My name is Elaine Gallant and I'm your host of Books, Books, Books, a live streaming series through Think Tech, Hawaii, where we'll be discussing the reading of books, writing of books, and everything in between and beyond. Today's discussion is with Rita Forsythe, my hope cohort in crime literally, because she and I have authored crime novels. Rita will also be hosting the show on an alternating basis beginning January the 4th, so be sure to mark your calendars. Right now, however, we'll be interviewing one another about Amazon's newest reading experience, Bella. We're going to delve into its culture as well as its benefits for readers and authors alike. Rita, my friend, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me tonight. Oh, it's my pleasure. You've published two novels so far on Bella. So first, can you tell us a little bit about your novels? Sure, I'd be happy to. My first novel is Under the Monkey Pot Tree, and that is a fictional work based on the legends of the Hawaiian mo'o and the la'ie pan here in Kihe. So I was inspired to write this to bring attention to the cultural and environmental significance of the wetlands. Elaine, I don't know what your weather has been like over the past couple of days, but we've been getting rain and mud. And I tell you what, if it wasn't for our healthy wetlands, things would be a lot worse for us here in Kihe. I agree with that. Even on the Lahaina side, the dry side, I agree. So. Oh, sorry. Now go ahead. You were going to tell me about Paper Dolls, I think. Yeah, well, let me tell you a little speck about Monkey Pot. In that novel, a woman arrives on the island of Maui to claim an unexpected inheritance. Don't we wish? And she soon realizes there's a dark side to paradise. So on to the second novel, Paper Dolls. That's a psychological thriller about identical triplet women. And of course, this is fiction. And they live in a remote farmhouse in Colorado. Paper Dolls is a cringe worthy mix of crime and comedy. So both books, Elaine, are available on Vella and they will be fingers crossed available on ebook and print next year, 2022. That is great, Rita. And I've read both your novels. Well, I'll say I read the first one into the Monkey Pot tree, but I'm working on the second one. Thanks. Love that. So Elaine, you've been published. What's your experience publishing The Fifth Sea and where the lilacs bloom? Well, The Fifth Sea was a paperback novel and an ebook. So and that was during Create Space Time. And that's about a rookie CIA officer who's left for dead after his first assignment only be taken deep into the CIA to help solve an illicit diamond operation. So that experience was slightly different from my experience on Vella with where lilacs bloom. Now, that novel is where God asked a grieving young woman to be an instrument of peace. But her promise proves harder to uphold once the devil gets involved. But both novels were easy for me to pose as an author. But Vella turned out to be even more so. I think it's more reader friendly as well. I really do. So let's talk about Vella in particular. What's been your experience at Vella? Because you started it. You got me involved. You're the groundbreaker. Tell readers what is Vella and what it means for them. Good questions. So everything that I say today, you need to know that it could change tomorrow. Our platforms are changing as we speak. But I think Vella is here to stay. So I can tell you my story. I can tell you my experiences. Please do. Yeah, I completed The Monkey Pot Tree. And about six months later, I was kind of trying to figure out how to best bring this book to my readers. And I was hacking through the jungle of the publishing world. And that's no fun. I'd rather just write, you know. Yeah. So I heard about this Vella program on Amazon. And they were saying it would be to offer readers stories told one short episode at a time. So that picked my interest. Well, but what is Vella? I mean, can you give us a more understanding of what it means for readers? Sure, sure. It is serialized fiction. And that's nothing new. Charles Dickens, Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, wrote in serialized versions. And, you know, we watch TV, we watch Netflix, some of us. And we're used to short chapter-like episodes. So now with Amazon, they have brought us that in book form. And it's just like watching a 20-minute episode on TV. Yeah, like L.A. Law or something. But now in reader format. So for some writers, they like to write and then pop the episode on right away immediately, like that very day. I don't do that. I haven't been brave enough to do that quite yet because I do a lot of editing before I want it to be public. So I complete my manuscript all the way through before I put the episodes on. And then I feather on the episodes a couple of day until the whole manuscript is on there. Yeah, I think you've got to be kind of brave to write on the fly like that. I'm like you, Rita, where I have to write and rewrite and write and rewrite until I finally get it to where I'm really happy. So I'm like you, where I wanted to put everything out. And I think you took your time in putting your episodes out. I think you put one episode out and then waited a week. And then you put another episode out and then you waited a week. And then for the next one, you're doing it a little differently, I think. I know what I did is I put the whole thing out in episodes. I hope put the whole novel of where Lilacs bloom out. Yeah, I put one out like every day, every two days as quickly as I did my last final double check before I sent it out into the world. Yes, would you agree that Vella is sort of like a shortened novella? Yeah, I think that's probably where it got its name, don't you? I think so, too. What did Amazon start, Vella? It's a really new program. It started this July, you know, six months ago. And I was one of the early adopters. I jumped in right before the launch. And since then, and that was with Monkey Pottery. And then since then I have finished paper dolls and got that on there. So it's a brand new program. Fantastic. Can you tell us where you found it and how you found it? I mean, I had never heard about it. You brought it to me and I've been writing for a little while. Well, I started seeing it on Facebook and I also have some other author friends who had heard about it and they hadn't done it yet. They hadn't put any work on there yet, but they had heard about it. So I thought, hmm, might be interesting. So I did some research and your listeners might be interested to know to know where they can find it. Go to Amazon.com on your browser. Apple users can find it on their Kindle app. Android users, unfortunately, not yet. Soon, I think it's cost. And it's only available at this time in the United States. But soon we'll be coming to Canada. Our dearest neighbor and friend and other countries in Europe. And so we're really excited for launching worldwide. How do readers read Vella? How does that process work? Let's say I want to read.  But let's say someone new is coming in and they want to read some episodes. How do they go about that? So if you are an Apple user, then you can read it on your browser or on your Kindle app. If you are an Android user, you can find it on your browser. That's it right now. And how do they pay for it?  And when you buy an ebook, you pay a price. So how do you pay for Vella? How do you do that? Really different. That's a really good question, Elaine. Each episode amazingly just costs pennies. And by the time you are finished with the entire novel, it's really a lot cheaper than if you bought the paperback book full price or the ebook. And so you purchase tokens on Amazon.com. And these tokens give you access to installments of between six hundred and five thousand words. And you can pick any book in any of the there's about ten thousand or more books on already in the past six months. And you can use these tokens to read multiple books at a time. You can switch back and forth. The cool thing is the first three episodes are always free on every novel. And at least at this point, they are.  And right, your investment is very could be zero if you're not enjoying a book, which sometimes happens, right? But if you're enjoying it, then you get the first three chapters for free. And then then you start paying the tokens, right? And they can even stop that at any time if they get into chapter ten and want to move to another book, right? Yes, yes. And then they go back to that book and buy. More episodes if they want to. Yes, it's very possible. So what are some of the other pros to Vella and also what are some of the cons? Let's see. So I think for pros, you know, we've talked about the low cost and the ease of access, but also readers can give thumbs up and they can fave, you know, their favorite stories. And kind of one cool thing for me as an author is I can write in authors' notes some of my thinking. So, for instance, when I was doing The Monkey Pottery, I did research on Hawaiian cultural points of interest on the pond, on the moos. And I would put my references down there, even though it was a fiction book. I would put my references in the author's notes. Authors can also, you know, write about what they're thinking at the time when they wrote it and why they wrote the words they did. So it's another form of interaction between the reader and the writer. So that's some of the pros, so cons. Well, one thing I was thinking, and you probably have some ideas to Elaine, but I was thinking that a lot of us are on the computer all day and working digitally and with eye fatigue. Sometimes people just want to relax at night with a paperback book in their hand, you know, and so that would be one of the cons for more digital access. What do you think? Is there is there anything else to add to that, Elaine? Well, I can think of a few cons. One, it's hard for the writer to give an autograph on an e-book or a Vella book. You can't really wrap it up for Christmas either, can you? You can't gift wrap it. And an e-books and Vella books have no heft, aside from the device you're reading them from, where a book has heft. And that's that that has some warmth to it, right? Living a page and, you know, but everything's become so digitally. But I can think of a thousand pros as well, like, for instance, with the digital books, you can highlight, you can take notes, you can look up definitions right away, just touch it. You can.  You can't do a hardback or a paperback, right? You've marked it up. E-books don't take up any shelf space. Neither do you, neither do the Vella books. You, they don't need to be dusted. And here's the good thing. When you travel, you can take your entire library with you, right? So there are some real benefits to digital and to Vella books that paperbacks and hardbacks don't offer. That's true. Sorry, I have a little cold going on. It's okay. I have a question for you, though. Sure. You've published both in traditional and Vella format. Can you discuss the evolution of the original hardback novels into episodic serials? Yeah, it's kind of interesting because, you know, things started with the hardback, going to paperback and hardbacks are tomes almost. You know, people built libraries around them and stored them forever and they are collectible items. And same with paperback, but then the pocketbook came around. And I don't know if people know about the pocketbook.  And you could just pull it out and read a few chapters or whatever. After that came novellas and now episodic serials. And I would do want to mention that the first paperback came out around 1935 by Penguin Books. And then again in 1938 by pocketbooks with Pearl Bucks, The Good Earth. And then the first digital, look again, my notes here, 1997 with the rocketbook. And these two men, Eberhardt and Tarpening, were lifelong voracious readers. And they saw a future where everyone would be reading digital books. And that's from Google. I got that source from Google. So it's quite interesting, the evolution of things.  And that's how we're reading now, that we can read instantly 20 seconds or 20 minutes or whatever we have. And not lose pace with what's happening in a novel. And that's where that's where Bella's pretty incredible. Yeah. And you know, I know my attention span is getting shorter and shorter. It's quite good for that. Oh, I just thought of another pro of books versus ebooks and Bella, and that is books pay bigger royalties. Because they're more expensive, right? So for writers, we, we earn a little bit more, but you don't have that interaction with the reader like you do with Bella, where they can give you a high five or a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And then as you're writing, you know, you can actually change the course of the novel based on the emotions that you're getting from readers at the time. Right. On a book or on a paperback, you have to wait for the reviews to come out and then it's kind of late. Right. The job is done. No one must rewrite that thing. Do you have any other pros and cons of print versus digital for the writer? Yes. It's, it's the higher royalties, number one. And, but both get your, get both get your book out into the world. Both offer the highlighting and note taking and a quick flip back and forth to mark pages and sharing between family members, except what digital all happens with a touch of a button, you know. So, and we've already talked about the other benefits. So let's see. Is there any benefits to the author to publish on Bella that you haven't talked about yet? Well, there are, you know, we have identifiers for a book. So let's say you're looking for a mystery or a thriller or suspense or something. Those are identifiers. And with Bella, you can change them almost daily. Let's say the trend is thrillers and your book has all of the elements of a thriller and a mystery and a suspense. So your first one is thriller and you can change that daily, you know, depending on what's going on. And I already said you can correct your novel as you go along. If you, if you're putting it on in episodes and, and that's how you're posting it to the system. And then the interaction with the reader. I mean, that's priceless to be able to put notes in as an author to the reader that, that says, you know, this building exists in France. And I visited it in 1997 and, you know, or I went into this tomb and this and this happened, you know, that's priceless for readers because they get that little bit of insight and authenticity to the book that authors put that authors give. So that's wonderful. For the beginning writer, Bella is extremely author friendly. Very, very author friendly. It's not scary at all. And it's not neighbor intensive as it is for traditional publishing. It is so simple. We can all do it. We really can all do it. If I can do it, anybody can do it. Well, what, what, what can you tell me about reader? What's your experience been in the benefits for you as a writer with Bella? I know that they right now are giving out bonuses to authors because it's a new program. And I know that will disappear eventually. So right now we're all earning a little bit more, maybe a little closer to a novel that that's in print. So what else have you seen? That's, that's been wonderful for the author or even the beginning author because, you know, you started with under the monkey pod tree. So in that sense, how did you navigate? What fears did Bella put aside for you as an author to put your book on Bella versus going right to Kindle or to print? Well, I first tried traditional publishers and you have to go through an agent and query multiple agents and wait multiple months for a response or not. And that's discouraging for the, the new author. It is the rumor that the saying is wallpaper your wall with the rejection letters and have a good laugh. Yeah, so I was really frightened about that because I've never done it before. And I also was worried about the permanence of like, what if I made a mistake and what if I said something that wasn't quite right or in, you know, something incorrect. And so I had a lot of fears, but with Bella, it's just you push a button and it's live. It's, it's on there and the formatting is done for you. It's just so incredibly simple that it just, it was really fun and it's exciting to watch your readership grow. And you have a little dashboard where you can see who, you know, how many people are reading each episode. And it's just very motivating to keep going, keep going. And so we need writers out there to not be afraid to publish. There's so many people I have talked to that say, Oh, I've always wanted to write a book or I have an idea for a book. And I think this is going to open up the floodgates of some amazing talent out there. What do you think? I agree with that. I would like to know though, Rita, what are some of the reader comments that you've been getting? I think you've had some interactions. You know, it's, they can't really comment on the device itself, but they can, you know, if you provide your email or Instagram, Facebook, that kind of thing, you can get a lot of comments from people. People are saying, where's the next book? You know, I've stayed up all night reading the book. Where's the second book of the monkey pot tree? It's just great to hit to hear how people, this one person said that she related so much to one of my characters and she said, that's just the way my daughter was acting. It just brings a lot of joy to a new author. Yeah, I had one reader say about where lilacs bloom. She says, I've always worried about this happening. You know, God coming to her and asking her to do something and then the devil getting involved and messing it all up for her. So, you know, it was quite fun to, it's fun to interact with readers, wouldn't you agree? Oh yeah. Yeah, it's another dimension. It's kind of that third dimension, you know, you read, you write, but then to interact between the reader and writer, it's something that I've never experienced before. It's really a kick. I agree.  Will you continue to write for Vella or will you eventually take your books off and put them into print? Well, if I can keep them on both platforms, I'm going to do that. If I can't, if it just goes to print, I'll just move them into print after a while. But once I start on my third novel, I plan on doing the same process. I think it's a great way to get started and to kind of try out your materials also. Yes. And do you have a title for your third novel? Is it a sequel to either under the Monkey Pod Tree or Paper Dolls? It's a sequel to under the Monkey Pod Tree. And I'm thinking it'll be under the Eucalyptus Tree. So we'll see. And then you need to do one under the Lay Tree. Maybe. A little Plumeria Tree. Or maybe Happy Bush. There you go. It's funny as authors. We always have other books going on, right? So we have one called Bird's Nipucca. And the other one is called Tentra Hooks that I'm working on. So that's quite, quite fun to be thinking ahead on all these things and planning what direction we're going to take our novels, right? Yes. What are you reading right now, Rita? Well, I'm reading your book where Lilax Bloom on Vela. And on my Kindle, I'm reading a fellow Hawaiian author, Toby Neal. I'm sure a lot of our viewers know Toby Neal. Yes, I'll be interviewing her on January the 18th. Oh, yeah. I'm reading her blood orchids book. How about you? What's on your bedside table? Well, of course I read your Monkey Pod Tree book and I'm going through paper DOS now, but I'm also reading Amor Tolls, The Lincoln Highway. And then I also have The Liars Dictionary by Ellie Williams. And then I'll be interviewing Alan Brennert in February, so I'm reading Daughters of Malakai. So that's all, all good reading right now. Rita, thank you for joining me today. It's, it's in our discussion of books, books, books and Amazon's newest reader experience in Vela. It's been my pleasure. I hope it's been your pleasure. We give thanks to Think Tech Hawaii, because in general, for the technicians, the staff, the production crew, and in particular the executive producer, Jay Fadal. We also, gracefully thank our viewers and all of you who've donated funds or provided financial grants in keeping Think Tech Hawaii streaming for over 20 years with the promise of going forward. So thank you very much for that. We simply can't do it without you. In closing, Rita and I wish you excellent reading. Watch me to show January the 4th on your books, books, books. And mine on January 18th with Toby Neal. Thank you. Mahalo and good.


Going on everyone Sam here with late in sports cards rip in at 23 top Star Wars chrome black hobby 12 box case number six random auto or pack style. We're gonna do the random now can roll the dice We've got 24 participants We're gonna go six times one two three four five and six Jamon L down to William and I'm gonna get cod today to Steve. I'm gonna get cod when I get home Six times on your autos or packs. There's auto one through 12 representing box one through 12 and pack one through 12 again representing the same thing Six times one two three four five and six gonna go auto four down to pack seven right Jamon L with auto four Lynn F with auto two at Thomas K pack 11 Shigunori you auto five Jamon L pack 10 William H with pack two Matt P with auto six Scott f pack five Socrates J auto nine Joseph H pack three name QL auto eight Daniel T auto 12 the door H pack six Jerry B pack 12 Paul K with auto one William N with pack four William H pack nine Thomas K auto seven Justin Oh auto 10 Sean P pack one bow P auto 11 William N auto three Brandon W pack eight in William N with pack seven. All right, so we got these copied over really quick I'll get tired of the cheaters. So I'll switch to fortnight. Yeah, that's fair Well, let's play cod together then Steve. It's guys ducking us, man Steve's ducking us. He doesn't mess with us Steve Steve don't like us man. He said I'll send him some beer Maybe that'll get him off my back for a little bit to play play video games with yeah, maybe they'll stop asking me if I send them send them beer All right, open the case here. We've got Boxes on my left here one through six and Seven through twelve. All right, that's one through six And then here's seven through twelve And top the bottom you can see empty box up top Good luck here everybody start with let me organize these really quick Link you ready for this All right, let me get this organized really quick Sort by column B All right, auto one is Paul K. Pack one is Sean P select Sean and Paul It's a 199 Lando Calrissian. Nice one there on the refractor We've got work to 75 on the blue. Nice one there as well and a rancor And a rancor so that's pack one right there auto one go to Paul is a gold of general Hux 11 of 50 Domino Gleason is general Hux Grats on that very nice. All right box to auto two is Lynn F. Pack to William H got Mace Windu Yoda And Migs Mayfield some Bill Burr action there Auto two is gonna be Lin F. That is Crescent in nice one there. Carrie Jones is Crescent for us a fortnight All right auto three William N. Pack three Joseph H figure in DN Admiral Ackbar to 199 And blue to 75 Schmi skywalker Nice one there and auto three going to William N. Is gonna be a green Ned B 81 of 75 Ned B or Ned E No, Ned B. We're good. Ned B. Dustin Sight hammer sight hammer is Ned B All right auto four Jamon L pack for William N to 125 Poe Dameron This one there Poe Dameron. We've got Obi-Wan Kenobi is against Darth Vader and Yoda and Then auto four going to Jamon L is Braio, Organa. Nice one there Simone Cassell is Brio, Organa Very nice. Very nice. Very nice On to the next one Okay, so pack five before I open it Scott F auto five Shigunori you kiddle conics purple Newt Gunray Nice one there to 125 grad Scott and a Cobb van Cobb van We've got auto five going to Shigunori is Captain Carson Tiva nice one there Paul Sian Hung Lee as Captain Carson Tiva. That's on that very nice and Pack six Theodore H auto six is Matt P. So good luck here Theodore I know Theodore's first break of Star Wars with us so you can get you something big out of the pack All right, we've got a job of the hunt Boss Nass to 199 nice one there and green R2 D2 Congrats on that Theodore pretty solid one of the better cards we pulled in this break for sure Grats on the little R2 action absolutely and Then auto six going to Matt P is Elea Kane nice one there Katie O'Brien as Elea or Eli a cane Rats on that Let's see what's going on in bot land now. He's gone now. He's back sitting down again Again everybody we've got Lane still got a couple of breaks left some mixers all that kind of good stuff Fanatics live with Lane on to number seven auto seven Thomas K pack seven William N Thomas and William here believe that could be a red Nice is so katano to 75 on the blue great pack there William That's buddy. That's Count Dooku and Yoda Fantastic fights and Mon Mothma. That is four of five for long nice one there Chris Parsons is for long Need the text since I have Star Wars. There you go Theodore. I Love it dude. That's awesome. That's awesome All right, we've got pack eight is Brandon W. Auto eight is NAMQ L The Raiders. Okay. I got you. I got you sounds good. That's what I figured. That's what I figured Bale, Organa To 199 platoon I swung there Okay, no, no, you're good. I wanted to make sure I wanted to make sure that was the situation No, perfect. You're all good all good and Dak. Walter all good all good all good Raiders All good for sure Refractor auto is officer M. K. Okay Okay, I just won there congrats to NAMQ all right Pack nine is William H and auto nine is Socrates J. Oh nice purple Imperial Royal Guard. God. These guys are so cool That's why I want to be a fun Orange rancor to 25 really cool one there. Grats on that willy-mache good stuff, buddy and general veers Very nice All right, we've got a Auto is Jaquill Tim dry is jacquille or Jaquill nice one there That's Jake All right, auto 10 just to know pack 10 Jamon L We'll go back and watch I'm not a hundred percent sure if what you hit in it Raiders But there might have been one or two cards for sure Trying to think in seven. I don't remember off the top of my head Finn got a green Yaddle to 99 Yaddle Yaddle and a fantastic fight to Obi-Wan and Anakin Skywalker And then auto 10 going to just to know is Groff Ditcher nice one there. Heath McGee Three-numbered nice nice Take that like us with the twins and gilded Rory D with a bunch of teams and update jumbo Right, we've got auto 11 bow P pack 11 Thomas K general Hux Darth Maul and Qui-Gon Jinn and Ki-Adi Mundi and Auto 11 is bow P with a Claude nice one there Nick Kellington is Claude and then pack 12 Jerry B auto 12 is Daniel T That is Count Dooku So 199 Emperor Palpatine nice one there and gold Lando Calrissian nice one there congrats Jerry Good pack for you there. He has a really good pack really really good pack and auto 12 is Salacious be crumb 84 and 99 nice one there Mark Dodson as Salacious be crumb I'll do it for the break everybody. No recap on this one. Thanks again for the fill up next nothing


Hey everyone, welcome to Echo Calypso. We're here at the official Facebook page of Echo Calypso and we have a few banners coming out tomorrow. We first have these. So the thumbnail said which one should you pull. So for the vibration arms, they are actually going to be good to be summoning for the top. Basically the banners that I'm going to be discussing are the top SSRs that we have in the game. So one is Aika, Fenrir and Yulia. So if you have, you know, currency pulling for these vibration arms, be my guest, I will try my best to pull for these as well. They are a good addition to buffing your cases. So Aiken is here, Fenrir is here and Yulia is here. So we are here for the case evaluation, not for the vibration arms. So let's move to the first banner that we have. So this one is going to be up on October 26th, November 1, up to November 1. Okay, that is a very limited time. That's probably a week. So if you remember guys, we already got Fenrir as a free SSR. Indeed, if you want multiple copies of her, you can pull for this banner, especially if you want multiple copies. Also, if you want a copy of Yulia, this is in this banner. So both of them can be pulled from this banner. Again, it's a 50-50 rate up between Yulia and Fenrir, and it might not even be the both of them in case you pull for this banner. So this is just a rate up banner for both. So again, if you're targeting Yulia, then you'll be good. Fenrir is basically your plus because she's already present in almost all of the accounts that started during soft launch and official launch. So this banner, it's actually by choice. Both are good. You're going to be using in your team Fenrir and Yulia. You can use them together. I'm using them currently together. So be my guest if you're opting for this banner. But I'm not really pushing you to get this because I am pushing you to get this banner. To go to this banner because this is a solo banner for Iken. The rate up is only for her, and Iken is one of the must-haves in terms of DPS for this game. You'll never go wrong with her again, guys. I made a tier list which pegs her as a must-have. She has an attack all for her ultimate and a lot of damage for that ultimate. Again, she's very hard to get, I tell you. So grab the chance to get on this banner as soon as it drops tomorrow. I'll probably be doing a summoning session probably late because I'll be traveling out of town. So I'm going to be pulling for Iken and this banner. I don't have her yet, and I'm excited to get her hopefully by tomorrow. So that is it, guys. Those are the banners, and I'm just going to be passing by some of the skills. A skin, sorry. This is Sova. So Sova is one of RSRs. So if I'm using her, I wouldn't mind getting this skin. Moving on to the next. This is Iken. So I'm not sure that I dig this skin, but it looks naughty. And let's go down to the new skins coming out. This is Snezhana. I like this one. Probably getting this. Hopefully as soon as I get my hands on my, what do you call this, on my account tomorrow. So we'll see. She has a tail as well. So what else? What else? Skin. So that's it. So also, we have a new code here, ECHO10KSEA. For those who have been playing from the start, you can use this 10,000 follower celebration. So that is it, guys. So again, those are my thoughts on the new banners coming out tomorrow. You know now what to pick. It's going to be Iken. And please do save up for her in case you don't get her. She's one of the best. So thank you very much guys for staying this far. Take care. Stay safe. This is The Warden and I'm out of here.


To me, the core element of really engaging agility being able to really be agile is all about feedback and the learning we get from feedback.  I mean, feedback is something that we've known about for a long time. Lots of different approaches that are based on feedback approaches. This one, Plan-Do-Study Act. Does anyone know where that comes from? Deming cycle, Schuert cycle? Yeah, absolutely. This one, the Build-Measure-Learn, has anyone seen that one? Lean startup, absolutely. How about the OODA loop? What's the meaning of that? That's the Observe-Orient Decide and Act. It comes out of the U.S. Air Force. John Boyd has been very active and it's very much the same thing. And then this type of feedback loop, the Control Loop. And all of these are really derived from the scientific method, the granddaddy of them all. It's all about what we observe, make some hypothesis, test and collect some data, analyze results, and accept or reject the hypothesis. How many of you were at Dave Farley's talk last yesterday evening? Okay, a couple. You're going to see a lot of very similar things. He brought in up the fact that the field of chemical engineering has particular ways of looking at things. Well, that resonated with me. I am a chemical engineer by training, petroleum engineering. Most of my career has been spent developing software for the chemical, well, mostly petroleum engineering system. So I developed software and managed teams of people that were learning how to explore and collect oil and gas. My background, I'm an executive roles in VP of Product Development, director of software and technology. At Halliburton, Landmark Graphics was a division of Halliburton. Doing some really cool things, very high-end performance, high-performance computing, 3D visualization, a lot of those things. I went to work for IHS, which is a data company, so I got exposed to data for oil and gas. I'm currently at Lean Canban. I'm the CEO of Lean Canban. My path to Lean Canban came through my accidental, perhaps, connection into the agile community. I had a chance meeting with Alistair Coburn, and he told me that he was starting a conference, which was the Agile Development Conference, the first one in 2003, and I had had some conference planning experience at my company and showed him some of the ideas we had done to really create a dynamic conference experience. He really liked it, and we brought a lot of that to the first. So I co-created the Agile Development Conference with him. Went on to run the Agile Conference for a couple of years, and was part of the Agile Alliance and also was a founding member and president of the Agile Leadership Network. I've been in the community for a long time. This is my fifth Agile India conference. I really enjoy it, opportunity to really share what I have learned over the years and engage with the community here. So what is business agility? What does business agility mean to you? This is business agility day. What does it mean to you? What's that? Responding. Responding to change, being able, and particularly to business changing conditions, right? So, what's that? Big stylus, okay, that's potentially something as well. All in the vein of trying to respond to a business. Over my period of time looking at things, part of the reason I got pulled into the Agile community was I had been working in a particular way. I had been working in the way that I had been trained as a chemical engineer, which was very much iterative and based on feedback. And I was working in a very dynamic organization that was just really well connected to its customers. And so I had an exposure of what I felt was really business agility back in the 1990s before Agile even existed. And so then when I saw the Agile community and what was happening, I finally found my home of what was going on and started to look at that. Yet what we say is in retrospect, looking back in the 90s, really the thing to me that drove us, I look at these things in terms of people process and technology enabling the business, what was really important to us, what we really had right, we had a great connection to the business and we created an environment where people were able to work it. We had great connections to our customers. Our customers loved us. We had great feedback loops with our customers. And we created an environment where people were empowered to do the right thing. So if I look at what's happened in a lot of Agile transformations, what I see is they start down here. They start processing technology. Yet I think where real business agility is up here in the people and the business. And so in the spirit of the Agile manifesto, I have come to value business agility over Agile transformations. Agile transformation in and of itself is pretty useless unless it enables business agility. So that's not to say that Agile transformations can't provide the leverage to get there, but you've got to have the goal. You've got to have the feedback loops that tell you how am I connecting to my customer and how am I engaging with the customers. So one of my first exposures here was the Scrum book, the very first Scrum book by Ken Schwaber and the late Mike Meadle, who was a fantastic individual tragic loss who was murdered last year in Chicago, which is just so sad. But this very first Scrum book, I got a little chuckle out of it because here again, as I'm coming from a chemical engineering world, Ken Schwaber is talking about how he was trying to, to a certain extent, discovered elements of Scrum or why Scrum worked. And he talks about how he was trying to sell a very heavy waterfall process to some chemical engineers at DuPont. And so he laid out the whole thing and they started laughing at him. And he said, why are you laughing at him? This is really wonderful stuff. It's great. And he said, it might look wonderful, but it'll never work. It can't possibly work because what you're truing is you're trying to apply a defined process model to something which cannot be controlled in a defined process way. We've discovered this in chemical engineering over and over. You have to, when you have processes which are not in advance definable, you need empirical process control. Empirical process control relies heavily on feedback loops. So here, the chemical engineering industry has taken this to great extent to a point where really complicated plants are automated. And there's a joke running around in the chemical, in the process control world that all future chemical plants like this, complicated ones, will be run by a man and his dog because they'll be so simple. And the really important part of it, the purpose of the man is to feed the dog. And the purpose of the dog is to bite the man's hand if he changes the valves because the systems were so automated. Now that's a joke, but the thing is to discover the fact that if you have process control feedbacks on automation, then you can actually control some very, very complex situations. And now we take that to the business world. So control systems here, the top one here is an open loop where it's an open loop or a defined process. We focus on inputs and the processes with the idea that we'll have very predictable results. The closed loop, our feedback system, is based on the feedback into the process and we look more at the outputs, right? And this is the part that makes it closed. Output feeds back into our input and we can control it. Here we're looking at things which we know in advance the process is so well defined that we have predictable and reproducible results all the time. So if we look at this, just in a schematic diagram, we have some output response, we have some controller, some process, and get some output. So very simple thing, not so popular here, but certainly in the western world and people love their toast, right? So they have a dial, that dial sets what color they want the toast. Now there's no feedback loop, what that really is doing is just setting a timer. That timer then goes in and we heat the bread up and out comes this wonderful brown toast. This is an example, I'm talking on a mic, I go through the amplifier and I get a sound. So something like this. Now what happens, this is an open loop system, what happens if I connect this back? So if I start talking and the sound starts getting louder and louder as I get closer and closer to the speaker, what's going to happen? Any idea? Screeching sound, so that is feedback, that is a reinforcing feedback loop. And what happens in a reinforcing feedback loop is the system gets out of control. That's not to say that these are bad, these can actually be quite good. If you want like an economic engine that's feeding itself and growth, a growth engine, this is perfect for a growth engine, but it's not a control system. So what we're looking for when we're trying to control work, flow of work, we're mostly looking for control systems. So control systems rather than having a positive feedback have a negative corrective action. So we start with some desired state, we take some corrective action in order to try to meet that desired state, then we have a process that happens which gives us some actual output through a sensor and feed it back. So let's look at a couple of very simple, simple of these that you can write that to. Here we've got a thermostat set and the thermostat just tells us to turn on or turn off the air conditioner or heater, whatever it may be set to do. So it's very simple, it's just a signal, sends a signal, this comes on off, then we get a new temperature, based on that new temperature, that feedback loop comes back to the thermostat and we keep the thing very much in control. So it's a control loop. Sometimes I feel like in the agile community we hear this word control and say, I don't want control, don't control me. Control is exactly what we want to control projects. We don't want to control people. It's how you control it that matters. We want to be within control. The opposite of control would be chaos. We don't want chaos or anarchy. But we want our systems which are under control, but control the system, not the workers. So I travel a lot and every time I come across a new shower, I've got to relearn it and figure out what's going on. But so what happens here? And I think a couple interesting things. So I've got a deviation, I've got a shower adjustment, I adjust it, turn it on, water comes out, I get a temperature, but I don't actually take a thermostat here, a thermometer, I use my hand, right?  Or the other thing is the flow rate as well, right? So I may have to adjust, I got two adjustments, right? Adjust the temperature, adjust the flow rate. But I can do this all, I don't have to do any calculate, there's no calculate, there's no numbers in it. It's all, and the reason this works is because the controller is a human, right? When the controller is a human, it's a relative subjective assessment, it's perfectly fine. When you're in a chemical plant, you actually have, and you're automating entirely with computers, you actually have to have set points and numbers. But here we don't. And that's good because when we're in project mode, projects have humans involved in them. So this tells us something pretty important in our feedback loops. Sometimes also we have more complicated or different types of valves. Like if I adjust one of these valves, I adjust the temperature, but my flow rate changes. So I've got to, often times we have to adjust two valves or two things to adjust. So there's multiple things in our feedback loop. We need to understand what those things are as we're doing it, as we get more complicated. So back to the basic situation here we've got. This is very simple, the reality is we get much more complicated. For example, we have multiple inputs, we have multiple outputs. We're measuring multiple things. This is called a multi-input, multi-output system. But the point is you've got multiple things you can try to control. And often times you can't control all, you can't adjust all of them independently. You can't, they're all interdependent. So you change one, you mess with the other. Just like I did in the two valve situation, I adjust one valve, more things change, right? This is a rally to the types of complexity that we have in the real world, right? Now we can start looking at this as well. What are some of the things we have in, for example, software projects? Well the output variables are things like value, schedule, cost, and quality. There may be many more than that, but these are the types of things we frequently have that we want to be measuring. And then we want to be making adjustments to those on an ongoing basis. This is how we get business agility. This is how we see, are we meeting the target? Are we meeting our customer needs? If not, maybe we should be doing something about it. So what are some of the things we could do? What are some of the things we have as knobs that we could work with? Well, I just list a couple of things. We can adjust scope, we can adjust date, we can adjust the team. We can add members to the team. We can shuffle people around on the team, move them around. We can adjust quality, make sure that our quality controls are better. We can adjust our processes so that we get better behavior through the system. These are the types of corrective actions we have available to us. And this is a type of feedback loops we need to be looking towards. What happens when we really focus in on one of those things? So we have a multiple of things, but what happens, and this is frequently one I see, where schedule rules everything. What happens when you say schedule is going to rule everything? Well, it becomes the big controller and we do everything, everything else becomes subservient to that, right? So this is a case study. This is the, we're essentially the same, a little bit, what happened? This is the Ford Taurus, it came out in 1986. At the time, Ford was nearly bankrupt. The company was doing terrible, the Chrysler Motor Company had just come out of bankruptcy or had gone in and out. So Ford was really struggling, and this car came out. And we look at it now and say, well, that's a pretty ugly car. But in 1986, it was pretty cool. It actually was a really, really effective car. The release of this in 1986 was just awesome. It saved the company. It was really, they really did, the project manager did all sorts of user group studies, customer surveys, to really hone in and make sure he met the market. Great job, right? Problem is he was six months late. So what do you think happened? He was demoted. He didn't meet the schedule. So now we fast forward to the second revision of the Ford Taurus. What do you think was the one thing the project manager made sure of? Made sure he was on time. Skipped all the special things that the first project manager did. No, we don't need any customer user, customer group feedback. And we don't need more prototypes. We don't need to check things out. We're just gonna make that date. Made the date. Horrible response. Way lower, I mean, just way, way, way less than the original rollout. So what happened? That's what happened there. Let me give you an example from my own company. The company I told you was doing so great in the 1990s. Well, later on, a new executive comes in. And we had, I could say at the time, our customers just loved us. We were delivering, but we were not on time with much of anything. We were always missing our commitments. We were making guesses and commitments, what we call commitments. But our customers really didn't care. They loved us because we were solving their problems. We were solving the problems that they had. But this new executive came in and said, well, I'm gonna reinvent this company.  This calendar of innovation means that every month we are gonna deliver something and it's gonna be hugely innovative and it's gonna deliver on time in that month. So what do you think happened? What do you think that behavior motivated from the employees of the company? We made every single delivery, every single delivery on time. After a while, but in order to make every single delivery, we sacrificed in every cut, we cut corners on scope. We cut corners on, not so much on quality, a little bit on quality, but mostly on scope. We weren't really that connected to the customer. We were connected to one goal, which was meeting a schedule. After a while of this, we had customer meetings and we talked, someone talked about the calendar of innovation.  That's not the type of ringing endorsement you want from your customers.  They didn't like us so much anymore. That was a mistake and that's because what had happened was everything else had become subverient to that one thing of schedule. And the reality is, we're trying to be business agility. Yes, schedule and time is important, but the whole picture is what matters. Are we meeting our customers? And I've never had any of our real customers. We were a product company, so product company, they had been used to. What they really cared about was meeting their solving their problems. We solved their problems. If we were six months late on delivery, that wasn't the issue because we were saving them so much, but the problems we were able to solve. What they cared about were we eliminating the problem entirely. And if we went with a partial solution that didn't eliminate it entirely, they didn't care, they didn't even use it. So you have to really get in tune with your customers and tune with all these parameters in the feedback loop. Let's look at the Knephen framework as a, this is from Dave Snowden. I really like this as a tool for understanding the type of complexity and discovery of knowledge work that we have. Ranging from obvious to complicated to complex and chaotic. And what I'm going to do is go through each one of these and what is the parameters and what they look like. So starting in the very obvious situation. If we look at our flow, we've got some set of inputs. We've got a very well understood process by which we go through and we then have outputs. And then the distributions are very narrow. We get pretty much known inputs, known process, very predictable outputs. Input, it's input output obvious to. So cause and effect is pretty much obvious to all. It's the home of the known knowns. What we do there is we sense it, we categorize it, respond and apply best practices. Very simple approaches. Typically manufacturing would fit into this. It's a repeatable process, we know it. Now we're just trying to hone it and optimize it. In the complicated domain, we have inputs and we have outputs. But on, at the very beginning, it doesn't look obvious. It's not obvious to everyone what it is. In order to discover cause and effect, it requires doing some analysis. Once we do analysis, then we can start to see what's happening. So we have the experts come in to do the analysis and then it becomes clear what's happening. This is the known unknowns. We know they're unknown, that's why we bring the experts in. The experts are the ones who are able to take it from the unknown into the more known space. And in this case, what we do is we sense it, we analyze it, do the analysis, and then response and apply some good practices. And I think that fairly often I would look at incremental product development as fitting into this category. It's where we're making some enhancements and the experts that already know the system are able to make those fairly easily doing the additional analysis. Although sometimes incremental product development does move into the complex domain. So in the complex domain, the key, we've got inputs, we've got this black box and we've got outputs. And no matter how much analysis we do here, we still can't discover the system. We can't discover the cause and effect. Cause and effect are only perceived in retrospect. Now how do we get that? Well, what we do is we put a probe through the system. So we put, we try something. We try something, we learn something. And then we provide feedback mechanisms by which we continue to upgrade our learning. So in retrospect, we discover something, feed it back, and continue to learn more. This is the complex domain. So we probe, we sense, and then respond. It's a new emergent practices because this is not something that we've necessarily done before. New product development of largely the home of the unknown unknowns. And even with that, the other thing is distributions tend to be a bit wider. And lastly, we get to the chaotic domain, inputs, black boxes, outputs, distributions all over the place. We don't even, we can't even tell what there's. There's no relationship between cause and effect. Largely the home of the unknowables. In this space, what do we have to do? We have to act, we have to do something. Do something because we've got chaos. Then do something which helps us get out of chaos. So accents respond, example of medical emergency. We've got someone bleeding, right? We don't go check and analyze why it's bleeding. I mean, we stop the bleeding, right? Stop the bleeding, that takes you out of the, then once that happens, it buys you time, right? You might think of this also, say we have a security breach. Well, what's the first thing we do? We shut down any way to get to the system so that there's no more security breaches, right? You take action in order to buy time to do the other work you need to do. Which takes it, once you've bought time, you've taken it out of the chaotic domain and pulled it into either the complex or potentially complicated domain. So another way of looking at things is the value chain, right? So I come from a product world. So in the product world, we have a market they're trying to meet. We do our product development and sales. These are pretty well tied together. We also have contract models and we have internal IT. Now, how do these look differently from a feedback or frequently from a feedback mechanism? Well, the good thing on product company is we know whether we're successful based on the sales of our products. We have a very tight feedback loop that tells us we were successful or not. What we don't have is we don't necessarily always have direct contact with all our customers. But what we do is we can send probes out to our customers and we'll get the feedback because sales numbers come back. Now, it's a lagging indicator, but it's still a fairly direct feedback loop. When we have a contract model, we have this specification. We become decoupled. We start throwing things over the fence. This is traditional contract, waterfall-ish type mode. Specifications then develop and then delivery. In fact, the system is designed to not have feedback loops in it. If you have feedback loops, it's, well, I have a change request. Well, change requests have to go through it. You create series process challenges to getting the feedback in. And you create a lot of friction in the system. So this creates a lot of problems because we don't really have good feedback. And I think also with internal IT, you can have it actually, it could go either direction. Sometimes where the IT and business have tried to work closely together, you could get that feedback loop. But I think a lot of places I've seen where there's a huge separation between IT and business, this feedback loop gets broken as well. And so it's something you need to look at in your organizations. How can we make sure we're getting proper feedback? Because feedback is the thing that enables us to really get to business agility. Feedback's all about learning. So this is just another view of it. I live in Houston, Texas. And so one of the problems we have in Houston in the Gulf Coast area in the US is that we have hurricanes. And hurricanes are pretty nasty things if they come and hit directly because they're huge. They've got huge amounts of wind and they're a lot of water with it. And so it's a really serious problem. Now, this was 15 different weather services that were projecting the path of a hurricane, Hurricane Rita. What do we know about every one of these projections? What's that? They're estimates? What else do we know about them since they're estimates? What's that? Probability. We don't know probability necessarily because they haven't told us. They've only given us a single path. We do know one thing about probability. We know that the probability is minuscule. It's essentially that they're all wrong. They can't be right because they're projecting out more detail. So none of them can actually be right, but collectively they're useful because they're coming from different perspectives and helping us know, well, this over here is New Orleans over here which is probably not gonna get hit and over here in Mexico or Corpus Christi Park, that's not, but this area here where Houston is, that's pretty serious because the other thing we know is that point is pretty accurate, it gets measured. And we also know the wind speed and things that we know about a hurricane. It's a category five, which is the highest level category. So pretty serious threat to the space. Only after we're done do we actually know where it actually went, right? So we only can, just like with any project, the only way we can actually know when it's gonna ship is when it's actually shipped. So in the weather forecasting business though, we make heavy use of forecast. We look at things and so what they have is what they call the cone of uncertainty out here at certain point and then over time, they can project where they think it's gonna be over time by iterating through time and going through time. We can learn more and as we learn more, we can know better where we're gonna be and eventually here, we're getting to the point where Houston might get saved because Houston's about here and eventually it comes to the east of Houston which was huge because on the west side of a hurricane is the dry side. So it was fairly uneventful in Houston when I was there at the time but it was still a big concern and this type of thing is this is how we take in new information, use feedback to help us make decisions. This I borrow from Jeff Patton, distinction between incrementing and iterating. Incrementing, we take an idea and build it a bit at a time. So if we're gonna paint the Mona Lisa, we could start painting the head and we could start painting a piece of the torso and we finally have a masterpiece at the end. The problem with this approach is that it requires a fully formed idea in advance. We can build it precisely and then build onto it but that only works if it's formed in advance. Iterating, we start by building a rough version, we validate it and then we slowly build up quality. So here we have idea. We don't have a fully formed idea, we just have an idea. We build this woman in a pastoral setting, we start with a sketch, we start building more detail and quality into it and eventually we come up with the masterpiece. So this is the difference and how we did this, it's through feedback and learning, right? It's incremental. So iterating allows you to move from vague idea to realization and the key, and this is the point of feedback. It's not the point of it is not to get it right in the beginning, the right objective is to get it right at the end, right? Because that's when you're delivered, that's when it's actually in the hands of the customer. So get it right in the end, that's the key. So this is the lean startup feedback circle. We start with some hypothesis which really should be coming from some observation. So observation, hypothesis, then we build some experiments, we design some experiments, we baseline and measure, analyze, learn, let me see. The example I'm going to show next is not specifically from lean startup, but it's an idea of how could you design experiments to help you learn? And it's an interesting perspective, and we'll see. Do you want to continue talking about me or should we discuss what the liver damage tells us? I was born in a locked cabin in Illinois. Himalayan academia doesn't cause liver damage. Add the fact he's coughing blood, you've got three of the indicators of organ-threatening lupus. It's moving too fast. Could be hepatitis E. There's only been one case of hep E originating in the US since his history, since he's been in and out of the country four times in the last year. You really think he's got hep E? No, I think lupus is way more likely. All right, then let's start him on IVC toxin and plasma pharesis. No, we should rule out hep E. You just said it wasn't hep E. I said lupus is way more likely, but if we treat for lupus, then it is hep E. Then he's toast? Exactly. But there isn't a treatment for hepatitis E. Either he'll get better on his own, or he'll continue to deteriorate. Yeah, I went to medical school too. Started on saldimendrol. If he's got hep E, that's only gonna make him worse. Not as much. It's goldilocks, people. Won't hurt him so much that it'll kill him. I want to hurt him so little that we can't tell. I want to hurt him just right. And if it does nothing. We'll know it's not hep E to start training for lupus. Now watch me do it while drinking a glass of water. What do we tell the dad? We think your kid has lupus, so we're gonna treat him from hepatitis E. And oh yeah, if it really is hep E, we're not actually giving him hep E medication. So it's gonna make him worse, not better? She's thinking, go for that. So you want us to lie? No. I want you to lie. Why me? Because he trusts you. So the point I want to get across from this is that when you're designing experiments, it's actually okay to design negative experiments. You don't always have to use that. They could have taken the most logical path, or what seemed like the right path, yet that didn't actually get them the information that they needed to have. So you're actually doing some, when you're experimenting, you're actually, it's all about learning. It's not necessarily about getting things in the hands of customers. It's about how can we learn something new? That's what feedback's all about. It's about learning, getting the learning, doing small learning cycles, rapid learning cycles through the feedback process. So how does Kanban do it with this? Since I'm in the Kanban world. We have ideas, we've got things flowing through the system. It's all about flow, and we can scale through the system. We understand the system. But then the feedback loops come in. We get our data, and we do incremental process improvement. So a key part of Kanban is building in incremental process improvement. We're an evolutionary approach to continue to build improvement. And likewise, we're bringing cycles back to help us understand the product. Now you can apply those two things both to any approach you want. You apply it to Scrum. But it's just bringing out, this is how we do it in Kanban. And what we do in Kanban is we have a full set of cadences where we try to reinforce feedback all the way through the organization. Because we believe that we have services that are interconnected through the organization. So we're looking for, how are we enabling feedback to go across the entire organization and pull that together? So we have a particular service. We're doing feedback within the service or the product line. But then at the, we're doing, we're rolling that up and having operations reviews and strategy reviews to make sure we're still on track with what we're trying to deliver. Feedback's a really important part. And you've got to be thinking whenever feedback is broken, that is creating an opportunity for problems in the organization. It's actually oftentimes feedback and transparency go hand in hand. And when you don't have feedback and transparency, that's the opportunity for politics to show up. So something to think about there. So this is one, I sort of want to, this is a video from John Cleese who was making, well-known for being a member of the Money Python Troop as well as Faulty Towers. And in recent times, nearly headless Nick in the Harry Potter series. He was doing a series of management videos back in 1986 or 1980s. And I came across it. This particular talk is called The Importance of Mistakes. And it's a really brilliant talk that he does. Talks about how he learned about this from his childhood, a book that was called Gordon the Guided Missile. And it's the importance of mistakes and the importance of feedback. So let me play this. Gordon the Guided Missile sets off in pursuit of its target. It immediately sends out signals to discover if it's on course to hit that target and the signals come back. No, you are not on course. So change it up a bit and slightly to the left. And Gordon changes course as instructed and then rational little creature that he is, he sends out another signal. Am I on course? Now, and back comes the answer. No, but if you adjust your present course a little bit, a little bit further up and a little bit further to the left, then you will be. So he adjusts his course again then sends out another request for information. And back comes the answer. No, Gordon, you've still got it wrong. You must come down a bit and a foot to the right. And the Guided Missile, its rationality and persistence, a lesson for us all. Goes on and on making mistakes and on and on listening to feedback and on and on correcting its behavior in the light of that feedback until it blows up the nasty enemy thing. Then we applaud the missile for its skill. And then if some critic says, well, it made a lot of mistakes on the way, we reply, yes, but that's a pretty good matter. Did it? It got there in the end. All its mistakes, the little ones in the sense that they could be immediately corrected. And as a result of making hundreds of mistakes, eventually the missile succeeded in avoiding the one mistake which would really have mattered, missing the target. So that's the essence of feedback. It's about getting the feedback, making the small incremental things, learning, and then getting it right in the end. Making sure you're connecting to your customer. That's what business agility to me is all about. So this is my contact information. Books stand back and deliver. Happen to connect with your LinkedIn. And I think we have about five, some minutes left for questions. Maybe a little bit more. Seven minutes, all right, more time. Who would like to start with a question? No questions? By a group? Somebody must have a question. Okay, very good. I'll be around. Feel free to, if you're too shy to have a public question, you can ask me in private. All right, thank you.


I have a challenge. Can you beat George? Who has the gramba to defeat the CEO and founder of Freedom? Well, apparently no one in the MGM3 guild in Elvenar. If you take a look here, I am currently the number one player in this guild of 25 Freedom Partners, and I'm wondering how come that is? Can you beat me? So what is this game? We had to create six guilds six guilds because so many of you wanted to play this game with me that I am now the guildmaster of six guilds in Elvenar. Now, I'm not number one in every of the six guilds, but I'm trying to be because I want to see how the Freedom family can help each other grow together. And here is how. If you look at the chat in all of these Elvenar games, let me hide myself. Whoops, I hid the wrong thing. You are helping each other by subscribing to each other's channels. You're chatting about what kind of games you play in this play. In this case, someone is playing Neverwinter, and he said it's a 10 out of 10. So it helps you discover new games. And the chat is just very popular. There's a lot of comments, a lot of suggestions. So get into the game. And even if you don't really play the game, get into the chat to talk to other Freedom partners. Also, the game has an in the game has a mail system. And some of you have been sending me messages like Zephyr 315 who said, these are all of my ideas so far about the Freedom game. Did you know we're asking you for ideas about what game should we make so that we can all play together as a family? If not, click that I up there in the top right corner. That'll take you to the video where you are where we are asking you to give us feedback on your ideas for what game we should make. So this has an in game messaging system where you can send people direct messages. And this is where you can also give people feedback on each other's channels. You can compose a message and say, Hey, I saw a great video by you. Here's my feedback. So Elvenar as well. Here is a pro tip. You see all these little blinky. Let me move myself again. You see all these little blinky resources. If you click one and drag, I'm dragging my mouse button, it gets everything without having to click individually one by one. That's a pro tip. Another pro tip is if you're starting to see the invisibility bug, let's say you go into combat, I'll pick one at random here, and I'll go fight something. And I'm just going to do this as a demo. And you notice some things are invisible. One of my characters is invisible. So the way to solve that is just refresh the browser. When you refresh the browser, all of these little bugs like invisibility go away.  Do you have any more pro tips about Elvenar? Click some links. Click the link down or click link. Tell me down there in the comments below. Ah, so we are still in combat. So I can continue the combat. Oh, here's a third pro tip. Another pro tip is if you don't like what's going on, you can retreat here and you lose no troops. So I'm going to retreat. Yes. And you see no loss of troops. So don't hesitate to retreat if you think it's going to go badly or it is going badly because it takes a long time to replenish your troops. All right. So for those of you who haven't joined yet, look for the guild which has available spots. You do that by clicking this little button here and then search for the fellowship M.G.N. That will tell you which of these, you can see three of them are full here. So this is the latest one I've created, the fourth one. We actually have two other M.G.N. guilds on server one. Some of you didn't listen to instructions and started playing on server one. So there's over like 40 of you now on server one. So I have two more guilds on server one. But this is server four. It's important that you join us on server four because this is the lowest population server. So there's less people to pass on our road to number one on the server. Now, of course, if you already put in a lot of time on server one, just keep playing there because there's going to be a lot more of you who will start playing the game on server one. A part of the problem is when you create a new account, you don't get to choose which server you will play on. It automatically throws you into server one. So you need to, after the tutorial ends, exit and go back to play the game and choose Kelinar. Kelinar is server four. And you know you're on server four if it says us four. That's the key. And then apply to join the M.G.N. guild by simply searching for M.G.N. and then clicking, uh, whoops, there's no players called M.G.N. That's good. Searching for the M.G.N. fellowship and then click view fellowship.  But if you click view fellowship, then you'll get an apply button down here. I don't see one because I'm the guild master. I can't apply to my own guild, but you will see an apply button. That's how you join the M.G.N. guild. And again, as soon as we fill out M.G.N. four, there will be an M.G.N. five and so on. As long as you keep playing this game, we will keep supporting you by giving you a guild to chat, help each other grow together and have fun. Okay, how are you guys liking Elven R? Tell me in the comments below. And who am I? I am George, CEO and founder of Freedom and you've been watching and we will grow together as a family because this is the Freedom family. You are part of it. We are all part of it and we're all growing together. So grow with us and partner with Freedom. That play now button right there on the video bar is all you need to click to get started.


So if you're asking which way martial arts is better, well let's take a look at the martial art. Why was it invented? Why was it developed in the first place? Who used it when they were developed? What were they doing when they were using it? Well Wing Chun was invented in boats and then perfected by the opera, the boat opera back in China. So what are boats? They're not stable, right? And there's lots of stuff lying around on the ground. You don't want to be moving around too much on a boat. You don't have that much space.  Now in northern China, they don't have a longer stance, okay? Like this because they use it for more kicks and they use it for jumping. They're able to jump off like rocks and things because they're not using it on a boat. They have more room to use their techniques. So you have to look at the martial art. What was it used for?


This year marks the first World Food Safety Day. Everyone everywhere has arrived to sufficiently safe and nutritious food. Yet from here to table, food can become unsafe at any point. Food safety is everyone's business, from the government and food businesses to the scientific expertise that consumers. Food safety awareness can provide a food-borne illness. So safer food means better health. Without food safety there can be no food security. Safe food contributes to the transformation of our agri-food system to be more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable. And improved agri-food systems are essential for better production, better nutrition, a better environment, a better life for all living on behind. Unsafe food often affects the poorest and the weaklings. So improving food safety is critical to ensure we do not leave anyone behind. Let us continue to work together in an efficient, effective and coherent manner and jointly commit to a world of safer food for better health and for better agri-food systems. Thank you.