It's a business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We're a show that broadcasts live every Thursday from 2 to 2.30 in the downtown studios at Think Tech Hawaii in the Pioneer Plaza. We've got beautiful weather in Hololulu this time of the year, so if you're not in Hololulu and you're someplace cold, feel free to come over and join us. Might even have you on the show. We broadcast success stories. We talk about businesses and business owners that are successful in Hawaii. And one of the reasons why we do have successful businesses is because of all the resources that are out there to help train and promote and get people focused in the right direction. And the Small Business Administration is an organization that certainly does a lot of that all year long. And I've got Jane Sawyer with me here today. She is the district director for the Small Business Administration here in the Pacific, which is a big area. Welcome, Jane. Hello, Reg. How are you today? Good. Welcome back on the show again. Thank you. It's good to be here. There's a lot going on these days. I guess I heard a rumor that there's a new sheriff in town, a new president in Washington. He's kind of doing some things to shake things up. What's happening? Is any of that impacting the SBA at all? Well, we do expect that it will. We are seeing some changes now. But a lot of the really strong programs with SBA are continuing on. There are programs in capital access, in government contracting, and in consulting and training. Technical assistance are all going forward. There have been long, long-life programs. They've had a lot of great success, so we expect to see a lot of those things continuing. It's good to have some of that continuity. Yes. There'll be some tweaks and maybe some new initiatives and programs that come up. But we're a small agency. We're looking forward to see what some of the new economic initiatives may be and where we're going with that. We're contributing to make our economy stronger and making sure that small business is taken into consideration with any changes that might come up. Absolutely. As a matter of fact, you cannot underestimate the power and the influence of the small business community, if you will, on a national level. I mean, it's a huge economic engine that we have to protect. And I know that there are some things going on that's going to be attempting to change some of the regulatory environment and some other things are going on, but you just don't know how that's going to play out yet, so you've got to stay a little flexible and have some patience. But there are some great programs that you've got that you mentioned is not going to be stopping. One of the, of course, is the annual awards that happen. You open talking about small business success, and that is one of the things that we really like to follow and see what these businesses are doing that are doing, exporting that are really creating jobs and really keeping the economy kicking forward. We're seeing that some of the numbers that came out in recent reports indicate that Hawaii is doing pretty well, a little bit ahead of some of the numbers from the mainland, and maybe softening a little bit here, but still ahead of some expectations in many areas. So we annually have National Small Business Week. And when is that going to be this year? It's usually right around the first week of May, so that's when we're kind of planning most of the activities. I know that we'll have our statewide Small Business Awards luncheon, which is a great event that recognizes our top small business owners, our exporters, the family-owned businesses that have been so much a part of Hawaii for so many years. We'll see young entrepreneurs, those newer businesses, they've been in business for at least three years, the owner is under 35 years, and he's shown a strong likelihood of success and many of them are already very, very successful and kind of driving new ideas and new pathways in their industries. See, and that's one of the themes of this show is trying to highlight some of those success stories, and I've been involved with going through and doing some of the evaluations and the judging and have been for a number of years, and we always have a very challenging time trying to figure out which ones are always going to be the ones that are recognized because, you know, from my experience, we always seem to have an abundance of applicants and people that are being, you know, sponsored and promoted for the position. I think that's really one of the strengths of this program is, well, it's been around for over 30 years that we've been looking at a number of different award categories for our small businesses here locally. We've had many, many national winners, and so often my colleagues will say, that's amazing that, you know, this business is happening in Hawaii and is so innovative or so successful or, you know, has such a long history of success and being innovative in their industry. So each year, you know, we set out the categories, we work with community organizations and bankers to get the nominations, and I think some of our rigorous kind of vetting and testing, we look at any business, we look at their financials, and we look at comparisons year over year. We look at job creation, we look at whatever they've done that's an innovative practice, an innovative product, you know, just what they've been doing and how they give back to the community as well. We usually have a team, as you know, being a judge for several years that we vet carefully as well. They do all the judging in the office.  Freezing cold for those people in Chicago and New York, it's not that bad. You know, well, we get a lot of complaints about that, so we... Well, it motivates you to go a little bit quicker. Yes, sometimes you need to do that, because there are a lot of choices, but that objective scoring process and clearance process that we go through does really mean that we're finding really high-quality, you know, high-performing winners. The results speak for themselves. I mean, last year, I think Ray Jardine. Ray Jardine? Yeah, he was what? Native Hawaiian veterans. He was the second runner-up nationally. Very good. That's... We bring together the top small business persons from every one of the states and the territories, so there are 52 of the best of the best that meet in Washington, and Ray was the second runner-up. Number two, I mean, that's amazing for such a small state here in the middle of Pacific Ocean. But he's done some incredible things. His business is about a little over 10 years old. He's been through the 8A program. He's got now over 200 employees in locations and contracts all over the world. Well, and for those people who may not know what an 8A program is, what is that? The 8A program is a special certification for small businesses who do contracting with the federal government, and these are start-out as socially, economically, and disadvantaged firms who get into a business development program that is sponsored by SBA, and it helps them develop the skills, become a protege of a bigger firm, and then kind of helps them to get special contracts to work with the federal government. 23% of that federal government pie is supposed to go to small businesses. That's huge. It's a big, big, billions and billions of dollars, and so we see them being very, very active, and we see lots of companies grow and become successful and get a lot of workers trained and then spin off into their own business as well. And they start working, you know, not only in Hawaii, but from Hawaii can work in locations throughout the Pacific and mainland and even in different federal locations across the world. Right. It's a great fertile ground, particularly with some of the things that are going on in Guam and with the presence of the military here and all their contracting needs. I mean, it's a great area for people to get that certification, get those contracts, and, you know, small businesses and also minorities, they have preference in that, don't they? They can in certain types of contracts and things like that. So it depends on, it's complicated, but, you know, and we can help anybody with that as well. We have a monthly free seminar to introduce people to the 8A and other government contracting programs like the Women-Owned Small Business Contracting Program, the HubZone Contracting Program, the Service Disabled Veteran Contracting Program. Some of them require applications to be approved through the SBA, some of them are self-certified, but they can give a small business a leg up in getting into government contracts. So it's a really good program to consider and learn about. So people out there in the audience can call our office and just learn a little bit about it and see if they might be, it might be a good step for them to take. Do you know your number off hand as to the number they can call? And then it's 541-2990 or go to our web page and that is www.sba.gov and backslash hi. Hi, Hawaii. Hawaii and you can find information there, find how to contact my staff or myself. And a calendar maybe of some of the different training that's going on. Yeah, we're very, very active in the training area as well. My SBA office as well as our resource partners in the community, the Small Business Development Center, SCORE, the Mink Center for Business and Leadership, our centers in Guam. So there are places that people can find the information. They're even online training, but that is just head to our website. Some of the other programs that are coming up, of course, everybody is familiar with SBA loans. So we're cranking along with that program. There's money available. We know that it's a little bit of an uncertain time for a lot of people, but it's a good time to evaluate if now is a time to bring some more capital into your business. We will meet people at a number of banks that we're launching our resource days for the calendar year. We have several that'll be coming up in late February and March. We have some in Kapolei. These are, we send our lender relations and specialists out into the field and they'll partner with the bank to have a day where they'll meet with customers. They'll meet with small businesses out in the community to talk about what our loan programs can do and if there's something that's tailored specifically for their needs, just for working capital. Help them walk through the process to see what works and what's right for them. Or to get them hooked up with someone who's going to help them refine their business plan or expand their financials so they really understand much, much more about where they should be looking for money. You know, is it the right time or steps they might need to take so they're a little more bank ready or are there other alternative lenders that can help them as they get bank ready? You know, I guess the SBA has got so many different types of programs and resources available, you can almost go from soup to nuts with them. I mean, to get them right up if they're thinking about it, they've got programs through the ScoreAce that they can explore, you know, what the options are, SBDC, you know, Patsy Mink Center, you know, and take them all the way up through, provide training, provide, you know, point them into funding sources and even be able to take them to the next level at some point. I mean, it's a full menu of services. And it's kind of before you start your business at every stage of the business life and even helping you to kind of prepare for exit strategy and every small business should have something like that, too. Hopefully it's business sale and, you know, share the wealth or decide. Funny you say that. Part of when I talk to clients when they come to me and they're thinking about doing a new business or maybe someone just comes to me and want to talk about it in general, it's one of the first things I say, okay, getting into business is great, but what's your exit strategy? Because sometimes having that exit strategy helps drive how you're going to set the business up and how you're going to manage it, you know, in order to have a more viable exit strategy when that time comes. It's an important part of the equation. Right, it really is. What do you want this business to do? What legal entity shall I be? How shall I set up my books? So then we just refer them to you. All right, well, we have to take a short break. Believe it or not, we just blew right through that first half. And now we're going to take a short break for about 60 seconds. This is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. I'm here with Jane Sawyer, District Director of the Small Business Administration in the Pacific region. We'll be right back in about 60 seconds. Aloha, my name is Danelia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman. We are the co-hosts of Keys to Success, which is live on Think Tech live streaming network series, weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. Aloha. Got a new show here. You've got to tune in. Check out my topics on sensitive, provocative female issues. So Tuesday mornings, 10 o'clock, don't miss it. It's going to be fun and dangerous. Hey, has your signal just been taken over or am I supposed to be here? This is Andrew, the security guy, your co-host on Hibachi Talk. Please join us every Friday on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back. This is Reg Baker, Business in Hawaii, with Jane Sawyer from the Small Business Administration here in Hololulu. We were talking about all the different products and services that the SBA has, and it's quite extensive. We spent a lot of time talking about what was available here in Hawaii and through the Pacific region. But I just want to mention that I'm involved with the Regulatory Fairness Board with the SBA at the national level, and I chair the ninth region. And because of that role, I get a lot of communications from the region on all the different trainings that are available in courses throughout the region. And I can tell you, if you ever had any plans on expanding from Hawaii to, say, California or Arizona or Nevada, there's an awful lot of training available in those areas that can help you do that as well. So it's very extensive what the SBA offers. Does that make sense, Jane? Do you see the same thing? Definitely. If we look at our core programs, there is kind of a national profile, and programs like the SBDCs associated with a university and available for free consulting with small business owners from startup all the way through. They've helped clients who have been in business for years and are just ready to kind of bust at the seams, but not sure how to take the next step or suddenly find maybe I don't have the credit to do what I need to do to grow. An example might be auto repair shop here in Honolulu that was doing great business. They could hire, with a few more bays, they could hire another couple of mechanics to come in. They had prospects there. They had plenty of customers, but they thought they should have the money but couldn't find it. They went and sat down with the small business development center network and they really worked through their financials and their business plan and they found where they were kind of overspending or dropping money out or not really looking at the best use of funds. So they helped them restructure some of their debt. They helped them look at greater efficiencies and how they were operating and found enough money to actually have the capital infusion they needed to make a bigger loan and grow the business. So it took them a little work but they got all that free consulting over months time and got them in the position that they then could get a sizeable loan from their bank with an SBA guarantee that then launched them to the next level and where they wanted to go. You know, it sounds like the SBA almost partners up and not in a legal sense but as a mentor if you will and help by partnering and showing them and walking them through all of this. Now I would suspect that the more the business can do and more engaged they are the better but certainly there's the advisors and the consultants there that can help them go through this process and guide them and obviously to some good success. And throughout the state. So we see businesses on Maui, businesses on the Big Island that may encounter the same kind of thing. Actually there's a well-known glass company, Autoglass Company who with SBA has grown to be the last, the largest Autoglass company in the Pacific because we've helped them with their own drive and their own vision to become, you know, that resource and serve the customers in Hawaii and in Guam but they've built a shop on every island and most of them have been started with the help of SBA financing as well. Maui, Hawaii Island, Hilo, Kona and I believe they're in Kauai now and Guam. Wow. So very good. So that's a great success story and you've got people with boots on the ground and each one on each one of these islands. I mean they've got SBDC centers out there that have these consultants available to help everybody throughout the entire state. Right, you know, one of the things I mean with working with our lenders, you know, with all the banks that are affiliated with SBA to do the guarantees, we do a lot of cross-training with them. We help the individual customers and prospective borrowers. We have SBDCs out there. We have, we work with other agencies and economic development entities. We work with several of the accelerators, you know, to help not just the mom and pop shops but we are helping people in research and development. We're helping people who are commercializing their new machines, toys, you know, inventions, tickets, whatever, practices to help them be able to sell to a bigger market, not just here in Hawaii as well but beyond the United States with some of our experts. And exporting is, yeah, exactly. Exporting is a big part of what the SBA would like to try and see happen, right? Mm-hmm. And we would, across the country, to help us put out more of our U.S. products and work with our trade balance, our trade imbalance, as the case may be, to get more products outside the U.S. So we work with D-Bed here and we work with the foreign trade zone. We do a lot of partnership training because it is a little bit different kind of customer than most people are used to dealing with. But there are some great programs providing some funds for travel, funds for product development, funds to do research, and Export U has proven to be a great program and they've enrolled a lot of people. I think their programs are going on or starting right now. Well, and I think to that point, there are a lot of these conferences that D-Bed works with and I don't know how involved the feds are with this or the SBA, but they'll take groups of 20 and 30 companies and they'll take them on a road show, if you will, to different countries to show them what the products are from Hawaii that would be available. And every year I hear about the people going out and establishing these new markets and there's training and some potential funding for some of that. Right, right. So a lot of it is through some SBA funding for those programs and I think they've taken people to the surf show, the Tokyo gift show, they've gone to Korea, they've been all over the place and these opportunities abound to do a trip with the folks at D-Bed or to identify a trade show that they may want to go in their industry and propose or write a, there's an RFP that's been out and probably it's closing up in the next week or so that people could apply to get up to $15,000 in funds to help them with a project like that. Wow, so it's just, it's unbelievable how much is out there available and most of this information would be available on the website or? We won't have all of that on our website but if they sent me an email I can connect them with the right website. So if they just sent it to Hawaii General at SBA.gov. Not that I'm the general but no. But Hawaii General or they could just find me and send it to Jane.Soyer at SBA.gov if they have questions about exporting or any of the programs that we've talked about. Not you personally but your team is out in the community quite a bit. I mean they're out there, they're engaged, you're talking to people. And it's easy to walk up and talk to them and get some direction. Yeah, and definitely take a look at our office calendar at the SBA.gov. You just scroll down and you'll find the events calendar and it'll forecast out everything that's happening in our office or with our staff anywhere on the island, resource days at the bank. We've started for business startups and newer businesses. We're having an SBA resource orientation at least once a month. It's free at our office. And it will go over a lot of the startup steps you need to take. Who has the best resources? When to stop at the business action center down on Nimitz. And what to expect when you get there. Names the websites. Gives you places to go for applications. Sites, useful training that's online. So it's a great resource to just come in for. It sounds like it. And that must be expensive. Oh, it's just the right price, you know. We like to have people come in and learn more and be prepared when they start businesses. So we'll do these courses for free. For free, that's the word I was looking for. It's free. We do ask that you let us know for coming so we can have all those materials for you. Of course, right. So you can find the dates. I think the next one's coming up on February 17th at yes, 9 o'clock, 9 to 10 30 in the morning down at SBA district office at Waterfront Plaza on Alamoana. And everybody, I guess, Waterfront Plaza is the same as the old restaurant row location. So it's easy to get to. Everybody knows where restaurant row is. It's right across from the federal building. So easy to get in and out. Very good. And I guess just to point of clarification, everybody knows about SBA loans. So what? You got like a ton of money sitting over there at the district office that you're just trying to give away or how does the SBA loans work? Well, I don't get to sign those checks myself. No, no. SBA, our 7A loan program, 7A is named for the section of the Small Business Act that creates these loans. So these are determined by Congress. They help set our funding levels, our ceiling where we can go. But we don't actually loan taxpayer money. Right now, we partner with the bankers, the people who really do the loan making as professionals. So most of our banks here locally participate in the SBA program. But a borrower would learn a little bit about the SBA loan and a lot of times you'll go to the bank with your request, hopefully knowing what you're going to use the proceeds of the loan for, how much you're going to need with a little background history because they are going to want several years of your tax returns. They are going to look at your credit score. It's a loan application. Banks are in the business of making loans to make some money. So I think that is something that we need to be cognizant of and respect a bit. But we're here to help them be able to make the loan to a newer small business who might not fit every one of their underwriting criteria. We help them relax that a little bit, as long as the small businesses can demonstrate they have the ability to repay the loan. That it's a reasonable project. They're putting some of their own capital and sweat equity into the business. They're committed. They're getting the game. They need to be committed to doing this. And it has to make sense. So that's also a good time to maybe visit with score, visit with the Mink Center, visit with SBDC here to have, bounce off your basic business plan and your financial projections with them. Because even a new business, some businesses who've been around a while have a track record. It may need some improving or a little bit better analysis and what they've had time to do. But even a startup business or pre-start-up business, you can research your numbers and do some projections and then have one of those organizations, one of their consultants kind of test it. We fall in love with our business idea. So wake up calls sometimes. Sometimes it's like, who's your competition? Oh, nobody's my competition. There's always somebody that is similar or thinking the same thing. So it's good to get a second opinion. It is. It's good to have a fresh look at it and maybe point out something that's obvious to somebody who's not buried into the fore so much. It's a good practice to go through. Jane, I'm sorry, we have run out of time. Oh, darn. Well, remember Small Business Week is the first week in May and we'll be introducing our Small Business Awards for the State of Hawaii May 4th at the statewide luncheon. All right. It's going to be great. It'll be great. I'll see you there. And we'll have you back on the show afterwards and maybe we can talk a little bit about who the award winners were. Great. All right. Be happy to. Super. Very good. This is Business in Hawaii with Reg Baker. We broadcast live every Thursday from 2 to 2.30. We focus on success stories or those organizations that provide the support to make sure that the Businesses in Hawaii are successful. Looking forward to seeing you next week. Until then, aloha.


This television view from the mid-deck of Columbia, coming through another developmental test objective being carried for the first time on board STS-73, referred to as HIPAC, the highly-packed digital television that allows up to six different channels to be downlinked to the Earth, allowing the researchers for the U.S. microgravity laboratory to view the results of multiple experiments simultaneously. And this television view again being sent down to the Earth through that HIPAC television system.  This container can then be heated on the surface by either a carbon dioxide laser or heated in the center of the chamber.  I promise I'm not being impatient. I want to hear suggestions. Safe Love Huntsville for Fred, it heads up. We're going to change the IR image or range for a moment and then we'll switch it back. Okay, copy that. And the semester is in between a couple of marks. So let's make that 0, 6, 3, 5. 0, 6, 3, 5. We copy 0, 6, 3, 5. Safe Love Huntsville for Fred. The voice now on the GATV channel. As a matter of fact, it's probably even a little more clear than the air demand. Okay, excellent. We'll let's start into our discussion this morning. We have here the Falcon team on orbit three, Rob Kelso, the flight director sitting right behind me. And we just thought we'd talk a little bit about the status of the flight this morning. Pretty quiet day down here at MCC. There are not a lot of problems being worked as you know. And I thought I'd just ask you about how the routine was settling in on here your third full day in orbit. Could you tell me how you've arranged the sleeping quarters up there for the duration? That's a pretty easy one there. We've got the sleep station set up. So there's four stations and seven people. So three of us hot rack and being a navy person, that means that three of the sleep stations are almost always in use except for the turnover periods. And then the commander has his own sleep station. So he has kind of a locker he can store stuff in as well. Do you find that during the shift handovers you're getting a lot of time to pass news back and forth or do you just sort of pass like ships in the night there? The first hand overseen maybe a little bit rushed, but the last couple days it seems like we've had plenty of time for the turnover. I actually had a left sock sensor that for you because he's doing the majority of the turnover work. Is the awake time split sort of at the beginning and end of each shift so that the overlaps are evenly split or are they all front loaded or end loaded? Front loaded I guess. But we set it up that way on purpose due to our sleep shifts. Now we have a real nice set up. Two hours pre and post sleep for everybody. And this morning we even got together for a little crew meeting about 10 minutes during handover. Copy that. And how are the meals working out? Are you able to take a break together in the middle of the day for the whole shift? We used to do that every once in a while, but rather than eating of course we're like raising as the day goes on. That's about the way we're eating down here at Socks. Food equals sleep. Rob's going to give you a status where you see and the team here. Good morning Socks. You're like you're tired. As you can probably tell this is our first shift with you after the great launch you guys had the other day. We worked all those four or five pre-launch shifts and so it's extra special for us to come in this morning and have you already flying and doing such a great job. Mr. Taff, I've worked a couple of those and it feels really good when you get to go home. Flying over Houston in the last couple of days you could probably tell we had some tremendous weather in Houston and of course this weekend was the wings over Houston and the Navy and the Blue Angels did just spectacular with some incredible acrobatics. So the Navy had a proud day this weekend in Houston. We love watching the Blue Angels. Sorry we missed them. They're always a good show. We had some good pictures of Houston I think when we were flying over and for the first time I was actually able to spot JSC. The air was so clear. Couldn't find my house though. Well, we're looking at the plot board here. It looks like you're coming up on another pass in a few minutes over the Houston area so maybe you'll have another opportunity for that. Okay, well we'll give it a shot. The only thing that we're kind of tracking here, Sox, we're still looking at the main landing gear, tire pressures and temperatures with the port door slightly closed and the pre-flight predictions and the real-time data are running pretty close and it looks like at least for the next few days that we're thermally in good shape and we're going to be talking with Harry Chang and the thermal people a little later today but things look like that's going well and as we had predicted. Alright Rob, good news. Sox and Rommel, if you look behind Rob here on the screen you can see Rich Jackson. The guy got you off the ground the other day after many attempts. He's happier than anybody I think to see you guys in orbit. And you'll notice you made the tire comment. Where's your tire? I thought everybody was supposed to wear a tire in MCC. I think we made an exception to the dress code today for Rich. That's why Jackson's not part of your team today. Oh, he deserves a break after all those launch attempts. He copies that and the room just had a good laugh when he teased him about his tire. Hey, I got one question for you Rich. When we took off the other day I called in the roll and I didn't hear any response and then I called the roll program and didn't hear anything. The first call we heard was go at the rottel up. Just wondered if you guys had heard my calls or if maybe we were... Sox, the word from Rich here is that we may have just had a misconfig on the ground system down here for the first two calls. We heard all of yours crystal clear and obviously we didn't get up to you until after the go at the rottel up call. Not at that point. The camera angle at liftoff showed the view straight onto the orbiter from the end of the flame trench and you guys were buried in a big white steam cloud for about the first five to ten seconds of the launch and then Columbia just came up right out of the cloud.  Yeah, we saw that in the uplink video on the KCA. It was really impressive. We appreciate it. Well, how's the view been from orbit? I know your attitude points the payload bay windows down at the earth or if you've seen any particular favorites of yours on your circuits around the globe. Attitude makes some things a little bit hard coming in at any native shots. I've got the overhead windows and getting things at 20... Now the Indians are coming back to play in Cleveland with the Braves. I guess they're down two zip right now. So you'll be able to watch some of the night game action probably later this week. Any tropical storms left in the Atlantic we should watch out for? It's amazing. I think it's finally dying down. Seems like there's more clouds over Africa than I remember. It's been great in Houston. We've had a great high pressure system sitting over us and the weather's been fantastic. It's a shame that you're in orbit and not enjoying the few weeks of good fall weather we get down here. Want to trade? Yeah, that's a real shame. We've got some pretty good weather on board though. Clear skies and since we adjusted the temperature controller. We're having plenty of fun up here. I think it'll be okay if we miss a little bit of the Houston fall. It sounds like a great environment to work in. You've got a lot of room to rattle around in and it's got a great team, obviously, meshing together up there. You guys hit the ground running and we've been very, very pleased with how well the timeline's been working out. You guys have been hitting everything right on time and it seems like the payload ops as well as the orbiter ops have been extra smooth this flight. Good. I think a big measure to the folks who did the planning pre-flight. I think another thing that helped us was that we were just a little bit lucky having to get five new guys who are just natural space people. That's obvious from what we can see. The laboratory ops in the back are just like you would imagine in a laboratory down here on the ground where tweaking, making some fine adjustments but the overall scope of the experiment seems to be working along just fine. I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot more of that years ahead so you guys are really showing us what it's going to be like in just a couple of years with Alpha. Well, good deal. I think this two-way video capability is going to be something neat that they'll enjoy too. It's really nice to see your faces and see your lips move while you're talking to us. There's always a little bit more that can be carried in the expressions and hand motions that you can capture over the underground. That's true, Sox. We just got a call from Moscow and Mission Control over there with Jim Weatherby this morning and everybody's watching your flight with great interest on that side. All the folks in our office over there are watching 73 and they're very pleased and proud of your performance. Great. Glad to hear it passed them our best wishes and I know they're glad to get us in the air so that we can get 74 launched here and get those guys flying up to the mirror to say hello. That's right. We're looking forward to that as well but I think we've got another two weeks of fun with you folks before that happens and we'll be ready for 74 in time on the 11th. Yeah, we're looking forward to the rest of the flight. Don't think you can spend too much time in orbit. I know I can't. I can't get enough of the view and the floating around. We just continue to feel better and better up here so let's hope it keeps going that way. In Columbia, the guys on the ground who prepped this ship sure did a great job. It's just humming right along with the things about Columbia and about being jinxed and having a lot of problems but you sure wouldn't know it here from our point of view up on orbit. It is just a super spaceship. She may be the oldest ship in the fleet but it's obvious she's been maintained very well and it's the cleanest ship that you could hope for on orbit on this flight, that's for sure. You guys, but I guess we better get back off to work. You got enough video and information for the GATV guys? Yeah, if you'll stand by one. I just want to do one more config test here and we'll wrap it up after that. Stand by one. Columbia Houston, just to close off GATV and now transmitting on air to ground one. Could you give us a report on the voice quality? It's lime clear. This is what we had a minute ago. It's just a little bit if that's a decent description. I understand. Some of that is probably due to my throat this morning but we'll try this config out again later in the flight. We'll spend on other flights with the families. This capability is going to be great for us. Thanks a lot for talking to us and spending some time on the air and we'll talk to you on the regular loops. Space Lab Huntsville for Kathy. No need to respond but we are currently waiting on approval to tips up the IFM to shim the X-axis video camera to correct this problem where it's currently slightly below center and as soon as that gets tips up to you you can go ahead and start but we want you to start this before you finish the RP-1 instrument bay activation. Space Lab Huntsville for Alby Advise. We have KU band coverage back and SCDC really likes that image. Now as we heard with KU band signal capability we're again back into bringing multiple channels of video to the ground and we have two types of video coming from the surface tension driven convection experiment currently. The module on TVC2 with your permission. This live video now showing us some dramatic gyrations by a drop of liquid which is currently deployed in the drop physics module and now we're taking a 90 degree different view of it. It's shaped much like a pancake now oscillating in one dimension primarily in... DPM said you can reduce the Z drive level to 8 volts if you want. And so below the spacecraft we have basically broad ocean areas with a few scattered high clouds. Columbia on its 51st orbit now out of what's planned as a 255 orbit mission and flying continuing to orbit the Earth in a gravity gradient attitude where the tail of the spacecraft is towards Earth and the nose remains pointed towards deep space and now with a little camera switching we can take a look at its payload bay door the one which is partially closed that payload bay door being directed be the one which is in the velocity vector orientation. A new view, new type of view since this is the first mission where we routinely have been keeping a payload bay door partly closed like this.


If you've ever been told that the Bible is just a bunch of random stories and teachings that are disconnected, watch this. In Isaiah 53 it prophesies about Jesus who wouldn't make an appearance till hundreds of years later. Here's verse 5. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and with his wounds we are healed. But then we fast forward to the New Testament where Peter is talking to a select group of churches. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. You're seeing the connection aren't you? All we like sheep have gone astray, every one of us has turned his own way, but the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. But then back in 1 Peter it says, for you were straying like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. Throughout the whole Bible it testifies of man's rebellion, but Jesus bringing redemption.


I'm Scott. And we're the host of Geek Nights coming to you live through telepresence. We're not live at all. So, Anime Boston, we were jerks and we decided to go to PAX instead. Well, not instead because we will be here at Anime Boston in I think the Constitution Room for two actual live panels tomorrow. We're doing motivational anime and we're doing diamonds in the rough. But right now, as you are watching us speak to you, if you haven't left the room already, which in case you're smart, good job.  But we said, hey, we said we would do a panel and it got scheduled at a bad time. What can we do? I know, let's record the panel on video and send it over and be really unprofessional and sort of jerky. Now, we have sent supposedly a goon, possibly multiple goons who are out here presenting. They might have introduced this video. You must berate them.  Those guys tell nothing but lies. Yes. Whoever they are or girls because we don't know who they are as of when we recorded this. No, we don't. But anyway, this is the how to run a panel panel for Anime Boston 2012.  Cause I'm not there right now. So it's a little, even when I'm there, you know, how you supposed to remember this. So here's the deal. We are at least relatively well known for doing good panels, good workshops, lectures, things. We've been doing this for, I don't know, since 2002, so a decade. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. So, you know, we've done a lot of panels, you know, and because we have done so many and we're so consistent over so many years, that's why they'll, you know, give us some slack if we say, hey, we can't show up. Let's send you a video instead.  You know, hmm, I don't know. Is that, do we need more for the intro? So step one.  Maybe I'll make an action too. Cause I felt like it was like end of intro already. It was. It's like we're going into the panel because we don't know what else to do. All right. I know, I'll do a funny bit here. So how to run a panel?  But you usually don't need to because in person, one thing to remember, because a lot of you might be thinking you want to run a panel, you want to run a lecture, a workshop, but you might be nervous. You might think you get stage fright. I'll tell you one thing. It is way harder to do it here when there's nobody watching than it is if we're actually in that room because we're getting no feedback. There is a soulless camera, a red dot that I'm staring at. So I can't tell if a joke is funny. I mean, maybe if we were way awesome, we had like video staff, we could gauge the cameraman's reaction, which would be pretty great, but we don't. So we're just looking at a camera with a red dot and that red dot does not tell us anything about whether we're doing a good job or not. My point, however, is that you don't need to be nervous.  So if you can at least be that much above terrible, people will remember you as legends. And not only that, right? But people always have this stage fright, like they're nervous. Like, what is really, what is going to happen? People are not going to boo you. You know, the worst. We've been booed. We've been booed. Okay, so they boo you. So what?  Oh yeah. I forgot you were allergic to booze. Yeah.   If you just get, and the other thing is that it's sort of one of those self-fulfilling prophecies, right?  Your nervousness brought about the thing that you were worried about happening because you had the nervousness. Self-fulfilling prophecy. We said it already.  So why do a panel at a convention? Well, one, like we said, I don't think I've paid for attendance at any convention since like 2002. Yeah, not a lot of paying going on. Yeah. Free badges galore. We're here free. We're at PAX free. We're everywhere free. So if nothing else, if you are motivated by a desire to get into conventions for free, if you do good content, they will usually let you in for free. Yeah, but then again, you know, we're not guests, we're just panelists, so it's not like we get free hotels. Yeah. You know, but hey, you take what you can get, right? No, I would say that shouldn't be your sole motivation because if all you want is to get in free, there are better ways to do that. Badge forgery. Totally works most of the time. Make sure you do a good job though. But two, you're here at the Hotter on a Panel panel. So I assume you've got some idea. Like there's some- I assume you're still here. I'm watching some video. Raise your hand if you're still here. Oh, look at all those hands.  It was like a 10,000 hands. I know, right? So you have something you want to say. Like you really want to talk about how Fluttershy is the best pony or how Sephiroth wasn't really a man and you have this complex argument about like why this is the case. Utana was really about ice cream. Whatever it is you have to say, you want to say it. So the first thing you would think about if you're submitting a panel or a lecture or a workshop is what are you doing? They're not panels. The fact that we call these things panels at every convention is a huge problem because the vast majority of what you see are not panels. That's right, a panel is when you have a panel as in a bunch of people who are all knowledgeable on a particular topic or maybe have differing opinions about a particular topic and there may or may not be a moderator who asks them questions or they could take questions with the audience or whatever and they all discuss this particular thing that is a panel. What you are watching now is called a panel at a convention because of the panel's department or whatever but actually this is a lecture, right? Or perhaps a presentation. Yes, we're just talking to you without stopping and telling you things that we know and educating. The weekend before anime Boston. Right, we're educating and entertaining and informing all at once. I don't know about entertaining. Depends on your opinion. The viewer might disagree. I think so. I definitely wouldn't be watching this if I were you. So what we're talking about right now are presentations or lectures. We'll talk about panels in a bit because panels are a very different beast and even though most of you don't do them you might want to do one and the way you do them is so different that they're almost completely different topics. So what are the panel killers?  Panel killer number one is when they waste half the time of the panel with some technological fail of some kind. They can't get the projector to work. Their laptop doesn't do the thing. They don't have the wire to hook up the audio thingy and some of those might be, you know you might try to blame it on the convention but the fact is we go to so many conventions you cannot assume the convention will have anything good.  If you can bring your own projector. I mean, I don't go that far. But, you know, you should have multiple laptops have your presentation on multiple USB sticks and multiple formats with all kinds of cables and batteries and power strips. And, you know, we have like so many backup things it's unbelievable. We cannot possibly fail, you know any technological sort of thing because we have so much backup stuff. If the convention center itself burned down and the city itself ceased to function so where we couldn't even get into the city well then we do this from home and send the video out. So we start the company. Yeah, you know, make sure that no matter what you have technology, you have backup technology and you've tested it before you left your house and that it works and that you know how to do it, right? Cause too many people show up and they don't know how to make their own stuff work and half the panel is spent sitting there doing nothing. And you know what? That's even worse than watching a video panel. Now too, the biggest thing you can do to ruin a panel is to have more than one or two people up there on stage. Now again, lecture, not panel. We gotta stop using the colloquial nomenclature. A panel can have 10 people on it and be fine because there's a moderator. A lecture, if there's more than two or three people on that stage when you walk into the room, walk out, it's probably going to be terrible. Or it's going to be one of those sort of non lectures, like, you know, one of those like court case kind of things. Yeah, but again, that's a whole different bargain. Then we're not covering that. So if you have a presentation, why do you need 10 people on stage? How much are all those people actually contributing? They were just trying to get more free badges, you know it, you know it. That's why at Techoneticown we cut it down to we only give, I think, two badges per panel now. That's right, we're going to be hardcore about it too. Yeah.  That's right. And then the convention will have more panels. It wouldn't have to put a video panel in some room because they weren't. So three, now notice we're standing. Not in, we don't have a studio or anything. This is just my living room. But we're standing.  Well, because what they do is you go to these conventions and most of them are in hotels or convention centers and the standard setup is to have a stage that's elevated with a long table with chairs behind it and then microphones on the table, which sort of, you know, sort of gives a suggestion to the presenter that you were supposed to sit in one of those chairs behind the table talking into the microphone. And if you're doing a panel, then that is sort of a good idea. But if you're giving a lecture, that's not really the greatest idea, right? What you want to do is you want to stand up, ask the staff and be nice to the staff because they're, you know, they're super helpful. Hey guys. You should never mistreat them. Maybe he's on this side. What's up, awesome staff guy, in case you're on that side. You should always be nice to them and thank them and be, you know, bring them cupcakes or beer, whatever they want, right? And basically, right, ask them, hey, can I get some wireless microphones? Hey. No, you might think, oh, why would I ask about that?  You don't want to have to deal with this. Now, speak, we'll talk about this in a second, but if they don't have any wireless mics, just rollin' this up, just pull the microphone out of whatever it's on, wrap it around yourself in some fashion and just stand there. That's right. And you know, you can do a little walk around. Little walk around situation. Don't tangle up. Right, yeah, you got them all in if you're wireless, you won't be tangling. Yup, nope.  Now, the biggest reason to do this, this is so much more dynamic.  You want to engage. All right, look at the, look at people who do a lot of public speaking, right? Steve Jobs when he lived, he didn't go behind a podium or a table. He stood there, right? He had a lavalier, I think. He wasn't holding a microphone, but he stood and he walked around the stage, right? What are those like evangelical guys on TV or like all those, you know, healing guys you see? They're always standing and walking around or those guys who are trying, you know, on infomercials, they're always standing, right? Cause that's how you get energy into the peoples. Now you'll see us break this rule. Usually Sunday morning panels have like mag fast. Well, you know, because we've done this so much, right? Do as we say, don't do as we do. It's all, it's the same as true in so many professions, right? A good example is music composition. You know, a long time ago I studied music composition. There is a list of rules for like, for example, four part harmony, like follow these rules and music will come out. You cannot follow this kind of note with this kind of note or this chord with this chord. If you follow the rules, even if you don't even understand what music is, pleasant sounding music comes out. Now a great composer breaks all of those rules, but he understands why he's breaking each one and pulls it off correctly. Until you understand why the rules are there, you cannot get away with breaking them. Yeah, it's like when you're a noob, you have to follow the book exactly, right? Do what the textbook tells you to. The masters never do what the textbook tells them to, right, but you can't teach someone that. You have to have the textbook skill first and then you can have the mastery skill. So, you know, when we're break, when you know, when you're watching this panel, whatever we tell you to do is what you should do. You should not just try to copy us because we're gonna break all kinds of rules, like put our hand in our pocket, we're slouching, doing all kinds of bad stuff, right? Don't do that. But in terms of microphone, you'll see a lot of novice panelists, if they try to stand up, they're gonna hold the microphone like this. No one can see your face if you're doing this. Yup. That's a bad idea. Also, you can overload the mic because usually the mics are wired way hot because most people are really quiet at conventions. Won't get into why, but you've seen it. They're quiet. Learn how to use the microphone properly, right?   And remember, the staff people there are also, they're gonna, you know, move the levels around on the mixer board to help you out if you're in a good convention that has that kind of activity. If not, you have to learn over and learn how to go and, you know, figure out which slider to move to do it yourself. Now, little kind of, we'll talk a little bit about sort of deep or maybe non-obvious techniques, you know, poise and presence and all that, but the biggest one, since we're talking about microphones, there's probably some big speakers on either side of the stage. You might think, all right, I'm gonna walk around, everything's good. The moment that microphone passes by the front of one of those speakers, it's over. Right, do not do that, right? It's so stereotypical, the feedback, right? And if you don't know, that happens because sound comes out of the speaker into the microphone, gets amplified at the amplifier, comes back out of the speaker, goes into the microphone again, and keeps getting amplified. Yo, dawg, I heard you like feedback, so. Right, so it goes, eh, right, that's what happens, which is why you never wanna have the microphone, this noise from the speaker entering the microphone. Do not do it, even once is very, very bad.   It's gotta have your hand right on the mute button or the cough button, or in the very least, if you have to walk in front of the speaker, most microphones, especially conventions, are an SM57 or an SM58, you don't need to know. It's an SM57. This is also an SM57. The thing to remember is that those are cardioids, meaning the directionality of the microphone matters. See if I point it away, I get quiet, and then I get loud again. It's because it gets more sound from the front than the back, so if we walk in by a speaker and the speaker's here. Oh, good idea. Yeah. As long as you don't point the microphone directly at the speaker, you're probably gonna be okay. Probably. So, another guy, did you just stay on stage? Don't get off the stage unless you really have to.  So, one thing that people really don't pay attention to is the unspoken and the unseen. Well, it is seen, but it's not consciously seen, it's subconsciously seen. And that is how you present yourself with your body language. And this is the most difficult thing to master because you're mostly thinking about what words are coming out of your mouth. It's very hard to simultaneously think about what position your body's in. If you notice, we're not even experts on this, at least not when we're not trying so hard. Well, there's some old famous videos when we were not too good at the camera stuff where whenever I was talking, Scott was hypnototing, not at the camera, but off from the camera. Or people would be like picking the nose up here. You notice I have my hand in my pocket. I'm sort of slouching, sort of looking off in the distance. You'll see when I have a clicker, I tend to be like flicking the clicker, like click, click, like I'm throwing it around in my hand while I'm going. Fidgeting, bite your nails. Oh, the heater came on, let me turn that off. Keep going. Turn the heater on and off.  Kind of not looking at anybody, just sort of mumbling. So if it's just you, it's easy. Always be looking at the audience and look at different parts of the audience. Now, if you don't need, you know, a lot of times it's hard to look people in the face.  Look at their foreheads or just look at, pick like three places in the room and alternate between them just as you think. Usually there'll be things you can look at, like staff table, water cooler. Fat guy.  You know, just keep looking around. Now, you don't want to be totally stiff. Like don't just stand there doing nothing the whole time because then it looks really awkward. Right, you gotta move a little bit. I'm a little fluid. I'm kind of walking around. Right, a little bit. You can shift from left to right. You can do the shift in microphone. I do the backhand pocket occasionally. Right, do a little pocket situation. But one person's easy. Just look around the room, look at the audience, engage and be kind of fluid. Two people is tricky because when I'm talking, what's Scott supposed to do? He can look at you, he can look at me. And the trick is try to pretend it's a natural conversation, even though it isn't.  Act like it's a real conversation. And try to do things that are appropriate. Like if the other person makes a funny joke, you can laugh. Ah. You know, if the other person's like to the audience, you can be like, hmm, hmm, you know. Just sort of add your body language to the feeling of whatever the other person's doing and then make sure you come in at the right time. And the only way to come in at the right time is to have a good repertoire with that person with years of experience. I believe you mean rapport. Yeah, same thing. We could edit that out, but because we're semi-live, we won't.  You know, we talked about rollins in the microphone. If you're holding the microphone, especially at cons, they might have a cheap cable. All that means is the Henry Rollins style, you want to wrap that cable a little bit around your hand to give you something to grip and to make sure that if you pull it too hard, you're not going to mess up the microphone or pull this out of the bottom here. That's right.  Kind of keep them out. Kind of, you know, just be semi-aggressive. Don't sit, like we said. Yeah. You definitely want to keep your head up, right?  Don't be looking at the ceiling, right? Don't look at your slides. Absolutely do not look at your slides. The moment you turn around and start reading what's on a slide. Now you could, if you have a graphic or some sort of chart, go with the laser pointer. Now let's look at this graphic. You can see here, I've got a better example. You can see here in Manhattan. Now look, see that building right there? I don't know what it's called. Nor do I know that one, but I'm interacting with this graph. I'm doing something. Yeah. As opposed to, so the first bullet point on this slide says Naruto is awesome. That's because Naruto is awesome. Now the second bullet point says that Bleach is not awesome. That's because Bleach is not awesome. Don't do that. Don't do that. Donnie don't doesn't do. Except Donnie don't does do that, but don't do that. Don't do what Donnie don't does. Because he's Donnie don't. You shouldn't don't do what he do. Now, if you really want to get good at this, what you've got to do, though it's going to be painful, is get a friend, even if it's on their cell phone, at least parts of the panels you do initially. It's really awkward to watch yourself performing the first few times until you get the hang of it. It's awkward to do the mirror thing. It's awkward to video yourself and then watch yourself on YouTube. It's awkward to do whatever, but you got to do it anyway. Just do it. Good God, you should see 10 years ago the panels we were doing at like Otacon. We're still not even that great. No. But we're great enough to tell you what to do because we're better than that. We're better than nothing, right? We're not good enough to be here in person. If we did even one panel, we'd be qualified to tell you what to do if you've done zero. If you haven't done zero, why are you here? You may notice the scene has changed with the power of editing. Okay. Time has passed. So anyway, when you're trying to, you're going to do this panel or this lecture, what do you do it on? You need to come up with something, right? And maybe you just have a favorite anime or favorite video game or something you want to do it on, right? Well, you could. You could just be like, hey, I'm going to do Madoka, the panel. That's cool, but is it really that exciting? What's that going to be? What are you going to say?  Explain what Madoka is without any sort of like other context. Are you just trying to like sell people on the show? Like what, you had to have some specific thing to go on. You need to narrow your idea. At the same time, right? You need to be incredibly knowledgeable about this idea. You can't just go and do a panel about something you know nothing about, right? What do you know the hell a lot about, right? There must be some something out there that you have studied fricking crazily. Like you know more about it than anyone else. Like you've watched Ice Shield 21 a thousand times. You've read the whole manga twice. You've read all the Wikipedia's about it and you've gone to every fan site. Like you are that expert, right? And when you're the expert on something, you probably care about that something, right? If you really, you know, you walk up to someone at a convention just in the hallway and maybe they're wearing a cosplay of a thing you like. If you really like that thing, maybe it's Pokemon, right? If you're a Pokemon fan, you can just talk about Pokemon for hours easily without even having to think or write or prepare. We did a semi-infamous panel at an Otacon many years ago.  So we agreed at the last minute, like at the con, like, all right, we'll do one on advanced wars. We stuck it into the schedule. We just happened to know a lot about advanced wars. And we sat there with no planning and for an hour talked about advanced wars and I think the people in the audience thought we made advanced wars. Some of them did, I don't know. Yeah, that's a separate discussion but one thing to ease your possible stage fright. On a stage, people think you're an expert even if you're not. They will lend a lot more credence to your opinions than they might if they're just talking to you in line. Also, here's a secret, no insult to you. Actually, yes, an insult to some of you, right? Is that people in the audience at panels tend not to actually know very much in general, right? I mean, everyone has something they know about but I've been to panels like one guy did a Nintendo panel at a convention I was at once. It was the time the Wii was coming out and people were asking him like, when does the Wii come out? What are the launch games? And he knew those things and I knew those things as we read blogs on the internet that tell us what those things are but most of the people had no idea. They don't read the internet every day. They don't follow game news. So they didn't know any of this stuff. So now you not only are you on a stage and holding a microphone which gives you some air of authority but because you're knowledgeable now you have this like real authority. People like, you know, they totally believed you was like from Nintendo. He's like, I don't work for Nintendo. I'm just some guy. He was no different than me. Yeah. When they asked me when advance wars, whatever, like three was coming out I was tempted to just give him a date. Right. They would have believed it too. So, but at the same time remember this, this could be dangerous and you need to be responsible, right? Don't just go telling people BS, right? Because you're in this position of authority, you know, you can cause some damage by saying the wrong thing. So always, you know, be very careful and fact check your stuff. But the point of all this is that especially if you haven't done panels and lectures before, start with something you already know a lot about. I mean, we didn't have to prepare to talk about how to run panels. It's been a decade plus, but we do do some lectures where we don't know a lot about the topic. Like we were researching right now for packs on like the monetization models of games. And while we know a lot about that we had to do a lot of research too. But if you're not already comfortable with public speaking, you're not already able to kind of off the cusp deal with the crowd and, you know, do this kind of thing, then you're not prepared to do research on something you don't know about and to present on it at the same time. That's right. You got to remove one of those factors for your first few efforts. Okay, so now you've decided on your topic, right? You need to write a title and description to go in the con book, right? We run the panels and workshops department at Kineticon and have for many years. We've been panelists forever. We work with people who run, like Lou is a good friend of ours. He runs panels here at Anime Boston. Okay, he'll pack same deal. Like, we know these people. We all professionally agree on one thing. Well, a couple of things. One, most of the submissions we get are awful, both in terms of title and description. And two, most of you out there, nobody reads the description in the book. A few people read the descriptions. A few people will read and see who is doing the panel because maybe they're a big fan of us or no one's a fan of us. But then they're gonna look. That guy is.  They care. They want to see a particular person.  And then, as most people, they just look at the overall schedule and they look at the titles. And not only are they only looking at the titles, they're looking at shortened versions of the titles, right? So you need to put incredible key words in that title that's gonna drag people in, right? For example, our first Oticon panel that was ours alone and not just like a real panel with other people on it was called Gekiga, putting the man back in manga. Now, if you know what Gekiga is, you expect a certain thing from that panel. That's right. Most people had no idea what that was. They saw putting the man back in manga and thought we were talking about Yaoi manga. So a whole bunch of Yaoi fan girls came in and- It doesn't, anything to get butts in the seats. If you do a good job, you can keep the butts in the seats no matter what you're talking about. They might've been kept in the seats out of horror as opposed to interest for that. It doesn't matter what you use to get the job done. So for example, good panel titles, anime you should see. People think, oh, there's anime I should see. I wonder what that's about.   I wouldn't want to do a panel that was about that but people see that title. They're gonna show up just to see what's going on. That's right. So for example, we did a, we do a panel. We've done it quite frequently about independent role-playing games. If we called it independent tabletop role-playing games, people probably wouldn't show up. Except for people who already know everything we're gonna say. That's right. But we call it beyond Dungeons and Dragons. People see that title. They know what Dungeons and Dragons is. And we're already disparaging in the title. A lot of people are fans of it and we're saying beyond. So beyond Dungeons and Dragons has so many implications, right? It's saying go past that, but it's also saying like maybe enhance that, you know? And that's a thing that they recognize. And if they're a D&D fan, they see that on the schedule, they're showing up. Now you want proof of how well this worked? It was our first Pax panel ever. And it filled the room. People lined up for hours to get in. Like we had to turn a lot of people away.  They were like, who are these guys to talk about D&D? I'm gonna defend by the end. Like we got them. We tricked them in and then we sold them our goods. That's right. We ran that same panel at Otacon. A zillion times. Of all places, we ran it at Otacon in the biggest panel room. One year. And it filled the room. We had to turn people away. People were all standing in the back, sitting in the aisles. Animecon, talking about gaming, Dungeons and Dragons filled the room because the title was provocative. That's right. So title is the most important thing. Yeah, the description is basically just the final sell on the few people who care about that. Worry about your title. That's right. Now too, when you submit a panel, spell every word right. And you know, people, it's weird. In the animecon industry, well not industry, more so than other conventions, we found that there's this weird anti-professionalism. Like the word professional or industry, they're bad words. People are afraid of that. Now I can see why. You've been to professional panels at these cons.  That's right.    There's no reason to go to these things.  But like professionalism is often frowned upon and I don't understand why. Because if you act professionally, even if you are not a professional, people will treat you professionally, even if they are themselves not professionals. When we submitted our first panel to PAX, basically I submitted it like a resume, like I was applying for a job. Like dear sir, to home it may concern, I am so and so. I would like to do a panel at PAX about so and so. Here's my resume. Here are my credentials. I have run these events at other conventions in the past. I have lectured on this. I have a degree in this. I've studied game theory. Here are all the reasons why I think I'm the best candidate to do this panel. Here's what the panel's about. And here's why I wanna run it. Seems simple. If you can't even put that much effort in, then why should I go through the effort of reading your description, reading your submission, and then giving you an hour in front of the people who are paying to be at my convention? All right, now going around of professionalism, right? Let's talk about some of the unprofessional things people do. Mostly what I see them is pertaining to slides and presentations. Oh, not this stuff. Yeah, picking your nose, sure. But mostly when it comes to slides and presentations, I see the most unprofessional things, right? People will, they'll put up, you'll see their desktop, they'll set up their stuff way late. Make sure before anyone comes into the room, you've already got all the technology set up and your first slide is already on the screen. No one even knows what OS you have, right? Unless you have a Mac. But even then, you might be dual-booting with the boot camp. Yep, the rule of thumb. No one should ever see your desktop background. Now, we violate that rule. Many people violate it because you wanna show clips. And oftentimes it's not easy to integrate a clip with your slideshow. It's okay to minimize the slideshow and pull up a clip but you'd better have that clip edited down to the exact part you wanna show. Yeah, if you start scrubbing back and forth looking for the spot. Oh wait, no, it's a little forward, forget it. The moment you pull out a DVD, I want motion data. That's right. You could have the DVD preset, pause at the exact spot, ready to go in waiting. But. And then open it up and press play. That never works. Never works. DVD players will like go to sleep, they'll be all, it never works. It doesn't. If you're doing videos, you should have all the videos integrated into the presentation somehow. I mean, you could do the hacky thing of putting like videos directly in PowerPoint. It's kind of ghetto. You could try to put YouTube's in a Google presentation, got doc presentation. That really won't work because you can't rely on there being internet. Pretend there's no internet, right? Never rely on internet because you will not have it. Nope. Or it will be slow, I guarantee it. Pretend there is no internet. If you depend on internet, just might as well cancel your panel. And what you need to do is you need to get some sort of playlist in a video player or something configured, write some software. I wrote a tool that does this, actually in the web browser. We'll have the video embedded as HTML5 and then I will actually have a presentation clicker and in JavaScript it listens for the clicker and then we'll go to the next video and you push the button. Now the clicker is key. Buy one of those Logitech like mouse clickers for presentations. They're like between 40 and $70. They make you look so professional, so snappy.  And they got laser pointers on them and they got timers, right? It'll buzz when you set it to buzz. Yeah, I have a- So now you know when your panel's about to end. So you're not sitting there like through the panel the whole time being like, ah, how much time do I have? What's going on?    And that's super unprofessional. It's people going over the end of the time, right? It's like, dude, panel's over, get out for the next guy, right?    Your slides should be an accompaniment. Well, in essence, they should not be the entire panel written out in text form. Yeah, if you need slides, I mean, some panels don't even need slides. You can just do video only. Some panels, you don't need anything. You just stand there and talk. I recommend always having slides. In the very least, you have an intro slide which says who you are, what the panel is, and maybe you have an outro slide, like here's my contact info, here's the website. We've done a few panels where there's only like four or five slides where it's just like, okay, here's the title of the panel, here's something to look at, here's a black slide just while we're talking and then here's a panel, there's a slide that has our URLs and our email addresses and stuff on it at the end. But when in doubt, the number of slides should be minimal. Every slide should serve a purpose. Maybe it's a joke. I mean, I have this picture of this train crashing that I use in a lot of panels. Almost every panel. I'll like cut, like I'll start me talking. In mid-sentence, I'll flip to that slide and the audience goes nuts because it's, you know, it's comedic timing. Slides should be minimal. One picture, one panel from a manga, a little caption. The moment you have more than like 10 words on a panel you've already screwed up. That's right. Also, the only kind of slides you should use are one title of text, you know, a bulleted list and don't animate each item of the bulleted list. No transitions ever. Just show the whole list at once. No animations, no transitions, no nonsense, no fancy background colors, no weird crazy patterns, right? Unless you're a professional graphic designer, in which case you can do it right, don't do anything fancy, right?  Now there are fancy things you can do that you could probably pull off really well. Like I've seen lectures where someone will have like 400 slides and he's clicking through really rapidly and they're kind of matching the cadence of what he's saying. That's a professional, that's not you.  When you level that, when you level up then you can try to do that high level stuff. For now, do not do, do not even try.  You should probably have some sort of thesis and you want to reiterate that at the end.  I mean, the point of this panel is do panels at cons, learn how to do them well, be awesome.  At the end, you gotta go out, again, the panel was about this, this is what I said, this is who I am and thank you. Now, Q and A. If you're gonna do Q and A. Now first, don't do Q and A. That's right, under no circumstances should you do Q and A unless you really, really, really want to. And know how to do it and are willing to do everything we're about to tell you. Right, so avoid Q and A. We do not do Q and A at 90% of the panels that we do. Sometimes we will lie and say we're going to and then we don't. And then we intentionally make sure the panel is so long that we do not have any Q and A. Now why, why don't we like Q and A?  Now, when we do take questions, here are the things that we do to make sure it doesn't go as badly as it would otherwise, right? We put up this slide, right? So these are the, Scott's rules of question asking, right? Because it basically addresses all the typical problems that people have when they ask bad questions. Instead of asking a question, they'll just tell a story about themselves and they won't actually ask anything.  Well, I'm making a game that's about my little pony and Warhammer mashed up. It's called Warhammer 40K Pony.  And pretending it's a question. He's doing self promotion or he's telling a personal story or he's doing, you know, something that is not asking a question, right? Some people just go up and make a statement, right? And if you just want to say, hey, I like your stuff. Well, I mean, that's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing that. But Q and A is not the time to do that. There is a limited amount of time for Q and A. There are probably a lot of people who do want to ask questions. Maybe some of them are good, maybe. Maybe. And you're taking away time from them. You could just go and say that later after the panel, any other time. Or look it up on Google because most of the questions you're gonna ask have already been answered by most people, most presentations. Send the panelists an email or something, right? That's not the time, right? Also, people ask questions that aren't relevant to the panel, right? If we're doing a panel about how to run a panel panel, don't come up and ask a question about like, oh, you mentioned this anime, whatever.  That's not what this panel's about. Now, this isn't just anime cons. This is everywhere. For example, there's this famous lecture by Douglas Adams that we watched a while ago. And the point of it is that he gives this lecture that has nothing to do with his books, at least the books that people know him for. It's a lecture about conservation and animals and Madagascar and stuff. It's a great lecture. The first motherfucker who comes up and asks a question, asks him if he has his towel with him. Yeah, it's not relevant to what was just discussed. Don't ask it. Now, it is possible to ask the funny question or the question that may not be relevant, but you are not a professional comedian. In fact, almost no, it's one of those things. You've gotta know that you can pull it off. Okay, let's go over here. I'm gonna take turns, you ready? I guess. You're ready. Welcome to Action Castle. Small cottage. There is a fishing pole here. Exits are out. Is it our turn to say something? I don't understand. Is it our turn to say something? You're in the garden path. There is a rose bush here. There is a garden here. Exits are north, south, and east. I'm scared. I don't understand. I'm scared. Fishing pole. You are in a cottage. There is a fishing pole. Can't the fishing pole. There is a pole. Okay, good. I think it's out. A rose bush here. There is a cottage here. Exits are north, south, and east. What the? I go into the cottage. We in the cottage? Anime screening. Sometimes a guy'll say something even though you're supposed to be quiet and it's really funny and everybody laughs. You don't want to be the guy who sees that happen thinks I want to try that too and annoy everybody. That's right. If you don't think you can pull it off, don't pull the pin out of that grenade. Yeah. Other things that people mess up when asking questions, they ask questions. Even if they do ask an actual question, maybe they'll make it incredibly long asking. No, it's gotta be one sentence, two sentences. You get, in my opinion, one non-comma punctuation, period. That's right. The other thing is that people will ask a question that even if it's a real question, it's only relevant to them. Like, hey, do you want to work with me on a thing? Hey, can you give me advice about this thing that is only relevant to me? No, the question you should ask has to be something that the whole audience or a good portion of the audience might potentially care about. It also shouldn't be a question that's been asked 100 times at the same person. Be like, ho author person who has written so many books and done lectures and panels at so many conventions. Where do you get your inspiration?  That's where I get it from.  Now, we don't need to talk more about that because you're gonna run a panel or a lecture or a workshop and people are gonna be trying to ask you questions. So again, don't. But if you must, don't open it up to the audience for questions with more than 10 minutes to go. That's right. Because that means that you didn't have enough in your lecture. A real panel especially. One of the biggest, we talked about lectures this whole time.  You're giving the reins of your panel to these guys out there. Another thing, do not let anyone ask a question before question asking time. You're sitting there at a panel especially at a nerdy convention, right? Of any kind. There's always gonna be a more than one person in that audience who's raising their hand.  They'll just shout something out. Like, you're wrong. Or yeah, there was, there was a third Gundam in the blah, blah, blah, right? Pretend they do not exist. Do not acknowledge their existence. Just keep going. Don't even look at them. Don't say anything in response to them, right? Don't try to fight with them or anything. Pretend they do not exist and most of them will get a clue. Now, some of them won't. We were at Megfest not that long ago and this guy just sat in the back and he raised his hand like this and he just sat there like, and every now and then he switched hands. He did the like prop the hand up because he's getting tired. I even, at one point a guy said, can I ask a question? And I said, no. And then I just kept going. That guy in the back didn't even flinch. Yeah, the other guy got the guy who I said no to got the idea, right? And I, you know, shouldn't have even said no, but I did because I knew I could do it right. And he's like, no, keep going. No stopping. If you must do this, there's a very simple set of rules you can follow to minimize the damage done by questions. Other than minimizing the amount of time you take questions. Number one, have a goon. Have someone who isn't you with a wireless microphone. If you can pull that off, who goes around gathering questions from the audience. Right. Do not let the people in the audience touch the question asking microphone. For example, if I, if I'm the guy in the audience and I'm going to let Scott ask a question. First, while someone else's question is being dealt with, I go to him like, hey, so what do you want to ask? Like tell me now. I want to ask about underwear. That's not even relevant. You can't ask that. Sorry.   All right, cool. So give me a second. You're next. And then, you know, the, the presenters finished. And I'm like, all right, we have a question here from Scott in the audience. What underwear do you think would be best for me to wear? Even though that was only relevant to me, it's a bad question. But it might have been funny. It's okay. Now the reason you don't let them hold the microphone is that once they've got it, they've got the scepter of power. Now they're sticking to start a big conversation. They're taking over the panel. They're bringing it back to them all about them. You don't want that. It's all about you. You're on stage. Literally don't let them touch it in any capacity. That's right. Now maybe you can have it on a stand and they walk up to it, but they cannot be allowed to touch it.  So as soon as, look at the, well, you're not at PAX, but the way the PAX Q and A works is they have people walk up and they say their bit and they kind of interact. And as soon as their time is done and enforcer kind of moves them along. And if the enforcer standing next to the microphone making sure- And if they don't move along, that microphone goes dark. That's right. And they move to the other microphone until they sort it out. Even better, what you can do, right, is maybe you have a technologically advanced situation. You can get people to submit their questions digitally and then bring up like the submissions and then read them yourself, right. You can have people tell their questions to the person, your goon. And then the person never even talks into the microphone. The goon asked the question for the person. That was the next technique I was gonna bring up.  Like you feel them out? And this might sound rude. You've got to make a determination as to whether or not they were an awkward fanboy or not.  Or I cannot let this guy talk. It'll cause a problem. Get him to tell you the question and then you do something like, Scott here has a question. He wants to know what underwear he should wear. Yeah. See how I've cut the fanboy out of the loop. The thing is, don't worry about, say, misrepresenting their question. All right, turn it into the best question you can turn it into or your goon has to turn it into the best question you can turn it into. Everyone else is happy because they've been spared five minutes of agony. That's right. Let's see, are there any other things you can do to improve the Q and A? I feel like I'm missing something important. Q and A is mostly impossible to improve. The best you can do is mitigate harm. Now, the best way to do Q and A is to not actually take questions from the audience but to have your goon or your moderator present to you a series of questions as though it were the Q and A. Panels are where this is best suited. Don't go up to the audience. Have a moderator who already has a list of questions who's going to ask your group of panelists. Like, so how do you feel about Bleach and the second season where they did blah, blah, blah? Also, do not be afraid, right? Some people, they try to answer a lot of questions because they feel bad. All those people wanted to ask questions we didn't get to all of them, especially if it's a famous person, right? No, spend as much time and drag any question out as long as you can, right? Just answer the hell out of it. Keep going that way, less questions.  That's right. So that's pretty much it. We're gonna let this wrap up. You can get back to the rest of your packs. Anime Boston. Anime Boston, because we are still at packs, but- Oh my, look at the time. Do not look at your phone during the middle of the panel. That's a very bad idea. Yup, but we will be here in person, actually in person, not a video tomorrow for both motivational anime, which is shows like Initial D and Fighting Spirit that really pump you up and really make you wanna do stuff that maybe you shouldn't be doing. You definitely will not do. And diamonds in the rough. Anime, you'd never think to watch. Then maybe isn't the best anime, but it is way better than you expect than you probably should watch it. Never judge a book by its cover. I think the best example before we wrap this up, Madoka Magica, who here's seen it? Woo! Woo! See all the people who didn't see it? They probably think it's just a girly show, Joe Magical Girl Show. Or they know never even heard of it. Yeah, but anyway, that's it. Thank you to whoever presented this for us, wherever you are. I don't know.  That guy's still here. What up? That guy. That guy. Hey, that guy's waiting for the next panel. Yeah, I know. Cause the next panel is on the philosophy of bleach. Oh. We out. This has been Geek Nights with Rim and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Kat Lee for Web Design, and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news, and more. Remember, Geek Nights is not one but four different shows. SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.