I'm with Keiko Napier in the, wait a minute, the True Protection booth. How you doing today? I'm good, how are you? All right, so what are we looking at? Well, we are known for our screen protectors. I've been in the screen protector business since 2005, but today we're at Macworld introducing some electronic products. We'd like to get the feedback of the Mac fans, as they have been our customer base for many years. Some of the things that we're showing are, this is a headphone, it's a Bluetooth headphone, but there is a battery pack built into the headphone. So as we all know, we sit on a plane, we watch a video, we start losing juice on our device. You can power your device from your headphone, so there is a power out. Oh wow, that's pretty cool, and they're really stylish-looking, bright white rectangular headphones. Thank you. This is a little mini speaker. This also has a power bank, so you can listen to it via Bluetooth off your device, but if your device starts to run out of juice, you can plug your speaker to power your phone. That is really cool. Now that's a cylinder, maybe half the size of a coke can, that's pretty cute. Thank you. This is another device that we all need power banks. This part of the device is a power bank. You can charge the power bank, of course, in the car. If you're traveling and you don't have your car, you can use your USB to power the power bank, and it has a power out, so you can use any of your chargers to charge your device. And just this little odd feature, it has a flashlight, so if you show up late somewhere. There you go.  On one end it's got the car charger, on the other end it's got USB that pops open to allow you to get to the other USB port. So now it looks like it's got a red, yellow, green. Is that to tell us how charged up it is? Yes, that's right. Very cool. This is our favorite project though, and one that I love to talk about. These cases are made in Los Angeles out of recycled plastics, and what we do is we work with different charities and different artists. Heather is a Hawaiian based surf artist, and she usually works with a non-profit in Hawaii. We give 15% of our sales, not profits of sales to the charities. And then we do periodic special events. This is for April is Autism Awareness Month. This is in coordination with Surfers Healing. Surfers Healing puts on surf camps all over the country for kids with autism. They get them into the water and get them accustomed to a new environment. Some of the kids really love it and find it very relaxing. So for the month of April, we'll sell this case at $39.95 on our website, but we'll donate $20 for each sale. So as you can imagine, we started with films. We are expert at films, but these are my son and I, passion projects that we want. This is where your heart is, huh? Yeah, this is where our heart is. I'm sure you can tell. We love talking about this. Very good, Keiko. This has been fascinating. You guys have a pretty wide field of product. So how does someone find your stuff? Please go to our website. It's www.TrueProtectionWithNoE.com. Very good. Thank you very much, Keiko.


Have a hard. Essentially just a poo. The door will be open. I can see. Alright, we got cover long. Us four, roll through this. All good? There's no one in there. Of a vehicle hide from this location. Right of that vehicle. Yep, Roger. Yep, I'm on the right hand side of the vehicle. Yep, Roger. Well, when we get back to the truck, we'll turn it face. Alright lads, we'll call you back when we get to the truck. Alright, let's leave it.


Climate change is the greatest ecological crisis of all times. It's the greatest ecological crisis humanity has ever faced. And what the scientists are telling us with a remarkably united voice is that this problem is very, very serious that we have already put so much greenhouse gas, extra greenhouse gas up into the upper atmosphere that we have pretty much already guaranteed ourselves a degree of mild climate change. And what they are telling us with an increasingly loud and desperate voice is that as we continue to do this, we are running a truly unacceptable risk of cataclysmic types of climate change that really nobody even wants to think about what that might look like. Now ordinarily, what does a species do unless they plan to imitate the lemmings? Ordinarily, when you are essentially about to commit ecocide, then the sensible response is to sort of take the issue seriously and to come to grips with what are we going to have to do to do about this. So that's the second piece of reality I think that it's important for us to understand.  Every single time the scientists look at the new data and evaluate the new data about how rapidly the change is proceeding, every single time the update is, remember what we told you last time? It's even worse. And the other thing to remember about what we take to be the consensus from the scientific community, we're taking this information from a very, very large network of scientists and they only tell us what they can get consensus on. So think about what that means. That means that the scientists that are giving us this information are saying this much we can be sure about. Most of them are thinking it's worse than they're telling us. And then every time they tell us and they update us, they tell us we underestimated just how rapidly this process is going. So that's the first thing. The second thing is absolutely nothing's being done about it. Amazing. Are carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions falling anyplace on the planet? No. You go back to 1992. All the countries of the world came together in Rio de Janeiro at the famous Earth Summit. Some important things were accomplished. Climate change is going to be a real problem. It's being caused by human economic activity, release of greenhouse gases. It's a problem that no country can solve all by itself. It's going to require some form of international cooperation because all countries are going to have to participate in solving this problem. The other really important thing that was decided at Rio de Janeiro was, well, it's important to recognize that when countries participate in solving this problem that you can't expect them all to participate completely equally because countries have different responsibilities or degrees of responsibility for having created the problem and countries have different capacities for just having the wherewithal and the wealth to actually go about solving the problem. And that was the language that actually goes all the way back to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. There was a recognition there and an acceptance on the part of all the attendees at that conference that a solution had to take seriously that countries had different responsibilities for having gone ahead and caused the problem and had different capacities for being able to contribute to a solution. You could roughly say, you know, you could roughly say there was a consensus there that we have to solve this problem fairly. So if you want to summarize a lot of complicated sort of resolutions and everything else that came down to this, the problem series is going to have to be solved by cooperation amongst countries that can't be solved individually and we really, we need to solve it in a fair way that's reasonably fair. The one thing that they did not decide in Rio in 1992, they could not come up with an agreement on mandatory emissions reductions for particular countries. That was a bullet that was too hard to bite in 1992. And so instead what delegations did was they each sort of said, we will volunteer to reduce our emissions by so much. Everybody sort of volunteered, how much am I going to contribute to solving the problem and various countries made announcements there either in Rio or soon after. Well, five years later the meetings were in Kyoto and when the world, when the countries regathered in Kyoto in 1997, there was an overwhelming fact that was staring them in the face. Not a single country had reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Much less had a single country come close to reducing emissions to the degree that they had said voluntarily we are going to try and do such and such. And in Kyoto, the world succeeded in biting the hard bullet, the hardest bullet of all, which is to recognize if we don't agree, if we don't have mutual agreement to mandatory reductions, we are not going to solve this problem. Now, economic theory basically suggests that there's every reason to expect this to be the case. You could simply say we don't need, sometimes we don't need economic theory. Somehow the facts and history sometimes teach you such an obvious lesson, you don't need to do a lot of theorizing, you just take the lesson from history. Well, you could say what we learned in the five years between Rio and Kyoto was that when we just voluntarily pledged to reduce emissions country by country, it doesn't happen, so we better try something else. Well, economic theory basically bolsters that conclusion. It says it's not an accident that it didn't happen. And perhaps at this juncture it's really important to sort of explain why it is that economic theory says it's no accident that if you try and solve the problem that way you won't get it solved because we are back in that situation again. Ever since Copenhagen there is no international treaty with mandatory reductions for anybody. That process was abandoned in Copenhagen and since Copenhagen the situation is that countries are back to maybe we will have conversations and discussions but basically we are back in the world of countries perhaps hopefully will be making voluntary attempts to reduce carbon emissions. Well, it didn't work before and it isn't going to work now. And what economic theory tells us is that there's every reason to expect that. I think I remember the numbers, I might have to look at a page here. It's basically the free rider problem. And this is a problem that we teach in economic theory courses. And the free rider problem says that if when I do something I'm not the only one that benefits a whole bunch of other people benefit too. Then I'm going to hesitate to do that if it's also the case that if you did the same thing you wouldn't be the only one to benefit, I would benefit likewise. So the name comes from this, there's a sort of perverse incentive for neither person or party to go ahead and do what is clearly sort of desirable because there's an incentive for each party to hesitate and wait and let the other person do it and then free ride on what they did because I'm going to benefit from that too. Now in this context I can sort of block out the sort of the rough figures here. China is the most populous country on the earth. When anybody reduces greenhouse, when greenhouse gas emissions are reduced any place on the earth roughly speaking every person on the earth benefits equally. That would be exactly true if the negative consequences of climate change were really going to be visited exactly equally on every country. And that's not true but that's a different issue. So for these purposes just assume for the moment that when greenhouse gas emissions are reduced no matter where they're reduced there'll be less climate change and then we all more or less benefit equally from having less climate change. Well China is the most populous country on earth. They have roughly 20% of the world's population. When China reduces greenhouse gas emissions, suppose they do it voluntarily China is going to do something, they're going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions well they pay 100% of the costs for those reductions. Whatever it costs to reduce their emissions they pay 100% of the costs but they only get 20% of the benefits. When the United States reduces, we don't have as many people as China when the United States reduces greenhouse gas emissions we pay for 100% of the cost of that and the United States gets less than 5% of the overall benefits that come from that. When the United Kingdom reduces emissions they get roughly 1% of the benefit but they have to pay for 100% Grenada, what percentage of the benefits does Grenada get if Grenada reduces carbon emissions? 0.0016%. There's no incentive for them to do that except if they are just going to do everybody a big favor. Well there's the problem. How does mutually mandatory reductions change the self-calculating logic that countries predictably engage in? Well the Kyoto treaty said that England would reduce emissions by 5.5% and basically they would bear 100% of the cost but look what they got in exchange they didn't just get the benefits of their own reduction of 5.5% in emissions they got the benefits of a 5.5% reduction in emissions from every other advanced economy in the world that's what you get if you have mutually agreed to reductions you get the benefit of all those other countries reductions along with the benefits of your own it's a total game changer it's the only way we're going to solve this problem so the first thing that has to happen is and oh so in Kyoto they basically said nobody's reducing without mutually agreed to mandatory reductions we're going to do it but they also took seriously and I believe we should take seriously and I think we can take seriously the idea that this should be done fairly and the way they took that into account in Kyoto was they said look the advanced economies are responsible for 80% of the excessive emissions that are up there the underdeveloped countries are really only responsible for at most 20% of what's put in there so the advanced economies really have 80% of the responsibility at this point for having created the problem and if you take a look at sort of comparative wealth and resources roughly the same thing is true that the advanced economies have 80% of the sort of resources that we could reasonably say they should be made available to solve a serious problem so in Kyoto they basically did a rough cut they said at least temporarily here in 1997 let's agree that all the advanced economies will commit to mandatory reductions not exactly the same for each country that had to be sort of argued and discussed but pretty much 5.5% and we will temporarily exclude the developing economies from committing to mandatory reductions we'll ask them to please try and reduce but we'll leave them in the voluntary status and that was the way in Kyoto that they decided to try and that was how they tried that was how they decided to implement the notion of fairness and equity but in Kyoto it was very very clear that this exclusion for this sort of this exclusion for mandatory reductions for the less developed countries that this was temporary and that in some post-Kyoto treaty then perhaps they would also have to participate in this stronger form that's what happened in Kyoto and very soon after Kyoto the US government said we're unwilling to participate soon as Bush was elected in 2000 he said we're withdrawing from the Kyoto process we don't believe in this I don't even believe in climate change that's my official position of my party this is all nonsense we're not going to be part of it and actually most people thought well with the wealthiest with the wealthiest country that's the largest polluter out of the process the whole process is going to really fall apart and largely thanks to the European countries and largely thanks to the Scandinavian delegations that participated in the in the European Union sort of thinking and thinking and strategizing about this Kyoto didn't fall apart because the Kyoto treaty said look this whole thing will go into effect when enough of the advanced economy signed it and a lot of thinking was well they're not going to get enough signatures there's never going to be a Kyoto treaty but they did get enough signatures which was rather surprising here the world is going to engage in mandatory reductions they're really biting the bullet they're doing the serious thing and the country that's wealthiest and most responsible is saying we're just going to free ride but it happened and then countries came together in Copenhagen and some of the countries that came together said look we have discovered there's some problems in the Kyoto treaty between 97 and 209 and these are some serious problems and we really need to we need to fix them some of the countries the European delegations for the most part the UK the UK was awful but the European delegations said we've identified problems in Kyoto we are here and ready to fix them in a post Kyoto treaty that retains the incredibly good things that were in that treaty in the first place the essential good things were we got to have mutually agreed to mandatory reductions and we got to figure out a way to do this fairly so we want to retain that and fix the problems and I'm going to spend some time here in a minute talking about the problems and how they can very easily have been fixed there were other countries that came to Copenhagen and here a rather strange thing surprised us all my wife is an environmental economist this is actually her chief issue if any of you have ever heard of the 350 campaign which is a campaign that's very very active trying to promote awareness about climate change and sort of urging governments and people to get their governments to do something effective about it Bill McKibben is the usual spokesperson my wife is an environmental economist this is her specialty she was his chief economic advisor at Copenhagen and they went and of course they came back completely depressed and discouraged over what had happened and this is something that I think is very important for Europeans to think about in terms of thinking about how you're going to go forward when the US wasn't even participating you surprisingly successfully kept on the right track now of course you want the biggest polluter in the wealthiest country to join the world's process for solving the problem and that's what everybody thought maybe hopefully was happening when the Obama administration is newly elected and they say we're not climate denialist and verbally Obama said and we believe the United States should be playing a very active even leading role in solving this problem and I'm sending Hillary off there to Copenhagen and I'm going to fly in two days later and everybody got all excited about that but it turned out that what the US delegation Hillary and Obama said was we don't like this whole Kyoto thing we really are unwilling to accept mandatory reductions and we want to work with people who don't want to do mandatory reductions so what came out of Copenhagen was no start instead of Copenhagen launching a process that would have that would have fixed problems in Kyoto and continued to send us farther in the direction of actually seriously doing something about the greatest problem we probably face in this entry we basically went 20 years backwards in time to an international situation that is exactly where the world was prior to 1992 prior to the Earth summit we literally lost 20 years of international diplomatic progress in what happened in Copenhagen now problems with the treaty and ways to fix it and I'm going to I'll be quick and some of this is a little hard to catch but there's plenty, there'll be time to talk about it there's five things that should have been done and could easily have been done to make a post-Kyoto treaty a serious what are we trying, what do you want in your treaty you want it to be effective and effective means is global reduction in emissions has to be big enough and quick enough so that we actually no longer run an unacceptable risk of triggering cataclysmic climate change that's what effective means and effective really is it's one thing and one thing only have you got a big enough reduction in global emissions it's nice, it's nice when your goals are very very clear cut and you can think about it that way and you don't have to get all complicated about it that's what effective means we want a treaty that would distribute the burdens of accomplishing this effective prevention of cataclysmic climate fairly you want a treaty that's effective you want a treaty that's fair and here's where we economists come in you want a treaty that's efficient it turns out that there's tremendous differences in what it costs society to reduce emissions in some ways rather than other ways and there's actually very very significant differences in what it would cost society to reduce emissions in different countries so you don't want to reduce emissions where in ways that it costs the most you want to reduce emissions where and in ways that cost the least that's what efficiency is now there's an immediate conflict that arises between what would be a fair if we want to distribute the emissions reductions fairly then we would distribute most of those emission reductions predominantly in the more advanced economies and less of the emission reductions in the less developed economies but unfortunately it is usually far cheaper to reduce emissions in the poorer economies than in the advanced economies the basic reason for that is we already have cleaned up industries to some extent we already drive around in a few sort of hydro cars smaller cars where the less advanced economies are basically still using that old gas guzzling technology so it's less costly at least for a while it's going to be far less costly for them to reduce emissions then to reduce the same number of tons of emissions in advanced economies oh wow well this is just a problem that isn't possible to overcome you've got a conflict of interest and it's just too bad it worked out that way well it turns out that there's actually a way of solving that problem of reconciling how can we make sure that this problem is solved fairly and at the same time it's solved efficiently we don't spend more money globally solving this problem than is necessary now when I talk to environmental or when I talk to environmental audiences they quite reasonably have the following attitude you're an economist so that's why you care about efficiency I'm an environmentalist I don't give a damn about efficiency I care about whether this problem's fault is going to be solved effectively and if the person is not only an environmentalist if they have a bone equity in their body they say well and I also would like to see it done I would also like to see it done fairly but here's why I tell environmentalists and people who believe in fairness and I am both of those that you should care about efficiency if the reductions are done inefficiently they're going to cost a lot more and therefore the political resistance to reducing the emissions enough to solve the problem is going to be that much greater anything that reduces the costs of achieving a certain level of global emissions is essentially going to make it easier for us to accomplish the incredibly difficult political task of getting people to agree that they are willing to go ahead and do this so that's why I think even if you're not an economist and you have no particular devotion to the god of efficiency that from a very practical point of view that's an important goal okay how could we affix Kyoto to make it more effective, more fair and more efficient first thing is by the time the delegations arrived in Copenhagen it was very clear that the overall reduction in emissions 5.5% for only the advanced countries wasn't going to get the job done that wasn't nearly effective and quite frankly the European delegations showed up for the most part with the attitude we know that the overall cut has to be bigger and steeper we know it has to be we know we have to do this faster because the science keeps coming in and telling us that the problem is even more serious unfortunately so there were delegations that arrived and they were prepared to read to deeper cuts deeper overall cuts they were willing to listen to the scientists that needed to happen unfortunately the entire process blew up and that never even got discussed I call that let the scientist advise us about how much we have to lower the caps the overall global cap what's the second thing that has to be done you have to cap emissions in all countries you can't exclude the mutually agreed to mandatory part is absolutely necessary now that can appear to be problematic oh there's two reasons you want to do that one is the one that immediately becomes apparent well if we have some countries that are forced to reduce and then other countries that aren't well those countries might increase emissions and it just cancels out the ones that we said had to be reduced so the usual thinking about well why should we cap the emissions in all countries is that one that otherwise the treaty won't be effective we'll make progress here and we'll just lose it over here there's another reason that you want to cap the emissions in all countries the way you reconcile fairness and efficiency in a context where it's more costly to reduce emissions in advanced countries than it is in poor countries the way you reconcile that is you create and allow you create a carbon market and you allow carbon trading if you do that and some countries do not have their emissions capped they're going to have serious difficulties policing the carbon market but if you cap emissions in all countries it turns out that you really don't have to worry about something that will inevitably happen if you allow carbon trading there will be cheating there will be what I call bogus carbon trading and I'll spell out sort of exactly what it would be so we can talk about it a bogus carbon trade would be a factory in Canada that says we're reducing our emissions but really isn't but somehow somebody says you did and they get more credit for reducing emissions than they really did then they sell that credit to some factory in Japan and factory in Japan doesn't have to reduce its emissions because they bought these credits from Canada oh but if it's a bogus trade there really wasn't any reduction in Canada and now we don't get the reduction we were supposed to get in Japan this is a serious problem now it would look like it's a serious problem no matter whenever it happens and it's actually very difficult it turns out that it's very difficult process to figure out just how much credit should be given to anybody that says I'm reducing my emissions so that they could sell those credits in the market and it's a difficult problem because you have to compare something that actually happened to something that never did happen you have to compare a hypothetical outcome to an actual outcome these people say okay we reduced our emissions but what would have happened if that project hadn't happened so there's something that the economists in the field they call it the baseline problem and it makes this a difficult process figuring out exactly how much credits should we give this company for this project saying that they've reduced emissions by this amount because they're going to take that credit and they're going to go ahead and sell it to somebody and as soon as that person that buys has it they don't have to reduce emissions by the amount of the credits that the piece of paper says it turns out that if you cap national emissions in all countries even if bogus even if bogus credits get sold in the carbon market it does not reduce the overall reduction in global emissions this is a complicated issue it is almost universally misunderstood by many of my political allies in the so called climate justice movement who have been screaming and yelling about how terrible the carbon market is and the whole Kyoto process and the clean development mechanism is but there's an easy way to fix the problem if sources selling emissions operating countries that have a national cap and if the treaty forces countries with national caps to actually reach that national reduction then any time a company in Canada sells a bogus emission to somebody outside the treaty is going to force somebody else in Canada to actually plug the hole by reducing their emissions and this has to do this ultimately goes back to what it's easy to measure and what it's not easy to measure and there's some surprises in there what's easy to measure is national emissions you would think that God has to be hard that's a huge big thing you're measuring what were the carbon emissions from a particular country in a particular year it turns out that is relatively easy it's so easy that it's almost non-controversial so there really wouldn't end up being a lot of arguments if the treaty ended up saying to a country you were supposed to reduce by such and such but you actually didn't do it because we can measure what you've done the country would have a very very difficult time making a credible case that oh we really did do it because it's actually rather easy to measure national emissions from data that's already readily available and what the Chinese delegation of Copenhagen didn't understand we're not talking about on-site inspections to see whether you're doing some sort of nuclear reactor they got all in a huff in Copenhagen saying we're not going to agree to anything where somebody might have to come in and inspect we don't even have to do it so it's relatively easy to see when a country has met its mandatory reductions and the way that the treaty organization is going to decide if the country has met its treaty obligations is they're going to say what are your actual emissions how much were you how much were you allowed to emit did you did anybody in your country sell credits to somebody outside because if you sold credits to outside then you've got to actually have come down as a country by that much more than you actually did what about if people inside your country bought credits from another country what that means is we measure your national emissions we compare it to what was required but if you bought credits then you didn't have to come quite down that much so that's how it would actually work that's how it sort of did work in the Kyoto process to the extent that any of this was going on during a time period so the second thing we have to do to sort of fix really a kind of a technical problem in Kyoto is we have to cap the national emissions in every country and we have to basically understand what the treaty organization needs to do is just get about the business of measuring national emissions and checking to see whether or not countries made their target and then actually get about the really serious business of deciding and what are the penalties going to be if the country doesn't something that was very under debated and under discussed and under it was like that was the real sort of elephant in the room that nobody wanted to talk about between 97 and 2009 and that's a serious problem and that doesn't go away now what's the problem with capping national emissions in every country it's completely unfair to the Republic of the Congo I take the Republic of the Congo as one of the more desperately underdeveloped countries in the world they bear practically no responsibility for carbon emissions as a matter of fact they're for a sequester a ton of carbon, tons of carbon and they are dirt poor trying not to diabetes you're really going to burden them with a cap that says you've got to reduce your carbon emissions that would reduce your already slim possibility of achieving economic development for your citizens from slim to minus minus number well there's the problem it's grossly unfair ha capping national emissions for every country doesn't mean the same cap and this is where the single most important document that you can read if you're trying to sort of think through climate change and climate change policy comes up and neither my wife or I are responsible for it we are truly we believe somebody else has done the best work out there on this subject it's called the green house development rights framework the people that put together the green house development rights framework said this is not rocket science differential responsibility differential capability the problem with Kyoto was we just did a dichotomous split we said here a whole bunch one whole group of countries have responsibility and capability the other whole group of countries is treated as if they had none it's really sort of a continuous variable and we can calculate it all we need to know is GDP per capita all we need to know is cumulative emissions per capita that's data that's sitting there in their wonderful pamphlet it's data it's available it gets updated all the time you can get their pamphlet version of the green house development rights framework I'm trying to remember the title of it anyway it's referenced in something I think you're going to get sent anyway but these the better thing to do is to go to their website online because they keep updating exactly what the differential response so they calculate an index they call it a responsibility a responsibility capability index and it essentially says we can sort of calculate in a way what is the what would be fair to require each country to do in terms of how much they have to bring their emissions down well you can allow the Republic of the Congo to increase its emissions for 20 years as long as it's capped so you don't even have to require some countries to cut back on their emissions which would probably make it almost impossible for them to develop at this point you can allow them to increase emissions as long as the increase is capped you can say you have permission to emit more carbon this year in the Republic of the Congo 10% more than you did last year you can actually use the you can allow that now doesn't that mean that some developed country is going to have to reduce even more yes of course it does so that's the third thing let the scientists tell us how much that global cap is going to come down cap emissions in every country so that there's no leakage and you can allow carbon trading that maybe somebody sold a bogus carbon credit to somebody else and my climate justice friends they're right about one thing the carbon market is not like other markets in the apple market if somebody sold an rotten apple to you and you bought it you'd object you'd refuse delivery you'd say this is no good it's rotten but somebody if I buy a certified emissions reduction credit from somebody else suppose it's totally bogus they didn't reduce anything is there any incentive for me to say well this is a rotten certificate no all I care about is the certificate is a piece of paper that allows me to reduce my emissions I just turn it in my government was going to tell me I had to bring my emissions down by some amount I can use this piece of paper instead so I had no incentive as the buyer to care whether or not this apple was rotten when I handed it to my government in my example it was going to be the Japanese company that bought it from the cheating Canadian company when I handed it to my government are they going to question me about whether or not there was really a reduction in China in Canada they had no incentive to because they're just going to take that and hand it over to the treaty organization and say see somebody inside Japan bought one of these things that means Japan doesn't have to reduce as much as a country and the treaty organization is going to take it and just say yep it's certified so it is true that you have to be you can't assume that the buyer is going to enforce the integrity of the market exchange in carbon markets so it's very very important to do two things make sure that even when the cheating goes on that it doesn't reduce it doesn't puncture holes in our essential goal here which is to bring down global emissions by a certain amount and that will we will protect ourselves against this if the country from which the bogus credit was sold if it has a cap because somebody else in that country then is going to have to make up for that difference and that's where the unfairness comes in and it's where the climate justice movement will still play a very important role there's going to be a lot of cheating and the cheating is unfair this is not a victimless crime but the crime when you cap the national emissions in every country when you have cheating in the carbon market is not the environment and our goal of protecting the environment and preventing climate change that's not who's cheated it's somebody else in the country inside the country where the bogus credit was sold out of so is there plenty of work for the climate justice movement to do to police the carbon market to prevent some people inside countries from being cheated by others in their countries selling these credits yes there is okay I'll be quick on this one actually early in the game way back in in Rio people realized it's not emissions that matter it's net emissions whoops what's that mean the real problem is adding to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that's what the problem is all about but every year two things happen we emit greenhouse gases and we mostly nature sequesters greenhouse gases so think of it as we send more gas up but we also take more greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere through sequestration does it really matter to us whether we reduce emissions by one ton or we increase sequestration by one ton really not and as a matter of fact we want to do is both we want to reduce our emissions and we want to increase our sequestration and presumably we want to do which is ever cheapest wherever we can so what we ought to actually do is perhaps on countries net emissions not their emissions if we don't do that we run into a serious problem and it became very apparent between 97 and 2009 it has to do with deforestation forest sequester carbon you got a lot of forests here now unfortunately they are pine needles and unfortunately the weather is cold a lot and unfortunately it doesn't rain a lot so you don't sequester as much as they do in the Amazon but Finland ought to get credit and paid for this so you ought to start demanding it because it's an incredible benefit provided to the rest of the world in terms of you know preventing climate change so the problem is it turns out that there is more net emissions from deforestation globally than from the entire world's transportation system I remember when I first saw that I didn't believe it when I checked it I still didn't believe it it's a real eye-opener so anybody that thinks well we don't want deforestation but it's a problem that's not immense think about the entire world's transportation system that includes all of the automobile emissions deforestation is causing more of the increase in net emissions every year than the entire world's transportation industry and here's the problem you do not want to encourage the following process forest gets burned down for planting agriculture we deforest and then we come in and we go ahead and we plant trees and get carbon credits for it failing to conserve existing forests and replacing them with new forests is actually going to take us backwards it's going to be counterproductive in terms of the effect on emissions well you don't want to set up incentives you basically have created programs and incentives for people's behavior so that that's something that turns out to be a really good idea the simplest way to take care of it is simply to make sure that what you cap and insist on reducing is net emissions from countries and here again there's an incredible measurement surprise when I started first working in this field 15-20 years ago I went to people that were already doing this in the U.S. over at the EPA actually and I said you know I understand I know the science logic that sequestration is important just like emissions are but I suppose it would be really really impossible to figure out how much sequestration is going on in different countries I know it's not that easy to figure out how much emissions are going on but I bet it's impossible to figure out just how much carbon is being sequestered in different countries and they said au contraire you wouldn't believe it but you know those satellites we've got up there that are floating around the ones that allow you to go to Google Earth and look in the window of somebody's apartment in Karachi we know what's going on on every little square foot of the planet all the time and the botanists have mapped the flora and the meteorologists tell us what was the temperature and humidity on every day every place it's actually the easiest thing to calculate the easiest and least controversial thing that you would have to calculate to set up a good treaty enforce a good treaty actually solve climate change is we can easily figure out how much carbon sequestration is going on in every country every year so we could cap net emissions and we could measure that and we could then enforce those sort of mutually agreed to mandatory reductions equitable caps yes if you do that if you cap emissions in all countries if you cap them fairly using some sort of formula like the greenhouse development rights framework if you do that you can allow full carbon trading which probably in this world today in the emergency situation we face in despite all the ugly things I told you about markets in that article that some of you read is probably a necessary component to solving the most drastic problem that humanity faces in a situation where we're not going to be rid of a global market system within the next two years at least the carbon markets and allowing full carbon trading allows the full efficiency benefits of the trades you don't have to police the market to worry that bogus trading is going to destroy the effectiveness of the treaty you can leave the policing basically to national governments and you can rid the climate treaty of that very very difficult job of deciding how many credits to award to people who want to come in and say I'm going to do this and I should get credit for this so I can sell it in the carbon market that's a tough process mistakes will be made Kyoto created a situation where the Kyoto Protocol had to establish a whole international bureaucracy to administer the clean development mechanism the clean development mechanism was companies were coming with projects in countries that had no caps saying we're actually reducing emissions and we want to sell this to some company that's going to have to reduce emissions in a country that has a cap and we needed to basically put together a team of people at the United Nations clean development mechanism that was deciding is this a legitimate reduction and how many credits do you need it's tough mistakes are made tremendous amount of arguing and quibbling over this and the environmental organizations were all over the clean development mechanism you're making mistakes you're granting more credits than they really deserve and of course the businesses are saying well you're being really slow in the process that the line is so long that I have to wait three years before I'm evaluated and then governments would come in and complain all our companies are sort of waiting in line this is hurry up you got to do this faster so it's a very messy process that makes absolutely everybody furious and angry with one another and it really and it became a major obstacle to the climate treaty essentially functioning effectively in a way that was making people confident and happy that this is really going forward well look if you do these other four things I said none of which are rocket science all of which people who went to Copenhagen and environmental organizations and people like my wife understood that these things would be improvements and these things are something that we should be able to agree to if we did all those things you could leave the task of awarding credits to national governments because it's basically the national governments that have something at stake if they award a credit that's bogus so they give some company more credit to sell in the carbon market than is legitimate somebody else inside their country is going to basically pay the price so essentially the you want to make the policemen the one that has the incentive to do the best job in a situation where doing the best job is going to be very difficult and you want to relieve the international organization from the most difficult and troublesome job so basically you don't have to have the international treaty organization standing in judgment about these credits what if you have a country government that says well we just don't want to give any credits to be sold because any credits that are sold out of our country we're going to have to we know national that means we're going to have to come down even farther than we would have had to as a country fine if a country government doesn't want to award credits let them not award credits if a country government does a terrible job of monitoring and they award many more credits than they should it will be their own citizens some other citizens inside their country that are going to pay the price of that are not going to suffer you know a lowering of the emissions in any case I'm going to stop there actually I should say I should say something very provocative about growth in the environment let me say that and that will open up a whole new area for discussion yes in a finite world infinite growth is impossible the actual quote is from Kenneth Bolding and there was a second sentence the second sentence is even more delicious only a madman or an economist would think otherwise it is beautiful but it's just fundamentally wrong growth of what and I'll make the argument very succinct ecological economists and in some ways I consider myself an ecological economist have a concept called throughput it's sort of material matter of various kinds from nature that we use as resources bring into our production processes and it's material matter that exits our production processes as waste products that's what they call throughput here is what is true in a finite planet infinite growth of throughput is impossible and only a madman or economist would think otherwise but throughput is not GDP when most economists and most people talk about growth they're talking about growth of the value of what we produce and the value of what we produced is not measured in tons it's measured in dollars or euros so the real question is this it is true that if you want to stop treading too heavily on the environment we need to cut back on throughput steady state throughput I could be behind that reducing throughput well obviously we have to reduce throughput of carbon emissions if we don't reduce throughput of carbon emissions by 80% by the year 2050 we are going to broil to death so in some areas we have to dramatically reduce throughput because we simply have to not increase throughput but the real question is is there any reason to believe that it's impossible to reduce throughput or hold throughput steady and yet have the value to us of what we produce in an hour of our time get larger and larger more or less forever I don't think it's impossible at all we're really asking is there are there any limits on how much more creative and inventive we might be about how much value we get out of our work time because that's really that's what GDP is supposed to represent now there's a whole bunch of issues about mis-measurement and everything else and the other thing I'm going to say on this subject is whenever there's massive unemployment which there is right now and is going to say we need more jobs more jobs means we need to get more production going it's totally understandable whenever there's more production the environmental movement says but more production just trades more heavily on the environment and that's only natural it depends on what you're producing if we put people back to work producing the same kind of throughput intensive goods we have been in the habit of producing if we put people back to work building more I call them McMansions the big housing boom in the United States a lot of that was these ridiculously huge energy and efficient you know mansions being built spread out over over productive agricultural fields well that is terribly environmentally destructive production if we produce more by producing more cars and putting a second car in everybody's garage or equipping every Chinese with a car that is terribly environmentally destructive throughput production but what if we put people to work producing billions of solar panels and we put people to work installing billions of solar panels on on roofs what if we put people to work building the windmills in the Columbia river valley where I live so that we don't have to burn coal for electricity we're getting more of it from wind power what if we put people to work retrofitting all our buildings so that their energy efficiency is 80% greater than it is now we could put hundreds of millions of people to work doing all those things over the next two decades and as a matter of fact if we don't we will broil to death if we actually set about doing what we need to do there is no more conflict between growth in the environment if we produce the kind of things we need to produce to save the environment there is no conflict between we're going to lose jobs that whole thing I mean and my particular region in the United States it was the major issue that led to tremendous clashes and disagreements and antagonisms between environmentalists and labor organizers it was called owls versus loggers so the environmental protection agency said because of the spotted owl a species we're going to stop forestry operations from going on in these particular forests in the coastal range of Oregon and as a result there were whole communities where job unemployment rate went up to 30-40-50% they were furious they didn't have jobs the environmentalists were happy nobody really cared about these spotted owls they're ugly little creatures yes I know there are some people but the real point was you saved the ecosystems in these incredibly wonderful forests on the coastal range that was a conflict of interest but that old debate that old debate really should not we should not get entangled in those disagreements anymore


Welcome everyone for joining the session of finding your UX voice by Dan. So let me introduce Dan. Dan is the co-founder of Charming Robot, a product design company based in New York. For the past 15 years, he has been helping startups and media companies share their online product strategy, including Foursquare, Rent to be Run Away, Jetsetter, and Savers. His experience also includes television, music, and print media. He has worked with great shows like Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Gawker, Saturday Night Live, Universal Music, and the Ball Street Journal. One of his most noted projects are creating the original strategy and user experience for Hulu. So prior to starting Charming Robot, Dan co-founded the design agency Heart Candy Shell. So welcome, Dan, and we're over to you. Great. Thank you so much. I appreciate that lovely intro. Great to be here. Hi. Good morning from New York City and good evening to you guys over there in India and everywhere else you're joining from. So today we're going to talk a little bit about finding your UX voice and kind of what that really means in terms of like both the industry and for yourself. And to kind of just reiterate some of the things you just heard, my name is Dan. I do want a company called Charming Robot and feel free to hit me up on social and you can agree, disagree, you know, challenge anything I'm saying there or here in the question box. My company, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about experiences from large companies, you know, like some of the ones that you just mentioned, including but also journal and we actually worked with WeWork before their kind of tragic downfall. We worked with large banks like Deutsche Bank and Barclays. We've worked with Booking.com. But we also work with startups, you know, with places that are just looking to get themselves out in the world and figure out what they can do to solve, you know, smaller problems that will probably eventually grow into larger situations. And you can hear a lot more about those things on my podcast, Story in a Bottle, where I talk to a lot of founders, a lot of UX people, a lot of venture capitalists. So we try to, we try to really expand the gamut and who we talk to because I think that when it comes to creating products in general, it's really important to understand all the different sides of that, of the process and the inputs that went to it. But today we're going to talk to what you asked and hear talk about your UX voice. And I think the important thing with UX is understanding that no matter what we're creating, no matter what we're doing, whether we're creating a product for, you know, mass amounts of consumers or we're creating a product for, you know, a single solution for business to business application. It's still about storytelling. It's still about, you know, how do we get someone from point A to B to C and what's their journey on the way. And how do we make that journey as seamless and as exciting and as useful as possible, and as simple as possible in most of the time. And even if it's something super complex that we're working on, we always want to keep it simple. But one of the most important things about this conversation today, and I look forward to your questions and please put them in, you know, throughout the talk. You know, I was saying earlier, I don't, I don't know that anyone needs to hear me just talk at them for 45 minutes. But one of the most important things is that like whatever that storytelling technique you have is, it should be unique to you. And there'll be a lot of factors that we'll talk about that'll kind of feed into what that unique methodology is for you. And there's no necessarily right or wrong way of doing it. But it's kind of understanding how to take all the factors that you get as part of your experience and leverage them. And I believe we're in, you know, in hard facts as well as is going to soft skills, and I like to start with a little bit of a foundation just to get a sense of like, where are we coming from let's all kind of start from the same foundation, when we're creating a view on the UX and so I think you know, let's start with history. And these are experiences been around for millennia. And some of them, I think we often think about UX is just something that happens in the world of digital and the world of software and the world of apps but in reality like UX and designing for people goes back to, you know, 500 BC, when, when the, the Greeks were really really interested in economics, you know, they were talking about how, how different spaces should be designed. And actually, even before that, you know, Feng Shui talks about the importance of space and the idea that how you, how you organize things in an area and let the elements collide whether it be wind or water and how kind of your surroundings affect your mood. Like those things have been existing in so long and they just simply evolved over time, you know, for now another, maybe in the past 120 years we've gotten a little bit more about making experiences that were a little bit more kind of hardcore and like actual like physical tools, you know, I think Frederick Wynzo Taylor talks about the idea of what is that in relationship that a person has and a worker has with their individual tools and how do they work for like, you know, how you hold something in your hand or how it interacts with the hammer me to nail or something like that like what are the, what are the ways that we can make that more efficient. And then we kind of start getting more into like in the late 1900s of 1900s we started thinking about user experience as something about actual human interaction, you know, what is that experience between the the actual human and the process that's going on to the point where actually Toyota was one of the first companies to really introduce the idea of usability and putting people, you know, in part of the equation that was not just for the cars that they were creating which obviously you want to make sure a car is super usable because I keep it safe on the road, but also about making sure that people who are part of the process had input into the process and one of the things that's really interesting about Toyota today is when it comes to UX research or hearing from people, they actually have factory workers can pull an accord to stop the assembly line if they wanted to have a suggestion as to how to improve the process, just a lot of ways like live action usability testing, but but really, you know, the first beginnings of getting input outside of just, you know, yourself or your kind of siloed way of thinking about your product.  And that's where actually product and user experience research comes in, like actual like the paper that's got this guy, Henry Dreyfus wrote called designing for people where he talks about, you know, where people come into contact with products and where there's friction there and where that fails. And the idea that like people have been thinking about this for a long time and it and you know, I think that in some ways, you could say the first true user experience, you know, centered company was probably Walt Disney, because their whole goal and everything they did once they kind of started doing their theme parks like Disneyland is you're creating experience as soon as you walk through that gates. You know, whether it be the rides you're going on the characters you're interacting with every single touch point that you have in a Walt Disney world or land experience is all about kind of the user is all about making people feel good. And that's what user experience is right user experience is always about like, what is, how does this product or how does this brand feel in every different interaction you have to today that interaction may not be walking into a physical space it could be the app that you download but it could also be how does that brand express itself on Twitter, you know, or on discord or how are we, how are we talking to each other about it you know what, what are the other ways that a publication or application is is kind of showing itself off in addition to just its core experience and I think that's kind of what Walt Disney was going for is not just that awesome ride, but every little piece of you know, every little detail really mattered. But it's not until the 1970s that you really get into the you actually think about today at least this was more hardware design with Apple and Xerox and, and IBM and, you know, I was actually interacting directly with products that we would buy you know in in store or in our office. And that's really when our industry started to come to fruition and I think this is all important because you think about figuring out how you tell your stories, knowing that you can tie, you know, the things that you're putting together down back to 4000 BC back to Walt Disney back to Xerox, and then you know, into a more modern era when Don Norman and Apple actually created the phrase user experience as the first user experience design person at Apple. You know, and he kind of really, I think ushered into this world of us at UX with his book the design of everyday things. But you know, I mean, the idea that we can, we can kind of leverage all those things to help support the stories we're telling today and the world of UX is so much more complicated because we're not just designing for hardware software, we're doing visual designs we're doing audio designs we're designing for virtual reality we're designing for, you know, large screens for tiny screens like there's so many different things we think about in the world of UX, but it all still comes down to 4000 BC and Feng Shui and thinking about, you know, what is a way to make space as well as possible, and as friendly as possible and as relaxing as possible for the people we have, we're going to use whatever product that we're just to say that UX has always been everywhere. You know, a lot of it, as I mentioned that a lot of people think of UX as a place where you basically spend your world in digital but the reality is that I think about this a lot when I, when I, not only do I work in the world of tech but I actually also own bars and restaurants in New York City, and I think about this the idea of UX design when creating a bar or a restaurant when you walk into a place, what is the person behind the bar looking like? What are they smiling at you? Are they reading the newspaper? What is the decor of the place? How easy is it to kind of find a table or a place to sit or move around people? It's not just about the aesthetics of it, it's about spatial design, and it's about making sure that a person understands what you're all about from the moment they walk in or they enter your website or download your app, and it's the thing that you think about, I think, almost before you think about anything else, because it is your brand, it is the story you're telling people about yourselves. So I think that there's some, some fun just real world examples just again to think about UX and the story you're telling outside of our typical day to day. And so, you know, UX design hits us everywhere we go and sometimes it can be quite alarming like this image on the left. Sometimes it can be, I think, quite poorly thought out, like this person in their hotel room on the right, they, you know, maybe to create an aesthetic, they added that curtain there without realizing that, you know, a person actually will be disturbed by the fact that there's no window, and so they kind of faked it. It's almost like that. In my last slide it says UX shouldn't come with the last minute. This was something where someone thought, okay, we can cover up a mistake we made by adding a bit of an aesthetic on top of here, but in reality, you know, that's a poor experience. In this case, you know, look at a playground where a slide drops into a hole, you know, imagine a kid going down that, that's a parent's nightmare, it's my nightmare. That's it. I think I would, I would look at that and be like, there is no real thought that went into the overall experience for the person who's going to go down that slide or the person who's watching kids going down that slide, because the planning wasn't correct. You know, the story they're telling here wasn't correct and no one voiced an opinion and said, hey, perhaps we don't want to have a giant hole at the bottom of the slide. And that's a big part of it too is voicing your opinion, understanding, you know, that someone has to speak up and be the advocate for the user. And how do you do that? Where do you do that? And how do you find your best way to do that? And that's what we'll be talking about a bit more today. Because when we do it, when we voice our opinions, when we get that story right, like the chances of success for a product go up by leagues and bounds. And this is something that you should own and be excited about as a UX designer, knowing that the voice you put out there, that the opinion you have, that the data you're using will in the end be what ultimately drives success for a product. It's not going to be the business vision, though that certainly is a good place to start to understand what is it that we're trying to do. It's not going to be, you know, the quality of code that again, that's important because it might help the speed of a product. It's really about understanding what is it that we are doing? What is the problem we're solving? How can I communicate the best solution for the user so we can actually create something that is a good business that does kind of marry those user needs and the business needs. And if it doesn't, if the thing that we're trying to do from a business standpoint isn't taking into account that user journey, isn't taking into account that story, then perhaps we want to rethink it. So let's start with the simple part. When you're starting in the world of UX, I think it's okay to have kind of a sense of like, I'm not sure which part is right for me. Like I can tell you from myself, like I never thought of myself as UX designer and until like probably five or six years into my career. But I thought of myself as creating experiences, even though I didn't know what that was. But I also like never was interested in one particular vertical here. Like some people just want to be content strategists. Some people just want to be user researchers. Some people just want to be visual designers. That's great. That's not a problem at all. There's nothing wrong with owning that and having kind of your own lens into that world. And if that's what you choose to do, then I think that's amazing. And find a way to like take that visual design aspect of yourself or that content strategy aspect of yourself and really insert it into the process to make sure that it's right for the audience. Myself, like I'm a generalist. I kind of am someone who really likes to lean heavily on strategy. But I can go down that spectrum to a certain point and like translate strategy and user user research and kind of overall thoughts on business analysis into probably probably best for me is a wireframes.  It's definitely not a skill set I possess and I once tried to do it early in my career and realized very quickly that I am not good at that. And I wish I was. But but the great thing about having a team is that, you know, you can you can leverage their talents to and kind of oftentimes combine your storytelling abilities based on the different skill sets you have. But in this case, you know, I think it's always interesting to like choose the things you like and maybe it's more than one of them. I think that I strategy and and user interface and and research, you know, but, but kind of understanding your lens here is where you start getting that voice like what is it that you're adding to the conversation. Where is it that you can put the most value in in early meetings in where you're putting pen to paper in all those places, because once you kind of own that it becomes a lot easier to be a part of the conversation. I think makes one of the biggest challenges are industries like the fact that like, no one's really decided on titles.  I think it's a little bit easier when you get into the more specifics of like, I'm an art director, or I'm a, I'm a researcher, at least you kind of have one particular vertical. But what often happens in our industry is instead of talking about how do we create the best experiences or how do we really, you know, bring the actual best successful interfaces and trends and patterns to people. We often get into these arguments about, well, are my UX or my UI. And I'm such a fan of not doing that.  I mean, even say, you know, worrying about titles when it really comes to the fact that like, what are we doing? What are we doing to be better at our industry? How are we learning to better serve our audiences? And our audiences can be users, they can also be clients, they can also be the business owners, they can also be, they're also probably like three or four different audiences. Right now that I'm working with, it's in the auto parts world. So super exciting. And we have like, so we have three different constituents, we have the owner of the business. And it's like, this business is like a marketplace for, for auto parts. So you have like the company itself, which is basically a middleman between the mechanics who fix the cars, the suppliers who supply the auto parts like the car door or engine or whatever. And then the insurance companies who are paying for the parts. So if a person gets into a car accident and the mechanic has to order a part, the supplier has to give a part in the insurance companies to say how much they're going to cover. We have to, we have to understand that those are, those are four different audiences, you know, for one product who have very different needs and very different definitions of success. So how do we come to them, understand their needs and then create a product that's going to be successful. I don't care who's a researcher or a product designer or whatever. All I care about is, how do we best get the information out from them? How do we talk to them? How do we empathize with their particular situation? And they're all going to be different ones and kind of use all that information to tie it together into one overall experience. And I think the best way to do that is to, is to take what your strengths are and put them forward. You know, I get asked a lot, and I was doing an article about this a few years ago about how you get into UX, you know, what is the best, what is the best way in? And I don't think there is one best way in. I don't think there's one best solution. And I certainly don't think there's one background. You'll hear a lot about people who, and maybe some of you on this call have taken, you know, immersive UX classes, kind of 12 weeks of really intense, you know, boot camp of UX. And I think that's fine. I think there's a lot of value to be held, you know, from getting the basics or kind of learning a bit more about an industry that you may be a little bit more unfamiliar with. But I certainly don't know that, like, going and getting a degree in human factors is the best way into UX design. Again, it's one way in. But I always like to think about, like, all the other ways that people get into UX, it actually does shape how you talk about things and how you kind of bring your own personality and experience to the user experience world. If you look at someone, for example, who majored in English or major in liberal arts, I think that there's something really interesting there because that person, if you're like an English major, one of the things you learn as a skill set from day one is how to defend your arguments. You're writing term papers or analysis or critical theory on things that already exist, but you're trying to attach meaning to them and find out, you know, how, what was this particular author or storyteller intending and why is it important and why do we care about it today? And then you have to defend those arguments. In the world of UX, it's the same kind of thing. You're telling a story that you're defending the pieces of that story, the pieces of those features, the flows all along the way. And you learn how to do it in a very compelling and I think often probably short-handed way. And similarly, like if you look at this person, 2% of people who come into UX are biology majors, like biology while obviously science, much more science than it is creativity probably, there's a path you learn around scientific method there and doing experimentation and being willing to be wrong in order to eventually find the right solution. Those types of approaches work so well in UX and can be, you know, the beginning of your approach, right? If you have scientific method background, that might be how you kind of walk people step by step through why this is the right answer for a particular problem. Similarly, if you have a liberal arts or an English background, you might start thinking about, well, what are the other facets out there that I can bring into this that help me make my argument? What does that story look like? If you're a psychology major or have a background in psychology, maybe you're approaching this more from like a cognitive standpoint.  So whatever the background you have, and it doesn't have to be any of these, but let that be what kind of starts your journey into how you explain yourself or how you explain the choices you're making in your UX story. So Sid Harrell is one of my favorite people in the industry. I had the fortune to like, basically interview about 10 leaders in the world of UX in coming up to do this presentation. And I'm hoping to actually turn this into an article at some point, but Sid is really well known in the US for a lot of her kind of industrial, commercial design work. And what I didn't know about her when I started talking to her was that her background was in poetry. And the fact that like, I love the fact that she is able to leverage that background that she had in poetry and as a linguist to be a better UX designer and to be a better person in the world of, you know, information architecture. And my guess is that, you know, thinking about being an expert in linguistics and definitely thinking about being a poet is poets about consolidation, right? It's about using fewer words to paint a word picture. Linguistics are about understanding the different ways that people approach language and those slight nuances that really matter between, let's say, Spanish and Portuguese. And, you know, using those construction patterns to be better in her career. And I love that she also is like, I'm not a visual designer. And maybe I like that because I'm also not a visual designer, but it doesn't prevent her from being a great UX person. She leans into the things that she's really great at and finds ways to apply those. And I'll be honest with you, like, I think that past that past experience is so important.  I grew up playing music in a band. I grew up playing sports. I didn't do anything that had in my mind anything to do with design. I had nothing to do with your experience. I later became a bar owner, which is a separate picture here, the first bar I opened. But that, you know, that's when I really started realizing that the storytelling, this idea that you're creating, you know, everything you do in the world of UX and design has a parallel somewhere else. I'll give you an example. So I'm the upper left hand side here as a play I did about 20 years ago. And what I've learned about theater and how it affects the way I approach design is that when you're in the world of theater, you can be an actor, you can be a director, you can be a set designer, whatever your role might be. What I find really interesting is that it's very similar to how we approach product. In theater, you know, if you're a set designer and costume designer and makeup designer and line designer out on the same page of the vision of the director. Well, then no one's going to be able to see the actors or really get a sense of the personality of the of the production, because they'll all clash with each other.  And that's true in product design to and I think as a UX person, our job is is to oftentimes wrangle those together right sometimes the developers and the designers don't see at I sometimes that the the person who's kind of the visionary or the stakeholder may have one particular sense of what they're doing, but but they don't know how it's going to impact impact everyone else. Thinking about like for me in my my voice in the world effects as I go back to theater and I think, okay, you know, does everyone understand how this is to work together. Stanley was true when I started designing bars. You know, I'm not I'm not an architect in any way, but I do understand that like and I do play a game with my friends every now and then we walk into a restaurant a bar and say what's wrong with this bar.  Okay, you know, is is this does it feel friendly. Do we understand what this is all about. Like, do the cocktails match the the overall kind of aesthetic like is the bartender friendly or is it not friendly is the personality of this particular place meant to be more aloof, you know, thinking about those things, help me be better at my job as a product designer or because it let me kind of divorce myself from. Oh, this is the rules of UX the rules of how to do it and be like no, what do I know how can I communicate what needs to happen here in the best way possible that leverages my kind of my expertise and my expertise just happened to come from places that had nothing to do with digital at all. So, and that's kind of where I think of like the idea these skills that we have here, they really do go beyond just one particular industry and you can see they are like all these different, all this stuff that goes into creating a product you know all this stuff that goes into creating an experience. There's so many different pieces and I don't think it's possible to necessarily be an expert at all of them, but I do think it's it's kind of fascinating that like, I don't think we ever take a step back and realize that to quit. To put something out there in the world that is actually successful takes so much effort and take so many different lenses of expertise that we shouldn't consider the one that we have as the only one, but I do think it's important to consider the one that we have to be a significant part of it. And if you think about it like let's see you come from a science background which again plenty of UX people have, they're probably going to come at it from a much more analytic, you know, how can this be done technologically and how do I turn that turn that into experience, but but being very empathetic to the developer versus someone who comes from library science might have a very different approach because of the way they organize information in their, in their heads, maybe by default, but also by how they were how they kind of were raised or how they were educated and that's going to bring them to a different way of approaching this, but that doesn't mean that the information architecture library science person, or the computer science person is right or wrong. It just means that like they they're coming at the same problem with a different perspective. And if you can combine those perspectives you're going to have a much more high a much higher chance of success than otherwise. So think about that when you're when you're, it's your voice isn't just about your experience. It's being understanding that people are coming at that very different point of view, and how do you accept that. How do you embrace that. How do you challenge that. And ultimately, how do you collaborate with that. So, my friend Jonathan Corman, another really new X person is a bit more cynical when it comes to this stuff. But I don't think it's cynicism is necessarily meant as a way of combating, you know, or excusing the challenges of our industry. I think it's comes from the place of, he really wants there to be great people in this industry. And when I was talking to him as part of this project. We were kind of in the midst of a renaissance of new, these are kind of the new UX bootcamps where a lot of people are coming out of it, and trying to, you know, shoehorn themselves into the industry versus finding out what's right for them. So, you know, in this quote, there's a not, there's an act for you to have a bigger doubt. Like, I think that's a bit, a bit of a misnomer, though I do think, you know, like in any industry, I think the more, more you have an act for something, the better you're going to be at it. But I think the idea is that like, you don't have to come in here and try to be everything to everyone. In fact, we would say, if you are UX in UX, you know, you should never try to be everything to everyone because that's impossible. You're boiling the ocean. And it's about figuring out what it is you have an act for. And then, you know, on top of that, well, where, where does that fit best into the world of product or UX design? And how can, how can you help? Like, that's the biggest question is really how can you help? And I think we have come to any problem, any project with the, with the idea of how can you help? You've already, you've already kind of leapfrogged above and beyond everyone else, because you're already looking to the North Star of what it is that the solution can be versus, well, what do you bring to the table? What do you bring to the table? Well, I bring this to the table, which is never a healthy approach. And when it comes down to it, what we are as UX designers, as product designers is we are empathetic people. And I think the word empathy often gets overused in the world of UX and product design. And we're like, oh, we were empathetic. We're, we have to like be thinking about the user, the user, the user. Well, that's true. But I think empathy actually and creativity come from all sides in a project. If anyone in, in working on product, whether it's wanting something new, or doing something that are evolving something that's been around for a while. There are so many stakeholders involved, right? The stakeholders can be the ultimate users. They can be the person whose idea was they can be the developer who's been working 18 hours a day to try to get me to deadline. It can be your fellow UX designers. It can be the project manager. It can be the marketer. Like there are so many different people involved in launching something. And our job when it comes to empathy is not just to be empathetic to the user, but empathy, empathy to everyone else around us who has their role to play. And this is the, to say that they shouldn't have that either, but we can lead there. So when I think about my voice or your voices as a UX designer or a researcher or whatever role in the world of product you want to play. I think about the fact that like we should be the ones who are thinking, who are, who are thinking about everyone else too. Like, not just how do we create this experience for the user that's great, but how do we in the process understand that, that everyone has an agenda that everyone to make everyone's accessible we need to come to terms on what where those agendas overlap. It's that generally kind of give us that, that perfect band diagram of what to focus on. And that put us up and I think left out of the boys, you know, I think that there's a lot of times we forget about the fact that we are the people who are bound to the two people in general right where, you know, we go back to the history of us. It was about creating necessarily the right experience for our audience, it was about creating right experience for ourselves right and for, you know, our peers and that's, that's kind of where it all comes from is like let's, let's make an experience it's great for, for everyone throughout the entire process including And I think that, you know, that comes back to some of the storytelling stuff we were talking earlier, you know, there's, there's storytelling can have many layers to it when it comes to our jobs.  And I don't know that necessarily that that's the best, you know, that's the best example of where our voice comes in the most handy because if our voice was the storytelling mechanism for every product we worked on, then there probably wouldn't be a lot of a lot of variety in the things we work on and I can't speak for anyone on this, on this call but I can tell you like you know in my team, we work on, we work on projects and so many different verticals you know we have a lot of stuff in media and entertainment but we also do stuff in like finance which is a very different, you know, tone and different audience, we work in fashion which is a different tone and audience as well we work in education, and in the nonprofit world and we've done work in construction like, like our stories are telling in the way we, the way we tell those in the end product tend to be more about how we understood the audience and how we had to relate to the audience and the thing that we're creating, you know, the auto parts.  So I'm not judging them on that. But, you know, I'm designing a product for them that's going to be say a very different approach than for someone who is going to be, you know, Gen Z super tech savvy and who spends a lot of their time on tiktok and Snapchat. And so that story is different but the story we tell along the way, you know that that way we, we, we kind of like pick up, you know, support along the way from all those different sides. So that's the story that really comes from the root of your voice, you know, and the way you use the tools in your arsenal to convince people, whether that be through, you know, logic and deductive reasoning whether that be through actual user stories from things that you heard from people whether that be from data and analytics like how do you combine those things and and pastings you've worked on to really get that across. And Sarah duty, I've worked a lot of work on a lot of research projects together. We actually just finished a project together. She has a great she's probably the foremost expert I think on how to put together UX portfolio. She's brilliant at storytelling because part of her whole thing and it was just telling about telling people who you are as a as a designer as a UX person. But, but I do think that her point here is that, you know, I think a lot of people think of UX design as this functional, you know, part of the process where we deliver black and white wireframes or maybe even prototypes and I think there's maybe great talks about about some of those sort of things in this conference already. But, but, you know, sometimes that doesn't make sense. Sometimes that's not how we need to communicate, because we need to get, we need to use whatever's right for you. Like Sid said earlier, she's not a visual designer, maybe boxes and arrows aren't the best way for her to tell her stories. Maybe it's anecdotes, maybe it's videos, maybe it's something else like how do we get across the stories we need to tell in our best way and our best patterns. Then a quick time check, five more minutes for the session. Great, thank you. So, I think the last part of this voice and the setting the most important part of it, which is, we as UX designers need to have opinions, we're not just telling stories for, you know, our own benefit, we're telling stories to get to a solution. And that opinion needs to be formed by a variety of inputs that I've already talked about. But it's how we express that opinion. I think that's that's most important. Because everyone has a style. But the first thing I think is, is if you're going to have an opinion, be clear about what the problem is that you're having an opinion about, like why is this a problem and sometimes it's super simple like the fact that in this picture, the mom is pouring milk into glasses, but there's no milk in the jug. Like, oftentimes, we either kind of dial back our kind of strength in our opinion or we are afraid to share it because we don't want to hurt feelings. But in the end, like, we need to show where those problems are before anything gets to launch. Like, we need to point those out as quickly as possible so that we can course correct it. Like, I'm doing this right now on a project I'm working on in cryptocurrency where, like, there's a lot of things that this kind of new wallet that I'm working on has to do. But there are a lot of problems with the flows because there's just holes everywhere. And, you know, they're doing like the marketing team has done a great job of creating like product demos and show, oh, like, this is super easy to use. But when you look under the hood, there's a lot of steps that haven't been thought through. And if we aren't pointing out those problems, like the go to market strategy and the go to market timeline will be totally whipped because we weren't thinking about or sharing the concerns we have. But it can be scary when you have to share like what you put together and you're putting in front of clients isn't accurate and we need to rethink this. Like, that's scary to go back to the beginning, but better do that now than not do it later. So where your voice really culminates is the attitude. Are you soft spoken and a listener? You know, are you a very loud kind of abrasive person? Are you direct into the facts? I think that that's something you consider and you'll get that from anywhere, but that'll feed into like how you even share your opinions. Or, more importantly, how you share an opinion as it's changing because your opinion will change and it should change and your lens on things will change because it's like products change technology changes. The way that people navigate the Internet is very different today than it was 10 years ago. And if my opinion on how people do that based on the research you hadn't changed without probably a dinosaur and irrelevant in the world of product design. So when you're coming to something and know that things are evolving and sometimes you have to be contrarian just to get people pushed over the line to that next level of experience, right? If someone is stuck in how they do something, this is always a big problem. And like they talk about, well, I do this or I do this. It's okay to challenge them. But back to should bring, bring whatever evidence you can behind you. And again, whatever that voice is that you use emphatic or set abrasive or self spoken, bring that but bring it with with real information. Because if we're not questioning things constantly, if we're not looking at things from the angle of someone outside of our purview, not looking at things from our clients or our stakeholders point of view from the designers point of view from the users point of view from the businesses point of view, right? Sometimes what the user wants is direct contrast to what the user wants, but we're still going to drive, you know, revenue or whatever. Well, how do you take a look at it from their point of view and understand here's how I can communicate why what their approaches isn't right. But here's how I know, you know, we can we can course correct. And just because someone's in charge doesn't mean that they're right. Oftentimes, I think the best people who are kind of in charge are the ones or who have the vision or who are who are kind of overseeing something. I think that they they should be dependent on some people with people like yourselves, you know, who who have a lens that is outside of theirs, who can bring a perspective that they can't have. And who I think ultimately can show them how to shift their thinking to be more on the right path. So I talked about communication style. One of the things that I'll tell you is that I I've had a lot of bosses in my life or people or people like managers in my life that like very much like had different approaches. I had a creative director years ago who was very committed. Like that was his his thing was like, I believe in this vision. I'm going to stand by it. Like I'm going to say everything I can to be emphatic about the fact that this is the way to go. And I had another boss who I think he led out of fear. And not not to me per se, but like to to the people who work with who are above him right. Talk about like being being questioning authority like he he would like yell and scream it at you know this this stakeholder and like slam the phone down. This is years ago. And I could never understand how that works because I can't do that. Like it's just not who I am. It's not it would not be effective for me. If anything, it would come across as just offensive. But it works for him. Works really well for him. And, you know, he's he's now super successful in the world of product management for whatever. And, you know, he was an intimidating six foot five biking looking guy. And I think that that probably helped into it where I am not that but but kind of seeing those different ways that people approach things. And borrowing here and there from them is kind of how I got to figuring out what's the best way for me to communicate.  He would just be like cynical and snarky. I just feel like condescending and how how why would you think that that's a terrible idea. And, you know, for him that kind of came came across as kind of commanding. And, and I think in some ways knowledgeable. But for me, I just thought it was mean and I could I can't pull that across. I for me I have to come across as like, Well, here, let me listen to you. Let me digest and let me come back with what I think as logically as possible. Make sense from all angles and I'm going to sit there and talk to you and be like your best friend. And that's my approach. And that's for me. Again, that's not right for everyone. But what what works for you? That for me it comes from like directing plays and doing with actors and doing those really challenging personalities. And also dealing with drunk people that bars through the more like calm and logically you are the easier it will be to get them through whatever situation they're in. So for everyone, I think it's about being an amalgamation. You know, like take take from the best parts of you take from your education take from the history that I mentioned earlier, take from the people you're working with people taking the people you don't necessarily get along with. Or agree with but but see how what what they have to offer can be useful to you borrow, beg and steal everywhere you can. Because as my friend Steve Portugal says, you know, those little things that make you feel good those little things that other people do that you never thought would be useful. File those away as as tips and tricks and tools to use throughout the course of your your career, you know, go back to history, borrow from everything. Read and read and read and then always look forward. Always be learning because nothing stays the same. And technology will change. People will change habits will change. And if we're not on the cutting edge of those things, if we're not the ones who are learning about those changes first. Well then we're never going to create experiences that embrace those that involve those and then ultimately change the way people interact with technology with devices. And probably with each other. So thank you guys so much. Okay. Thank you all for joining the session. Thank you down for thank you Dan for taking the time and talking about this interesting topic was very interesting.