But I appreciate you all joining today. So we have Anthony Lusardi from Digital Asset here, again, to talk about when to use Digital Asset, modeling language, Dan will smart contracts and really going into do they need to be public permissionless and centralized. And we're very grateful that he's here today. And Anthony, I'll hand it off to you now. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, thank you very much, everybody, for having me here. Thanks, Chris, for helping me put it together. And David, as well. I really appreciate getting the opportunity to talk about these things, which is less about Dan will specifically, except at the end, talk a little bit about it and more about when do we need our smart contracts to be public permissionless and decentralized. And also, I would caveat one small, small thing there is that demo actually doesn't stand for anything anymore. So it's really just a demo. It's not Digital Asset's markup language. But anyway, let's get started. And also, I'll want everybody to know that you're free to ask questions whenever you want. If I'm talking and you feel like interrupting, go ahead. I really want to make sure that the session is engaging and that people can ask questions. And we can all actually discuss these things rather than just me dictating to you to even further incentivize that. The first five people who ask questions will send you some demo swag. And we actually have some pretty cool t-shirts that aren't just the corporate logo, but actually look a little fun. So I'll drop my email in the chat. And if you are one of those people, this is basically on the Honor system. Just email me. And I'll get back to you with all the info I need in order to get you your shirt. But anyway, that's my email address. And yeah, let's get started. So to answer my question for myself, at least, I would say that some of our smart contracts absolutely need to be public, permissionless, and decentralized. But all of them don't. And I'll disclaim this too in the rest of this talk with the fact that I personally love public chains. I am huge into Bitcoin. And I personally think that the world changed significantly in 2009. And so I'm definitely trying. I'm definitely approaching this from a aspect where I think that these technologies coexist. And they accomplish largely different goals from each other. But on the more private side, it happens to be inspired by the public side, but does some things a little different. And so that leads me to the first question for the audience. And since this is a hyperledger audience, I imagine some people might have thoughts on this. So if you do, maybe I'll give you a moment to think about it. But why would we want permissioned smart contracts as opposed to everything being a public smart contract? All right, no takers. So I'll actually I'll say mine then. And if anybody comes up with anything in between, then feel free to chime in. But anyway, it's in my mind, it's because decentralization doesn't really solve every problem. And really, unless your asset on a public network is fully issued by it and enforced by it, by the network itself, decentralization would actually leave you in a situation where applications become much more costly in their operation, much more exploitable, and aren't really providing the guarantees that you expect applications to provide. You actually see that a lot in present day smart contract applications where, because of the software development lifecycle, devs actually need to upgrade their smart contracts. And because of that, they are very often end up trading off the benefits of decentralization and largely just losing them. And in exchange, are accepting all the negative aspects where, like I said, it becomes much more costly to operate your codes out there completely in public and anybody can see it. And if they find an exploit, they can run it at any time off into great profit, as we see fairly regularly in the news. And you lose out on those guarantees. So that is unfortunate for a lot of different applications. And then further, when it comes to public chains, what we're really seeing is a very narrow band of applications succeed, particularly financial applications. And we don't really see much else. And my own feeling on why that is, and I think that this is actually well supported by the facts as I'll show on, the next slide is public blockchains need transaction fees. There's a lot of claims out there that you can get rid of them, but it is my opinion and quite a well accepted one that transaction fees are needed for public blockchains because they incentivize the block producers to sustain the blockchain too, and they also help prevent spam and because they encourage a wide amount of block producers, they provide security to the network. So these transaction fees are actually very necessary. And transaction fees aren't going to be a core part of why you would use private chains. They have their own benefits beyond this, but this is one thing where we see kind of what public blockchains are kind of limiting themselves to really by necessity, by function of how they work. And really that boils down to when you have financial transactions, you really just have to answer the question, can I make money on this? So on those transactions, participants become very insensitive to the actual cost of doing them as long as it can be a profitable transaction for them, for themselves. Whereas on the other side, you might have the question now, is it really worth spending $50 right now to renew my decentralized domain name? And that's what we're actually seeing too. So if we went to EtherScan and we look at the top 50 addresses of those that we can identify, not all of these we can identify, a lot of them are probably exchanges, but of the ones that are well-identified, they're basically all financial applications. In fact, the one non-financial application that sometimes makes it into the top 50 here is ENS, that decentralized domain name on Ethereum. And that's really like so far down the list that it's sometimes in the top 50 and sometimes not. And prices here too are just fluctuating substantially, which makes it very unpredictable as to when you can affordably use most contracts on Ethereum. And really on any public blockchain, it becomes, when you're doing large applications on them, it becomes very cost prohibitive because costs fluctuate so much. Not so much with value transfers because they're so small, but as your transaction gets more and more complex, it just becomes more and more costly. And then that will itself be a factor of pounds based on the congestion on the network. As you can see, even right now, it costs about $15 just to swap the token on Ethereum. And that's basically all I'm going to talk about application specifics here, but it's something to keep in mind that public blockchains have really limited themselves to these things by necessity, which is fine. I mean, it's a huge space in general, but it doesn't really leave room for some other creativity. And so I have another question for the audience and really I want to know what do you think then some of the other pros and cons of the public and private chain choice are? And then I'll of course also give my thoughts. Ling Cheng said business logic or that was a few minutes ago. I think that was in regards to the first one. Oh, okay. Sorry, I didn't see the chat. I had it behind the other window. And just Herwood said security and ownership of nodes. Yeah, absolutely. That's a pro on the private side because you get to, well, in both you get to run your nodes, but you actually get full control over how your node is structured rather than having to be very broadcasting, talking to the entire world. And Jess also says where trust needs to exist versus where it needs to be developed. That's also true. That's another trade-off. If trust needs to exist in a business relationship and that's a pro of a private chain, if it doesn't need to exist or if it's in a way or if you are capable of structuring it away where it is not necessary, then that's a pro of a public chain, but those are very good points. And yeah, so I have quite a list and actually some of those, those are on it as well. Pros, one big thing. Oh, Jess also says all around cost and interoperability. Yep. As we saw with public chains costs are, it's not just about being expensive. It's that costs are unreliable. You can't really predict next month what your costs are going to look like because you're at the behest of the other, all the other participants in the network. And also, yes, interop is much easier because while there is still, there are still elements of trust in a private network that actually makes it so that you can interop in much more traditional ways. It's actually very hard for two public chains to truly trustlessly as they would really need to, you know, transfer assets between themselves. There are a variety of schemes, but really much, much simpler interoperability there. So yeah, that's another great point. And yeah, so one of the things I had here is simpler upgrade authority. So really like I mentioned earlier, even on permission list ledger centralization is a major, upgrades are a major source of centralization, even on permission of sledgers.  I think V2 and V3 might have some governance introduced, but I'm not too up to date on them. But most smart contracts have this upgrade path that by necessity is going to be controlled by a small group of people or an equally small group of large token holders. And this is true in both public and private chains. There will be upgrade paths. There's different ways of structuring it such that, you know, people can selectively upgrade and opt into upgrading. Also again, on both public and private chains, that's actually kind of the methods that we recommend with Damol ourselves and that a lot of other people are doing on a variety of languages and on other platforms. But that's always something to consider is that upgrades introduce centralization in some way to some degree and largely is the same across public and private chains except when you're talking about base layer upgrades. And so then in that case, you know, having this authority rather than having it be abstracted, deep in a smart contract and rely on very new untested forms of governance, you can actually just have a very simple, this is who's going to be able to upgrade this contract when and how, which I think is very nice to have, especially when, you know, that full lack of control is actually very hard to implement. Also privacy and so by necessity, you know, all public chain state has to be shared with all people. And this has led to like a real industry of bot reducers, exploit, discovers and really cool things called flash loans that I recommend people check out just go ahead and Google flash loans. It is really, really cool to see some of the, it's a crazy thing that happens on public chains. It's probably a fairly harmful thing that happens on public chains, but it's also a very technically and financially interesting thing that happens on them. So I don't promote using flash loans or anything, but it's a really, really interesting thing there. And, you know, it's really this brand new tool chest where people can go ahead and find weaknesses and that lack of privacy leads to it. And then the, probably also poor coding practices on some other cases lead to more of those exploits, but privacy really, really opens up that window maximum to the most amount of people who would be capable of exploiting this now are, now are able to. And so on private ledgers, you actually get quite strong permissions on who is shared, on what is shared with who and when, and later I'll actually show you how that's achieved in Damo. And also similarly, trust is made explicit like I mentioned, create authority. On public chains, you generally trust somebody via the token holders to vote properly or the dev team or others who just simply hold the keys to upgrade the contract. Whereas on private chains, you can take that implicit and poorly defined trust, make it explicit. And so it'll be well-defined. And so you know exactly who you're trusting, when you're trusting them and how. And I think that's something that is really, really missing from public chains in general, except for some cases where it's not. Went off the screen a little bit there, but operational costs are cheaper and predictable. So as mentioned earlier, whatever the costs are for each network participants around the server, no more, no less, that's what it costs. And it ends up being cheaper too, because you don't need to make certain guarantees that I'll talk about on the next slide, which removes financially incentivizing block producers to behave well. You don't have that layer because you are trading off and putting a little more trust in the system. And that really reduces your operational costs. Also is going to make them much more predictable. You'll know if I'm putting a shank through this many transactions on average, it's going to cost me this much. If I suddenly need to burst and increase my capacity to do 10 times more than that, I know roughly how much that's going to cost me, whereas on a public chain, I won't know that. At least not in any sort of sense of the future. But let's talk a little bit about some cons on using private chains over public chains. And the first really is that they're not permissionless. So if you need your application to be deployed once, run forever, never have any intended interference or change to it, then private ledgers probably aren't the place for your application. Private ledgers in general are going to trend towards well-permissions contracts, meaning parties to a contract and all parties to it, and their respective nodes all have permissions, rights, and obligations over their contracts. But of course, it's also now exactly what we mean when we're talking about permissionless public chains. So what we mean there is that anyone anywhere on a permissionless chain can access the contract as long as they can pay the transaction fee to do so. This is not something that's possible on private blockchains. You can create really open, a low permission, federated entities with it, but you cannot entirely remove the permissioning of it in the same way you would be able to on a public permissionless blockchain. And so this might not always matter, and many practical applications deployed on public blockchains actually do have a permissions architecture. So it's really worth considering whether or not your public and permissionless application, and probably applies less so for the hyper ledger side, but really it's worth considering whether or not you need these things. If you truly need permissionlessness, which will give you the next point, censorship resistance, then you want a public permissionless chain. And so with censorship resistance, there is the argument that even public, even sorry, even private chains are censorship resistant because you can go ahead and deploy your own private ledger and nobody else can stop you. It's not censorship resistant in the way people talk about it in the public space where really any node can choose to exclude any other node and they have positives and tradeoffs to that or any node can choose to exclude any other party and there's positives and negatives to that, but it is possible whereas with the public chain, it's not. So those are really the two major things that you won't be able to get in the private blockchain space. You can still get to a very high degree of censorship resistance in a private blockchain somewhat, but not anywhere near the same degree you will in a public one. And there's actually quite a lot of detail there that I think would probably take up the rest of this talk. So let's just leave it at that for right now. And so now I just wanna talk a little bit about DEML itself and kind of what the pros and cons of it are. So, or really the pros of DEML. So the first is that DEML has a, or it gives you a simplified stack. DEML is a very high level language that with its tooling abstracts away lots of concerns. So you don't need to make any assumptions about the underlying data storage or any of the core platform code, you get this very clean separation. You don't have to muck around with ABI's or other data formats that are very terse by necessity in some cases. And instead you can use very standard GRPC and JSON interfaces that also those interfaces themselves automatically derive from your code, which I think is really cool. And for DEML by virtue of it being a functional language, you get a lot more guarantees. So you get with DEML using the UTXO model essentially you have transactions that don't have unintended execution paths. Every execution path in every next step at a DEML application is known ahead of time. And for the majority of errors and issues, those are actually all caught at compile time before your application ever ends up on a network as opposed to execution time when it's live and running. You also get the ability to explicitly define, read, write and execute permissions, which DEML is going to enforce, which gives you these very explicit obligations and kind of ties back to earlier where I said, you know, if you need to trust somebody in part of your business application, then you should at least make sure you're explicit about it. And this really like make sure that you can specify who can read, who can write and who can execute on this smart contract without other parties being able to read, write or execute if they're not allowed to. And you also get a lot of platform flexibility and interoperability as just mentioned earlier, code that's written for most chains today, whether they're public or private, tend to have these very tight couplings of their execution environment and data storage. And also, so it's tied to their network architecture as well and these public and private deployments tend towards one or two platforms taking really the lion's share of the space. And so what that means is if you end up choosing an architecture that ends up not being one of the bigger winners in the space, then you might find you have a hard time finding support you need. And so with Daniel, we basically separate the runtime from the platform. The platform that it's running on will be used for its data persistence and consensus, which are very, very valuable parts of this whole equation. But then you then also have the flexibility and the ability to interrupt with other platforms or even just other nodes running the same software as well. And yeah, lastly, there's really no need for reconciliation. And this is one of the biggest pros of, I would say, blockchains in general in the space. And I think when you boil it down, like when people talk about using blockchains to solve business problems, what they're really talking about is the fact that there are all these people out there who desperately, desperately want to work together on a business problem. And what they end up with is if you keep a copy of your data, your client keeps a copy of their data. It's not in the same format. It's not following the same schema. It doesn't have the same exact expectations. You could imagine if you were to give five programmers the same exact RFC and say implement the spec such that it can act, such that these applications can interoperate with each other. Of those five programmers, you might get back six or seven different implementations. It's very, very hard to match specs together with these things. And so really with Damol, you get the very simple ability to codify all your operations between two or more parties that want to work together but are going to otherwise not be able to match their specs. And what this boils down to is that both parties can share the same schema and keep the same matching set of records relative to the parts of records that they are authorized to see and use without having disparate records that are going to periodically fall out of sync with each other and need to be reconciled with each other. That reconciliation on top of just being really, really hard to do in general is also very expensive in and of itself. And yeah, so I am actually getting close to the end of my presentation here, but I just wanted to show you a little bit about what Damol looks like in case you're unfamiliar and kind of how it codifies these processes. So like I said before, Damol has these abilities to say, who can sign off of my contract? This is like a signatory to a real-life contract that you would sign on a piece of paper. This is the person authorizing it. These are observers. These are who you share the contract with such that they can see it.  And then you can be very explicit about who can do what, when, with the contract. So for example, to accept BRIOU, that's over here, the recipient can actually choose to accept it and go ahead and create that actual obligation. Or the recipient can go ahead and reject it and essentially archive this contract. All this little function down here does is it archives the contract. So like I mentioned earlier, Damol is a UTXO model, which makes reasoning about the state of your contracts very simple. And so when you run one of these choices, the contract itself archives and the other choices aren't going to be able to execute because you need an active contract in order to execute a choice on it. And so that's really all that does. It's a little helper function. And really that's what it looks like. And it gives you quite a lot of things from there because that little bit of code, actually, this is all the code to my front end. I'm not the best at writing front end code. Maybe somebody could write somewhat meter code than me. And obviously this presentation isn't very clear because it was too much to fit on a slide. But it does show you that you get quite a lot for free and you can have a full featured application with very, very little behind it other than the business logic here. Right now you'll notice we haven't worked with, we haven't worried about our data persistence. We're not worrying about our actual deployment here. We're not worrying about any sort of consensus because both deployment and consensus are largely handled by the blockchains we run on top of. We're not worrying about our JSON API or GRPC API. All that is free. And I think that's pretty great. And yes, so in conclusion, and obviously if anybody has any comments or questions, we still have a bit of time here, but I'd say not everything needs to be public. And really in most interactions, you do end up trusting someone. So you might as well be explicit about it. And yeah, that's my talk. If I'll just ask you a question here, is Damol hosted as a platform or simply a programming language? It's actually both. So Damol itself, what I'm referring to Damol for the most part, I'm referring to the programming language. But we also have a essentially an SDK on top of it that we call Damol Connect. And that includes your JSON API, GRPC API. It includes a bunch of tooling to help you develop your applications. It includes co-generator tools that can make sense of your Damol code itself and make interfaces such that your user interface can easily hook into it in both JavaScript and Java and a lot of other stuff. And then yes, there are also places to host and deploy Damol code. So we have hub.damol.com.  And so can I talk a bit more about interoperability? Yes. So for interop, we have something called Canton. And what Canton does is it essentially allows you to, sorry. What Canton does is it allows you to take your Damol applications and without writing any other code, have them communicate across either the same blockchain, like if you have two fabric nodes and you want to interrupt between them or between completely different ones. So if you want your fabric node to talk to your sawtooth node and they're both running Damol smart contracts, Canton will be able to do that. So you can actually check it out at Canton.io. And you can also visit bit.ly slash try Damol.  I don't know if the Canton one's there. So I'm going to add that immediately after this call. But yeah, it's a great resource to start off with there. And Polly has a question. Can EVM and Damol be run simultaneously? Or is it either or? Say on Bessu, can Damol be run on public UTXO chains? So that's, there's a lot there. I would say, so when you're running Damol on Bessu, for example, if your code is in Damol, it can't directly talk to any code that's running purely in EVM because it wouldn't be able to enforce the guarantees from those contracts to the Damol contracts. So, you know, you could always rig up a compatibility layer or something there, but I would say that in general, when you're trying to do these things, like once you've committed to using your Damol code, it's not going to be able to interrupt with, or it's not going to be able to freely interrupt with non-Damol code. You'll need to either have a compatibility layer there or I'd actually recommend, you know, porting your code over. If you actually tried it out, you might find that it's actually pretty easy to do. And can Damol be run on public UTXO chains? The short answer to that is yes, of course, because Damol doesn't care about where it's persisting data. But again, Damol is just, is not actually, wouldn't be actually be executing on those chains, wouldn't be giving you the trustless properties of those chains. It would be writing data to those chains that then other people could read off of and maybe connect their own runtime to. We do have some slightly old examples of these things working. And we have, for example, a reference application that can, you know, execute Bitcoin transactions on a Bitcoin test network. And we also have some other things that can do similar stuff on a test of theorem network. But I would say that in general, it really is more geared towards private chains. And so what's this question from Jess? Could Damol manage a multi-chain hybrid model with some things being done on private and some things offload to public? Yes, absolutely. So Damol can like pretty much anything else out there interact with whatever you want. You know, you would just need to make it talk to the JSON API or GRPC API. And yeah, you could have a hybrid model like that. Oh, we also have a question from YouTube. Thanks, Steve. So Hamza says, can we consider smart contracts used by only one participant on a private network? Let's say three participants are there and each has their own smart contracts no one else is using. Is this a valid use case? Yeah, I can't see why that wouldn't be a valid use case. That's actually one nice benefit of Damol, too, is that you can go ahead and deploy this single node and a variety of people could use it for completely different applications and you don't have to worry about your node being application-specific. There are some cases right now where in some of the private space you have when you deploy your chain, you are deploying a very application-specific chain and Damol doesn't have that restriction. So yeah, that's a great question, Hamza. And it's definitely a valid use case. And yeah. Any other questions right now? Thanks again, Anthony. That was really informative. And thank you, everyone, who asked questions. A lot of good constructive discussion here. Yeah, absolutely. I got a lot of great questions. Again, before everybody leaves, and I'll actually say it, my email address is anthony.losarty at digitalasset.com. That's A-N-T-H-O-N-Y dot L-U-S-A-R-D-I at digitalasset.com. If you ask a question, this, of course, will be on the Honor System. Please go ahead and email me and I will make sure you get your t-shirt. No, we do have some pretty cool ones, in my opinion. But yeah, thanks, Chris and David, for having me and thanks everybody for listening and asking such great questions. Awesome. Thank you again. And we look forward to everyone joining the next meetup. And again, as always, if anything that you would like to present or talk about, please feel free to reach out to me and we'll try and fit you in within the schedule. Great, thanks everyone. Thank you. Thank you.


Of all the terrible things about our diets, high dietary sodium intake, high salt intake, is the leading risk, estimated to be causing millions of deaths every year, killing millions mainly through adverse effects on blood pressure, an increased risk of stroke, heart attack, and kidney damage. High pretension, high blood pressure is still called the silent and invisible killer, because it really causes symptoms, but is one of the most powerful independent predictors of some of our leading causes of death. It involves consuming a diet very rich in potassium and low in sodium, but today this pattern has been completely reversed. This flip reflects a shift from traditional plant-based diets, high in potassium and low in sodium, a shift from fruits, greens, roots and tubers to salty processed foods stripped of potassium, which is considered a nutrient of public health concern, because 98% of the US population doesn't even reach the recommended minimum daily intake of potassium, as I mentioned in the last video. The low potassium intake itself is implicated in high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, yet few physicians actually think about proposing their patients eat more foods that are potassium rich, like fruits and vegetables, to better control blood pressure. Even though several meta-analyses have now confirmed that high potassium intake appears to reduce the risk of stroke. There's even a reduction in stroke risk independent of blood pressure effects, consistent with other protective effects of potassium, such as reducing clot formation, reducing hardening of the arteries, reducing the generation of free radicals. Higher sodium intake is associated with a 20% increased risk of dying prematurely, where higher potassium intake was associated with a 20% reduced risk of dying prematurely. Yeah, but sodium is found in crappy processed foods, while potassium is concentrated in healthy foods like beans and greens. So having a low sodium intake and high potassium intake may just be a marker for a more healthful diet and more plant foods and less crap. How do we know sodium has caused an effect bad? Because randomized controlled trials show sodium reduction leads to blood pressure reduction, just like they're randomized controlled trials, showing that if you give people extra potassium, you can bring down their blood pressures as well. So what about using potassium chloride to salt your food rather than sodium chloride? That's what's found in these zero sodium salt substitutes. Potassium chloride is a naturally occurring mineral salt, which is obtained the same way we get regular sodium salt. Since we get too much sodium and not enough potassium, this would seem to make potassium chloride a win-win solution. Now whole healthy plant foods would be the best way to increase potassium intake. Fruits and vegetables have all sorts of other good things in them besides potassium, but we have 10 studies now. Randomized controlled trials showing that just swapping in some potassium chloride for regular salt can lead to significant reductions in blood pressure in people with hypertension, suggesting that salt substitutes may even help prevent hypertension as well. We know salt substitutes can lower blood pressure, but does it actually decrease the incidence of hypertension? And more importantly, disease endpoints like stroke and mortality? You don't know until you put it to the test. In a randomized controlled trial, households had their salt replaced with just a quarter of potassium chloride. At that level, most people either can't tell the difference or even prefer the salt with the potassium mixed in. Okay, but did it actually do any good? The use of even the quarter salt substitute was associated with cutting the risk of developing hypertension in half. Okay, but what about actually following people out to see if there's any change in the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease? Five kitchens in a veteran's retirement home were randomized into two groups. For about two and a half years, salting meals with regular salt or, unbeknownst to the cooks and diners, a 50-50 blend of potassium chloride. Those in the half-potassium group cut the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by about 40% and lived up to nearly a year longer. The life expectancy difference at age 70 was equivalent to that which would have naturally occurred in 14 years, meaning that just switching to half-potassium salt appeared to effectively make people more than a decade younger when it came to risk of death. As we speak, there's a massive randomized control trial wrapping up in China involving 600 villages and more than 20,000 people that'll give us an idea of just how low we can drop stroke risk with this strategy. China is perfect because up to 75% of their sodium intake comes from salt they add in the home kitchen or dining room, whereas most sodium in the American diet comes prepackaged in the meat and processed foods we buy. Those certainly the food companies could switch over themselves. Why haven't they? And why haven't more people embrace these salt substitutes if they work well and can taste just as good? We could be achieving the benefits of a high-potassium paleolithic diet without the toxicity. So, is salt substitution ready for prime time or what? What about safety? Yes, there are convincing arguments about the benefits, but what about the risks? Like, you know, the quote-unquote inclusion of potentially fatal salt substitutes in the food supply? Wait, what? We'll talk about the potential downsides next.


So ni qualani l актив vendors I admire a specha Gracias Isha sobun Hwa kwa Vietnam Hahu narega n enables the digital market relationship ya kwa watatiawa mwa inking kus MONDA r感謝 shark no vanilla They gave them deals and then at the end of the day, they disappoint sometimes. Even influencers are disappointed by the clients maybe they don't compile, maybe they have agreed on terms for payments and all that and then they fail. So I came up with the company, but before I was a film director. I've been a film director for almost five years now. So I switched because I met this Henry Desago, we started doing content together. I learnt a lot of things through him and so I decided now I have to come up with the strategies because there are many influencers coming up, there are many talented people outside and my interest was just to become a good person of raising gifts and talent. I've been an artist as well, I was a gospel artist and I'm still doing music and I'm still doing videography. I've done several videos for various artists here in Kenya. You mentioned something very important that every day influencers are coming up and just to put this across just for people to understand so who is an influencer and if there is a difference between an influencer and content creator? A content creator is someone who have creativity of building up a story or coming up with something that is trendy and influencer is someone who can influence people maybe in the marketplace to buy a product someone who can influence in terms of the content that he or she is creating it's something that is directly to something that is going to be influential to people so it depends because at the end of the day there are people who are becoming celebrities and then they opt to say that they are influencers but at the same time you find that here in Kenya we are applying even an artist to become influencers in companies you get a big artist like CurryGraf is on Odibert and all that and they are doing good because at the end of the day they are having followings in the social media because social media has power and if you are an influencer you must have power in the social media you have to have followings you have to have good connections with people and also ratings there are influencers who have maybe they have messed up and there are companies that can never give them businesses because at the end of the day they are looking at the image of the company and the image of the influence and then they find that it's not trending Okay, you get into so many things and before we even get into the aspect of branding let's go back to what you have said was important that for you to be an influencer you have to have the numbers so is that the only thing that is needed if I have the numbers then how am I an influencer now? there is another thing, character you have to have a character before even you become an actor or an artist you have to have a character or an actor a character or an artist you have to be a good singer maybe you have to be a good rapper for you to become a good artist the same thing, an influencer most of them they are comedians a comedian can be an influencer most of the people from Churchill's shows now are influencers they are doing influential, they are very influential to the society and so you must have that character and also you have to have ability of creativity you have to be creative like in a day you have to be creative you have to create content you have to have something to tell people so that you can make them be motivated or laugh alright and let's speak now on the branding aspect of it because you have mentioned a couple of influencers and they are doing different things on ground so how do you, I am interested someone who is watching this conversation and they are interested to be in this space whereby they are influential that they can actually even run there it's like you employing yourself it's a self employment kind of a thing because now I can get to work with brands and from that particular perspective how can I brand myself to be unique and different first of all you have to know your uniqueness get to know what's the difference between you and another person maybe in Jogush and Omosh you have to get to know like in Jogush karaktayake is this one Omosh karaktayake is like this you have to get to know what you can do best other than the other things that people are doing like music, being komiko you have to get to know your best at this and now you run with it now you just create and also associate with other creators so that they can style you up then now when you have been start up you will find like maybe you are a stand up comedian you become a stand up comedian there are those comedians you can't call them here to do a stand up they just do it randomly like they shoot, they review, they revive maybe they can act as two characters in one video and so that's very difficult for them to be a stand up comedian because they can't act both characters at the same time so first of all you identify your potential you get to know where your best at and then from there now you start working on it consistency and then send yourself so you should just stick to your lane yeah yeah yeah don't be someone else you be yourself okay and we have this situation earlier on in your study in this conversation you mentioned that we have influences that come up people who get noticed in the society and they are labeled like the star like we had the Isit Uhuruwa Umoja the guy who resembles our president Umkenyata and then he was there's so many brands wanting to work with him and then later on the whole situation went on silent currently if you ask me the last time I had of Uhuruwa Umoja I will tell you probably I can't remember yes or maybe now because we were here and you were talking you mentioned he was here on Friday so what do we usually go wrong as people who want to get into the limelight and just make a name for yourself what do you go wrong for such kind of a face he just came up and everybody was on him but now the problem was there are many people outside who are looking for such people to make money through them or to make a name with them so there are those people who created an account I got a person who created an account for Uhunye he started doing the clips wherever he goes he gets the clips he posts them he makes money out of it but at the end of the day this person was not having anybody to direct him on the ways to go so the guy it reached a point and he went back to the things that he was doing after all the companies that had given him deals they start feeling like they are wasting because at the end of the day this guy is not influential then so when I came into his life I saw him as an executive person because he looks like Uhuru so I picked him and I branded him now we are in the process of creating content with him doing the script writings for him and making image even we are doing auditions last week we were having another audition that Uhuru is coming to have an event and he will be performing for the first time so I am looking at that image in a position of thinking on how he can be an executive for the society he can talk positive like the way Uhuru is he can do creative things for the society and all that but not just being someone who is just influential for nothing because first of all I have identified his character I have discovered what he is best at then now I am able to know how I am going to fix it okay and for someone who is watching us probably influence and wondering I have the numbers why will they come to ultra focus solution one thing is that many people are failing because of you can't be even if you are your own boss you can't do all these things together you can't be thinking on the content thinking on how you are going to shoot some of them they shot for themselves with a phone like Mungayiv and others but at the end of the day they get some connections they become great and have their media team but you see you can't be going to look for clients at the same time you are answering the mails you are on DMs you are on shootings you can't do all those things because not paid you you go demanding for client payments and another thing you can't be walking along the streets all the time like we used to work with Desago on the streets everybody know him so at times he will forget that he was doing something or he was to do a content because now he is not able to multitask most remen they are not good in multitasking so ultra focus come in make sure that we are connecting with the right people we can go and chase business we go to companies we ask for deals we analyze the company we get to know the weaknesses of the company we are able to see this company maybe it is during a real estate company we are able to know if it is in Malindi we are going to source for an influencer in Malindi also we not only manage influencers we also source for the companies maybe you have a yard we source for you depending on the region if you are in Kisumu we can't bring an influencer in Kisumu we get some voice corresponding to the area so it's more like a marketing agency yeah it's a marketing agency so someone who is watching us but they are not in a position to have a manager and they are content creators it comes to negotiation what a couple of tips you could give us that will make them stand out in that particular room first of all you have to check on your as I said character is the most important thing because you can get an influencer and you manage the influencer and then when he is going to get deals he is not transparent to you with you so in one way or another you will find like you are competing with your influencer he is doing this you are doing this another thing is that management and marketing we have to do contract we have to create a contract maybe it can go for one year or two years and then we are able to every month or after three months we review we see where we have done good for you and where you have done good for the company then we are able now to strategize and see how we are going to bring in and at the end of the day we have to make sure that you are earning even not only by getting clients for you also from YouTube and social media because they are paying so we create content for you and make sure that at the end of the month you have the rent, you have some cash too for your bills and all that let's look at ways a content creator can actually make money apart from just the platform social media like YouTube there are those like feeds at times you can get a client telling you post for me a poster and you charge some 5,000, 10,000 another question from that what estimates that this particular post is going to go for 10,000 and this is going to go for 50,000 and probably the other 100,000 if there is no image of an influencer you can't overcharge but when your image is used you overcharge another thing is your followings if you have higher followings like Desagu is almost one million you can't compare him with another person who has 100,000 followers so it depends it depends with the following and the ratings as well also you do the analysing analysation of how people are engagement the engagements of your account how people are engaging, how people are responding because even when you when you are getting an influencer for your company you have to check am I going to benefit am I going to sell anything am I just use these influencer no awareness because one is we do influencers in companies for awareness and another one for sales okay and there is a situation whereby I've seen this in a couple of YouTubers as well where they reach a point where there is a block of creativity how would you advise someone to handle that particular kind of situation it depends because maybe someone has a male family he started with no family now he has a family so it depends but at the same time you need to have a creative team when you have a creative team you can be waking up and you don't have idea and those guys will sit down like Jogush he has creative teams a team that works for content, scripting locations videos it's a big team that is helpful that he don't need to think too much they already know the character of Jogush so when they are coming in they are coming in as they work for him he comes in as an image he is told this is the script act it couple of ways they can also maintain what they have currently if they are influencers and that is their line of business how can they maintain the problem is as we are going as the way life is going things are changing people are doing kikis something is not there but they make it be there you can fake even disease nowadays just to play around with the people's perception I see what you did there but the thing is you are faking it so even influencers some of them are forced to do that another thing is that influencers are affecting lives of people because some of them are living a fake life they are forcing things when you are watching and maybe you are watching a certain lady who is an influencer all the time he goes to these supermarkets he gets deals on offers he exposes how the house looks like he gets decors and then you are like even me want to have even you can be a stubborn to your husband when you are demanding those things but at the end of the day this guy is getting endorsements and he is getting all those things for free so sometimes it is good even an influencer to be real tell people we are getting these things for free but you can go buy them I am just marketing I am a marketer I am selling them I am making sure that you are getting good deals and you are going to get those stuffs at a good price that's it but now most women are very stubborn to their husbands because they want the same thing okay let's talk about collaborations I have seen a couple of influencers who feel like I have been into this particular space so how important is it for influencers different influencers collaborating together it's very important because different people new talents are coming up and some are in high school today so in the next 2 years there will be big stars and the one who have been there before will come down so when you are collaborating you are gaining from the other influencer maybe this influencer has different followers from Malindi but when you collaborate you get followers from Malindi and the other one gets from Nairobi so it benefits in gaining power and gaining people and also making you get known where you have not been known and how to balance between what people perceive you to be the limelight and actually living your real life so that you don't fake it out here and put unnecessary pressure on yourself in this life you have to face such you have to face such because someone will tell you today we are going to have an event and we are forced to wear white and you don't like white, you have to wear white so it's the same thing you will be forced to have some changes in your life but it depends where you are standing at if you say no it's no because you can be told now you are introduced to peer pressure maybe drugs, alcohol and you are never used to as a person where to stand at what to refuse and what to accept a couple of challenges do you face when working with content creators one is that when they start getting money if they never had money before they become stuck on some of them they start living someone else's life so there you can't tell them anything some will tell you that you have made a lot of money now you have to give me this cut they force you to something that is not possible and you remember some of them they come with no content they don't have cameras, they don't have anything so you work with them from scratch maybe someone has been doing content it has been good that they have views and all that but it's not quality when they come to ultra focus we give them quality and with that quality we enhance that of higher standards but now they as they engage with the client some of them they are carried away then there comes misunderstandings and all that but most of them are loyal couple of tips that you could give to content creators who are listening to this conversation and it could help them in the long run be yourself be a go getter because I have many guys on my inbox I am a content creator I am a comedian I am an artist one thing that I tell them show me what you have already done show me what you have now if you are standing there and you are waiting for someone to come and help you pick you where you are and style you up no it won't happen it's you to move go knock those doors ask for other influencers go act with them as an extra then from there you will be able to stand one day and you become a style alright and you are going to work with Disago so what would you say that stands out for you just by working with him working with him have given me a lot of manpower in terms of people getting to know me one and also people getting to know what I do because the videos the qualities that recentry has been there and also other influencers have been coming some of them have been up coming when I was working with him and now they are big people now they have gained followers and all that and again I have gained clients of high end we started with small clients from town businesses and now we have companies that we are having some endorsements and deals and contracts it has been good for me so for someone who wants to keep up this conversation they want to get in touch with you and they want to know the way forward when it comes to content creation and just probably managing aspect of it how can they reach out to you we have a website called ultra forecast digital solution also our social media accounts is ultra forecast studios so you can get us there ok thank you very much Steven so on Jenga we are just talking about aspect of content creation managing also content creators thank you very much thank you so that is Steven he is the CEO of ultra focus digital solutions so make sure you keep up with him if you want to keep the conversation going at Y244 channel is where you can find us across all our social media handles Michelle Lashira so you can find me across all my social social media accounts