Chris Doe. Chris Doe is one of the most well-known designers in the world right now because he's taken over YouTube. He's taken over the world. He's a super, super well-known, super talented designer. We can beep out the. In this video, I'm gonna talk with Chris Doe about branding yourself and running a design agency. Let's go. What you're about to hear is a clip from the Product Breakfast Club podcast with conversation between myself and Chris Doe, one of the most well-known designers on the entire planet right now. We're gonna be talking about all things personal branding, all things design agency running, and we don't hold back. Everything you're about to hear really is just a snippet from the podcast. We're trying that out. We're putting it on YouTube to see how it works. And do let us know in the comments what I should ask Chris if I have him on the podcast next time, or if you have any comments to give to it. We just sometimes love getting some comments. Have a good one. All right, talk to you later. So, hey, Chris. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure, Jonathan. You are right now founder and CEO of Blind, also running the Future, but how did you end up starting Blind? Where did that come from? Just give us a little context on that one. Sure. I think there is some shared DNA. I've not thought about this, but being kind of an accidental entrepreneur to both the companies I've started, I was freelancing in Los Angeles doing motion design work and just kind of barely knowing what I was doing.  I have an opportunity for you because my business partner and I need a design firm. So we'd be willing to invest money and partner with you to start a design firm. I put in my notice, I was done. As soon as he said that, so I met up with his business partner. I wrote up a business plan, which was terrible. Didn't know what I was doing. This is kind of the dawn of the internet here. So we're talking about 1995. Wow, okay, cool.  Google hadn't been invented yet. So I wrote a business plan. I met up with them for dinner. While at dinner, this is pretty bizarre. He wrote me a check for $5,000 and handed it over to me. And he said, this is a good faith gesture that we're gonna do business together. And that's what it took. And I started the design company. Long story short, it didn't work out for us as a partnership. So we dissolved the partnership and I renamed the company blind and everything else has been the same 22 years later. What didn't work out specifically? Okay, so the nitty gritty is this, is that we had initially agreed to $100,000 seed capital to run this company. I had projections that we wouldn't make a profit up until like month eight, but we were already making a profit at the beginning. So I called my uncle up and I said, where's the rest of the $95,000? Where is that? He goes, we're having some issues right now. There's some bigger issues we need to resolve because there were hotel developers. And so they ran into some problems and he said, we can't focus on this right now. So I had to write them a letter. It's kind of a cash call to say, you need to supply the rest of the funds by this date or you forfeit your partnership. Okay. And I was just waiting to see what they would do. It would have been great to have a partner up in my heart of hearts. I kind of liked this. I want to run this by myself. I don't want to ask people for permission. And since we're making money and getting clients anyways, I don't really need it. Before you started that company, did you ever want to start an agency or is that just because it happened by accident that you got into it and understood that it's something you wanted? I think as far as I can remember, even in my early teens, I've always wanted to start a business. I didn't know it was going to be a design business. But I remember in high school, I started a t-shirt printing company because I had worked at a printer and I thought, boy, if I could use my design hustle a little bit, find a client, which I did, and do the designs, I can have somebody print them and then make money in between. Now I didn't realize how to structure a business and all the costs that go into making something. So I was under the delusion that I was making profit when I was just barely covering my expenses. Right. That was a good lesson, but I've always tried to do something like a car washing business or I would go to the Crete Coyote Creek and go fishing for crayfish and then try and sell those. So that kind of entrepreneurial spirit to try to make a buck, I was very driven to do that. How old is Blind right now and how many people work there right now? Blind is in its 23rd year of continuous business under one owner operator that's myself. Wow. I think we're about 14 people on staff and a whole bunch of freelancers and some interns. Not bad. So that's actually pretty rare, a company like that. At least from the design companies that I've studied, it usually either goes two ways, it grows and has marginal profits and eventually gets bought by some bigger conglomerate and just kind of dies or it just doesn't really work out and it fades out and everyone just kind of goes their own ways. And I think that's pretty impressive. How were the first five years? I would say the first year and a half was the toughest it's ever been. And even though it was tough, we've always run a profit. I think there are two years where we actually lost money like we were in the red. Some years it was very thin. So the first five years were actually quite good. Like once we got to the first year learning hurdles and challenges that surround any first year for a company, kind of figure out what we wanted to do who our clients were, our voice, our place in the marketplace. Once we figured that out, things started to catch on. It wasn't supposed to be like this because I was told if we were successful graphic designers, which is what I studied, we would probably make $27,000 a year as an annual salary. And I remember as a teenager, I talked to my older brother who's four years older than me. How much money do you need to make to feel like you've made it in America? He says $100,000. So for some reason I was fixated on the number. If I could make $100,000, I'm a success. So when my department chair told me you could expect to make $27,000 as a salary, I was a little heartbroken. I was like, okay, this is gonna be a long slog to get to $100,000. But I'm out of the gates first year. We're doing really well. We've grossed more than that. I'm not saying that's what I put in my pocket because it costs money to make money. I had to hire people, so I was fine. But here's the sad part to the story. So now five years in, it's near 2000 and my wife had been secretly investing money in Dotcoms. And you know what's going on with this story. I know what's coming. So I'm pretty sure and to this day I don't know the exact amount because it's too painful to think about really. Here's a very important lesson. First, don't do what everybody else is doing. Her excuse to me at that point in time was, everybody's doing it, it just told me to invest. And it looked good until it didn't look good. But you don't know what you're doing.  Meaning you've contributed nothing to it and you know nothing about it. So you're at kind of whim in the marketplace and if it goes down, you're dead. That's what happened to us. I have a very old school mentality. I like my money. I don't want to invest it foolishly and I'm not really trying to get anywhere super fast in terms of money. I just want to earn it and I'm okay with that. How many people were working there when you broke that million barrier? How many people were on staff or was it like freelancers? What was the workforce like? I think it was my wife and I. Now the first year in business, I hired two or three people. I did and then the business went dead in that first year. Like it was going great until it wasn't because I didn't know anything about sales and marketing. I didn't know anything about customer service. I barely even knew how to bid jobs to be honest. I just threw numbers together. It was just a guessing game. And so of course we ran into some problems and basically we ran out of money. One year after starting, we ran out of money and I told everybody, I can't pay you anymore. You guys all gotta go. I'm sorry, they're all my friends. And so they all left. So that's when we went back to zero but the very next year as we rolled from December to January, I picked up a new gig. We started producing that, started making money. And I think we brought in some people again, freelancers this time. I was a little leery of bringing anybody on staff. And so I think we only had two or three people freelancing for us at that time. Cause I also remember, boy it'd be nice to like hire two or three people on staff. I know that the workflow was good enough to support that. But I'm a little conservative when it comes to that kind of stuff. Like I wanna make sure there's a ton of money in the bank account before I hire somebody. Sales in particular is something that took me a long time to get a hang of. If you were starting an agency today, if you were starting a design business today, and I guess this is like a really cliche question, but you don't have any contacts, I guess you do have the skills you have today. What would you do differently? I think in today's age with all the platforms for you to gain traction and awareness, I would exploit those to their fullest. I would try to build an audience as quickly as possible and to kind of figure out my social media game because I believe you can get work that way. But I would have to figure out somehow to position that work, to be appealing to clients who could afford six figures. That's part one. Part two is if I knew what I know now, I don't think I'd have a problem getting to a million dollars. That's the problem. I'm in my 40s right now, right? So there's a lot that I know that I can walk into a room and ask a client and look him right in the eye and ask them for a $100,000 logo and be okay with that, right? If I'm a 21, 22 year old kid, I would think $2,000. Okay, how would you get in the room though? How would you get in the room in the first place? Okay, so now you're stripping away all the people I know too, right? Yeah, just on your own. Well, I mean, okay, if one of your ways of doing it would have been knowing people, then I would be interested in how you would get to know the right people as well. I was talking to my digital director Ben Burns last night about this very topic. And I said that I moved from San Jose to go to Los Angeles, to go to what I perceived at that time to be the best design school in the most competitive marketplace. And when I went to school, I made it a point to prove myself in every single class and every single day to be at the top of my class. I'm super competitive, but I was like, I need to be the best. The opportunities that were created by choosing to go to Los Angeles to be around like-minded, super competitive, super talented people, open doors, and I was able to go down those doors. My first job as a professional was in advertising, something I did not want to pursue. But my friend Colleen Mathis was in advertising who'd seen me, remembered that I was just a hustler. And so when she graduated before me and got a job opportunity, she reached out to me and said, I need a partner, would you come with me? So I dropped what I was doing in school and I went to work. So that's opportunity number one. If we look at other opportunities like directors who were studying in the film program, I would help them out with their project. Now I have to guess, and I'm not sure this is true, the reason why they reached out to me was one that was free work, but that I had a little bit of a reputation like I'm a sharp designer. So I helped them out with their projects, two students helping each other out. When they got a school and they got a gig or they met people, they would recommend me all the time. So they recommended me to a large fashion and beauty company which is where we got our first six-figure job. They also recommended me to an editorial company that needed an identity design. So I did that. So I did it for these guys that were starting up a new company. And when they got commercial gigs, they also recommended me. And this story can be repeated over and over again. I got an opportunity to design what we call key art, video game packaging art, because one of the guys that I knew in the computer lab, because I was an assistant there, he wound up working for a video game company. So when they asked, do you know anybody, he put me up, I got the gig, so I wound up doing video game packaging. So you see how this works? Like being ultra competitive, striving to be the best person I can be, and trying to be decent to human beings while I'm doing it, I'm not perfect, open to all kinds of opportunities. So these friends or colleagues or classmates wound up becoming sales agents for me. That's really interesting. There's a couple of things, the geography as well. Like you mentioned that you moved to LA, geography for me, that's something that people don't think about too often. There's a lot of books out there that say it doesn't really matter where you are. You can do everything from your home. You can do everything from like middle of the countryside. And it's true, but it makes it more difficult. If I think about how AJ and Smart, how we got our first clients, it was definitely related to geography. It was definitely related to physically being in a space where people might want the work that we're doing. I didn't learn a lot at college, but what I did learn is how to make connections and how to do good work for people who then recommended me further. So if anything for you, college was probably just like a really great place to learn your work ethic and build your network as well. But being extremely reliable, not just skilled, because I think today as well, there's a lot of people who are very good at their jobs, but I think maybe if there was like 10 people in your class who are equally as skilled as you, they might still not have been as successful as you. Maybe it's because you're also, we're extremely reliable as well. And I think it's harder than you would think to find reliable, enthusiastic people to do work, at least from my experience, they're few and far between, but people think they're everywhere. I want to probably the most competitive market for creative services in the world, Los Angeles, entertainment capital of the world to try to make a name for myself. When I was in school, I didn't know how to network because I was very awkward in kind of just anti-social. I had some friends and I was coming into who I was as an adult and finding my own confidence, but I really built my whole identity around being a graphic designer. And I remember talking to somebody, I was like, what makes you so special? He asked me and I said, well, I work really hard, man. And he says, everybody here works really hard. You can't just work hard, you have to be great. And it resonated with me. And one of my teachers who I really, really looked up to and still do to this day. And he says, so here's the thing, I just want to destroy this myth for you guys right now. This is first semester, first class at Art Center. And he said to us, you guys think you're competing against your classmates. Look around you right now. You're not competing against them.  Good luck trying to do that. And so that was like a slap in the face. It was like, oh my God, this man that I was learning from, that I revered and everybody else did too, was telling me, this is where the bar is at, so wake up. So my way of networking was to out hustle and out produce and out design everybody in the room. That way I would let the work help me where I was deficient. So these people that I met along the way came from a byproduct of two things. One is my genuine desire to help people. People would then ask me, hey, do you know how to do this thing? And so I became like an unpaid tutor for lots of people.  So I'm gonna say that the first five major gigs that I got out of school came from these relationships, all the significant ones. There was even this guy, his name is Jovo, and he was an industrial designer, kind of an Eastern European guy from the former Yugoslavia, right? So I was trying to help him. Later on, this guy winds up inventing a product and starting a company, a multimillion dollar company, and he hired us to help him.  And would definitely go down the route of like, don't devalue yourself. I definitely have a different opinion on that. What do you think about, at least early in your career, doing unpaid work? To be honest, I don't like doing unpaid work at all, period. I start to question the person's motives. Like why are you asking me to do this? So you don't value my time. I think there was a time and place for that and that was in school. So I was helping out friends and friends helping each other out. Sometimes I'm gonna be honest, it felt very one way. Like I was helping them, but they weren't helping me. But that wasn't true either because there were friends later on who graduated school who recommend me to other people on open doors. It's not a linear relationship where you do somebody a solid and tomorrow that's repaid. The way I look at it is like this, is there's a karma bank and it's better to just have more karma in that bank than to have less so that there's not a ledger out with a negative sign in front of it. Some people do wind up just using you and you just have to accept that and that's okay. At the time in which you're doing it, you have to say, this may never go anywhere and that's okay. I've lived most of my life with that mantra and that's why at the beginning stages of our career, some young students would find out about our design company and there was a little bit of buzz about us. They'd come by and hang out and talk and chat and my girlfriend, latest be my wife, would say like, why are you spending so much time talking to these guys? You have so much work to do. And it was true. I just felt like they had something that they need help with and if I could do something to help them, I would. And these relationships have blossomed over time. Not all, but most have. It was a really great feeling. So when you're out of school and real businesses come and ask you for free work, that's where I'm like, no, you can afford the work. You're just trying to low ball me or you just don't respect the work enough that you wanna pay for it. And that's okay.  I just have to say you need to go somewhere else and that's totally okay with me. Right. Have you ever done work for free that you wanted to do for a company or for a person that wasn't interested in you doing that work in the first place but maybe you just said, I really wanna do this thing and I'm gonna do it? More like self-motivated free work. I know what you're saying because you're so excited about working on it and you wanna just close the deal so you offer it up to do for free. I'm searching my memory banks. I could be incorrect about this but I don't think I've ever done that. I never come to the table more desperate to close the deal than the other player. It erodes all my leverage, right? I've worked on some of the biggest brands in the world. I've worked on Nike. I've worked on Xbox projects, PlayStation, just the things that you dream about working on. I've worked on UFC projects which I'm a big mixed martial arts fan. I don't go into like, oh, please hire me. You know what, I'll just discount it in half. This is counterintuitive. The more you charge, the more the clients respect you. I agree.  This is what's gonna close it. They run around with that scarcity mindset and they're always worried that the next gig is not coming. So all you have to do is blink a little bit and they'll drop their price, cough and they'll drop it again. And so they wind up getting exploited. So where did the sales come from? How does that work? Do you guys have a team? Just go wild, tell me everything. We get commercial leads when I say commercial, like TV commercials from my sales rep in New York, her name's Carolyn. So she represents us now, not just for the East Coast but all of the United States. So if there's a new commercial gig, chances are it's gonna come from her. But we've been in the business for a really long time. I know most of the art directors, executive creative directors, very high level people. And so as long as we're kind of on their radar, some of them will reach out to us from time to time. We're working right now with the Eisenberg Group. They're a smallish advertising agency. There are over 500 employees, smallish, right? And they have a lot of big accounts. The owner, Mr. Eisenberg himself, is somebody I knew back when they were 15 person agency and it was a relationship that we built from a long time ago. And there was a period, probably an over 10 year period where we didn't work together, but now we're reconnected. They're much bigger, much more successful and we're still doing what we're doing. So now we do a lot of Xbox work for them. So cool. We did the launch for the Xbox One X. You saw that. That's amazing. And these relationships are gold. Typically when they call us for a gig, they said it's a one dog race, it's you. As long as you do something that we feel is good about, we're not gonna bid you against anybody else. And that's a wonderful relationship to have, kind of trust and shorthand. So we're not jumping through that hoop, do the dog and pony show all the time. So that's great. So that's another relationship that we have that we built. We do a lot of work for Dunkin Donuts. We have for over 10 years. We used to do a lot of work for Angie's List and there's a handful of other clients that we do work for. Believe it or not, we do these animated things for Swiffer, the floor cleaning product. Oh yeah. Yeah. The dust mop thing. Yeah, we've been doing animated work for them for years now. And so it's nice to have a few clients or accounts where they continue to just come back to you and say, we need more of this, we need more of this. Most of the leads come from relationships we've built. Did you guys ever have any cash flow issues like after the first five years? No, no. And I'll tell you why. Even though we lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the stock market, we never did because I'm a super conservative guy.  So I'll buy a nice lens. I'll buy a $2,700 lens because I think I can shoot something and make something with that. And so some people have guilt around buying things. I do not. When I buy something, that object reminds me, why did you buy this? You need to put that piece of kit into use so that you can go make more. How does this help you? Like this mic that I have, it forced me to record more podcast interviews. Just to get into the future now, the future is at least from what I can see from an outside perspective, it's a separate company. It's a different business focused on education. It's an education company teaching people basically everything from the business of design, tools and skills of design. And you guys are completely destroying it on YouTube. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely without a doubt the most impressive.  It's its own thing, but I'm assuming the benefits of that are going to start feeding back into blind as well. At some point, I'm assuming, but I'd love to know where did that idea come from? How did you decide to make it into its own company? And like, when did you know that this was going to be something like more than a site project? Because most companies, what you're doing there is a little marketing department or someone in the corner making stuff that no one cares about, but no one's taking it seriously. How did that happen? Okay, so at the very beginning of our conversation, I said, sometimes we have these accidental businesses that there's something inside of us and then the right opportunity, the moment happens and it crystallizes. I'm gonna rewind the tape a little bit. Boop, boop, boop, boop. Five years out of school, I started to teach. And I taught at Art Center, I taught at Otis and I've been lecturing here and there for about 10 to 15 years now. I love working with students. They're not jaded. They want to learn and there's this potential cliche where you will learn more from your students and you ever teach them. And if you've never taught, you won't understand that at all because that doesn't make any sense. But when you teach somebody something, it forces you to go inside of your own brain and figure out, well, why do you think that? How did you come up with that solution? Or why do you believe that to be true? So you start to get really introspective and you start to think about the things you think about. You learn to process and you learn to understand your own process and so that you become this whole other person. The problem with teaching is the pay sucks. You drive an hour to school to teach a three hour class, you get back in your car, your day is pretty much shot and you got paid for three hours worth of work. They don't pay you for anything that happens outside of that. And not in terms of developing your class, the syllabus, not to pay you for faculty meetings and things that you need to do unless you're on staff and I'm not. So as much as I love teaching, I thought that this is not sustainable because it will affect my quality of life if I became a full-time teacher, this doesn't make sense. And it wasn't until my wife said to me, she challenged me one day because she would go to my classes, she would sit in there, even though she's a graphic designer too, that's how we would spend some time together and she would see me teach and see who I've evolved into while watching me work with students. She said, you're great at this. You have a real talent to teach.  I believe you're wasting your time here. So I thought it was all a compliment until that part came. I was like, what do you mean I'm wasting my time? And you have the normal reaction. I think that most people have. I'd like to think I'm better than this, but I'm not. And first like, oh, what are you saying? Like, here's my wife trying to tell me what to do, telling me this isn't good enough for me and just like riding me on this thing. I wasn't yet ready to admit that she was right. But I was like, you know, I need to do this. How can I do this? How can I teach and make it into something? So I started to develop a program. It was called Blind U, short BU. And I love that just as an acronym for be yourself, right? BU. Oh, I like that. I didn't get that immediately, but now I'm like, I love it. Yeah, right? It's pretty cool. This is about four years ago. I run into my friend Jose Caballer and he offered very generously to help me with a client I already had to do UX design with me for me. And that became the Trojan case study and also is part of the core coursework that we sell. It was that very first experience of him coming over. He says, Chris, let's do something together. I need to produce content. If I can camp out here, we'll explore some things. And so it was very organic. It was a little slippery and undefined and amorphous. And those things make me very uncomfortable because I'm like, when does this guy leave? What does he want? How long does he park here? And that initial kind of like, okay, he made a gesture of generosity. He wound up staying there for years. And we formed a company together. It was called the school. He dragged me very reluctantly to be on camera with him to produce content for YouTube. He was kind of like my training wills for being an on-air personality. And eventually we make some content that catches on with people. It's the Oli's branding case study. It felt exciting. And I had this dialogue because this is the first time I really put together a deck to teach online to a virtual audience that isn't there. I love working with students. I'm very dynamic around my students, but how do you play off nothing? Like right now I'm looking at a piece of glass, right? I'm looking right into the barrel of the lens. There's no emotion, no micro expressions, no body language, no shifting, no nothing. And I need to draw energy from something. Otherwise I just feel like I'm insane just talking to myself. Piece of emotionless glass. Yeah, it pretty much is.  It is weird. This leads us to the future. Jose and I have different visions for how to run the company. So ultimately we separate very amicably. We still work together. There's still parts of what Jose does that's part of our course. And we still have him as an author. So we send him a check for every product that he sells. The business continues on. So we rebrand it as the future and we're charging ahead. Now there are bigger channels out there that talk about design. There are. There aren't too many. I think in terms of what we do, there are none. So the market is wide open and it's been a very interesting experience for me. We try to provide really high value content to the viewers out there. That's how I found you guys. That's how I found Blind. That's how I found out about you. It was because I was just seeing your content constantly popping up on YouTube. The first thing I watched was like how to sell design or something.  That's one of most popular videos. Yeah, it's a great video. I subscribed and then I just started watching more. We were also building our YouTube channel and you guys are definitely an inspiration. We're doing something a little bit different for sure but you guys are just like dominating in every possible way. So it's just like, it's crazy. So how did you guys grow your YouTube channel in the first place? How did you get that so big? When I joined the YouTube channel and Jose and his company, we had 1300 subscribers. There's a theme here. I'm a super competitive, enically driven person. So I would watch the numbers every single day and he's like, Chris, you are so obsessed. And I'm like, yeah, you are what you think about the most, right? So okay, I'm thinking about our subscribers right now and I'm seeing this. And my wife again, she'll say, honey, I cannot watch your show. You guys ramble on from this to that. It's all over the place.  I'm like, wow, thanks, honey. Let me see what I can do about that. So that's when I told Jose, I'd like to write a deck and produce our show because it's too free form. I'm not sure it's valuable to anybody and I don't wanna sell anything. The videos that we had done before were really geared towards talking about the products in one way or the other. So if you watched the video, you'd go and think about buying the product. I said, I'm not that kind of guy. I don't wanna produce it for that. So I sat down, I made a deck. I spent hours writing the deck and putting it together and assembling all these images. And that was the only case study on branding identity design. We did that video and the video started to get a lot more views than everything else we had done. That video now has probably three or 400,000 views. And it was like, wow, things that I take for granted that I know people actually want to know. And it also taught me if you put in the work to write a deck and you have a point, people will watch it. And so we produced that and it was very invigorating. It was like, okay, I need to write more decks. We need to have more structure. And so we kept working on that. We also have internet friends, Roberto Blake. He reached out and said, guys, I can help you with your SEO and how you can find stuff. So he was on our show and he taught us how to title things and how the YouTube algorithm works. So I have to credit him too for giving us what were just no-nonsense, straightforward tips, and there's an episode on that. So if you search Roberto Blake, that video will come up. And it's that episode that are like, okay. And I just wrote notes fiercely. I'm like, boom, boom. And I told the team, we need to do this consistently all the time. Thumbnails, meta tagging, the descriptions, annotations, all the kind of stuff. And we would work on that. And that's how we eventually grew the channel. You do need one or two kind of viral-ish hits to really spur growth. And that really came, and I'll tell you how it happened for us. So there's no secret here. I had a freelancer who's joined us and he was really good with Google stuff. And I said, I want to run an ad campaign. I want to pick a video to promote. I will pay people, literally, to help them make more money because I want to get more views. So I tried to find one video that was the least offensive video that we had because every video had a problem. Christian Tukaki, audio was bad. Somebody was too distracting or the camera worker was out of focus or something stupid, right? And I tried to find the one video. So I said, I think this pricing logo design will be that video. I said, go put an ad campaign on it. So we wound up, I think, spending a couple thousand bucks promoting that one video.  So it went from getting 30,000 views, maybe to 50 or 60,000 views. It wasn't a gigantic jump. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, I'm paying a dollar per view right now and this is killing me. I can't financially support that because this has no backend. There's no commercial, there's nothing here. But what happened, I think, is it got in front of a couple of people that were really critical to the channel's growth. One, it got on the radar of Jonathan Rudolph who runs logo inspirations. It also got on to design taxi and creative block and it started to get shared all over the place. And so that video started to take off, right? So even though we had turned off the ad campaign, it started to take off. And I have all the numbers and metrics because that's the beautiful thing about this kind of stuff. We saw the organic shares and all that kind of stuff. And so it's quite wonderful. So let's say I spent up to $4,000. I can't remember how much we spent promoting that video. Just on that one video. I was like, I think this is the least offensive video. Let's go with this one. And it started to take off and then it got more eyes. And then all of a sudden when we posted and shared little clips of that video on our Facebook page, we grew from 3,000 likes to almost 30,000 likes within a week or two. That also told me we're on to something here. Now I need to think about why this content was relevant to people. And what happened was we started to hear from hairdressers, plumbers, general contractors commenting. It's like, this applies to me too. So when you have a piece of content that goes beyond a very small niche, there's a good chance that it will be shared and then people will become aware of what you do. That's really great. How much time do you spend on the future compared to blind these days? I spend, I would say almost 99% of my time on the future. I try to spend as little time as possible on blind. And if you're looking towards the next few years, if you're looking towards the next five years of growing the future, where do you want it to be in five years? I know exactly where it'll be. It'll be a $100 million company within a couple of years. It really will be. Yeah, I talked to my financial advisor, right? And I tell him about this new business model. He's like, wow, tell me more about it. First of all, education is very hot. A lot of education companies out there trying to figure it out. Costs of private school education is very expensive. There's concerns that you'll never be able to pay off your loan and the job market isn't there. So everybody's looking for an alternative. So we've essentially built up a catalog, a library of content. If I wanted to, I'm not going to do it, but if I wanted to, I can just turn off all 400 videos and say to some university, would you like to license our catalog?  The good news about this is this, is it has a very predictable income model. We do on average about $1,500 of sales every single day and we're growing every single year about 300% year over year. So we're having that kind of crazy hockey stick kind of growth where it's like flat line and just spikes, right? I told him what I want to do is once we hit a million dollars in revenue, I'm gonna come back to him and talk to him and say I'd like to raise a million dollars in capital. We have a proven business model. I want to raise a million dollars in capital model because I need the money, but I want to sell 1% of the company for $1 million. That gets us to our $100 million valuation. I use that money to hire more writers, producers and editors, even different hosts. And we just keep producing more and more content and keep building out the curriculum. Okay, now I just want to put some context because there are probably some young people listening to this are gonna fall out of their chair.  I can't even believe he's saying those kinds of things. And I'll tell you something. It's a relatively modest amount of money, relatively speaking, because Linda.com at the time I was looking into it was sold to LinkedIn for $1.7 billion with a billion, 1.7 billion. She became a billionaire teaching people. What she taught were hard skills, how to use Premiere, how to use Photoshop, how to color correct, how to use your camera. What we're teaching are soft skills, how to communicate, how to think, how to search, how to research, how to brainstorm. Those are much harder topics in my humble opinion to teach. I believe our catalog and the way that we produce content is a lot more exciting than most online tutorials. We make it exciting to learn. We make it fun so that you don't fall asleep. We're relevant. We have practical business experience. This is not some theoretical academic person telling you, I think this is how you market. This is how we personally market and how we've grown our businesses, how we run our ad campaigns. You're learning from us in real time with real stuff because we're actually practicing designers in the most competitive marketplace. Right. There are no has-beens here. We are current, right? And that's a very unique selling proposition. YouTube, for the most part, is made up of amateurs shooting their show in their bedroom. It's a one person operation. And they're famous mostly for their personality. Not necessarily for their skill nor their experience. Right. I'm out there winning and losing million dollar jobs and I share those experiences. So there are very successful designers that are professionals, but they're not making any content. They have no desire to make content. Yes. For a number of reasons because they're camera shy because they don't see the importance of this. It won't always be like this, but we're here. Why do you think you're going to be able to beat companies like IDO and Udacity? I don't know. I don't focus on the competition. I just focus on us. Simon Sinek talks about this. He talks about there's the finite game and the infinite game. Companies like Apple play the infinite game. The game never ends. We just compete against ourselves. We don't care what Microsoft is doing.  We just focus on ourselves. We try to get better every day. Some days we lose, some days we win, but we will never lose because we will never quit. There's the big difference. So I don't really pay attention to what IDO is doing. I don't pay attention to master class really. I'm sure they're all doing really well. Well, the first thing is that it's not a zero sum game. There's like many billions of people on the planet. So it doesn't even matter if you have IDO, Udacity, Demi, whatever. But I think at least from my perspective, one of the reasons why you guys are going to stand out, especially on the design side and especially for the topics that you have, I think it's more the attitude of being willing to take the risk to put out all that free, extremely valuable content in the first place. I think there's a reason why you're pretty much the only company doing that. If I would talk about IDO and Udacity and Udemy and all of these things, they're obviously like these big business machines that will spend a lot of money on advertising and that's probably how they'll get most of their people in. I think people are probably going to fall in love with your brand. You'll have to spend less money on advertising because people are just going to talk about it and spread it. And even if you don't capture the entire market, which is not necessary anyway, I just think you guys have an approach that's going to be a lot more lean in the short term. And then by the time you've already captured so much of the market, it's already too late for the other ones anyway. You do bring up some very interesting points that I'm not really thinking about. Most people have a very traditional marketing business model, right? We're going to produce a course. We're going to create false scarcity, like enrollment opens at this point, even though it's all video based, come on, right? They're using all the traps and the triggers to pull people in. They give you a taste of it. They might run a webinar that really asks more questions than they answer. And that's a really good business model. But I'm just a punk and I don't want to do things the way other people do it. I want to do it my way. In my ways, I'm just going to give you guys free stuff. Sometimes I feel like, okay, I need to make some money. So I'll put some stuff behind a paywall. But for the most part, 99% of our content out there is 100% free, ad free, sponsor free, no nothing, no sale at the end of it because I want to help people. And that's why I'm genuinely just touched that strangers from all over the planet just sign up to give us five bucks every single month for the price of a cup of coffee or whatever it is wherever you live. And for a lot of people, they live in developing countries. So even five bucks a month is a lot of money for them. And I just, I genuinely appreciate it. And people give us hundreds of dollars too just to support the network. So I believe the sharing economy, like I'm going to give you something and then people volunteer. They volunteer to write annotations for us. They volunteer to do translations. They do battle for us. They really try to go up the chain from wherever that and say, we need to subscribe to this. We need to support them. If you say something critical of us, they go to battle. I'm like, you guys don't have to do that because whereas I'm trying a little bit more surgical with how I respond to some of these comments, they just drop grenades. It's like, whoa. I've seen that on YouTube. The force of the response exceeds what it warrants in terms of the original comment. They just go to war. And that is in a way it's touching that people care that much. Yeah, it's really cool. And we're going to continue doing this. So right now we're scaling, I think we're at 217,000 subs. We're trying to get to a million dollars. So we're doing lots of different things this year from different guests to different types of content. And we'll probably be running another ad campaign just to get people to watch the video. That sounds crazy to me that you're not building that audience just using ads all the time. Is it something that you guys have? It was just one time and now everything else was organic. It was just one time. That's insanity. We only run one ad campaign for that one video and that was it. But I think I have another video I'd like to promote. So I was like, let me think about that. And as you know, you watch our channel, right? My son who's 11 years old, he comes and sits in my lap. He's like, dad, how come you don't run ads? Cause it shows you right there how much money you can make because ads are terrible. I don't want to run ads because I'm annoyed by them personally. And I know I can make a few more thousand bucks a month. Yeah, but I'd rather just have people watch the video. And if watching it ad is deterrent to watching the content, then I'm going to take it off. I'm not saying this is going to be forever. But right now I want to just grow the channel. I want nothing to get in the way of you learning and wanting to watch and consume the content.  That does make sense though, doesn't it? They have no incentive. So actually that's the only reason we have ads on our channel because obviously we're not going to make any money. We have like 3,500 subscribers. We're going to make like 3 cent a month. Yeah, Matt, we're going crazy. We're going crazy here. I think we can make $18 a month with that. This is one of those moments when it's like the Alfred Hitchcock where the camera zooms in and the camera dollies out. My world is so warping right now. And what you say makes total sense. They would be incentivized to feature you if you had ads on. Exactly, 100%, 100%. It was literally a conversation I had today. Oh my goodness, because we're not making any money for them. You're not helping YouTube. You know what I also heard? I don't know if you know this. Apparently if you have links in your description, you get punished as well and you should only have them in there if you're really, really needing to monetize something. Okay, I didn't know that.  We're getting like D ranked for having those in there because YouTube wants you to stay on YouTube as long as possible. Yeah, but sometimes the links are to other YouTube shows or episodes because we do a lot of cut-downs now. That's fine, I think. Your Instagram today anyway, I saw like the future Instagram posts, but it came up in my feed because it was after getting a lot of attention.  Do you guys have like, and are you guys kicking off on Instagram right now? Now we have multiple channels, multiple pages and it is a lot to manage. So I don't manage the Instagram account for the future. What they're doing is they're mining the content we've already made and figuring out how best to tell those stories on Instagram.  They have one piece of content and they just shoot it everywhere. It's like a shatter shot approach and I don't believe in that. So somebody else handles the Instagram and that's not me. So I don't know exactly what they're doing. And we want to post content native to the platform and to that specific audience. Yeah, the Instagram, it's interesting. I did actually see an ad for the future. I guess it was linking to a course. Somehow it seems like you guys are pretty much nailing it on there as well. I mean, even the most recent post has 772 likes. That's quite a lot because it seems like I'm just starting to see this stuff right now. For me, super impressed. Happy that you took the time out. I really appreciate it. And I think it's like also something very different for our audience. The show is mostly about the product world, what a lot of people have been asking about growing agencies and actually a lot of people specifically asked me to interview you. So you have an influence outside of your own future world as well. So Chris, I mean, I got so much information out of it. I feel super selfish. It was really amazing talking to you. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. It was real blast and I enjoyed the dialogue. And I hope to come to see you in Berlin one day. Yeah, you should definitely drop over and you guys are down in LA, right?  Definitely. I would love to do it. Then I'd be super famous. And you can rock an Irish flag and a German flag if you want. 100%. No, I'm going to dress as a leprechaun. I'll be 100% leprechaun. How's it going, lads? Today I'm going to show you how to design a product. Oh, sure, Jesus. There's a bottle of whiskey on the screen here. I'll do full on Conor McGregor, don't worry. Chris, where can people find you on the lovely internet? You can find us everywhere. If you go to thefuture.com, you can find us there. And feature is not spelled with an E at the end. If you go into YouTube, youtube.com slash the future is here. That's the future is here on Instagram. The future is here on Twitter. And you can also follow me personally at the Chris Doe. That's D-O for Doe. And we post lots of content. So if you just search on Facebook for either myself or the future, you're going to find all kinds of weird pockets of information. Great stuff, Chris. All right, hope you like that little snippet of myself and Chris chatting away. There's a lot more of that on the podcast itself. You can find it on any podcast app for free. We have daily blogs on Instagram, on our AJ and SMART channel. We also have a newsletter you can check out down below, which is a bi-weekly product innovation newsletter where you can get the most up-to-date product design news, all the kind of industry stuff that you might want to know that comes to your email every two weeks. No spam, no bull. Finally, we also have a super popular Facebook group called Innovation Hackers, where designers all around the world and innovation specialists all around the world come to share their links, come to ask questions, and come to share their stories about their work in product design. So definitely check that out. Thanks so much for watching and have a great one.


Okay, well this video is a continuation. So the other day we Worked in GIMP and we made this 2d image for a street sign. Let's make a 3d sign We're gonna do two different things here. So let me go ahead and just open up Blender and Just you know, I've been trying out different screen recording software. So hopefully this is recording Okay, some of the programs seem to be causing some flickering. I've tried changing some settings In my video settings, but if there's flickering a little bit at parts of this video I apologize and I delete the default cube and So there's a few things we can do here if I go up to File I can go up to user preferences I can go to add-ons which I'm in right here and I can type in plane and you can see there's an Import images is playing which is a great plugin. I use this all the time and So once you have that checked you go back to a 3d view and you can type in hit spacebar of your 3d view Type in plane and you can see you have just add a plane or import images as plane I'm going to choose that and I'm going to go to my temp folder and in here I have the image we made in GIMP right here. So I'm going to open that. There's some options here. Let's go ahead and Shit set the Z transparency here and use alpha and I'm gonna go pre multiply and just say import Excuse me Now again the image we made originally here is very low resolution 336 by 336 so you know you may want to make this bigger But let me go ahead and hit F12 here and there you can see we have a sign because I export it as a PNG with a Transparent background so now I can go here and I can go Rotate X 90 so it's I rotate 90 degrees on the X axis and Let me move my camera here So I'm gonna hit control alt zero to bring my camera to the current view again I can hit F12 it looks black now That's because of the where the light sources we can move our light source hit F12 again There is our street sign so I can now scale this up and if I go into a Textured mode you can see the image there and now I can add in a Cube mesh and I can scale that way way way way down Go back to front view and I can scale it on the Z axis Scale it up a little bit this way. That's actually probably way bigger than I need. Let's see. That's a pretty tall sign there Move it back if I do In textured mode I can't see that flat plane if I hit Z to go into wireframe mode I can see where that plane is and on the side view. I can easily Line it up here as long as it's not coming through and there we have a street sign and we can Parent them or even make them one object I'm gonna select one than the other and then I'm gonna hit control P and Parent objects so now I can move the base of this and I can Grab it on the Z axis and move it up here Maybe scale it down a little bit. Oh, you know, it'd be good also go into edit mode here and Grab this Like that and then again line this up grab Z Grab on the Z axis like so so now when I Scale it it scales appropriately and if I rotate it it rotates down at that base So I'm gonna move that back down here and Let me just move here again. I get the view. I want control alt zero on the number pad I don't know if I said that earlier now I can hit F12 and you can see we have a street sign I can add in a plane for it to sit on now Doing it this way we have to make sure so this this is a flat image with a transparent layer We want to make sure that shadow cast properly as you see when I hit F12 here You see that square back there That's because it's rendering a shadow of the of the entire plane here even though some of it's transparent The way we can do that and that's one of the drawbacks of doing this method I'm gonna choose the plane where the shadows going to be cast. I'm gonna give it a material and go down to Shadows and I'm gonna say receive transparent now if I hit F12 the shadow looks appropriate I can move our light source here. There you go. You can see what it looks like a little better there And of course, it's very simple. You might want to do a little more work, you know shaping the post but that's a very simple street sign here and Of course, we can go into our world and I like to turn on ambient occlusion turn into a pre or not Pre-multiply but multiply environment lighting and hit F12. I think it looks a little bit nicer there And we can even make our sky, you know white 12 looks a little nicer there and if we want if we want like that infinite white background We can again choose this plane go to its materials and under shadows We can say shadows only If I hit F12 now now you have that infinite white. We're not really getting that shadow There's there's tweaks you can do for that But they're just depending on what you're looking for And that is one way to create a street sign But again now doing this any object the shadow is going to be cast on you're gonna have to make sure that you choose Receive transparent on their material So there is another way you can go about doing this and that is actually make a 3d model Another another drawback to this I should also mention is let's say I rotate this Uh 90 degrees or how about and rotate it z negative 90 degrees So now we're kind of looking at the backside that if I hit F12 It's the same sign on the back So this is a quick easy way to do it, but not necessarily the best now Uh, and again, it depends if you're just making a scene that's going to be off in the distance This is a quick easy way to do it, but uh doing it another way is not much harder So in the next video, we're actually going to create a sign of that shape So let's uh end this video here. I ask I thank you for watching. I ask you to visit filmsbychris.com That's chris of the k there should be a link in the description as always. I hope that you have a great day


So a problem like this is very similar to an empirical formula problem. Let's try it. It says a 3.10 gram sample of anhydrous nickel 2 sulfate was exposed to moist air. If 5.62 grams of a hydrate of nickel 2 sulfate was obtained, what is the formula of the hydrate? So in order to do this, we have to understand that anhydrous nickel 2 sulfate means nickel 2 sulfate without the water associated with it. And it's going to make the hydrate as the product. So I'm going to have something like that. Plus x amount of water goes to nickel 2 sulfate x H2O sulfate. Does everybody understand that that's the equation that we're going to be working with? So, well, what do we need to do? We need to figure out how many moles of nickel 2 sulfate we've got to start out with. So I calculated the molar mass of this earlier. What did we get? 15473. So 154573, we'll cancel that out. 0.0200 moles of nickel 2 sulfate. So the mass of the hydrate is 5.62 grams. The mass of the nickel 2 sulfate is 3.10 grams. We should be able to figure out what the mass of the water is from those two numbers. So the mass of the water is going to be, well, 5.62 grams minus 3.10 grams, 2.52 grams of water. Remember, the molecular or the chemical equation gives us the mole to mole ratio, not the mass to mass ratio. So what do we have to do to this number? Convert it to moles. So you remember the molar mass of water for 0 moles of water. Is everybody OK with that? So now, remember, we're looking for, well, what's this formula? So we know most of it. We just don't know x here. Does everybody understand that? So what do we have to do? Well, we're going to, x is going to be bigger than 1, right? So we're going to have to figure out the mole ratio. So the number of moles of nickel 2 sulfate is going to be 0.0200 divided by 0.0200 nickel 2 sulfate 2, well, what do we got? 0.140 divided by 0.0200 H2O, like that. So very similar to doing the empirical formula, except in this case, we're figuring out coefficients. So when we do that, when we divide 0.02 divided by 0.02, that gives us 1, right? The other one is, well, we don't even have to do it. It's 7, all right? So is everybody OK with that? So what would our formula be? Nickel 2 sulfate heptahydrate, for niso4.7 H2O. And if we wanted to name it, it would be nickel 2 sulfate heptahydrate. Why would I say, why do I keep saying nickel 2? Because nickel is a transition metal. So we have to remember, say, nickel 2. So let's just write out the name of this thing. So 2 sulfate. So the 2 is because nickel's a transition metal. Heptah means 7. Hydrate means 1. Any questions on doing something like this? So I know we've been doing things like this for a long time. I think this was chapter 3 or chapter 4 material. And I know we've done a few of these in the lab, so.


My name is Keith Moore, I'm the Royal Society's librarian and today I'm joined by Dr Mark Richards, who is an Atmospheric Physicist from Imperial College. Mark, welcome. And we're here to talk about John Evelyn, one of our earliest Royal Society Fellows, and in particular one book that he wrote and published in 1661 called Fumafugium. But first of all Mark, if we had goggles and could see the atmosphere, what would it look like? Well, it would look like some sort of soup in some respect. I wouldn't say quite say pea soup, but it certainly would look like a soup, a mix of all sorts of different chemicals and components, and it's quite dynamic. Now John Evelyn's book Fumafugium takes in some of these ideas, doesn't it? Because some of it is very visual and he addresses his book to King Charles II, because he wants something to be done about it. It was one day as I was walking in your Majesty's Palace at Whitehall, where I have sometimes the honour to refresh myself with the sight of your illustrious presence, which is the joy of your people's heart, that a presumptuous smoke issuing from one or two tunnels near Northumberland House and not far from Scotland Yard, did so invade the court that all the rooms, galleries and places about it were filled and infested with it, and that to such a degree as men could hardly discern one another for the cloud. There are some few particular tunnels and issues, belonging only to brewers, dyers, lime burners, salt and soap boilers and some other private trades, one of whose spiracles alone does manifestly infect the air. Whilst these are belching it forth their sooty jaws, the city of London resembles the face rather of Mount Etna, the court of Vulcan, Stromboli, or the suburbs of Hell than an assembly of rational creatures. Marcus, this is a very visual way to talk about industrial pollution. I mean he does use very vivid language, doesn't he? You've got the volcanoes, it has a kind of rather beastly quality, something like a dragon, so this seems to be very visible pollution, doesn't it? Absolutely. He's given pollution this almost made it feel alive and therefore more of a threat. In modern times that element is still required. Pollution is not going to be solved by let's say a logical argument or a purely economic argument. It has to permeate into the hearts and minds of the general public for them to put pressure on shall we say the powers that be to take action so that we can reduce the effects of it. What if there appear to be an arsonical vapour as well as sulphur, breathing sometimes from this intemperate use of seacull in great cities? That there is what does plainly stupify is evident to those who fit long by it. Newcastle Coal as an expert physician affirms causeth consumptions, physics and the indisposition of the lungs, not only by the suffocating abundance of smoke but also by its virulency. For all subterranean fuel half a kind of virulent or arsonical vapour rising from it which speedily destroys those who dig it in the mines. Mark Evelyn talks about his expert physician giving views on the impact on human health of particularly burning coal. What's the impact on human health of pollutants today? Same or different? Well I suppose now we're talking about maybe emissions from transport like nitric oxide, sulphur dioxide, potentially things like volatile organic carbons and things of that nature. They have all sorts of effects, respiratory illnesses and there's even evidence to suggest that they can have impacts on brain tissue and so on. So they're similar in the sense that they are severe adverse health effects but the pollutants are different and so how we measure them, how we visualise them are different to perhaps then where it was very visible, it was smart, it was thick smoke and it was clear that you are breathing that in. Whereas now where a lot of the pollution sources are let's say from vehicles, the particles are much smaller, essentially invisible to the human eye. It's possible to be in a world where you don't necessarily have this sense of urgency because you can't see the effects but yet we know that pollution kills many many thousands in the UK every year and millions worldwide. It is this horrid smoke which obscures our churches and makes our palaces look old which fouls our clothes and corrupts the waters so as the very rain and refreshing juice which fall in the several seasons precipitate this impure vapour which with its black and tenacious quality spots and contaminates whatever is exposed to it. Now I like John Evelyn's method of detecting pollution which is kind of sounds like looking at his white shirt and seeing the spots on there. Now you have your own detecting system don't you? Tell us about that. Do you have a portable system like John Evelyn's shirt? Absolutely, not quite on the shirt but we realised that the then current way how air pollution was monitored was very much dependent on large fixed stations that are positioned in specific areas. Ultimately we are on the move often and so we developed, we basically took the fixed open path unit and we basically housed it within a box and initially it was a violin case if truth be known. So we literally had two people walking with the units down Exhibition Road and all around South Kensington and at that time you had people selling newspapers and flowers and things on street corners so we decided to place a unit there for about 15-20 minutes just to see what sort of pollution they were being exposed to. Now the average wasn't necessarily a lot higher than elsewhere however what there were were huge spikes and those spikes were basically correlated with the changing of the traffic lights and so you start to think that a relatively innocent job like selling newspapers or flowers on the corner could actually be very dangerous especially if you are quite vulnerable because you were being exposed to these spikes time and time again. Not therefore to be forgotten is that which was by many observed that in the year when Newcastle was besieged and blocked up in our late wars so as through the great dearth and scarcity of coals those fumous works many of them were either left off or spent but few coals in comparison to what they now use. Divers gardens and orchards planted even in the heart of London were observed to bear such plentiful and infinite quantities of fruits as they never produced the like either before or since. So Mark we've spent a little bit of time with John Evelyn having read Fumafugium what impression do you come away with? What do you think of Evelyn? This was not John Evelyn's area of expertise per se but he was concerned enough to raise it at the highest level and sometimes you know something like air quality is precisely that type of topic that everybody should be concerned about. I like to think of John Evelyn as an environmental protester I think. I would say so yes I mean he was in a position to influence the powers that be the decision makers and he used that position to bring attention to something that didn't just affect him affected you know people much more widely and so for that I think he should be commended. I'm learning a lot of tips here how to how to get things done. I think when I get back to Imperial I'll call one or two of the senior academics your most sacred esteem you're supposed to esteem sacred scholar.


This question is from Varshani. If one has been pleading for nothing less and one is doing all the sannas and becoming emptied each day, but the experience still has not happened, what is one to do, Sadhguru? Emptiness does not come in installments. Because emptiness means that which is not. Why emptiness is? Because fullness, there is no such thing, it's just a word. If you really look at it, let us say, I will put one billion dollars into your pocket. No, I have no such plans, I'm raising funds right now, okay?  It feels very full for one day, but then you see her walking with ten billion dollars, huh? You have? Then suddenly your pocket feels empty with one billion dollars. Then let's say we'll put another nine for you, you have ten billion dollars. Then he is walking with hundred billion dollars, suddenly it again feels empty. So your pocket can never be full, no matter how much we put. We'll take your head. When you passed your first standard, you felt like, what's more, what's there more to know in this world, you know?  And you went through this, went through this, then they told you ten standard is public exam, that's it. If you do that, this is the… your parents went on telling you this is the key aspect of your life. Ten standard is very crucial, you believed.  What college? I thought I… Number ten I reached. Perfect number, champion number, but no good like this at every point.  Well, initially you just fell in love with only one person. Then when you fall in love with one person, you know, she produces one or two or three. Then you fell in love with all of them, but then they produce grandchildren like this. That also you love, actually more than this one, so your heart also cannot become full. You go in a constipated installments, that's different. If you fall in love with everything in the universe, still it is not full, still it is capable of taking more. So your pocket cannot become full, your head cannot become full, your heart cannot become full. So fullness is an illusion that you chase. There's no such thing. But emptiness is possible. What is empty is never partially empty. Fullness is always partial. Emptiness is always total. When something is empty, it is absolutely empty. So you don't do that in installments. If you try to do it in installments, then you you will never catch emptiness because you cannot catch emptiness. This happened one day. A lady was having a neighboring woman, another lady from the neighborhood who is also about her same age, both of them have children. So of course she wanted to, you know, boast a little bit. She said, we bought a few liters of olive oil and we soaked our baby in this olive oil. Then the other lady asked, really? It must be very expensive, but his skin quality has must have really changed. Then the man in the house came out and said, I don't know about that. We've not been able to catch him till now. So don't try to catch emptiness. You can't catch emptiness. It's not anywhere. F, but it's total. So what do I do? How do I empty myself? You understand this, if I take a bucket, I can empty it by throwing a mug after mug out. If I take a well, I can take, you know, take buckets and buckets and buckets and empty it. Well, that is not the way it happens. You become empty, not because you have nothing.  You're not possessed by the things that you carry. Right now you're possessed.  When you're dispossessed, you're empty. So this is the purpose of sitting with eyes closed, not praying to somebody, not calling out some god, not something just cut off, lockdown.  You're simply all by yourself. But of course, many of you are behaving as if you're possessed. When you're dispossessed, you're empty.  I'm saying you're looking in the wrong direction. You're looking at a few titbits that you have gathered in your life. Yes, that's all you've gathered. And thinking, if I leave one, I will become empty. Okay, I leave one more, I'll become empty. People go to Kashi. It's a tradition that in ancient times, they said, when you go to Kashi, you must become dispossessed. There's nothing more. Every day you see hundreds of bodies burning there. You sit there for a few days or a few months. When you come back, you're dispossessed. You are not entangled with anything. Then people made it little more. You must leave some money and come. You must leave something else and come. These days, they give... leave only Pawakai and come. The bitter god. Anyway, they were not eating it. So that one, they will leave it and come. You must leave something and come.  That is not the way to leave it because you are aiming at the wrong target. Even if you shoot it, not going to go away. This happened. One day, Shankaran Pillai was newly married. So he made it a point, when he's coming back from his office, he always stopped in a restaurant and made sure he ate reasonably well and then came home. Because home was an experiment still. So he came home and his wife was... as soon as he came home, she opened the door, she hugged him and cried bitterly. She asked, what happened? She said, just for you, I went through so much... From morning I've been online taking instructions from a cooking instructor and I made chicken biryani for you. I think it turned out well. But the dog, our dog ate it up. I just went for a shower.  Shankaran Pillai says, it's okay, I don't cry. I will buy a new dog. So, what's her name? Vasini. If you want to become empty, what is needed is to get dispossessed. There are methods for that, how to do it. Don't try to empty one thing after another. It'll take... Even if you go for a million years, you will always be finding something new because how you gather it, you never know. You can get rid of this, you can get rid of that, but you keep on gathering other kind of things. So don't go that way. There are proper methods. You should get initiated into something which will work.


Hi all, Salvatore here. On International Human Rights Day, I made the extravagant sounding claim that people in the world would be lucky to live in India from a human rights standpoint. In fact, that's pretty easy to show.  And if you cut that in half and you ask, do half the people in the world live at a worse human rights level than India, you're looking for something like 3.3 billion people in the world who have worse human rights in India. And I can quickly show you 3.3 billion people in the world who have worse human rights in India. Let me start in China. We've got 1.4 billion right there. Let's add in Indonesia. We're now up to 1.7 billion if you include the Philippines, 1.8, something like that. Throw in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We're up to 2.1 billion of Russia and much of the former Soviet Union. Now up to 2.9 billion. Clearly Iran, you know, so up to 3 billion. Most of the Arab Middle East, we're already over 3 billion. And then almost all of Sub-Saharan Africa, or for that matter, North Africa as well. So almost all of Africa has worse human rights than in India. So you're now at this point over 4 billion people in the world who clearly have worse human rights situations than people in India. When you start getting to Latin America, it may get questionable. India may be at similar levels, but we can very clearly and easily show that more than half the world's population lives in countries that have clearly worse human rights situations than in India. In other words, people in the world are lucky if they live in India from a human rights standpoint. Now consider that India has a GDP per capita of just over $2,000 per year. Among poor people in the world, among people who are living at GDP levels under $10,000 per year, they're incredibly lucky to be living in India. India has done a great job. I'm not saying that there aren't abuses and problems in India. Of course, there are problems everywhere. But the scale of problems in India is clearly demonstrably quantitatively much lower than in the rest of the world as a whole and certainly much, much lower than in the developing world as a whole.


We are a meetup group for people who design and build APIs. Thank you for coming. So the topics we usually discuss during our meetups include API design and best practices, the API development process, from certification to development, testing, and so on. The business of APIs, the future direction of technologies that's related to APIs. And yeah, that's it. This is our second meetup. We had our first meetup last year. And I think that was pretty awesome. And I hope this will be pretty cool as well. Today we have an interesting set of topics by three speakers. First is Joss, who will be sharing on Beyond JSON, exploring different serialization formats. Then we have Gao Xiang, who will be sharing on API gateways and microservices. Then we have Pei Song, who will be sharing about APIs with the main driven design. So without further ado, let's start with our first speaker. I'm the first speaker. So hi, everyone. I'm Joss. I'm a software engineer working at a company called BandLab. We're a music startup. And today I'd like to share with you Beyond JSON, or fantastic serialization formats and where to find them. And so over the course of preparing for this talk, I realized that serialization sounds awfully similar to serialization. Do you see that? Yes. So I'll be using a lot of serial related examples for this talk. So for the benefit of those of us who might not be familiar with APIs, I'm just going to start with some introduction about what the web API is and what exactly we're talking about. So first of all, a web API is basically like a website for your software. Let software communicate with each other over the network or the internet. And my talk will be covering about alternative serialization formats. And serialization is a key step in this software to software communication process. It answers the question of what medium does the system communicate with? What language does the systems communicate with? So examples of web APIs. I think all of us are familiar with logging with Facebook. Logging with Facebook is essentially calling Facebook's API, Facebook's website, to communicate with Facebook's underlying authentication system. Other APIs include third party services like Twilio, which is an SMS communication API. Stripe, which is a payment API. And HelloSign is an electronic signatures API. And there are also services that allow APIs to communicate with each other. For example, IFTT is short for if this, then that. Let's you trigger, for example, if you receive an email, you would trigger something else, maybe an SMS, using Twilio's API, a charge, using Stripe API, or something else. It wires up different APIs together to communicate and create actions that are triggered using APIs. And Zapier is kind of similar. Both are third party services that utilizes APIs to build new things. So this is the structure of my talk. I'll be starting with a brief introduction to serialization, what serialization is. I'll be talking about JSON, which is the most common format of today's APIs, followed by message pack and protocol buffers. And finally, have a conclusion. And that's serial. OK, so serialization. What is that? Anyone have an idea? Serialization. OK. So serialization is the process of translating object state to be a row in your database into a format that can be transmitted and reconstructed later. So one analogy is like you have a letter and you want to send it to someone else. So you put it in an envelope and you send it over the wire. Someone opens the envelope and retrieves the state, the message inside. So another analogy is you have a bowl of cereal. You put it in the box and you send it to someone and that someone just opens the box and pours, just eat the cereal. So for APIs, communication between systems is key. So the main use case for serialization is transfer data between different systems. This is because systems might be implemented in different languages. For example, you have a Ruby API, a Node API. They might have different data types, different ways to represent strings. And to communicate with each other, they need some kind of shared language that they agreed upon a priori at the beginning that they agreed to be the language that they're using. So for example, some of us here might be bilingual. We speak English, but maybe we speak a different language. But for the sake of this meetup, I'm speaking to you in English. It's like a shared language we both have and we both understand. So serialization formats is that shared language. So this example, you have different software systems written in different platforms, different languages. They have their own way of encoding data types. So to communicate between each other, they need to somehow translate the data types in their own language to another language. But the problem with this is that for every pair, you need to have some kind of integration or some kind of middle layer to handle that translation. So instead of doing this, we use some kind of common data serialization format that the systems agree to speak. And so this is what we'll be looking at. Different data serialization formats. So the most common is JSON. So your Ruby API return a JSON response and you consume JSON. It's the de facto serialization format of the web. And so in this type, we'll be looking at three different formats, JSON, message pack, and protocol buffers. So in looking at these three formats, we will evaluate a few key attributes. One is how readable are the formats? Does it spot types, validation? Does it spot schema evolution? And so on. We'll revisit these three attributes when we look at the three formats. And with that, let's start with JSON. So JSON is today's standard way of, standard serialization format. It's easy to pass. It's easy to generate and read. It's human readable. But the drawback is it has no schema and no type checking. To sum up, it's easy to work with but not very efficient with the wire. It also has no schemas. So this is what JSON looks like. It's based on JavaScript. It's an object with keys and attributes. And yeah, this is JSON. Looks like this. So I think of JSON compared to the other two formats as like a postcard. You don't need an envelope. You can just send it as is. You need, and it can be read, it can be read by the browser natively. So but the drawback of using plain old JSON is that it has no types. So the types of JSON are limited to those things. But beyond that, for example, the other types that might be available in statically typed languages like enums, for example, we cannot represent that natively with JSON. So some features of some types are lost in translation somehow. And because JSON is dynamically typed, if you want to validate the format, the shape of the messages, we have to do it by writing code. Like for example, if this attribute exists or if this attribute is an integer or a Boolean, these things have to be written down in actual code rather than having a kind of schema or type to validate this automatically. So to check if a required attribute exists, if you check the types of an attribute and other validations, these has to be done in actual code. So that's not nice. And I realized that, have anyone heard of JSON schema? JSON schema, yes. So this does exist. And this does, JSON schema, it's okay. So JSON schema is a way to describe the shape of your JSON messages and validate them. So for example, you might be sending, so this is an example of a JSON message. So maybe you could say that, hey, these messages I'm sending have a first name that is a string. The last name is a string and other attributes. We can specify a format that we can then use to validate without having to write code to check manually every single message. But this is not perfect. And as we'll see, other serialization formats have a more expressive way to solve this issue than JSON schema. Any questions at this point? Okay, thank you. So next we'll look at message pack. How many of you have used message pack of? Oh, cool. What do you use it for? Serialize the object and installing the latest. Ah, yeah. It's a common use case for that, yeah, thanks. So message pack. Similar to JSON, but there are new formats. I mean, also when you have data, there are new formats. I've heard of it. Yeah, yeah. I'll send it to you later. I do essentially, close it to the protocol buffers, the third one, yeah, which we'll look at later. Yeah, that's pretty interesting, next. So other than message pack, so this is the best way I can describe message pack. It's like a clown car of dogs, I don't know. So message pack is like JSON, but it has an efficient binary encoding meaning you can compact it very well. Takes, first of all, it's not human readable. It's smaller, it takes less space.  And it has schemas and types, but we won't go into that in this talk. And the key strength of message pack is that it's useful for systems that require low latency and high throughput. And it's also used in storage, in reducing the amount of storage that you need to store your data. In real life use, it's used for real-time games and systems that really need that low latency and high throughput. And it can very easily be a drop-in replacement for JSON. If you're already using JSON to use message pack is like three lines, of course. So this is what JSON looks like. And that's what message pack looks like. It's a binary format. Again, it's not human readable. It's not supposed to be, but it takes less space. So, yeah. In most cases, usually it's around a 50% reduction, but it depends on your use case. So I will quick demo for message pack. Is it visible? So, okay. So let's say we have a serial object. And let's say we have an API that usually returns JSON, a JSON string. And using message pack, just convert it to a message. Oh, sorry. And that's it. And you send this instead of a JSON string. And then at the other side, when you want to consume this message and just decodes that message pack into a JSON string. So it's just a simple serialization into message packs, into message pack, and deserialization back into whatever it was. And it's not limited to JSON. It could be just straight up, for example, it could straight up decode like a Ruby object or any of the languages, data structures. So just a side-by-side comparison between JSON and message pack. Basically it's, I mean, message pack is using some, it's own code, it's not readable. So that's message pack. So the key idea, key difference between message pack and JSON is that message pack has this idea of compressing the messages into a different format for efficient transport. So that's the first idea. And next we look at protobuf, which has a couple more interesting ideas. So protocol buffers is, according to Google, a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. So the two key ideas here is structured, the three key ideas here is structured, efficient and extensible. So it's the, so for internal services at Google, apparently they don't use JSON, they use protocol buffers for their internal service communication. And it's a compact binary format like message pack, as we've seen, it's also efficient. It compiles a different, smaller, more compact version prior to sending over the network. It has schemas, which we'll look at next, and has client generation, which we'll also look at next. So this is an example of a protocol buffer schema, they call it a proto file. Essentially this describes the shape of your messages that you send between systems. So this person, message, has three attributes, an ID of an integer, format, a name, which is a string and an email is a string. We have other annotations that describe whether or not these attributes are required for it to be valid. And if you notice there's like three, I don't know what the, three numbers. And this is used for schema evolution. Essentially over time you'd expect that your system will have changes to the messages it sends to each other. And so how do you spot that? So we'll take a look at that soon. So the rationale behind protocol buffers is this quote. It says, we carefully craft our data models inside our databases, maintain layers of code to keep these models in check, and then allow all that forethought to fly out of the window when you want to send that data over the wire to another service. You might have a very carefully written database schema, but when you send it over the wire using JSON, it just ends up as a string or something else. That's not exactly the schema that you came up with. So this is schema. A key feature of protocol buffers is given a schema, it can generate the client that consumes the messages automatically. For example, given the schema, it just run a CLI command. Generates the Java client code that can be used to consume and form messages of this format to other systems, to other services. And not shown here is the fact that if we didn't, for example, set the ID, and then we build it, it would throw an error. And all that is done automatically by the generated client. Schemes are awesome. It's a very expressive type system. It's not just like required optional. There are other type systems like enums, composite types, you can define, for example, we define a new type here, then use that type in our schema. So it's a pretty expressive system to describe the shape of the data that you're sending between services. So next we look at schema evolution. So in most cases when we're building systems, we only know something once we start doing it. A few comments later, we might discover that, hey, we're doing this wrong, we shouldn't have this field or oh, we're missing this field, so we have to add it. But we also have to support existing clients that are already using messages of a particular format. So the challenge here is, can we add new fields or schema over time without breaking old clients? So this is schema evolution and it's not available in JSON schema. So this is pretty interesting. So remember the numbers, this is where it's used. So for example, let's say our previous version of our app uses this particular message format as an ID, name and email. And in our next version of our app, we've changed the schema into this. So notice for the new field, we removed one field and we've added a new field. And we specified a different attribute ID. So protocol buffers, when this happens, the old code will happily read new messages because the email is optional anyway. And to the old code, any optional fields that were deleted in the new schema, we just have a default value or something now. And the new implementation that uses this schema will also just read the previous schema, previous messages, just fine. Yep. I know it's a little confused. Any questions at this point? What if we make it take away from this one of the various things? Sorry? If we make it take away from this point? Yes, okay. Think about, so no, it doesn't work like that. Unfortunately, you cannot delete required attributes. You cannot add new required attributes either. So it's very limited in that sense. Yeah, thank you. So yeah, that's pretty cool. So just to quickly summarize, when is JSON a good fit? Would you want data to be human readable? When the data is consumed directly by the browsers or by JavaScript, you don't need to sterilize, you don't need to transform to a different intermediary format. And when it's not important for the data model to be tied to the schema. When should we use message pack? When low latency or high throughput is key, or when storage considerations, when you want to reduce amount of storage that you need to store your data. And so both message pack and protocol buffers are only really recommended for internal communication because anyway, if it's a public API, it's the browser that's consuming it. It's, yeah. And protocol buffers is pretty interesting because you can serial structure data and use schemas. And this client generation, given a set, given a schema, you can just generate a client in any language and platform that is spotted by protocol buffers. And also has a somewhat useful feature for additive schema evolution. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, okay, thank you. Thanks. Yes. Is there a specific reason other than your young age that you didn't look at XML? Thank you for addressing the alphan in the room. I think it's... Yeah, I figured it would be... It's close enough to JSON. It's... Yeah, sorry. Actually, I did consider looking at other formats like Avro. I just figured there was not enough time, so thank you. Sorry. Thank you. Here, it's talking with the JSON for JSON, right? Yep. But we also said JSON, there is no schema, so how does that handle them? Because your message pack had a schema, right? Oh, this thing is optional. In most cases, when people use message pack, they don't even use this. Actually, you can use JSON schema. It's just... converting the string into a smaller string and sending it over the wire. So you can definitely use both JSON and message pack at the same time. Whether we use case to use message pack in a browser or is there a big serialization tool? I think... I have seen an implementation using message pack to send state updates for games, for example. You have sent a lot of packets over the wire. And, yeah, it's on the browser. So you would have that deserialization step in your game client to receive that state update. Is that the question? Game plan. Game plan running in the browser. It's a... Oh, okay. That was a good question. That's my question. To find the format, suddenly and then independently? I just want to... Oh, you have to explain... You're too old for that. I can't do that. I'm not a computer science major. Oh, okay. Something I should mention is that message pack and protocol buffers have implementations in different languages. And they all satisfy the same unpacking and de-packing... unpacking and packing to the same message pack and protocol buffer formats. So they have a message pack and protocol buffers have clients in multiple languages. And they all follow that same spec. So it should be independent in that sense. Or applied for AI again. I don't know. Thank you.