Okay, it's 5 p.m., 5 o'clock rock. I'm Jay Fidel on Think Tech, and guess what? We're doing Think Tech Tech Talks today, and we're doing that with Kevin Miyashiro. He is one of the principals, the co-chair of the IMS 2017 conference, and that's the International Microwave Symposium. You got it right in the first try, Jay.  You know these engineers. We like big, fancy acronyms, yes. And we're going to call this show IMS 2017 Men's Business Technical Tourism. I love that term. That's Kevin's term. Welcome to the show, Kevin. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So here we are, and it's, what is it, June 2nd today. And the rest of our lives, you know, the rest of the world goes forward from here. But what I want to know is how you got here. Don't tell me taxicab. I drove. How did you, what did you do in your life to deposit yourself here in this place at this time?  I had no idea what I wanted to do. Apparently he made a decision from my sister and me before we were even born.  I have so decreed. And you know, him and my mom, both, I mean, they shaped us kind of towards that goal. And then lo and behold, I became an engineer, went away from... That's so easy to be an engineer. Did you sail through school? Is that what you're saying? No.  It's a tough degree. But you know, you get through it. You enjoy it and everything. Went away to work for a while in the LA area. My game plan was to get my doctorate and come back to UAC and teach. Completely didn't happen. Got my matches and said, I'm out, forget it. But then, you know, my wife and I, who we both grew up here, we decided to move back to raise our kids here and everything. So we've been back for 15 years, give or take. We first hosted this show, the International Microchip Symposium here in Honolulu for the first time. It ever left the continental U.S. here in 2007. So I was 10 years younger, a little bit less wise and a little bit more open-minded about things. And so we had such a good time. We said, hey, why don't we do this again? So we put in a bid in 2008. You're a founder of the show, then. You know, Wayne Shromer deserves really the lion's share of the credit. He's the one that made the first move to bring it here in 2007. The joke that we all have is, Wayne was 30 in 1998 when we first bid it. When the show came, he was 40 in 2007. I was 30. And so it was sort of my turn to kind of come help do things. So I served as the pitchman to convince the deciding committee to bring it here. Wayne really is the brains behind the operation, so he helps make everything happen. I am now in my 40s, so to speak. And so now it's our turn to kind of pass the baton into the next generation to find the next young, unsuspecting person in the 30s to go bring it back again. And then every 10 years, it'd be beautiful to have this cycle repeat over and over and over again. Let's do a shout-out to Wayne. You could use his last name because I don't know his last name. Professor Wayne Shromer. I mean, like... Oh, that Wayne. That one. Oh, wow. Yeah. You know Wayne. Yeah. We've known each other a few years. Okay. So what are you doing now? This very moment I'm talking to you. Thank you. Good. Very metaphysical answer. So I run my own business. It's called Terrace Technologies. It was started on Maui. We moved it here to Oahu in 2009. It is a wireless business, so it's related to this conference. We do a lot of defense work, but we've actually been moving into a lot of the commercial space. So we combine wireless technology, software stuff, if you hear about all this cloud software, we do that. And so we're just trying to build as many things as we can to get them out there in the world. That's what we do for a living. That's great. But don't you... And this is digression from what we plan to talk about, but I need to ask you. Don't you feel... You're going off-script, man. That's all right. That's okay. Think, Tech, you know. We follow our intuition and our curiosity. That if the world is going to public nodes where everything is going to be free, somebody has to hook it up there, but after that it's going to be free. This is what I think is going to happen. Are you still relevant then? I actually think more so. Just because the infrastructure is free, so let's say the day comes where the information highway is as ubiquitous as the physical roads that we all drive on, right? I as a regular citizen, do I pay for that road? No, and yes, I mean, I don't, I don't write a check, but my taxes pay for that, right? So why couldn't my taxes pay for that same information highway that's spewing these ones and zeros all over their place? But still, there are services that I need to buy my soda from, I need to get my gas from. There's all these stops that can come all over the place on this information super highway. So companies and vendors like mine wear the services and the capabilities and the products that ride on this information highway. We live in America. It's a capitalistic society. We get to make profits off of adding value added services, even on this free backbone. So in a way, the more free they make it, the faster they make you, they help you go. I think the more businesses can benefit from offering services on this super fast highway. You want to build that highway? I don't want to build a highway. There's a phrase in Silicon Valley that they said, don't ever be the gold digger. Be the one who sells the shovels and the pails to the gold digger. So you want to arm people who want to go do things as opposed to building out the rail roads. I'll leave that to better and more talented people than me. That's not going to fly. Okay. Wow. Now, how did you get from all of that to being the, what, co-chair of this whole big important conference?  Is that what it is? As long as it lasts, you'll be involved. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, you give credit to the team. I mean, you look back in 2008, kind of after we finished, as the saying goes, it takes a village, right? I mean, so it was weighing me in a handful of volunteers that really said, okay, we want to do this again. It took the convention center's leadership to come in and help us craft the story. Debbie, at the time, we had some other folks running the center. We had the key anchor hotels and Waikiki that had to muster up.  It was 9, 10 years ago when we did that. You were one of the early science conferences at the convention center, weren't you? Yeah, we were one of the first ones. Breaking ground there, effectively. We were trying to show this idea of this technical tourist that there's a demographic that could be valuable to the state that presumably has a higher income level because they have a higher education or whatever else you want to call it and they bring their families along. So the net economic impact per family of these technical tourists is potentially greater than just randomly pulling whatever tourists we can bring into the state. So trying to get over the branding bias of, well, you can't possibly come to Hawaii and do real work because you're going to be sitting at the beach. We had to overcome a lot of those biases and show, well, you can bring people here, have a great technical event, and then they go get to have fun after that. It's actually possible to do both. Tell me why this is a great technical event. Well, I mean, so you think about it this way. The way we see it is we are hosting 8,000 of our best friends from all over the world. The IEEE Society is the world's largest electrical engineering society in the world by far. We have a few dozen sub-disciplines. Our wireless stuff is one of those sub-disciplines. So this IMS is the flagship event for the whole year. It goes somewhere in the country every year. It happens to be here in Hawaii this year. So this conference represents the best and brightest in research. So we have people that have to submit research papers. We only accept about 40%. Really? So for every two that comes in, only one actually gets accepted. You sit on that committee? I don't. We have about 80-some-odd people that actually review papers, tons and tons of papers. And so you have the best and the brightest in terms of new advanced research. We have about 450 exhibitors, literally from all over the world, not only from the continent to the U.S., but from Asia, Korea, China. That's Lee Wood. He's doing exhibitions, exhibits, yeah. Right. Showcase scene. A lot of times they actually release products here at this show because this is the flagship show. So if there's any show to launch your brand new product, this is the show to do it at. What kind of product are you talking about? Is it a product for consumers or a product for the industry, for researchers? What is it? Typically, the target audience are other industry members. The vast majority of our vendors are what we call component vendors. They build the things that go into your smartphone. They don't build the smartphone. But we also have, one of our big pushes this year in particular is the 5G market. The 5G market is a next-generation market for your cell phone to actually help you download like a whole 8G video phone in a few seconds. But is it soup? It does it taste good? It sure does. No, no, no. Is it ready? Oh, not yet. Can I go out and buy it? Why can I not yet buy it? There's a global release that's actually getting ready literally right now. And so there are some early releases. You'll see some commercials from Verizon and Sprint I think is pushing that. So they're getting ready, but prepared to see in the next three years, the whole world is really going to change. In my opinion, 5G is the tipping point where the speeds are so fast, I don't know why you'll ever want to plug a wire into your wall ever again.  So that's here. We actually have, I want to say, three, maybe four of our local companies here showing what we have to sell to the rest of the world. So everybody's bringing their wears out to show for the party. But when you say that, it makes me think that this conference, IMS 2017 actually accelerates the speed at which we are going to have 5G. Is this true? Yes. I mean, like I said, it really does feel like your friends from all over the world are coming because the people that are pioneering things and are pushing the envelope, they're all here. Sometimes this is actually the only time throughout the whole year that you get to see some of your colleagues. Everybody's busy. Everybody's running around trying to email and all that. Yeah. So this is like face-to-face time, quality interactions, quality exchanges. It only happens at symposiums like this. What about trade secrets? Can you talk freely? That's up to you. It's up to whatever your competitive strategy is. Some folks are very open. Some folks are very not. I mean, literally you walk on the show, sometimes they have these silence booths. Right? Is that right? They look like these booths. There's maybe one window, there's a door, one way and one way out for you to have these very private conversations right in the middle of this floor where there's thousands of people walking around. Nobody can hear them? Yeah. So it all depends on the strategy of the business. That's so interesting. So when you start a conversation with somebody, I mean, somebody you've dealt with, you can lay the foundation for that. You can say, how free can you be? Can we talk? Can we talk? Yeah. Come over to the side here and step into my office. You know, so, I mean, there's two very different ways to look at it. The research side is very, very open on principle that the goal and the obligation of a researcher is to spread knowledge, right? You're rewarded on publishing, presenting and teaching others what you know, very, very open, right? It's gratifying. Correct. If somebody is giving you gratification, they're giving you a nod, they tell you you're doing a good job. Correct. And you've come up with a great idea that we haven't thought of good job. Yeah. We have other folks that are, well, we want to grow our business, maybe a little more close-hole. You know, it just depends on what they want to achieve, right? Yeah. That would be interesting, though. And deals. There'll be deals. There is a lot of deal-making that goes on. What's a deal like? Can you give me an example of a deal? So to buy a 10-by-10-foot booth costs, after it's all said and done, runs you about $4,000 to $5,000, okay? So in order to make it a successful event for you as a vendor, including the time and cost of travel here, payroll and everything else, you want to be about 10x that. So you want to be able to walk away feeling like I've got at least 50 grand of pretty darn inked deals by the time we pack up when we go home. Is that gross or net? That's gross. Okay. And many of the vendors actually far exceed that. I mean, it really depends on what your sales price is for your product. I mean, if you sell something that's, you know, $0.25, that's a lot more hands you got to shake to get to that number. But some of our vendors, we have vendors that sell very high-end test equipment. Some vendors that sell very high-end software. Each one of those is tens of thousands of dollars. When it takes one or two sales for you to go, okay, I made my numbers, we're good. And you get brand awareness.  Just those soft touches sometimes pay off. Maybe not today, but tomorrow they can pay off very well. Case study. And whether we have a public conversation on the floor of the convention center or one in the little booth, you and I, we get together and I've had an idea. We've exchanged email. You have something that I need. I have something that you need. So we make a little partnership. We make a deal. And it is a piece of technology that will fit in the next version, maybe made the 5G version of my Samsung phone, which I love the early Samsung number eight. Great, great phone. So where do we go from there? How do we make the big bucks? What do we do? Lift the phone up, this phone or any phone and call Samsung. Excuse me, Samsung. We got some technology for you and we like, you know, millions and billions for our technology because we know you can't get it anywhere else. So, I mean, that would be awesome.  I'm still waiting for that to happen. That will happen before I retire. I want that to happen for you, Kevin. But, you know, usually it's a process, right? But the beauty of a show like this is actually the diversity of attendees. You have some of the largest manufacturers like Lenovo is here. Samsung is actually here. And you have some of the smallest vendors.  You at least start it, right? You know, as a saying goes, you do business with those that you trust. And sometimes it takes that handshake, you got to look them in the eye and just feel them out to go, do we, do we want to work together? It's unlikely to, you know, people are walking around with checkbooks and everything. But this is where the relationship starts. This is the guanxi thing, right here. And I agree, certainly you have to have that trust if you're going to make a long-term and heavy-duty deal with, with anybody in this incredible pipeline that you, that you're involved in. Let's take a short break, okay? And we'll come back and we'll talk about the larger economic issues around this kind of conference symposium. Now that's Kevin Miyashiro. He's the co-chair of IMS 2017. And he's telling us about how it's going to work. Next week I'll be there. I'll see you there. We'll be right back. I was like bingo. Bingo, we're back. Kevin Miyashiro, he's a co-chair of IMS 2017, begins next week at the convention center. And what's extraordinary about this is, you know, there's a lot of scientific conferences coming down the pike. And a month ago, so Debbie Zimmerman and the LLA meeting, you know, involved, oh gee, hundreds of researchers from UH and, and elsewhere and the hotels and everyone who is interested in and wants to, you know, encourage scientific conferences here. And there are plenty of them coming down the road, really. Yeah. But what's amazing about this is that you guys were among the first to do it here. So you understand this whole economic connection to have scientific conferences here. Why do I like a scientific conference better than a conference of say, I don't know, postmen. By the way, the postmen are also coming. Thousands and tens of thousands of them. Just don't make them mad, right? We don't want them going post on us.  It's all about postal. So, you know, you look at the numbers, right? We, we have 8,000 attendees coming. That those are the people that are registered to come to the event. What do you think the chances are that an attendee is going to get to come to this event and their family is going to say, have fun without us. We'll just stay home, right? Very low. So actually we have a lot of families that tag along for the ride. So first of all, even though the event is only about a week long, they tend to stay beyond that either before or after. So the average stay is closer to a week and a half. They might even hop to the neighbor items, right? You encourage them to do that. Oh, absolutely. And so let's say there's 10,000 total bodies conversion of the state, right? In addition to that, most of them are going to be engineers, managers, supervisors, something like that. So running the stereotype, their income is higher than the average American household income, which means that the spend per family is higher. They buy the nicer rooms. They go to the nicer restaurants. They stay longer. They can, they have more residual income. So from an economic stimulus perspective, it's a great way to go, right? We, the impact that we forecast for our event alone is about $35 to $40 million and a week and a half's worth of time. It's not a bad day's work, right? If you could have one of those a month, and you think about how much that could change the tax base for the state, what we could do to reinvest those taxes into redoing our sewage system, redoing the roads, whatever it is, it's a great way to go to couple the fact that we still have to this day one of the best brands in the planet as the Aloha State, combining that with very high spend families. I mean, it's a great win-win for everybody. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I absolutely agree. It's free money almost. You know, in a sense that we wouldn't have it otherwise. We wouldn't have any of it otherwise. So the idea is you'd much rather have it than not have it. And it's good for the university. There's a connection there in the research side. College of Engineering, for example, be down there in force. I know it will. Wayne, we're not kidding. So, you know, the thing that strikes me is that this is so good that somebody, maybe you or your cohorts are going to figure out, you can do this in Asia, too. So, I mean, actually, the reverse is actually already true. So I refer to IMS as the flagship conference. It really is the big show for the year for this society. But we also have a lot of smaller conferences in some of the emerging areas. Asia is one of the biggest emerging areas. When we track our demographics, our membership demographics year to year, the biggest percentage growth for the last, I want to say, eight years in counting is always Asia. It's one of more of the countries in Asia. And so we have smaller, but if emerging conferences that go through China, India, Japan, Korea, and it is keep rotating, do we want to pull those here, maybe? Or do we want to actually send more things there? We don't really know yet, but we know that Asia as a hub is growing really fast. And Hawaii has always been touted as we are that great bridge between the continental U.S. and most parts of Asia. Yeah, we want to be that. And so we can be central to that conversation. Yeah. And we could be the hub. I mean, in a sense, in the scientific sense. You know what strikes me? There's not too many places in the country, you know more, but where you can say that it's a hub of scientific conferences. If we could achieve some notoriety in that department, it would really change the way the world looks at us. First of all, we wouldn't be grass skirts and hula, which is very nice, but this is better. And it would be something that brings people in, not only from the U.S., mainly the regular market for what I could keep, but the whole world. Right. And the more conferences, and each conference feeds the other conferences, they're all, some of the parts is greater somehow. Yeah, absolutely. And so you're in a movement. This is a movement. In a lot of ways, it feels like it. I mean, I don't know the specifics, but I have a sense that as the years go by, we are having more of these technical type conferences coming here to Hawaii. So it feels like something is changing. We're being able to shed that perception that you can't work hard and play hard here when you come to an event like this. Yeah, that's what Debbie Zimmerman is doing with the LA thing. And it's impressive because there are so many conferences and maybe they, if one scientific organization sees another scientific organization out here and says, well, I guess it works for them. It must work for us too. So you have a snowball kind of effect. And our event, I think, is particularly notable because we're a two-timer. It's one thing to say you did it once. If you never do it again, the question is, why? Maybe it wasn't something good to success or something. The fact that we can do it two times in a row, I would hope that that would give a lot of confidence and motivation to others to say, wow, they really did do it twice. Hawaii has the capacity to support an event of that magnitude. We can do it too. That would be an awesome measure to send out to people. So I can see the convention center, which is just one structure in this schematic somehow. The convention center wants this, obviously, because they need business. They want business. That's a given. And Waikiki, they want it. The hotels want it. The restaurants want it. But in many ways, that money, that gross, that net that results from scientific conferences like IMS goes to those guys. It doesn't go to... Why do I care about IMS? So I don't know that I could make a direct, clear correlation to... Start by saying I'll get a better phone out of it. Cliff, did I mention we're giving away free iPhones? I'm just kidding. I don't know that we can make a clear economic correlation to everybody that lives here. As somebody that's grown up here, my kids are both born here, my wife grew up here too, that I actually feel like a big part of it is this is our opportunity to show the world what the aloha spirit really means. I am amazed to this day in the modern 21st century that some people still go, do you guys have electricity in Hawaii? Are you kidding me? Right? I mean, so to show... Okay, we're a bona fide big city. We have all the things that you can expect. But you can read about the word aloha in Wikipedia. You can't quite get it. You need to feel that. And so I actually feel a certain amount of pride in being able to host all these people here. And it's something that you have to feel. And it's a great way to extend that aloha spirit to all these people that, for many of them, this is actually the first and potentially the only time they're going to come to Hawaii in their lifetime. And the fact that we get to be the reason why they come here, I think that's awesome. Yeah, but they're also emissaries. Everybody you run into in the mainland, you tell them, I'm from Hawaii. Everybody has the Hawaii story. They know somebody. They came to Hawaii. And it's always with a smile. So now we have 10,000 sales people going back to wherever they are to tell somebody else to come back here. All right. Well, the other thing is, as mentioned before, the university, because I think the university benefits by this a lot. Even if it's not a, you know, I mean, this is obviously associated with the university, but there are other conferences that are not necessarily. And the point is, the university can get grants out of this. Their research money can come in here. People can see once we identify as a franchise in science and technology and bring these conferences in, then we can bring grant money in too and bring researchers from far away who don't mind spending time here. You know, they believe they're in a place where there is excellence, so they need to have intellectual excellence. And so, I mean, any contact we have with any scientific organization helps build our reputation and our potential in that regard. I mean, you know, there's interesting serendipity that can occur. And a lot of times, you just can't predict when they're going to happen. An interesting example of that, you know, back in the 70s, a guy by the name of Professor Norm Abranson hanging out in Stanford said, hey, I kind of like that Hawaii weather. And that surfing thing looks pretty cool too. Packs up, moves out here. He and a bunch of colleagues at the university. And the internet. Right. I mean, a lot of people don't know that that actually has a lot of its roots in Hawaii, right? So having those kinds of events occur, start from the research end. They start from these serendipitous meetings that happens here. It's really hard to know and predict exactly how these things can show up, but you have to have enough swings at bat to have that serendipity show up. So the more times you have these events here, the more likely you are to have something great and profound happen a few years out from that. Yeah. And of course, people in the street do benefit. I do benefit because there's more money, you know, flowing through our economy. Right. And it filters out and down and all over the place. And as you said, you can collect greater taxes. So I have to pay fewer taxes in order to get that same infrastructure. No, I'm happy about that. But let's talk about you again. Let's talk about how your week is going to be. I like to know what happens when you wake up in the morning, you know, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and you have to make sure this thing holds together. What's it like for you? You know, it's an interesting thing. I liken it to getting married. So you have all this prep, getting ready for your wedding, right? You're stressed out. The car's got to be right. The food's got to be right. Everything's got to be right. And then the actual day comes and then you just let go. You're there with your friends and then it just sort of happens. And the most interesting thing about being an event planner is you see all the things going wrong. You know what's supposed to happen. But the key to success, as long as your guests never know that it was a miss, you're good, right? So it's very easy to get stressed out about this.  Signs could go wrong. We could run out of food. The lights could go off. Who knows? But we have a committee. Our steering committee is about 200 volunteers deep. We have paid staff of about 20 to 25 people. We have all the people at the convention center. So you've got an army of people ready to deploy at a moment's notice to any one of things. So by basically today, let it happen. I mean, it's so yes, we could lose sleep. There's kind of no point to losing sleep. What's going to happen is what's going to happen. And as long as we see enough smiles on the floor at the end of the week, we're good. Let it happen. Kevin Miyashiro, letting it happen tomorrow and through the week for 10 days, it's going to be great, Kevin. Wish you well. Thanks for having us, Jay. I'll see you on the floor. I'll be there. Aloha. Aloha.


Alright guys, so this is a bit of a weird video because I'm reviewing lucid dream leaf right the lucid dreaming pills or supplements that you may have seen on the internet But I don't actually have the bottle, you know, I've actually not got the bottle anymore. So Where normally if I was reviewing a supplement, I'd hold the bottle up like this so you can see I've actually tried it in this Situation I have got rid of the bottle because I've used it and you know, this was a few months ago To be honest with you guys, I just forgot to make the review video completely past my mind I just had other things I did made other videos and I just forgot like I just managed to I was trying it out and writing notes on it And I just forgot to review it and so threw the bottle away But you know, it doesn't besides the theatrical effects of showing you the bottle of the thing I'm reviewing I can just put a picture on the screen so you know what it looks like and the chances are if you're watching this review video You know what dream leaf looks like because you are looking for a review on dream leaf Or maybe you're one of my subscribers and you're just seeing this because it's my latest video in which case if you're interested in In lucid dreaming pills, you're gonna want to hear this But if not, that's fine. Just you know leave a casual like as you exit the the YouTube watch screen and I'll see you tomorrow So lucid dream leaf looks like this. Maybe I should snap my fingers. It looks like this It consists of two pills one red and one blue It famously is advertised using the red and blue pills as in the pills from the matrix because in the movie the matrix when Neo is given a choice between the red or the blue pill one of them will let him sort of I think Morpheus said something like it will let him stay in wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes meaning to see how far He can expand his mind and learn new things and be aware of like the new world that he could experience So lucid dream leaf is pretty similar to that in their marketing. They've they've tried to be this sort of matrixy dream-like company which offers lucid dreaming supplements in the form of These pills so as it stands at the moment, okay? And I'm gonna get on to the ingredients and how they work in and more importantly why they work And how you can use them and also on at the end of this video. I'll talk about some of the limitations of dream leaf and maybe how you can Improve it using your own techniques and also there'll be some links in the description if you're lazy and you don't watch this whole video There'll be some links in the description where you can just click on the link go and see More testimonials and more reviews and learn more about dream leaf So the links will be in the description But I would invite you to keep watching before you consider buying it just because I've got some things to say about the ingredients and how they work So the blue pill the blue pill contains a 5-HTP and mugwort now each of these ingredients on their own can help induce lucid dream I should say it can help support lucid dreams not induce they can help support lucid dreams So then the red pill has choline alpha GPC and hoopazine a there are various lucid dreaming supplements Which have a mixture of these ingredients or maybe some have like just one or two These guys dream leaf have created a system where you use both types of lucid dreaming supplement in one sort of effective method And I'll get on to exactly how it works There are certain substances which cause a REM rebound effect REM is your rapid eye movement sleep Okay, this is where most dreams and especially lucid dreams happen You have about five to six REM sleep cycles or REM sleep stages during your night sleep Now if you have something if you take a substance which is a REM suppressant which has a REM rebound effect Well, that means is you take something first thing before you go into bed before going to bed It suppresses your REM sleep for the first half of the night But then in the second half of the night when the half life You know when that substance has been absorbed by your body and the effects of almost one off in In the second half of the night your body will then respond by giving you a massive boost in your REM sleep It's known as the REM rebound effect This is very beneficial to lucid dreaming for a number of ways firstly you have longer REM sleep periods towards the end of the Night Secondly they're happening at a time of the night where you're most likely to lucid dream because of the hormones balanced in your body Serotonin versus melatonin your body is starting to wake up and alert yourself ready for the day But at the same time you're still very sleepy and very likely to dream This means it's it's the perfect sweet spot for learning for lucid dreaming because your hormones are balanced in just the right way So that you're alert, but you could still be asleep as in lucid and Because of this REM rebound effect from the 5-HTP in the blue pill of dream leaf You're going to experience longer REM sleep. So that's the sort of foundation for this It's like suppressing your REM sleep during the first half of the night and then giving you this REM rebound Which is like opening up your window for lucid dreaming in the second half of the night Okay, so we'll get we'll we'll revisit this in a minute But just bear in mind at the moment the blue pill that you take first before going to sleep is Going to suppress your REM sleep and then give you the REM rebound and then obviously along with the blue pill Isn't is mugwort, which is just like a relaxant is going to help you fall asleep faster And it's going to help you enter that deep sleep stage Quicker right so it basically is the sleep aid mugwort is the sleep aid part of the 5-HTP of the blue pill Sorry, and then 5-HTP is the part that's going to suppress your REM sleep and give you the rebound effects Okay, so that's the blue pill you take that first before going to sleep I'd advise you to take it as close to falling asleep as possible Not a few hours before I would advise you to take it just before falling asleep And that's what I've been doing now the red pill so the red pill is Meant to be taken it says four hours later I would advise six hours later But that depends on your personal sleep cycles and when you fall asleep I would advise to take the red pill after six hours of falling asleep So that you're just going to target that REM sleep a bit better But this is just again this is based on the way my sleep works So I find that for me my best chance of lucid dreaming is after six hours of sleep not four It might be different for you obviously experiment right note to keep a journal that sort of thing This review will go on a bit. I promise you if you watch this whole video You'll have a huge a much better understanding of how this thing works and why it works And it will help you to make an informed decision So keep please stick with me here if you're considering buying any lucid dreaming supplements You need to understand how the ingredients work and how they're going to actually give you a lucid So we've talked about the blue pill the red pill is going to slow down the breakdown of a CH So specifically the hoopazinae is going to slow down your body's ability to break down a CH Without knowing what that means basically it's going to help you start to feel more alert and aware so a CH is acetylcholine and The hoopazinae is what's known as an acetylcholine reuptake inhibitor. It stops your body being able to sort of disperse and take away Extra a CH meaning that you become more aware and alert at a time when you should be asleep This is what's going to help you become lucid and it's what's going to help you raise your consciousness and be able to be Aware even though you're asleep. So then the choline batatrate helps slightly helps with you know memory injury and recall But the main effects is it's going to bolster the hoopazinae and help you Maintain your level of awareness while you're while you're dreaming and then alpha GPC Without getting into too much about alpha GPC basically it helps you maintain your alertness and but specifically it helps you promote sort of Your critical thinking or your rational, you know, your logical rational thinking mind during REM sleep This is important. Okay, because and each of these ingredients does play a key part here It's important that you open up and keep active your rational thinking mind Otherwise, you might have a vivid dream and you might be lucid, but if you don't have that background of rational thinking You'll just be swept along with the dream and it won't last very long So in my opinion alpha GPC is important for maintaining a long lucid dream because it keeps your rational brain on That's how the two pills work. Okay, they're working combination The blue one is sort of like a setup pill to just to get your mind in the right place and to help you fall asleep fast at the beginning and Promote around REM rebound effect then the red pill is going to be focused on Increasing your level of critical thinking making sure that you stay alert and aware even though you're going to be going back to sleep To lucid dream So that leads me on to how this actually works, right? So you take the blue pill you fall asleep and then after about five hours or six hours You're intended to wake up. So you need to set an alarm and then take the red pill now because it has some ingredients Which can cause like stomach problems for some people I would always advise taking it with a small snack again This is just me and a lot of people find that it's absolutely fine without a snack But I've always found that if I take a pill on an empty stomach, especially at like five in the morning I don't feel so good Some people do wait back to bed and they can wake up for an hour You know even go for a walk or read a book and then go back to sleep and they still find they can lose the dream I can't do that because once I'm awake. I'm up and my body's like fired up and ready to go I can't then go back to sleep unless I'm really really tired Which I'm not usually I'm not usually really tired. So so yes So I would advise to have a snack way of bed take the red pill after six hours of sleep and then The the idea with this whole thing is you do awake back to bed You just go back to sleep with the intention of lucid dreaming It's made it's made more likely by the rim rebound effect and by the whole Ingredients list of the red pill and the fact that you're doing way back to bed now Is it effective? Yes, it does work But it's not guaranteed and the reason for that is that a CH reuptake inhibitors or you know pretty much most lucid dreaming supplements rely on that process, okay of just Maintaining your critical thinking and making in lucid lucid support more likely. They're quite rudimentary and they're quite sort of Yeah, they're quite basic But they do work sometimes and they definitely give you some sort of edge But they don't guarantee lucid dreaming and in fact you would get a fairly similar result if you Just did the wake back to bed on its own It still gives you fairly reliable levels of lucid dreaming if you did the wake back to bed properly That being said the red pill and the blue pill in combination do have an effect the blue pill I would say for me at least is what worked the best that was what gave me the most results now I can't prove that Because I never tried it with just the one or maybe I should have done maybe I should have just tried to read the Blue pill and done a wake back to bed without the red one But you know if you've got the whole set if you've got the red and blue pills You may as well try them together. It can't hurt, you know, and it's going to give you that edge So what I would suggest to do is just to get a batch try them out You can get a 30-day supply for like I think 20 or $30 or less You know they always have sales on and everything and by the way if you click the link in my description You should be able to get a discount as well, which I've negotiated for you guys But yeah, I would I would advise just to try it out But not to rely on it in the sense that you try it every single night with the pills because like I've said before Even if you just do wake back to bed every night After a week or so or even less you're gonna feel awful You know, you're gonna be constantly interrupting your sleep and that's not good for you You need to have a reliable sleep cycle You need to be waking up and getting up at the same time Sorry waking up and going to sleep at roughly the same time and by doing wake back to bed every day or every night I should say you're gonna constantly be interrupting that which is not good for you So yeah, I would definitely recommend giving in a try I had several lucid dreams when I was trying it and in fact I actually did write a review post about dreamleaf months ago I think even you know, this was a long time ago that I that I reviewed this thing I just never made a video about it for some reason So I will link to my review post in the video in the description here if you'd like to learn more And you know, you can read about my experiences then but you know overall it does work It gives you an edge But you need to be aware that it involves wake back to bed Which is not good for you long-term you have to do it every now and then and yeah I would advise to take a small snack with the red pill and Wait six hours instead of the four that they recommend Try all of this for yourself Please go ahead and try it for yourself See what works for you Combine it with other things as well Like try meditating try doing all the things you should be doing as well And in that situation you should see results Overall, it's a good product It's marketed well It looks good the ingredients are solid Dosages are strong enough to have an effect What more can you say it's fairly cheap as well Like it's sort of the It's a very good product to get Especially if you're new to lucid dreaming pills or supplements And especially if you want something which is going to play into that whole like Adventurous spirit of the matrix of sort of going down the rabbit hole And just getting started I completely approve of dreamleaf and I think you should try it out Check the link in the description But also don't do your own research read my post as well if you want to learn a bit more I'm pretty sure I've covered everything in this video but just in case right, you know Sometimes I forget things right So that's it guys leave a like I'm sorry this video has gone on a long time But hopefully you now understand a bit more about like how the ingredients work and what's in it and why They've decided to combine two pills instead of just having it all in one Anyway, I've said enough you've you've you've been told enough to make an informed decision Hopefully go and look at the review post do your own research and let me know how it goes Also, if you ever tried dreamleaf leave a comment Let me know how it was Thank you by the way for your kind words about my hat in yesterday Not yesterday's video In the other days video much appreciated I'm wearing a different hat in today's video Leave a comment about that I don't know I just like it when you guys comment because it makes me feel like there's more of a community And I do read them I genuinely read every comment So anyway see you tomorrow done Thanks for watching guys this video and this channel was supported by my Patreon followers Who are updated in the description of every video at the time of uploading Please consider giving just a dollar a month to support this channel Or just click the links in the description you'll find links to various lucid dreaming products Articles techniques and tutorials If you did enjoy this video, please click the notification bell and subscribe and I'll see you next time While you're still watching this you should have clicked one of my related videos by now right Or subscribed or gone onto my website or something like that


What's up everybody, Jason here for jaspyscasebreaks.com. We are giving away a $2,500 mystery dozen spot away with this 1920 Panini Hoops Premium Stock Multi-Pak Celebrate number 85 on jaspyscasebreaks.com. So again, guys, first we do the break, randomize customer names and teams, distribute hits out of the pack break. Then at the end, we will randomize only the customer names that bought in and customer name at number one will get the spot in the mystery dozen break. So let's do the break first, let's roll it. We got ourselves eight, three and a six, nine times. Good luck. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Joshua down to Joshua. Nine, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Lionel magic down to the Los Angeles Lakers. All right, if you guys wanna see your team really quick. I'm starting to bug me, gotta put some eye drops. All right, so there you go. There's your teams, now let's switch scenes and do the quick pack break. PJ, Terrence Mann, Darius Basely Silver, Anthony Davis Green and Aaron Gordon Blue, NBA City. Nice little color match there. Keras Levert, Vince Carter and Charles Barkley. All right guys, switch scenes. Let's give away the spot. All right guys, good luck. Member, name at number one gets the spot in the mystery dozen roll. Six and a four, 10 times. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 10 times. Daniel, wow. Daniel, congratulations, six and a four, 10 times. You are the winner. Wow, I think Daniel only got one or two spots too. Man, crazy good luck right here. All right, well congratulations, man. You just won a spot in the mystery dozen after 10 times. One more way to win is on the website right now and we're about to do the next one, guys. Appreciate it.


A computerized system can find books in seconds at California State University Northridge. The Cal State Northridge Library has more than one million books and two million magazines and newspapers. The complete list of publications is digital. Students can use digital downloads in their studies. The library's Mark Stover says most academic journals are now available electronically. I would say that probably 90% of the journals that we subscribe to now come in electronic format. With books and monographs on the other hand, it's a little bit different story. The library is digitizing its paper holdings to save them and make them more available. They include handwritten letters and old newspaper stories. Steve Coutté is the university's digital librarian. They can be backed up and they can be stored off-site. They can be very well protected but are not necessarily meaningful to us if we don't know 10, 20 years from now what those files, what is contained in those files. Librarian Helen Heinrich says universities are making sure that hard copies of books remain in storage even after they are digitized.  So there is always, there will be a copy of record. We are going to weed our collections, we are going to reshape them and use the space to repurpose into more learning places for our students. But I think that print books, especially because of copyright issues, are going to maintain their place for many years to come. I'm Steve Ember.


Welcome to our second of this lunchtime interview series. So, tomorrow we have Robert McBride from the Rockingham Museum and Arts Project. We'll be talking with Joe Chen from the Taiwanese company, Puppet, and it's double about making community arts spaces and access to the arts in the community, in Leeds Taipei, in Taiwan, and here in our own region. So, I hope you'll be back for that tomorrow, and I hope you all know and think here in the meantime what's happening for the rest of the day, so I'm not going to spend time doing that, I'm just going to turn it over to John. So, I'm John Potter, I'm the executive director of the Latchez Theatre, right up the street from where we are today, we're celebrating our 80th birthday today. That's the end of my shameless plug, and I'm thrilled to be here and thrilled to get away a little bit. But, our friendship with the Sanglass Theatre runs long and deep, so we're very pleased to be intertwined in working on this together. Arts like inclusion and diversity are on a lot of lips these days, people talking about the arts and everything else. As an example, Americans for the Arts issued a statement in 2016 that acknowledged, quote, cultural equity is critical to the viability of the arts sector. The Canada Council for the Arts, in its current strategic plan, identified as one of its goals, quote, to strengthen and support enabling a culture of participation, inclusion, and diversity. And Carol McCord of Alternate Roots wrote, I imagine an arts field that becomes a beloved community manifesting a culture of generosity based on principles of inclusion, diversity, and equity, and rejecting the politics of fear. There are many laudable examples of progress and practice of inclusion in the arts and elsewhere. I'll cite as one example, Moving Beyond Inclusion, which a collaboration which brought six of Europe's leading dance companies together, united by the fundamental belief that working inclusively produces more exciting and more enlivened artistic work. It's very encouraging to hear. Yet there is more to be done. As a 2014 article by Sean C. Harris titled, Diversity, Inclusion in the Arts Are Not Enough, reminds readers that many efforts, however well-meaning, are misguided. Quote, whenever people talk about diversity and inclusion, the underlying question seems to be, how do we get them to join us? The real question needs to be, how can we work in solidarity with them? Today we'll be examining the topic of changing our perception of disability through an inclusive theatre practice in the UK and Vermont. And with us are Ben Pettit-Wade, artistic director of hijinks, one of the UK's leading inclusive theatre companies, as well as Laura Lawson-Tucker and Darlene Jensen, co-founders of the Theatre Adventure Program of New England Youth Theatre. So we're very pleased to all be together up here. I don't think we can applaud enough for all these folks up here, so it's great to hear. I'm going to start with Ben, if you could shed some light on hijinks, what it does, how it does it and how you came to be involved. So that's a loaded series of questions. So I'll start with hijinks. Hijinks is a company that's been around since 1984, it was founded. Initially it wasn't an inclusive theatre company, so a company that works in the way we do now. It was a touring company going to small-scale venues. We're told to speak up. Do I need to speak up? Yes. I'm going to small-scale venues. About 20 years ago the company became interested in making inclusive work. We had a community group called Odyssey, which actually reminded me a lot of the group. Obviously you have a theatre adventure, a large group of performers, both with and without disability that simply had a passion to perform. That group still exists today as our community arm of work that we do, but alongside it we make professional touring productions that include casts with neurodiverse casts. To do that and to maintain the professionalism and quality we have our own training programme for our performers, which we call our academies, which we started in 2012. They meet two days a week throughout the year. It's an ongoing programme so it's not like a course where you're doing a year or two years and then we say goodbye to people, we're working with people in an ongoing process over a number of years. On those courses we have a pool of tutors that teach whatever their specialism may be, whether that's clown, puppetry, improvisation, movement, etc. We now have five academies around Wales. We've got two in Cardiff, one in West Wales, one in North Wales and one in Mid Wales. Overall we're working with about 70 adults with learning disability and autism on those courses. Here today actually we have Lindsay on the front row here, Gareth and Richard who are overjoyed that they get to spend the next hour listening to me. They're products and members of our academies, but also in the production meat bread that we'll be performing today. We then take students that have been embedded in the training to work in smaller groups to make the productions. All our productions are devised so it's a collaborative process so everyone has input into the making and then we tour our productions both nationally around the UK and internationally. Our aim, if you like, our vision is to change perceptions of neurodivergent members of our society within both our own country and others and to present a positive perspective, I guess, through the power and quality of the work that we're presenting. So that's our touring work. Now we also have a lot of other stuff we do as an organisation so we have a festival called the Unity Festival which we started about 10 years ago, it was going into its 10th edition in 2019 and that celebrates companies that have a similar ethos to our own from around the world so it's an international programme alongside workshops a week long in venues. That started originally because we're lucky enough to be based. Our office is in quite a prestigious theatre called the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff but at the time 10 years ago it was very difficult for companies like our own to get a platform in those sorts of spaces as sort of a mainstream if you like theatre venues. So it was an opportunity for us to form a partnership with one of those venues to present a festival. We were very keen on it and so each year since then they've been a partner on the festival and they basically give over a week of their venue to us to programme. And through the festival actually, that's been a big part of how the company's developed and how our work has become more international because obviously through running the festival we got to meet a lot of people, like-minded people like ourselves some of whom also would have their own festivals and so we created a little bit of an exchange between us and other companies especially around Europe to be able to start to take our work outside of the UK. So I've done the academy, I've done our tour introductions, I've done the festival and obviously Odyssey is still running which is sort of our community work. So we also have something we call drama foundations which is for adults that have an interest in drama but in reality aren't going to be able to kind of follow it as a professional sort of venture but it's a benefit, this kind of social and confidence building. So yeah, basically a drama group and we've just launched a film strand to the work we do. So over the next five years the students are going to have more of a focus in some of the sessions on developing skills for camera and there's a sort of programme put in place where we're going to produce a number of short films over the next five years to get those out to sort of film festivals and that sort of stuff. And the other thing we do, because actually the difficulty, the company has grown hugely in the last five years we've sort of quadrupled really in size of what we're doing and with that comes difficulties so to be working with 70 people that we're training around the country obviously those people, they want opportunities as well to go beyond that training to find work and the reality is as a company we can't serve all those people in what we're doing and give them those sort of professional opportunities that for example Richard Garrett and Lindsay have had with me Fred. We don't have the capacity to do that. So we also try to advocate and encourage external companies, whether theatre companies to work with us to cast our performers and we offer packages to support them through that process and also casting directors in film and television. So more and more now we're getting casting directors getting in touch with us because we have our own acting agency so on our website that's got a separate part of the website where each of the students have a very short show reel kind of introduction video for each one where you can click through and have a look and see and sort of meet online and arrange a casting and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, that's it. So that's it. That's all. So yeah, we keep very busy, it's very busy. And how did you personally find your way to this work? So I trained in drama in Liverpool. We finished in college. A group of fellow students performed our own company for a couple of years that toured. Through doing that I learned a lot both about the management side of kind of getting toured together and the funding and all that sort of stuff as well as small scale touring. But then I applied for a job in London for a company called Spare Tide Theatre Company who are a community theatre company. So they make work with all sorts of different communities within London. They work with older people with gay and lesbian community. And one of the groups they were working with was a group of performers with learning disability and autism. And yeah, before that I had no surreal kind of concept or thinking this is what I wanted to do. But walking into that room, what came across was the absolute, the welcome that you got. And from witnessing the work that the group were doing I became very excited about the potential and the creativity really that was in that room and what could happen if you allowed that creativity to blossom. So I worked there for about four years or so with that group. And then I took a couple of years just sort of out going and teaching English in Poland and moving around doing different stuff around Europe. Kind of not knowing, really not knowing exactly where I wanted to go from that point. But that time away made me realise that what I really missed was this group of performers that I had been working with. And so I took that time away and it took that really to make me realise that that's what I wanted to sort of carry on doing. And I applied for the job at Hygienx while in Poland and came back for the interview that was about 12 years ago. So I started in that role as what we call the Outreach Officer which was basically organising projects within the community and then have worked myself up to Artistic Director in the 12 years since being there. You made good use of your time away. I think having that space to sort of refocus and find that kind of realisation that that was the thing. Can you go to the place of missing? Yeah. And that's very instructive. Well let's hear a little bit about theatre adventure in listening to Ben. Lots of similar ethos and basic principles. The shape of tap is different but the bones seem to be very similar to what goes on in Hygienx. At least my impression. Let's hear some of tap's story. Well Laura, this is Darlene. And Darlene and I met 19, probably getting close to 20 years ago. And Darlene has a son with various disabilities. And I had an early childhood program and Elijah was one of my students. And we both as educators kept talking. We both as educators kept, Darlene and I kept talking about because my orientation as an early childhood teacher was dramatic arts and storytelling and lots of movement and was always wanting to help my young children have lots of opportunities to work together as a group with their creativity and lots of drama. And so we started talking about Elijah. And Elijah, I really embraced this thought of helping Elijah enter my group of six typically developing children. And I learned so much. It was really my first experience, intimate experience of working with a person with disabilities. And so this is physical and cognitive challenges. And I think what that, and we kept talking about creativity and opportunities for people with disabilities and specifically in Brattleboro and in southern Vermont. And Darlene, we'll start talking in a moment, but Darlene was discovering sadly that opportunities that her son could do, Elijah could do, we've described as a tag along experience. So you talk the director into enrolling your child with disabilities and that director says, where are they? Well, okay. And not to blame anyone because it's lack of experience and knowledge. And then the parent or the caregiver is assisting that person to participate but never really becomes part of the group. There's never any, people didn't know how to accommodate and to tweak their program to open more doors for someone who had physical or cognitive challenges. That's why I called it tag along. It was like, yeah, great. Yeah, you can join us, but we're not going to do anything differently. So when we decided to have a theater program, we wanted it to be sort of what we ended up calling the reverse inclusion model of everything was determined by the people who had disabilities and what their needs were. And if typically developing people came into the program, they had to tag along with us. They had to adjust to come in with us. So we launched theater venture with New England New Theater. We talked to Steven Stearns, the founder, director, and women had to work very hard at all that we had this idea. And then we felt very strongly that to start a new program, to give it, you know, credence, to give it like value, we thought it'd be more powerful if we were part of a larger established program, I mean organizations such as New England New Theater. And Steven was very, very open as he is as a person and as an artist. And he said, yep, great, great Lauren Darlene. I'll find the money and you run it. And we're like, great, wonderful. So about four months later, he got the first grant of $5,000. He said, okay, go for it. So that first summer 2004 was a one-week program. And because we're educators, we were quite plugged into youth, children and youth in our area. And we easily enrolled. I think we had 12 that first year. And just dove in. I'm using borrowed space. This is before this building on Flat Street existed. And it was a one-week program and it became clear, oh my goodness. We have like the tip of the iceberg here. There was a groundswell of interest. And what I felt was, oh, I might get a little bit teary here, but what I felt was that there were so many people in our extended community with so much to say and offer creatively as a creative person that had never had an opportunity. And they were just like jumping at the chance. And so we dove into it and we learned tons. And before we knew it in a few years, I mean our peak of performances when we were like crazy, 2008 we had eight productions. And we were like, ah! So we went from a summer program, added a fall class, and added two more classes, and boom! And there we were. And we just, you know, we weren't seasoned enough to know it was this way too much. But what was great, though, was that so, like this momentum was developing and so many youth and then adults were coming forward and saying, I love to perform. I love this. You saw a little bit of that yesterday for sure. And so many of our students today had been with us for, whether it be 15 years, 13 years, 12 years, 11 years, because they're so dedicated. So that's kind of the roots of where we are. And we grew so much, we're still part of Normal Vivian Theater, but we moved to a new space that's really big. And we can practice in our performing space every week, which is essential. And that's at the West Village Manion House in West Brattle Grove. And that's the Unitarian Universalist Church. And this is now, we're just starting our seventh year in that space. And that's been really exciting, really exciting. It expanded. Being in the bigger space and being able to be on our stage every single class, our students taught us that they had more to contribute and more to the whole production. Because sometimes they would do something that very naturally, like we would say, you know, you're going to exit from over here and they'd exit from somewhere else. And it was just natural that that's what their character would have done. And, you know, we were more thinking, you know, this is the logistics of it. And then we're like, oh, yeah, right, that makes sense. So then we realized we had a more collaborative process going on, either, you know, by all different ways of communication, or just by doing what they felt naturally, or saying, oh, I think this, or I think that, or what if we did this, what if we did that. So it was just very interesting to be open to that and find how, you know, even moving a space brings out new creativity and new expression within people. I think one of the things, as I listen to both your stories, thinking of the initial walking into the room for the first time or the first gathering, and right away the mindset is, you know, we're not serving creativity to a population. We are in the presence of creativity, and we are to stir it up and inspire it and let it out. And to me, that feels like a barrier that other people would not get to as quickly as you did, but that was sort of day one outgoing. But, you know, let's talk about some other barriers to, you know, that you've encountered as you've created work, made work, and then tried to bring it to the wider world. And I'm also intrigued with what Hygiene's does on creating a sort of professional development and support around that, and that must be a barrier-leading endeavor as you get your folks working. Yeah. Yeah, what it starts. I mean, in terms of the process of making work, you know, the way that we believe is the most accessible is to devise our work, which is why we do it that way. The script-led process, for me, is something that is just unworkable for many of our performers, which is why we choose to start with a blank page and to ensure that the text that does become part of our productions is the text that's spoken by those performers, so it's spoken in the way that they may speak.  So that's one kind of barrier, if you like. The thing about the training and opportunities, our work is in the UK, there's still a stigma attached for a paying audience that, you know, you're asking people to come to a production and there's still that thing of, okay, it's a cast that includes performers of all types, and neuro-typical, and it's the attitude that the quality is not going to be there or this isn't going to be for me, or it's in some way not going to live up to the ticket price. Or uncomfortable. Or uncomfortable. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a battle, and it's one that's improving for us as our kind of name becomes more known, I guess. But it's something that's one of the reasons as well that we started the festival. And that's what festivals are great for, is building those audiences and changing perceptions in that way. But it's an ongoing sort of battle, really. And it's the same as any theatre company. You need to develop trust in your audience to get them coming back again and again. But it feels like it's a harder task for companies like ours, because it's all kind of mixed into those perceptions that we're trying to change. But in terms of our performers working both for us and for external companies, obviously, there's a whole package that needs to be tailored in terms of a person's support to go and work outside of the company. And for us as well, I mean, we've got another production on the road at the moment in the UK with, obviously, an entirely different cast and three very different performers from our academy who have very different support needs. I mean, Lindsay, Richard and Gareth, you've been on the road with Fred to all sorts of places and they're incredibly independent. Is that true to say, you guys? They're saying I probably am. Yeah. But still, if we're in a big city or something like that, obviously, we take on a lot of that support for making sure people are safe going out and around and where you are and all that sort of stuff. Things that you don't necessarily have to think about if you don't have a neo-revolutionist cast. So on our tours, we always have to ensure that there's a dedicated member of support worker on tour with the production and in the kind of climate we live in where you're making small-scale theatre work which actually, financially, often, is very difficult to justify to have the additional cost of a support worker on tour is a tough thing and to then try and encourage an external company if that's what they need, if they want to employ one of our forms with learning disability and autism, then there's another barrier there for that happening. Yeah, does that answer my question? It is. It was a sweeping question. John, can I pop your... A little story popped in my head and this is around barriers, like if I think about our barriers, there are probably two biggies and the first one is, of course, the attitudes and attitudes toward folks who are different from the mainstream and the others' money. But I'm going way back early, early on and in our early period, we did not charge admission very early. And so then I got connected with, by chance, with a director in... Rhode Island. Rhode Island and of a company for adults or children with disabilities. And so I think he happened to be in Brattleboro and was visiting an EY team so then I got connected with him that way. And so I called him because I really wanted to find out more about his work and what he was doing. And he was great. He was very, very open. And then he started asking me about theater venture and this is probably five years into it for us, approximately, or less. And so... We got into pragmatics and then he said, because he was very much part of theater organization and they fully funded everything and salaries and so forth. But then he came back to me and he said, well, Laura, tell me, what are you charging for admission? And I kind of stammered and said, nothing. And he said, why are you not charging admission? Are you... Do you feel that your actors aren't good enough? And I stopped dead metrics. And what he was really helping like with a mirror, he was helping me realize we do not need to make excuses for our actors. Matter of fact, we need to promote them and over the years, and I'm sure this has happened for you too, then, we've had many audience members say this is like the most exciting theater I've ever been to. So it's not that we need to prove ourselves what we partly do, but more let's show people these possibilities like you guys and me, Fred, which I can't wait to see me, Fred. And so it really flipped me around as one of the directors of this program and I embracing the attitudes that I want other people to embrace. And so I totally changed my thinking after that. You all have used the phrase changing perceptions and that includes your own. Yeah, absolutely. We've learned right along with our troop. The troop teaches us, we teach them, we're all teaching each other, and that's really the joy of the work and the depth of respect for each other. One of the things I encountered, even from people writing or thinking from a fairly sensitive point of view to this was there's still a transactional nature. If you are inclusive, then donors, audience, funders will line up to you and that's a good reason to do it. And I think advancing beyond the transactional nature into the fact that it's a practice or the experience of it being a continual practice, again, you were already practicing it and you had your perceptions change, flipped deep and broadened. And that feels very much, it's not a deal that you're making, but it's a practice. And to me, that seemed like an important aspect of inclusive theater. I wonder if any thoughts about that particular notion. The importance and in the absence of that, can you speak to Elijah's experience and the experiences of other folks you've taught, worked with? My son Elijah has cerebral palsy and he also has cognitive challenges. We use, I mean, I always say he was born to be a teacher when he was 11 weeks old. We were in a body, mind centering movement, therapist's workshop retreat and he was the teacher and he's been the teacher ever since. He teaches us every day. We use him as our role model to say if Elijah doesn't get it, we've got to figure out another way to teach it because he lets us know. Right away, if he's bored or whatever. But I'd have to say it's a non-probable. Elijah reminds us, don't just work with words. It's really important to put words aside, because we're so word oriented. When our very first troupe that we had in 2004, what Emmaus May was, I homeschooled him, but we did a lot of working with educators from the University of Vermont and one thing they said was, he needs to have some adult driven activities. He just can't rule everything because he needs to learn how to have attention. Well, here we are, 12 students, we're going one by one by one. They're all sharing something that's important to them each day. My son, who is so distractable, is sitting on the edge of his seat like this, looking at everyone go around the circle for, what, 20 minutes?  I mean, so every day he teaches me something and he's learned more words. You know, he's just in totally engaged. He kind of tells his caregiver when it's, he knows when he needs to go out for his part, for his character in a show. He's like, up, ready, come on. And she's like, oh yeah, right, right, right. We're going on in a minute. So he intuitively has learned, you know, 15 years. I think this has been the best thing. When I finally took him to school, I just said, it's not an option. Just put in his IEP, whatever you have to do. But this kid's going to theater adventure as part of his educational program because he's going to learn more there in three hours than you guys are going to see tomorrow day. I'm sorry. And you know, and it's really true because that's what speaks to him and his way of learning. And we've seen that. My deep quote is that one day we were practicing and one of our students who rarely spoke, he has autism, he rarely spoke to us. And his character was going to sing Hakuna Matata. And I put the microphone in front of him. He sang clearly, articulately and on key. And all this commotion's going on and Laura's like, cut, quiet on the set. Do that again.  But still for me, learning about people on the autism spectrum or a student who's deaf or a student who's blind, that's all new learning just because I have one kind of a son that doesn't mean I know everything. And so that's been very exciting for us to learn. So right there, my whole idea about people with autism who can't speak, you know, what are they taking in? We don't know because sometimes it's hard to understand what they're understanding. It was just blown out of the water with that young man singing, no worries. And I would just add to that that Elijah has helped remind us a lot that we all learn. And it's so often in our society we might think someone, they'll never be able to blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's so not true at all. And so the belief in that we're all learners and that means the teacher is still. Yeah, I bet. In terms of whether I see it as a practice, I think definitely. Making inclusive work as a practice. Again, that's one of the reasons the festival is to try and sort of show that it's not just us, there's companies all over the world that are making this work and sharing this practice. But in terms of my role in the room as director, when we're devising our productions, I very much see it as being able to design a show that is going to show each of those performers in sure their strengths. So that's where it becomes, you know, a practice.  Okay, how can we use that? How can we use that? And being open to that. And being open to the surprises. Yeah, absolutely. Students will show things that are like, whoa, like you described, like that's amazing. That happens all the time. And I mean, for example, in Meet Fred, and this is very much a part of the show for those that have seen it and those that will see it, is from the beginning, I always wanted one of our Academy students to be one of the puppeteers on Fred. And we worked through puppetry for months on end with the students on the course and some of them became very good at it. Actually, I had one student who was probably achieved the most in terms of technical ability. And I had turned and I asked him, look, do you want to join us on this production? And he said, no. I said, why not?  So he refused to do it. He wouldn't do it. So, you know, so he didn't come and join us actually in making the show. Our other students did and he was also very good. But to have the skill to be able to maintain the style of puppetry we use in this show over an extended sort of hour and 20 minutes is a lot of focus and a lot of sort of cognitive ability and discipline. So that's why in the end, and it's this thing of making sure you're working to people's strengths is the decision was made that we would have the Academy student play in characters alongside the puppet and our tutors being the puppeteers. But those are difficult decisions that sometimes you have to make if you're going to commit to everyone being able to play to their strengths and produce the best show produced with that group of people. Yeah. It's like a good time to have you elaborate a little bit more on Meet Fred once about and how did, you know, you weren't primarily a puppetry company so the decision to make that foray as part of this was good. So, yeah, I mean, primarily as we've been speaking about we're an inclusive theatre company but we did a workshop in 2014 with a company called Blind Summit who are a fantastic puppetry company based in London, in the UK. And we learned in that week about the style of Boonraku puppetry that they use so they have sort of cloth puppets that they use as training puppets. So what that meant is that we got a chance to both kind of observe and perform on these puppets. So I got kind of to experience what it is to be in that puppet working alongside two other performers and improvising in the moment. And it's very kind of, it's a wonderful feeling and the inspiration really from that was just to kind of in some way make a puppet show using one of these puppets. We went away, we ordered like we had seven or eight Boonraku puppets made for us by Blind Summit and then I came back and we worked for seven, eight months kind of a day, half day a week training with the students on the academy and exploring what worked, what didn't work and some, meeting some characters through the puppets. Some of the sequences that you see in the show kind of first starts to take form through improvisations within those sessions. And then we kind of went into more focused groups of like eight performers, some of our academy students alongside some of the tutors to continue to sort of explore some of the themes. And at that point, what became clear was this, the relationship between the puppet and his puppeteers and how the puppet, you know, the puppeteers give the puppet life in simplest form without the puppeteers the puppet doesn't exist. And then the parallels between that and the reliance that many of our performers have on a support network to be independent within their lives and live full lives. And what happens if that gets taken away? So at the time that we were making the show was austerity, was a big buzzword around Europe, the crisis and the government was making a lot of cutbacks to services and people's benefits. So people, this support was being taken away and through various bureaucratic systems whereby people were asked to re-apply the different benefits and through that process we're losing their benefits. So a lot of our students were going through this change. It was a big stress in people's lives within the disabled community. And that whole atmosphere I guess started to lead into the work that we were making in the room. So that's what the show became.  So that was always the approach. But then the similarities were obvious. The parallel issues. Yeah, I felt that, just your little demo the other day. I was like, oh yeah, that's our life in a nutshell. And people brought their experiences to the room so Fred has to go to the job centre, you know, and go through all that kind of ridiculous trying to be made to get a job, none of which are appropriate for him. But always with the threat of losing some of those benefits if he doesn't agree. I mean, definitely that's something that, you know, that was an experience, Richard, your experience with the job centre is something that kind of was very pertinent during the making of the show. Do you want to? The truth behind the job centre scenes was that because in me, Fred, don't give any spoilers yet, I played a really horrible character who's worked at the job centre and basically in real life I was at the receiving end pretty much. I was the one who was the one who was like going to the job centre, going to these interviews and the benefit offices and that.   So you had to fight for it together recently. Yeah, I was frightened. So the first thing that happened when I found out that they took it away was I actually text Ben and Dan swore out of fear as well. I was like, oh my God, my Ben has got what am I going to do? That's all that. So when I came to forming this character me, Fred, I just wanted to put as much Ben as I discussed into that role as much content as I wanted to throw in there. So, yeah, hopefully a little bit more of a realistic interpretation why I felt like being in there and being, like, interrogated I think is probably good words to describe it in that particular situation.  And, you know, I won't give much away, but we'll see. Yeah. One other area I'd like to quickly explore is changing perceptions in the wider community and how you feel that's going and, yeah. I think it's, and certainly this show as well is the show that's really taken us, you know, beyond just being able to visit the similar sorts of festivals that we run, those inclusive festivals where, in many ways, you're already in an environment that's preaching to the converted, if you like, to more mainstream festivals that aren't, you know, where audiences, you know, are coming already prepared for what they might see here. And I think that's when you start to sort of, yeah, start to really hope that you're making, starting to make that difference because you're reaching the people that, you know, you want to reach, exactly, yeah, exactly. It's such a difficult thing, though, and to have as a company that aim and vision that we want to change perceptions within society, it's an impossible thing to actually quantify, you know, when you're succeeding in that and what exact impression you're having without, you know, giving out various questions. It's with the obvious questions in there where you're not really going to get a realistic closed path, you know. What does 20% more open look like? You can only hope, really, that that's the case. And, you know, we get, sometimes, there's feedback that, you know, it's offered from people, which is lovely. But, yeah, we hope we're getting there. We can only hope. And how about for a further year? We have felt that with, as I said, in our early days, you know, our audience were families, families of our students. And over the 15 years, our audiences have really grown a lot. And we have sold up audiences now, but that's 15 years of doing the work. But it's very exciting. And it's very, very exciting. And we get lots of comments from people. And, yes, absolutely, we want to do what we can do to help shift thinking and really open people's minds to thinking differently. You can't make that happen, but I think it's all by invitation. And I think it sounds like hygiene is definitely, and I think theater venture, a quality of the work that we present on stage, I think, is invitational. It's presenting actors who are passionate about what they're doing, which automatically sets a tone of, and opening. But you can't make that happen. I think it's the power of theater is what kind of boils down to. Now, I understand hygiene's got to come to theater venture. I have a little interaction. How did that go? He was great. And I was going to say, Jenny, one of our students at the very end, I was so taken. She just very freely raised her hand. We were in a circle. And Jenny said, this was really great. I am so glad to know there are other theater companies for people who have disabilities, or however she says. Yeah, especially in another country. Yeah, my hope and sort of wish, as I was talking with all of you, is what can we do to clone you, bottle you, franchise you, turn you into seeds that could be cast out. I appreciate hearing that you have added other locations and have grown. It's gone beyond, it's gone out. We went to China in May with this show. And we have an organization in China, AC Orange Theatres. They're the second largest theater group in China.  But they, they're, the moment they're trying to basically buy rights to run what we do in China. So we have this ridiculous, we have no idea what it's going to lead to. I mean, they want to buy the exclusive English language version rights to meet Fred. An exclusive Chinese version meet Fred. And they want to buy exclusive rights to all future hygiene productions to tour in China. And exclusive rights to run the training that we do. You know, it's a world we have no experience of or concept of. It's very exciting. It also throws up lots of questions about control and all that sort of stuff. But the spirit is that they want to be able to, you know, offer more opportunity for their communities with disability in China, which is great, very positive. Yeah, that's very important. Interesting concept to franchise in a contractual way. Things that happen organically. Exactly, yeah, absolutely. That's an entire condition. Are you engaged all in training future trainers and artistic directors and directors in your work as well? Not so much. We certainly have a lot of interest in our academy, often so people come and visit and we're very open to having people come and see how it's run and look at it as a model. I mean, the actual model of the academy was something I spent three months in Spain with a company in Seville called Danza Mobile in 2010. And it was there that I observed they had a five day a week training course and professional performance companies alongside it for their dancers. So it was that model that then we modeled the academy on. So we're in turn very open to coming to visit and really learning sort of more in depth about how it all works. That's good. We are so small. I know, I know. But what I do want to give a little shout out to very quickly to a couple things that are currently happening for theater venture. A few things that are currently happening for theater venture that's really exciting. And one of those things is that we did get a grant from the Vermont Developmental Disabilities Council and it's called SEATS. You just mentioned SEATS. And we have mentors who are actors in the Thursday troupe and they come in the Wednesday troupe and they help role model. They help modeling, acting and being friends and buddies and so leaders and leaders. And so those four mentors are being trained to be trainers to other adults with disabilities and we're using theater as the vocabulary, as the context for how we're teaching some of these leadership skills. So we're in the throes of that right now. And so we're going in the state. We have two sites here in Brattleburg. Family's first inclusion center. The Ross went up to Springfield and Bella's Falls, ACRS. And so we'll be working with adults with developmental challenges. So our mentors are learning to be the leaders in that. So it's very exciting. And related to that is a training guide and we called it a training guide. It's not a good name for it, but a book. And it's a book about future venture but it's very practical. And it's a book that we hope with the final chapter to write is now about the SEATS grant. And it's a book that, and it's very specific about not just our history, but how we do what we do. And so the goal is to get this finished this year. And the idea is to send it out to communities. And knowing that their inclusive program won't look like ours. But this is an idea that helped people get started. That's wonderful. We have time for a question or two in the audience. Anybody? I've actually seen the show and I want to say when I first saw it I really couldn't tell who there was no difference in the actors to me between people who were neurodiverse or not. And it was very impressive to see that whole the acting, the story. It's a very compelling show and it was very fun. And I was just so impressed by the quality of your performance with the actors. I was so impressed and I wish this was after so I could talk about it more. But that you put out some challenging attitudinal things about what's going on on stage. And I think that it makes a lot of people uncomfortable like trying to figure out how am I supposed to feel about this. Because it's very challenging. And I'm really curious to hear how other people will respond once they've seen it here. Because it's excellent. And Ben knows I've been a big supporter of theirs since I first saw the show. Thank you. Really quickly, what's next for theater? When can we see you next? Ben and you guys got a little taste of this. The Thursday troupe ten years ago did a show called Raising Our Voices which was a show about them. And it was a great show. We really loved it. But they were telling us they didn't really want to do a show about them. And they want to be in stories. And so we had done ten years of that. Lots of different stories. And so the last three years we did Shakespeare. And we did some pretty exciting Shakespeare. And at the end of last year's season, many of the students said that was great. But can we move on? And so what we came to was Raising Our Voices together. And we're going, it's a totally different show from ten years ago. But it's about them and it's a musical. And the music Ben and your troupe got a taste of. We're beginning stages with it. We're just launching it right now. But some original music and the themes that we got from the students that are important themes in their lives are independence, working, friendship and romance. And so those are the topics that will be approaching and addressing. And we'll have a preview, which every year we have a fashion show. And so that's coming up. And there's fashions of the spring production. November 9th. And so this Raising Our Voices together will be the focus. And give a little preview of what's to come for our spring show in April. And we have a Rack card over there that has a bunch of information about us and our shows and so forth. Thank you to all of you. Really appreciate it. And thanks to you for being here. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having us.