People that I know We also have we're we're live streaming the entire event In a partnership between a lot of the resources here at York So thanks to the crew at LTS and also it's going out through howl round So that it reaches Fairly far and people did this is meant to be a sort of when we envisioned these Symposiums they were meant to be sort of casual conversations updating on the projects and because there was so much interest in this one This space that we that we went for was this large space Which is exciting that there's that much interest in and these sort of things coming together But it's also meant to be casual so though it is in a formal theatrical space Feel free to come and go you can't bring coffee and food into the venue here But we have ample coffee breaks. It's meant to be a leisurely day for conversation and things like that. I did want to start out with with our with our land acknowledgement and Add a little bit of detail actually to it as well. So We do recognize that There are many nations that have long-standing relationships with the territories and areas in which the York campus sits This this area has been under the care of the Anshabae the Haudenosaunee Confederacy the Heron Wendat and the Metis And is currently home to lots of indigenous people This isn't a necessarily a historical statement We acknowledge the the current treaty holders the Mississauga's of the Credit First Nation I wanted to add a little bit of detail to us. I know that when I hear these land acknowledgments I also like a little bit of support. So I put a map up on up on the screen I'm gonna make a plug for an excellent resource if you're ever wondering Whose land you're on for native-earth.ca. That was a wonderful mobile app, which You'll perhaps understand One of the reasons that I'm a big fan of it once we get through a number of the projects here I'm very interested in space and geography But looking at that it's also a great online resource This is a map of the GTA But also you can see how these these traditional territories sort of overlap in this in this area here and we can You can that's a little bit small there, but you can see Where these these traditional nations have overlapped in Stewarding the land around here and also where the where the treaties are so if you're ever interested in knowing Whose land you're on it's an excellent resource. It's community developed and it's ever changing as it has more More detail in it, but taking a look at the the traditional territories and the treaties is interesting I did also want to make a couple of plugs for for some local indigenous Artists and events that are coming up just in the next month with side of Chuck is having its 32nd iteration It's a festival of new and developing work that that's put on by Native Earth it was I keep saying a saying native land and I keep reversing the two of them But native earth that's gonna be coming up later in the month I also wanted to make a specific plug on Friday, November 22nd And he's they're also gonna be in the two-spirit cabaret But Dakota Alicantra Camacho Because one of the projects that we're gonna be looking at today groundworks is sort of related to another dancing earth creations project called between Underground and Skyworld and they're in the cast for that as well. So I thought that that was a nice way to making the connection there also, there's a initiative that's been started that that has a bit of an academic home here at York called the climate change theater action and I Co-direct that with a collaborator name on Chantal Billidow and there's a number of indigenous playwrights that are contributing work to that and part of the festival also be reading specifically those plays in there and Then I also wanted to plug later in the month. We're going to here at York There will be a symposium on indigenous environmental justice that will be here So if you're interested in getting more involved with a number of these issues and Connecting to the land in that way. There's a number of opportunities there that are coming up just in the in this month And if you're especially a very with second check, I'll see you there That being said, I wanted to welcome Joel on up to the stage to talk a little bit about what sensorium is we've been each of these symposia is going to be connected with a University where we've got some partners there or are local to various projects that we're working on and we've been really fortunate to have This relationship with some sorghum. So I'll turn it over to you Joel Hi, Ronan I have a little kind of it's not really a speech but just some brief notes that I like to share actually My name is Joel on I'm an assistant professor in computational arts here at school of the arts media performance and design and I'm also the interim director for sense for sensorium Which is our faculty research unit in digital art and technology and on behalf of sensorium and its executive committee As well as the associate director in research I would like to thank in and Justin and tostelab for inviting us to be partners in this event and also to In initiating such a wonderful series of events that will provide I'll faculty and students exposure to the processes and innovations in artistic practices around mixed reality So some of the brief thoughts that I had right around mixed reality As an ecologist by training. I think of mixed reality in somewhat a different way as one might today Indeed an ecology of any given environment already consists of multiple realities mixed And mashed together in a field of interactions and energy transfers Multiple species coexist and evolve together and into each other Responding and communicating with the environments as they do And where these are most importantly explored are At the liminal zones between ecosystems these edges where organisms move fluently freely adapting to the behavioral and semiotic structures on each side and They've been doing this for a really long time. Obviously these edge effects are the reasons Why the earth became and has remained habitable? Of course and in the human and these become geopolitical events, you know stage invasions species migrations boundary transgressions and associated antroprogenic pushbacks Of course, this is one example amongst many today where the inability for us to understand another species will view or umbelts has produced undesirable effects in this sense then Mixed reality for an ecologist really represents a sort of failed equilibrium and it's a source of despair However a large part of the environmental humanities today revolves around a rediscovery or redefinition of what while or wilderness is And in our futile Search for feral places and things that are untouched or unmaimed by our hands since everything including the air We breathe as a product of civilization Wildness becomes a concept then that that teaches us a way to see or to observe or to describe It becomes as author Jack turner describes a nature literacy that is not rooted in place or circumstance But in the concept of self physical psychological and philosophical transformations Something that exists deep in our evolutionary history that is immeasurable and beyond academic definition I posit it's a biology of wellness. Really. That's the seed of our perception our sensory apparatus or our sensorium So that's what we aspire to be here at the research center aptly titled sensorium Center for creative inquiry and experimentation in the digital arts As a haven for outliers in the academic community here at York Who transition between disciplinary boundaries and engage in these departmental edge effects? If a hundred thousand flesh-eating zombies can reveal so much more about humanity as in the walking did then regular documentary May I venture to suggest that makes reality and all its myriad shapes and forms Processes and technologies that will be described of course in the in the course of today's events Will teach us more about what it means to be real what it means to be natural what it means to feel to sense To show empathy to love Makes reality therefore becomes a site for productive frictions between the new and emerging and the emerging with the deeply centered wellness of creativity Imagination and play the technologies today and in Toaster Labs Italia series Will explore the cutting edge the visuals and sounds and stimulus of today's fast-growing aesthetic cultures But add in the human and these become productive frictions and moments for truly profound revelation So on behalf of sensorium and its associated faculty and graduate student members I thank you for bringing us into this process together, and I look forward to the rest of the day's events. Thank you Thank you, Joel. I'm gonna welcome the other two-thirds of toaster lamb to the stage Justin Garrett and Andrew Sampri Yes, I did right this time. I know I know you hardly think that we work together on a regular basis So we came together what we wanted to do and we're gonna get together a couple of mikes And we're gonna move over the seats here where what we wanted to do in this sort of first bit Was to talk a little bit about the origins of the way that we work and what we're working on How the Atelier came together and that will sort of take us through to that that first period I think You can still see the monitor there so we the history of toaster lab is that we came together in 2016 I keep saying 17 But that was sort of the first project that we worked that that was the premier of the first project that we did together Which will highlight a couple of the aspects to it here the origins of how we became toaster lab as opposed to another name is that we needed a name to register a project under and It had for a while I'd say a decade or more been Something of a personal website so that's sort of where the name came in but it fits really well into what we're doing Of the logic there. Do you feel differently under you're making face? I don't feel differently, but I'm actually curious how I want to hear about how we're connected to toast how it's connected to toast I Did not put an image of its origins and its relationship to toast In this slideshow that we're about to show But I will explain that there was at one point Where I made a thing out of a toaster And I just got really attached to the form of it and so everything like if you want to follow me on Twitter It's at toaster dog. I remember this now. Yes and so it was toaster lab because I just didn't want a vanity URL at the time and Then when we put together our first show and we needed to register it under something The name stuck and has has has stuck. There'll be multiple labs only one toast though moving forward so What we do is place-based extended reality experiences they take on a number of different forms There we go so the three of us each have different levels Or different areas of expertise and then different levels of knowledge within each other's sort of expertise my My area tends to be in the physical production and media production So in terms of working with recorded media and then connecting it Andrew, what do you do? So my focus is at least in this context is mostly on the engineering aspect I am an artist so I do I used to do a lot more installation work And then I moved into doing theater work and digital sonography But again in the context of toaster I think I'm mostly handling the the technology and the infrastructure back end And my background is in Creative writing and performance and narrative, but also in production management. So all of those things combined make toaster lab Yeah, so we have a we have a co-governance model where we sort of work under unanimous decision-making amongst the three of us We also and then we'll get into the structure of the atelier in just a moment So that's a little bit more. We each have our own individual practices What's that? Yeah, look it's us. There we are Yes So we each have these backgrounds that have these These areas of expertise that work together well and the one of the hallmarks of the way that we end up developing Projects is making sure that we're working together at each step of the way knowing that sometimes narrative and production work together production and Any sort of development and coding need to work together and those all need to move together at one time because we've all been involved in projects in which One of those is leading or you've been delivered with one of those things then I have to make something fit nothing And that's sort of outside of the way that that we choose to work So where where this came together is that? We were interested in Sort of social mixed reality experiences things that took people out of headsets I know there's a slide of a picture of someone in a headset here We also Have been into varying degrees. I'm more of an avid geocacher than anything else in this list here, but looking at Various types of place-based activities that you could do together and the explosion of that especially with the addition of Pokemon go Pokemon go actually like was released in the middle of our first large project together and made all of our grant narratives about half as long Because when we started we had to explain the mechanics of what became Pokemon go in a very abstract way We're like Pokemon go, but outer space and art And people like I get it But before that they didn't necessarily and then one of the things that this opens up an opportunity for these like Inter interwoven metanarrative so a lot of the projects that we work on look a work across a number of different locations and Try and integrate like story into the place that we're in and come into these extended universes Which in our in our own framework not necessarily that we're working with any of this IP But that in our own network that has led to some Significantly sized undertakings things So What we aim to do as a company as a production company is to produce mixed reality content that delivers it through an original platform a lot of the Code that is developed with the projects Is is Itself bespoke a lot of that the responsibility of Andrew We want to take users on a hunt of the experience. So we're trying to guide people through additional space There's always an element of gamification to well No, you're not always but there's typically an element of gamification to that and so far is how somebody progresses through it and the Logics of how somebody accumulate that experience when it's not because we're all theater makers That it's not necessarily as clear as working through a theatrical experience from start to finish that adds an enchanting digital overlay to life integrating original and awful tech and Bringing the audience into the place, right? So our first project together was called transmission and this is before we actually knew that we were going to be a Company like I said, we created more of an extended universe than necessarily one script In the end there were 13 hours of content Involved in it. There was a live stage performance. We had done a lot of mixed reality production There was a couple of installations associated with it that were tied to also some of that media We had a companion podcast series both in world and out of world that sort of transitioned over the course of its run And then some additional events to that What was what was it? What was your experience like working on transmission? Well, I think taking some of our cues from maybe writing like a Season of television was more what we were thinking of but at the same time you could experience it all at once in And geo located in the city So that was the it was just a really simple like a quick weekend project that we did to write learning scenes Just kidding. It was years and years of work and and that that is I know that it's up on the side But this is does say that all of this took place over 30 specific sites across the city of Edinburgh During the festival as part of the future play festival in Edinburgh and then we did a smaller version of it for the future of storytelling festival in New York on Staten Island Andrew anything to add on to what it was like to do a transmission So I came we met sort of after transmission most of the creative process was underway So for me, yeah, it was I mean it was a great project. I really enjoyed it But it was definitely like you want to do what in in what timeline? So, I mean, I think I literally flew in the week before the show and sequestered myself in a room and piled up a bunch of beer and coated And we've been doing some work It's not to say that there was no nothing there But it it was I think it will talk about this in a bit But it led in part to sort of the the plan that we have to try to create a long-term infrastructure as opposed to The kind of like oh my god, we need all this stuff right now Which is usually what happens no matter what and I don't mean to put that at the feet of toaster lab I think that's common to a lot of art and tech projects But no, but the project itself was was really nice and actually even even that sort of in the room working was was quite fun Because we had other expertise in the space as well So like the sound designer was staying across the room for me across the hall So at some point I realized we didn't actually have any sound in the app So I just knocked on the door and I said hey, I see you have a synthesizer here And he composed a soundtrack So it was actually in that in that respect. It was super fun. It was like wrap summer camp for app right Yeah, it becomes an interesting like budding up against what we think we can accomplish in theater and often times Can if it was very analog theater versus the limits what you can get away what you can get away with on the technology So what would I recommend doing this as your first project? Well, it seems like it worked out because here we are on a stage So that's good, but it was I think when you're kind of at the beginning of experimenting with new technology I think we'll hear a lot about that today You're not sure what your own limits are and then you kind of move past like the normal meat space limits of time and space And then you just keep going and you end up with this like really ambitious large piece of art Yeah, I'd say that it it was probably it's not I wouldn't recommend doing this as your first project But that's only if you realize that this is the project that you're doing when you commit to doing it so a little bit of the background to it you can see sort of it was available in Various Apple stores. It was an iOS only experience. It's still there It has the New York content in it though. It's the New York content. Yes, it's just fun And so and you can still download the podcast the podcast is actually really interesting the first 12 episodes are actually just It's Topical conversations with space scientists. So in the process of researching the project we interviewed about 18 different experts within various aspects of space science to like as the dramaturgical research and recorded a lot of them because they were at distance and Turned it into a podcast and then turned it into an in-world discussion of moving ahead You can take a look at some of the app here and you can see a little bit of the interface here So we've got in the in the lower corner They're one of the site-specific performances that happened in the windows of which is also where we were staying This is this is efficiency running it as a theater project that people were sleeping but in these rooms But from 7 to 8 p.m On most nights or 8 p.m. To 9 p.m. On most nights there was a dance performance that you could watch in those windows as well But you can see here that they're the main way that someone interfaced or that the two main ways that someone could interface with this Experience was either being notified when they became proximate to something or they could guide themselves around through a map And we also would suggest various pathways that they could take all of the content that was in it not all of it But about half of the content all of it's geo located About half of it is locked to a specific place in this experience So that it was an experience that took place in a specific place So you had to go to that place to actually unlock it and access it We had a few power users that went through everything one of them involved a hike not a not like a strenuous hike But it took a while someone broke their ankle while we were trying to make to build it Mixed reality is really hard The reality part of the mixed is so there's a couple of different screenshots here of the mixture between the Live they're recorded pre-recorded like archival footage That's there and then a bunch of the the 360 sort of VR Experiences that were embedded within so put these put these all together So it sort of set up the way that we work We work with much more knowledge as to exactly how one of these projects comes together at this point The funding for it was a combination of research funding We had a bit of private investment some people who just like thought what we were doing with school public grants, there's some corporate partnerships and And ticket sales so it's like really in so far as an arts project One of the weird things about it is that it was very small for a media project But it was massive for a live project. Yeah So people would engage with some part of it like a hundred to 200 times a day based off One of the other interesting things that that we learned about this is that we can actually get metrics over viewership because we were Streaming content or somebody had to download something and so in addition to ticket sales We're also like how many people and when are they watching individual pieces of content? Which has informed a lot of the ways that we've been working And I mentioned the presentations that we had before So what this led to was actually a relationship Between now two entities. I'm gonna turn this over to you to talk a little bit about place lab And it's relationship to toaster lab just to make it more complicated No worries. So I had actually prepped a very quick talk. Should I do that? Okay, can I stand at the podium you can stand a very weird doing this sitting. We'll talk amongst ourselves. We'll sit here very supporting Thank you very much. Good morning everyone So my name is Andrew. I've been doing art and technology work for a long time, especially software development in creative mode In around 2009 I was working at IBM and I started to obsess a bit about this new location feature that was popping up on web browsers And especially iPhone apps and I organized a conference called the social and the spatial and the idea was to bring together a bunch of Practitioners from different corners of the internet and from different types of practice And my favorite folks who we brought there were people who are working in virtual worlds And folks who are working in sound who are trying to kind of bridge this conceptual space between the layers that we occupy online And the real world One of the attendees is a plug But one of the attendees is a sound artist who some of you might know named Halsey Burgund And he recently launched a project called audio AR org which is a community catalog of resources related to audio augmented reality And you should all check it out But fast forward a few years I had done a collaborative film project called Hotel City Which was a film project where we took the content of film Slice it up and put it on places on a map and then the film actually recreated itself through a geographic algorithm So it would redraw different paths and then recompose the story And then my partner on indeed and I made an app called summer of darkness for the summer of 2016 Which was the bicentennial of the year without summer. This was an unprecedented global climate change incident So there was a volcanic eruption it completely changed the weather and because of this Lord Byron and his entourage who were spending the summer on Lake Geneva, which is actually where I live Were stuck inside and so Byron challenged his compatriots to write a ghost story and that's when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein So as a result of this project, which was an app-based project I met Ian and then we collaborated on transmission, which we just talked about So then around this time basically Ian and Justine and Anandita and I were just geeking out about doing location-based work How interesting this was how we could tell stories differently And I was also taking a look at some of what we just discussed the technical effort on a lot of these projects And I was seeing from my own side a lot of duplication like I was solving the same problem in these different projects over and over again slightly different ways and Also, there was some there there are many issues There's also the scaling issue that Ian mentioned where a lot of these projects would be like way too small to be a media project or way Too small for an app project, but way too large for a fringe type theater project And I also I do make my own work But here and in most of my collaboration I find myself in an engineering role And if you've ever done that you know how difficult it can be to mentally switch from kind of like I need to Solve these technical engineering problems and then oh, yeah There's a dramaturgical thing that we need to do and it's because the pace of this work is different The way that it actually needs to come about is different time timelines So in order to fix this problem We need to have some kind of a longitudinal effort some sort of sustained long-term development work to try to create a set of frameworks to try to create software or technologies and What's the word I'm looking for best practices that will allow us to kind of solve these problems at the speed of aesthetic composition And that's really the end goal that's a really hard problem so how do we actually scope this down and We thought that maybe we could do this in one particular area Which was to try to figure out a way to create some sustained long-term development work around tools for creating geographic stories And that's the reason that's the long story for the place lab Which is a company that founded with myself and my partner on andita and we're focused on creating these tools The strategy specifically is to try to keep up this development pace by producing one single code base With a maximally permissive open-source license so that we can reuse the techniques across different projects And the key part here technically is that the emphasis is on reusable code and infrastructure So we're not trying to create a platform like Twitter or layer or YouTube We're not trying to create a container into which people can put things But rather create a bunch of stuff and scaffolding that you can just use and make your own projects The very first project here, and I'm wrapping up is a tool that is creatively called the map tool It's a kind of Swiss Army knife for creating these experiences of media on a map We're handling the composition of the map the collection the packaging and the serving of the media to mobile devices And the next step we're working on creating a rule set around how this media gets played back depending on local conditions Ultimately, we'll also have a set of example code for how you can consume this on the web on Android and iOS And it's tricky work because creating reusable anything is many times harder than creating a one-off But we're trying to drive this this way and using especially the atelier projects if not as direct Use cases at least conceptually so there's a lot of times that Ian and I will sit down and talk through these projects and say Okay, what's in common here? What could we actually build out that would that would support this? In the end my hope is to solve some of the issues that Adrian and I were talking about on the way over Adrian's from Pony and you'll hear from her later Where we create a whole project and our project and we love it and we see it and we go. Yeah, that was a great first draft I want to do it again So that's me. That's place lab Thank you, and it there's a You deserve the applause. Yeah Yeah, where'd your mic go? Here it comes Thank you so much An interesting point that I just want to like pull out of there is in so far as this question of scale is that when we got to The end of transmission and we sort of realized what we had actually Committed ourselves to and making this project. There's a conversation of like what's next and how do we work with this again? And how do we fund that and part of that became a Conversation or a difference between working from project to project which is sort of how we started Moving into what is now the Atelier project and then a couple of conversations we had on more of a although that Those who we talked to would say that they are not Venture capitalist, but that somebody was like oh, so you're gonna make a platform for delivering AR content That's like scalable like YouTube and we're like, but we're artists and they said well Yeah, but you know what you make some case studies and then you'll have the platform And then you'll be rich and you'll do whatever you want and I was like I just want to make the thing I don't want to I don't want to run a company of that like that which is maybe not the Some people will think that I was a foolish choice. It's so far has worked out for us No, no, I think that that's part of how we find each of ourselves in the position that we're in individually and collectively So what is the Atelier and what are we here to talk about today? So we're doing this two-year deep dive. It's sort of we locked it kicked it off in June of this last year and sort of a Co-presented panel between where we were all working at the time in Prague as part of the Prague quadrennial I know actually see some work from that a little bit later today and folded a festival of live digital art Which takes place it's put together by spiderweb show and takes place on the Queen's University campus in Kingston and In informing this partnership we launched a project there And then wanted to essentially work through this process of like holding up ideas or boosting other performance projects and providing the capacity Recognizing that within a lot of performance projects that Whenever you add in another department, that's hard like those are hard to scale as well because there's not necessarily the thought of What exactly that is and it's hard to picture So what if we were able to come in and say like we have these goals of developing these tools? We need case studies to be able to do that also If there's somebody who's interested in that coming together Then how can we support them and actually realizing that work? So we've committed over the the course of this two years culminating in our final report out will be in In June of 2021 with as many projects as possible presented at world stage design in Calgary in August of 2021 And that each of those will be working through roughly 18 of those So this is a list of our current projects that we're working on right now We'll hear from all of these in some fashion today To update here. So we sort of came in to start of the project with some things that we're already Working with but they're sort of all over the place taking different approaches to the way that things come together Just a couple of shots that you'll probably see some of later We've been this is as part of the groundworks project that we've been working on With communities in Northern California We've been climbing mountains and going to acorn gathering sites with our VR cameras This is over in in North York. This is our Parkway Forest project, which we created a web app for youth to create small VR films and then presented that that this last summer but the previous summer Back to the community and looking at continuing to develop this as well as one of the first implementations I think of toaster lab of the actual map tool is also part of that It's still still techniques of beta. Yeah, yeah and then there'll be much more detail in in 80 and Mackie's presentation on our collaboration with swim pony, which is a location-driven audio project that's happening around the Along trails along in the watershed area around Philadelphia So one of the other things that we did in in addition to starting to provide the capacity for this was also How do we bring in the expertise either because they have technical expertise or production expertise? So we've put together an advisory board that consults on our project. Most of them are here today There's a couple of people who can't be with us So we'll be introducing people throughout the day. Beth Gates will actually be presenting remotely, but otherwise Eileen Jessup is very pregnant right now. And so can't travel so she can't join us today and Sydney sky better also has some and Patrick was out there No, they both have parenting responsibilities that prevented them from being with us today But we'll actually hear from everybody else today as well So this also became our first opportunity to pull together everybody as many people as possible in in In-person because people are scattered throughout North America in the way that they're working And just sort of as an indication of sort of the direction of where we're going right now this is as part of the Grand Works project we were doing some work on Alcatraz and So we did a VR shoot of a performance there Which I'm not going to talk too much about because it will come up during our panel right after lunch as well So we've we've really cut down on our level of ambition After that project reeling those those little work now we're doing what we're trying to do ultimately is trying to make things like trying to understand this way of working and trying to Introduce people together. So the outputs of what we hope that this project will offer are an open source script library that will allow somebody to do the mapping and then also the framework for how to Start up creating their own bespoke applications as well and then looking at the different media types and how those get integrated in the different ways we take We're able to use The data in people's phone a lot of our projects are rooted in the idea that we want them to be accessible as possible So you'll see a lot of our stuff tends to be focused on mobile because people tend to have mobile devices as opposed to More single-use hardware I just want to say how grateful I am that you all are here today to join us to talk through these questions and talk about these projects and That we are also very grateful for the funding from the Canada Council for the arts For our digital strategy fund, which will take us through these two years and the six symposia That we're going to be hosting and we're grateful for York University and Centaurium for hosting us today We hope that everyone has a great day and that you are free to come and go as you please This is just as by way of housekeeping And tell your friends is not too late. We're here till five And we really hope that you have a great day and you feel free to ask questions It is as we are clearly expressing it meant to be a casual conversation day As Ian said even though we're in the formal space And so if you all have any questions for us before we take a quick coffee break Please let us know otherwise you can find us in the lobby too Share the live stream link. Yes, the live stream link. You can find it. Yes on howlround.com on our website at toasterlab.com slash atelier slash York or on our Facebook page and slash mr. Toaster lab and we're recording it as well and Hoping to share at least a summary and the recording Later on and that will be true for all of the symposia moving forward Which will take on different forms some of them will be formal like this others will be more sort of hackathons within other larger Infrastructure asking key questions, but we'll have more information about that at the closing as well So our next session will start at 11 o'clock And it's focused on social ghosts at 12 o'clock We're gonna have a lunch break and the space will need to be cleared that will be on your own And if you do need recommendations for where to go for lunch We will help point you the way while in the lobby to lunch options We'll reconvene at 1 30 have a short break at 3 3 15 again, and then we'll close the day at around 5 o'clock Thank you


35, 06. Now we're going to go up, right away. Go pot away. 34, then that's going to be 35, 35. Yeah, yeah, I got to have that. I'm not packing regular army stuff. So that's going to be 33. Significant new line up livery. You got to do that. You got to do that. So that's going to put you in. They need to be punished. Put the whole field back in 35. 35, 34. Then we go ahead and get squared. Why do you get a jar of peanut butter? Put my rug. Put my rug.


Welcome to the session, the Test Automation of Scaling with On-Demand Agile Working, Workplace Learning by Rudolf Kreuz. Thank you, Rudolf, for joining and we are glad you can find a time to join us today. Okay, so, hello, ladies and gentlemen, I will share my screen. Give me one second. Welcome to the Selenium conference and my talk about the learning evolution at Riveson Bank International. Well, Darwinism. You know the theory from Charles Darwin that not the strongest survive, rather the who can adapt faster. What does this mean in the context of learning? We must learn new things faster and when we need it. Meaning just in time. In other words, the digital Darwinism and the WUKA world requires lifelong learning and adaptive learning strategies. In the following 40 minutes, I will explain how we at Riveson Bank International, short RBI, transformed our IT delivery division towards self-based lifelong learning. So, who am I? My name is Rudolf. As an HR engineering coach, I am helping our development teams in using appropriate HR engineering practices like continuous integration, continuous deployment, DevOps, test automation and so on. As a learning guide, I am supporting our colleagues to find the best learning approach and I am implemented during the last years in RBI, the HR workplace academy and the HR learning approach. And I am the Guild Lead for our Test and Test Automation Guild. Well, and I am the organizer of the HR Test Automation Meetup Group, with more than 1,400 members and organizing six times per year the so-called Test Busters Night, which is a mini-conference in Test and Test Automation. Well, yes, and you can contact me via LinkedIn. Let me tell you more about Riveson Bank International, short RBI, that you know the context of my talk. Riveson Bank International is a traditional bank with over 100 years of history. RBI considers Austria and Central Eastern Europe as home markets and we currently have network banks in 13 CE countries. In Austria, we are the leading corporate and investment bank for the top 1,000 commercial customers in the country and we have around 47,000 employees and a customer base of more than 16 million customers. As I said, RBI, a traditional, more or less conservative bank, is going through an adaptive transformation and we use a very nice metaphor in our organization for that. We are moving away from this big, slow, ruled by command and control containership towards fast, agile, self-organized speedboats. For us, adaptive is not the purpose itself, but a tool to realize a better business impact. And adaptive is our basis for remaining competitive in a fast-changing environment, better known as the WUKA world. Five years ago, we started our transformation and now we have around 500 speedboats with around 4,000 employees working in agile teams and all of them must learn new things at high speed to steer their speedboats through the rough banking business sea. And therefore, we needed a new learning approach. But why do we need a new learning approach? As I already said, we are living in a WUKA world, which represents our new business reality. WUKA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. It is a world in which you never know what to expect. Business in the WUKA world means that companies compete in an environment that is characterized by continuous, fast, and unpredictable development. In such a world, learning is of central importance for effective operations. And one of the most important ways that knowledge workers can interact with the WUKA world is through continuous learning and allowing employees to learn in action during their daily work, learning on the job is one of the most important steps toward readiness in a WUKA world. In RBI, we have different possibilities to learn new skills and competencies. From the traditional perspective, we have our individual trainings. That means if you find a training you consider relevant for yourself, you can go to your manager and hopefully you get permission. Then we have Charlie. Charlie is our learning management system where we have learning offerings maintained and organized centrally by our HR and learning department. This is more business-related soft skills, standard ID skills, and all this stuff. And then we have our talent program. This program is a structured program designed to find talented employees who have high potential for growth. And then last but not least, we have the GoID Academy. And this is the initiative maintained by our ID division, which I will tell you more about on the next slides. As the name already suggests, the GoID Academy is a group-wide IT learning and development initiative. We have 19 units involved and more than 560 participants in 2019. In its traditional approach, each program of the GoID Academy is fixed content, mostly delivered by external trainers with a fixed time schedule, and pre-selected participants. You can see the programs offered by the GoID and all of them covering strategically important competencies. This is our special program for all IT-related agile things, DevOps, agile, and so on. To support one of the RBI strategies, which is Upskilling People in Test Automation, we created a dedicated test automation program, basic and advanced, for the 2020 GoID Academy. The GoID program was very successful and we had huge demand. In early 2020, we launched four new programs on DevOps, Cloud, Agile Engineering, and Test Automation. The trainers were fixed, the participants were nominated and confirmed, the flights and hotels for the first module were booked. And then the pandemic broke out and turned the entire GoID Academy upside down. From one day to the other, everything changed. We had to decide whether to cancel all the programs or to offer them remotely. The decision to grow remote was more than just a challenge, it was an opportunity. With the elimination of additional expenses and opportunity costs as well as the absenteeism, the demand for the training tripled and we had to scale. So what got clear to us was that such an approach of fixed content and training schedule does not allow for flexibility and scaling and that we needed amplified learning formats to adhere to the academy. Or in other words, we recognize that we must create a new learning approach for the WUKA world for our small speedboats. The focus of learning in the WUKA world can no longer be the HR centrally controlled education program with its formalized modification offerings be in face-to-face or virtual. Learning is more. The 70-20-10 framework provides a good orientation. And this framework or this model says we have learned approximately 70% of what we know and can do through our work, in particular through new tasks, challenges, crisis and changes. And then approximately 20% will learn through meeting and interactions with others. That means with colleagues and customers. And then we learn around 10% through formal learning opportunities. That means seminars, qualification programs or structured online courses. And you can see which of these parts are generating the best return of investment. And we answered WUKA and the 70-20-10 model with two new approaches, with the HR Workplace Academy and the HR Learning Guide. The HR Workplace Academy brings together learning and work. The goal is to overcome practical day-to-day challenges. So that means we are not learning to acquire certifications or knowledge which you maybe will need in 12 months. The Workplace Academy enables our colleagues to solve concrete problems that they are facing during their individual daily work. And the Learning Guides help the learners to find their individual learning journey if necessary. By the way, this is Matthias. Remember this face. You will come across it many times in this talk. HR Learning is characterized by two aspects, the performance problem and new learning formats. HR Learning in the WUKA world is considered as performance support and primarily serves the purpose to solve problems and challenges during the daily work rather than do accumulating knowledge. We speak here of learning and applying and not learning and storing. After all, the actual purpose of HR Learning is to enable the employees to continuous improvement or, in other words, to do their jobs. What could be a typically performance problem in an HR development team? Imagine a team comes up in the retrospective with, we need automated tests, but we do not have the skills for it. This is a typically performance problem because the team cannot do their daily job. And the team agreed that Diana, the manual tester and Max, the Java developer should start in automating the tests. The plan is to start with web and Java and then proceed with API testing. But Diana and Max have no idea how to do it. In a traditional approach, Max and Diana would go to the learning management system, search for the right training, hopefully there is one, check if the dates fit his schedule, register for it and then wait for confirmation or to be added on the waiting list. In our agile approach, with our agile workplace academy, we give Max and Diana the opportunity to create their own learning journey, their own learning experience to learn at their own pace and along their own paths. If they want, we even provide learning guides for them to support them on their learning journeys. Learning which should solve a performance problem has to be close to the workplace. And therefore, we need learning formats that enable individual self-service learning with the possibilities to exchange regardless of time and place. And this can happen in a guided or an unguided way. The classic face-to-face classroom training alone is not long enough and here we need a blended learning approach. The API Workplace Academy is based on the idea of blended learning. And when we talk about blended learning, we mean the combination of learning formats that enables students to learn at their own pace along their own paths. And from a singular learning event, we go into the direction of a learning process that means to continuous learning. And work and learning moving closer together in terms of content and time. In combination of the different learning formats allows for more flexibility and individualized learning. And to strengthen the effect of the Workplace Academy, we paired it with the support from our HR learning guides. As I said, the goal of the Workplace Academy is not to acquire certifications or to stockpile knowledge for the future. The aim of the Workplace Academy is to master practical challenges from everyday working life and to combine learning and work. Does anything in this picture look familiar to you? Yes, here you can see Matthias again. To implement this blended learning approach, this Workplace learning, we created a new learning architecture. And this architecture is not only for test and test automation, you could use it for every other topic for DevOps, cloud, whatever. So regarding test and test automation, we have first we have learning topics. There we have test engineering, then test automation foundation, then test automation adapters. These are the things which we want to automate. This could be a web UI, API, a mobile app, a desktop app, whatever. And then we have the test automation development learning topic. This is bare adapter, bare programming language. That means, for instance, for web UI with Java C sharp JavaScript. And a learning topic has subtopics. As an example, test automation foundation has the subtopics test methods, test automation frameworks, and CI, CD DevOps. And then, of course, we have skill or competence levels. That means, you know, basic advanced expert. It is unnecessary that I go here into the details. And then next we have our learning elements. These are the trainings. And a learning element could be a e-learning course, a Udemy, a plural site linked in. It could be an RBI training. It could be a recording from an already delivered Go ID Academy training. It could be a blog post. It could be a book, an article on a website like medium.com, a YouTube video, or a one-to-one peer session with a learning expert or with a colleague. And then we have the key element. And the key element is our learning journey. And a learning journey has a learning outcome, a competency which you want to achieve at the end of your journey. This is a learning outcome for our test automation journeys. The learner can develop automated basic tests with the given programming language for a given adapter. A learning journey has a beginning and an end and supports the learner to solve their performance problem. In practice, however, such an approach does not always do justice to the complexity of blended learning. Because depending on the role and or the competence of the learner, there can be different starting points and different learning elements. But the impact, the outcome is the same. It can solve their performance problem. And to handle this diversity, we have the last brick in our learning architecture and this is a learning pass. The learning outcome for Diana would be Diana can develop automated basic tests with Java for web UI. And of course for Max, it would be the same. Tricky is that Diana and Max would have different learning paths. As I said, a learning path is an individualized learning journey. And let's have a look on a learning path with examples. Remember Diana, Diana a test engineer with no development skills and no test automation skills should automate web UI tests with Java. What would be Diana's learning paths? Diana would start with test automation foundation, followed by test automation adapters, followed by test automation development for web UI and Java. Then I do not need the test engineering topic since she is a tester and she has all this knowledge. Now the question how a learning path for Max could look like. Max is a Java developer with no testing skills and no test automation skills and should automate web UI tests with Java. This is the same learning outcome as Diana but the way differs because Max has another skill set. So what is the difference? Max first would need more or less the same as Diana. Test automation foundation, test automation adapters, test automation development. Only that the path starts with test engineering because Max has no testing skills. And from the web UI test automation, we do not need Java programming, the Java programming learning element because Max knows everything about Java. As you can see, the same goal, the same journey but another path. And now a tricky question. Six months later, Max should also automate API tests with Java. What would be the learning journey or what would be the learning path? Yes, Max needs only test automation adapters for API and test automation development for API. That's all. Not more, not less. I guess you know now what is the learning journey and what is the learning path and how this is connected to the learning initiatives. So what is the time? Okay, we are perfect. And now I show you an example with a learning sprint where the learner is supported by a learning guide. As I said, the learner could also execute the learning sprint without a learning guide but to bring the concept of the learning guides closer to you, we will do this example with a learning guide. But first, what is a learning guide? A learning guide supports the learners individually in their learning process. In addition, the guide supports the organization with the implementation of this new learning approach. And he is an ambassador for a deeper understanding of agile learning. As an example, currently together with two other colleagues, I support eight of our network units to implement this agile learning approach. The learning guide helps the learner in the planning phase of a sprint to choose realistic goals. The learning guide provides assistance in setting a clear precise and doing the realistic formulation of these goals. And the learning guide ensures the provision of the learning content, of the learning elements that fits the defined learning objectives. But also the individual learning behavior and needs of the learner he will consider. If necessary, that means that the learning guide may be organizing special learning formats such as job shadowing, coping groups and so on. The learning guide will be supported by the learning experts who are the specialists for a given topic if necessary. But to make it clear, the learning guide does not act as a staff manager or a line manager who said what the learner has to do. The learner drives his learning sprint in a self-organized, self-based way. And does anything in this picture look familiar to you? Yes, we have Matthias again. Then in the first step, the learning guide discusses together with the learner the performance challenge, the learning budget in hours per week and other details that provide the boundary for the learning sprint. And the outcome of this task is the learning epic. That is the strategic goal of the learner that we document in the form of a learning epic. For the learner, the learning epic could be following. As you can see, we define what is the current status, what is the current skill set. We define the expected outcome, the impact, and we define how the impact should be visible. And we are using this format to make the impact measurable to make it clear what is expected. Or in other words, the written word is more powerful than the spoken one. In the second step, the learning guide selects together with the learner the learning elements based on the learning journey from our learning portfolio and defines the learning path, which then is stored in the learning backlog. Our learning portfolio is currently an Excel sheet with more than 500 learning elements grouped by learning topics, subtopics, and by learning packages. This portfolio will be maintained and reviewed by our learning guides and the learning experts. The learning portfolio is our holy grail for learning test automation. And in the backlog, then you will see the learning package, what is the title of the element. If it is selected for the backlog or not, and in which sprint it will be executed, then the link to the content, the most important information of this course. And then what is the effort and the costs. Currently, beside YouTube videos, blog posts and articles from medium.com and other websites, sorry, we are using online courses for test automation from Udemy, PluralSide, LinkedIn Learning, O'Reilly, and of course from the Apple Tools Test Automation University. From the Apple Tools Test Automation University, we are using around 95% of the courses in our learning sprints. We are using so many courses from the Test Automation University because of the high quality and the excellent content of these courses. And another important fact, they are free of charge. And with more than 5,000 people in IT who must learn test automation, we save a lot of money. In fact, until now, we have only 5 commercial courses from Udemy and PluralSide in our eLearning portfolio that we are using. 95% of our learning sprints have costs of zero euros. You heard right, zero euros. And back to the learning sprint. Once the learning path is defined, the next step is to agree on transfer tasks. Transfer tasks are an important concept and key to learning in the workplace. For this purpose, given tasks from the project and from the daily work are defined in which the newly learned competencies are then used. Transfer tasks guarantee that the learner applies the new skills directly in everyday life and that the learning has a value for the team. This is pure learning by doing. Remember the 70-20-10 model. And this approach ensures that learning has an immediate impact to the team. Yeah, and then after the planning, the self-directed learning phase, the learning sprint begins in which the goal is to implement the transfer tasks after working on the learning element. And it is important to say the goal is not to watch the learning videos or do the courses. The goal is to deliver the transfer tasks with or without the help of the courses. During the learning sprint, the learner acts on his own, which does not mean that he is on his own. He works on the learning elements and the transfer tasks, maybe together with the help of the learning guide or a learning expert, or he discussing ideas with colleagues or takes part in learning communities. In any case, the learning guide and the learning expert are always available during the sprint to help if necessary. And does anything in the picture looks familiar to you? Yes, here we have Matthias again. And then at the end of the learning sprint, the learner presents his achievement for the learning sprint. The feedback from the team then could influence the next learning sprint. You can see we also leave this agile mindset in learning, inspect and adapt. As an example, during a learning sprint with a learner with the goal of test automation for REST APIs, the team recognized in the sprint review that they could use the automation for creating test data via the APIs. And because test data was a big performance problem for the team. And due to that, we adjusted the next sprint with test data management topics and defined transfer tasks to fit the new goal. As you can see, learning on demand just in time, learning what has an impact to the team. And last, but not least, in the last step, we have the sprint retrospective. And of course we have the usual questions, what went well, what went wrong, what we must improve. And then we have a fourth question, an additional question, which is the most important for us for the learning guides. The question is, have you learned something new that you can use in your daily work? And if the answer is no, then we must adjust the learning sprint or we have a problem. So, and now some agile learning success stories. Then we have Tom. Tom is a data engineer with no test and test automation knowledge. Whose team develops the RBI data science platform. This is going in the direction of Jupyter notebooks and so on for our RBI data engineers in the Amazon cloud. And the challenge, the performance problem was that Tom should automate infrastructure tests with inspect, which was considered the best solution at this time. And already in the first sprint, Tom realized that inspect was not the right solution. And in the second sprint, he did some BOCs for different infrastructure testing tools in order to automate the first test in sprint three with his found solution, which was the Amazon CDK. And then we have Maria. Maria was a business analyst and was tasked with introducing agile testing methodologies and the whole team approach to her team. The challenge was that testing was previously done by an external team that fell victim to a short term reorganization. The Walker world says hello. To make matters worse, a regulatory requirement had to be implemented a short notice, which also affected the topic of testing. And Maria did an excellent job and realized everything within her learnings, her learning epic. And in the meanwhile, she is also the testing chapter lead for six test engineers in her tribe. Well, and in the meanwhile, you should know this guy, you should know Matias. The question is why is Matias so omnipresent? Matias was the first person in RBI who got an agile learning guide. In this case, I was the learning guide due to the huge demand from the teams regarding test and test automation support. We had a bottleneck due to the fact that I was the only Agile engineering coach for test and test automation at this time. The challenge of Matias was he was a developer and wanted to join the Agile engineering team as an Agile engineering coach for test and test automation. But test and test automation was not his area of competence. And one day suddenly he stand by my desk and started the conversation with, oops, oops, sorry, now. And he started the conversation with, hi, I'm Matias and I want to learn everything about test and test automation. Can you help me? But the best would be that Matias tell us his success story. Hello, yeah, it's me, Matias. Yeah, thank you really first to bring me here on stage to give me the chance and also that you use me here as a role model. Yeah, it's already more than two years ago where we two sat together and agreed on my learning journey where I transformed my our upgrade myself from being a developer up to being a test engineer responsible for engineering or focus on engineering and testing. To be honest, it was really challenging. At the beginning it was so much to learn testing is a own world test automation and all these trends. It was incredible. And there are situations where I thought maybe I should stop or how to keep track. And to be honest, without the Agile learning journey which I had and of course without the guidance from Rudy, I would not be there where I am today. Today, I have so many teams to get better in their majority level of testing, test automation at the end, software development, which is incredible, which I'm very proud of. And I'm very thankful for this whole initiative, which is also then responsible by RBI. And, you know, nowadays I'm at the level where I can call myself as an expert because I know also evaluating new things, new trends, trying out new PUCs, new frameworks. And even at the level that I share what we're doing. Today I'm also here at the Selenium conference where I talk about continuous security testing, which is very, very trendy and highly important that recommended to join the talk. It will be even after the session. And this, everything was possible just by this big learning initiative where we are very proud of, where we drive it, where we spread it now in the company, I personally act as now as a learning guide and also learning expert. So I guide people, create their journeys and support them in getting better in the content. And what should I say, that's a cool success story. We're happy to be there. Wish you a great day. See you. So, thank you, Matias. Well, so that was our journey to bring an Asian learning approach to RBI. And last slide, what are our lessons learned? First, there is no one size fits all. In Asian learning, the aim is to give the learner as much freedom and autonomy for the learning process. Not each type of learning approach works for each learner. A generation set employer needs another approach, maybe as a baby boomer. Offering different learning offers is the key to success. Then, meet the cognitive skills. Asian learning combines self-organization and self-directed learning. That requires special metacognitive skills and competencies, because now the learner has to take on task that in the old way of learning, we're taken by the manager, by the teacher, by the seminar leaders, professors or lecturers. We have seen that one of the biggest challenges is that the majority of the learners fail in organizing their learning process on their own. And then, last but not least, dedicated learning time. No matter how much you embrace or reward skills development, if your team members feel like they do not have the time to develop new skills, you are not going to do it. Encourage the learner to block out specific times to concentrate on skill development is here the solution for that. We found out that this is the best solution when you block dedicated learning time in your calendar. So, ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the last slide or the end of my slides. Please feel free to contact me via LinkedIn if you have any additional questions or if you would like to talk to me in general. You won't see Matias on my slides now, but if you want to see more from him, I recommend his talk about DevSecOps, which is coming up right after me. I can highly recommend this talk. So, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us. It's an amazing session. We really liked it. Okay. Thank you. Bye-bye.


I just made this one jar of refrigerator beetle beetle. Hi there and welcome to my channel. Check out these refrigerator beet pickles that I've just pulled out of the fridge. Gonna give them a taste for the first time. So this is a recipe that I'm gonna share with you where you can make just one jar of beet pickles in less than 30 minutes. So when I think of making pickles, I have visions of my mother and my grandmother working away in a hot kitchen during the summer, making jars and jars of pickles. And this process of cooking and canning up a whole year's worth of pickles all at once just always seemed very daunting to me. So I never have done it. But now that I've learned how easy it is to make just one or two jars using this quick refrigerator method, I'm all about making pickles now. Okay, so we're here in the kitchen and I have a container of beets here that we cooked up last night. We enjoyed some with our supper and now I'm gonna take these leftovers and whip up one jar of refrigerator beet pickles. So this is just a basic brine recipe with four ingredients that I make for all my pickling whether I'm doing beets, green beans, cucumbers, carrots. This is a good basic brine just to start with. And this is gonna equal a 16 ounce or two cup type measurement. So to start with, let me put in one cup of water. Add one cup white vinegar, quarter cup of white sugar, one teaspoon of salt. That is your basic brine to start with and from here you can just add in whatever types of spices or different flavors that you wanna add to your pickling. So for my recipe today, for my refrigerator beets, I'm gonna be adding in about 10 or so black peppercorns, one bay leaf. And I'm gonna try adding a little bit of heat to my pickles here today. I'm a little leery of making it too hot so I'm gonna just put about a quarter teaspoon of red pepper flakes. So as I said, you can add whatever your taste buds enjoy the most with your pickles. You could put in some dill, some garlic, different types of pickling spices, juniper berries, all spice berries. You can also substitute the white vinegar with apple cider vinegar, substitute the white sugar with coconut sugar, or even some honey if you prefer. So we're gonna put this on the stove and get it simmering and then we'll get our jar filled up with some beets. I'm just gonna let this simmer away for about 10 minutes just to get all that bay leaf and pepper flakes and black pepper flavor infused into the brine. So after it's simmered for five or 10 minutes, I'm just gonna remove it from the heat and let it cool down slightly. So a lot of these beets are just a nice size already.  So I'm just gonna put these right into the jar and then the bigger ones cut them up into sizes about the same as these. So some of these we boiled on the stove and the bigger red ones here, we roast it in the oven which really gives them a nice flavor. They turn out a little bit less mushy after cooking but these have all been chilling in the fridge so they're pretty solid right now. Okay, so I have filled up my jar with all these beets. So I have the yellow beets and the Detroit red and some of the Chiaugua type beets. So it's really nice, pretty colors. So after our brine has cooled down for five or 10 minutes, we just add it to our jar of beets. As you can see, there's more brine than needed here. You can make another second jar with it you want or just discard what's left over. I just stick a spoon handle or something down the sides just to make sure that there's no air bubbles. Top it up with a little more brine and that is it. You've just made yourself one jar of refrigerator beet pickles. So I will be just letting it sit on the counter and let it cool to room temperature before putting it in the refrigerator and it should be ready for a taste test within 24 hours. So I think I could have probably added some more hot pepper flakes because they aren't quite as spicy as I was hoping. So I hope you enjoyed watching my video where I shared my one jar recipe for refrigerator beet pickles. And please leave a comment below, hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe so that you can join me on my next video. Thanks for watching.


You are someone who cares about people. You're someone who works hard, wants the best for them, okay? We're going after relationships over transactions. Hey, what's up everybody? Ricky Caruth here. I just want to give you a couple of updates really quickly and I haven't done a video like this staring right at you in a while. So that just tells you how busy I have been and the work that I'm putting in doing podcasts, putting together deals, coaching calls. I'm just out here making it happen, trying to do the best I can do to provide the most value to you. I have to say the thing that I'm most excited about right now is my kickoff of the Zero to Diamond Tour in Miami June 30th. I made a post on Instagram and there were over 600 agents who registered for this event was just an Instagram post. So I'm really excited about that. I'm going to put 1,000 agents in that room. I haven't done any advertising or anything up to this point. So I'm about to start going hard there. We're good. We're more than 40 or 50 days away from that event. It's going to be an incredible event. I'm going to put a link in the description for you guys to get tickets. These tickets are absolutely free. I'm also working on Nashville for in July. I'm working on Dallas and Charleston for August, Vegas later on in the year, Charlotte. And of course I'm going to be in Orlando speaking at the Florida Association of Realtors National Conference. That's going to be August 26th. So I'm super excited to get back on tour, get back on stage and see you guys. I love getting out there traveling, seeing you guys, hearing the stories, shaking hands, taking pictures and all that good stuff. So I can't wait to see you guys at those events. I also want to give away a good 10, 15 signed copies of my book list to last, How to Survive Every Real Estate Market Crash. Just comment below what city you're from, what market you're in, what brokerage you're with. And I'm going to pick 10 to 15 winners over the next 24 to 48 hours. I've got some really big names coming up for the new podcast. Me and my partner, Juan Carlos, put together. It's called Road to 10,000. And my biggest guest coming up is Mr. Grant Cardone. That's going to be late May. We're going to record that episode, we've also had Glenn Sanford, we've had Brad Leon, we've had Tim Harris among many other incredible agents. So that's Road to 10,000. I'm posting those videos here on this channel. So be sure to click, subscribe, hit the bell so you can get notified every time I do that. But I'm also on all the podcast platforms, iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify, all those places. So I'm going to also go put a link below to a place where you can go to your favorite podcast platform if you're not already following me on one of those podcast platforms. And if you're on iTunes, please go and give me a five star review and let me know what I've done to help you in your business. What has my content done to help you in your business? And also go ahead and comment below who you would like me to bring on that podcast. Who do you want to see me and Juan interview? I would love to know you guys's thoughts on what names you think we should reach out to. My personal business so far this year, my personal real estate business, guys, I'm still selling. I'm still single agent status with one assistant out here doing the thing. This will be year number eight with 100 deals. I've done seven years in a row with 100 deals per year. And I'm just excited to have built my business up to this point and to turn around and share every little piece of how I did it with you for free. But so far this year, I'm at 33 deals and 15 million. I'm right on par for where I normally am this time of year. And it's just exciting the way that I built my business up to this point where everything's automatic. Everything comes to me. I'm not chasing business, business is chasing me and it allows me time to focus on my other businesses. For example, the coaching business and the personal brand that I have built. You know, it is amazing to know that there's gonna be a thousand agents in Miami in one area that want to come see me speak and just the humbleness, right? It just makes me incredibly humble to know that that many people wanna come see me speak. It just, it takes the words out of my mouth. I don't even know what to say, I'm speechless. But it goes to show you what happens when you put work in and you do good things and just take what you've done in this world and turn around and share it with people without trying to charge them and make money, okay? Yes, I make money from my coaching program. I get paid to speak, I have books that I sell. I have sponsorship deals. Also, my real estate team, outside of my single agent business, I have a real estate team that's nationwide where we just cross 600 agents and we're doing more than 375 transactions a month for the last two months. That's a huge jump from not even maybe four or five months ago where we're just breaking 100 transactions per month. So I'm pushing there to get to 500 transactions per month and then 1,000 and I'm just gonna keep on going with that but that's turned into something that's super successful and growing really fast and I'm really excited to work directly with all the agents on my team. I also have some really big announcements coming up soon for some things that I'm doing and some things that I wanna offer to you. So again, be sure to click subscribe, hit the bell so you can get notified every time I post a video or have anything I wanna share with you.  It's more of clips from my podcast and my live coaching sessions and live cold calling sessions. So I'm gonna do some more videos like this, of course, sharing some strategies and some different things but today I wanna talk about the listing presentation and the listing appointment. What we do at the listing appointment, how we handle ourself at the listing presentation and the way that I do it is a lot different than anyone else. Let's just say any other coach, no other broker is gonna tell you to do it like this but all I can do is share with you what works for me. I'm not telling you this is the way to do it. I'm not mad at you if you don't do it this way. That's not the point in my content. The point in my content is just for me to be able to share with you what I do, what works for me. You can take it and do what you want with it. If you take a little piece of it, if you take the whole thing, if you don't like it at all, at least you looked at what I did and made that decision and moved on from there. So number one, when I show up to a list appointment, okay, what do I have with me? Okay, I don't have a listing presentation, a PowerPoint. I used to do that. I tried that. Guys, listen, I tried everything in real estate. There's nothing I didn't try. I tried every single thing that's out there. I've given it a shot. Okay, I'm still testing things out. I tested out some Facebook ad stuff here just in the past month. I'm still testing things out as I move along here. I don't wanna get left behind and if there's something out there that's better than what I'm doing, I wanna know about it. I wanna incorporate it in what I'm doing. I'm not closed-minded, right? I don't say that, again, I don't say that what I do is the only way and what I do is the best way. I don't say that at all. I never say that. What I say is this is how I do it. So when I show up, I don't have a PowerPoint. The times that I tried the PowerPoint presentation, you know, I'm going through it. I can see, I can feel them over my shoulder, you know, looking at the PowerPoint. I'm going through this thing and I can tell that they are absolutely not interested in what I'm sharing with them. Slide by slide, telling them how I'm gonna market the property and what I'm gonna do and what I've done and this and that and the other. They don't care about any of that. They don't care about any of that at all, okay? What they care about is just a few things. Do we make them feel comfortable with us? Do they feel like we're gonna work hard to get the job done? Do they feel like that we have their best interest in mind? Those are the things that these sellers and these clients and the buyers as well, same thing for the buyers. That's what they want to know, okay? And so that's what we have to share with them. So we have to become really great at communicating these things to our prospects. We have to become really great at communication of who we really are because this is who we really are. We are people who, if you're following me, you are someone who cares about people. You're someone who works hard, wants the best for them, okay? We're going after relationships over transactions, okay? I know you guys have heard me say that because I literally have coined that phrase. I coined that phrase back in 2017. I was the first to bring that phrase to the market and it's my core value and it's how I built my businesses. It's how I built my real estate business, my coaching business, my book sales, my speaking career. All the above is from building relationships over transactions and you gotta think this way. You gotta walk into these listing appointments. Number one, not expecting anything, right? Because you don't expect the listing. Now a lot of people say you have to visualize getting the listing. You have to assume that you're getting this listing. I want to assume something but it's not the listing. I wanna assume the relationship. I wanna walk in this situation knowing that when I leave, I have a new friend who is gonna do business with me, okay?  You've got to pick up on this stuff and you've got to package your communication in a way that they feel like you're not just there to just try to get a listing today, no matter what. Because trying to force them into a listing before they're ready can be very damaging to your career much less the relationship with that client. When you do that and you have to get good at knowing when to push and when not to push. Remember, 95% low pressure, 5% high pressure but you got to know where to put that 5%, when to stick it in there and go for it. And it's gonna be after you've made a strong connection, you know why they wanna sell, when they wanna sell and then you can kind of game plan with them of how this thing's gonna go. So when I show up to the property to do this listing appointment presentation, whatever you wanna call it, I wanna walk in and I just, I want to create within the first couple seconds this aura, this vibe of comfortableness that we're all just here trying to figure out what we can do to help and it's all good, okay. I'm not here to try to get you to sign anything today, okay. If that's what the next step is, then let's do it and let's make it happen. I'm ready to get to work, let's make it happen. But I wanna create the situation of how's it going? You know, show me the house. I'm gonna put my folder down. What I bring with me is a blank listing agreement. Comps on the property, a gift card to a nice restaurant, all in a folder with a Ricky Caruth pen, okay. That's what I like to do. When I leave the presentation, whether the listing agreement was signed or not, I'm gonna give that entire package to them. They can have it. When I walk in, I wanna set that folder on the table, okay. And I wanna see the house. I want them to walk me through the property and tell me everything about why their house is the nicest house on the street. Everybody thinks their property is the nicest one on the street. Of course they do. It's their house. They spend a lot of time there. They have a lot of pride. I'm the same way with my house, okay. Of course, I think mine actually is the nicest house on the street, neither here nor there. You wanna walk through and let them do all the talking. When you're talking to people, I want you to do the 80-20 rule. I want you to talk 20% of the time and listen 80% of the time. And out of the 20% of the time you're talking, I need you to do 80% of that and you need to be asking questions, okay. 80-20. We're only talking 20% of the time, listening 80% and out of the 20% that we're talking, 80% of that is us asking questions. Not making statements and talking about ourself, short statements, asking questions, trying to learn more about them. That's what this is all about. We're trying to collect data here. We're trying to collect data to figure out what we can do to help this person short and long term. Because as you make this connection, this connection is gonna be worth 10 to 20 deals to you over the life of your career, through repeat or referral and referral over referral, okay.  They lose that relationship and those 10 to 20 deals. That's what you gotta think about. So you gotta just put yourself in as many of these situations as you possibly can to get better and better and better at how to handle, know when to go for it, let's just say.  So after they show me the house, we're gonna basically have made a circle through the house and end up right back close to that table where I put my folder down. At that point, I wanna sit down and start talking to them about why they're selling and really get the backstory. This is where you're really gonna win. This listing is when you get the backstory and you're listening and you're trying to relate and you're trying to figure out how you can help this person based on this backstory and why they want to sell. Once we understand that, then we're gonna open the folder and start going through the comps with them to try to establish price, okay? And as we listen to the backstory, we're gonna put together a game plan with them, we're gonna establish the price and then there we have everything right there in a package. We know why they're selling, we know what we all need to do together to get the job done and when we need to do it, what the timeline is and we've went through the comps and established a price. And then at that point, it's up to the seller of kind of what they wanna do, right? And we may move forward right then. It just depends on why they wanna sell and what the game plan is. That's how I handle my listing presentations. I make them very personable. I want to come in like I'm a friend or family member, really close friend or family member and I want them to feel that because they are, they're an extended part of my family. I wanna do everything I can do to help them get the job done. So I hope that helps you with your listing presentations and helps you win more listings. If you don't like the way that I do it, I hope you at least picked up something out of it and incorporated something there and that it really helps you take your listing conversions to another level. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching today. Reach out on Instagram if you need anything at all. I'm still answering all of those DMs every single day and we'll talk to you soon. Let's go.