Computers keep changing the world, but their power and safety is limited by their rigid design. The T2 tile project works for bigger and safer computing using living systems principles. Follow our progress here on T Tuesday updates. This is the 47th T Tuesday update, let's get into it. So for the last several weeks we've been working on getting cash updates going between tiles. The two things we need to have intertile events, which is what's going to allow us to make an indefinitely scalable computer by connecting more and more tiles is by being able to have an event that starts on one tile and ends on another tile. In order to do that we need locking where we say please don't mess with this stuff because I'm going to mess with it and then we need a cash update where we say here's how I messed with it. Make your cash copy of MySpace look the same as MySpace so that we'll have a consistent view across the border. In this past week using the loopback cables using the tile connected to itself so it doesn't really know that it's connected to itself but it makes debugging a lot easier. We actually got intertile events working on loopback and I'll talk about that, that's the main event. In the coming week having loopback cables it turns out it does not get us exactly all the direction that we need to go to get true intertile events and I'll talk about that. Alright so in education and outreach yeah so also last week I did this podcast. The book I mentioned Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Audible.com is making a follow on little podcast, a series of podcasts called Algorithms at Work and Brian invited me to come on and talk about the T2 style stuff so I did that last week. They actually sprung to rent a studio in Albuquerque that I drove over. Another one of these things, no idea that this thing ever existed at all and here it is. I talked to Brian, mostly Brian and also Tom Griffiths for most of an hour and it was really quite good and actually had a sound engineer guy doing sound engineering that I chatted with after he was a nice guy. He's also a musician and overall it was really good like I said we talked for about an hour and I have no idea how much of that they're actually going to use but we really hit everything. It was living computation, it was hardware determinism, it was indefinite scalability and it was the T2 Tile project explicitly so that was really great. We'll see how much of that ever gets used out of no idea what the timeline is for that stuff coming out but did that and it was fun to be in a recording studio. I've never really done that before either. Coming up in two weeks is this workshop at the Santa Fe Institute that I got invited to about biological computation. Now I'm not speaking at this thing, there's a bunch of people going and they're not having that many talks but they are having sort of little impromptu 10 minute things on the final day that you can sign up for so probably I'll try to sign up for one of those and just let folks know the stuff that we're doing here as well. So that's education and outreach. Alright, the main event. Limited to the case of doing it on loopback, we actually have intertile events happening for the first time really in the history of the universe and it's incredibly slow. I mean at this point I'm kind of adjusted to it. I sort of feel like Rodney Dangerfield. I'll tell you, I feel alright now but last week it was rough because it was. It's incredibly slow doing all the communications and so on and so forth. Now I warned us that it was going to be slow but we're nowhere close to one air. So I made a little time lapse that we'll take a look at and then I'll come back and say what I think we probably can do about it and so forth. Oh yeah, T2 Tile on full loopback. This is basically the first thing I got at work. So we have one particle here that just tries to go west. Every time it has an event it tries to go west and look at this. It's actually going out the west and coming in the east. That's the intertile event. But it's, you know, look at my watch. So that was speeded up like 1500 times or something like that, like two seconds in an hour. I don't know. It's incredibly slow. It's watching paint dry. It's watching grass grow slow. And we knew this was coming. We knew it was possible. But, you know, I actually said, okay, now I could make a measurement of what was that air based on the video. So I did that.  But that is excluding certain overheads and it takes a lot of time to sort of make estimates and the estimates to relax and so forth. So I said, well, you know, look, let's just, we know that the dot is going to move one site every time it gets an event. Because here's the event. I called it Watson, you know, like, come here. I need you. It's kind of a little one of the circles of Inferno because it never actually arrives. It just keeps going around and around. But it just swaps west every time it has an event.  But the all the ones that are happening in empty space, they generate updates. They generate traffic, less traffic than they might be if there was stuff, but there actually is stuff still going. So, so here it is. And so, you know, I just marked it. So when it was all the way at the right hand end, one of the times it got there was like almost 7pm. And, you know, there are 52 active sites, which is sort of a weird number, but internally there's actually 60 wide. But then there's a stripe of four for a cache on one side and a stripe of four for a cache on the other side. It's take away eight. So 60 minus eight is 52. So 52 events will actually take us around the universe once. And that took it arrived back there at 918. That's like two and a half hours, 8400 seconds, 8400 seconds for 52 events, .006 air.  You're very lucky if you ever see the Watson move. So that's a huge bummer. I mean, you know, knowing that that was a possibility and actually saying here we are are two different kinds of things. So now the couple, you know, there's a whole bunch of footnotes on this. So footnote number one is, you know, the although having the loopback cables makes debugging and stuff much easier. There's a sense in which it's actually a difficult case for the performance. Because normally when we have a whole bunch of tiles in a grid and a given tile tries to grab a lock to the west, say, there will be some fraction of the time when the lock is already being used by someone else. And so the attempt to grab the lock will fail. And when that happens, MFM just goes on and says, we'll just have an event someplace else. It doesn't wait because it really can't wait because the whole point is that everybody's independent. But when you're on the loopback, it never fails because when this guy is requesting a lock out the west, he's definitely not also requesting a lock out the east. So every time we actually try to do an event that's on the border with the loopback, it succeeds, which means we have to do the locking and the cache update and send everything and so forth. Whereas when we actually had tiles, intertiles, and they were talking to each other, some of them would fail and go on and do it. So we might actually get a little bit more performance out of that. There's also a whole bunch of things and I've talked about them over the last weeks and months where I was giving up performance in order to make the implementation simpler, more obvious, or more robust. And I even did two of those in just this past week that, you know, because there's a difference between the way the MFM code looks at the world. For example, the MFM code wants to take one lock at a time. If it needs to, it tries to get one and then tries to get the other. Now the underlying Linux kernel module that I wrote actually takes a set and you can say, give me these locks all at once and it will actually go for them in parallel. But to preserve as much of the mobile feast machine code for purposes of getting it running, I don't take advantage of that. I just try to get one lock. I try to get the other. Similarly, the mobile feast machine is expecting to have a separate channel, six separate channels, one for east, one for west, all separate that it can read from whenever it wants to. Whereas the way the Linux kernel module is designed, it provides all of the MFM traffic on a single channel with each packet labeled by its destination. So rather than redo all the mobile feast machine code in order to get it working, I put an additional layer of buffering that reads all the packets in and dishes them out to six different waiting areas so that when the particular direction east or northeast or whatever it is wants to go for a packet, it can go to a specific place, but it means the packets are getting copied in extra time that they don't need to. There's a zillion things like that. So on the one hand, a lot of that stuff could be fixed. But on the other hand, you know, that might bias a factor of 10. It might even conceivably bias a factor of 100, although I doubt it. But even if it did, that would be a half an error. And really, we just got to adjust to that's what the T2 tiles are going to be like.  I mean, after all, you know, it was on the third day that the earth brought forth the plants and the actual fizzy jumpy run around the animals didn't happen until the fifth day. Maybe when we're trying to build a completely new computational stack, we should be thinking that looking at the T2 tiles running is going to be less like going to a movie and more like sitting in a garden. Maybe it is like watching the grass grow. And that could go to something like Montreal next year that, in fact, it really might be a better idea to have the display if it works out in the lobby so that people could just be kind of going by it as if it was kind of like a mural and say, wait, that kind of changed from before lunches or something like that like seeing things happen in the garden. And from a scientific purpose, you know, we can still just point the camera at it just like I did here and do time-lapse to see what the future could look like if we had tiles that had better air, you know, that could have better air. It takes some adjustments, but I'm okay. I think it's there. Like I said, Rodney Dangerfield. So that's it for this thing? Yeah, that's it for this thing. All right. So now part of, you know, understanding all this is saying, you know, why is it so much worse than I was fantasizing? Because I mean, you know, theoretically, this was like supposed to be engineering rather than fantasy. So I want to go back and go through where the numbers came from, the estimates that were underlying this so that we can understand, you know, why is it that the T2 is coming out the way it is and so forth? Does it actually make sense? This is going all the way back to 2012 now, almost seven years ago when we published this paper in the computer journal. It was one of the longer papers that we did. And, you know, one of the good things about good and bad, depending on how you break, is you get a lot more reviewing, a lot more intensive reviewing in journal papers than you do from conference papers where, you know, you know, generally, you kind of get either one round of conference paper reviewing and it's either in or out because the thing's going to happen. Whereas journals that the reviewers can ask for lots of changes. And one of the things the journals that the reviewers asked for here was, well, how is this going to work? How is it going to perform? And this section three that we added, performance estimation, was in response to a reviewer request. So what we did was saying, well, you know, we don't have any actual hardware, so we don't, we can't really know, but we can simulate it, we can guess. And here's the main line. We can expect an indefinitely scalable air in the several hundreds to a thousand or more without heroic engineering using affordable tile suitable for research. So, you know, that might be true for somebody else's definition of heroic engineering. It's not true for my hardware abilities with the T2 tile. So where do we go wrong? Let's drill, we drill a little deeper into it. Since we have no actual indefinitely scalable implementations, here we employ a hypothetical tile processors with parameters or something like figure seven. And here they are. And this is really the smoking gun. So we imagined back in 2012 that the little tile would be going at 100 MHz and in fact these guys are going 720 MHz and they're capable of going 1,000 MHz at gigahertz, but I usually have them running a little slower for temperature. So it's going a lot faster than we were imagining for the hypothetical processor. Instruction time, two cycles per instruction, that's perfectly reasonable. The intertile mutex lock try, 20 cycles. 20 cycles at 100 MHz, that is 5 microseconds, something like that. Well, we saw that we were doing like 50, 100, 100 plus microseconds because we're doing it all in software in Linux. We tried to go fast, but we're nowhere close to that. Same thing for the unlock, nowhere close to that. And the intertile IO speed, 1 to 10 Mbps, because we were hypothesizing to check a range of variations, we're not getting anything close to that either. The sort of raw sending stuff, pushing stuff through the wire can approach a Mbps, I can actually get over a Mbps if the packets are big enough. But once again, that's not including all of the going through Linux, going from the buffers, going getting copied here, copied there, copying multiple places, we're not getting anything like the intertile IO speed and that's really where all the performance is going, I think. With these kind of numbers, we got this kind of graph back in 2012 that if everything was working exactly right, we might have gotten 7,000 air or yeah, that's if you could do an event in 1,000 instructions and you had a 10 Mbps line and so on and so forth. So in fact, we are much more down here in the very, very, very close to zero end of the spectrum. But as we've been saying all along, for scientific purpose, for engineering purpose, any number is a benchmark. And from one point of view, the smaller it is now, the more fastest growing we can have as we make improvements going forward. And again, we don't know by the time we actually get to benchmarking Dreg physics on an indefinitely scalable grid, whether it's going to be more or less than 0.006, we don't know. All right, and it says, MFM performance is highly sensitive to communication costs and so forth. Well, that I think we've kind of confirmed. It wasn't a surprise, but here it is. All right, so now one of the things, I can't really take too much time about this, but going forward, one of the reasons why the loopback is an easier case is because, you know, if we're asking out of East, then definitely something exists on West, whereas in the inner tile case, they can be booting, they can be going up and down, they can be in the middle of anything and stuff can fail in just about any direction. And so it pushes you, it pushes me, it's in the process of pushing me. So here we've got the default fail illegal state, and that's the typical way that you write correct and efficient programming. Anything that shouldn't happen, you assert that it doesn't happen to stop the insanity. But the alternative approach, the self-stabilizing approach, is to say, well, if something unexpected happens, let's explicitly say, here's your safe space. If we get lost, let's meet at the old tree. Have fallback positions just in case anything goes wrong. So this kind of code has been changing into this kind of code. If the unclaimed case happens, which really shouldn't happen, then we log an error about it to let somebody know. But then we go ahead and reclaim it, which is a step towards actually letting things happen again and so forth. And this is happening all through the code. It really goes back to, well, just don't have time to go into it. I would love to talk about CCR, which is another one of the really big projects I did a long time ago that had similar kinds of self-stabilizing code in it for dealing with this kind of thing as well. So just about out of time. Last week was rough for a couple of reasons. But here we are. We're going to make digital living plants with stuff flowing through them. And then just like you make time-lapse videos of plants growing and see how amazing that is, we'll make time-lapse videos of things happening on the T2 tile grid. And hopefully we'll get soon to that being amazing as well. So, alright. And the bottom line is it's not 0.006 air. It's 6 milli-air loopback has been achieved. It's not the benchmark yet, but the benchmark is going to be in that ballpark and we're going to say how many milli-air can we prove that is established on an indefinitely scalable grid. We'll find out. Next update will be out in a week. Thanks for being here. You have a good week.


Hey, it's time for voiceover body shop. How's everybody doing out there? We have a great guest tonight. Yeah, it's voice actors. We all have to have demos and People complain about their demos or they love their demos and there's so many guys producing Angels so many people Producing demos we figured why don't we have somebody who knows a lot about making demos on the show? And so our guest tonight is Hugh Klitsky say hello Hugh. Hello Hugh It's two weeks in a row dead there when did that last time? Perhaps I need to rephrase the question Because you know she and I like know each other so it's like hmm. Maybe that's why maybe that's why So are we already out there if you got a question throw it in the chat room? Because Jeff Holman who I he's like out of the frame right now, but he's he's here And he will be taking your questions and relaying those to us. Are we ready mr. Whidham ready to go? All right voiceover body shop right now Voiceover body shop is brought to you by voiceover essentials.com the home of harlin hogan signature products Source elements the folks who bring you source connect the oh heroes dot com Become a hero to your clients with award-winning voiceover training Voice actor dot com your voice over website ready in minutes Voice over extra your daily resource for voice over success And by world voices the industry association of freelance voice talent And now here's your hosts dan and george Well, hello there i'm dan lennard and i'm george whidham and this is voice over body shop or vo b s so Got a gift this week Mike dirner sent us this wonderful Mic flag because really nice everybody's tired of the one i print that or something No, it's done a 3d printer somebody is doing these with 3d printers And you know the people like me who collect old microphones. It's like well, you got to get the flags So and it looks a lot better than the one the paper one that was printed out like four or five years ago and Kept trying to find different ways to stick on the mic and Thanks, mike. It's cool. Yeah, but you know as soon as I as soon as we're done I can just take it off and oh that's even that's great Yeah, you know as long as it doesn't interfere with the diaphragm at all Do I sound okay with this stuff high enough? Yeah, you know if if anything it makes me sound better and look more professional Anyway tonight We gotta have a great guest We're gonna talk about demos and demos are of course very very important So why don't we introduce our guest and that way we can get into a discussion of this Hugh Klitski is a voiceover coach director and producer in new york city He teaches the conversational read self-direction the commercial read and dick directs auditions As he says amongst other things Hugh is directed Booking auditions for commercials animation ad r politicals podcasts Narration games audiobooks promos affiliates trailers e-learning and industrials, which is just about everything Let's welcome to voiceover body shop Hugh Klitski Well, hi guys How you doing tonight? Good. Thanks All right, that was a long introduction But then again you have a lot of stuff that you do and directing it So tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this nutzo business Was purely by accident. I was Well, back in the day. I was I was uh, it's something of an odd low point in my life I was selling cell phones at radio shack And was casting about I was a uh, I did my graduate and undergraduate work in music composition And I had worked with some filmmakers who uh in grad school who um Knew that I was looking for something to do all my freelance work all my music work had dried up And I had to turn to as a friend of mine put it an alternate an alternative lifestyle you know to support myself at the time and I wound up scoring an independent film for a fellow who had absolutely no budget And I said to him, okay, I get it. You have no money All your friends got to do it And the interesting thing though the acting was really good But the film was it was a art film and it was kind of odd And that's an important part of the story and I said to the guy I don't know if you can help me with this But Don't work for free But if people can't afford to pay me they barter with me They do me favors and what I want more in the universe than anything right now Is a better job than my day job because my day job sucks And he looked at me and he said, okay, what about my old day job? I said, I don't know what you did He was the voice over casting director at the agency And turned out that the talent in his film were all signed Actors who came in and did his film for him as a favorite And I interviewed on a friday at nine in the morning. I got a call three o'clock in the afternoon I got hired and to my surprise. I said, wow, that's great. Thanks. That sounds fantastic. Now. What am I going to do? And you because I didn't know anything about it. I didn't know anything about the work I didn't know about anything that was going on, but I was trained on site you know, they had another agent who had trained all of the people that did the job after him and Most of those folks lasted for about a year maybe a year and a half in the position and I stayed for almost 15 years Wow, well, you're gonna you're gonna learn a thing or two over that period of time So and you were there for 15 years and almost yeah. Yeah, um, okay It was less than that, but it sounds good if you round that number up, right? You know nearly Nearly 15 years, you know, it just sounds good. That sounds like my broadcasting career. Yeah, I was in it for 15 years They paid me for 12 of them, but you know um So now you're you're you're not you're producing demos, but you're not really known for that. Yeah, I'm a coach primarily Yeah, but I knew that when we had talked about my being on here We just discussed the idea of you know, maybe I could talk about demos and I said sure I could talk about demos because I do produce them. I don't feel like I produced A whole lot of them But people come to me with very very specific ideas and very very specific questions I rarely produce anyone's first demo. I usually produce their second, maybe even their third Often students of mine who have coached with me. They'll say do you and I say yes, and then that becomes part of our That after working with me for a while and they they've changed develop their skill set in a different way They then trust me to show that off to the very best of My ability because I understand them Yeah, I mean you can so much more effectively coach somebody or direct somebody and produce a very convincing demo When you're coaching them and you know all their strength and weaknesses and Having gone through I think many people probably did go through that first demo And it was done on on a probably on a shoestring budget Maybe very very quickly or maybe they spent a lot of money on it But it was still done very quickly Or the script was generic or maybe the script was 10 years old Which somebody recently told me on the side a very prominent demo producer did their first demo He found out years later that he shouldn't have a 10 year old commercial script on his demo, right? Uh, but yeah, it's the things that people learn and so when they get to do that second time with you they really They're going to get a much much better product and they're going to appreciate the skills you bring to the table The thing that troubles me most sometimes is is Not just the direction but more the casting I find that the fit of The right content to the individual is so important But at the same time, I also know that I'm speaking from my own experience because Casting was essential in the agency world And so I was constantly around the thinking and the questions and the ideas of What's the difference between this person being able to perform something versus somebody who's the right fit for something That fits the request and then to try to synthesize that into with a demo is very very important And I don't think that can really be underestimated Because I hear demos and again, I'm speaking from my experience. What's in what I value when I listen And I'm sitting there going that content doesn't match They would never be cast for this Why is that on their demo? You know, it just doesn't it doesn't fit and then I'm not paying even Even really paying attention to the read to the production to anything else and that's a very very fine line because People want to be aspirational with their demo. They want to be able to say this is what I'm capable of doing This is what I want. I want to be able to show that off But if it's not a good fit for you in the first place then already you're You're you're losing. Yeah What are the good elements of a demo?  It's just You know, what what is it that that you should have in a demo? I think they should be slated, but I think they should be slated by somebody who's not you I think they should be slated by somebody who's of the opposite gender is you was also As well because I think it's I think there's a psychological benefit to having somebody set you up Means statistically it's proven that people that are have other people speak on their behalf They earn more money And I think that when somebody of the opposite gender slates your name They're like, oh this person has somebody else that believes in them, right? This person's prefer a pro. Yeah, then they can what do you call it? They'll listen in a different way You know, it's it's very subtle. What goes into a good demo? I think a demo has to actually I think it don't needs to be a little entertaining believe it or not I think you actually have to like listening to it And that's kind of difficult to capture. I think that you have to You have to hold people's attention in the right way at from the very very beginning And then you have to conclude very very well at the end Perhaps even having the beginning of a spot upfront and the end of a spot at the end I think demos have to have variety. I think that demos have to be They have to show Certain kinds of skills. They have to show that you can interpret copy well They have to show that you can tell story They have to be a strong representation of the artist that you are Right now and then in turn your skill set has to be able to back that up So as we were talking before on the beginning, you know Dan was saying how yeah I want you to do it like you did on the fourth cut of your demo Well, then the the talent is there we're trying to remember what the fourth cut was You know and that can be very very Now you're showing your age, but I'm But I'm not of that age too, you know, I am old enough to have cut tape But not a lot of it not a lot, but yeah, I am old enough to have cut tape it's It has to have it has to have variety. It has to show knowledge of marketplace. It has to show Where your voice is likely to be sold then if you and If you have an interest or strength That you have knowledge base for example, I'm producing a demo now This person has a background in broadcast journalism focus on finance and she When she um auditions for things she gets lots of likes in Whichever of the the pay for the sites she's on specifically around finance So I'm immediately like yep. We got to have that for sure. There has to be a finance spot on your demo But she's never really thought about pharma So I think that she needs to have a disclaimer for example a black box warning For example on her demo because that's also important and those two are kind of like cousins in a way Just in certain parts of the read Just a little bit. I could I can hear that That black box fair balance warnings black box warnings fair balance warnings have to Put over information clearly and responsibly And I can hear that in in the business reads in certain Spots maybe for like sunday morning business shows If they're in there for those specific kind of investment portfolios To be able to command and hold attention But perhaps still temper that with a bit of warmth or a bit of approach ability So that's why I mean where they have cousins there are elements of the reads that have certain similarities What is the what is the black? I'm I think I know what the black box won't when you Sure, it's sometimes in in the pharma universe. It's sometimes called the black box warning where You have to have the In a pharmaceutical ad you have the good stuff up front Then you have the warning disclaimer in the mirror in the middle effects and side effects and all that And then they reprise the good stuff at the end Right, right. Gotcha. But under FDA guidelines You're supposed to present them Identically all the way across That's not policed very heavily unless somebody complains Deb said in the old days you could just squeeze it at the very end. It could be very very high speed And that's no longer the case and no longer no longer the case Yeah, no longer the case at all But they'll frequently cast two different people they'll frequently cast a voice up front that'll do the You have this problem with this, you know emotional not too emotional Then they have the disclaimer in the middle the The warning and frequently they're of two different genders And then at the end that other voice comes back And i'm certain there are reasons i'm not exactly sure why but it's such a pattern That there must be a reason That works for the pharmaceutical company is better For sure Yeah, if you're just joining us our guest is Hugh Klitsky and we're talking about the elements of your Demos which you all have to have out there if you've got a question For you about demos and that sort of thing Throw it in the chat room. Jeff holdman's back there writing everything down and relaying it to us And we really appreciate his taking the time to do that for us um All right, so when you produce demos What is the process like for you? How do you do it? There's a lot of talking There's a lot of conversation You know, there's a whole lot of really understanding You know, I want to hear the demo that they had before I want to understand what their experience was like with that I want to understand what they want to accomplish with a new demo I want to know why they wanted a new demo now Is it just simply that the stuff is dated? Is it just simply that the stuff is um They've learned how to read conversationally You know better for 2023 as opposed to what was going on in 2019 And once I divine those reasons just in talking it out, then I'll sit there and really pay attention I'll have them read for me to really understand what they gravitate towards what they're good at What they're not good at and I'm also willing to at moments to say have you thought about this? Have you thought about that and I'm listening very objectively and very abstractly To their voices trying to say Okay What about for example? I produced a few elements for somebody's uh demo not a full demo But just a few pieces because he wanted to show himself as being more than just a big voiced guy And I said okay What would you like to be able to show that your current material doesn't and he had lots of cars And he had lots of really big huge aggressive masculine things He said I would love to have a whiskey spot And I'm like yep You absolutely could have a whiskey spot 100 percent Because he was it was that was important to him. He really wanted that But then because of his age, I suggested maybe you want health care Because it would be perhaps you being warm and supportive toward A family member an older family member perhaps But the but the context of the read the content in the read would have to express those ideas of support and caring and trust For my family and yours as a as a subtext in the ideas And then I said to him What about this and I put a Polo black spot in front of him and he never thought about that before He never had thought about that and now that that leads his uh his player Where it's just a very simple straightforward masculine read and the my my post guy, you know Uh emailed me back and he said his demo was an absolute pleasure to me And I'm like then we did it right because suddenly he was doing sexy grandpa for the first time in his life You know just reading polo black But it's really you know Again I think casting is super important from there you can have read and from there you can then have Post and to think about the demo as an object all the way through with variety with um with just that hint of Entertainment value in those 90 seconds or those 75 seconds that it's something that you want to listen to because that's just gonna help That's gonna help your cause But also just to make sure that everything is strongly and specifically in their wheelhouse Also being willing to take them just outside of it in order to make them feel Great about the about presenting themselves Do you produce entire? Spots like a like you were producing a whole commercial I'll and then lift the the gold out of each spot. How do you do it? I do I I do that But I've certainly seen producers that don't and A student of mine once said will you coach me on material for a demo that you're not going to produce which I said absolutely of course I would and I was very surprised when she came to me with pieces of commercials and I Didn't question it But I said okay, and we worked the material together and everything and I heard the end result and it was great It was probably one of the best demos. I've heard in quite some time where I felt it captured her It was energetic. It was empathetic all these things and I was like that guy Is definitely thinking about the demo object in a different way than me He had all that mapped out in his imagination Before giving it to the talent Me I sit there and I'm sitting there taking pieces of things and reorganizing and understanding Routining of this piece to that piece to the next piece to the other piece Because that's the way that makes sense to me. That's a little bit of my music background That's a little bit of my theater background where I'm sitting there understanding the Routining of things the organizing of things fast to slow to intimate to authoritative to communicative But I have to feel all that out this producer he'd add all that mapped out in his imagination and I'm just like Good for you, man. You you nailed it fantastic It's completely different ways of thinking and I think it's important for talent to Understand the way a producer works before you pay them anything Because then you can understand does this make sense for the way that I would feel most comfortable Do I think that that process could bring the best out of me? Yeah, it's it's a lot like home voiceover studios actually because Every voice is different. Every room is different. George and I are always like Everything has to be custom designed for that specific person for their lifestyle How they live in their house that sort of thing and clearly your size Yeah, well, there's that too and uh You know, I so what you're doing is good educational stuff.  Where it's okay, of course the same read all the way through. I'm like, there's no contrast that sort of thing or there's It sounds like they're putting on something that they're really not and to me It's always important to be intellectually honest with your demos I am capable of doing this and will you be able to reproduce this if you get hired for a gig? Great Yeah Uh, once once again, if you've got a question for you about doing Your demo or getting demos done or any questions about demos throw it in the chat room right now We'll get to it in our next segment So, uh, how do you choose the scripts? I mean when you're I mean you're interviewing people You're you're asking them all these questions That's it. I mean that that's it, you know really more than anything else It's a fine balance between the things that they're interested in Things where they've succeeded perhaps. Are you booking this? Do you have that on your current demo? No, okay. Let's do that. You know, let's find a good example of that whatever it is Is it mom, you know, or are you booking? You know team or are you booking young mom? Versus older mom, right? Because the decisions that In the in the casting again think about it, right a young mom is maybe only is preoccupied with different things and making different decisions Then a slightly older mom For example, you know, they're on there an older mom might be on their second car For example, while a young mom may be thinking about okay, I've got to get rid of the The car that hubby and I had and we're trading it in for our first Uh family van family van or whatever, you know, and then how do we feel about that? You know, and how can we talk about that and how can the emotional subtext? resonate around that content How can can that? actor relate to those ideas in genuine specific And as dan has said correctly repeatable ways I mean How many talent have explicitly said I saw the script. I understood it right away and I got the job That's because they're speaking from the content of their own experience And then being able to project that into The content of a script, right? Sometimes yeah, exactly It's acting but it's acting in a void There's there are so now we're started to wander off into voiceover training and conversation more, but that's okay. I do Why you get into yeah, is that okay? Yeah, yeah, that's a bit that's a bit more around how do Does an actor make a voice actor make decisions when there's a lot of information that a On-screen actor or on stage actor would have and they have to fill in the blanks with their imagination, right? So yeah, I mean, let's talk a little bit about the conversational read. Uh, sure I I you know I've you talked to so many people, you know, who coach and you know And they're in the business and it's like what is the conversational even conversational itself has become something of an anathema, right? Conversational has practically become a synonym for um, announcer practically You know and it was the first I had heard it at at wovell where suddenly it's like I don't want to hear that conversation We I want to hear it authentically And I'm sitting there listening and I'm going okay And at times I've heard that read described as real. I've heard that times as described as genuine I've heard that described as authentic. I've heard it described as the real person read off the street but I do think that there's a real trend to Doing less but better And The better doesn't go away, but and that's that's not my phrase. That's dita rams dita rams was Right god. He was a designer. He did a lot of design for brawn. He was a german designer very strong in minimalism And he said and one of his ethos was less But better when I saw that I said to myself. Yes, that's a great way to try to talk about genuine authentic Conversational quote-unquote reads. Yes, you are doing less However, the subtext has to be stronger. It has to be even more specific now than ever That if you give multiple takes maybe you need three different points of view on it Rather than just pausing or just Making new melodies out of it. That's not conversational. It never has been right that way in the past I might have advised people saying once you make a strong set of decisions play those decisions three times in a row And that would be enough variety. I'm starting to question that. I'm starting to say to myself now. Okay Maybe now Make three different choices and play three different choices and make them strong choices But still be willing to make three different choices to really reveal different subtests Right that just made me think of something was anybody ever Recorded in a demo or had any demo two cuts That are the exact same script, but red and or produced in totally different ways Nothing I'm aware of but I don't with like an a and a b read that would never end up on a demo, right? Not that I'm aware of but at the same time if somebody was willing to go outside of the box that way and go for it I think that could be interesting. I don't want to start a trend here or anything But I think that's a I think that's a very very interesting notion. I think they have to be really uniquely different read I mean they have to really be saying different things I think that Well with their subtext for example, I think I think that if they were completely produced completely differently I think that might mask the The changes in the read people might be a little bit more Dazzled by the difference in production, but at the same time a different production Could highlight different parts of a different approach Right. It's an interest. It's an interesting question. Yeah. It's a very very interesting question. And if somebody Did it I think that they would have to Do it really really well, but also I think it would have to be understood for what it is And I think yeah, have somebody putting that out and then having somebody else understand what they were doing To be able to appreciate it might be A hurdle a little too high to jump Yeah, well, let's let's talk about self-direction for a little bit because self-direction is Possibly I mean as a as a as a voice actor with a home studio Self-direction is possibly the hardest skill that most people have to pick up because We're not directed a lot of times I mean if it's a if it's a big commercial with an agency or something There's always going to be you know conferencing on that and you know three guys listening at the same time But when you're auditioning How do you how do you? What are some of the keys to good self-direction so that you know when your audition goes out there? You've made you've made choices. What are the right choices or not? Sometimes the wrong choice is what's going to get their attention When when you send out an audition like that Well, the first thing I say is that when you do multiple takes The first thing I advise people to do is to listen to them in the reverse order that they record Because that affords just a hint more objective. There's something about taking the time to experience it Take three first and take two and then take one That gives you a chance to just be able to Get a bit of more of a 10,000 for you for a moment because The goal should really be objective if at all possible And when I say objectivity to not judge yourself Just be able to listen to yourself Inquisitively and attentively But somewhat dispassionately to be able to say Okay What did I do? Because from there You can begin to adjust Right if you hit some a word too hard, for example, you stress the point You have to be careful not to kid yourself.  All right. I hear that On this next take That's not going to be a problem because I understand I did that before right And that's one way to another way to really begin to start to Give yourself permission to improve by saying This is what I've done listening with your eyes shut is very very good because It's the only people I think that really follow along with the script that closely are the writers You know in general and they're not the decision makers more often than not.  I'm not judging All right Get a little get a little zen just a little just a little Because it'll it'll help you to It'll help you to hear It'll help you to hear and then be able to go. Yeah, that was fast So how do now i'm going to slow that down? And when you begin the self-direct Do one thing just One where it's like this time i'm going to go slower And then understand yes that the next take it's going to happen you and allow yourself to go slow And then see how that affects things I'm not going to hit that that brand as hard right and now see how that affects everything that goes on All right, our guest once again if you're just wondering is Hugh Klitsky and we're talking about getting your demos right And if you've got a question now would be a fabulous time to throw it in the chat room And we will get to those questions right after the break which we're going to take right now So don't go away.  Are they at a professional level to record for broadcast? And what does that mean? To me it means it doesn't sound bad I've seen several now demanding cardioid condenser microphones Some are great and cheap ones not so great. So, how do you choose? It's like standing in the checkout line at the supermarket deciding which candy or mince you want to buy So which is right for you? Make it easy on yourself and get the harlin hogan signature series v o 1 a The first and only mic designed for voiceover performers by a voiceover performer The v o 1 a faithfully captures deep tones without sounding bassy and has a silky smooth top end That's never harsh a perfect sound palette for both male and female voiceover performers Get the complete kit with my cable and shock mount now Go to voiceover essentials.com where you'll see all their great products made just for us voiceover people Well, I'd like to tell you guys about our sponsor source elements The creators of source connect and source nexus and a lot of other tools And if you haven't been to the site lately, I recommend you head over there because they've had a whole site redesign They have a lot more useful educational content to help you feel oriented with what their tools are what they're capable of doing And it's a really good idea to get Acquainted if you don't know what source connect is it's a tool used to connect studios To studios around the world that includes yours and if you want to be available for the big gigs and possibly Remotely producing your next demo because a lot of demo producers also use source connect You might want to get ready so head over there get yourself set up with a subscription So they can get you on boarded help you get set up and all that will be included In the cost of your subscription when you do that So source dash elements calm get started today I don't think there's a feeling quite like that moment when Something you've auditioned for becomes something you get booked on Especially when it comes to audiobooks you audition for an audiobook On acx or in some other Form or fashion and then somebody says hey, we like what you did We want you to be our narrator If that isn't a feeling that you've had lately because either you haven't figured out how to do audiobooks or because the efforts that you've put toward audiobooks Just don't seem to be working. I've got a solution for you Let's start with some free videos and then if you want registering for the acx master class I'm david h. Lawrence the 17th along with dano day I teach that class and you can get to those free videos and to registration if you'd like at acx master class dot com slash join That's acx master class com slash join. I'd love to help you get there This is bill radner and you're enjoying voiceover body shop with dan lennard and george widham v obs dot tv And we're back with hu klitski once again if you have a question throw it in the chat room And we got a bunch of questions for you from our worldwide audience that is tuning in specifically to hear you tonight you so Let's let's move to those. I'm excited. I'll do I'll do my best Okay, george you get mr. Romero's question All right frank asked. So what's the current trend on length of demos you meant you alluded to it earlier, um, but um Are we getting to short demo singularity? He said to short demo singularity? I I think that I think the I think players are really interesting I at first I kind of again Coming from the agency world. I just Kind of at first turn turned my nose up to them, but I thought to myself I realized from a very practical sense So when it goes to your site, they can pick bing bing bing go through and hear them one by one and pick what they want It's really interesting and that's really really compelling I think overall it's important to have a full demo object though It's you know, traditionally 60 seconds. Sometimes it can go longer I don't think you need to be slavish to that But 75 seconds is okay. I wouldn't go past. I wouldn't go to 90 I would probably hang around 60 67 seconds somewhere around in there But you it's got to hold the retention if you're going to do it for that long. Yeah Yeah, which is no easy feat. Yeah I'm sure. Yeah Kate on youtube asks Do you need to build a portfolio or is it case by case? I guess when you're working with somebody? You know, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure. I'm not sure what a portfolio is exactly. I'm not quite sure I I think with the demo you're Different types of reads that you would do, you know, not just strictly commercial but But you need to have a commercial demo and a narration demo and and these various other things But I think what she means is Do you look and see? Well, you need to have this kind of a demo and then maybe you should try doing one like that That sort of thing Yeah, I'm not I've never really been a fan of what's sometimes called the hybrid demo Because I think that's a little confusing. I think people People will always take the path of the least resistance Where it's I want to hear what I hear and then I want to hear the commercials. I want to hear them do narration. I want to hear them do audio books And so I wouldn't or I want to hear them do promos There was a trend for a little while of blending promo and commercial together. I never understood that Quite because those are two really really different things But then promo readers starting to started to have to do more commercials. So then it was like a promo Demo with some commercial elements in it Like brought to you by Nina the old school that way had become a trend coming back and then Agents had to go in and negotiate saying no, no, no That's a commercial you need to pay Like that's a commercial But it's a but it's in the context of the dump of a of a promo No, no, no So something like that maybe should go on a promo demo That little bit of commercial segment for example Yeah, and I've and I've differentiated my demos and you're strictly commercial Strictly announcer. I'm like, I need an announcer demo because that's what I get hired for And uh, you know, you have to know who you are and your market in order to do those different things Some people have commercial announcer and some people have commercial conversation Right. I've seen that I think that's fine Something the chat room said what if it says come what if it says uh conversational but not a announcer Are we talking about straightations of what if an announcer is there's like over the top announcer There's well what they're saying they just said the phrase conversational but not a announcer So that means it's conversational, right? Right? Right. I guess that was tying into the whole point of that Conversational is the new announcer Yeah, I mean that's But there are reasons why too I think because it's Yeah, it it's so difficult to describe but if you hear it it's like You can you can hear that the way the pause is used In an announcer way, but the read and the phrasing is conversation So that can happen a lot in broadcast television or in podcasts So it's like the net result is this kind of a hybrid thing But since the pandemic has ended there's the trend towards less and less and and Speaking in the natural tessitura in the natural register not pushed In any way at all to make things As if you are speaking to somebody who's So close you could reach out and put your hand on their form That physically close to you Actually speaking of trends One of the things that I do which some find controversial for some reason But I make processing presets for people's auditions And so one of the things that we that I'm doing is I'm making judgment calls about ecu for example The balance of low end to high end, you know and tilting that back and forth right or some of both right and um Have you found there's any kind of? trend in terms of what's booking In terms of ecu because I am hearing that brighter and less warm and less Brighter and brighter is more of a trend but I don't know if you've heard of a trend that way I have not heard of a trend that way And because so much of what I do is focused on the read I'm smart enough to Let that live with guys like you Yeah about ecu and about home studio setup and about presets and all of that kind of thing I can press record. I can press stop. I can edit And then I'm smart enough to stop talking Where I'm just sort of like no, I'm gonna go farm this out to my post guy because that's his thing Yeah, you know, I can make music choices. I can edit the music I can understand the relationship between where I want the music to exist next to the To the narration Yeah, and I can add sound design and I can make those choices and understand where all those things go aesthetically and then I stop And I press that that thing called export and I send it to other people with the other skill set to Mix and master and clean up and do all of the posts on that Right that way. Yeah, because that's not my that's not my strength. That's not my strength as a producer AJB voice actor who's listening and watching on youtube. Is it okay not to use a brand name in your demo? Seems sort of self-defeating, wouldn't it? I there were a couple of interesting theories around that um, somebody said to me once, you know you know You know, it's like you play a demo for somebody for five people you're gonna get five different opinions Right and there were very interesting opinions around that Some people felt like you didn't need the brand name because the brand was the most important thing was the read I thought that was interesting other people said if you don't put the brand in there They're gonna get confused to know what the hell you're talking about But if you put the brand in there that might confuse them more because they may think oh They've booked this Therefore I can't use them for this or they may have non-compete Which means they may not be able to go out for this So All of those thoughts and those thinking suddenly you can give yourself a massive headache Just trying to second guess every possible negative opinion So I'm always of the mind where and sometimes now They don't even have the brand name in the finished spot How many car commercials have we seen where it's a wonderfully written script? They don't even name the car. It's just on the screen as a logo at the end Some moments I've sat there and said say the name of the car Just put it in there. It's gonna button it all nicely just do it Why because the script seems to need it that's why and then I go back and I listen to it and I'm like Yep, good. I'm glad we have that or No, no No, it's more about them. Get the get the name out of there. I don't want that You have to make all of these aesthetic decisions all of these choices and somebody made a mistake and somebody got punished for it And suddenly somebody thinks that's gospel and the only way to do it And That's just not the way the world works That sometimes people never get caught and sometimes people do get caught and sometimes an agency complains when they hear their stuff Used and other times they don't complain It's very very all over the place And there are no hard and fast rules But you can sit there and you need to pay strong attention to the things that can show you off To the very best of your ability If you're a if you're a ballerina and you're exquisite at dancing balance sheet you should With or without permission You should do that because you have that skill set and if balance and if the estate complains Maybe then you have to adjust But you're not pretending to be a balancing train dancer because the man has been dead for a very long time It's now you know with his estate You understand i'm saying yeah, there are all kinds of reasons why to do things and to not do things You have to make sure that this that the choices that are made on your behalf Served you first right Yeah question from debbie erwin because she's here Uh, which man would you like to introduce me on my demo sexy grandpa? Uh, joking aside Well, that's a creative choice too Not all male voices are the same and if that's the first thing a person is hearing You know, if especially male slate.  Yeah What what sexy grandpa I could see hers, you know being you know at a samalia kind of a girl I could see that, you know You know just go just go right straight up and down famous that way or maybe maybe you know I could see her with a cowboy though So maybe like, you know K cause or something like that little kevin costner up front, you know You know bringing some bringing some of the cap the california cowboy real that he can that he does You know kind of hey might might trend a little bit too just a little too young You know, she did say which sexy grandpa should be on the front of her demo So yeah, I would say either you go for the class the vintage or you go for the classic right You've got the question from jeff ciarto All right. He says uh I find the times I end up reading too much into the script and Extremely critical of what I've done much to my detriment um It's his thoughts and then says I wasn't conversational Oh, the thoughts in his head are things like I wasn't Conversational or I'm too much announcer Um, I guess he wants to know How to get that out of his head I guess It's hard for me to answer that without actually talking to the person, but I would suggest that If they could get just a little bit of distance just a touch even if it's Recording it stopping not listening back standing up going away But then really going away, you know go Do half of half the dishes or something, you know and then listen again And then come back and listen again just with trying to just let yourself understand that It got to get a little bit of space just a little bit of space Yeah, I like your idea of closing your eyes while you're listening back and you know and asking yourself the question Did I make myself clear in what I was saying? But or did I just sound like I was reading a bunch of words that I really communicate it? And if you close your I mean, I usually have to close my eyes when listening to people anyway Because they're going so fast and you have visual stimulation and sometimes I can't follow both at once So just really focusing in on your voice is is really important Um when I directed a lot when I directed all those auditions I would close my eyes all the time, but then I began to realize that as a coach I had to temper that because When I was directing an audition I didn't care how you got there all I cared was how was that you did get there So I'm giving you a direction note I don't care how you get there get there and then I want to hear it But when I'm coaching someone It's very different because I have to balance Being objective at understanding what they're doing with understanding how they're doing it and then being able to correct their how So I I've had to temper some of my own process as I've moved from purely directing to Coaching with some direction It's it's very different it's kind of like when we we we listen to audio and We want the audio raw And we know the producers want the audio raw But we do know that some people are still going to be doing some processing And is that wrong because is it better that they everything they do be technically pure? Or is it better what they do sound technically good? Right and so we fight that little battle I think I do anyway fight that little battle at times So it's feel it ties in a little bit to what we do from a technical standpoint Mike Derner who provided us with this lovely mic flag asks What should never go in a demo? the offbeat for its own sake the The the thing I wanted to include just because I liked it That you everything has to have a purpose right? Oh, I just threw in this I just threw in this old spot because I booked it and I liked it No, it sounds like an old spot It just is an old spot. Oh, this was the thing I used I was known for right No, you're looking to address marketplace right now Yeah, you know things like that Things that just sound wildly out of out of production character You know just so different where it's jarring where suddenly I'm not listening to you read I'm listening to the audio quality of that thing right Alrighty, well Hugh. Thanks so much for being with us tonight and And give imparting this information to us if they want to get a hold of you And if they want some coaching on it, where would they go? I would imagine it's okay, so it's it's Look at that I don't know which way to go So my own site is a disaster, but it's a disaster in process So I direct everybody to vo now.co and if you go there You'll find the coaching and classes page and you can book a free consultation and yes, it's just Click on it We have a conversation we set up a time They usually are about 30 minutes Usually they run longer And then we can talk about you Usually I give people scripts up front so they have something they can read for me I can critique you a little bit and then To really try to understand What it is that you're looking for and how I might be able to help so vo now.co Go to the classes and coaching Hit on the one of the photo that looks like me, you know, as opposed to the beautiful photo of deb erwin who's there too And you know set up a free consultation with me and I'd love to talk with you Alrighty, well, thanks for being with us tonight. We really appreciate your time and Parting your wisdom and it's just great to see you again too. Good to see you too. Alrighty, great to meet you George, thanks All right Well, we'll be right back and wrap things up and re-rack it for tech talk right after these important messages So don't go away You're still watching vlbs Your dynamic voiceover career requires extra resources to keep moving ahead There's one place where you can explore everything the voiceover industry has to offer That place is voiceover extra dot com Whether you're just exploring a voiceover career or a seasoned veteran ready to reach that next professional level Stay in touch with market trends coaching products and services while avoiding scams and other pitfalls Voiceover extra has hundreds of articles free resources and training that will save you time and help you succeed Learn from the most respected talents coaches and industry insiders when you join the online sessions Bringing you the most current information on topics like audio books, auditioning, home studio setup and equipment Marketing performance techniques and much more. It's time to hit your one-stop daily resource for voiceover success Sign up for a free subscription to newsletters and reports It's all here at voiceover extra dot com. That's voiceover x t r a dot com Well, here's something I don't normally do i just hit the timer 60 seconds to talk about voice actor dot com What is voice actor dot com? It is a place to get if you if you're just starting out in voiceover You have to have a website no matter where you are once you get your demos and we've been talking about demos the whole night You've got to get them on a website. What do you need on a website? You need your name your demos and your contact information And you're not going to dazzle people with artistic expression so much with your website So what they do at voice actor dot com is they have templated websites where you can go in Insert your information easily maybe change the color of the backgrounds a little bit add your own pictures But you can literally be online In half an hour to 45 minutes as opposed to six months So go over on over to voice actor dot com and get your website set up now We are the world voices organization also known as wovo We're the not-for-profit industry association of freelance voice talent voiceover is a complex entrepreneurial business Wovo is there to promote the professional nature of voice work to the public to those already established in their voiceover practice And to those who want to pursue voiceover as a career Membership benefits include a supportive and creative community a profile and demos on voiceover.biz Our searchable directory of vetted professional voice talent our exclusive demo player for your personal website Our mentoring program business resources and our video library our annual wovo con conference A fun and educational weekend with other members with the chance to learn and network Webinars and great speakers and weekly social chats with other members around the world If your world is voiceover make wovo part of it world voices organization. We speak for those who speak for a living Yeah, hi, this is carlo zellers rocky the voice of rocko and you're watching voiceover body shop Yes, you are and uh Next week on this very show We will have tech talk number 105 unless of course you are watching the show live right at this moment You could just stay with us and we will get into tech talk And you can ask your questions in real time and george and I will answer them in real time Whether the right answers or not, so I just put mine into chat gpt Because you've written so much already it's gonna just regurgitate everything you've already written anyway It would just convincingly lie about the facts for you. That's why you're here after all right Yes, anyway, I thanks to hugh klitski for joining us tonight because imparting all that very important wisdom about demos because it's a really important piece of our Our business, uh, let's see You still have a coupon for uh people who will go over to george the tech We still give you guys 10 off. I don't see it used very often, which is fine bizarre, but van V obs fan 10 Still get to 10 off any services bookings at george the tech right and you can find me over at home voiceover studio dot com Where yeah, that's where I do my thing with helping you with your home studio When i'm not doing voiceover work for all my major clients all over the world, which is fun stuff Uh speaking of people all over the world who are our donors of the week while we start off with Grace newton christopher epperson robert ledham steven chandler kasey clack jonathan grant tom pinto greg thomas a doctor voice antlion productions martha con 949 designs sarah borges phillips appear brian page patty gibbons rob rider shawna pennington baird don griffith Trey moseley Diana birdsall there she is maria makas and sandra man willer Thanks everybody. 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We're gonna re-rack it and set for tech talk. Come on Stick around ask your questions. Listen to george and I talk about home voice over studios because no one knows more about them than we do uh, so Guess what? This is not an easy business That's why we're here to give you the information on all of these different things that Run together in our business all the things you got to know and along with the technical stuff, so It's not easy to get everything right, but we have discovered that if it sounds good It is good I'm tan Leonard and i'm george widham and this is voice over body shop or vio B s Stay tuned for tech talk


innovation editor at the Financial Times in London. It's a great pleasure to moderate this panel today and to be back in Helsinki. I think the first time I was in Helsinki was in the 1990s. I was writing about the pulp and paper industry. It's obviously a very important industry but not quite as interesting as what's going on today. Something crazily good has happened in this part of the world since I was last year. So welcome to our pan list today. We're going to be talking about Tom's report. We have Roxanne Vazer who is the director of station F, the startup campus in Paris, and then Sebastien Szymyukowski who is the co-founder of Klana. So welcome. I wondered if we could start. Being a journalist I take a bit of a more skeptical take than Tom and I wanted to ask about how fast Europe really is moving. I mean it clearly is going very quickly but is it going as fast as it needs to compared to the rest of the world and what is going on in US and China. And if you look at some of the stats the EU still has no digital companies in the global top 15 by market capitalization digital companies and accounts for just 4% of the 200 leading online platforms. So when are we going to be able to go toe to toe with China and the US? Sebastien, do you want to start on this? I think actually European companies compared to US ones are very competitive and doing extremely well. I think China is a different league and we should all be very happy that that market is so big that they're currently focusing on winning their own market rather than coming and competing with us guys. The Chinese are faster, more hard-working, smarter, more creative, but we're happy to be here in Europe. There's less competition here as well as in the US. Okay and Roxanne you were born in Palo Alto I believe so you have a very American perspective on what's going on. How do you think Europe stacks up globally? So before we get into all the Europe bashing that I love to do I actually think we should stop and take a minute to actually consider all the positive things that have happened. I think 17 billion dollar companies in one year alone that's incredible. The number of developers being ahead of the US having increasing numbers that's not something that we should overlook. I think Tom mentioned in his presentation as well the number of IPOs some of the biggest IPOs if you want to consider it in Silicon Valley this year were European companies so I think that's stuff that we really cannot ignore and actually it's just a matter of time so your question was about time and I will let Tom tell you when that time is. I think it's we can spend a lot of time looking at indicators that tell us what's happened in the past or we can spend time which is what we're trying to do with the report to look at the data to give us an indication of what's happening in the future and I think for a long time we've been talking about the promise of European tech and I think this year as I said it's been this incredible wrecking breaking year and you know Roxanne just gave the numbers but I think we can feel confident in our ability to go toe to toe when we've produced four companies with an IPO of you know five billion or more and there were fewer actually in the US this year. I think Sebastian is absolutely right that China is a is a special case and I think you can't overlook the fact of the you know the special conditions of that market. You know I think Roxanne also kind of just said we're just getting started and you know we made the point around diversity inclusion we've kind of had all of this progress and we've done it with our hands tied behind our back and on our knees so just imagine you know how much more we're going to achieve not only when we're able to build an ecosystem that's inclusive and that speaks to all its people but also once we start tapping all those markets outside the UK and Germany and the Nordics there's almost you know yeah we've barely got started in in tapping the potential from from from from sort of Eastern and Central European and Southern Europe some super excited. All right I want to come back to that in just a minute I mean one of the things that has massively changed in Europe over the past few years as is evidence by this event is the cultural change that has happened and we were just chatting backstage about what people wanted to do when they left University. So Roxanne you're at station F this startup campus clearly being an entrepreneur is very fashionable in France now can you just tell us a bit about that. Yeah so I've seen a huge change we were talking kind of over the last 10 years you know when I first when I first came out to Europe it kind of was very far from being trendy to be an entrepreneur and I think there's some numbers today that show that in certain countries it's roughly 70% of young graduates actually want to be an entrepreneur now there's some debate around whether that's healthy or not should everybody be launching a company so there's probably gonna be some kind of fashionable trends that are gonna have people come and go and some less valuable companies be created but I think that's just the name of the game. So there's an image outside France that most people want to go and become a bureaucrat and go to Enna. Not at all the case no. And Sebastian when you're at Stockholm School of Economics did people want to be an entrepreneur and how much has it changed? I mean when we started Clona there was 7% that wanted to become entrepreneurs and today 70 so that's a massive shift back then I mean you gotta remember this was before the financial crisis people wanted to go and work at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and McKinsey which is not the case anymore right but also think that like in Sweden at least I think to some degree in other parts of Europe as well it's not only about like it's kind of interesting to see this blend of it's both about being an entrepreneur but it's also about making an impact in the world and trying to create some kind of company that can benefit the world right and that's those two trends have been combined in a very exciting way I think because I mean one is that people who have this desire to make an improvement actually use a company as a vehicle to do that and I think that's can be very disruptive and have a good very good impact on the world because operating as a company is a smart way to operate I think so I think that's a cool trend and I want to just highlight on the US and Europe comparison obviously that's close to my heart is just that I mean I think there's different industries but when it comes to FinTech I mean Europe is so far ahead of compared to the US like in the US you may mention one or two companies in Europe I don't know like 1520 which are probably all of them by now over a billion dollar valuation and we're doing extremely well so and I think that's I think there's a number of reasons for that but I also would highlight that we never give the EU credit for anything that's why we all hate it and some people want to leave it or are even planning to leave it but actually like PSD2 for example it's just such an amazing change for the benefit of the consumer to protect the consumers interest and allow the consumers to switch and so forth so I mean here actually the regulators they're doing worse in other areas like stock options and stuff but in this area they're actually doing a lot to help the FinTech industry and in general make Europe to be ahead of the game so it's pretty cool it's always a great thing for a Britain to hear what a wonderful thing the EU is but we'll leave that aside for the moment and now we were talking about the culture change one area that clearly does have to change a lot more that was identified in the Atomico report is on the issue of gender and inclusion and diversity and they're really quite shocking numbers about gender diversity if not unsurprising I guess so I'd like to ask all of you what do you think can be done about this how can tech be made more inclusive Roxanne? So I'm really glad that we're talking about this because it's a huge issue and I I'm glad that we also called it out a little bit by what it is because I do think a lot of people consider it to be someone else's problem and nobody actually comes out and says you know yes we are an all male team or we are you know we have issues with inclusion diversity as our team so I'm really glad that we actually put our finger on that again I also want to be realistic it's not a European problem and I do think that means actually there's a huge potential for Europe to even take the lead as a worldwide leader in actually changing that making a difference now what actually needs to be done there's a lot of different things a lot of organizations that are out there making suggestions kind of as a on a grassroots level but I actually I think we actually need a different type of movement today like we've we've had a lot over the past year year and a half around me too it was a lot of calling out bad behavior and I'm sad that we had to go that route but apparently people didn't know what was bad behavior and now I think we need a movement kind of in the opposite sense what is good behavior what are initiatives we should be doing and recognizing and things that we should be following so I think we kind of have to take a different approach now to the way things are handled okay Sebastian what do you think on this issue look I think it's an old complex problems so unfortunately there are no silver bullet solutions right and I think it's it's a lot of mixes but I think that some important aspects are obviously into role modeling and you know as people get more successful highlight the cases of that I think diversity obviously stretched beyond gender as well I mean in our case at Kana for example we have 80 nationalities so people from 80 different countries working there so I think that like so again like our ability to kind of recruit from all of the world bring people and so forth these are also things that drives and what are you specifically doing to make that happen are you going out and finding yeah I mean in our case is actually the problem is Stockholm is just not big enough I mean we have Spotify we have ourselves we have I settle there's a lot of successful companies and there's simply we can't find enough people so bringing people from all the world now it's because of the current political wins is becoming a little bit more challenging but but you know Sweden has been a great country in that sense to be able to bring talent from all over the world and now we also bring even more to Berlin actually which we're growing much faster in because of and that's an amazing you know multicultural city that you can bring people from all the world so. Right Tom what do you think what can practically be done to help change this. Yeah I mean I think Roxanne called it out and one of the things we highlight in the report is the number of amazing initiatives that have already proliferated that are having positive impact even in the UK alone we came up with 28 different initiatives that are tackling it from one way or another I think the reality is you know step one is to be conscious of the fact that there's a problem and then I think step two is recognition of the fact that we all have a responsibility including us as investors and then I think it's about taking those first few steps and we we actually introduced into our term sheet earlier this year a clause that they're asks of the companies that we invest into to put into place a diversity and inclusion policy if they don't have one in place already within six months and that was something that got an amazing reaction from from all of the founders but one of the bits of feedback that came back was okay well how do we do it which is why we've launched this guidebook which will help entrepreneurs and leaders to know how to think about how to plan how to build how to implement how to measure and how to iterate the policies and put it at the core of their companies and I think as I said it requires making it a first and foremost priority does that mean that you won't invest in companies that don't have sufficient diversity I think if we found that that there was a resistance then that would be something that we would think about yeah absolutely okay I just wanted to jump on to the back of that actually I also think it's really important that we talk about diversity we don't just narrow it down to men and women I actually think there's diversity means a lot more than just that it's I think one thing that we tried to do for example at station F is also address underprivileged entrepreneurs people that are not just coming out of business schools and engineering schools but also people that may have very very different backgrounds and struggled quite a bit and they don't have a degree and their refugee and maybe they've you know had a very difficult situation I think that's also something we really need to address and consider with the different diversity initiatives yeah now one of the other things that came out of the report was that as Tom has been saying tech is going right across Europe now it's not just confined to London Paris Berlin Stockholm Sebastian I wondered if you could give us a sense of where you think the next kind of hot spots are around Europe as you said glarner is now operating in lots of different markets where do you think that the next hot spots are going to be in Europe I'm not sure if it's the next I mean Berlin has been on the map for a long period of time but I just feel that like it has a lot of prequisites that other places are lacking right it has cheap housing a cheap accommodation it's and it's also a very attractive young city for young people to come from all of Europe more so to be honest in Stockholm even though I love Stockholm it's in amazing many ways but so just in general I think the prominence of Berlin is going to continue to rise to be honest it's its center and it's it's a popular place to be and then hopefully you know we'll see more parts in Eastern Europe as well happening I mean I think what's cool today is also I meet so many founders today which would say like yeah we are like four people here and you know we have a couple of developers in Ukraine and we have this and that right so I think nowadays like this whole video conference we talked about that 15 20 years ago people gonna work on a distance but actually the technology is starting to get to a maturity level where actually you can work on a distance from each other in a way so start seeing companies that are more geographically spread out as well which is pretty cool right now it used to be said that 10 15 years ago entrepreneurs in Europe went to Silicon Valley five years ago they went to London Paris Berlin Stockholm what's happening in France Roxanne I mean are if you set up a business in Leon would you stay there or would you come and work in station F in Paris yeah I think France has changed dramatically I mean you said it a few years ago I think people would look at France if you were a foreigner and you wanted to build your company there you would laugh and you would not even consider it and today that is not the case at all we see tons of international entrepreneurs from around the world wanting to come and base their companies there I think obviously some of it has been impacted by Brexit by Donald Trump in the US by High Silicon Valley prices so we see actually people instead of going to those locations now they're coming to France and I think you can be based anywhere you want I mean I think Sebastian said it great you have teams that are you know scattered throughout Europe you can be based one place have your team somewhere else you can even hop around I see entrepreneurs now that they'll be six months here six months somewhere else and I think that's that's beautiful and that allows you really to become an international company right Sebastian you were talking about what the EU has done to create more of a kind of digital single market but there are still lots of areas where it's deficient and one of the charts in the report which I thought was quite interesting was that so many companies decide to open their first international office in the US or even Australia than they do necessarily in their neighbouring country now Tom points out that that's because they don't necessarily need to open an office in a neighbouring country but still there's very much a focus that you have to make it in the US and planner itself you're operating in the US when do you think it will be when you really does have a kind of single digital market that it will be just as easy to operate in Stockholm as it is in Paris as it is in Berlin as it is in Belgrade I mean language barriers will always exist of course but I do think that one of the fallacies of EU is that they've harmonized the business rules but they haven't harmonized consumer rules right and so consequently as you move throughout Europe the consumer rules like specifically for us in banking it's even worse but just in general it's a problem that there are specific setups and every country will interpret these consumer rules in different ways even though they're officially recommended just look at GDPR even then so so the point is that like I think that's that's the kind of next challenge obviously currently it's a little bit challenging to to drive that political change through the EU but I think we I mean the problem with you really is that currently we all sit and vote for people to go there to grab as much money of that coming back to ourselves and any organization that is built up on everyone trying to grab as much as possible benefit from it is not going to be a very successful one we there has to be a revival of the idea that as us sharing something and making some sacrifices jointly to achieve some a greater common good that that is the reason behind doing it and that what's going to make it better and unfortunately that's not where the political climate is today right yeah and in France Roxanne I mean President Macron has clearly been very interested in the whole kind of tech sector and he's been a very kind of pro-European president is he going to be a kind of driving force for some of these change we need to see I hope so I think just jumping on the back of what Sebastian said I actually have seen quite a bit of change with regards to the number of companies that actually consider the US as their second market after their local country just in the past few years I think we're seeing companies that now they'll actually consider the US much much later in the game and they consider launching a number of European markets at the same time or from very very early on so even if maybe the numbers don't show it yet I think we're probably at the beginning of a new trend Tom I just want to make one extra point which I think is we should embrace this because you know we've been talking a long time about how do we grow the ambition levels of the companies that emerge from Europe and ultimately we want to build global winners and you know I think being a global winner requires winning in the US too and so to the extent that that's on the roadmap where whether it comes first or whether it comes after an expansion in Europe it's absolutely the type of ambition that we want to see and there's you know as we as a as I said earlier we're seeing more and more European companies cross the pond and have success and that's a great thing now one of the other points that you made in your presentation was that how little institutional investors tend to put into VCs and startups and I met Reid Hoffman in London the other day who was talking about his whole philosophy of blitz scaling it's quite hard to blitz scale if you don't have this massive pool of capital which is prepared to be thrown at companies like Uber to sustain them for a decade of loss making before they go public and do you sense that there is a change in the pension fund industry are they becoming more interested in the sector Tom? I mean absolutely is this is the simple answer but I think it's not necessarily as simple as they start to recognize what's happening and the money flows you know I think there are some structural challenges that need to be overcome not least in terms of the ability to deploy certain check sizes but I think we have conversations all the time with pension funds and I think the thing that has really made a difference is the transformation of performance of European venture capital which is driven by the amazing companies that have emerged from Europe and I think of course you know what are these institutional investors trying to chase it's yield and so when you see that European VC can be competitive with US VC and it's competitive to European buyout then you'll see that rebalancing happening and it's happening it's happening here in the Nordics fastest and you know I think the more that we can educate and the more that we can close this knowledge gap the faster it will happen elsewhere too. Right we're drawing to a close but I just want to ask all of you for what advice you would give to all of the entrepreneurs in the room Sebastian what is the one thing that you've learned in your career that you think would benefit the people in this audience? Oh my god I don't know no I would say in the end actually it's gonna sound a little bit cheesy but just follow your heart to be honest and like don't like it's great to take advice from other people but I mean life is really about doing what you believe in and you don't want to regret that you listen too much so just like follow your inner voice and do what you think is right. So as the singer said at the beginning or sang at the beginning life is not addressed rehearsal it's the show I believe. Roxanne do you have a bit of advice? Yeah I guess I will draw also on personal experience and kind of in a similar theme to what Sebastian just said but like when I moved to Europe about ten years ago people looked at me and they were like you're crazy you love startups you're born in Silicon Valley and you're moving to France and I think now people would totally not question that choice and I just want to like kind of hit that statement that a lot of ecosystems are growing changing developing very quickly so if you want to be based somewhere if you believe in the place that you're at stay there because it will change. Well thank you very much for a fascinating discussion but just before we leave the stage I actually want to make an announcement as a journalist I tend to report the news rather than make it but I do have some news today that I would like to share with you exclusively. In the first quarter of next year with a team of very smart journalists and entrepreneurs and investors I am launching a financial times backed but separately run media site called Sifted to cover Europe's blossoming tech sector. I've been so convinced by what I've heard today that I'm actually going to set up a startup and try to write about all of this. We intend to deliver the best journalism to tell this largely untold story of what is going right across Europe in some of the regional cities as well as the centres. We will focus on many of the issues that we've been talking about today and we want to sift the best of the content that's already out there to help you as entrepreneurs. We've already hired five great reporters including Maya Parma from the Financial Times not only is she a great tech journalist but she is also Finnish so she can really speak your language in all senses of the word and she will actually be moderating the next session. We are going to double our team over the next few weeks and we'll launch in quarter one of next year. For the moment we are a very scrappy startup like many of you and we have a very scrappy website called sifted.eu. Please sign up for our emails, look out for these leaflets which we are going to be handing around today and have a look at our site. We want to create a media platform for you to share your big ambitions and achievements and to give you and Europe a stronger voice in the global tech debate. So thank you very much to all of our panellists for a wonderful discussion and on to the next session. Thank you.