FreeSalonEducation.com invites you to join us every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time for live and interactive classes from your favorite FreeSalon Education Educators. So grab a mannequin, get set up, and make sure to share your results using the hashtag FreeSalonEducation. FSE live starts now! Hey guys this is Matt Beck from FreeSalonEducation.com here with FSE live in the morning. This was an interesting morning. So I'm excited to go over some haircutting stuff with you guys. We don't have a ton of time we have you know a good 45-50 minutes so that should be plenty. What I want to focus on today in this haircutting class we're going to work on the structure of cutting a graduation but I want to go through different techniques with cutting graduation and also work on over direction. So I want to start off with standard sectioning on the mannequin. So what I did was I just took off that if you can show the top view put the GoPro in the ceiling. So the top view so we just took a square off right along the bridal ridge across mid crown and then back over along the bridal ridge. Very symmetrical on the top so we're not really we're not offsetting anything for this haircut it's going to be a real standard graduation. Now as we work through the back here there's a couple of things that when I started cutting graduation that was tricky to me and so I'm going to go through a few different ways that people do that and some mistakes that you can make along the way as you're you're cutting a graduation and a haircut. So we're working in the back the the challenge here is we'll turn the mannequin a little bit. You can see that the head starts off it's rounded up here so so the elevation is pretty simple within this back area nothing's very uncomfortable so it's pretty easy to cut but then as we work as around the occipital bone and the neck the nape of the neck tips in tilts in whatever as it goes in that's where it gets uncomfortable and we're trying to like weave in and out of the sectioning. So I want to show you guys a couple things that I do it makes it more comfortable for me. So we're going to start off I took a section right down center back clean that up a little bit and what I'm going to do is I don't want to work in too big a section so if we were going to cut this one length I wouldn't want to take a big section let's say take it from the occipital bone down and just cut all this hair because if you try to cut too much hair you're going to start pushing hair and that's going to lead to an unsuccessful result as well. So you want to work in small sections so we're going to take about an inch wide section through the back and we're going to work horizontally and the reason I like to work horizontally in the back in the beginning of the haircut as well is because that's just more comfortable for me from a hand position standpoint. So I'm going to slide that clip up and away and I'm going to take another horizontal line in the back and when I first start off the back I really like to work both sides at the same time because that's going to allow me to make sure that the haircut stays balanced and it just works better for me but if you guys like to do one side first then go back to the other you can do that as well. So we've got our first horizontal line in the back so what I'm going to do I'm going to turn the head a little bit mostly so you guys can see more of a body position standpoint rather than the actual cut. So I'm going to take my comb and I want to cut this at one length first and the reason I'm going to do that at one length is because it's not actually going to be a one length and we've talked about this before because the head is curving in so if I cut this all flat here we're going to have different levels of graduation starting already. So we're going to start off I'm going to use my comb as a guide and I'm going to cut my first line. Now I'm just going to follow that comb across and then to clean it up just use the tip of my scissor and work through just for any like straggling hairs that are going through there. Again it's the tip of my scissor clean up the line. Now when I work backhand I don't always like to put my comb in here because then it gets a little a little too scrunched I guess so I'm going to go through and just freehand along the edge and line there. So comb that down again using the tip of my scissor just to clean up the line and using that tip of the scissor at about a 45 degree angle works pretty well. So I mean straight up and down is not going to take much out so if you just angle it a little bit you can get a nice clean line in there. Now I'm going to take my next section. My next section is going to be nice and small again and like I said I'm going to show you guys what the difference between cutting this vertically and what it would be cutting it horizontally. So let's get this section out and then. Hey Matt something I just want to point out with that I just remembered that you taught me not that long ago. Yeah while you're section or creating your section the direction that you're combing all of the hair before you do it to make sure that you get a nice clean section. I'm just thinking about that because I just had to revisit that with someone the other day. Okay. Showing what a difference that makes having the hair go in the direction before you try to create this section rather than combing it all down and trying it section. Okay I know you're saying yeah. So as we're basically if we're going to take a parting what Brian's saying and stuff that we've worked on before if I was going to part vertically I'm going to comb the hair or let's just say obviously vertically it's easy but it's because we're combing the hair down but if we wanted to take a diagonal back parting what I would do is comb that hair exactly in the direction I want to take that parting and then when I go through to take take my section it's nice and clean every time. So same thing horizontally we're going to comb the hair that way then take the section so it'll be a few combs over then take the section. Now the reason I'm going to go in horizontally instead of vertically and this is something that I learned a long time ago is if we're working vertically and let's say I take this section here it's pretty simple so it's pretty simple to take your first section here comb it out and cut so this side is pretty easy for me but as soon as I move to the other side and we're combing and I'm holding my fingers in a downward position this way to keep that same angle because my elbow has to go so high in the air and it just wants to drop the whole time it's not comfortable so I get an inconsistent result within my graduation so one side will be a little bit longer than the other and I think that happens with a lot of people so if I work horizontally the only thing I have to worry about is when I take my section or my parting there I only have to worry about how much I elevate this way so I need to make sure I stay consistent within this elevation but it's comfortable so I'm like this the entire time as opposed to sometimes being like this and sometimes being like this so it just works better for me and that's why I like I work horizontally usually through the throughout the base till I get to the occipital bone and then when I'm working on top of the head then I don't mind moving to vertical just depending on what haircut I'm looking to achieve so I'm gonna start off on the left side sad you tell me if you can see that so I just want to grab a little bit of the old hair that we had the guide man if you want to move the mannequin a little bit here actually I think we might be good you know what if I come over here I'm gonna take a little bit less hair you really want to make sure you see the guideline now I don't want to take too much of this hair some people will scoop this all up here to cut but what you're doing is you're stretching all that hair from the bottom so your guideline is right away going to be way too short for the graduation you're you're basically gonna start layering it when you didn't want to so I want to make sure I don't take too much hair I don't put too much in my hand and then I'm gonna bring this out horizontally here find your guide back a little bit to your left we can see your hand we can see your scissors but we can't see the actual section here alright let's go back to this side we'll figure it out one of these days this is the beauty about not doing it live because you can make adjustments so we're working we worked horizontally and now as I'm moving it's gonna be a slight diagonal forward so just a just a little shift in the cut this way because we're really just following that head shape as well so right away we start building up a nice little graduation in there so I'll bring down the rest of that bit that I had there and just really during this you want to focus on your elevation here because you need that to stay consistent and we'll go through and cross check it at the end but you really want to make sure that you're focused on that elevation so you don't build up too much weight or too little weight whatever you're looking to go for as you're working with your elevation do you want to kind of maybe just touch on what to expect with this type of haircut as far as how high you lift it versus how low you keep your elevation well so that's so that when working horizontally yeah so that's gonna change throughout the haircut depending on the head shape and the density so let's say that we have somebody that comes in that has a high density of hair as I'm working through here maybe I don't want the bottom to be so thick so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna elevate it higher at this point so we might have the elevation all the way up here throughout this part of the haircut and then when we get to the top start dropping it down more it really just depends on where you want to shift that weight to I think people get so caught up in building the line perfectly like this you know like so they want to see that crisp line but really that line could shift and move depending on the density of the hair and where we want the majority of the weight to sit right now because my elevation is here that's where I want that weight to sit and you can see that that's what's happening it's building up right there but then all of this hair that I'm gonna bring down to this point I don't necessarily want all the weight from this hair to sit here I might want to sit a little bit higher so my elevation is gonna shift with each panel that I take down so you can see how that's kind of coming into place because we're over directing it slightly back you're getting a little bit of that a-line kind of feel to it that can be determined on how much you shift back and how much weight weight you want to push to the front and length as well so now we're gonna go through take down another section here another panel we're combing it nice and tight over so you want all those little hairs to get out of the way so you can stay nice and clean through the haircut once I finish the back then we'll go back through and we'll cross check it as well so really just working those little hairs over and then clipping it away so now I could move vertically because now this is pretty comfortable no matter where I'm at but I'm gonna stick to horizontal through this section and then we'll work vertical on the next so I'm gonna grab right out of the center a bit more of the guide there so my elevation is even higher at this point because like I said I don't want all the weight sitting down at the bottom so we're gonna bring up that elevation you can see how it starts to shift that weight up a little bit move the mannequin now we're working on our diagonal forward because now I'm wrapping around towards the ear there's less density there so I can drop my elevation a little bit towards this part of right behind the ear because this is really thick and then this gets skinnier so I don't want to have it the elevation super high through that whole part because what's gonna happen is this will be too weak in the line that we're trying to create in there so you can see it started to shift that weight up so now it's sitting a little bit higher nice and soft and we'll work this section here moving into that diagonal forward again so now I'm gonna comb everything down because I'm gonna start working vertically now throughout the haircut so I'll comb all of this down we only have about two inches left to work with and I'm gonna be working on top of my fingers at this point so I'm gonna part the hair a little bit find a clean section straight down vertical so now the thing I like about working vertically is I can really see exactly how much weight I want to leave on this so even if we wanted to cut and round this off we could I'm gonna leave a little bit of that weight on there so I'm gonna come out to our guide and then I'm just gonna work a line straight along my fingers so you'll see there's gonna be a buildup of weight from this point of the head because this is obviously curved and higher here so we're gonna have a slight buildup of weight but we want that to kind of finish off our graduation so I'll keep working that same angle throughout the back so I'll just take a little bit of what I just cut so we're working with a traveling guide the traveling guide is gonna give us a nice foundation and shape if you over direct something too far as it starts to get heavier you you lose that structure a little bit so but again now that we're working towards the ear the density changes so I don't want to over direct it all the way I don't want to over direct it too much or I don't want to not over direct it because I need that weight to land in the corner there so now as we get to the corner of the head here we're gonna start to just over direct everything straight back not to the center back but just straight back to build up a little extra weight if you can see that on there but you can see how starting to get heavier now that we're over directing it into that corner so now the last little bit right behind the ear is also gonna be over directed straight back and cut at our guideline you see that that now here's one thing you're gonna see that this hair is shorter than that that's okay that doesn't mean you need to cut all that off which I think a lot of people just jump to doing that I like having that little bit of a disconnection because that starts to bring in that line if you can see that so just because that hair is shorter under there it doesn't mean you need to cut it you can always clean it in the dry cut but not everything needs to be connected all the time so now we're gonna work through the other side we'll take a small bit from our guideline staying on the same side of the head but the only difference now is I'm combing the hair towards myself because you always want to keep a consistency with how you comb the hair to the guide so when we were working on the left side I was pushing the hair to the guide and now I'm pulling the hair to the guide just so that we stay consistent with that we're gonna comb it down again just like the other side this is traveling and it's traveling until we get to that corner and then we over direct back everything over directed straight back and we start to build that forward wait line so you can see it's not too heavy of a graduation what I like is that we work through it shifting our elevation to take out some of the density through the haircut but then you still get the volume and the layering sort of throughout the hair I guess it's not layering technically but you can see all that movement and texture in there but it's still nice and sleek so somebody that had a higher density of hair it would be just as easy to work through it with higher elevation to lighten up the haircut so you don't get that big kind of fat bob at the bottom if you don't want it if you want it's a different story so what I want to do now is go through real quick comb everything over spray your hair down a little bit so everybody quiet on there or they are you guys typing a lot of people just watching enjoying we got people skipping classes to watch this people skipping fire drills nice so working diagonal back you could see as I work through it so there's the line that we're looking for and that's our cross checking so we were working horizontally pretty much gonna work vertically but at a diagonal is come more comfortable so you can do that as well so we're just gonna work through here a diagonal back I'm just gonna check a couple spots if I see something crazy there's our disconnection so I don't want to cut that off that might be a place where sometimes people are cross-checking and they see something they cut it off and it completely changes the haircut so you don't want to do that either so just as you're working through be be aware of your disconnection but you can see that line is pretty good it's a little bit of a round to it that's because of the shift in the elevation so I think we're pretty good with that part of the haircut so now I want to work into the sides and what we're gonna do with this with these classes and how they work is I'm gonna cut the sides of this haircut hopefully you guys have picked up quite a few tips within the graduation and all of that and how we worked it and then next the next time I cut hair which will be in a couple weeks we're gonna go through and we're gonna do dry hair cutting and detailing on this same mannequin so we'll smooth it out and do all of that so that you guys don't have to sit through the blow dry and also so these classes aren't super long and you can kind of take those tips try them out and then work on the dry cutting later so we could do a couple things here depending on the look that your guest wants you could either keep over directing everything back to that point and really build that a line feel to it with also removing some weight or you could square off the graduation which is something that I like to do and we'll do that because I think at this point a lot of people know how to just over direct hair but I want to cut a nice square feel to it so like I said we pushed that weight into the corner but that doesn't mean that we need to keep it there it just means I wanted to push weight there to have a nice solid foundation for going in later and cutting the shape that I want so if I didn't push that extra weight there I'd really have nothing to cut so I'm gonna comb this up and out of the way I don't want to cut it all at the same time again that's what has to do with pushing the hair too much so we'll comb the hair down turn so I'm gonna comb the hair down using the wide teeth of my comb so there's not too much tension in it a lot of times they'll have their ear depending on how their ear sits on their head it might kind of push this hair out a little bit and that's fine everybody says tap on the ear I just think if you comb it lightly over the ear it works just as well so now what we're gonna do is come across here remove that corner we're just gonna work a nice square line in the haircut now I want to soften this the rest of the hair that's gonna come over top of this so I don't want to cut all of that hair just square at the bottom I'm gonna have a slight bit of elevation to it so we'll break this in half and I'll grab a little bit of that hair to work as a guide and I'm gonna just slightly elevate the hair and work that line a little bit more so then it falls nice and soft rather than having just kind of a harsh floppy bottom on the haircut break this in half slight elevation working square last little bit now I hold the hair from the bottom into this for my guideline because it's too far away at this point so just grab a little bit of that old hair and use that as your guide make sure you're not following the round of the head here it is gonna be a slight over direction back so then you guys can see how it tucks nice right around the chin length instead of it just being a super heavy feel to the haircut knock myself out mad I don't remember someone's asking are you going to Orlando yes yeah I'll be in Orlando we're doing the same thing in Orlando that we've done in all the shows so that's kind of the goal to end up end this year's hair show run so we'll be interviewing some of the artists there cool cool and then I'm done being an interviewer after that well all right I'll do it not completely done but I'd like to do some hair all right same thing working across with just a little bit of that hair get that line moving and somebody's probably gonna ask how do you know that both sides are even well hopefully if I did my haircut correctly they are even this is where you pray to the hair gods that you didn't mess it up but yeah if you check it with balance and you're doing all of your cross-checking and all that it really should be the same pretty much on both sides and if you need to make it shouldn't be too extreme if the parents so you could go through and just make some minor adjustments but everybody's head is a little bit different so you're not gonna necessarily be symmetrical on both sides so just working square cross it's funny Justin you laughing chuckling I was just referred to as J man J man I enjoy these classes in the morning because it was much less stressful getting ready for everything because everyone's a lot quieter because it's early as much mayhem in the background you know I've calmed my road rage that's pretty even success all right so what we're gonna do is in two weeks we're going to I'm gonna leave this top out because I like to cut the top of a graduation dry for the most part I'm not saying I do that all the time but for next week we're going to because we're gonna focus on dry hair cutting so all of this will be smoothed out whoa she's tired so all of this will be smoothed out but you can see with having that square section it gives us a lot of fun to kind of go through and create texture really just give this haircut its own unique feel because there's hair all around it that's long so we can go through and do all kinds of dry cutting techniques we'll cut probably a fringe in there in a couple weeks when we get back here and do it so next week I believe we have Draya coming in yeah yeah so Draya is going to do a graduate or not a graduation that's the brain Draya is gonna do some long hair so so I'm really excited to see that like formal styling long hair I'm just clearing that up because somebody did request that we do a long hair cut yeah okay yeah we're gonna do a long haircut as well if I have any mannequins left long hair I can model for that they keep doing it I know we keep taking them down I'm like oh there's my really nice Bahlia's one and now she's got a Bob well here's the thing you have like when you do like I did this shag haircut which was pretty long I mean they're only so long they're only this long so we do have some really long hair mannequins though which we could cut into give them a nice haircut yeah some fun stuff so we'll do a long haircut for you guys and if you have any other questions post them in the comments and or video requests or anything because we're doing these videos every week every Wednesday morning now at 10 a.m. so all you guys have to do is log in and join us every Wednesday morning this seems to work better we have splitting hairs coming up tonight which is our live video podcast that'll be at 7 30 p.m. which it seems to be very fun at night so it's the end of our day we get to talk hair and kind of relax instead of stressing and getting the class together and all that so I thank you guys so much for watching this video I hope that these tips help you it's definitely these are little things little adjustments that I've made when I cut a graduation that I've really helped because I think if you get too stuck in I have to cut the whole thing vertically or you know we're worrying about where your elbows at if you just move horizontal and just focus on your elevation this way and you can get those perfect lines in the haircut and then work vertically towards the top you'll be more comfortable and it should work out good so is there any other questions on there anything yeah I think we're pretty good all right well everyone enjoy your salon day thank you for watching the video make sure you subscribe to us here on YouTube and share it with your friends we love that and that's pretty much it thanks to Bercato products for sponsoring videos and Mizutani scissors which is what we use today the DB 20 scissor I love so you can get those on shopfse.com but you guys have a fantastic day and we'll see you guys on the next video thanks


So the club is called Berkeley XR and the idea is to inspire other students to create and to use this new platform to design, create and compose music and art. So every week we would show them different kind of gear or different kind of softwares or different kind of games and experiences that you can do in virtual reality and hope that some of them will find it so inspiring that they would want to build something by themselves. And I help a lot of my students build their project. They come to me with a prototype or an idea and I just go with them through the stages of how to build this and to make this into reality or virtual reality. Boom! What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Don Sokian. We are at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge in Massachusetts. We are now going to be talking about creativity and music in the era of VR. We have Shirley Spikes joining us on the show. Hello. Hi, how's it going? Good to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. I'm so excited to talk to you. We have so much to unpack about the subject. Shirley Spikes, yes, is the CEO of Virtue Studios, President of Berkeley College of Music Virtual Reality Club and on the advisory board at MUX. She's passionate about immersive technologies and spatial audio, unleashing our full creativity in the era of virtual reality. And you can find the links below to Virtue Studios, to play MUX and Woojer and her Facebook page as well. So yes, check out those links. This is going to be such an epic convo breaking all this down. Let's, Shirley, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions. We love asking people. We find ourselves as stewards of Earth. What is your current take on the state of our world? It seems to me that the world is going to a place of valuing personal identity and discovering yourself with creativity and coming with the full potential of what a person can get on any kind of field. Yeah, that's what's up. Yeah, that's what's up. Yeah, unleashing the full creative potential. Yeah, and valuing the self discovery of people trying to reach that potential for me. Yeah, the process of finding out what we find to be most meaningful and fulfilling in our lives and then going after that. As long as we have to have these right physiological needs met, we have to have the right basic, the tools that are available to us. Yeah, but we always had that. But what we have right now, I believe, is the idea of you can want more from life and that's okay and no one's going to judge you for that. You can be successful and no one's going to judge you for that. Quite the opposite, they're going to help you become even more successful than you would think you would be. So it's an era of experimentation and trying to find the inner self of each and every one of us. Yes, yes, it's crazy thinking about the amount of, I believe it's somewhere up 1500 total billionaires on the planet and how it's just looking like as the pie of the economy of the planet is going to grow. It's going to be closer to 3000. And entrepreneurs and artists and people who want to make the world a better place. People who actually want to change things to the better and to the greater good. She's incredible. Yes, yes. It's like billions of people around the world gaining access to democratized technologies at the edge of the field. Exactly, it's amazing, it's a great journey. Yes, yes. And specifically, I think the technologies that you're going to be teaching us about in this episode especially are going to unlock a lot of creative potential. Yes, yes, let's do the journey. So, OK, when you're when you find yourself born in Israel and you've got you're going to have to teach us about kind of like the craziness. Like, I'm really interested in what this is like. It's so much different than, you know, being born in the US. That's true. It's kind of like a much smaller piece of land and it's true.  In some ways, yes. So teach us about that and how you picked up your your interest in music and then got out to the Berkeley College of Music. I I started playing when I was four. So I don't remember any time of my life that I didn't do music or didn't hear sounds in my head or didn't analyze whatever is on the radio. So it was always a part of my journey. And Israel is a very, very small country located right in the Middle East between a lot of Muslim countries. So we're one of a kind. I think because it's a very small country, a lot of people finding themselves through the entrepreneurial journey, just because we don't have a lot of resources and people are like, OK, we need to generate money out of our ideas, make sense, kind of software. Yeah, not only also hardware and also a lot of stuff, cyber defense, which is Israel is very big on. So I always grew up around entrepreneurs and people who want to get something more out of life. And I had a lot of people that told me that in Israel, you actually feel like you were living because something might happen to you. There are. Oh, yeah. So there are a lot of dangers in Israel, but but you learn to appreciate life because of it. And then can you give us an idea of like the density of the like of powerful nodes of like individuals and companies? A majority of them are in Tel Aviv. Is that Tel Aviv? Herzliya is a huge one on startup companies. A lot of like, I think that the top 50 companies in the world have already opened a center in Israel. You have a lot of incubators. There are a lot of headquarters are based in Israel. A lot of companies actually started in Israel. A lot of companies that you're using on a daily basis, like Waze, for example, USB thumbtrives were invented in Israel. Yes, yes. Yeah, and I believe sherry tomatoes as well. Cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes as an Israeli invention. Interesting. Yeah, there was something like that. You're welcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe it was the vehicle that made the the lane assist where they would prevent. Yeah, that company also. Mobileye. Mobileye? Mobileye. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have a lot of friends who work there, actually. Yeah, yeah, see, what's up? Yeah, what's up? Yeah, shout out to the Israel Tech. What's up Israel? Yeah, soccer peeps. OK, so then all the way to, you know, having since four, you've always noticed sound, always noticed sound. I always notice sound. I always hear sounds. I always analyze songs in my head. I always try to understand better music. I went to the conservatory in Jerusalem. I grew up in Jerusalem. And I went to the classical conservatory in Jerusalem. And I did a few classes also in the higher academy in Jerusalem. And then I moved to a school we call Ramon. Back then we called it Ramon. Today we call it a BIN school at Berkeley International Network School where all my credits got transferred to Berkeley. And I studied composition arrangement and conducting because I realized that I didn't want to just be a player that just plays to other people or play other people's pieces. I want to be able to create my own music. So I studied composition, arrangement, and conducting for three years. And after that I took one year off to study and get the money to get to Berkeley. It's really expensive, as you know. Yes, this is a very expensive school. It's a very expensive school. I am on a few scholarships, thank God. But it's still a very expensive school. And this is a top Berkeley College of Music is one of the top schools in the world for music. Yes, yes. Yeah. Frequently ranked in top five or so something. And it's worth leading in being the top one of music education and music technology. The first one to get a degree for film scoring. The first one to offer classes in virtual reality and in video games. So they're groundbreaking in a lot of different fields. Film scoring classes, VR, yeah. Yeah, the first one to get, I think, I think it was the first school to get jazz as a degree. I think the first school in America to get jazz as a degree instead of just classical music or traditional music. So it was always breaking the ground. Berkeley College of Music has been a little bit, I'm always trying to get in there and see what's going on. I'm just a little bit older than my country, honestly. Berkeley, I believe, was founded in 45. 45, interesting. Yeah, and Israel was founded at 48. Yeah, the founding of countries and yeah, countries and stuff. Okay, so yeah, cutting edge of music technology, you're out here now. You're doing electronic production and sound design. Correct. And you call this the biology of music, which I thought was so interesting. That's honestly how I see it. Sound and controlling sound. Yes, teach us about this. So yeah, I started actually studying film scoring and I moved to a different major, which is electronic production and sound design and I didn't even know what I'm getting myself into, honestly. I thought it was just going to be trans music or party music, but not at all. So the way I see it, electronic production and sound design is the biology of music, which is understanding the depth of sound and how does sound move through the air? How can I control it? How can I manipulate it? What does it mean to hear a sound? Why does it sound different when you play a note on a violin or on a piano, even though it's the same note? Why doesn't it sound the same if it's all just frequency and amplitude? It should sound the same, but it's not. So it's really getting into the depth of what sound actually mean and understanding how to design it and manipulate it any way you want. Yes. Yes, it's like taking God control over a sound. It's actually biology. It's understanding how things are built. Why does it sound good? Why does it sound bad? Why do we like something better than the other thing? Why does some sounds are natural and some sounds are not? And how does it move through the space? Yes. Yes, the same note on different instruments. Exactly. That's a good one. You also had all these other ones of which note to play. How long to play that note? So, yeah, one of the things, yeah. We work with MIDI controllers that allow us to control which notes you're playing in which specific time. M-I-D-I, for those that don't know, M-I-D-I MIDI controllers. MIDI, this is the protocol that we transfer audio from. And a lot of our students are actually designing MIDI controllers and different ways of how to manipulate and control sound. Using buttons, using breath control, using pedals, using virtual reality controllers, for example. So you could use a lot of different things to control and manipulate music. Yeah, because the days of the mouse and keyboard, those are like long, we're way going past that. Now, so teach us about how you would actually be able to do cool things like if you like the college of music. Yeah, so the way we see it, at least in electronic music, is less like a linear piece of music, less like this at the beginning, and then this happened, and then this happened. And more kind of like puzzles or blocks, that you create those blocks independently and then you choose however you want to build them in every different form. And you can play them in reverse or you can play them in the same time. And you kind of create yourself those templates that later on you're using for different materials. So the same song can sound differently. This is why we listen to DJs, how they take different audio pieces and combine them together to one big piece. Yes, yes. So then how does, how do I make one of these kind of like modules? And then how would you go about designing that? And then how do you plug that in with the rest of them? How can you make it go backwards, speed it up, amplify it? So we use something that we call DAWs, which are digital audio workspaces. Those are softwares that help us control, record, control, edit, and do any kind of manipulation that we want on sound. I'm using few different ones. So usually for live performance you would use a software called Ableton Live. For building patches and to actually understand the signal flow and the sound, you could use Max MSP, which is a very nice software that you can design your own sounds in. Other than that, there are a lot of different tools like QBase Pro Tools, Logic. Each one is using his workspace and then kind of create music based on the workspace that he chose. Yeah, the tools are so many now and they're just... So many. And they always come up with new ones, which is great, I think. Yes, I hope that the time that we spend learning tools can translate into knowing how to use the next gen tools because you don't want skills to just come off obsolete. Definitely, definitely. The way that we perceive music has evolved a lot from the single channel to the stereo. That is true. To ambisonics. Yeah. Yeah, so when we started playing instruments and starting performing as humans, we did it firstly in small chambers, usually in royalty families when we called it chamber music, like a small set of instruments that were playing a little and nice piece or a minuet. And then we moved into bigger symphony halls and we kind of tried to get the viewer to feel something bigger. And the way that the orchestra is sitting, the way that everything is designed in those symphony halls is so you can get the best sound possible. And they're sitting and they're spreading everywhere so you can get the entire feeling of listening to a symphony orchestra. And from that, we can go forward in time into recording music. And for start we had only mono. And we recorded in mono and we listened in mono to everything. And then came stereo, who changed everything that we know about sound. And suddenly, oh my God, I have two channels and they can move between them and I can like pan things into different speakers and each ear can hear something different. And then we moved into getting it on our smartphones and on our computers and headphones became like so much more advanced over the years. And you have now noise canceling and you have bone conducting headphones which sits not on your ears but on your bone conducting? They're cold, yeah.  So you can hear two layers. You can hear the real world and you can hear the virtual world or the non-existing world in your ears in the same time. And it comes to today where I think that our world is going towards ambisonic and spatial audio. So in the past what we used to have, we didn't have a definition for that but now we call it headlock music which is music that is just locked to your head.  Doesn't matter how you move. You can walk, you can turn around and it's gonna sound the same. And we took that and we amplified it today into ambisonic or spatial sound. So firstly you can hear the room and it sounds way more bigger in depth. Secondly, when you turn your head, the music is gonna move based on where it sits in the room. So let's say I have a drum kit right here and I hear it on my headphones and when I move my head, it's gonna stay in the same place instead of moving with my head just like we hear music on just with our ears. And the idea is that we're not only hearing left and right. We can also hear back. We can also hear front. We can also hear up and down. We don't have that in headphones yet. We're starting to get into that and understanding how to record and to get sound that is immersive into the world of virtual reality. The 360 sound ambisonics is so cool because we're talking, you know, what used to be we'd go movie theater, we'd go to a surround sound system at our house and we'd go, oh, it's so cool when you can hear the person walking from over here to over here. But then these are also have so much healing potential, meditative potential, spiritual, transcendent potential. I mean, yeah. Definitely. For everything. The experiences that we can design inside of ambisonic chambers. In VR, let people feel different places. Let people visit different places. Let people feel something that they've never felt before. Actually enhance them with sound. Movie theaters are already doing that using the Dolby Atmos studios. So what they did is they designed kind of a 360 environment with speakers everywhere and the sound just travels between them. And now the composer doesn't even have to know about this. You just have a little joystick and he can choose where he wants the sound to go. So he doesn't even need to say, now we want it on speaker number 17 and now we want it on speaker number five. No, it doesn't for him and you can make automations and you can actually make the sound rotate around your head or move around the space, which I think is wonderful. Do you have this simplicity? I just love the simplicity because it is really democratizing how easy it is to be like you're just like, oh, it's a joystick now. It's just thought and it's just like the simplicity for creativity. And this is so critical for human ingenuity. I'm really looking forward to that being unleashed more. And I want you to drop us into you being the president at the VR club at Berkeley College Music. That is true, so last year I started the club actually with my friend, Maxine Gautier. He came to me, we talked a little bit about the club and then he said, yeah, I need a co-president who would manage it together with me. So I started Berkeley XR, that's the official name of our club and the idea is to inspire- So XR stands for mixed reality, right? It stands for, okay, so XR is an umbrella term for virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. So a lot of people said that it's expended realities or extended realities or extreme realities and each time it happened, one company just coined that or decided that that's their thing. So now we just see XR as an umbrella term for everything that has to do with immersive technologies. So the club is called Berkeley XR and the idea is to inspire other students to create and to use this new platform to design, create, and compose music and art. So every week we would show them different kind of gear or different kind of softwares or different kind of games and experiences that you can do in virtual reality and hope that some of them will find it so inspiring that they would want to build something by themselves. And I help a lot of my students build their project. They come to me with a prototype or an idea and I just go with them through the stages of how to build this and to make this into reality or virtual reality. Yes, yes. So this is cool because you're doing what I think if we could get to more labs and communities, right? This is so critical. You show new gear and how those can make new experiences. You show 360 video. You show, you record potentially video games tell stories in VR. Of course.  And this is an exciting time because VR is so new that whatever you do in this field, you're the first one to do that. There are no rules.  There are no ways or protocols of how to do things. You can design whatever you want. You can come up with a new idea right now and you're probably gonna be the first one to think about that. Which I think is a very exciting time for everyone, for any kind of field to go into virtual reality. I've seen designers go into virtual reality. I've seen architects. I've seen mathematicians, physicists, doctors who use virtual reality, psychologists using this new platform to either tell their story, help their patients, help their clients, whatever it is. This medium can take it. You just need to put your hands on it and not be scared of new challenges. I love how you said the frontier in this field is that with only maybe a couple million of these extended realities, umbrella terms across these hardware devices across the world right now, if you have an idea for it, you are really potentially one of the first ones to have that idea for it. And then to actually be able to execute it, you're gonna be seeing tens of millions of people using these platforms soon, even hundreds of millions. And then you're gonna have a mass, you're gonna, whatever you build for it, hopefully will be part of a massive library that will be used by so many people. More than that, you could be the leader of that. You can determine this, from now on, this is how we work. You can actually change the history of virtual reality right now. Imagine that, any kind of field that you're studying, you're hearing about those breakthrough people who just tried something different, tried to break the rules and see what happens. Virtual reality is so new that anyone can have their place to do that. And I've seen so many amazing ideas. We have a student, for example, who is trying to visualize mixes in virtual reality, like how does a compressor work? How does a reverb work? How does all those tools that we're using to create audio, how do they actually look in space? I had another student who was working on kind of- How do they look in space? I'm so interested. Right? That is so interesting. I don't know. I don't know. We're gonna have to check up with that student. So he's still working on that project. Even just how the sound is being propagated through the room. We had people, yeah. We had people that did 360 videos. We have now the power station of Berkeley in New York. We just acquired the power station. It's a big studio that used to be for recording a lot of big artists. Like a Virgin was recorded there, for example. And today Berkeley is using that for recording music, but also for 360 videos. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is pushing the edge even further. Yeah, yeah. How hard it is to be the first one to do something today. How easy it is to be the first one to do something in virtual reality. Think about that. Interesting, yeah. Do you want to really add another app to the app store, or do you want to potentially go and pioneer virtual or augmented reality? How hard it is to be the best jazz player in the world. How easy it is to be the first player in virtual reality. Just the first. It's kind of like Mars, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, be the first one on Mars, be the first one to call- That's another thing that some of my students created a tour on Mars through virtual reality so you can actually visit Mars. Yeah. There's so many that are working on the planets. Yeah. Yeah, it's so much fun. Visiting celestial bodies, yeah. It's so much fun. Yeah, the uses of this are so endless. And I really want to hear what your thoughts are on this as we're going to drop into the next uses of this for you, but what do you think about the human mind, especially the child's mind, like of course learning from a textbook versus learning from spatial intelligence with an augmented or a virtual reality. It's almost as though the brain is just going to be able to capture the knowledge so much more effectively. I think it depends on what, but on a lot of things, virtual reality can actually help you study, be more focused for start. We have so many distractions today and everyone keep talking about the distractions and the phone and the Facebook and your emails and everything. In VR, you can't do that. You only have a headset and that's it. Now you're immersed for 10 minutes and you're going to stay in those 10 minutes and you're not going to check your Facebook on the background because you can't because right now you're immersed into this new world. A lot of people have called virtual reality the perfect empathy machine. Yeah. Because that is the first time that you can literally walk in someone else's shoes. You can feel what it feels to be someone else to get out of your comfort zone for just a second from your own living room and to find a new story. So I think it's a great medium for storytelling, for sharing experiences with each other and for creating just new content everywhere. And I think that anyone can find something that he's passionate about and just bring it to the new world of virtual reality which is how I got into virtual reality, honestly. I just took my passions and I said, you know what, this is what I like. Let's let other people enjoy what I see as fun or what I see as exciting. Yeah, I can't get over that. When you can really get behind the eyes of someone you can really start gaining a sense of empathy and right now what we're doing is we're doing, oh, I wonder what this person's life was like the last 20 years. Can I really get behind it and try and understand it? So now you can. Now you can go as deep as even people that are being displaced around the world or haven't really corrupt governments are really tough ways to meet their basic physiological needs. That way you can potentially become more aware of that and want to participate in. Definitely, definitely connect people together. It's interesting, it's like perfect empathy machine. Yeah, I definitely agree that it can be a very good source for empathy. I also do believe that like eye to eye is just so critical like passing a good minute just like looking at someone else's eyes. You need to be very cautious with VR, that's what I think. A lot of people will use it for bad things. You need to understand the risk that you're taking when you're stepping into someone else's shoes. That's how I see it. There was someone who created a VR experience to show what it feels like to live in a hostile environment of domestic abuse.  And I've heard of people who are crying and people who really broke them down to pieces and you need to be very, very careful. The rule that we put ourselves through in VR is don't do anything in VR that you would regret in real life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything that you would regret in real life, don't do it in VR.  It's like, I don't wanna do it in the physical world. I don't wanna do it in the virtual world. We need to just eradicate that from our world. Or killing people. Or killing people. Just get it out of our physical world and not have to put people behind it in virtual spaces so that they can better empathize because we're changing people's physiology when they go behind the eyes like that. It's like- Yeah, and it could really tear apart people. It could tear apart people. You need to be very careful with that.  I think that's a really important one. Yeah, yeah, but okay, on a more positive note, we have, yeah, virtual studios. Virtual studios. You can find that link in the bio below.  Top 10 innovative ideas. The top 10 innovative ideas in 2017 and 2018. 2018, I won with a different group. With a different group. So that's still huge. You won twice in a row. That's lit. Thank you. Good job. So then this development of these immersive musical experiences, marrying music and VR. So yeah, teach us about being in the conductor's seat. That hackathon changed my life, honestly. They even called me the year afterwards to talk about my experience in the hackathon and invite other people. So that was my first year in Boston. I was here for two months. I could barely even speak English coherently. And I decided, you know what? I need to know people. I need to find out people. I need to know the scene. I need to know who is against who and who do I need to talk to.  And I entered there and I didn't know anyone. I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything about VR back then. And I sat next to a guy and usually what I do is I just offer my services as a musician and as a composer and a sound designer and say, yeah, I can do music. I don't know anything about VR, but let's do music. And there was a guy sitting next to me and he said something boring about blockchain. I didn't even bother listening to him. And then he asked me, what do you do? And I said, well, I'm a musician. I do music. He said, oh yeah, maybe you can like design an instrument in VR that like, I don't know when you move your hands, it moves. And I said, what, you mean like a theremin in VR? And he said, yeah, just design a theremin in VR. And I said, why a theremin? If you can design an entire virtual orchestra that like sits everywhere and then you can be the conductor and then you can control everything just like a real conductor does on stage and you can like cue them and stop them and everything. And he told me, hey, you should pitch. And I looked to the other side and that guy was sitting next to me and there was another guy and I'm like, hey dude, I'm pitching, how's it going? And I pitched my idea and he joined me and after three days of work, we created the first in the world virtual reality symphony orchestra that can be controlled with actual hand gestures just like a real conductor does on stage. Yeah, I love it, I love it, I love it. Yeah, it's a Cinderella story of how I got into VR. That's what's up. Yeah, you're just, we, sometimes we need these, it's a reoccurring theme of people that sit with us on the show is these bits of stimuli that come from mentors or from family or from people around us in our environments that are just like, eh. Oh, you should do something about that. You should do something about that.  And so, okay, so tell us about, you know, the hardware and how I can just go, okay, violins. We're using the medium of virtual reality and we're using the immersive 360 space to design the entire orchestra. So you're standing right in the middle where the conductor is standing and you have your score and you have the entire orchestra just around you where the first violin sits right to your left and the last double bass is sitting right to the other side so you can actually, it takes away your entire space so you physically need to move your head to see everything which I love about VR. I hate when people just use it as a 2D space. For me, VR, use the 360. So we designed an entire symphony orchestra and we're using a tool called leap motion to scan the hands of the player and based on simple gesture that conductors do, we were able to teach people how does it feel to conduct on stage and honestly, to be honest with you, the best sound is from the conductor point of view. If you want to get the best point of view to hear a symphony orchestra, it's right where the conductor is standing. I love that, yeah. The entire, like, all the music just comes right to your ears. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, what a cool, yeah, and then if it's ambisonic right there. Then it moves with you, exactly. That's so cool. So if the double bass is sitting here, the cellos are here and the violins are right here, if you move your head, they would actually stay locked in their position, not locked to your head. And you can get the experience of how it feels like to conduct a full symphony orchestra. This is so the future of immersive experiences. It's like the ambisonics, the virtual reality, the spatial engagement process. These are all such critical ways to be able to unleash creative potential and it's, yeah, I love it. And you can sign up in the link as well. Yeah, yeah, you can sign to our website and we're gonna send you some updates about your game. I love it, virtual studios. Everyone check it out. Virtual studios. And then also on the advisory board at Mux. Mux, yeah, that is pretty new. And this is PlayMux.com. Yeah, so it's Mux, it's already on Steam, so you can already buy it. It's a game that lets you design sound in virtual space. So we're using modular synthesis ideas. So you're using tools like an oscillator or a cutoff filter or LFOs, which is a low frequency oscillators and you patch them together to create your own patch that can play sounds or you can trigger the sounds by yourself and you can create an entire show using just virtual reality. So I just got on the advisory board of this team. This is another really interesting one and we have some images that you can see embedded here. It's just like so cool how you can take and move around different pieces of music in the 3D space. And actually create your own instruments with your own unique sound. Yes. That's the fun part about it. Yes, yes, we were talking a bit about that. Also, right now the best we can do is really voice and you can do a little bit with other, but like to be able to really go deep into creating your own instrument.  It's oh, so I'm literally, I'm in them. You're in the middle. You can just build it through the space. You can put it everywhere you want and then you can just step outside and build another one next to it and then connect them to each other. So it's all around you, it's surrounding you with sound. And I can move my character through it and be able to look at the things. Correct. And one of the things that we're working on adding right now since I got into the team is adding spatial audio to it as well. Whoa, so I can hear it. Because I think that this is going to be a few, yeah. And then the way that the pieces are connected, I can do something like create a different, rewire the connection from the way that it's moving every once in a while over here and it can just change. Exactly. So you can say, let's say you have like a constant sound of ah, and then you can take this and connect it, let's say, to an LFO and then suddenly it's ah, and it moves. And then you can control the amount of times that it do that. You can control the velocity of it. You can control anything you want and create your own instruments and understanding sound in a better way.  There's so many things in our world that like when you pay attention as close as you did when you're four, you know, when you're really, really starting at a young age to start paying attention to how it all sounds around you and you can dive in by like closing your eyes. It's not as fun as it sounds. I love it. It's not as fun. I love it. We're aware of all this sounds like we don't have background music. It doesn't exist in our world. We don't have background music. We don't have background music because when we hear music, even if you put it in the cocktail party, we're gonna hear it right here. We don't have background music. It's not a thing that like exists in our brain. We always hear everything that is happening around us. See, but that's, I like that a lot, but I also hear that, hear you on how that can be. I love when people ask me, what is your favorite kind of music or what do you like to listen to? And I say, nothing.  You know how much music I listen to and I'm at work? No, I want to rest. I want to listen to silence. Yeah, yeah, that's that. I want to listen to silence. When I'm resting, I want to listen to absolute silence. Yeah, what are those anechoic chambers? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get locked into the mouth. We're just going to the studio like, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Noise canceling, ah, yeah. No, but I don't listen to music on my own time. On my free time. That's such, yeah, that's like, yeah, when you're, it's like whatever field you're in, if you're doing that field, even like before you sleep, when you wake up in the morning, it's like, you're an entrepreneur then, right? Or like, what's the, how would it, yeah. You know what happens when I listen to music? I would listen to a song and then I would say, ah, that's kind of a catchy song. That's nice. That's a cool song. Ah, they did this, ah, okay. And then they used this. Ah, I would have used it differently. I would have like designed it like this and I would maybe like add a violin here or maybe like some horns over there or maybe it's some drums. Oh, I know a drummer that I can call. You know what? I can book the studio for next week and then I can record this and maybe then we can call the singer to do the arrangement and then like we can, yeah, yeah, that could actually work and that happens every three minutes. Every time a song changes.  Every time. Yeah, and meanwhile I'm over here like, ah, yeah, yeah, I like, ah, there's music. I didn't even notice that. I just left like Spotify on. Yeah. I fall asleep on Spotify like. Yeah, yeah, that's very funny, your analysis.  And yeah, yeah, everything's skin. Yeah, it's all, it all becomes in a sense your field that you're going deep in. Okay, now let's do Woojer. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, so teach us about this. This is an Israeli company and this has a crazy haptic feedback suit. You can feel sound. It is. So I'm working on the content creation for this company and they're called Woojer and they've created two things. Firstly, they created a haptic feedback strap that you can put on you and then they created a bigger one that is called the Woojer vest, which you wear on yourself and it can take sounds and turn them into vibration based on the frequency of the sound. So you can physically feel sound and not just hear it. Yeah. It enhances all the experiences that you have, especially on virtual reality, which is mainly what I use it for. And we're working on creating sounds and libraries for them that can work with their suit. So you can not only hear sound but you can also perceive it as actual vibration just like you would hear it at a club. So the biggest difference between how you hear music in a club or how you hear it in your own headphones is exactly that, it's the subs. And subs are notes that are so low that our ears can't even hear them but you can feel them as vibrations. When you hear it through headphones the vibrations are not there because the sound is not strong enough. So you get the feeling of being in a club without it, which is really a revolutionary thing. Yeah, the feel as though strapping you into a Woojer permanently is fun because you would be like, you would be like, I don't want to keep feeling the sound on me all the time. How do you, yeah. Meanwhile, I would be like, oh, this is cool, but then event, yeah. And there's so many applications for this. So I was telling you a bit about David Eagleman and Neosensory and how that's interesting for people that are deaf that they can actually be able to feel the vibration of words and learn words. It's like new senses, right? It's a very interesting concept to be able to use haptics to hack our senses. We're trying to use it also for physical therapy, for helping with physical therapy. We're using it for anxiety attacks. Usually when people feel an anxiety attack they need something to hug them and to hold them. That is a great way to do it using the vest. We're working with blind people and trying to get them, get like a room scan and then whenever they get close to one of the walls, it would start vibrate on just one side so you would know that you're getting closer to a wall and you're about to hit it. So we're trying to find a lot of different applications for it as well as introduce it to virtual reality and music and virtual experiences just to enhance them and to get more of the feeling of it. Yeah, yeah, and haptics are also nuts because it is such a crucial part of our immersion into virtual realities. As soon as you can be completely strapped and when you step on the twig you actually feel it snap on your foot. I mean, we're talking like some crazy, crazy. Well, haptics I think is the hardest one to recreate in virtual reality because haptics is everything you feel. It could be feeling like a bump on your shoulder but it could also be the sense of hot and cold or the sense of fur versus steel or it could be anything. Anything that you can see, anything that you can touch need to have kind of a sensation and I think it's one of the hardest topics in virtual reality. But the Woodrow Company, it was designed by musicians, for musicians and it works on waveforms. So it actually detects audio and I think that a lot of musicians would love to try and use that. And then you also went and told us a bit about the way that this actually leads us into, this actually really interesting leads us into the way that DJs are now at venues and they have ambisonic systems that they can use. So Dolby Atmos is already open, I believe three or four venues in the world for spatial audio. That means that the entire venue is surrounded by speakers and the DJ goes on stage and he can actually create sounds that are moving through the air and they said that you just feel like you're inside the track. Just immersed inside it while you're in a club with your friends and suddenly a sound just comes and round around your head and just goes away. I think it's a very cool experience and I think that we're gonna see more and more of them over the years. The immersive experiences are gonna be taking a huge for old in society. Definitely. Definitely and I wanna hear some of your thoughts on the future of all of these technologies kind of coalescing, where do you see it all? So firstly, I'm seeing virtual reality becoming more mainstream and more people adopting it and I think that one of the fields that haven't adopted it yet is fashion and once fashion people with a fashion degree would actually get their hands on it and say, I can do it better.  Cause a lot of people are telling me, oh yeah, I look dumb or I can't see anything with it. So I believe that this is gonna happen sooner or later. Also the hardware side of things, it's just like taking the compute off of the glasses and putting the compute in the cloud and then the 5G infrastructure and maybe- Definitely. I think those 10 gigs a second or something- Definitely, we're getting there. We're already in the place where our phones can run VR, which is incredible.  Yes, it's not the best. Of course, we have a lot of work to do but we're getting there and the more I see people complain about virtual reality, the more I just wanna tell them, just give us few more years. I promise you we're working on that, we're getting there, it just takes some time. But a lot of people are complaining that for example, you can't move more than one meter. We're working on it, just give us like a year or two and we're gonna get there. Or people are telling me, yeah, okay, I get it, you can shoot things but what else can you do? And really, we're working on it. You see me, I'm working on a few projects at the same time and inspiring others to create content for it so we can create an ecosystem where we all profit from virtual reality and then I think it's gonna become way more mainstream, more people are gonna use that, more professions are gonna use it, not just for video games. Well look, there's thousands for doctors, there's thousands for architects. They're already using that. Yeah. They're already using that. Thousands though in the library. Oh my gosh, look at the heart. Yeah, in Mass General, they're using virtual reality and augmented reality to treat patients. They're already embedding into their systems. For example, doctors who want to treat a patient but they need to keep clean hands but they need to write something down. Instead of actually taking a pen and paper just in space, just use augmented reality to write something in space. Architects, why show someone a blueprint if you can just let them walk in the building you haven't even built yet? Just let them walk in it, enjoy it. So I believe that more and more industries are gonna realize that this is the future and it's already here and you need to adopt to it. Yeah. And then I wanna ask you a couple of questions that we typically ask on the way out of the episode. This is gonna be interesting to ask you. Are we in a simulation? Are we in a simulation? Are we? I don't know. A lot of people have called me the glitch in the simulation. So maybe, maybe not, I don't know. Does it matter?  Does it matter if it's a simulation or it's real? For me, it doesn't matter. As long as I'm enjoying the ride. Okay, okay. And how about what is the most beautiful thing in the world? Wow, that's, so I see beauty define, I see beauty, hmm. I see beauty as three elements that needs to come together for me.  So the first one is heart. That means that you need to have your heart in something and you need to actually truly believe in it and love it.  It needs to be well thought and well processed. And the third thing is hands, which means it needs to be well crafted and well done. And those three combined together, it can create actual beauty. That's a good synthesis, I like that one. Thank you, thank you. Yeah, yeah. Shirley, thank you so, so much. Thank you. It's been so enriching, it's so enlightening. We have, the edge is being pushed, you are pushing the edge in the virtual outer space. You're unleashing so much of the cool potential that we have with creativity and music in the era of VR. I want everyone to take a look at Shirley's links in the bio below, virtuostudios.com, playmux.com, wudger.com, also her Facebook, go and check that out. Support support, go and keep sharing this type of content around. Get more people, our coworkers, our friends, our family, online communities. Just get talking about virtual reality, be that first in that career to be able to create in one of the first. Be the first, go there, don't be afraid. That's right. Don't be afraid of a challenge, it's gonna be worth it. That's right, that's right. And support the organizations and the entrepreneurs and the artists that you believe in around the world. Definitely. Support simulation, our links are below. Help us continue coming to cool places like Cambridge and conducting interviews and awesome people like Shirley. And go and build the future everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you soon. Peace. Good job! Woo!


Artists tell us things about ourselves and see connections in things that a lot of us don't see. My name is Chris Floyd. I'm a photographer and I've just spent two weeks photographing 13 artists for the National Lottery. People have spent their time during the pandemic transforming their communities through the power of art. The power of art is that it can connect people on a level that so many things cannot. I've seen how it can really transform lives. There was one young student and she never knew the link of the Islamic civilization and mathematics and geometry pattern. For her it was a sense of belonging that was about her heritage.  Writing poetry as a group, I imagine it's like jamming with a whole load of friends. The words are sort of flying around and we're just catching them in the air. And that's what art is after all, is giving things to people that they didn't know they needed or wanted. But when it's presented to them, they realise how much it expands and improves the world and the life that they live.


back to my channel. Excuse me, I'm sorry, my voice. I woke up with it being kind of wonky this morning, I'm not sure what's going on if I'm like starting a cold or if it's just the fact that we slept in this morning. But the girls and I have just kind of been hanging around the house and I am getting ready to decorate so I thought I would do a kind of a vlog style decorate with me this year and I'm hoping to get all of the at least main floor decorated today and hopefully the bedrooms. The coffee bar is something that will be a separate video and you guys will be seeing that tomorrow and then I think the playroom, I'm gonna actually have like a fun day and let the girls decorate their own tree and stuff like that this week. So today I'm just gonna see what I can get done and it's literally about ready to either snow or rain. It's so cloudy and so dim and dark. So excuse the lighting if it's a little bit up off and on through this video. So I think we're just gonna go ahead and get started and I need to make myself a cup of coffee. I haven't done that yet. Today is actually Cyber Monday and so I've been posting deals on my Instagram account all morning and I'm ready for a cup of coffee. Okay, I have my coffee made and I'm ready to get rolling and as I go I'm gonna be cleaning with these three. They are the three Mrs. Myers holiday scents from Grove and I know you probably already know this and have heard other people say this but I'm just gonna let you know that there is a link below for you to get an entire set of one of these scents for free. It comes with a dish soap and I believe a cleaning caddy and a hand soap that would, you can choose your scents of what you want for each of those. So actually that's one of the things I'm gonna start with is changing out my stuff by my sink for the holiday scents and then I'm going to do this corner and fill these buckets. And if you guys missed it, I did do a Thanksgiving cleanup where I took down all of my fall decor. So everything is very bare and it's a fresh start to redecorate. 🎵 The angels in the setting from it said to scum it 🎵 So I think I am going to move on to the dining room. I might come back in here. You know how it is. You kind of have leftovers and you can stick some things different places but I love what's set up so far and I had had some greenery in these before and I decided you know what? Be kind of cute to do pine cones. Last year I actually went and picked these. I have two bags of them and I spray painted them. So it's something that I can use every year and just very simple. I like my counter space out here. So I just kind of went simple with that. I think I'm gonna get some battery operated lights for up in here yet. Tomorrow I'll probably pick those up at the store. I do have a few but I'm gonna save them for the banister. So yeah, I love what I have going on so far. Oh and one more thing. I get questions about this little stand all the time. It's actually metal and it is from Hobby Lobby. So yeah, that's where it's from and if you can find it there, especially on sale, it's a really good price. I wanted a little stand like this but I really wanted one that was metal so I can wash it when soap gets in it and things like that. This is in our dining room and these are the next two areas, this little spot and then also this one as well that I'm gonna be working on and I'm not exactly sure what all I'm gonna do yet. I know, sorry there's like Christmas decor everywhere. I picked these up at Michael's and I'm gonna actually cut them and I wanna attach them around the edge of my sign here and this is from Walmart. If you guys are curious, it was with their fall decor. So yeah, I think I got these specifically for this sign so I'm hoping I can figure out a way to attach them and then I'll figure out what I'm gonna do on here. And having a good, good time from Santa's coming. I'm thrilled with how that turned out. I love it and then I actually have a video. I'll link below. I did a tutorial on how to make these little globes. I did that last year and I just like this. It's very simple and the table is right here so I have a centerpiece or whatever so I don't want too much going on back here but I really like this and again I might get some battery operated lights for in there, I'm not sure yet. Okay, I'm gonna show you guys a little decor hack. This is something that is down the line of chalkboards but something very different. I've actually never seen anybody do this besides myself. This is an old cookie sheet. It's actually from the thrift store. I probably paid like a buck for it or something like that. And I, every once in a while, go ahead and take the paint off of it and redo it. It's fun, it's kind of like chalk if you hear somebody gibbering in the background. It's just hazely and she just knocked my tripod. As long as you use like acrylic craft paint and this is just the kind that you can get from Walmart. I think it's like 50 cents or something like that. You can just use a cleaner and I don't remember what I used the last time to clean it off but I'm just gonna use my method anti-back and some wet wipes and wipe it all off. Sure, cause I was getting a little bit warm but I'm slowly making it through everything and this clock back here, my grandfather actually made and I refurbished it a little bit. It had mechanisms that were broken and so now I enjoy decorating it. For different seasons and of course just in normal decor but I think I'm ready to head on to the living room now. All right, so this is the current state of this wall in the living room and the girls are playing in the background so that's what you're hearing. So generally I put my Christmas tree here so I think one of these end tables is gonna go upstairs in the playroom to put the little Christmas tree on that the girls have and then I'm gonna take survivor, that's that plant's name if you guys don't know, there's a vlog about that but I'm gonna take him and put him upstairs on a little plant stand and probably move this couch down just a little bit so that the tree will fit there.  So we'll see how that goes and then I had like a whole entire basket and stuff on here for the fall but now I'm gonna put something different there and then this I actually got for a really great steal at Michael's and I'm really excited it's something I've never bought a big piece like this that's specifically for a season so I'm excited to put this up on the wall and I have some other things that are gonna go up here. I use command strips although if I remember right behind one of these there's a spot that the command strip was pulled off wrong and there might be some paint missing so I'm gonna try to cover that up until I get time to touch it up probably whenever winter's over I'll touch up the paint. So this here I can leave up pretty much most of the winter it's not super Christmassy so that's what I love to do is leave up a lot of my winter decor not just for Christmas. That clears my mind I'm all for a good start I hear the jingle bells people singing. Okay so this is kind of what I have going on in this corner for the moment I need to do a little spot treatment there on the carpet and right there so I think I'm gonna do that this afternoon so the tree will go in here and that like I said earlier is gonna be flocked and also I am gonna do a Christmas house tour probably next week when I'm completely done getting everything decorated but I think I'm gonna switch ends of the room and work on the built in bookshelf now. It's cold outside the tingles in my heart clears my mind I'm all for a good start hear the jingle bells people singing about love. All right I love what I've got going on here but I'm gonna switch gears a little bit because I'm not sure what I wanna fill in with yet here and I'm gonna do the stockings on the banister. I am on my way I'm in motion yeah let's go hang out on the beach without free we'll be chilling and having a good good time it's Santa's coming to visit no he wouldn't have been a good good All right you guys well at that is all the decorating that I got done today I thought I would get way more done but in between the taking care of the girls and everything that's kind of what I got finished but throughout my vlogs in the next week or so I'll be decorating like my room and other areas of the house so stay tuned for those and I'm really happy with everything that I've so far put together I'm just excited to be able to leave it up for more than just Christmas a lot of it is just a very winter theme so I know I don't have to worry about taking it all down as soon as Christmas is over I hope you guys are excited for the rest of Vlogmas if you're new to my channel don't forget to hit that subscribe button give this video a like and I'll see you guys in tomorrow's video


Now, let's talk about this for a second. This graphic right here, that minor element in everything we've said, explains a growing cultural phenomenon in our society, and that is men going their own way.  Thank you, Greg. All right?  I'm out of here. I'm going to take care of me. I'm going to be moral. I'm going to be responsible. I'm going to take care of my needs appropriately in an ethical manner, but I'm not committing to you this relationship, this condition, and I'm not doing it in this society. And that movement is growing rightfully so. I don't think it's a beneficial one, but I understand it. It is a human preventable tragedy, and I understand it. They have awesome arguments. Unfortunately, I draw a different conclusion. It saddens me when I see this. What's a better option? Well, unfortunately, you have a degree of competition here too. Remember how we talked about women are fighting their lessers? Ours is the opposite. We have the alpha male other guy here. What's his range of marrying down look like?   You know it. I know it. That's fierce. Ultimately, it doesn't pay to be average. Not only is that risk, it's a losing proposition. The result should be obvious. You need to improve yourself. This is where self-improvement comes in. You need to be better than you are. You need to be better than what you're satisfying for mediocrity. You need to be better than average. It is too painful not to, too costly not to. The nice thing about this, and this is awesome, we know what those skills are. We can identify them today. They're mainstream. They're absolutely out there.  Study after study has shown literally 30 minutes over a course of a week, over six weeks will cut your divorce rate by 50%, targeting the most at-risk groups less than 10 hours of social skill behavioral empathetic communication training.  Saves marriages. Saves marriages. Saves relationships. Saves families. That's powerful stuff, and we're not talking about it. Not nearly to the degree we are. You want to see a vampire? Who's attacking that? Who's attacking this? Call out a vampire when you see one. All right? Lastly, I want to sit down and say something else. If you're looking at your marriage potential and you're trying to be better than average, I'm going to tell you you're going to be aiming for the human ideal, okay? I'm going to tell you don't be satisfied with cultural expectations of marrying down, okay? Seek a partner better than yourself. Seek a partner that you can learn and grow with, okay? That's represented here. Take a guy that's here, increase your range. Now graphically, take a look at this. This quality here is dramatically different than the quality this guy's going to have, and this is a change of perception. A guy who's not asking more for himself is going to be marrying down. This guy's going to open himself up to alternative potentials, and the quality of his life I guarantee you is going to be superior than the same guy who doesn't. And that's just a matter of perspective. You control that right here, and that is probably the most costly bit of real estate you already own. It's your mind. You don't own that.  Think about that one. I will also sit down and say this. This is what we strive for, okay? When we talk about here and the human ideal, the difference between this and this right here isn't skill set. It's not a skill set. All right? It's tricky. I'll tell you what it is. It's purpose. It's purpose. It is knowing your purpose. And when your purpose is parallel with somebody else's, going to the same objective or striving for the same objective, and you're willing to commit to that, you get that. Now for this happy couple. This isn't the end of the story. They have a whole lifetime to work on this. Greg Swan sits down and says marriage should be an endless story and an endless conversation. That conversation should be pointed to this direction. That conversation should be looking for those ideals, okay? You should be committing daily to that. That is a life well lived, and it is a process, all right? And it has to be earned. This isn't a given. This isn't achieved in one day. This isn't a moment. This is a lifetime of commitment. If you're going to do this, you better man up smart. Which by the way is where you can find me. You can find me right there, manningupsmart.com. I have an entire blog dedicated to social skills that are pro-relationship that will teach you the individual social skills, the relationship management skills you need to know and understand, as well as relationship maintenance skills and repair. You need all those to be able to have the initial skills of attraction, the initial skills of stability, the initial skills of maintenance to be able to do this. You can find it right there in my blog. Ultimately, if you found this presentation beneficial, act on it. You're going to have to act. But I started this presentation by saying I have a cause. I'm here to champion a cause. I'm going to ask you to do more than that. I'm going to ask you to share this information with everybody you know. The people you care about, the people that need this, the people that utilize this. Take this video and share it with others. Help me turn the sexual marketplace into a rich, vibrant, and healthy place to be, not just a sexual one. Thank you. Thank you, Socrates. Awesome. Stop it. Normally, we have QA, QC, what I want to sit down and say is that I could fill all the questions. We have lunch. I know I pushed this long. Let's go to lunch. I'm here all weekend. I will take all lunch. I'm not going anywhere. I just want to make sure that we keep every band scheduled and we respect it. All right, one or two. Actually, check this out, guys, Socrates is going to also be at the dinner and at the one-on-one dinner on Sunday, more of the reason to go there. We do have time for one decent question, two short ones or decently long questions. Does anybody have? I'm sorry, I thought you were really fantastic. Your preparation really showed and it was a remarkable presentation. The graphing, God bless the architects for being able to visualize. We were talking yesterday about your ability to maintain your masculine frame in your relationship. In other words, not using those escalating social skills to cost you your masculine sexual power. I wonder if you could talk to these gentlemen about how to do that because that is the problem when they finally do get into a relationship, how to maintain their own masculine dominance in a relationship so that they don't turn into a child. All right, this is going to be a bit of confession. This is going to be something I've done to answer Greg's question immediately. If to preserve your masculinity and you know, for example, let me fly right back to... Oops. Shit. Oh dear. Can you redo that? Sorry. Start me at the beginning. I apologize. Yeah, I can take it from here. Okay. I'm up. We were talking War Machine and all he could do is add alpha, alpha, alpha, alpha, what do you do?  You have to stop yourself. You have to self-arrest. That doesn't preserve your masculinity. It's going to be heightened. You're going to be humiliated by it. People are going to shame you. Culture will shame you for just walking away, but you're going to have to be strong enough to do it. You have to understand your purpose and why you're walking away and what you're walking away from. Now, how does that play out? It's going to be a challenge, and when you talk about independence things, for a number of things that if you're looking at things and I see behavior, you don't want to reward bad behavior. So what do you do? You don't feed it. And you have to be willing to walk away from it. I'll put a woman on time out. I know it's like a peaceful perony. I will put her on time out. Okay? No. I'm not doing this. We're not. This isn't acceptable behavior. And no, you are no longer in my realm of influence. You're no longer welcome here. I'm pushing you out. Okay? I'm holding you out, babe. That's going to be incredibly tough to do, especially if you're dating, and you're not committed. I've actually had to do this while I was dating to stay independent when we talk about the social skills of independence. Okay? What do you do when you don't want to be in a relationship and she pushes for a relationship? I put her on time out. Okay? Not only time out. I actually make room for her to make better decisions. Okay? That's called frame. Because if I'm as awesome as I know I am, there's no competition.  But you have to be that good. You have to know it. You have to know your worth and your frame. You also have to have it tested. Untested worth doesn't have value. You don't know how good you are until it's tested. Okay? If you want to be independent, let her make outstanding decisions for herself. Help her have other options. You need to have an inferior man night once a week. Not only have, I insist on it. You need to go out with inferior men and then come back and spend time with me and put it in comparison. Not only that, I want you to have several inferior men night. Name them. It's brutal.   It gets easier on the other end. Okay? Let's pull that one up real quick. Here it is here. Okay? It's awkward. All right? It's tough. Get in the habit of it. Get in the habit of exercising the muscles you want to strengthen. How many talks have we had so far on fitness, on strength development? Start exercising your virtue. And that is how you do it. By being non-needy, non-outcome dependent, and you provide people the best options available. Answer your question. Guys, we got to wrap it up and get to lunch. Thank you. Socrates, standing ovation from everybody here. It was awesome. Amazing, amazing speech.