Hey guys, it's Julia and welcome back to my channel. And hello! It's been a while. Um, at least it feels like it's been a while for me. But today I'm going to be bringing you guys my February wrap up talking about all the books that I read in the month of February. I read a total of 10 things this month. I did not complete every book on my TBR. I did not read my classic of the month or my king of the month. But I did read Two Kings the previous month and I did finish a classic in March that I really really liked. So you'll hear more about that later. But for February I read... I'll put the shittie here. There you go. First thing I read was All We Saw. This is a little just a poetry collection that I read on my phone. It was okay, wasn't great, wasn't bad. I just don't have much to say about it. It was just kind of average in my opinion so I ended up getting that three out of five stars. Then I read Rumble by Alan Hopkins. So this story, this is about a boy named Matthew who is an atheist if I remember correctly. It's been quite a bit but he's dating a very Christian girl and a lot of their beliefs clash very often and it's just about Matthew and his coming of age story and it deals a lot with religion and other topics as well. But I buddy read this with Peter from Peter likes books. He has it. I don't even think he's finished it but I really enjoyed this one. It's probably in my top three favorites from Alan Hopkins. I thought it was just really raw and truthful and emotional and I got really into it so I do think this one is definitely a good one to pick up and if you don't know Alan Hopkins, her books are written in verse if you do not know. So yeah, quite enjoyed this one. I gave it four stars which is pretty bomb for me. So here we have a super exciting one and that is Planting Gardens and Greens by R. H. Sun. So this is his poetry collection and I was his new poetry collection and I'll actually send this by Andrews McNeil publishing an exchange for an honest review. So thank you so much to them. I was so happy that I got to work with them a bit this month and get sent some poetry collections in exchange for honest review but this was just I love this so much. I have talked about this a lot in reading blogs and things like that but I did end up giving it a 4.5 out of 5 stars. It's one of my favorites of his collections and his collections are just always really fabulous and I think you could tell by the tabs how much just I tend to enjoy his work and my only comment that was just like the audience that I thought it was targeted toward. It's not even a problem. I don't know if it was a problem but I talk about it more in Dabstall. Link the reading blog where I talk about it down below but just thank you so much to Andrews McNeil publishing and I just really enjoyed this and you guys know how much I love R. H. Sun. I have like all his stuff and I was super excited for this release so yes I ended up giving this a 4.5 out of 5 stars which is amazing. Then I read another amazing one that I was also sent by them and that was the wish doesn't burn in this one which I was sent an early copy from the publisher and this was so good and I'm so excited. Like right now it's on sale so it's out there and I'm super excited for everybody to read it. I think I think I liked it better than The Princess Saves Herself in this one. It's very feminist, powerful, women's like you know it's all it was so positive and just feminist and I just really appreciated that and I love how it talked about like the fire within people and I just love so many things about this and I think it was really really fantastic and I am so excited to see what else she's gonna release in the future because she's only released two collections but they they're both amazing. She's releasing a third one in the series I think about like mermaids and sirens which sounds awesome but I ended up giving this one a 4.5 stars as well and it was really cool. I gave a lot of really good ratings this month as you can see which is really amazing which is why I'm not too upset about that I didn't complete everything on my TBR or my goals because I did read a lot of things I ended up really enjoying and I participated in any contemporary fun. I don't think I mentioned that but I did okay. I've read like one thing whatever. So next up here I have Retribution Rails by Erin Bowman. This is the companion to Vengeance Row by Erin Bowman. These are YA Western books and in this book we follow two characters one who part of a gang and he was kind of forced into this violent lifestyle and then one from a girl named Charlotte who ends up clashing with the clan not the clan but clashing with the gang in a way and we follow both their point of views and it's a Western. It's so much fun. I love Western so much. If you guys have any recommendations please let me know because something about like the desert and the way they talk and just the setting and these characters were so amazing. We're so amazing and I just love the journey and I loved the message throughout the story and I love this way more than book one which I did quite enjoy book one but this I ended up really really loving support like I was I had a lot of good ratings this month and this I just enjoyed reading so much so I'm giving this one a 4.75 out of 5 so it's definitely one of my favorites of the whole entire year and I just really loved this.  Next up here I have a very big book so I'm gonna try not to hold it up for too long but that is lighter than my shadow this thing is heavy. This is by Katie Green. I read this for Contemporary Thon and this deals with a lot of really important issues and really tough issues so I will play some trigger warnings I'll put the rest of them on the screen but for some trigger warnings for abuse as well as eating disorders so please keep that in mind but I personally think this is one of the best graphic novels I've ever read. It's really really impressed me. I've never read something so raw in like a graphic novel format and it was just beautiful and I think it just needs to be read by so many people if you think you can handle the subject matter and I gave it like five stars. Wow I had a good reading month. Camera's dying great. Next up here I read how to deal tarot for everyday life. This I received an advanced reader copy this comes out in May. May 18th. I would see this from HTC frenzy which is the teen department over at Harper Collins so thank you so much to them for sending this to me but I request this because I've been wanting to get into tarot and tarot ratings and tarot cards and like I've just been really getting into it recently and I wanted when I saw that they had this book coming out I requested it because I was really excited about it. I did like it like my rating doesn't sound like I liked it but I did enjoy it I think it is a good guide. I don't know if I would recommend it to like older people like I don't know I thought the writing was very juvenile and it was a lot like oh when your BFF does this and when your BFF dates your boyfriend like it was just very like middle school ask which it is like young adult but it's still the actual writing style was very juvenile to me and it very much got on my nerves and not all the cards match up with the deck and there was just some things like that it was just one card but it was just some things like that. I just didn't love it but I do think it's a decent guy so I gave it around like a 2.75 to three out of five stars. Next up here I have Dear Aunt Catherine and this is by Laurie Ann Poken and this I was I was sent in exchange for an honest review by the author which unfortunately I did not end up joining this one very much at all. I had a lot of problems with it and I kind of ranted about it on Twitter a little bit but basically to tell you what this book is about.  I just really wasn't impressed with this. I had a lot of issues just with the way it dealt with topics such as rape and then the writing was very up and down for me. I overall just ended up having so many issues with this book and I was really disappointed in it because I love helping out like self-published authors and stuff so like I felt bad giving such a negative review but I'm a reviewer first always and I just really didn't enjoy this one at all. Yeah there was a lot of problems with it. I gave it two stars but yeah. Next up here I have a Wild Embers and this is by Nikita Gill. I ended up really enjoying this as another poetry collection and I just love this one so much. It very much is Amanda Lovelace-esque. It's a lot about feminism which I really enjoyed and I enjoyed like it was just the becoming, love with is broken, homes, the bones of trauma. It was just a solid collection and I ended up really enjoying it. It was 7.5 out of 5 stars. I was really impressed by how much I enjoyed this one though. I don't know why I didn't think it'd be like incredible but I just quite enjoy it. My last read of the month was Everyone's an Alien when you're an alien too and this is by Jommie Sun. This is a really cute story about an alien that comes to earth to study humans and then along the way he's like he doesn't even meet humans but he meets these animals and they tell him about life and he like learns things. It's very it's very cute. It's a graphic novel and I just really like the messages in them. There was kind of like a little snarky sense of humor in here and I see why people like it so much. It was very cute and I think it does have a lot of great messages in it. I gave it 3.75 out of 5 stars. So there you guys have it. Those were the books that I read in the month of February. Let me know what you read down below and I promise more videos will be coming for you soon. I'm so sorry. I've been really slacking which I never do but yes thank you all so so much for watching. If you're new here be sure to click the subscribe button and click the notification bell to be updated for when I post new videos and all those sort of stuff. I'll see you very soon. Bye!


All right, let's go right to it. Let's go. It's all good. I knew I was waiting for you, so totally fine. Well, you know, overall, it's just we had to have better execution of ball placement, being able to get off blocks, avoid to the kick side.  There's gaps. Everybody's responsible for a gap. You know, when leakage happened, explosive plays happen is you either have too many guys in the same gap, or you don't have somebody in that gap, and that's where we got exposed. So we have to do a better job, one, executing, getting our guys in a proper position to make plays and be gap control so we can force the ball care to go east and west. And that's, you know, my responsibility and I take blame for that. Again, we talked about ball location, being able to execute one from the kick all the way down field to the coverage, stranding coverage, and being able to get off blocks. And we have to do a better job. Again, overall, our basic fundamentals when it comes to that, making sure we're in the proper lanes, playing the proper gaps, and then finishing on the football. I didn't, we're missing somebody in their lane responsibility. You know, so, and then again, it starts with the kick, and then it correlates down to the coverage.  And on that play, particularly, we didn't have, we didn't have both of those. So we have to do a better job of that, Mike, of, you know, making sure because, you know, before that, our guys have been covering pretty well and doing a good job getting on and getting off blocks. But as you more you cover and you only get better reps, sometimes they'll hit an explosive one on you, but we have to do a better job finishing on the football and given our chance, given our chance of opportunity to finish on the football. So we had to clean that up and we look forward to the challenge this week versus the Jets. Like, you're not going back with us, but like, how do you teach that? How do you? Like, is that just a complete mental thing? Or is there something physically you can teach, say, hey listen, don't get out of this way and don't ruin integrity? Oh, we work that, you know, every day we work kickoff coverage, whether it's in the jog through or whether it's in practice, we're working those basic fundamentals. One, idea in who's probably going to block us on a particular return. We have certain keys from first level back all the way down to the returner. We have particular keys that we're reading when it comes to kickoff coverage. And then from that perspective, once we identify who's blocking us as we're running downfield in coverage, we have to defeat that block one with speed, all right, putting stress on the return team. And then also, you know, using some, you know, wiggle to make a guide miss and then using our, our hands being having upper body violence to get off the block because the longer in the block, that's going to give those guys opportunity to rebound and make sure they get in proper leverage. So we got to do a great, better job of a D in the blocks. All right, defeating the blocks and then finishing on the football coming up with, you know, either a body part or the football. April Williams, obviously, may have to play more nickel in the absence of Isaiah Oliver. How does that kind of change your game plan at all in terms of what he would do on our return to Georgia?  And, you know, he's very reliable and he was a great player for us, you know, defense and special teams. Again, it's next man mentality. Now with that, you know, every his role may change on defense and on special teams. So we as a special teams unit, we rep a lot of different guys in different positions because we believe in small menu, big understanding that we have a smaller menu that allows our players to have a bigger understanding conceptually of what we're running and what we're trying to accomplish on every particular play so we can move different pieces in the different spots. So excited for Avery. Avery is always going to have a role on special teams. And it's opportunity, whether it's an offensive phase on special teams or defensive phase on special teams, it's an opportunity for him to go out there and make plays. You know, I we believe on special teams in our room, you know, the smaller the menu allows our guys to have a bigger understanding of what we're doing.  But those guys might just have an understanding of their particular role rather than having to understand the whole concept of what we're trying to accomplish. As a player, if you understand the bigger picture, it allows you to be more aggressive and more detailed with your particular role of what you're doing. Whether I'm a two on kickoff, if I understand I got to contain the football to my threes, fours and fives that are playing inside of me, I could be more aggressive that setting the edge of our coverage unit. As a returner, if I understand what the jammers are doing on pump return, whether a single press, double press or trying to invite the inside outside release, I could be more aggressive as a returner when I'm catching the ball and getting upfield and getting vertical. So that allows our players to special special teams. We have different players playing different positions, or they might be playing one position, but backing up another position due to injury just like it happened on Sunday. So we have an injury, we can move different players to different spots.  We have we have multiple guys represent at that position. Whether it's, you know, it's based on body types too. So you're looking at the DB room or the receiver room when you're looking at those type of body types when playing that position, whether it's on kickoff coverage or pump return. Throughout the week, we rep various players at those positions and we rep in a this happen, this may happen, who would play that position or if that may happen, who played that position. If this safety is getting more playing time or this receivers getting more playing time throughout the game, we expect that happening who would go in and fill that role. So those in game adjustments goes back to small menu, big understanding to nature. It allows us as coaches to be able to make those adjustments. And we feel great. We feel good about those adjustments great about those adjustments because they understand what they're doing rather than trying to survive it down. We want them to excel on the down. It's just more so like where he feels comfortable directionally when it comes to punting the football. He's a seasoned vet. He's been doing it for a long time. He's been successful at doing it. And he's already been in the building, which is awesome. So him and coup and Josh getting on the same wavelength and rhythm up with how we're operating on as a special teams unit has been great for our room. So it's great having them in here. He's already been here for a while. And we're excited for the opportunity for him to go out there and perform on Sunday. Well, we prepare for, you know, worst case scenarios, whether it's the snapper situation, if something were to happen to Josh, or if something happened to our punter, something happened to our kicker, or even our holder. So coup, he does get those reps in on the special teams field on the side, getting his reps in getting contact on the football. But at the end of the day, whether you get it with the pun team at practice or in the game, that's a totally totally different beast. So I really appreciate an applaud coup for, you know, just being just a ball player and going out there and being able to perform. And he did a great job on his last punt getting that ball inside the 25 for us and allowing that ball to be in the field of play so we could bleed the clock a little bit. Yeah, we do rep just, you know, worst case scenario because things can happen in game. You'd rather be prepared without the opportunity than unprepared with the opportunity. Were you all telling coup to avoid the returner because you were worried about his hang-down on those two punts? It was more so worried about the direction. Just the direction of the punt, you know, making sure we can get the coverage to where it needs to be because if we say, hey, coup, punt the ball right, and then he punts the ball right, or he goes to punt the ball right, everybody's avoiding and trying to get to the right and the ball ends up left, now we have poor leverage on the football. So it was more so, hey, which way do you feel comfortable with punting the ball? So we could, protection's going to be the protection, but getting the gunners and the rest of our coverage team to get to where they need to get to, we weren't necessarily worried about the hang-time because coup can hit a decent hang-time on his punts, but the direction on that last punt was awesome and is exactly what we needed for that situation. No, he won't kick off.  I think he's been there, he's been there with, this is now his third head coach, he's been under there, former player, played in the league, and they're a big representation of how he is as a player and now coach. They play fast, they play physical, they're disciplined when it comes to how they rush after the punter and how they cover in the coverage game. They have Tommy Morse out there, he came, he's with the Saints, we're pretty familiar with him being in this division with Morse, a great directional punter, he's been doing a great job ever since he's, you know, he was a newly acquisition player when man went down as the punter and then Matt Amidola, strong late kicker, but they're return units, they're solid barriers, they're aggressive, they're going to attack and it's a great opportunity for us as a special teams unit to come back this week and perform at a high level versus these guys, but Brent does an amazing job with those players out there. Yeah, if you have to fix the problem that you had on the kickoff attack, you know they're going to see that and try that.  So just being consistently disciplined when it comes to whatever our technique or our assignment is, so we could be physical at the point of attack, whether we're blocking, whether we're tackling, whether we're getting off blocks. So those are things that we look at every week and even if Richie makes that tackle, we're still coaching the same stuff up. We're still talking about the lane integrity because that's all it takes is for one person to miss a tackle and then your one play away from either a touchdown or a tackle inside the 20. Where does pursuit come in on that, you know, on a running play, you're like, if I get to the ball. Yeah. Where does that come in on a coverage? You know, pursuit usually comes in when you're forcing a returner to go change the direction, you know, the more vertical penetration you get in the coverage unit, you could at least make that returner to either not allow him to get vertical or you stop his vertical penetration, you create him to go east and west and now you can pursue to the football still while keeping leverage on the football. No, we get my hard time. I've been getting my hard time the last couple of weeks. You know, I know that I was getting hard time like, hey, how many tickets are you guys having for the London game? And he's like, oh, my brother has me in charge of all the tickets this year. So I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah, that's the plan. You know, we're excited for him. He's been doing a great job with decision making. He's been playing multiple roles for us and he's been stepping up to the challenge and he's a good ball player. It has a lot of room to grow as a player and you only get better reps and you get better being exposed to different things, whether he's playing on defense or on special teams. And the cool thing about it, he's very humble and he has a willingness to grow. So, you know, experience to me is defined with what you're exposed to and are you willing to grow from those experiences? Thank you. You guys have a great day. Take care.


Hi there, I'm Nate Adams. Welcome back to part two of the Electrify Everything course. We're going to be talking about scaling electrification, and you should be wondering why I'm bringing this up so early. And the reason is this is probably the most important piece of this course. Because if we don't succeed at what I'm going to be talking about here, electrification is going to fail, and we aren't going to move as quickly as any of us wants towards electrification. So critical concepts here. So please open your minds, hear me. I really care about this, but I really want to see it happen. But it's going to take a whole lot of people pulling in the same direction for this to actually work. And this chart right here is the key. So hopefully it's familiar. This is the technology adoption curve. And this happens every time something new enters the market, be it a technology or product or whatever it might be. And if we don't get from early market to mainstream market by crossing the chasm, we fail. So we need to put a great deal of time and thought and effort into this. So I want to walk through our thought processes on this because we put a lot of time into this and we think we actually have a way to do it. And it's the only one that I know of for residential single family that I think crosses it. Okay, so here is the core syllabus. This is the second piece on how to scale electrification. Starting with the next video, we'll dig into nuts and bolts, which is probably what most of you are here for. But I highly, highly recommend that you stick with me through this, because otherwise you may actually end up hurting the cause and not helping it.  This is the second one really, because the adoption curve is the first. But this is what the path to residential electrification looks like. It is narrow, and you will fall to your death if you go very far at all to one side of the other. And this is also kind of a good picture because you can't see where it's going off in the distance. So we will have to make course corrections as we go through all of this. But this is not an easy thing to reach the mainstream and do it quickly. So it can be done, but it will be fairly gradual. Accelerating that progress is not the simplest thing in the world. So there's no room for missteps.  Here's the next kind of mental picture. I want you to think of the scene from the Princess Bride. So I love this scene. It's hilarious.  You're following victim to one of the classic blunders. So electrification really is a land war. And this isn't a land war in Asia. It's a land war in the US. I'm going to excuse my poor use of PowerPoint here. But we have 105,000 individual HVAC contractors. And there's many, many more if you look at the employees that work for these companies. And about a hundred million individual homeowners that have to be convinced that electrification is a good idea, is in their best interests, and is worth paying a little extra for because it's almost always extra to do this. This is not an easy task. And this is really important to do this because we need to stop the first clock. So we think of this in two clocks. The first clock is coming from 0% penetration of heat pumps at replacement in plenty of markets have higher than that. But some markets like where I live are almost 0%. We need to push that to 100%. So anytime a new piece of residential HVAC equipment goes in that has a compressor. So like air conditioners have a compressor and heat pumps have a compressor. Anytime a compressor goes in, it is a heat pump. Now the curse here is we are going to be talking about quite a few hybrids, which is a heat pump stacked on top of a furnace. It is what it is. I don't love it. You don't love it. But particularly in northern climates in older, leakier homes, it's going to be the option because you're going to need more power to heat them the cold days. So that just is what it is. If you want to change that, we are going to need to shift incentives. If you see me talking about resale value, the shell projects that you need to do, so insulation and air sealing is what I mean by building shell, those projects generally cost between $10,000 and $30,000 for most houses. You're not going to get that back at resale. So as it stands, I don't see more than a few percent penetration of houses doing that. And for any leaky older houses and some newer houses, for that matter, in cold climates, they're going to have to get a hybrid. But at least they will be getting a hybrid and not an air conditioner on top of a furnace. So that's an important piece. But what's really critical to understand here is until we get to 100% replacement being heat pumps, we don't start the 20-year replacement clock. So about 5% of residential HVAC is replaced every year. So it's about a 20-year lifespan, might be 15, might be 20, but 5% is a nice conservative number. So that means that it's going to take 20 years, once we get to 100% replacements, to get to 100% penetration. So like a 2030 target is really aggressive to get to 100% replacement with heat pumps. This is why I proposed a couple of weeks ago the policy of pay the HVAC manufacturers who currently make about 5 million air conditioners in the US and 3 million heat pumps, pay them to make all heat pumps. That will at least stop this first clock basically instantly. It could be a year or two out. So 2021, 2022, we could stop that. It's a pretty inexpensive thing. It also aligns incentives of everyone involved because the manufacturers aren't being bullied into doing something. They're being paid to do it. And because there are a number of small things that need to be done differently in installs to prevent warranties, they are likely to train contractors and supply houses in how to install heat pumps better. So they'll likely take a bunch of the bumps out of the process. Bad news is though, that is going to incentivize single and two stage heat pumps, which have just okay experiences. My in-laws have a single stage heat pump on their house. They normally heat with a wood boiler that's outside, but early in the season they'll heat with a heat pump and single stage and it's hugely noisy. So the fan is noisy. It wakes my mother-in-law up when it turns on. So that can be a struggle all year. But the outdoor unit, I forgot how loud it was. We stayed with them for a couple of days back this past fall and it was like, wow, that thing is noisy. Every time it turned on, I heard it. That is not a good experience and that is what single and two stage equipment is going to deliver. And so if we just switch everything over, we're still going to deliver or even bad experiences to a lot of people. So it's important to understand that as we ramp this up, we need it to be good experiences. We're going to come back to that. But noisy is bad. Good news on ramping to 100% is that 40 million homes in the U.S. are already electric thanks to the southwest, sorry, the southeast and the northwest, which both for economic reasons have ended up tending towards electrification. Now if we're going to win this land war, we're going to need an army. Might as well extend the metaphor. The key thing here to note though is it needs to be an existing army. So we've spent a long time figuring out how to do this. And if we need to build a brand new infrastructure, a brand new type of contractor to do this, it's not going to be fast enough. We need to take what is out there now. And then the good news is on the manufacturing point, the difference between an air conditioner and a heat pump is a few hundred dollars in parts. And the supply chain is already there. The manufacturers could switch over in six to twelve months without a great deal of trouble, especially if they were incentivized to do so. But we need an existing army of contractors to work with. And the HVAC contractors are the natural choice for this. Because A, they're already changing out to that we want to change out. They don't always do water heaters, but that's okay. That can be a separate thing. But they are already in homes working on air conditioners and furnaces and heat pumps and things like that. So they're already there. They're often going to have a lot of resistance to moving the heat pumps, particularly in colder climates. But that we can work on. So there's a few critical things that are needed to convert this army, though. They need a sales process because selling heat pumps is different from selling other pieces of equipment. It's much more of a consultative sale about comfort than it is the traditional business model. And then the business model also needs to be better because this needs to be attractive enough that HVAC contractors naturally want to install heat pumps. So whether or not we get the policy in place, we want them to be happy about heat pumps. So they need ideally better profit margins, better closing ratios, lower callbacks. And the callbacks relates to the good installs. The installs need to be good both for homeowners to have a good experience and not have to call the contractor back and also help the contractor avoid expensive callbacks. Because that's one of the biggest profit killers in the HVAC world is the callback. It's expensive to go back to somebody's house. So those are key. So I'm going to put out there that the HVAC 2.0 army may be the one to do this. So we have built in these things, the sales process, the business model, and naturally good installs because we'll be publishing a bunch of the pieces of their work, the measurements of their work, and then they'll be competing with each other for results. So it's a race to the top on results, rather than a race to the bottom on price. And so there's nothing like engaging our competitive instincts to push that sort of thing. So I do submit that the HVAC 2.0 army might be what to do it. We're early on, so later I'll give you a couple of paths to help us build this network in this army. All right, so back to the adoption curve. Let's dig into this a little bit more deeply. So electrification has a couple of really big risks, and there's more beyond this, but these are the three biggest ones that stick out. So the worst thing is if somebody electrifies their house and then they get a thousand dollar January or February electric bill. I've seen these. I helped one client with it. It surprised me at a single stage heat pump, but the house is relatively tight, and it turned out to be bad thermostat settings. In fact, the thermostat was bad. It wasn't capable of the settings it needed to use the heat pump effectively. So by not spending an extra $75 or $100 on the thermostat at install, it has cost that client upwards of $10,000 in money for the resistance electric to run that heat pump, not the way that it should be. So $1,000 winter electric bills are very possible. This will make a lot of angry people, and this is really going to hurt lower income clients as well. So we have to be careful with this. Second one is discomfort. I've heard a number of people that are like, yeah, I had a heat pump, man, my house was cold. I'm never getting one of those again. Heat pumps applied poorly deliver really bad comfort. It can be even worse than gas furnaces. And again, single and two stage heat pumps are usually at fault there. In fact, for all three of these, they're usually at fault. The last one is noisy HVAC. So I mentioned that with my in-laws. The fan is loud, and then the outdoor unit is really loud.  And it's just really noisy. The issue with that is that bad experiences don't scale. So the general round marketing numbers are a happy customer tells two other people about their experience, and an unhappy customer tells a dozen other people about their bad experience. If we don't manage experiences to make them super positive for both the contractor and the homeowner or script, it's not going to scale. We're not going to cross the chasm. We're in real trouble. So when it comes to these risks, if you are here, you're pretty much by definition early market. And so bending your mindset here is really important to do for pushing us to scale. So you might deal with these.  But the mainstream market, if they get any of these things happening to them, they're telling that dozen people. And with social media, it can be a lot more than a dozen real, real quick with some negative reviews. So we have to be very, very careful not to create bad experiences for homeowners or contractors. And if we don't do a good job of creating good experiences, we're not going to get to this 100% heat pump replacement. That's going to be a real problem. Now another way to look at this is that early market, so these folks over here and mainstream market, they speak very different languages, like very, I mean this would be like democrat versus republican or vice versa and trying to get them to switch sides. Good luck. You may be successful once in a blue moon, but man it's not going to move them. So we have to be very careful at the language and the tactics that we use reaching the mainstream market. So here's how they basically think the different groups. So tech enthusiasts or innovators, which are the first couple of percent, and I oftentimes fall into this camp. So behind me I've got a bunch of indoor air quality monitors. I was excited about those because I saw their potential for proving that what we do actually works, and they have been really useful for that. So I dug into those years ago. So sometimes I am a tech enthusiast and that is basically, ooh shiny, it's the latest, it's new, I want that. I don't even care if it doesn't work well, I'll try it. But oftentimes those things end up in the back of the kitchen drawer. The next group, the visionaries, generally like to have things before their friends. And lots of different motivations here, some positive, some negative, but if you are an early adopter you like to have things first, oftentimes for the sake of having them first. Those don't move the mainstream market. So the mainstream market is held together by the fact that products need to be demonstrably better than what they're replacing and they need to be easy to buy. If we can't provide both of those we're in real real trouble. The good news is inverter based variable speed heat pumps can definitely provide being demonstrably better and easy to buy. But again we have to remember that the mainstream market, they hate early adopter language. So let's look at an example. This is a great example of a huge market failure. 1980s diesel, so in the 70s there were two oil crises and so there was a push for fuel efficiency and diesel is naturally 30 or 40 percent more efficient than gas because it burns all of the fuel. And so the manufacturers came out with the diesels really a bit late. It was 82, 83 before they came out and oil prices were back down. But they were miserable pieces of garbage. They were awful. So this is an article from AutoWeek and it just says cough cough and it's got this little car driving away. They were terrible. So the early market will put up with some of the bad experiences come from that. I mean so here's early market reactions. I mean you still see old Mercedes diesels driving around.   So the early market will brag about the mileage. Hey I get 40 or 50 miles of the gallon out of this car. Again as they smoke on by. I had a buddy in college who had a late 70s or early 80s Toyota diesel and man I never wanted to follow him. I'm like you follow me. I don't want to breathe your fumes. Or another common thing would be it's the latest thing. You know it's new and exciting. So let's try this. Or you still see the biodiesel stuff. It can run on frying oil. These arguments are arguments that mainstream buyers hate. They don't just dislike them. They hate them. This does not move them. If you use these arguments it will push them in the wrong direction very very quickly. So we have to be super careful not to use early market arguments with the mainstream. So the mainstream here's what they said. It's underpowered. It's smokes. It's noisy. It is not a better experience. I mean I have an example of this from my own life. My dad bought a 1983 Chevy Dooley diesel and that thing was gullus and it smoked and it was noisy and I still remember him trying to pull our boat up a hill in the neighborhood and the truck just got stuck. Engine's howling and the boat and the truck are actually rolling backwards down the hill and it wasn't that steep. Like it shouldn't have been a problem pulling it up. My dad was furious. He talked about pulling that motor out and dropping it on the driveway of the the executive who okayed that project and I actually talked to one of those executives who's one of my marketing professors in college and he said that's exactly what happened.  That is not how we get things to scale. Don't do that. We need to provide really good experiences for both sides and boy my dad was hardcore against diesels for decades after owning that truck so that was not good so we can't do that. Now the bad result like I said is diesel reputation was damaged for decades in the US and it failed across the chasm here which after dieselgate might have been a good thing but in Europe on the other hand they continued to develop that out. The turbo diesel came in and they became the most common engine in European cars for a long time. They're now starting to flip particularly Norway as they're electrifying but I rented a Ford Mondeo wagon in 2004 and I drove that thing all over Europe. I drove it just the whole time and I put 4,000 miles on that car in three weeks and had a blast, loved that car, came back, wrote a letter to Otto Eek which is where this picture came from and it actually got published saying how often do you rent a car and really really want to buy that car but it wasn't available in the US at that time. So the EU and the European markets in general moved to where the diesels were actually a good product until dieselgate anyway. The irony though is that a lot of the VW money is being used to build the electrify America charging network which will move us to EVs and it also forced VW to move towards electrification faster than perhaps they might have otherwise. Now there's a big danger that's related to all this though is that heat pumps already have a bad reputation among many homeowners and contractors particularly in cold climates in the US. So this is something that has to be very carefully dealt with and if we don't shift that we are going to fail to cross the chasm. So to shift the entire thought process of this we have to design for the mainstream. We can't design for early market, we need to be planning ahead so I'm here talking to you as the early market but we are obviously thinking very strongly about the mainstream and we have to design for both sides of the transactions here so it has to be homeowners and contractors. And to do this we coined the phrase here the church of the kitchen table so there are two parties that matter in residential electrification. Homeowners, contractors, nobody else matters sorry you don't matter I don't matter for that matter in this because you know I can help facilitate these but at the end of the day I'm not writing a check or doing the work. So here's why contractors sell and do the work and homeowners write the checks so that's why it's so important. Both of them must have amazing experiences if we're going to see scale so we need to see a massive growth every year at least 50% growth is what we want to see. This is not an easy thing to do it just isn't but if we can provide really good experiences clients will naturally tell other people about them refer people in hey it's this fellow was magic I can't believe what he did to my house it feels totally different I can't believe it's the same place that's a super common piece of feedback that we get and if you do that well you can have basically zero marketing cost and still have very very fast growth best example of this is Tesla they don't spend money on marketing yet they grow very very quickly. So to do this we have to make sure that homeowner and contractor interests rule above all so whatever other incentives there are for other people though their incentives don't matter it's only the incentives of what homeowners need and contractors need that really matters. Now to do this we think about having either friction or grease so if you picture a machine are you pouring sand into that machine and adding lots of friction and you're going to kill it or you adding grease to that machine this is what we want to think about so this is the question in our minds which is anything that you want to do does this add friction or grease to the kitchen table transaction if it adds friction don't do it seriously don't you're you're going to slow things down you're going to screw things up and if you wonder why we generally don't like residential energy efficiency programs it's because pretty much 100 of the mad friction to the process so here are some examples any kind of paperwork that either the homeowner or the contractor has to do those are friction that slows things down anything that requires a certain type of equipment to be used that slows things down anything that requires a certain method to be used or certain material to be used that can slow things down so you want to leave the solution paths as open as possible and you more want to see results than anything and if we're aiming at electrification what you want to see is well installed heat pumps whatever that might be now a grease example really the only thing that works for this is upstream incentives so we want to hit things before it ever makes it to the kitchen table so it doesn't affect the contractor or the homeowner directly you know the contractor might know that this equipment is now less expensive because of incentives but it's not going to slow the process down at all so there's two different ways to do this you can do it the manufacturer level or the supply house level so again i mentioned the policy proposal to pay all of the the HVAC manufacturers to make all heat pumps no more air conditioners and that will again kind of grease things coming down but i've mentioned several times single and two stage heat pumps they don't really provide that great of experiences they just don't because they run at the two stages still only a hundred percent and two-thirds power and you really want something to be able to dial way back down i mean imagine trying to drive a car at either two-thirds throttle or full throttle and those are your only options nobody would want to ride with you because they'd be snapping their neck all the time same thing goes for HVAC in houses we want to move inverter variable speed equipment as much as possible and that could be local and state incentives aimed at supply houses to make inverter equipment look less expensive so we need to get to the mainstream market we must get there or else we can't stop that first clock or we don't stop it soon enough and remember until we stop the first clock where every new piece of equipment is a heat pump we don't start the 20-year clock of running through all the inventory and every six seconds a new piece of residential HVAC is started up in the US so during this video there's going to be a whole bunch of them all right so how do we actually do this we need to speak mainstream in everything that we do and this is going to be the vast majority of the market it's 84 percent by the numbers so we need to talk to the mainstream about how new technologies like the inverters in particular are better than current options and they are they need to be easy to buy so contractors need to offer them and not offer them begrudgingly we need to ask what people value because the the better equipment does cost more so we don't have to justify the all the cost of the equipment but we do have to justify the cost of basic equipment to the higher end stuff that works better and we do that by seeing what do they value and is there enough value there to justify that extra cost and if there is we're good the equipment sells and usually those fall into comfort and health buckets as you were filling out last time by answering the four questions of the comfort quiz important note here climate usually isn't worth much when it comes down to actual dollars and cents so it's not something to really lead with now when it comes to speaking mainstream this is kind of the simplest thing that ties things together that we found so you want to talk to them about something familiar with a twist so this is me and an electrify everything event so the the bald fellow is leaning on a heat pump water heater this is one of our electrifications and i am leaning on the air filter for this hvac system so that is actually called a bad it got nicknamed a big air drop so that filter is sitting horizontal there does a great job with filtration knocks down how much a house needs to be dusted actually it's really good at knocking viral particles out of the air while we're in this covid mess but most importantly it looks like a furnace so there were two different clients that came there that hadn't yet electrified but were figuring out whether they wanted to or not both of them saw and touched this piece of equipment and thought it looks like a furnace it looks familiar i feel safe buying this and then they did and both of them said that this visit affected them and one of them said basically this is what did it for them the other one was already leaning that direction anyway but being able to see that the new technologies don't look that different is really nice so another way is it works just like an air conditioner but it can heat as well as cool which can mess with people's minds but you have a refrigerator in your house running right now that has heat coming out of it but the air inside is cold there's still heat in cold air that's what heat pumps do they extract that heat but the other thing that helped those two clients was they looked outside and the outdoor unit looks basically just like the air conditioner they've had it's a little bit bigger and it's up on the legs but aside from that it's the same piece of equipment it was very familiar but it had a twist or another way you do it is you talk about it's like another stage for your furnace so i talked about the the hard on off or the two thirds on off typically a heat pump is going to be something like a third or even a quarter the size of the furnace that's in your house right now so it's going to be a nice little gentle tip in and when you're in spring and fall you don't need nearly as much heat to heat your house so most furnaces are generally two or three times larger than they need to be even on the coldest day which makes them 10 times too large on mild days so we commonly hear that when it's say 45 to 55 degrees outside that houses just feel really cold and not comfortable that's because of oversized equipment in almost all cases so if you put smaller equipment in which is a heat pump and you make that a stage in there you get much better comfort in spring and fall so that can be the bonus that comes out of it the other thing you can do is ask questions so key one is are there rooms that are uncomfortable some parts of the year the rooms you don't like to be in or the rooms you don't use some of the year which happens pretty often and then is it winter summer where is it how much is a bother you that sort of thing ask a bunch of questions is anyone of allergies so that filter i'm leaning on can knock a bunch of the garbage out that makes people allergic so that can be helpful are there mold issues in a house this is more on the east coast than a west coast problem but beginning to hear some of it on the west coast but that can lead into conversations and i should flip back up to this are rooms uncomfortable so my buddy Robert Brearly one of his favorite questions is do you have a weird relationship with your thermostat and that's a great question because a lot of people do it's like it's never comfortable i don't know what's going on you probably have the wrong age back and your house might be leaky so a couple things to avoid in speaking mainstream though don't talk about new technology they don't want to hear it they want to hear this is tried and true they want the second or the third generation heat pump water heaters are on their fourth inverters are the original inverters were heck invented probably the seven days but the current generation of equipment that we're seeing out the cold climate heat pumps are on their second or third iteration so they're coming along but new tech they don't want to hear about they don't want to hear that it's the latest trend that's not what they want to do they don't want to know what the kids say things like that don't talk bands particularly with contractors eighty percent of contractors are politically conservative if you want to rile them up just say the word ban that's a great way to do it and lots of homeowners don't want to hear that either so that's not something to lead with and like i mentioned earlier talking about green and climate generally is not a good way to actually have someone buy so they may indicate interest interest does not equal money and we need people to spend money so to close repeat after me i'm an early adopter but i will speak mainstream so again i am an early adopter but i will speak mainstream that's how we actually scale electrification and to that end we have built the HVAC 2.0 process and system to do this it's more it's a natural result more so than a natural goal because heat pumps just happen to solve all kinds of comfort problems smaller equipment is good heat pumps tend to be smaller well they're almost all smaller than furnaces so it's just the way to go and we'll be talking about that shortly but the way to think of 2.0 is like airbnb for buying HVAC so right now the kitchen table experience is bad for both sides contractors don't enjoy it homeowners don't enjoy it it's just not fun so 2.0 serves both HVAC contractors and homeowners so the two sides of the platform and it delivers a smooth and pleasant experience for the mainstream on both sides so again this is us trying to solve this problem for single family residential electrification so at the end of this when we get into finding a contractor we'll get more detail on this and we'll be touching on HVAC 2.0 as we go through the electrification course speaking of which if somebody sent you this video or you haven't signed up to get the rest of this course i highly encourage you to do so because there's tons and tons of content and so i will put a link below the video please sign up for that all it cost you is an email in your first name and if you want to donate later you can but you don't have to so hopefully you have found some value here i hope this shifts your mindset because again we have to plan on the mainstream now and build things for that now the time for pilots and case studies and so forth it's it's over like that time's gone we've got to move and move quickly and move with something that works across the entire market so hopefully this helps i'll see you next time when we dig into the actual nuts and bolts of electrifying your house i'm Nate Adams have a wonderful day bye


So, good morning, Sarah. It's nice to have you with us this morning. Sarah Gurry-Rosemblette, who is one of our keynote speakers, is with us and she'll be speaking this afternoon at the conference at Eden. Maybe you could share with us a little bit what you'll be talking about at your presentation this afternoon. Yeah, I will talk about five pairs of contrasting trends that exist right now in confronting at the macro-level higher education systems at large and individual higher education institutions at the meso-level and each institutional, each higher education system has to find the balance, the equilibrium on the continuum of these contrasting trends. For example, they have to decide whether they want to be more global, international-oriented or still be more national, which is a big issue right now. And obviously, the needs of different higher education systems are totally different. If you take Burkina Faso, for example, where they have 2% of their population studying higher education, their needs are very different from the Italian higher education system or the British one or the French one, United States. So, this is one issue. For sure, the change of also for the distance teaching universities moving from the industrial model that was pioneered by the British Open University to the digital model actually created a lot of big challenges for the large-scale distance teaching universities because they have to move to a totally different infrastructure, technological infrastructure, teaching learning system and it's a huge problem. You have to decide who are your competitors, who you are competing with and who are the people that you want to collaborate with, organizations or universities or the marketplace that you would like to collaborate with and so on. So, I speak about contrasting trends and they need to find an equilibrium for each higher education system, for each institution, how to shape their mission and operational strategies. Okay. So, what role do you see leadership playing in all of this? A huge role. A huge role. Because, for example, if you take Australia, the government has decided that they want large numbers of transnational students, mainly because of higher fees that they pay compared to the Australian students. So, the government invested a lot in the whole issue of globalization, internationalization, which is not the case in many other countries. That more individual institutions decide whether they want to be more global international or they want to be geared mainly to national priorities. And the leadership is tremendously important. So, leadership not just in the sense of the institution, but leadership also with policy makers? Of course, Kansas for higher education, ministries of education were in countries in which the responsibility for higher education is situated within ministries of education, all the case in Israel, for example, we have a council for higher education. So, they very much shape the priorities and accordingly also divide the kind of budgets for the institutions. You mentioned the open universities and some of the challenges that they're dealing with right now, and I think about the open university in the UK and some of the issues that they're dealing with. What do you see as the primary challenges for the open universities and what do they need to do in order to reinvent themselves perhaps for the 21st century? You know, I'm going to, and I'm now in the process of writing a paper for the special issue that will deal with open universities celebrating 50 years of the, with Alan, yes. And the name of my article is Open Universities, Innovative Past, Challenging Presidents and Prospective Future. Part of their big success also created their identity crisis because when they were invented, the British Open University, when it was established in 1969, it was innovative in so many aspects, open admission, part-time students, the teamwork and so many other things. And many establishments in the higher education, since the more campus-based universities were very skeptical and critical about its very establishment. But because it succeeded so much, so many of its goals are right now commonly shared by all higher education institutions. And since they were adopted by so many higher education institutions, it's an identity crisis because there is no special role for the open university. At the beginning, there was a line that it was an open admission, but only 20,000 students per year were founded by the government to enter the university and many more wanted. So it was like first come, first serve, they stood in a line and if they were not accepted the year that they applied, they were promised to be accepted the following year. No line anymore, a decrease of third of their students in the last 10 years. So it's a huge problem that basically is creating an identity crisis and they really have to find with whom to collaborate. The future learns that they invented. They are leading more than 70 universities in preparing something, but still the investment has not returned back. So there is more investments and kind of economies of scale provided right now. A huge problem. One of the things that, you know, traditional institutions are now shifting toward engaging in more technology enhanced learning. So technology is becoming more commonplace within traditional education. How do you see that impacting traditionally distance education institutions in the open universities? And what can we do to retain our, so to speak, our position within the educational landscape? The problem is that the campus-based universities in some aspects have a better position in using the technology. Because if the whole idea of the iron triangle of John Daniel of the industrial mode was that you use a very small number of faculty preparing high quality materials that can be studied by dozens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of students. This is not the case with technology right now, because the teacher is still is becoming back to interact with the students. So Universitat Roberta de Catalonia that was established already is an online university. The system is really very, very different. Okay. So you see two main strengths then from the distance teaching universities and that would be their ability to teach the masses and also and to organize themselves for the masses as well as the collaborative aspects. What other strengths do they have that they can maximize? They are more efficient in providing support systems for, because right now the digital literacy is lacking both by teachers at university and also by students. Even those students that were born with a mouse in their hand, they know how to download the music files, they know how to do wonderful things with the computer, they do not know how to study. So basically the digital literacies have to be practiced and provided by universities and the distance teaching universities can have an advantage in doing it. What other changes do you see happening within education that are impacting distance teaching universities? First of all that many more students study. When the British Open University was established 50 years ago, they were responsible for 95% of part-time students. Now all universities kind of applied to part-time students. Many more of the age cohort if it was once 10 to 20% now it's over 50% studying. So it's not just a quantitative change, it's a qualitative change and definitely it is something that is affecting the distance teaching university. The distinction between distance and campus was very clear for nearly 170 years since the University of London opened its gates in 1858 to all inhabitants in the Commonwealth. But the distinction is not existent anymore because campus universities can reach out and the fact is that the MOOCs and OER are mainly pioneered by campus universities, not by the distance teaching universities. So it's a huge challenge. Did you see some of these issues being addressed at the conference? Yes of course. Mainly in the keynotes but also in some of the sessions. What did you enjoy most about the evening conference while you were here? That you hear a lot of a practice already a research and practice conducted in different parts of the world and it is quite interesting to see things that are done and also plans that are planned to be done and from all over the world. So it is really interesting. Okay well thank you for taking the time to speak with us this morning and we appreciate that for sharing your insights and good luck with your keynote this afternoon. Thank you very much.


Yeah, walking down memory lane in East Village. Okay. And if you're a New Yorker, you know exactly what that means. I'm Jay Fidel, and I was originally a New Yorker. And for a time, Ken Rogers and I were New Yorkers together. And that was before most of you were born. This is ThinkTec. And we're talking about community matters, about a community that has long since passed. Because after how many years, 60 years, Ken and I went for a reunion to all the old places in Lower Manhattan and Upper Manhattan, for that matter, in memory lane. And it was a great reunion just only a week or two ago. And we wanted to tell you what we found, the changes we found. You can't call it the underside of New York City 60 years later. Hi, Ken. Hi, Jay. I thought we were going to, you know, kick the old tires except when we got there, none of the tires were there. Exactly. That's the message here. So Ken and I were at the Joe Weinstein Hall, which is brand new at the time, at the intersection of Washington Place and what is it, Leica Street, I guess. And we were resident counselors, graduate counselors there. And we had two floors of undergraduates who were our charges. The place was brand new, spanking clean. It was Po-Ed, men on one side of a courtyard, women on the other side. It couldn't have been nicer. It couldn't have been prettier. And it was in, you know, the Greenwich Village. That was then, at the time, really famous. It was the time of Jack Karowek. It was the time of the hippies. It was the time of some very rich people who lived at the foot of Fifth Avenue, only a block away, and Washington Muse, which had great historical value. And it was Caddy Corner across Washington Square from NYU Law School, where I went to school. And Ken's school was a graduate business school, GBA down on Wall Street, right near Trinity Church. But all that has changed. And we went together to look. And Ken, what did we find to our amazement, our disappointment, our chagrin, and our revelation? Well, some things were disappointing. And others were not so disappointing. For example, Weinstein Hall, a wonderful place where we got to allegedly be in charge of a bunch of undergraduates. But the whole feeling of that place was totally different. When you walked in the front door, the first thing you were confronted with was security, more security, and additional security. And there was no way that it even looked like the nice, open, welcoming place that I remember so fondly. It did not seem to be well upkept. The people were pleasant enough, but it really just was not an inviting place at all. They were doing some renovations that might give them a bit of an excuse. But I thought compared to the other pieces of New York University that we saw, most of the other places were an improvement, or they were better. They were cleaner. They felt nicer. But Weinstein Hall didn't feel nice at all. If I were a senior executive in the NYU system, I would feel that that's a disgrace compared to the rest. Yeah, I agree. It's that whole thing with hosting little notices with scotch tape on the walls about some event or some activity and leaving it there for months for years after the activity has taken place. And I agree with you about this security. Jesus, there were so many people. And some of them were friendly, as you say. And even worth chatting up, but others were not friendly. And that's because of COVID. It's because of the threat of violence by people with guns. And so NYU reacts that way, as a lot of schools do. And the same thing at the law school. I went to the law school with somebody who had taught there recently as an adjunct that told me that my name would be in a big book, a book of graduates of NYU Law School. And I went there twice, one for an LLB time, and then later on for an LLM. And indeed, I walked in and I told the guy, I was the security guy, that I was in the book. And he looked me up. And there I was twice in the book. And then I told him that I had been advised that if I was in the book, then I could walk around and say hi and whatnot, go see my old classrooms, even my teachers, if they were still alive, probably not. And then I said, well, now that I'm in the book, can I walk around? And he said, you have been misinformed. You cannot walk around. Because to the extent that system was in place before COVID, it is not in place now. And you're going to have to leave now, even though you're in the book. And I said, well, look, I need to go to the bathroom. So could I walk across the hall and go to the bathroom? And he said, well, since you spent six years at NYU, paying all the tuition and studying late at night, why don't we let you go to the bathroom? I went to the bathroom and kid, I'm here to tell you the bathroom was very nice.  And that was really very gratifying. It was a great bathroom. And it was nice of him to let me do that. So suffice to say it's all about security, as you said, and it's all about COVID.  In fact, the whole neighborhood was different, wasn't it? Yeah, it really was. I found that the general neighborhood was a lot cleaner than I remember.  The streets all look very clean, particularly Washington Square Park, I thought, you know, was very attractive. The one of the interesting factors in that neighborhood was that the New York University has obviously had a lot of endowment money since I was there because they own a large number of the buildings surrounding the area. And they're very well kept. They looked pretty sparkling. But on the Washington Square itself, I found there was nobody looked like a beatnik, which was, you know, a very common looking person back in the 1960s, the early 60s. But you had every type of person you could think of. And one of the unique things about Washington Square Park, it was so busy that the people watching was really the dominant thing that was happening and that compared to anywhere else in New York, when you saw some, you know, young lady from, you know, age eight to 60, they didn't have their hand in front of them with a phone as they were walking along. They were too busy, as were you and I, watching all of the people, you know, I can remember crossing Washington Square Park in the middle of the day on a weekday.  You'd walk all the way across and, you know, you'd not have the monstrous crowds of people that were there. It was very enjoyable. Yeah. I told you my story with Paul Steinman. I went to school with Paul Steinman, you know, before I went to college. I was in grade school with him, in high school with him, and Art Garfunkel. In fact, they were stars in the city music, you know, the New York City music scene, even in high school. I forget their band name, but they had a band and they had a song that was a top song. Anyway, at one point in high school, Paul asked me if I would join their band and sing with them. I said no. It's lucky you didn't. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe not. And Garfunkel said, yeah, why don't you join us today?  And you can hit a number one, you know, citywide hit also. And I said, no, no, I can't do that. I got to go to law school. Okay, fast forward to law school. So just as you say, people would play chess and it was quiet in Washington Square Park. And Paul, you know, wasn't doing much. As I recall, he went to Queens College with me. I saw him in Queens College and Garfunkel went to Columbia. And so this was the kind of reunion. I met him around the fountain there in the center of Washington Square Park. And we sat on the fountain and it was quiet. It was intimate, if you will, getting on the fountain and, you know, having a rendezvous, talk about the good old days. And I said, how are you doing, Paul? He says, I'm terrible. I don't have a job, you know, and I'm not in school right now.  I have no idea where I'm going. He said, I really envy you, Jay, that you're in law school, you know, across the way here at NYU. And I'm not. And I hope I can find something equally useful to do. I'll never forget that meeting, because it was shortly thereafter, within a year anyway, that the graduate played, and all of a sudden, Simon and Garfunkel were catapulted, you know, to national, international fame with their music in the graduate. And guess what? Guess what, Ken? I wasn't in the graduate. I wasn't in their band. I wasn't there. I was still banging my brains out in law school. So there you go. That was the nature of Washington Square Park in those days. So what did you feel about the masks? You know, we walked around and we saw all these people in New York City, and it was still COVID, you know, then New York was having a surge of COVID. But what are people doing about the mask? Well, it was hit and miss. There was lots of people with the mask, but an awful lot without. In the Washington Square Park area where there were these large crowds, you know, there were not very many people with masks. Whereas, you know, we're at one of the big theaters in Midtown Manhattan, one of the required masks in the theater, and everybody was right on board.  There didn't seem to be that lack of cooperation at all in that theater, you know, but I was surprised, you know, as we approached the theater, you know, we went by, you know, one of the fire exits and there were, you know, two policemen there, you know, or extra security guards and, you know, got the feeling that the security type of thing that we had encountered elsewhere applied in all kinds of places in New York that wasn't there 60 years ago. Oh, no. What did you think of the play, The Music Man? What did you think of the play, Ken? It was super to go, you know, to a New York theater where it's so large. I enjoyed the dance, the dancing part of that play was exceptional. They have a very good theater in Kelowna in British Columbia, even though it's a it's a teeny-weeny city compared to New York, but they don't have the scale, like the number of actors that are out there, you know, doing the dancing. The choreography and dancing was outstanding. I was very surprised with the crowd, though, that the crowd cheered at anything and everything. That sounds like Honolulu. They do the same thing here. Whatever they do on the stage, the crowd is giving them a standing ovation. And indeed, there was a very long standing ovation after this play was over, wasn't it? Yeah. Well, I mean, I can remember, you know, theater, even though when I was there 60 years ago, I was poor as a church mouse, so I didn't get to go to the theater too often. But then, there were only cheering and clapping when it was deserved. You know, that's the standard that we have in Canada, at least in my area in Canada, is if something is really good, they get a clap and they wait and, you know, not as often as was done in that huge theater in midtown Manhattan. Yeah, the Winter Garden. But, you know, it isn't always thus. I remember going to, I was telling you, I remember going to Tosca, the opera at the Metropolitan Opera. And the crowd didn't like the performance. I liked it. I thought it was just fine. My wife liked it. She thought it was just fine. But the crowd were all, you know, opera devotees and they knew a thing or two about opera. And when it was over, they booed. They booed. They booed all the players. They booed the orchestra. They booed everybody. So, you know, it doesn't always thus. It depends on who the crowd is and how good the performance is in their eyes. So, yeah. Now, so let's move downtown a little bit. So we went looking for a GBA, the Graduate Business Administration School, where you took your PhD. And, you know, it was not in the same location. They moved. It wasn't there. It didn't exist in the Wall Street area, which really, really surprised me because when I went, virtually all of the students that were in either a master's or doctoral program at NYU Business School, they were all part-time students. All the classes were, you know, in the evenings. And the first year I was there was really the first year that they ever had full-time day students. I took most of my classes along with the part-time students at night. But all the part-time students were people that worked in the Wall Street area for the most part. So that when you had a class that started at 5.30, they'd kind of walk over from their office and go to class. And, you know, there was a class from 5.30 to 7.30 and another from 7.30 to 9.30 every weekday. And that was how I went to school. You know, that was the timing that I went because that's when all the really good classes were on and the big, big name profs were available. And so I tried to always get into the classes that had the real experts, you know, at that time and still NYU ranks so highly in the finance area compared to all of the colleges in the world. You know, I suppose it's not surprising since it was New York City and it was in the Wall Street area. But when they moved that graduate business school to the Greenwich Village area, it would be pretty difficult for executives that worked or let's call it the employees in the Wall Street area to get to the Greenwich Village to get to the classes there. It wouldn't be, it would not be as convenient. So I don't know how their enrollment has changed in terms of those part-time students. But, you know, they still seem to have the ranking in the area of finance. Now, I have the same experience in the NYU graduate LLM tax program that all the classes were in the evening. And, you know, the students came from Wall Street. They managed to get up town and they came directly from their law firm offices or the government offices. And it was quite, it was quite different than it is now. I think now you have these graduate programs and they're all day long. And it's difficult to get those same people to come up from Wall Street at the time of the classes. So it's different. I don't know exactly how different, but it's different. So we also went to one Vanderbilt, one Vanderbilt Avenue, I think it is. And that is a huge building, 96 stories as big or maybe bigger than the Empire State Building, which is not far away. It was a really interesting experience to go that high in a building that was built, that was dedicated to visitors, tourists, and guys like you and me who wanted to see for miles and miles and miles. What did you think of that? It was a fantastic building. It's pretty startling to be looking out a window and looking down at the observation deck in the Empire State Building, which was, you know, not that far away, of greater surprise to me. And sort of another one of the main changes was that one of the most gorgeous buildings when I was in New York 60 years ago was called the Pan Am Building. And it's the one that kind of straddles or it's right behind the Grand Central Station, while this new building, one Vanderbilt called the Summit, from the observation deck, you look down at the roof of that building that's now called Met Life Building, anyhow, Met Life that dominates it. But the top of that building was a heliport. And I can remember, you know, as a poverty stricken student, thinking that, you know, it would be really quite something to be able to land on the top of that building. And, you know, a couple of years after I had graduated and had earned enough money to build at least a paper and airplane, et cetera. And I took my wife to New York and, you know, as a special treat landed on the top of that building. And I was startled to find out that they don't use that heliport anymore, you know, because these buildings are taller than it. I don't know why, but obviously somebody had called it a security question.  But, you know, obviously, for security reasons, they don't allow that. But it's kind of startling to look down upon a heliport that used to exist and it was 70 floors in the air. So let's talk about the Statue of Liberty. We went to the Statue of Liberty. It was a really hot day and a million tourists around. And we had to take a boat. The boat stopped at the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island, and Ellis Island with the immigration building there from around the turn of the century. That was really interesting. And I have to admit to you, I hadn't been there, if at all, for many, many, many years. What was your impression of the Statue of Liberty? Well, it was a lot bigger than I thought it was. You know, I had taken a little cruise around the New York Harbor and the same time that I had taken my wife there. But, you know, it was, you know, I think it was five cents cost to ride the Staten Island ferry back across the harbor and back, you know, and that was what we did at the time. But everybody took their dates to Staten Island because for 10 cents, well, I guess it's 20 cents, you know, round trip. You can have this beautiful view of New York Harbor and beyond the ferry. It was all very romantic. Everybody took the Staten Island ferry. I would assume that with the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, that doesn't exist anymore. You know, I think they still have that. I'm not sure. But I doubt that it still costs a nickel. Totally, totally. I did see Governor's Island, though, from our boat and that was interesting because I spent some time in the service on Governor's Island. It's no longer a Coast Guard base, but it is still a very impressive island in the middle of New York Harbor. Moving on, though, we not only saw Washington Square Park, which was the circus, as you described it, but also we went to Central Park and we walked around there. And of course, there was a similarity between Central Park and Washington Square Park. But what did you think of Central Park? It is certainly the center of Manhattan. Well, I was very cognizant of the difference in the people from Washington Square Park to Central Park. Central Park, certainly the southern area of it that we were at, it was very much a family type of place. There was a lot of small kids. There were very few kids in Washington Square Park. Perhaps the odd one was a son or daughter of a tourist. But most of the people in Washington Square Park looked like they were local New Yorkers, where everybody in Central Park looked like a New Yorker and looked like they were there with a family outing. That tremendous park, really a people's park. Every city should have a park like Central Park. So much going on, so inviting actually. But before we run out of time, I want to ask you about my neighborhood. You were kind enough to accompany me back to my neighborhood. On the best mode of transportation we could find, namely the subway, which is actually a very efficient system and relatively cheap and fast and no traffic jams on the subway. So we went out to my ancestral home, if you will, back in Queens and I showed you my schools when I was a kid. I showed you my streets, my neighborhoods. And of course, you didn't see it then as I did 60, 70, 80 years ago. But let me tell you there were things that were remarkably similar, the same unchanged. And there were also things that reflected the new world, the new New York, the new country we live in. And I guess that's a piece I want to ask you about. What did you think of Boris Till's and Regal Park in Queens as an expression of diversity, as an expression of middle class living, as an expression of a prosperous, well prosperous may not be the right word, but a thriving community? Well, my definition of a middle class community is very different than a New Yorker that, you know, I come from or was born and raised in a city called Calgary in Alberta, you know, which is now about 1.6 million people.  The percentage of people in condominiums is very low, where everything in Queens was a condominium. But the startling piece to me and kind of got the hint on the way there as I don't know which cab driver we had a couple of cabs, but one was from Nepal and another one was from Uzbekistan. Well, you know, I tend to think that Vancouver and Kelowna, you know, in the areas where I, you know, near where I live or in Calgary, that they're very cosmopolitan type places, but you don't run into people from, you know, very, very unusual places.  A lot of Russians there, but, you know, it changed gradually because every time I've been there, I've noticed more and more that it's very diverse and, in fact, it's become, what do they call it, the bedroom community for the United Nations?  I wouldn't mind living there. And by the same token, when we were walking around in Manhattan, I remember there was one street corner where you could hear any language, every language, and I turned to you and I said, Ken, is there anybody here that speaks English? Because it wasn't clear that anyone in the, anyone down the block spoke English. New York is very diverse and it's not only diverse in terms of, you know, the ethnicities that live in the country. It's diversions and all these people come from all other countries and they all manage, they all get jobs, they all get housing and maybe tougher for some of them than others. But the fact is, it's a relatively friendly, relatively, what's the word I'm looking for, tolerant kind of place. And we had, you and I, we like to chat people up, right? We like to chat up strangers. We had so many fun conversations. It was really easy. You know, it certainly was a very welcoming community and the people were really friendly.  Yeah. So we're, we're at a time, I'm afraid, we could go on, as we did in New York, which was a wonderful trip with such a nice reunion and it's so nice to see you now to talk about it. We could go on for a long time just, you know, kind of examining what happened and finding conclusions and lessons in that trip. But let me ask you one last question. What's your, what's your general impression of it? What's your takeaway? What would you tell people about this trip, you know, to explain the change, the delta factor between then 60 years ago and now and our experience in sort of reentering the city after all this time? Well, when I was a student there and I really thought, you know, New York was not a great place to visit. You know, I just thought it was, you know, a big, hustly bustling place and that going as a visitor was really, really a lot of fun. It really is a nice place to visit. But you wouldn't want to live there. There was an article in the paper a couple of weeks ago about how a studio or one bedroom in the East Village and we walked in the East Village make at the West Village, I'm sorry, goes for $4,000 a month, really small, really small apartment. And so you wonder how you can make enough money to support a lifestyle with that as the rent. And then of course, food isn't cheap, restaurants are in cheap, nothing is cheap. On the other hand, you learn, you learn to be parsimonious. You learn to negotiate. You learn to only buy what you need. That sort of thing. Well, it was a great experience, Ken. I really, I was so happy to meet you there. Thank you for coming to meet me. And we had a wonderful time, unforgettable. I'm still, I'm still living through it. My memories are still popping up in any hour of the day of our rendezvous in New York. And I hope we can get to do it again.  Go to Hawaii instead. So anyhow, that's the impression of my neighbors. Thank you, Ken Rogers. Ken Rogers was my roommate in the early 60s at NYU in Weinstein, Joe Weinstein Hall.  Such a good time together in the days of the hippies in Washington Square Park, just a few feet away. Thank you so much, Ken. Talk to you soon. So long. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. 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