Middle child of President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden seems to often be surrounded by scandal. Even now the FBI is investigating him and we know the 52 year old has battled with some serious addiction issues in the past. Despite all of this and having somewhat of a tragic childhood, Hunter has always lived in stunning homes, from where he grew up to his upscale Washington, D.C. estate and currently his Malibu rental mansion worth 20K per month. So Michael and I have dropped our very own house tour of our new home that we moved into earlier this year, so subscribe to our personal channel if you want to see where we're living and more of what we're up to. In these videos we don't reveal any addresses even though I've done a house tour of my own place please do not show up at any private residences because it's not safe for anyone. Hunter Biden is an attorney better known for being the second son of current U.S. President Joe Biden. He also was an investor working with hedge funds, venture capital and private equity funds. Despite his list of credentials, Hunter is often the center of scandal such as the current laptop controversy which has him being investigated by the FBI. But that's not what this video is about and today we'll be focusing more on Hunter's real estate over the years including his current Malibu rental mansion he's living at with his wife, South African model and filmmaker Melissa Cohen and their infant son. His home also boasts an art studio which Hunter had apparently been putting to use working on his paintings. Hey guys it's Kara the Vampire Slayer back with another exclusive house tour here on Femus Entertainment in this one checking out the homes of Hunter Biden. Don't forget to like, subscribe and hit me up on Instagram to chat and now let's get into this video. Hunter Biden was born in Wilmington Delaware but spent many of his early years in a gorgeous 1723 colonial mansion. While his parents Joe and the late Nealia Biden were the first living in Joe's parents' four bedroom home in Falkland to save money, they eventually moved into their mini estate in Delaware in 1972 when Hunter was three years old and when Joe was elected junior senator. This five bedroom mansion sat on three acres and boasted almost 5,000 square feet of space with features like five fireplaces throughout. Built in the 1700s the property used to be part of a 200 acre plot that was later divided and once the Bidens moved in they made some changes including extending the den. Tragedy rocked a young Hunter's life first in 1972 when he and his elder brother Bo were injured in the car accident that took the lives of his mother and baby sister Naomi. Sadly Hunter's older brother would also pass away more recently in 2015 from a brain tumor. Hunter went on to study at Georgetown University receiving a degree in history and while here he lived in Washington DC working odd jobs. This was also reportedly when he started drinking more and doing drugs marking the early start of his battles with addiction. Later on after marrying his first wife with whom he shares three children, Hunter went to Georgetown Law for a year before transferring to Yale and graduating in 1996. From then on Hunter's career became closely intertwined with his father Joe's politics. Much like his father Hunter also bought a historic estate in 1987 in Wilmington, Delaware with the original home dating back to before the Revolutionary War. After renovating this home he would sell it later for nearly double what he paid and moved to Washington DC with his family into a rental home. When he officially became a lobbyist in the early 2000s Hunter would move again this time back to Wilmington to be closer to the rest of the Biden family while commuting to Washington for work. In 2006 Hunter ended up purchasing a 1.6 million dollar a boat in a posh Washington DC neighborhood but it was reported that because of this he was having some financial issues. Apparently Hunter didn't have enough for the down payments and took out a mortgage for 110% of the purchase price. Picture family home with spacious and well kept colonial style spread with a wrap around driveway and tree shaded law. Located in Northwest Washington DC Hunter's former house had four floors along with 4,390 square feet of space throughout with five beds not including the lavish master suite. There were also 5.5 baths, three wood burning fireplaces and custom upgrades. Common spaces in the home were spacious and comfortable including the grand living room, formal dining room and Eden chef's kitchen. The kitchen was nearly all white aside from the stainless steel appliances, touches of green the center islands and hardwood flooring underfoot that ran through most of the home. Here there was also a picture window overlooking the grounds as well as a cozy banquet dining look. Elsewhere there was a family room with windows spanning almost poor to ceiling that wrapped around the space as well as another casual dining area. Hunter's former master suite has a large bedroom which opens to the elegant master bath boasting features like heated floors, a dual vanity, soaking tub and steam shower. There were also two walk-in dressing rooms with windows and lit organizers. Back downstairs in the home you'll also find a family room with fireplace, one of the guest rooms and baths, a screened porch and more. In total there were five guest bedrooms most of which had a neutral color scheme at the time. Rounding out the property was the outdoor space that had a lot of lush greenery along with terraces, decks and a sports court. Once Hunter and his first wife Kathleen finalized their divorce in 2017 they put this property up for sale at 1.85 million dollars selling it for 1.6 million. In 2018 Hunter decided to make the move to Los Angeles and while it was said he purchased a multi-million dollar home in the Hollywood Hills turns out that it was a rental he was paying a 12k a month for. This home was built in 1961 and designed by Buff and Hensman boasting mid-century modern style and over 2,000 square feet with three beds and three baths. The Hollywood hideaway was just off of Mulholland Drive and could only be reached by a long gated driveway providing ideal privacy. As you'd expect from the style of home it was hallmarked by its floor-to-ceiling glass sliders to blend indoor and outdoor spaces as well as minimalistic decor and an open floor plan. Not only did the property have amazing views of LA they were directly visible through all of the glass in the home. When Hunter moved in the home had been recently renovated to offer an all-new kitchen with top-of-the-line appliances and custom cabinets. There are also a handful of open and comfortable living spaces as well as an office and plenty of inviting bedrooms. Outside the home had a Zen courtyard along with a wrap-around deck plus plenty of terraces to take in the views of the San Fernando Valley or Dino Fresco. The swimming pool is further away from the home itself. Set down a foresty pathway and right above it is a glass cabana that one could use as an office or hangout space. At the end of 2020 Hunter decided to make moves from his Hollywood home. This time choosing a larger abode in the upscale Venice Beach area of California and this rental home was canal side. It said that this 3,800 square foot spread was costing him up to 25k per month and it also had two beds and 2.5 baths. Interiors boasted a fresh all-white color scheme for the most part and it was even more noticeable on the outside of the home. There were open plan living spaces along with a 25 foot high ceiling in the main room and in common areas like the kitchen and dining room there were pops of brown, beige and red. Both of the bedrooms here were large enough to be primary suites and each had a large spa style bath attached while one had its own airy lounge space that led to a petite courtyard with plunge pool. Then the other bedroom spanned across the whole top floor of the three-level property and was complete with a sauna and spiraling staircase up to the roof top terrace. While that home was lavish and all since 2021, Hunter's current pad has been a rental in Malibu that costs a reported 20k per month and has its own art studio. He moved into this home with his current wife Melissa and their infant son Bo Jr. and the spread offers up four bedrooms in 2.5 baths. Hunter claimed that he wakes up at 5am each day, stops in the kitchen to make himself some coffee, then heads to the garage which is where the converted art studio is as well as a table for his paintings. Hunter's newfound career at the time as a painter likely made this art studio feature quite the selling point. The garage studio is a brick floor as well as the skylights. Inside the home itself, there's an open floor plan which at this point we can see Hunter is a fan of and it also has plenty of views of the ocean. The main living room is indoor outdoor style with pocket doors for easy flow. There's also a vaulted ceiling and stunning floor to ceiling stone fireplace. There are solid oak floors in the common spaces as well as a nearly all white kitchen with casual dining space. The bedrooms in the home follow a natural and laid back style like most of the rest of the place with a lot of whites in some blue colored spaces to emphasize those ocean views. The private grounds are spacious with features like a stone patio for entertaining built in barbecue and swimming pool with spa and Since Hunter is the president's son after all, he can't have the secret service too far away. ABC reported last year the agency was dishing out over 30k per month to rent out the Malibu mansion next door which also boasted a castle like tower. While seeing as Hunter Biden's life is shrouded in controversy yet again, I wonder if he'll be switching up his living space anytime soon. I guess only time will tell. Well, that's going to conclude this house tour after looking at his many homes. What did you think? Be sure to let me know down in the comments as well as who we should feature next on here. Thanks for watching. Hit that subscribe button if you haven't. Follow me on Instagram if you want to chat and I'll see you all in another video. Bye


Thank you very much for joining. I hope you can hear me well It's about time to start This this presentation is about comparison of open source Software home automation tools. My name is León on the V and I'm a senior software engineer at consumer group In the next 30 minutes I'll provide an overview of the open source home automation systems that I know and at the end of the presentation There will be like five minutes for Q&A I Work for consulco group, which is a services company specialized and embedded Linux An open source software my colleagues and I have experienced in upstream contributions to various Popular open source projects starting with the Linux kernel you boot the yokto project and open embedded automotive grade Linux and many more the company has Has an office here in California. However, we have engineers around the world and I'm coming from the office in Bulgaria So I'm traveling from Europe to here The agenda for the next 30 minutes is Of course home automation. First of all, what are the challenges in front of home automation after that? We will do an overview of the popular open source home automation open source platforms that already exist and We can use and finally I have a slide about conclusions Based on my personal experience. I have to say that this presentation is inspired by my My desire to pick up the right open source Software to install in my home to manage all these devices that I take from different brands Internet of things is no longer just the buzzword a decade ago Everyone was speaking about internet of things the huge possibilities that if internet of things can provide however today internet of things are all around us and their new New challenges in front of them internet of things are heavily used in home automation tasks most notably for smart speakers Smart lightning systems and of course robotic vacuum cleaners, which are very popular nowadays True various gateways it's possible nowadays to connect devices that are Operating on various protocols such as Zigbee Bluetooth to the internet as well Obviously having internet of things in our home automation has a lot of advantages, but it also Has some disadvantages The major advantage is that when we combine artificial intelligence and machine learning with the big data generated from all those Sensors and smart devices that we have in our houses We have huge opportunities to understand our ourselves better and to optimize a lot of processes that we do and to make life Our life better of course, so the disadvantages the not so bright side of the things is that When you buy devices from different vendors, it's very hard to make them work together There are several initiatives that we're gonna mention that are trying to solve this Very often sensitive personal information is stored in the cloud and there is no option To use the device without a connection to the cloud as a software engineer I'm always concerned about privacy without I wouldn't say that I'm a privacy or security freak in any way But still sometimes, you know having personal information in the cloud is something that bothers me So how open source can help? Make things better the first of all there are collaborative projects for Interoperability this means that when you have numerous devices From different vendors these projects are trying to solve on a vendor level this problem by using a similar protocols and Making things work together Some of those projects Have been present on previous editions of the better Linux conference. So I'm sure you are familiar with those names The open connectivity foundation Which which is a joint venture between Intel and Samsung opened off? Which is adopted in Panasonic devices, of course Mozilla web of things I'm sure everyone knows Mozilla and they have this initiative for internet of things and In the slides you see that they have even in an implementation that you can also use and the eclipse IOT Foundation is also working on a variety of open source projects, which helps connect various devices However today we'll focus not on these initiatives, but more on open source home automation platforms, which are far more practical They they are started by Various people various creators because they had the problem that I had in my home after buying all those devices from different vendors I wanted to to control them together to make them work together so In in the next slides, I'll cover more than 10 of those platforms so when I was Preparing initially For for this talk I had in mind to focus only on three of them and a few others However, it appears that there's so many other home automation open source platforms that it's very hard to pick just one therefore, I Decided to put a lot of slides and to cover some of them not all of them, of course We are not going to do a side-by-side comparison But rather say what what are the benefits and of each platform? Of course, there are a lot of links so after the talk The slides are already shared so you can have a look and check all the details. I Have to say a disclaimer here. I have used Some of those systems personally in my home not all of them and I don't consider myself an expert because you see that some of those systems have a lot of a lot of features a Lot of features that I'm not very familiar with as well however Some of them have very good documentation others not so good and I hope this presentation will show you the variety of open source home automation platforms that are there on the market and Finally in the conclusions, we can have some kind of a discussion. I'll share with you my thoughts of what's what's good and what can be made better All right, so let's start with home assistant How many of you are using home assistant? Can you raise your hand? All right. Okay. That's fair amount of people So home assistant is an open source home automation platform Which is written in Python 3 with polymer and yaml for configuration files It's one of those platforms that is perfect to run on Raspberry Pi And you see in the next slide that Raspberry Pi obviously is a very popular among these open source home automation Platforms because most of the time people are creating like do-it-yourself solutions with installing these open source software solutions Home assistant nowadays It's recommended to work on Raspberry Pi 3b or newer such as b-plus or eventually even 4 it has been started six years ago and Actually, I've never met the creator of the project, but I believe he he's living here in San Diego There is a really nice talk By him from a previous edition of embedded Linux conference, which is available online at the last of my slides You see a link to this talk. I highly recommend you to have a look at it where he Explains internals how home assistant works and makes a deep dive Here we will not have enough time to do a deep dive in any of the platforms that we we will discuss Home assistant has a huge community. There are more than 10000 1500 contributors They have forums with a with a lot of people asking question or replying question the documentation is It's quite good. Of course the source code is available at github under Apache 2.0 license So it's an entirely open source project The key features is that home assistant supports more than a thousand components in other words most probably if you buy If you buy a device a home automation Internet a thing from Available on the market most probably an integration for it already exists in home at the home assistant Of course the examples are like Ikea trophy Philips Q Google assistant Lexa Amazon. I call nest Cody and so on And the good thing in home assistant is that a few releases ago? Maybe it was Approximately a year ago They provided user logins. So that you have a System with users you can define users and restrict access to the system only by certain users They are continuing the efforts to make different permissions for those users so that the user in future would have Access to different parts of the system One of the key features that I really enjoy and home assistant Is the automatic discovery of devices? This means that as soon as you have home assistant properly set up and running It will discover certain devices There is a very well-defined protocols which could help you do this another key feature is the automatic updates of the lavalas UI this is the default UI and Those of you who know me from my previous presentations know that I'm a huge fan of in cutity the machine to machine communication protocol and Home assistant has an excellent integration of various in cutity components So as I told you a home assistant is Home assistant is a Solution that can run on various different platforms, but one of the most commonly used platform is a Raspberry Pi There are a couple of ways how to get started with home assistant on Raspberry Pi Nowadays the recommended solution is hacaio. This is an embedded Linux distribution Which is now made with built root It has a docker container and route for software over-the-air updates It has been started by Pascal Vizelli in two years ago in 2017 It's compatible not only with raspberry pi but also with inter nuke with odroid devices fingerboard orange pi prime and of course virtual a virtual appliance As far as I remember initially they started with a build based on the yachter project and open embedded after that They decided to switch to to build root Another option which is very popular back in the days was to use the has been image The has been image as the name suggests is an image that had out of the box in styles home assistant on a Raspbian image or and Raspbian is the the default The default Linux distribution provided by the raspberry pi foundation for all raspberry pi models and versions It's for all raspberry pi models versions because the images compile for RV six And of course you have the option to do a manual installation I told you that I'm a huge fan of impurity Just to repeat once again a home assistant has having more than a thousand components These are just a few of those components that are related to impurity Impurity is a machine-to-machine protocol that helps you transfer Payload which could be text or binary payload Through various connected devices Using a broker. How many of you have used them QT? Okay, like half a drill more right. It's um, it's a really awesome protocol because it It allows you near real-time communication and it's very convenient for internet of things and both home on home automation however, the problem is that impurity solves The issue how to transfer the data between the devices, but it does not define How to serialize the data that you are transferring so home assistant has a solution for this they have a very good documentation and a very straightforward way that includes Jason and call it messages how to Send data between the devices and an impurity broker to which home assistant is connected I'm particularly speaking about this because you see that some of the other systems that we're gonna We're gonna talk about have adopted this approach and have adopted the standard defined by home assistant So the next And the next open source home automation platform that I would like to cover is open hop open hop is one of the oldest home automation systems and how many of you have used it no matter which version of open hop Okay, just all right for people or it so I'm gonna cover open hop to in the next few slides. There is a huge changes between version one and two Open open hop stands for open home automation bus The second version is written in actually both versions are written in Java But this one has been completely rewritten. That's that's why There is a huge difference between version one and two and there are a lot of tutorials if you are an existing open hop Open hop user with the version one how to migrate to version two For a while it was based on the eclipse smart home, but since version since version 2.5 things have changed it has more than a 1,500 supported things these are the devices that you can integrate easily on open hop It has been started almost 10 years ago by Kai it has also a huge community and more than 400 contributors the source code is available again in github the licenses eclipse public license to zero You can install and run open hop on Devices supporting Microsoft Windows Mac OS and the new Linux distribution including crossberry pie pine 64 or docker Open hop is also providing mobile applications for Android and iOS which are available at the application stores While speaking about home assistant, I told you that home assistant solves very well the impunity specification for payloads and open hop also has this auto discovery feature really convenient and It for impunity it supports both the homey specification and the home assistant impunity components The same components that you saw in the previous slides defined by a home assistant can be used in a similar way by open hop the next system that I would like To to talk with with you about is the mottics now. How many of you are using the mottics? anyone all right Although Nobody said that is using from people here in the room. It's again a very popular system It's very lightweight. This is one of the advantages of the mottics and it's lightweight probably because it's written in C plus plus Of course there there is support for Python plug-in framework It again runs very well on Raspberry Pi. It has been started seven years ago and It also has big community with more than 250 contributors the source code is available again at github under GPL version 3 license You can install the mottics on Microsoft Windows and GNULINX distribution Again, it's it can run pretty well on Raspberry Pi There is no dedicated image for Raspberry Pi unlike open hop and home assistant. However, the installation is It's simplified by an installation script All right, so now I would like to Given give you an overview of other open-source systems. There are many of them We will not go in too much details Probably because we don't have enough time for them But you see some systems that have a very long history and we are starting with mr. House Mr. House has been started 20 years ago When I when I had a look at the logs and I saw that it started in 99 I was I was amazed But home automation is obviously a problem that has been around for quite quite a lot of time and will it will remain Mr. House is written in pearl since it's quite old Quite quite old too. It runs on Windows 95 or newer versions of Windows and of course most of the UNIX based platforms It's available again at github under GPO version 2 license It doesn't have as big community nowadays as the three other systems that we had a look at But of course if you like coding on pearl, it's it's good to have a look at it Another system written in Python with a front-based Front-end web interface based on Aurelia is open motics This in this is an interesting solution because there is a Company behind this project. It has been started more than 15 years ago And it became open source in 2012 seven years ago. The company is based in Belgium So it's It provides not only the software, but also the hardware and there provide open source hardware So some of the so the hardware schematics are available as well as the software both are in github Creative commons is used for the open source hardware Schematics and GPO version 2 for the software There is a community maintained home assistant plug-in so you can use You can interface things that are already supported by home assistant another system that has A similar approach of not only providing the the the software, but also providing the hardware is Gdom it's a written in PHP Has paid Android and iOS applications. It it supports Various protocols through which you can connect various internet of things and devices It has been started more than five years ago by two co-founders it's Which are based in France? The core source code is available at github under GPO version 2 license So here the interesting part for those two solutions are that they are not only software, but they combine software and hardware And now for those of you who like JavaScript, they are entirely A Platforms entirely based on JavaScript the first one that I would like to share with you is called IO broker It's written in JavaScript with of course not GS and Redis it runs on both arm and Intel devices It's compatible x86 64 devices. It's compatible with Various new Linux distributions Windows and macOS or pretty much you can run it on any operating system out there It supports Almost 300 connected devices, of course this number is far less compared to some of the systems that we covered at the beginning but it supports numerous adapters for integrating third-party systems and Protocols one of the key features here is again that it has automatic discovery Devices of devices over being and in Qtd started in Germany. It's available in github under MIT license If you remember at the beginning I told you about this collaborative projects by started by several several associations One of the most Muzawa and the web of things So Muzawa is not only working on a protocol and a way how to integrate things together But they are also providing a reference implementation of a gateway, which is called Muzawa web things gateway it's again written in JavaScript just like In the previous solution on the IO broker with no GS and there are some Python scripts as well it runs on two devices and Out of the box and there are instructions how to easily got it working on raspberry pi 3 b or b plus and to resomnia Are you familiar with the to resomnia project? Anyone right? Okay, yeah, to resomnia is a very interesting project because it's an entirely open source Wi-Fi Router high-end router. That's why Muzawa has chosen web of things to support it It uses the web of things framework Of course the the task of the whole gateway is to monitor and control your smart home devices with a unified web interface and To provide add-on so that you can integrate the various devices It's again available at github under this time under Muzawa public license to zero and Katie Gehry is giving a talk in one of the other rooms. She is representative of Muzawa So if you have technical questions regarding Muzawa web of things gateway, you can also find her and ask Because it's a it's a really interesting project We're moving on with kawa os this is a server written in C++ The web application is based on angular gs. I'm not sure which version of angular gs I know that in the front-end web development world. This is also important, but I'm not sure for the moment There is a graphical user interface for mobile mobile devices and desktop application written in Qt and QML I Saw that there are some integration APIs that are written in the go programming language So this solution integrates together various programming languages It's built with the octa project and open embedded so it provides a Linux distribution For the supported devices which are Raspberry Pi, Primal board, QB board, Intel Atom and of course other Intel X8664 machines which are defined pretty much by the The the configuration that it makes picks up when when it builds the image Most of the users are French French speaking, this is another thing that I should Should note some of those systems are have for regional popularity Which means that they're popular in certain countries and you can see that sometimes the documentation is Or the forums are not only of English-speaking people and I've noticed while I was doing the research for this this presentation that a lot of the solutions are very popular in certain region depending on the the creator of the project Chaos is available in github under GPL v3 license Open that home is another solution it's written in Java and Apache Maven it runs on Windows Mac OS new Linux distributions, which include Raspbian for Raspberry Pi It supports again multiple protocols and devices including Wi-Fi and radio band devices it offers an open-res interface and of course just last Pretty much any of the other systems can be extended with plugins again. It's available with github and the licenses GPL v3 and The next system is smart home and G it's written in Python. It's available for manual installation or with Docker There is an image for Raspberry Pi, which is based on the Raspbian distribution It has been started seven years ago, but the user documentation at the moment is only in German However, the developers documentation is in English. This is this is a fine example How a system can be? Can have a long history and can be originally very popular most of the users are obviously based In German speaking countries and because of that the user documentation is available in German And the source code is in github under GPL v3 license And Another solution that this solution is more exotic in my opinion because it's written in C sharp It's again open source Python and JavaScript are also used. It's available for Microsoft Windows Debian and Ubuntu with compatible or and any Compatible Debian derived distribution that support that packages and Mac OS, of course There is an Android Client application. I couldn't find an iOS application It supports Some of course quite a lot of devices including some Scenarios for voice control it has been started seven years ago and the source code is available again in github So, okay We are coming towards the end of the presentation as you have seen. There are so many so many Solutions we didn't do a deep dive in any of them However, I have to say that this the systems that we Mentioned so far our system that solve this particular problem how to integrate all those Devices that are available on the market from different vendors and to work together However, if you are interested in home automation with open source software tools There is a huge variety and there are awesome projects that deserves our attention. I'm personally using Kodi Which Kodi some media center it there there are several distributions like Libre a leg open a leg which you can install on a on a device plug it on your TV and enjoy an open source solution for Watching your favorite movies and shows another solution which is Having an open source client is flex. It's a it's a streaming solution again for those of you interested in voices voice assistants my craft is an alternative of Google assistant and Alexa Snips is another Open source tool that provides you options to build your own home assistant Of course on cloud if you don't want your date all of your data in the cloud and if you prefer tool To keep your favorite photos or documents in in your home in your own cloud for the people who like Retro gaming there. There are some great projects like retro pi which allows you to get back into the 80s or early 90s and enjoy your favorite games I Have I have one set up with really cool case that includes retro pi. Unfortunately, I don't have enough time to play with it All right so as you have seen there is a huge variety of open source home automation platforms nowadays several years ago There was a demand on the on in the open source community for such kind of solutions But at the moment there are a lot of solutions If you ask me too many of those solutions are available in my opinion and this is a personal opinion Home assistant open hap to and do motics are ahead of game as of the moment I'm personally using Most of the time home assistant and open hap to the good thing is that you can run both of them simultaneously The motics is also a nice solution as you have seen From the previous slides, but it doesn't have such a good MQtD support And therefore I prefer to use home assistant and open hap to because I have a lot of open source hardware devices that I create on my own and For me, it's easier to integrate them in home assistant and open hap to Unless you have a very very good reason, please do not start another home automation platform We have plenty of them in my opinion. We should focus our efforts as a community in making Making things better making new features better futures one of the problems that I Have experience and some of my friends who have tried those systems who are Who are not engineers is that very often the installation? Is very difficult and time-consuming? So one of the hardest steps is how to get started with some of those platforms Some of them have better better process for installation. For example, the museo web of things has a very straightforward process how you can you know connect your Your gateway to your Wi-Fi network, but for some of the other for some of the other systems You have to you know download an image flush it to a micro SD card after that mount the SD card Type in your Wi-Fi and for a regular user. This is something that's difficult I know that everyone here in this room is an engineer and probably it sounds silly that it could be difficult to mount an SD card and go to a specific location and type in a Wi-Fi password, but if you think about And consumers sometimes this could be could be hard So the business models are Different as you have seen some systems provide everything open source and rely on donations other systems Such as a home assistance Assistant have paid cloud subscriptions and this is one of their ways To get some money to fund the further development of the project Often there are companies providing paid support for the people who cannot so fast something in in the With with the system with the tool of course there is There are marketplaces for plugins and sometimes Sometimes there are paid plugins no matter that the whole the whole core part of the project is free and open source and as you have seen there are a couple of Solutions which provide not only the software, but also the hardware which And their business model is based on that to sell the hardware and with the profit to continue developing Thank you very much These are a few useful links This is this is the link that I've mentioned if you want to learn the insurance about home assistant. It's It's a couple of years old, but still very valid So We're I'm a bit late, but I would like to hear your questions So thank you very much for your attention and please let me know what questions we have. Yes, and this is for the recording Okay. Yeah, this is a really good question. So the question is why I'm using at home both home assistant and open have I don't have a good reason for this I'm just curious person and I like to to experiment and one of the reasons was to see if they can work together so Yes, they have different They have different approach I Would say that in terms of features that I personally need home assistant has more features but it's always good to try new things and In February I visited FOSDM, which is the largest open source conference in in Europe I met the creator of open hub and since I have been using open happy in the past I decided to give it another try because I had a chat with him He had a nice boot and there were a lot of improvements in open happy in the recent years Do you have other questions? I think yeah, sure Yeah, this is an excellent question very common question. I think every one of us is having this type of problems and In my opinion As you have seen there are so many projects too many projects However, there are certain projects that have this critical mass of users that are more actively contributing and One of the things that are there most most of the time people are contributing back to these projects are plugins or add-ons Whatever is the name within the the project so that They can integrate third-party devices like devices that communicate to different protocols like hubs to communicate with let's say Zigbee or whatever And if you have such device at home, and I think every one of us is having the best The best approach to pick up the right home automation platform for you is first to go and check that in the documentation how difficult it is to to get support for your particular device and which additional hardware to use To make them talk to each other Yes, yes The whole idea behind all these platforms that you saw is to solve this problem The thing is that there are so many different protocols so that Different platforms have different level of support depending on the on the platform. Thank you very much Are there any other questions? Yeah? Can we just? Yeah, so those those projects that are Widely used and have a lot of contributors Provide on their websites a list of products that are supported For example at home because I can because I can can I have Alexa in in my living room and Google assistant to Google home in in my kitchen and the the room that I used to work from And I have homecasts around the TVs and Lightning from different vendors and this becomes a huge problem if you want to connect them together I don't like the idea that big corporations wants us to buy Things from us one vendor just because those things can work Talk together and I'm using Home automation open source tools to solve this problem The best approach that I would recommend you is to go to the website of the particular project out if if I'm on your place, I would start with the tree the first tree that we've Covered and check if the particular device that you have in mind is already supported if it's not supported which Which is possible if it's a rare device The next step would be to see How difficult is it to get it supported because since it's an open source project You have the freedom to write a plug-in and integrate it like no Yeah, this sounds really fun Fortunately, I don't have enough time for games, but I'll try to give it. I'll give it a try Okay, thank you very much for joining again


Okay, so that was amazing view of Trinidad and Tobago, and may I ask my co-hosts Shirley and Sandra to check the waiting room as people join us. And let's get the show on the road. First of all, as I mentioned, happy Independence Day and the place looks amazing. So today we are going to talk about creating Toastmaster brand compliant communication, though even the posters says creating posters. But really I want to talk today about creating brand compliant communication when as a club or as an area or as a district, we communicate to non-toastmasters how we should do this. And the tool that we are going to use today is Canva because it's free. As mentioned, I am a photographer. I am a scuba diver, so I'm looking forward to coming to this beautiful place. Today I am there virtually, but certainly when things get back to normal, I love to come there and meet up with you in person. A year ago, I converted all of my photography gear and converted it into a YouTube studio and that's where I started my channel Tech for Toastmasters. This has helped me to reach out to so many Toastmasters around the world. I've gone to give workshops on Canva, on PR, on branding, or even for that matter on hybrid meeting, which is the new buzzword. This is what I've been doing. And do check it out. To get the most out of today's meeting, do keep your microphones muted. Use the speaker view. If you have any queries, please put them in the chat. I will address them. So today we are going to focus on how to create or how to use the brand manual to advantage, how to access the brand portal, the Canva design elements, how to do some basic editing. We don't have enough time to do deep dive, but I will make sure that we go slowly and we do our best today. And how to share your work, how to collaborate. When I asked you all during the registration process, you have asked so many questions. And some of these things, all of these things mentioned here, we are going to cover today, how to remove background from your pictures, how to use curved text, how to decide if the picture in the poster is brand compliant or not. Please explain gradients, radial gradients, explain transparencies. Give us tips on creating posters, how to create posters. In fact, the whole session is how to create posters and tips on how to create posters. And some of you all asked me how to add colors. This was the question that you all posted in your form when you were registering. Some observations that I found is that, will this training be recorded? Yes, it is being recorded. I will share it with the division. It can be watched later on at your own pace. If you have missed something, you can go through the training and see, aha, this is what I missed and continue and complete your work. I will try to keep it as interactive as possible. Somebody asked, is it better to use a phone or a laptop for Canva? Use whatever it is. Phone is, the laptop is easier because you have more space to work with. And also, you don't have to download Canva. It's a website. You just go to the website and that's it. That's all there is for Canva. You don't have to download anything on your PC or on your phone. Of course, there is an app, but for your computer, just go to the website and do your designs. We have a Photoshop user. I hope he is here with us. Tips on how to use. I use Photoshop for my photography. I find Photoshop very difficult to do branding design because it's too hard. And I believe as PRs, we shouldn't be wasting so much of our time on obsessing over design because there are so many ready-made templates that you can use in Canva. Quickly make it.  This is my way of looking at branding. But anyway, if you are a good in Photoshop, yes, but for most of us who are new in PR role, Canva is what I recommend because it's easy to use. Some of you will ask me about features, whether we could show it today. But today, I want to focus on the free version of Canva. But if you are willing to pay a little money every month, some of you might, but it's $9 or $10 a month. And if you pay them, then you get these extra features. You get to create something called templates that you can create one time and use them all the time. You can share it with your team so that you can collaborate on the work. So these are some of the things, especially what we call the brand kit. You can keep all the color codes so you don't have to remember them. And all the logos in one place, you can create kit. But this is a pro feature and I will not be covering them today. But you can always make a note of it and see whether you want to do something like that. And due to time constraints, I think I might not be able to cover videos or to have YouTube music and newsletters. I'll try to touch up during the Q&A session. But these are some of the things I might have a challenge covering in the 60 minutes. I'll try my best. Everyone is looking forward to the session. Please give me a thumbs up. So let me open Canva and explain what Canva is all about. Let's get on with the show and I am now sharing my screen for you. And I hope everyone can see the Canva. Yes, my wife is here, so I will make her a co-host. So in case I face any problem, she'll come running to me and tell me or she will unmute herself and tell me that I'm doing something wrong. And that's one good thing of having your wife in the same training session. She acts as my quality control. So first of all, let's talk about Canva. Canva is a simple, easy to use tool. And I was looking at the registrations and I found, I ask you, are you a beginner? Are you an expert or are you an intermediate?  Maybe you have just tried Canva. Maybe you have done some designs, but you are not feeling comfortable. So what we are going to do today is we are going to use the next 50 minutes to slowly go through a simple design, create it ourselves. So as much as possible, what I want you to do is you have your Zoom window open in one place and keep Canva open in the other place. How do you do? You go to your website and you just type WWW. Canva.com. OK, in my reminder email, I had told you I'll try as much as possible to create your account. So you should be able to log into your account if you have not already done so. And I hope all of you have an account on Canva and you are able to create a design by clicking on this button over here on top, which says create a design. And let's start creating a very simple design. Now, when you click on this button, create a design, you get different options. And so depending on how you want to present your design, is it for Instagram? Is it for Facebook? So you can create different dimensions or is it a poster that you want to print as a A4 size, for example? So there are so many options available here in Canva for us to choose from. So in our example today, we are going to create a Facebook post, something that we can post on our Facebook channel. So what I'm going to do is in the search box over here, we can say Facebook and you can get different kinds of Facebook designs that we can create. So I'm going to create a Facebook post. So I want you all to go to Canva.com. I'll give you a minute. Make sure that you have logged into the account. If not, quickly create one account and then click on this button here, which says create a design and type the word Facebook and click on Facebook post.  And then you can come back to Zoom and so observe what I am doing in this session. I like to hear or see some kind of a thumbs up saying that so far it looks OK to you all. If not, please put a chat message and I will ask to unmute. I want all of you all to benefit from today's session. We are going to create a poster, something like this. And if you notice, this poster has a couple of things. They are all brand compliant, by the way. It has a new color, which was not available for us before. What we call a gradient. I will show you how to create a gradient like this. We have our logo. We have a picture from the brand portal. We have some elements here. We have some curved text. You all wanted to learn how to do something like that. And we have something called a transparency. So using all of these elements, let us try to create a poster, something like this.  And the first thing let us talk about is the colors. I hope most of you all know what are the different types of colors that are in the chat. If you can tell me what are the Toastmaster brand colors that you can use when you are making a poster? True Maroon. Yes. True Maroon is one of the colors. What's the other color that we can use? Loyal blue, say Sandra, cool gray, happy yellow. So let's look at what are the colors that we can use in a Toastmaster content. So if I go to our Toastmaster brand manual and I will show you where you can find this manual. So as we can see, colors are basically three. We have three colors and you have just mentioned it in the chat. We have something called a true Maroon. We have a loyal blue and we have a cool gray. These are the three primary colors of Toastmasters. We also have a happy yellow, but this is called, as you can see, clearly it's called an accent color. It is something that you should use to highlight something, not the primary color. So we have the difference between primary color and accent color. And what it means is the primary colors you can use as much as you want. Accent colors use them judiciously. What do I mean by this? If I was to go back to my Canva design and let me try to change the background color of this. So to change the color, I can click anywhere on this design of the white area and I will see a color box on the top here. And if I click on it, I can choose the color. But I cannot choose any color like this because in Toastmasters we have to be very precise. We have to use this color codes. And you may all the time you might be struggling to find or remember this color codes. I have a very simple trick that I use. I print this colors on a piece of paper like this and I keep it next to my desk. Even though I am considered a brand expert, I also keep forgetting this color codes, by the way. But it is good to have a reference like this next to you. And I have a design, I will share this design to you. We can print this and staple it and keep it somewhere next to your screen so that you don't forget this color codes. So having this color codes that are here 7-7-2-4-3-2, which is the true maroon or 0-0-4-1-6-5, which is so these are the precise color codes we must use. So if I am going back to my Canva and I try to say change the color code to click here and then I type the color code 0-0-4-1-6-5, which is the color for loyal blue. That's called the loyal blue color. And if I click on it, now this is the background of your image. Now this is good if you use this color. Also, if I was to use the maroon, the true maroon as you all mentioned, which is 7-7-2-4-3-2, you can use this or you can use the cool gray A9, B2, B1. So these are the three primary colors that we can use when creating our design. In addition to that, there is one more color that we can use as part of our design, which is white. White is also a brand color, even though it is not mentioned in the brand manual. White is something that you can use. Black, can I use black color? Sorry, black is, by the way, 0-0-0-0-0, all zeros, not advisable. It doesn't have the Toastmaster. Even though black is a color in the brand palette, it shouldn't be used as a full primary color for background. And also, by the way, if you were to print this on a paper or on a poster, your ink will get over. So these are the three colors. Happy Yellow, use it only for certain things, as we will see later on. As I mentioned to you, it is good to have something like this as a reference. This is what I'm using with me. So what I do is I print this and I keep it in front of me and I can share the link to you so you can print your own and later on use it for. So all the color codes are mentioned here. A9, B2, B1, 7, 7, 2, 4, 3, 2, 0-0-0-4, 1-6-5. This is an accent only, used only for accents.  So I hope you got that idea now. What are the color codes that we should be using when we go to our design here? And a blank design. Because members and VPPRs were complaining, this is too limited. Only three colors to use and only one accent color. Recently, Toastmasters came up with a solution for us, which said, okay, let's make you happy. Let's give you gradients. So using gradients, we can now make more interesting color codes. So again, to understand what is gradients, gradients is nothing but a combination of two colors to make your design look more interesting. So if I was to show you my my gradient setup, so as you can see, when you want to create gradient, you can use a blue gradient made up of this color, which is 0-0-4-1-6-5, which we know is loyal blue and this color, which is 6-0-9-4. So if you combine them together, you can make a gradient. Similarly, for Maroon, we have these two colors, which allow you to make a gradient and for cool gray, these are the two colors. So because our example is a gradient background, we are going to create a background here in our, here instead of this, we are going to create a gradient background. I'll show you in Canva how to create the cool gray gradient. It's one of my favorites. On the left hand side, you can see something called elements. If you click on the elements, you have lots of elements that we can use in Canva. And the element that we are looking for is called graphics. And under graphics, we have something called gradient. And the gradient that we are interested in is this one, this color. If you all can find this gradient, it looks bluish like this. And if you click on this three dots, it shows that it's a square gradient. I want you all to click on that gradient and bring it into your design like this. And as we know that the gradient is a combination of two colors. And we are going to create a gradient for cool gray. So click on the first color on the top here. And we will change that to the cool gray color, which is nothing but A9, B2, B1. Please make a note of that A9, B2, B1, that's your first color. And then we will click on the second color, which is currently published. And for that, we will change it to a color code called F5, F5, F5, which is like a lighter version of gray. And this is how your gradient looks. I can move this gradient around and I can make it bigger like this as much as I want. And if you can achieve this one, congratulations to you. So what I want you to do is I want you to take one minute to create a design to make this gradient by going to elements and then go to graphics, gradients and find this gradient and change this to colors. This is your exercise for you for the next two minutes. And once you finish it, I want you to click on the share button here. And I want you to take this option copy link and I want you to post it in the chat. Let's see who can do a gradient background the first. Of course, gradients are optional. You could use a normal color, one of those three primary colors that I mentioned, but gradients look cool, so why not use them? Now that we have seen how to set the background, if you some of you couldn't make the gradient background, no problem. You will later on check the video and you will follow it and try to make a gradient background like this. Let's move to the next element of our design, which is we wanted to have a logo on top here. So let's see how we can have a logo in our design here. Now, the easiest way to get logo is, of course, from the Toastmasters website. And as VPPR, we must be familiar with the Toastmaster website, Toastmasters.org, where we can go to the resources section here and go to the brand portal. All the things that we need to create good brand compliant content is available for us here in this section, especially, for example, the design and the logo elements here, you will have all the logos and try to use logos only from this because there were some logos and some brand elements that have been retired. You may still find them on your PC or some way, but if you don't find it on the brand portal, it means it's a retired element. Let's forget about it. Whatever is available in the brand portal is what we need to use because we want to create a consistent message for all clubs. So when you click on logo and design elements on the Toastmasters website, you will find all the logos, the wordmarks, the lockups. You can check which one you like. I generally like the logo, which is the color logo here. And you have different options, JPG and PNG. When you're working with Canva, PNG is best. It has a higher quality. It has transparent background, so it looks cool. So the fastest way to get a logo from Toastmasters website to Canva is to click on the PNG option here and you'll open this logo. Then click anywhere on the logo and click right click on it and say copy image. Go to your Canva design, wherever it was, like here and press control V. It will bring the logo directly into your design. And once it is in your design, you can resize it by moving the corner like this handles and place it wherever you want. So the next thing, of course, is to put text. So whenever we are putting text in Canva, all we have to do is click on the text button on the left hand side. And choose any of it doesn't matter. You can choose this line, any one of this text. You can just drag and drop it. It doesn't matter. And you can put your text. Just drag and drop whatever you want and then just change the text here. I want to say, for example, division F. The only important thing about text is the fonts. And you look at here on top, it says open science extra. That's the name of the font. And if I change it to some other font, let's say something like this. All these are fonts that we shouldn't be using on a Toastmaster brand communication. OK, so let's talk about fonts. We have only two fonts, by the way. These are the only two fonts we can use in a Toastmaster brand content. So if I go back to the brand manual and by the way, the brand manual is in the Toastmaster same place where I brought the logo. You'll find the brand manual also there. So we have only two fonts. The first font is called Gotham, which is the primary font of Toastmasters. And we have a font called Myriad Pro. So these are the two approved fonts of Toastmasters. Gotham for your headings for your main text. And then Myriad Pro for the body of your design. So if you have the on top, the name of the club or something like that, you will use Gotham. And when you want to type some text underneath the design, you will use Myriad Pro. Unfortunately, if you go to Canva and try to find Gotham, you will not find it. And if you find Myriad Pro, also you will not find it because these two fonts, though they are beautiful fonts and they look really good. They also paid fonts and expensive paid fonts, by the way, something like $1,000 you have to pay to the company that owns these fonts. But as clubs, we can't afford that. So they understood that. And what they did is they said, OK, guys, when you want to use Gotham, instead of Gotham, your alternate font is Montserrat. So wherever you are supposed to use Gotham, use Montserrat, which means Montserrat is your main font for headings. And wherever we were supposed to use Myriad Pro, go ahead and use this font called Source Sans Pro. That's it. These are the only things you have to remember. So in Canva, because we don't have the main fonts, in Canva, our choices are Montserrat for headings and Source Sans Pro for the body of the design. Somebody mentioned Ariel and it is mentioned here, by the way, Ariel is a font that you could use as a backup. Ideally, don't use it. But if you have no other choice, then you can use it. Which means if I was to put this division J by now, you must have figured out that the font that I should be using is Montserrat. So click on this text and change it to Montserrat. You can type it. You can say Montserrat. So it will show you all the Montserrat options. There are multiple of them. Some Montserrat have like extra bold, semi bold. You can choose anyone. It doesn't matter, actually. So if I want the heading to be extra bold, fine. Let me go and say division F, right? So that's the font that is brand compliant. And for body, whenever I want to do this, I will use Source Sans Pro. So stick to only these two fonts, friends, whenever you're doing anything Canva, when you want to highlight something, use Montserrat, when you want to type some additional text, then use the Source Sans Pro. And one more thing we will do before we share your content is images, OK, what kind of images we can use in a poster. And my friends, the main reason I find brand in compliance is because whenever a VPPR is trying to create a content, they start by looking at the theme. Oh, we have Independence Day, for example. And you'll try to create a picture that represents the theme. And that's where generally the problem with branding comes. If we go back to your brand manual and you look at the images, it very clearly says what kind of images we should be using. And we should be using images only of people. And those people are looking engaged, empowered, supported. If you have photos from your club meetings, those are the photos to be used primarily. If not, there are two options. Of course, the primary option is to go and bring the images from Toastmaster website, which is here, as you know, in the resources. As I mentioned to you, go to the brand portal and find the images that you want from this professional images. There are around 100 or so images that we can use. So this is your first choice. You can go to the website. You can find all these images that are available free to use. They are professional images. The other option that you have is go to Canva and look for images here itself. So we have photos. There are a lot of photos here, but of course, we can't use all of them. You have to search for, let's say, meeting. And if you find a meeting photo that looks similar theme as a Toastmaster meeting where people are connected, engaged, something like this, I have no problem using this image. And it's free, by the way, to use. So you could use an image like this, or you can go to the Toastmaster website and bring the image and put it here. Or if you have your own member photos, those, as I said, are the best photos to use. So try to use that. For example, I'll give you an idea. I have here with me in this upload option, some images that I had uploaded before. If you see here, for example, this is one of our club meeting photo before COVID, of course, and I love to use four images like this because it shows the reality. It shows our club what we are. And so people are attracted to come and join this team, not some professional images. So if you have club images, use them as your first priority. For this example, we will bring one image from the Toastmaster website. As I mentioned to you, these are all the images that you'll find on the brand portal. Click on any one of them, find the image that you like. And how do we download the image? It is not the same as logo in the logo. I had shown you that you can right click in here. You don't have the right click for some reason. Toastmasters has protected the images not to directly copy it from the using right click. But if you click at the bottom here at here, you have an option called download. And if you click on that, it will show you, OK, you have different sizes that you can download. Medium is more than enough for designs. And you can click on the download button. So that downloads the image on your computer. And now what I can do is I can go back to Canva after I have downloaded the image. I go to Canva and then click on uploads. I want to bring the image into Canva. Click on this button, which says upload media, and then click on this button, which says device and bring the image from the. This is the same image that I downloaded. I brought it into Canva and I can just drag and drop it here. So try and download any image from the Toastmaster website and place it here. Since we have only 10 minutes more, I won't be able to complete the whole design. But I hope you have got a good sense of colors, fonts, images, logo. That is actually the essence of a Toastmaster brand communication. Sticking to this fonts, sticking to these colors. This is what we want. So whenever you want to start with a design, don't start thinking about the theme or what you want to convey. Start by looking at the assets that are available to you. And how we can creatively use them. Many people say, oh, but this kills all creativity. It looks all the same. My answer to that is very simple. You are not promoting your club. And this is something that I would like all of you all to take as my message today. You're not promoting your club. You are promoting Toastmasters. So if all the clubs provide similar messages, similar themes, similar colors, similar photos, what happens to non Toastmasters is they start sort of linking. Oh, this is all connected. This is a single organization. At the end of the day, they might not join your club. They might join another Toastmaster club, but they have joined Toastmasters. And I believe that overrides trying to sort of build only your club. It's more about the message that you're creating, a unified message. That, for me, is the more important message today to deliver when I talk about branding to create this consistent messages. One thing we can do is I will show you how to use text. Right. So let's use a text here and let's make sure that the font of this text is Source Sans Pro because remember the font for the body is Source Sans Pro. And if you have a text like this, let's say, let's make it Canva Workshop. There are a lot of interesting effects that we can apply. For example, if I click on this button here, which says effects. For example, I could say curved. Very easy. Right. And then if I go down at the bottom, I can define the angle of the curve to make it different like this, make it really curved or something like that. So you can play with the curve angle by this way. The other thing that we should be observing when let's say I have this division F and I know that I can change the color of this font to loyal blue or I could make it, for example, happy yellow. If you make happy yellow, the problem you will notice the other thing that we should be keeping always attention is the contrast between your text and your background. So whenever you put some text, it should contrast, which means if your background is light, make the color of your text dark. If your background is dark, make the font light. In this case, because my background is light, I could make the text maroon blue or black. Any three will work. What will not work is having it in this color. Unless you want it, let's say artistic effect or this color where there is not enough contrast. And also if you use white, for example, can't read it. So unless there is an artistic idea behind it, avoid having text that is difficult to read. When you're creating a gradient, the second color cannot be anything. It has to be this only. So if you're creating a blue gradient, your first color is 004165. Your second color is 006094. That's it. Don't use white. Don't use black. The second color has to be this. If you are creating maroon gradient, these are the two colors. By the way, this is some exception. I don't know why they did that, but the true maroon is not here. This is a dark maroon and a light maroon. It's not the normal true maroon. And for gray, these are the only two colors you can use. The second color has to be this F5, F5, F5. So these are your gradient options. I have seen a lot of designs where they make a gradient like this. They make it as, let's say, 004165 as the first color. And the second color is white, something like this. No, this is not a approved gradient. The color to be used in this case is the other blue color. OK, so keep that in mind. Brand manual to show the gradients which are acceptable or compliant. Yes, it's the same thing, which is the design that I was just showing you. So when you look at the gradient, it shows like this. When you're creating, you can do a blue gradient with this combination. You can do a maroon gradient with this combination and you can do a cool gray with this gradient. So both the colors are mentioned very clearly that you can use for creating gradients. OK, so we have reached actually the end of the time that was allotted to me. I would be more than happy if some of you all want to ask certain questions. For example, there is a question that was asked about hyperlinks, how to create hyperlinks. Very simple. If you have, let's say, a Facebook page, let me check if you all have, as you do have. So let's say this is your Facebook page and I want people to click on my link on the poster and come to this page. So what you do, you copy this link here using Control C, go to your design. So here I want to put a text box, which says click here to go to a Facebook page. This is the text that I want. I can resize it to be big or small. Always make sure that the font is so sans pro so that we are brand compliant, even though the other font looked almost the same. But let's stick to 100% brand compliance. And all I have to do is I have to select this text and here there is an option called link. Click on that and type that Facebook link here that we had copied from the Facebook page, paste it here and click apply. So what happens is it creates a clickable link. But do keep in mind that this link will work only if you download this design as a PDF as a PDF file, not as a JPG or PNG. But if you download it as a PDF file, then this link becomes clickable. You click on it, it will take you to your Facebook page. Though we have not done a very complex design, some of you have managed to do the gradient, the fonts, the colors, the photos. This is just the building block. And I hope it has given you some kind of look into not just to create the design. You can keep adding a lot of things that you will find here. As long as the colors are the same, you can keep adding things, make it as interesting as possible, but keep this idea of following the brand guidelines in terms of colors, photos, assets, fonts and the logo.


Hello, and welcome to TA Made Simple, a series of videos where myself and Bob Cook, a transactional analysis therapist, I always get that wrong, analysis therapist, a man trained in TA, talks about the aspects of transactional analysis. If you've stumbled on this video as a single video, find it in the playlist because this is one of a whole section explaining TA theory. And I think this is a particularly interesting topic we're going to look at today. It's about developing your identity as a TA therapist. Correct. As opposed to a client-centered therapist, or a gestalt psychotherapist, an existential psychotherapist, or any of these different brands of therapy. But what makes transactional analysis psychotherapist or psychotherapist stand out in terms of theoretical understanding, identity formination. And that's so about what makes us up as TA therapist, which is different. What are the philosophical assumptions that we follow besides the practical models? Yes, I think that's the interesting one.  I'm going to make a bit of a guess here. I think the first position is the TA has a tripartite view of personality, maybe? That's right. We'll start there anyway. The idea that the personality is split into three, tripartite, parent, adult, child. And as we've shown earlier in these videos, the person is divided into three, the parent, eager state, the adult eager state, and the child eager state. And all TA practitioners will have that model in their head. You're absolutely correct. And that's very different from, say, the client-centered position, which I've got this right, is a unitary model of personality. It is. It is in classic person-centered therapy. Configurations of self by Dave Mims would see us as having sub-personalities crucially surrounded by a circle. So we would have lots of different personalities, but you're right. We would be a unitary whole. Yeah, so it's very different. So all TA therapists, if they've been trained with this tripartite model, will look for what part of the self or what eager state the client's coming from when they walk in the room in terms of energy. And if you're classically trained, the idea is that the person needs to have more energy in the here and now, which is the adult eager state. And if you've not got much energy or has a fragile sense of self, then the treatment is going to be, first of all, helping the person be more in the here now and building up their adult eager state. Yes. And in a classic sense, that's what TA was all about, isn't it? Reinforcing or strengthening, you mentioned this before, strengthening the adult eager state, not getting lost in the past. Are the confusing and overwhelming emotions of the child?  He wanted something quicker. So his idea was this tripartite model and strengthen the adult eager state. So it was, as I've said many times, almost like an early CBT therapist, highly educative, really, Eric Byrne was. And now, of course, it's changed and evolved in 50 years. But you're right, the tripart model is the first step, if you like. But if we look at some philosophical assumptions underneath this, I think the first one is that it's a humanistic model. So I went to the TA community website, and I put in philosophical, I was interested in the first philosophical assumption. So I'm just going to read out the first one. And it says, TA is a humanistic philosophy. Right. This means we focus on each individual's potential and stress the importance of growth and personal development. So they are, so TAs bang in the middle of the humanistic revolution of Carl Rogers in the early 1950s. Yeah. I mean, I guess the main difference would be about how humanism would be viewed in a person-centered way. This always confuses students, how come one's called humanism, one's called psychoanalytical. And I guess the difference there is that both the therapist view people as humans, they're not analogous as Freud would say, someone to be interpreted and studied like an animal in a cage. Yeah, that's how I, that's exactly how I see it, which takes us up to another philosophical assumption of a TA practitioner, which is the second one. Not that it wasn't on the website, but I'm going to give you my view of philosophical assumptions of transaction analysis. And that's open communication. Very different principle of open communication is very difficult from the difference from the psychoanalytical position of one-up, one-down and interpretation. So Bern really very much believed in open communication, adult-to-adult communication, and contracts and everything needed to be transparent. It wasn't about a one-up, one-down state of psychoanalysis. No, and I guess if we were to draw a stereotypical picture of this, this would be someone on a couch with someone with a bow tie, maybe a bid, talking in a full German accent, saying things like, I'm not going to do a German accent, I won't be pasteurising, tell me about your mother or that type of thing, writing notes, hiding behind a pad. TA is very much about a person-to-person interaction, isn't it? Yeah, and also contracts are very important in the sense of open communication. So both parties, client and therapist, are sharing their form of treatment, if you like, instead of this analytical sense again. Yes, it was a big departure, wasn't it, from what would have been Classical Freudian ideas. What else kind of formulates or helps the professional formation of a TA therapist, Bob? And this is a very big one. This is probably what most people, if they think of TA therapists, think about in the public eye, perhaps with social workers or teachers, and that's the principle of I'm okay, you're okay. You know, the principle of that people's behaviours might not be okay, but in its essence, people are born okay, and it is the environment around them, which may turn them into frogs, but as they work in the TA therapy, they can start becoming princes, but the actualisation for change is in all of us. And so people are born okay, and other people are okay, that humanistic principle, and I think that's a really important one. Yes, it comes from a position, doesn't it, that its behaviours that cause people difficulties, not the entirety of who they are. Separating the sin from the sinner is what I used to say to my therapist, because if you hold that philosophical assumption, I think you really can then open your mind to curiosity.  And if I can hold that, I'm okay, you're okay position takes a lot of doing, by the way, many of the clients I can see, my heart is much more open to the heart of the person sitting in front of me. You know, I think it's a really good position to come from. And I guess if you're coming from that position, they're more likely to open their heart to you. Yeah, correct, absolutely. Another philosophical assumption is that all humans have the capacity to think. You know, they all have the capacity to think and make their own decisions, if you like, and that's a really interesting one. We are brain dead, so we all can think, and it's about the promotion of helping the person to think again, and to be in the here and now, and reinforcing their adult, if you like. Yes, yes, this the idea that we're not fixed. There's a potential for change if people want to engage in it. And another philosophical assumption is around autonomy, spontaneity. You know, Bern talked about a lot about his transaction analysis, his early transaction analysis. Part of the treatment plan would be about that we can, discovering, evolving, enhancing the human's capacity for autonomy, freedom and change. Yes. Yeah, well, that's the whole, that's quite a West Coast America philosophy. Well, that's where it comes from, yeah.  It's quite a kind of social construct in there, isn't that? And of course, Bern lived on the West Coast, didn't he? He lived in California. Yeah, yeah. And he was part of that radical movement, if you like, that we talked about earlier. But those philosophies, those assumptions, which come from what you've just said there, are a great bedrock, if you think of relational psychotherapy today. Yeah, yeah. Well, they formulate what we call the Aizow relationship, don't they?  He wanted to use a biblical term to signify he saw them as a spiritual being more than just another person. Interesting. That's right. So if you've got those philosophical assumptions, when you sit down with the client in front of you, yeah, I think relational psychotherapy of today, if you want to look at it that way, it's far more likely to happen, because you've got a non-judgmental position. You've got a position of growth. You've got a position of seeing the person's actualization rather than their restriction. You've got a position of really working with the person towards transparent growth from an open communication, egalitarian position. Yes. Yes. And not to me, egalitarian is an interesting one, isn't it? Because, because, you know, it does, there's still, I think, some expertise in TA, more than that, perhaps the humanistic world, because ultimately it still is, to some extent, a thought model, isn't it? You'd be talking about parent, adult and child. We're in the humanistic world. We tend not to talk about the theory too much. It's all based in the relationship. Well, it's certainly more egalitarian than, as I say, Freudian psychoanalysis. Yes. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely it is. And it's an important change from those, if you think TA came out of the middle 1950s, but psychoanalysis was still very much, you know, popular. I know we've got the rise of humanism, Carl Rogers coming along and Fritz Perls. And we've got that, as you said, that sort of whole revolution. And TA does fit into that revolution. It's an important psychotherapy. And I know TA as perhaps split into different ways of thinking about change. But those assumptions that I've just talked about, you know, you're okay, I'm okay, everybody's got the capacity to change, to make decisions, to change are really important ways of fundamentally looking at the human being when they come in front of you. Yes. And I'm wondering, I'm going to be a bit controversial here, Bob. No, are you? Yeah, who are you, Bob? You can say that is fun. But anyway, I love you. Okay. I think that actually a lot of humanistic therapies, whether they're person-centered, Auguste Del, therapists, would embrace those ideas, I'm okay, and you're okay, they might not use that terminology. People have got the ability to change the non-judgmental approach. I guess the only difference would be the tripartite view of personality, which of course is unique to TA. And to some extent psychoanalysis, it's a slightly different tripartite view of personality. But I think it's pretty universal, to be honest, Bob, if I could be that controversial. I agree with it. Because once we go on to the theoretical model, that's different. The methods to do with inquire, achievement, involvement, onto some of the sort of, some people call gimmicks, but I think they're very powerful techniques like egograms, like understanding the drama, triangle, various things that are peculiar to TA, and then treatment planning with deconfusion, decontamination, etc, etc, then that, that, they're different. Gestalt has interruptions to contact and has its own methodology. So once we get into theoretical models and methods, they may slightly, well, importantly differ. But in terms of the philosophical or philosophical assumptions from the 1950s and that humanistic revolution, I hope they are very similar. They are. I mean, I guess one thing that separates the person-centered humanistic world from the TA humanistic world is where we work, you know, person-centered therapists work in, on the edge of awareness. In other words, we don't go into the subconscious process. So we work on the edge of awareness. Whereas it's my kind of understanding that in TA, there's, there's a kind of exploration of subconscious process, bringing the subconscious to conscious. Now you're in a really interesting divide, because Eric Byrne, classical TA there, he'd be 1961, talks about strengthening the adult. He talks about the paradigm state. He talks about the childhood case and educative processes. What are you talking about going into the unknown that you just talked about or the unconscious? He would send people off to Gestalt psychotherapists or send them off to psychoanalysts. So he, he actually, when he talked about his new TA, it was all about strengthening the adult ego status. Right. But how is that now in, in, in contemporary TA? Oh, now we've changed a lot. Yes. TA is simple. The last, you know, the last 14 videos, I've talked about all the different approach ending up with relational TA, which is really in some ways very psychodynamically based, though some people might argue against that. But we've checked many of these different splits, these changes, though you have a completely different field of transactional analysis today than of course in 1961, where the emphasis was very different. Absolutely. And I think one of the things I've come to appreciate over the years is that with psychotherapy, it really, it really is about looking at your whole life, whereas with counselling, it might be looking at aspects or difficulties of your life. And how to manage them in the present. And how to manage them in the present. And I think, I think that's a big dividing line, although I'd acknowledge that some person centered therapists may work with whole life development. But I think generally speaking, it was person centered therapy was developed as a more kind of growth model, working on what people could alter. Definitely. And so was transaction analysis. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think you're right about these philosophical assumptions that come out of the humanistic revolution. Yes. It's interesting that, you know, we talked a little bit about existentialism in the last video. We talked a little bit about, you know, lots of different philosophers. And it's interesting that a lot of therapy is grounded in philosophy, as opposed to science. Yeah. The art is, that's where the, psychotherapy is where the arts and science come together. Yes. And I really, really think that's true. Yes.  Yeah. That's our views. That's our views. But I think that they're pretty universal and they've been pretty grounded in literature as well. Yeah. Yeah. I'm okay. You're okay. Look at unconditional positive regard. We could go on, couldn't we? We could go on forever. If you're wanting more of this type of video, and this is only one of a number, then go into the bar below and I'll put a link into the playlist. And you can see the entire playlist where we start, really, with just the TA structural model. And we've worked our way through in these videos right up to this here. Yeah. And the next one is, I just want to tell you ahead of time, TA treatment planning and diagnosis. There we go. Not to be missed. That is definitely a not-to-be-miss one, isn't it? So thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye.