in one area 5 to 10 displays all changing at the same exact time, frame to frame, everything running pixel to pixel. But the beautiful thing about live sync is what it does is we're wide open, open API, open source. If you want to play ball with everybody else that might be in the control room and we want to be able to trigger whatever else you might want to trigger with that piece of content. So if you wanted to run a home run graphic at Fenway park and you want to get your LED lights for a night game to flicker, you know when the guys around the bases. ANC Live Sync can trigger that software and it can all run synced and simultaneously. So, we really like to say that we can be the quarterback of the venue like somewhere like Wells Fargo Center. We trigger an IPTV program to have a goal animation run in the suites over whatever TV broadcast is being shown.  So, we've really come a long way in that regard. The software has come. Leaps and bounds, probably even from six years ago when you talk to Mark and we're really proud of the software that he's developed with his team. David: And this is your own software. It's not something you sell, right? It's software that you use when you're working with various customer venues.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. A lot of times our software is installed when we are doing the full install. Right. We don't really sell it out of cart. We have started to look into that, right? Like we think the software is at a point where it can do that and can be that. We did a deployment this year at I think it's PPG paints arena at Pittsburgh Penguins where another LED manufacturer got the LED job but they came to us for the software. So that was just a software standalone installation where we went in there into the control room and installed the servers and had it integrate with everything else they had there and it runs their live game presentation now. David: Right and when you're talking about being known for LED or being known for LED display control and so on but you're not a manufacturer or reseller of somebody else's product, right?  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we're not a manufacturer at all. So we do have competitors in this space, right? You know, big name, LED installers but they're all manufacturers. So, even though we were competitors, we're kind of not, you know what I mean? Like you can see a world where we can come together with some of these and enhance their business. Right. We feel that we can do a good job on the installation side and on the service side. But we really talk to the clients and figure out what they need from the LED signage perspective and we go out and find the best possible product to deliver that.  And then we'd like to use our four business lines to create a cohesive partnership with that client. So, once we're in a venue and they want to add a display here and there. It's very easy to add it into our existing licensing software or to add it to our services. Right? So, we like to use or give the partner back ad dollars by finding somebody to buy advertisements on their home plate or elsewhere in the venue. So, we really can use our different lines to be a full service partner for all of our clients.  David: It's interesting. Years ago, I remember talking to somebody about shopping malls and how shopping malls, particularly in Asia, were no longer just seen as warehouses or Harmonized venues for retail. They were experiential places that were programmed and that had like programming calendars and special events and everything else related to it and it kind of sounds like what you're doing and what you can deliver is you're really programming a venue or in the case of down by the World Trade Center, multiple venues so that content cascades across them things happen and so on, but it's all kind of cohesive as opposed to maybe more traditional digital signage and just display work where there's something driving this, there's something else driving that maybe they once in a while sync up but they're not really working together.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, I agree. I think these are all becoming everyone's fighting to get the people to their venue, right? I mean they want to drive sales or drive concessions or whatever it might be. And the malls are becoming more of let's go spend a few hours at the mall. I mean let's not just go pick up something I need, right? It's like, let's do this with the kids or see this special event or whatever it might be. And being able to create an atmosphere that's inviting and appealing to people's eyes kind of goes hand in hand with that. And then obviously you can promote the upcoming events and whatnot too. Right. So there's just more and more digital installations happening and the interesting thing that we're seeing in the business and it's happening in sports as well.  I mentioned Jerry Cifarelli Sr started with rotational signs like static banners behind home plate and on ribbons and that grew into LED behind home plate and then LEDs on Ravenstein, these massive center hongs. But now these at home venues and these sport venues are now expanding, right? You have these big conglomerates businesses that are doing stuff outside beyond just the stadium, right? Trying to get people there before the games and to the restaurants and to the bars and you're seeing digital marquee that you would typically see on the highway, kind of up on the back of a stadium or down the street at the bar that they just built, that's owned by the same kind of marketing company that owns the business or has similar interests. So, if they are kind of meshing a lot and they're all trying to fight for those eyeballs and fight for those people to bring the dollars and revenue in their way.  David: Yeah, it kind of seems like the worlds are converging, when I was reviewing your company website and seeing how deep a background you have in sports, both college and pro. And expanding into retail and in public spaces like mass transport and so on and thinking at first that well these are very different worlds but when you really think about it they're very similar worlds in a lot of ways these days because like airports are shopping malls and sports venues are no longer just the arena,  It's the multi purpose sort of event area with retail and residential and hotel and everything else and it's all being driven by the same developer or developer group. So they are harmonizing all this stuff.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, that's exactly right. And we're here to help. Whatever those entities are to create a cohesive appeal to the entire look. And then what's happening too is a lot of our venues are old, right? Our malls are a little older, our stadiums are getting older. So you're going to see more of these stadiums, new builds will happen but you're going to see a lot of renovations where there's going to be seating upgrades and there's going to be changes to potential sight lines and things of that nature and make egress and easier and more exits whatever it might be. But the technology is really what's going to put the renovations over the edge and it used to be that once you walked through that little tunnel and saw the baseball diamond, the first LED you saw that day was then. Now it's like when you're a couple of miles away on the highway, you see a billboard that's on the stadium. So right away, you're triggering people's eyeballs before they even get to the park. Then you're tailgating and you're seeing advertisements run in your face and then you scan your ticket and you see an LED when you go through the lobby and the concessions and things like that, those can be obviously monetizable and you can have advertisements there. And the same things happening in malls and in transit hubs and in other places where they're trying to grab your attention before you even think about heading into that wherever you're at, wherever you're going.  David: Do you have to sell this whole notion into these kinds of venues or do they just inherently get it now because they've seen it in action elsewhere and it's no longer just this sort of exotic concept? Joe Occhipinti: They definitely have seen it and they want to do it. I think where we come in is kind of helping them bring that to life. So we actually have like an architectural designer that will go and meet with teams and say, Hey, we have this area of our club or of our mall or transit hub that we'd really love to be able to monetize and put some LED signage here but we don't really know how to do it. So that's where we come in, I would say we consult them but we're really just trying to provide another service to an existing partner or potential partner to say, Hey, we'll take some pictures, we'll create a virtual world and we'll throw some LEDs on there and you guys can kind of see and understand what it might look like. And how do we angle it right to catch the attention of people coming up the stairs so that whatever it might be. So you can maximize the eyeballs and the dollars that you would get from that, right? Or the feel or the presentation that you want there. So we're doing that constantly. We have done that at a lot of our marquee venues where we start with one install and the next thing you know is there's three or four or five installs over the next five or six years where they're adding a screen here or there because they realize it's a high traffic area or during walkthroughs or tours. It's a good place to promote their upcoming events or whatever it might be, you know what I mean? So we kind of do that a lot for our places just to allow them to continue to add to the technology and to provide a better presentation to their constituents that are at the venue.  David: Is it just the highly visible stuff? In the case of, let's say, a sports and events center, are you also driving the menu boards, menu displays in concession and the ticket windows and things like that? Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, we've done some of that. As I mentioned, Wells Fargo is like our, I don't want to say crown jewel but it's been a really great partner for us for I believe over a decade. And we literally do everything there from, they have a sports book lounge on their top level to where they were ingesting staff feeds and scores and betting lines, their main video screen is kind of kinetic. It comes down at one size and opens another and we just have to hit one button in our software which allows it to do that and then their IPTV system. I think it's upwards of 700 LCD or TV displays that they have across the venue and we don't have our own IPTV software but we built a bridge between us and their IPTV providers so that when they do score a goal or there is a win, we can send graphics out there. Or if something they want to promote to their suites or to certain areas of the business of the venue, I should say, we can do that. Or even emergent emergency messaging or something like that. We have the ability to go full blast on every display that we touch that's in there. And then even still, they're even adding more, we have billboards out on 95 there in Philly. They added some more displays on their outside, where if you go to a flyers game tomorrow, you'll see us up there kind of installing it. So, like I said, they're trying to get you from when you're a few miles away to get you thinking, you know, I'm excited for this game and I'm excited to participate in this event but also what goes out on there, you alluded to that. I kind of said the betting lines and things like that. But one of our venues we have in the city, we have two JP Morgan Chase banks and you think that's kind of like a sleepy thing like who's going there to see the LED. But what Chase does for their customers is while you're sitting there, you might see If there are any subway delays, we work with the MTA to ensure that you'll see any traffic it might be if you're heading to Queens and say, it'll say take the tunnel not the bridge or whatever it is. Right. And whether we'll pop up. So yeah, we're not creating this data but we're ingesting it from different feeds and from different sources and we're making it pretty, we're creating the graphical ways that it might show up and kind of add to the person's experience being at whatever venue they're at.  David: Right. Now if I talk to virtually any CMS software company out there these days  and I asked them about data integration, they'll say, of course, yeah we do all kinds of  data handling. We've got APIs and this and that where we're all over that stuff but I get the impression that there are very much different kind of tiers of this that you can have kind of basic data integration that yes, you could query, let's say some transit data if it's publicly available as an XML feed or something. From what you're telling me, this is quite a bit more exotic than that. Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, I believe it is. I mean, I think what we can do is if the weather variable says it's going to be cloudy, we create a graphical thing that shows what you would think would be cloudy and that shows up there, right? Or if when it's time for the weather to come through and it's sunny, the background will say 65 and it'll be sunny but if it's 65 and rainy, the background will have rain on it. So we're even going to that level where what the trigger is we're not just spitting out what the variable is but we're trying to create a cohesive content experience too, that kind of shows what's happening and then it allows us to trigger different items in our software too that if we can automatically change when the variable goes from top one to bottom one, it automatically changes the advertisements that would run in that happening. So it even comes with efficiencies on our end of what we're able to and how we're able to gain presentation and things of that nature. But yeah, I mean these are little subtle things that the customer or the fan really appreciates and it's just great for us that we have an in-house design team. We recreate these things, we're then our statistical engineers and our developers are then creating ways for it all to work together. So yeah, you do have your base level where we just want to see the scores on a ticker which we're happy to do but if they want to get more involved and do some more graphical things to enhance the experience, we're obviously able to do that as well. David: When it comes to things like game day experiences for big sports venues and multi purpose venues like that, do these organizations have their own teams that handle all that and they just kind of work with you or are you actually doing the game day experience for these companies? Joe Occhipinti: It's different at every venue. We're happy to be part of the team. However they would like us to be. It goes anywhere from a place like the game bridge field house, right? They just hosted the all star game and we live sync touches every LED display that's permanently installed there. And our operators heavily involved in production meetings need to understand what the run of the show is to load the content prior to the game. He's been there so long. I'm sure maybe he will make some say, Hey, maybe try this or that. I don't know but he's been there for a while. He's great at what he does and they fully trust us to carry out the run of shows that they have created but what might be in that run of show or graphics that the in-house design team also creates. So that's kind of part of the services department that I mentioned before, we also have graphic designers in house that if they want a special intro or some graphical element for a camera like a kiss cam or something. These keys and things that you see that help with game press, we kind of create those things for them. And our guys are downloading it, testing it, making sure that it works for the game when it inevitably runs in the game. So it is varying levels somewhere passive, right? We're like, Hey, we're here, let us know what you need us to do. Let us know what content needs to be run. And then in others where we're heavily involved where we're talking to them twice a week on content and churning out thousands of hours of graphical design and in their production meetings and we're upgrading their stat layers every season and creating a new look that might go with their season tickets or whatever it might be. Right. So they would kind of like to have that whole cohesive kind of brand. Brand look that they go for. So it does vary per client just based on your level with them and what they want to get out of the relationship.  David: Your company background is much more in sports but as we mentioned earlier, you kind of branched into retail and mass transport and other kinds of things like that. How does the business break down now? Is it still predominantly sports or are you seeing quite a bit of traction in these newer areas?  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. I mean, obviously the legacy business, it used to be ANC sports and we dropped the sports when we started to foray into other things, the at home kind of markets. I would say we do more volume and on the support side but there's obviously a lot of growth and a lot of greenfield on the place we call it places are out of the home side. And we've been lucky enough to do some impressive installations where the clients have trusted us to perform those, even though we had a lack of experience in it. I've mentioned Fulton and Westfield, that was our first foray into it and was a hit and it looks great and still looks great, seven eight nine years later. We did a really good install down in South street seaport which we believe is really impressive. We did some stuff at Moynihan train hall. So we've been lucky to have some big marquee type installations. We are trying to build our relationships with a lot of the out of home players without naming any names. Like we were trying to build those relationships and just kind of see what the partnerships look like there and be an installer and integrator for them as well, just like we've been able to do in the sports.  So, I think the numbers will probably say that we're still more of a sports type business. But I don't think it's that far off from being even one day and I think we are going to put some resources behind it and we're going to do some stuff with the software that will help us change. We are in the process  of changing our user interface to be a little bit easier to use. We're doing some cloud type and quick play type stuff at NBC Universal right now, where they can walk around with their phones when they're doing tours and they can just change what's being displayed on the screens from their phone. So we are putting some resources behind it because we believe in it that we could help a lot of different partners achieve their goals there. David: I would imagine the typical media companies, even very large ones, would be pretty happy if somebody handled these more involved installations like Times Square or an entertainment district where there's a lot of screens because they're primarily in the business of selling media time and display faces and so on. I don't know that they really want to get all that dirty in terms of running these kinds of networks, particularly when they start to get quite complicated.  Joe Occhipinti: Literally and figuratively dirty like we're also installing the displays. It's a heavy construction type thing too. Right. So we're installing the display, we're doing the steel work and then we're plugging everything in and running the show as well. So yeah, I think we have a lot to offer. And obviously, we need to make some enhancements and it's almost like the out of home stuff isn't easier. It's different from in-game live presentations. And like you said, the legacy business was built that way. So when we got into the out of home market, it worked for out of home but we had some of these features like scheduling and overtakes and some of these things but they weren't maybe as robust as they are today cause we started doing more in it.  So, we've really focused in and debugged them and made them stronger and better so that we can run an out of home type market but it's almost too robust for the simple kind of one display on the side of a building like I'm talking about where we specialize is game presentation where you see five or six or seven different screens. They all have to be synced to kind of make the game presentation feel cohesive or in certain venues like Westfield, where you see many screens at once, you don't want it to be choppy and look off but we're maybe a little bit too robust when it comes to a single display, right? And because we're too robust, our features, maybe a little bit heavy in terms of costs. So we're going to try to address some of those things and really create something that would get all the features that we have but can also be used in an easier type setting as well and not be so cost effective and then like I said, we want to start getting our cloud infrastructure stronger and things like that, so that people can go by and change it with a phone. Right now we have people on staff that are scheduling these places for us in our lives. They're voting in and scheduling all these things. It would be easy if you work for Westfield World Trade and you're trying to court a client. You don't have to coordinate with ANC and the scheduler to, Hey, between 11 and 12, I want to show Sixteen Nine podcasts on all displays.  You could just walk around and you could press a button on your phone and right when you're showing up and you can just launch it. Right. So we're trying to do things like that.  David: The Fulton Center thing is interesting in how it crosses into a world trade in the Oculus retail area and so on. What did you learn out of that in terms of putting together a visual network that was going to run across multiple venues that aren't necessarily visible to one another. They're connected by tunnels or concourses but they're different things in certain respects and also, instead of a game where people are sitting for 40 minutes, almost all of them are constantly on the move.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. So obviously they placed the screens in places where they felt there was going to be higher traffic, right? Like an entrance to a subway tunnel or you come out of the path from Jersey and you're trying to get up into street level Manhattan and you walk that past, what amounts to almost four or five hundred feet of screens and it was definitely a little difficult to envision what they were trying to do but as it started to come together, it made a lot of sense to us and they kind of made it a little easier on us than had they treated the different areas of the facility to want to run different things, right? They want the whole facility to run everything all at the same time. So we're able to create the software, create batches that have all the displays and throw all the content in there and then schedule them appropriately rather than this side underneath by the path station needs to run this at this time and then over by tower two, we want to run that. And then in Fulton, we want to run this other thing.  They are two separate venues so we have two different schedules going at each one because they're different trains that run at each station, right? So in Fulton, you have four or five. And in Westfield, you have the AC and the two-three or whatever it is. So you have to decipher what goes where but the way they wanted to run it allowed things to be a little bit easier on the back end but we had to deal with network infrastructure and everything else like that which was new to us in this type of a venue. But they're really there to obviously be advertisements. Also, they need to make the place feel beautiful. Have you ever been down there? It's like all marble, it's a really beautiful facility. So they had to fit and they wanted to be in your face cause they were driving advertisements. They want to be appealing but they still need it to be beautiful and look good as well. So there was a lot of pressure on us too. The 24/7 nature of it is a little different than sports where you have a game and if something goes wrong, you generally have till the next day or two days later to fix it. That doesn't happen outside of home. Things gotta be working 23 and a half hours a day with not a lot of downtime and not a lot of issues happening because advertisers are walking through it and potential advertisers and the customers. So it was a lot of pressure on us. We literally have people walking the facilities downtown, New York, for 18 hours a day reporting issues and fixing issues. We don't want to have any downtime on these displays because the stakes are that high.  David: Yeah, really. How many people do you have working in the company? Roughly?  Joe Occhipinti: We have about just under a hundred full timers and depending on the seasonality of it, we have around 200 part timers that work for us all across the country.  David: And of the full timers are most of them kind of in the greater New York area. Joe Occhipinti: There's probably like 30 percent in this area, just cause like I said, we have a lot downtown and kind of work at our headquarters in Westchester but we're pretty spread out. We have upwards of almost a hundred venues across the country where we have something.  So, in those markets, like in LA or Washington DC or Baltimore, where we have a lot of different things going on. We have full timers that are in those markets actually running a stable of part timers as well.  David: Yeah, because they need to be there. They can't just say, well I can get there next Thursday or something. Joe Occhipinti: Yeah, they gotta be there at a moment's notice most of the time. .  David: Alright. This is great. If people wanna know more about ANC, they just go to ANC.com.  Joe Occhipinti: Yeah. ANC.com.  David: Nice and simple.  Joe Occhipinti: We do some stuff on social media but LinkedIn is really probably the one that makes the most sense if you want to check out some of our posts and what we've been up to lately. But we just did a full rebrand. We changed our logo. We kind of changed our colors after we bought the company back. I think the website looks great. So yeah, ANC.com will take you straight there and you guys can learn everything there is to know about us.  David: Powered by C10, I see. Joe Occhipinti: Powered by C10. C10's still around. Obviously, Jerry Cifrelli Jr. founded that company and that was the vehicle from which we acquired ANC but obviously with the legacy he had with his father and the name brand that ANC had, we decided we wanted to keep it. And just give it a refresh and push it forward. David: All right. Joe, Thank you very much for your time.  Joe Occhipinti: Thank you, Dave. This has been great. I appreciate it.

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.

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GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! To get your new unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, and get the plan shipped to your door for FREE, go to https://www.mintmobile.com/genius15 Follow David on IG: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on Insta: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We haven't followed Albert Einstein's ratio exactly here on Portals, but there is great wisdom in his insight that if given an hour to solve a problem, he'd spend 55 minutes focusing on the problem, and five minutes thinking about solutions. It's one of the perceptions helping us uncover practical solutions to the puzzle and pain of the human predicament.In the latest addition of the series “Current Openings: What the World Doesn't Quite Get Yet”, we distill the new intelligence, power and potential discovered as we face the challenges of living a purposeful life in a time of chaos and crises. Earlier Current Openings applied Einstein's advice and clearly defined the dilemmas: the addiction trap; the knowledge and emotion problems; the brain/body conundrum.In this conversation, Aviv Shahar and David Price Francis review the profound insights that are opening pathways to the true nature and potential of the human mind and emotions. We also see the healing available when we live a life in natural balance and harmony with the planet and universe.What we've discovered along the way includes:Esoteric knowledge isn't a secret to keep hidden, but potential to be activated, brought online vs. online. The key is the initiatory process that activates the energetic and spiritual domains.In challenging times, the best-case scenario is to engage with multiple paths concurrently; find the tethering moment of surrender and uplift through different paths at different times.The communal journey has its lights and shadows, agonies and ecstasies; it's where we can find a distributed collective intelligence and discovery.Another path is a mission-based endeavor and practical application with a purpose that will lead our development, rather than us trying to develop ourselves.Key to the addiction trap is understanding synaptic or circuitry locking — repetitive thoughts creating strong synaptic connections that form grooves in our brain we keep repeating.We understand the universe as a living system that wants to both preserve itself and conserve energy, and evolve to become more capable, connected, and intelligent.We engage with the leading edge of consciousness through the lens of choosing which program and habits will we power; we avoid the erroneous choices that can hijack our system.This conversation builds upon concepts and insights explored throughout the Current Openings series. It 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 upcoming special events can be found on the Events page. Also visit and subscribe to our YouTube channel. TWEETABLE QUOTES “So I think starting with the predicament — if we don't realize there is a predicament — we don't get to the starting gate. So if we're in our lives and we just think, ‘ Well, this is the way that life is, and I need to be in harmony with the world culture the way it goes on, ' that's as far as it goes. Then we're staying with the exoteric, which is staying within the fact that I've got my established religion that I was born into.” (David)“So if we spend our life, our brain life, playing Mutant Ninja Three or some other video game dynamic that is very separated from the universe, the idea of the meta-universe, the human-made universe -- and then that would be bringing in something that is alien to our systems or actually setting us up for contradiction and various kinds of anxiety -- more medications get sold to handle that -- and we're dealing with a disconnect between our brain and our body in that sense. So probably most of the so-called chronic diseases are a great part of what causes the disconnect between these two parts, I think.” (David)“Collecting our experiences is like gathering potatoes. So we gather and gather and gather potatoes in our life. But then, if we're going to actually then create something out of those potatoes we need to have the ability to distill from the potatoes the spirit of what's at the essence - when we can take them and bring them through a refining process. Because according to our development, it's not just our experience that creates who we are, it's what we make of that experience. And I think that's fundamental to what we're getting to in The Human Predicament.” (David)“So to me, the energy, the connection, is made when we get the right kinds of understanding and have a pursuit of purpose. We can make an energy connection that actually causes that kind of coolness and trilling, and we feel it in our whole system. That is going to be sort of a big part of the human proposition: how we can raise the level of vibration not only mentally but in every other aspect.” (David) “What we essentially said was that, number one, the universe is a living system. And this living system, when we say it's alive it means it is a place full of energy, and it has two drivers. One, the first, it wants to preserve itself, to preserve and conserve energy, and then it wants to allocate the preserved and conserved energy to evolve and become more sophisticated, more capable, more connected, more intelligent.” (Aviv) RESOURCES MENTIONED Portals of Perception WebsiteAviv's LinkedIn Aviv's TwitterAviv's WebsiteEnergy Worlds

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! To get your new unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, and get the plan shipped to your door for FREE, go to https://www.mintmobile.com/genius15 Follow David on Insta: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Head to https://www.TryFum.com and use code GENIUS to save 10% OFF your order! To get your new unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, and get the plan shipped to your door for FREE, go to https://www.mintmobile.com/genius15 Follow David on Insta: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you to our Sponsors:  Rocket Money - Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions - and manage your money the easy way - by going to rocketmoney.com/trashtuesday BetterHelp - Find your bright spot this season, with Better Help. Visit betterhelp.com/trashtuesday today to get 10% off your first month. DraftKings - Download the DraftKings casino app NOW and sign up with promo code TRASHTUESDAY! New customers can get a deposit match up to $500 or more! For you! For a friend! Trash Tuesday Merch!! Get it at https://itstrashtuesday.com/   See Esther on tour. Check out dates at estheronice.com See Annie on tour. Check out dates at https://www.annielederman.com/shows More David So:   youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt8OnQ7ztuLrPrehlj8ZuuQ Twitter - https://twitter.com/davidsocomedy GeniusBrain podcast - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL91mUNcJ6cuRQQUgY7TNXMeraip4Lx5hD Dudes Behind the Foods - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOOzLp9dthYQyChFh4ol_TMFz0AbgIHRa The Casuals MMA podcast - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn_LM5J3HGszLxdbCAyzkkg 02:40 - David So Immediately Roasts Esther 04:25 - David So Immediately Roasts Khalyla  06:15 - David So on Weddings 11:52 - David Insults Khalyla Again 15:37 - Esther Will be a Dance Mom 18:30 - David's ADHD/ADD 21:48 - Bobby's Been Different Lately 25:09 - David So's Issue with Filipino Girls 27:45 - Micropenises and Pulling Out  30:55 - Esther's Not Over Her Highschool BF 35:47 - David Rips the Girls Apart for Over Thinking Men 39:15 - Why Nice Guys Actually Finish FIRST 45:45 - Women Talk Too Much and Men Don't Care 49:10 - Banana Break/Bird Watching 52:00 - Esther is a Disney Princess & David's Schocked 56:20 - Liking Cars & Driving is Not a Personality 01:01:30 - Realizing Our Dads Have Anxiety 01:05:30 - Socializing is Exhausting 01:09:07 - Girls Fall for Each Other Too Quickly 01:10:27 - Why David is The Best Straight Guy Friend to Women 01:15:00 - David Would Never Set His Friends Up w/ Annie, Esther, and Khalyla  01:19:00 - Why Couples Fighting Is a Good Thing 01:29:00 - David So is One of The Girls   Subscribe! https://bit.ly/HitOurButtonsOfficial Clips Channel: https://bit.ly/2QDAi8X Trash Tuesday Podcast iTunes Audio Feed: https://bit.ly/TrashTuesdayPodTrash Tuesday Podcast Spotify Audio Feed: https://bit.ly/TTPodAudioTrash Tuesday Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itstrashtuesday     Listen to our other Podcasts: TigerBelly - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tigerbelly/id1041201977 Rick and Esther Have a Time - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rick-and-esther-have-a-time/id1694264079 AnnieWood - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anniewood/id1653515392   Follow Us: Khalyla Kuhn - https://www.instagram.com/khalamityk Annie Lederman - https://www.instagram.com/annielederman Esther Povitsky - https://www.instagram.com/esthermonster Theme Song Written by: Bobby Lee http://instagram.com/bobbyleelive Banana Break Song by: Can Nguyen 

Thank you to our Sponsors:  Rocket Money - Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions - and manage your money the easy way - by going to rocketmoney.com/trashtuesday BetterHelp - Find your bright spot this season, with Better Help. Visit betterhelp.com/trashtuesday today to get 10% off your first month. DraftKings - Download the DraftKings casino app NOW and sign up with promo code TRASHTUESDAY! New customers can get a deposit match up to $500 or more! For you! For a friend! Trash Tuesday Merch!! Get it at https://itstrashtuesday.com/   See Esther on tour. Check out dates at estheronice.com See Annie on tour. Check out dates at https://www.annielederman.com/shows More David So:   youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt8OnQ7ztuLrPrehlj8ZuuQ Twitter - https://twitter.com/davidsocomedy GeniusBrain podcast - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL91mUNcJ6cuRQQUgY7TNXMeraip4Lx5hD Dudes Behind the Foods - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOOzLp9dthYQyChFh4ol_TMFz0AbgIHRa The Casuals MMA podcast - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn_LM5J3HGszLxdbCAyzkkg 02:40 - David So Immediately Roasts Esther 04:25 - David So Immediately Roasts Khalyla  06:15 - David So on Weddings 11:52 - David Insults Khalyla Again 15:37 - Esther Will be a Dance Mom 18:30 - David's ADHD/ADD 21:48 - Bobby's Been Different Lately 25:09 - David So's Issue with Filipino Girls 27:45 - Micropenises and Pulling Out  30:55 - Esther's Not Over Her Highschool BF 35:47 - David Rips the Girls Apart for Over Thinking Men 39:15 - Why Nice Guys Actually Finish FIRST 45:45 - Women Talk Too Much and Men Don't Care 49:10 - Banana Break/Bird Watching 52:00 - Esther is a Disney Princess & David's Schocked 56:20 - Liking Cars & Driving is Not a Personality 01:01:30 - Realizing Our Dads Have Anxiety 01:05:30 - Socializing is Exhausting 01:09:07 - Girls Fall for Each Other Too Quickly 01:10:27 - Why David is The Best Straight Guy Friend to Women 01:15:00 - David Would Never Set His Friends Up w/ Annie, Esther, and Khalyla  01:19:00 - Why Couples Fighting Is a Good Thing 01:29:00 - David So is One of The Girls   Subscribe! https://bit.ly/HitOurButtonsOfficial Clips Channel: https://bit.ly/2QDAi8X Trash Tuesday Podcast iTunes Audio Feed: https://bit.ly/TrashTuesdayPodTrash Tuesday Podcast Spotify Audio Feed: https://bit.ly/TTPodAudioTrash Tuesday Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/itstrashtuesday     Listen to our other Podcasts: TigerBelly - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tigerbelly/id1041201977 Rick and Esther Have a Time - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rick-and-esther-have-a-time/id1694264079 AnnieWood - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anniewood/id1653515392   Follow Us: Khalyla Kuhn - https://www.instagram.com/khalamityk Annie Lederman - https://www.instagram.com/annielederman Esther Povitsky - https://www.instagram.com/esthermonster Theme Song Written by: Bobby Lee http://instagram.com/bobbyleelive Banana Break Song by: Can Nguyen 

Try MOOD's new THCa flower today and for 20% OFF your first order and a FREE gram of THCa flower, go to https://www.hellomood.com and use promo code GENIUS. Get a $13 starter set for just $3 at https://www.Harrys.com/GENIUS GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Go to https://www.zocdoc.com/GENIUS and download the zocodoc app for FREE! Grab the NordVPN deal at https://nordvpn.com/geniusbrain and get extra subscription time! Follow David on Insta: @DavidSoComedy If you want to support the show, and get all the episodes ad-free go to: https://geniusbrain.supercast.com/ To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Try MOOD's new THCa flower today and for 20% OFF your first order and a FREE gram of THCa flower, go to https://www.hellomood.com and use promo code GENIUS. Get a $13 starter set for just $3 at https://www.Harrys.com/GENIUS GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Go to https://www.zocdoc.com/GENIUS and download the zocodoc app for FREE! Follow David on Insta: @DavidSoComedy To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Try MOOD's new THCa flower today and for 20% OFF your first order and a FREE gram of THCa flower, go to https://www.hellomood.com and use promo code GENIUS. Grab the NordVPN deal at https://nordvpn.com/geniusbrain and get extra subscription time! Head to https://www.TryFum.com and use code GENIUS to save 10% OFF your order! Get a $13 starter set for just $3 at https://www.Harrys.com/GENIUS GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on Insta: @DavidSoComedy To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To get your new unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, and get the plan shipped to your door for FREE, go to https://www.mintmobile.com/genius15 GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Get a starter kit for just $3 at https://www.harrys.com/genius Follow David on Insta: @daviddocomedy Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Go to https://www.zocdoc.com/GENIUS and download the zocodoc app for FREE! Grab the NordVPN deal at https://nordvpn.com/geniusbrain and get extra subscription time! Follow David on Insta: @daviddocomedy Follow Bi Nguyen on Insta: @killerbeemma Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David Colebatch, CEO of Tidal, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Tidal's recent shift to a product-led approach and why empathizing with customers is always their most important job. David describes what it was like to grow the company from scratch on a boot-strapped basis, and how customer feedback and challenges inform the company strategy. Corey and David discuss the cost-savings measures cloud customers are now embarking on, and David discusses how constant migrations are the new normal. Corey and David also discuss the impact that generative AI is having not just on tech, but also on creative content and interactions in our everyday lives. About David David is the CEO & Founder of Tidal.  Tidal is empowering businesses to transform from traditional on-premises IT-run organizations to lean-agile-cloud powered machines.Links Referenced: Company website: https://tidal.cloud LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-colebatch/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Returning guest today, David Colebatch is still the CEO at Tidal. David, how have you been? It's been a hot second.David: Thanks, Corey. Yeah, it's been a fantastic summer for me up here in Toronto.Corey: Yeah, last time I saw you, was it New York or was it DC? They all start to run together to me.David: I think it was DC. Yeah.Corey: That's right. Public Sector Summit where everything was just a little bit stranger than most of my conversations. It's, “Wait, you're telling me there's a whole bunch of people who use the cloud but don't really care about money? What—how does that work?” And I say that not from the position of harsh capitalism, but from the position of we're a government; saving costs is nowhere in our mandate. Or it is, but it's way above my pay grade and I run the cloud and call it good. It seems like that attitude is evolving, but slowly, which is kind of what you want to see. Titanic shifts in governing are usually not something you want to see done on a whim, overnight.David: No, absolutely. A lot of the excitement at the DC summit was around new capabilities. And I was actually really intrigued. It was my first time in the DC summit, and it was packed, from the very early stages of the morning, great attendance throughout the day. And I was just really impressed by some of the new capabilities that customers are leveraging now and the new use cases that they're bringing to market. So, that was a good time for me.Corey: Yeah. So originally, you folks were focused primarily on migrations and it seems like that's evolving a little bit. You have a product now for starters, and the company's name is simply Tidal, without a second word. So, brevity is very much the soul of wit, it would seem. What are you doing these days?David: Absolutely. Yeah, you can find us at tidal.cloud. Yeah, we're focused on migrations as a primary means to help a customer achieve new capabilities. We're about accelerating their journey to cloud and optimizing once they're in cloud as well. Yeah, we're focused on identifying the different personas in an enterprise that are trying to take that cloud journey on with people like project, program managers, developers, as well as network people, now.Corey: It seems, on some level, like you are falling victim to the classic trap that basically all of us do, where you have a services company—which is how I thought of you folks originally—now, on some level, trying to become a product or a platform company. And then you have on the other side of it—places that we're—“Oh, we're a SaaS company. This is hard. We're going to do services instead.” And it seems like no one's happy. We're all cats, perpetually on the wrong side of a given door. Is that an accurate assessment for where you are? Or am I misreading the tea leaves on this one?David: A little misread, but close—Corey: Excellent.David: You're right. We bootstrapped our product company with services. And from day one, we supported our customers, as well as channel partners, many of the [larger size 00:03:20] that you know, we supported them in helping their customers be successful. And that was necessary for us as we bootstrapped the company from zero. But lately, and certainly in the last 12 months, it's very much a product-led company. So, leading with what customers are using our software for first, and then supporting that with our customer success team.Corey: So, it's been an interesting year. We've seen simultaneously a market correction, which I think has been sorely needed for a while, but that's almost been overshadowed in a lot of conversations I've had by the meteoric rise and hype around generative AI. Have you folks started rebranding everything with a fresh coat of paint labeled generative AI yet as it seems like so many folks have? What's your take on it?David: We haven't. You won't see a tidal.ai from us. Look, our thoughts are leveraging the technology as we always had to provide better recommendations and suggestions to our users, so we'll continue to embrace generative AI as it applies to specific use cases within our product. We're not going to launch a brand new product just around the AI theme.Corey: Yeah, but even that seems preferable to what a lot of folks are doing, which is suddenly pivoting their entire market positioning and then act, “Oh, we've been working in generative AI for 5, 10, 15 years,” in some cases. Google and Amazon most notably have talked about how they've been doing this for decades. It's, “Cool. Then why did OpenAI beat you all to the punch on this?” And in many cases, also, “You've been working on this for decades? Huh. Then why is Alexa so terrible?” And they don't really have a good talking point for that yet, but it's the truth.David: Absolutely. Yeah. I will say that the world changed with the OpenAI launch, of course, and we had a new way to interact with this technology now that just sparked so much interest from everyday people, not just developers. And so, that got our juices flowing and creativity mode as well. And so, we started thinking about, well, how can we recommend more to other users of our system as opposed to just cloud architects?You know, how can we support project managers that are, you know, trying to summarize where they're at, by leveraging some of this technology? And I'm not going to say we have all the answers for this baked yet, but it's certainly very exciting to start thinking outside the box with a whole new bunch of capabilities that are available to us.Corey: I tried doing some architecture work with Chat-Gippity—yes, that is how I pronounce it—and it has led me down the primrose path a little bit because what it says is often right. Mostly. But there are some edge-case exceptions of, “Ohh, it doesn't quite work that way.” It reminds me at some level of a junior engineer who doesn't know the answer, so they bluff. And that's great, but it's also a disaster.Because if I can't trust the things you tell me and you to call it out when you aren't sure on something, then I've got to second guess everything you tell me. And it feels like when it comes to architecture and migrations in particular, the devil really is in the details. It doesn't take much to design a greenfield architecture on a whiteboard, whereas being able to migrate something from one place to another and not have to go down in the process? That's a lot of work.David: Absolutely. I have used AI successfully to do a lot of research very quickly across broad market terms and things like that, but I do also agree with you that we have to be careful using it as the carte blanche force multiplier for teams, especially in migration scenarios. Like, if you were to throw Chat-Gippity—as you say—a bunch of COBOL code and say, “Hey, translate this,” it can do a pretty good job, but the devil is in that detail and you need to have an experienced person actually vet that code to make sure it's suitable. Otherwise, you'll find yourself creating buggy things downstream. I've run into this myself, you know, “Produce some Terraform for me.” And when I generated some Terraform for an architecture I was working on, I thought, “This is pretty good.” But then I realized, it's actually two years old and that's about how old my skills were as well. So, I needed to engage someone else on my team to help me get that job done.Corey: So, migrations have been one of those things that people have been talking about for well, as long as we've had more than one data center on the planet. “How do we get our stuff from over here to over there?” And so, on and so forth. But the context and tenor of those conversations has changed dramatically. What have you seen this past year or so as far as emerging trends? What is the industry doing that might not be obvious from the outside?David: Well, cost optimization has been number one on people's minds, and migrating with financial responsibility in mind has been refreshing. So, working backwards from what their customer outcomes are is still number one in our book, and when we see increasingly customers say, “Hey, I want to migrate to cloud to close a data center or avoid some capital outlay,” that's the first thing we hear, but then we work backwards from what was their three-year plan. And then what we've seen so far is that customers have changed from a very IT-centric view of cloud and what they're trying to deliver to much more business-centric. Now, they'll say things like, “I want to be able to bring new capabilities to market more quickly. I want to be able to operate and leverage some of these new generative AI technologies.” So, they actually have that as a driving force for migrations, as opposed to an afterthought.Corey: What I have found is that, for whatever reason, not giving a shit about the AWS bill in my business was a zero-interest-rate phenomenon. Suddenly people care an awful lot. But they're caring is bounded. If there's a bunch of easy stuff to do that saves a giant pile of money, great, yeah, most folks are going to do that. But then it gets into the idea of opportunity cost and trade-offs. And there's been a shift there that I've seen where people are willing to invest more in that cost-cutting work than they were in previous years.It makes sense, but it's also nice to finally have a moment to validate what I've assumed for seven years now that, yeah, in a recession or a retraction of the broader industry, suddenly, this is going to be top-of-mind for a lot of folks. And it's nice to see that that approach was vindicated because the earlier approach that I saw when we saw something like this was at the start of Covid. And at that point, no one knew what was happening week-to-week and consulting leads basically stopped for six months. And that was oh, maybe we don't have a counter-cyclical business. But no, it turns out that when money means something again as interest rates rise, people care about it more.David: Yeah. It is nice to see that. And people are trying to do more with less and become more efficient in an advanced pace these days. I don't know about you, but I've seen the trends towards the low-hanging fruit being done at this point so people have already started using savings plans and capabilities like that, and now they're embarking in more re-architecture of applications. But I think one stumbling block that we've noticed is that customers are still struggling to know where to apply those transformations across their portfolio. They'll have one or two target apps that everybody knows because they're the big ones on the bill, but beneath that, the other 900 applications in their portfolio, which ones do I do next? And that's still a question that we're seeing come up, time and again.Corey: One thing that I'm starting to see people talking about from my perspective, has been suddenly they really care about networking in a way that they did not previously. And I mean, this in the TCP/IP sense, not the talking to interesting people and doing interesting things. That's been basically steady-state for a while. But from my perspective, the conversations I'm having are being driven by, “Wait a minute. AWS is going to start charging $3.50 a month per assigned IPV4 address. Oh, dear. We have been careless in our approach to this.” Is that something that you're seeing shaping the conversations you're having with folks?David: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean right off the bat, our team went through very quickly and inventoried our IPV4, and certainly, customers are doing that as well. I found that, you know, in the last seven years, the migration conversations were having become broader across an enterprise customer. So, we've mapped out different personas now, and the networking teams playing a bigger role for migrations, but also optimizations in the cloud. And I'll give you an example.So, one large enterprise, their networking team approached us at the same time as their cloud architects who were trying to work on a migration approached us. And the networking team had a different use case. They wanted to inventory all the IP addresses on-premises, and some that they already had in the cloud. So, they actually leveraged—shameless plug here—but they leveraged out a LightMesh IPAM solution to do that. And what that brought to light for us was that the integration of these different teams working together now, as opposed to working around each other. And I do think that's a bit of a trend change for us.Corey: IPAM has always been one of those interesting things to me because originally, the gold standard in this space was—let's not kid ourselves—a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. And then there are a bunch of other offerings that entered into the space. And for a while I thought most of these were ridiculous because the upgrade was, you know, Google Sheets so you can collaborate. But having this done in a way with particular permissions and mapping in a way that's intuitive and doesn't require everyone to not mess up when they're looking at it, especially as you get into areas of shared responsibility between different divisions or different team members who are in different time zones and whatnot, this becomes a more and more intractable problem. It's one of those areas where small, scrappy startups don't understand what the fuss is about, and big enterprises absolutely despair of finding something that works for them.AWS launched their VPC IPAM offering a while back and if you look at it from the perspective of competing with Google Sheets, its pricing is Looney Tunes. But I've met an awful lot of people who have sworn by it in the process, as they look at these things. Now, of course, the caveat is that like most AWS offerings, it's great in a pure AWS native environment, but as soon as you start getting into other providers and whatnot, it gets very tricky very quickly.David: No, absolutely. And usability of an IP address management solution is something to consider. So, you know, if you're trying to get on board with IPAM, do you want to do three easy steps or do you want to follow 150? And I think that's a really big barrier to entry for a lot of networking teams, especially those that are not too familiar with cloud already. But yeah, where we've seen the networking folks get more involved is around, like, identifying endpoints and devices that must be migrated to cloud, but also managing those subnets and planning their VPC designs upfront.You've probably seen this before yourself where customers have allocated a whole bunch of address space over time—an overlapping address space, I should say—only to then later want to [peer 00:13:47] those networks. And that's something that if you think you're going to be doing downstream, you should really plan for that ahead of time and make sure your address space is allocated correctly. Problems vary. Like, everyone's architecture is different, of course, but we've certainly noticed that being one of the top-button items. And then that leads into a migration itself. You're not migrating to cloud now; you're migrating within the cloud and trying to reorganize address spaces, which is a whole other planning activity to consider.Corey: When you take a look at, I guess the next step in these things, what's coming next in the world of migrations? I recently got to talk to someone who was helping their state migrate from, effectively, mainframes in many cases into a cloud environment. And it seems, on some level, like everyone on a mainframe, one, is very dependent on that workload; those things are important, so that's why they're worth the extortionate piles of money, but it also feels like they've been trying to leave the mainframe for decades in many cases. Now, there's a sense that for a lot of these folks, the end is nigh for their mainframe's lifespan, so they're definitely finally taking the steps to migrate. What's the next big frontier once the, I guess, either the last holdouts from that side of the world wind up getting into a cloud or decide they never will? It always felt to me like migrations are one of those things that's going to taper off and it's not going to be something that is going to be a growth industry because the number of legacy workloads is, at least theoretically, declining. Not so sure that's accurate, though.David: I don't think it is either. If we look back at past migrations, you know, 90, 95% of them are often lift-and-shift to EC2 or x86 on VMware in the cloud. And a lot of the work that we're seeing now is being described as optimization. Like, “Look at my EC2 workloads and come up with cloud-native or transformative processes for me.” But those are migrations as well because we run the same set of software, the same processes over those workloads to determine how we can re-platform and refactor them into more native services.So, I think, you know, the big shift for us is just recognizing that the term ‘migrations' needs to be well-defined and communicated with folks. Migrations are actually constant now and I would argue we're doing more migrations within customers now than we have in the past because the rate of change is just so much faster. And I should add, on the topic of mainframe and legacy systems, we have seen this pivot away from teams looking for emulation layers for those technologies, you know, where they want to forklift the functionality, but they don't want to really roll up their sleeves and do any coding work. So, they're previously looking to automatically translate code or emulate that compute layer in the cloud, and the big pivot we've seen in the last 12 months, I'd say, is that customers are more willing to actually understand how to rebuild their applications in the cloud. And that's a fantastic story because it means they're not kicking that technology debt can down the road any further. They're really trying to embrace cloud and leverage some of these new capabilities that have come to market.Corey: What do you see as, I guess, the reason that a number of holdouts have not yet done a migration? Like, historically, I've seen some that are pretty obvious: the technology wasn't there. Well, cloud has gotten to a point now where it is hard to identify a capability that isn't there in some form. And there's always been the sunk cost fallacy where, “Well, we've already bought all this stuff, and it's running here, so if we're not replacing it anytime soon, there's no cost benefit for us to replace it.” And that's actually correct. That's not a fallacy there. But there's also the, “Well, it would be too much work to move.” Sometimes true, sometimes not. Are you seeing a shift in the reasons that people are giving to not migrate?David: No, I haven't. It's been those points mostly. And I'd say one of the biggest inhibitors to people actually getting it done is this misconception that it costs a lot of money to transform and to adopt cloud tools. You've seen this through the technology keeps getting easier and easier to adopt and cheaper to use. When you can provision services for $0 a month and then scale with usage patterns, there's really no reason not to try today because the opportunity cost is so low.So, I think that one of the big inhibitors that comes up, though, is this cultural barrier within organizations where teams haven't been empowered to try new things. And that's the one thing that I think is improving nowadays, as more of this how-to-build-in-the-cloud capability becomes permeated throughout the organization. People are saying, “Well, why can't we do that?” As opposed to, “We can't do that.” You know what I mean? It's a subtle difference, but once leadership starts to say, “Why can't we do this modern thing in the cloud? Why can't we leverage AI?” Teams are given more rope to try and experiment, and fail, of course. And I think ultimately, that culture shift is starting to take root across enterprise and across public sector as well.Corey: One of the things that I find surprising is the enthusiasm with which different market segments jump onto different aspects of cloud. Lambda is a classic example, in that it might be one of the services that is more quickly adopted by enterprises than by startups and a lot of cases. But there's also the idea of, “Oh, we built this thing last night, and it's awesome.” And enterprises, like you know, including banks and insurance companies don't want to play those games, for obvious reasons.Generative AI seems to be a mixed bag around a lot of these things. Have you had conversations with a number of your clients around the generative AI stuff? Because I've seen Amazon, for example, talking about it, “Oh, all our customers are asking us about it.” And, mmm, I don't know. Because I definitely have questions about and I'm exploring it, but I don't know that I'm turning to Amazon, of all companies, to answer those questions, either.David: Yeah. We've certainly had customer conversations about it. And it depends, again, on those personas. On the IT side, the conversations are mostly around how can they do their jobs better. They're not thinking forwards about the business capabilities. So, IT comes to us and they want to know how can we use generative AI to create Lambda functions and create stateless applications more quickly as a part of a migration effort. And that's great. That's a really cool use case. We've used that generative AI approach to create code ourselves.But on the business side, they're looking forwards, they want to use generative AI in the, again, the sample size of my customer conversations, but they see that the barrier to entry is getting their data in a place that they can leverage it. And to them, to the business, that's what's driving the migration conversations they're having with us, is, “How do I exfil my data and get it into the cloud where I can start to leverage these great AI tools?”Corey: Yeah, I'm still looking at use cases that I think are a little less terrifying. Like, I want to wind up working on a story or something. Or I'll use it to write blog posts; I have a great approach. It's, “Write a blog post about this topic and here are some salient points and do it in the style of Corey Quinn.” I'll ask Chat-Gippity to do that and it spits out something that is, frankly, garbage.And I get angry at it and I basically copy it into a text editor and spent 20 minutes mansplain-correcting the robot. And by the time it's done, I have, like, a structure of an article that talks about the things I want to talk about correctly. And there may be three words in a sequence that were originally there. And frankly, I'm okay with plagiarizing from the thing that is plagiarizing from me. It's a beautiful circle of ripping things off that that's glorious for me.But that's also not something that I could see being useful at any kind of scale, where I see companies getting excited about a lot of this stuff, it all seems to be a thin veneer over, “And then we can fire our customer service people,” which from a labor perspective is not great, but ignoring that entirely, as a customer, I don't want that. Because by the time I have to reach out to a company's customer service apparatus, something has gone wrong and it isn't going to be solved by the standard list of frequently asked questions that I clicked on. It's something that is off the beaten path and anomalous and requires human judgment. Making it harder for me to get to people who can fix those things does not thrill and delight me.David: I agree. I'm with you there. Where I get excited about it, though, is how much of a force multiplier it can be on that human interaction. So, for example, in that customer's service case you mentioned, you know, if that customer service rep is empowered by an AI dashboard that's listening to my conversation and taking notes and automatically looking up in my knowledge base how to support that customer, then that customer success person can be more successful more quickly, I think they can be more responsive to customer needs and maybe improve the quality, not just the volume of work they do but improve the quality, too.Corey: That's part of the challenge, too. There have been a number of companies that have gotten basically rapped across the snout for just putting out articles as content, written by AI without any human oversight. And these don't just include, you know, small, scrappy content mills; they include Microsoft, and I believe CNN, if I'm not mistaken, had something similar with that going on. I'm not certain on that last one. I don't want to defame them, but I know for a fact Microsoft did.David: Yeah, and I think some of the email generators are plugging into AI now, too, because my spam count has gone through the roof lately.Corey: Oh, my God. I got one recently saying, “Hey, I noticed at The Duckbill Group that you fix AWS bills. Great. That's awesome and super valuable for your clients.” And then try to sell me bill optimization and process improvement stuff. And it was signed by the CEO of the company that was reaching out.And then there was like—I expand the signature view, and it's all just very light gray text make it harder to read, saying, “This is AI generated, yadda, yadda, yadda.” Called the company out on Twitter, and they're like, “Oh, we only have a 0.15% error rate.” That sounds suspiciously close to email marketing response rates. “Welp, that means 99% of it was perfect.” No, it means that you didn't get in front of most of those people. They just ignored it without reading it the way we do most email outreach. So, that bugs me a fair bit. Because my perspective on it is if you don't care enough to actually craft a message to send me, why should I care enough to read it?David: Completely agree. I think a lot of people are out there looking for that asymmetric, you know, leverage that you can get over the market, and generating content, to them, has been a blocker for so long and now they're just opening up the fire hose and drowning us all with it. So I'm, like, with you. I think that I personally don't expect to get value back from someone unless I put value into that relationship. That's my starting point coming into it, so I would maybe use AI to help assist forming a message to someone, but I'm not going to blast the internet with content. I just think that's a cheeky low-value way to go about it.Corey: I don't track the numbers anymore, but I know that at this point, through the size of my audience and the content that I put out, I have taken, collectively, millennia of human time focusing on—that has been spent consuming the content that I put out. And as a result of that, I have a guiding principle here, which is first and foremost, you've got to respect your audience. And I'm just going to have a robot phone it in is not respecting your audience. I have no problem with AI assistants, but it requires human oversight before it goes out. I would never in a million years send anything out to the audience that I hadn't at least read or validated first.But yeah, some of the signups that go out, the automatic things that you click a button and sign up for my newsletter at lastweekinaws.com, you get an auto message that comes out. Yeah, it comes out under my name and I either wrote it or reviewed it, depending on what generation of system we're on these days, because it has my name attached to it. That's the way that this works. Your credibility is important and having a robot spout off complete nonsense and you get the credit or blame for it? No thanks. I want to be doomed from my own sins, not the ones that a computer makes on my behalf.David: [laugh]. Yeah, I'm with you. It's unfortunate that so many people expect the emails from you are generated now. We have the same thing when people sign up for Tidal Accelerator or Tidal LightMesh, they get a personal email from me. They'll get the automated one as well, but I generally get in there through our CRM, and I send them a message, too. And sometimes they'll respond and say, “This isn't really David, is it?” No, no, it's me. You don't have to respond. I wanted to let you know that I'm thankful for you trialing our software.Corey: Oh, yeah. You can hit reply to any email I send out. It comes from corey@lastweekinaws.com and it goes to my inbox. The reason that works, frankly, at this scale is because no one does it. People don't believe that that'll actually work. So, on a busy week, I'll get maybe a dozen email replies to it or one or two misconfigured bounces from systems that aren't set up properly to do those things. And I weed those out because they drive me nuts.But it's a yeah, the only emails that I get to that address, honestly, are the test copies of those messages that go out, too, because I'm on my own newsletter list. Who knew? I have two at the moment. I have—yes, I have two specific addresses on that, so I guess technically, I'm inflating the count of subscribers by two, if advertisers ask. But you know, at 32,000 and change, I will take the statistical fudging.David: Absolutely. We all expect that.Corey: No, the depressing part, when I think about that is, there's a number of readers I have on the list that I know for a fact that I've been acquainted with who have passed away. They're never going to unsubscribe from these things until the email starts bouncing at some and undefinable point in the future. But it's also—it feels morbid, but on some level, if I continue doing this for the rest of my life, I'm going to have a decent proportion of the subscriber base who's died. At least when people leave their jobs, like, their email address gets turned off, things start bouncing and cool that gets turned off automatically because even when people leave voluntarily, no one bothers to go through an unsubscribe from all this stuff. So, automated systems have to do it. That's great. I'm not saying computers shouldn't make life better. I am saying that they can't replace a fundamental aspect of human caring.David: So, Corey Quinn, who has influence over the living and the dead. It's impressive.Corey: Oh, absolutely. Honestly, if I were to talk to whoever came up with IBM's marketing strategy, I feel like I'd need to conduct a seance because they're probably 300 years old if they're still alive.David: [laugh]. Absolutely.Corey: No, I get passionate about this stuff because so much of a lot of the hype now has been shifting away from letting people expand their reach further and doing things in intentional ways and instead toward absolute garbage, such as, “Cool, we want to get a whole bunch of clicks so we can show ads to them, so we're going to just generate all bunch of crap to your content and throw it out there.” Everything I write, even stuff that admittedly, from time to time, is aimed for SEO purposes for specific things that we're doing, but that's always done from a perspective of okay, my primary SEO strategy is write compelling, original content and then people presumably link to it. And it works. It's about respecting the audience and so many things get that wrong.David: Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of scary now because I always thought that podcasts and video were the last refuge of authentic content. And now people are generating that as well. You know, you're watching a video and you realize hey, that voice sounds exactly consistent, you know, all the way through. And then it turns out, it's generated. And there's a YouTube channel I follow because I'm an avid sailor, called World On Water. And recently, I've noticed that voice changed, and I'm pretty sure they're using AI to generate it now.Corey: Here's a story I don't think you probably know about yourself. So, for those who are unaware, David, I hang out from time to time in various places. There's a international boundary between us, but occasionally one of us will broach it, and good for us. And we have social conversations where somehow one of us doesn't have a microphone in front of our face. Imagine that. I don't know what that's like most weeks.And like, at some level, the public face comes off and people start acting like human beings. And something I've always noticed about you, David, is that you don't commit the cardinal sin, for an awful lot of people I meet, which is displaying contempt for your customers. When I have found people who do that, I think less of them in almost every case and I lose so much interest in whatever it is that they're doing. If you don't like the problem space that you're in and don't have respect for the people paying you to make these problems go away, you shouldn't be doing it. Like, I'll laugh at silly AWS misconfigurations, but my customers are there because they have a problem and they're bringing me in to fix it. And would I be making fun of? “Ha ha ha, you didn't spend eight months of your life learning the ins and outs of how exactly reserved instances apply in this particular context? What a fool is you.” That's not how it ever works. I wish I could say it wasn't quite as rare as it is but I'm tired of talking to people who have just nothing but contempt for their market. Good work on that.David: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, I had a penny-drop moment when I was doing a lot of consulting work as an independent contractor, working with different customers at different stages of their own journey and different levels of technology capabilities. You know, you work with management, with project people, with software engineers, and you start to realize everybody's coming from a different place. So, you have to empathize with where they're at.They're coming to you usually because you have a level of expertise, that you've got some specialization and they want to tap into that capability that you've created. And that's great. I love having people come to me and ask me questions. Sometimes they don't come to me nicely asking questions, they make some assumptions about me and might challenge me right off the bat, but you have to realize that that's just where they're coming from at that point in time. And once you connect with them, they'll open up a little bit more, too; they'll empathize with yourself. So yeah, I've always found that it's really important for myself personally, but also for our team to empathize with customers, meet them where they're at, understand that they're coming from a different level of experience, and then help them solve their problems. That's job number one.Corey: And I'm a firm believer that if you don't respect your customer's business, they shouldn't be your customer. It's happened remarkably few times in the however many years I've been doing this, but there have been a couple of folks that have reached out I always very politely decline to work with them when this happens. Because you don't want to make people feel obnoxious for reaching out and, like, “Can you help me with my problem?” “How dare you? Who do you think you are?”No, no, no, no, no, none of that. But if there's a value misalignment or I don't think that your product is going to benefit people who use it as directed, I will not let you sponsor what I do as an easy example. Because I can always find another sponsor and make more money, but once I start losing the audience's trust, I'll never get that back, and I know that. It's the entire reason I do things the way that I do them. And maybe, on some level, from purely capitalist perspective, I'm being an absolute fool, but you know, if you have to pick a way to fail and assume you're going to get it wrong, how do you want to be wrong? I'll take this way.David: Yeah, I agree. Keep your ethics high, keep your morals high, and the rest will fall into place.Corey: I love how we started having ethical and morality discussions that started as, “So, cloud migrations. How are they going for you?”David: Yeah [laugh]. Certainly wandered into some uncharted territories on that one.Corey: Exactly. We started off in one place; wound up someplace completely removed from anything we could have reasonably expected at the start. Why? Because this entire episode has been a beautiful metaphor for cloud migrations. I really want to thank you for taking the time to chat with me on this stuff. If people want to learn more, where should they go to find you?David: tidal.cloud or LinkedIn, I'm very active on LinkedIn these days.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to both of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for going down this path with me. I didn't expect it to lead where it did, but I'm glad we went there.David: Like the tides ebbing and flowing. I'll be back soon, Corey.Corey: [laugh]. I will take you up on that and hold you to it.David: [laugh]. Sounds great.Corey: David Colebatch, CEO at Tidal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, upset comment that doesn't actually make cohesive sense because you outsourced it to a robot.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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GeniusBrain with David So is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/GENIUS for 10% OFF your first month! Follow David on Insta: @DavidSoComedy Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: https://bit.ly/GeniusBrainPod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up Trap Family The boys are back with a podcast favorite David So! Every Time David is on things get Wild real quick. They catch up on David having Covid, old parenting styles, Video games, A lottery gone wrong, Manscaping, Black And Korean Culture and much much more! Tune into this wild episode and get ready to laugh a whole bunch. Wipe your feet and join us inside the Comedy Trap House!  Follow our guest: @Davidsocomedy  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp! Go to https://www.BetterHelp.com/TRAPHOUSE for 10% OFF your first month! If you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan & Morgan. Go to https://www.ForThePeople.com/TRAP or dial Pound LAW (Pound 529) from your cell phone.   Join the Comedy Collective “Dormtainment” at the Comedy Trap House for their weekly podcast. It's hilariously insightful, thought provoking, and sometimes-just flat out stupid. Eavesdrop as we discuss current events, personal theories, and our journey! Side effects from listening include laughter, mental growth, and a burning desire to chase your dreams. Thank you guys for all the support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices