How can we get beyond the surface and promote a deeper conversation? That's the topic of today's podcast where I'll be exploring five of my favorite phrases for deepening the conversation. Let's dive straight in. So today we're going to be thinking about how to have some deeper, more meaningful conversations. And one of my favorite hacks for this is just thinking about the way in which we respond to somebody who is speaking to us. So perhaps that conversation has kind of started or we feel that we're in a good safe space to have a bit of a deeper conversation with someone that might be a child or it might be an adult. But we're not quite sure how to encourage and enable that conversation. One of the things that can go wrong here for many of us much of the time is that our human instinct to kind of volley the conversation back and forth, back and forth and make it quite evenly distributed can get in the way. What we really want to do when we want that conversation to go deeper and we want the person that we're listening to listening to is an important phrase. We're not talking to them. We're listening to them to go a bit deeper to explore their story, to expand on things. We need to have a think about some prompts that means that they are doing more of the talking and we are doing more of the listening. So prompt number one is tell me more. So when somebody is talking to you about something, they've begun to make a bit of a disclosure to chat with you a little about something that's on their mind or something that's happened to them or a way in which they're feeling. Rather than responding and taking your turn in the conversation and perhaps sharing your experience, instead we invite them to go a little bit deeper. We use a phrase like tell me more. Sometimes I will simply say say more. This is one of the things I'll often say if I'm running a training session and somebody has made a suggestion or shared an idea or an experience following a moment of discussion. Often they'll share a tiny snippet and I'll be intrigued and want to know a little bit more about this and want the people in the room to gain a bit more from their experience. So I will simply say say more and that's all the prompt that someone needs sometimes. It's that invitation that says I'm listening. Actually, I do want to know a bit more about this and that's important to know. Sometimes the person you're listening to doesn't yet know how ready you are to listen. They're still kind of gauging the conversation, mapping out the space. Is this safe? Is it the right time? And by prompting them specifically to carry on, to say more, to tell me more. I'd like to know a bit more about that or whatever exact phrase feels good for you. Tell me more works well. Then that tells them, yes, this is the time. This is the place they do want to know more about this. I'm not boring them. I'm not taking this too far. This is okay. So tell me more is number one and probably the one I use the most of all. Number two, I kind of hesitate to use this and always want to write it out of any of these kinds of suggestions because it's so so corny. But how did that feel or how did that make you feel? It's so cheesy and it's like such a complete trope about all therapists and counselors everywhere. But there is a reason for that. It's a really, really helpful question when somebody tells you about something that happened to them or something they did or whatever. Asking how did that make you feel is actually a really great prompt to get them to think a bit more about it to help you to step into their shoes. And it can sometimes give you some really surprising answers. Because in particular, if somebody has overcome a challenge, for example, they've done something, you know, where they had to feel the fear and do it anyway or something like that. How did that make you feel is an important question because sometimes we might expect an answer of proud and the answer might be terrified or actually it wasn't as bad as I thought or what have you. There's all sorts of different ways that someone might be feeling. And the thing that we always have to remember is we're not mind readers. We might know the person that we're listening to quite well. But sometimes that can actually get in the way because we think we know how they feel and often we just don't. And the only way to really know is to ask them. And sometimes even they don't know how they feel or they didn't know because they haven't connected with this question and your prompt can mean that they take stock for a moment and go, Oh, actually, how did I feel about that? I'm not quite sure. And then they might begin to explore it. So how did that make you feel as cheesy as it sounds is actually a fantastic question for deepening conversations. Another really helpful prompt to explore things from different points of view can be to encourage them to step into the shoes of somebody who really cares about them and ask them. What do you think your friend or your parent, for example, would think about this situation and asking them to look at it through the lens of somebody who's kind and compassionate to them. The reason to do this is because we're not always very kind and compassionate about ourselves. And so if you're listening to someone who's kind of beating themselves up, doing themselves down, clearly not very proud of the things that they've done and just giving themselves generally a really hard time. So try and flip the lens and say, well, what do you think a friend would think in this situation? What do you think a friend would feel about this? What would your mum say about this? Or similar can help us just to begin to explore the situation through perhaps a slightly more positive lens. And they might be dismissive of the other person's point of view and they might say, Oh, but they're always really nice to me. Or yes, they think this, but I don't agree. But again, that gives us something we can begin to pick apart. And actually, if we see that there's real dissonance between how they feel, how they respond, their take on things and the take that someone who's kind and compassionate towards them would have, that in itself is a really interesting dichotomy that we might begin to want to actually pick apart. Number four kind of riffs on that a little bit and it explores what advice we would give a friend in a similar situation. So if somebody find themselves a little bit uncertain what to do next or how to approach and handle a certain situation, sometimes again, flipping that lens instead of thinking, what can I do for myself thinking? What would I advise for a friend can be a really helpful way to get out of a bit of a rut in the conversation in the thinking. What we'll often find is that people are a lot more creative and can come up with better problem solving ideas when they're looking at this on behalf of someone else. Often as well, they'll have more confidence in the capacity of a friend or someone they care about to get themselves out of a situation. So they might think a little bit more widely and they may also, if they've got any kind of self esteem type issues or negative narratives going on, they might feel that a friend or someone they're more compassionate towards actually deserves to find a way out of this situation. And so their thinking can be opened up that way. I sometimes will also flip this conversation directly around and just say, what would you advise me if I came to you with this problem? I particularly use this technique when I'm talking to my daughters who are 13 about friendship issues. Actually, I'm not very good at dealing with friendship issues. I'm good at listening to them. I'm good at helping my daughters to explore what to do next. But I don't have lots of really good experience or ideas to draw on here if I'm absolutely honest about it. Whereas my daughters actually have got a lot more experience and often come up with really good ideas. So I will go to them sometimes if I'm having any kind of friendship issues for their ideas. And so if I find that they're talking to me, they're looking for advice, they're sharing what's going on with their friends, I will just flip the conversation on its head and say, OK, so if I came to you with this problem, what would you be advising me? And sometimes then there can be a bit of a challenge in the conversation because they're then not prepared to take their own advice. But again, that gives us something to explore and a starting point as to what might be our next steps. The final prompt number five is what do you wish had happened differently? So sometimes when we look back at a situation, particularly if it's one that we're beating ourselves up about, if it's something where things didn't go quite as we might have hoped, then the question, what do you wish had happened differently? Or what could happen differently next time can be a great way to begin to explore and expand on what's happened. Maybe thinking about what did go OK. We can also, you know, lengthen this out by saying, and what would you keep the same? What went well? What were you proud of? Those sorts of questions. But what do you wish had happened differently can help us to look back through that lens of recognising where the challenge and the problems might have been, but also thinking what could happen differently another time. So you might explore this for one of two different reasons. One might be just really trying to pick apart the situation to really understand it from the point of view of the person you're listening to, really trying to get what was it about the situation where perhaps things didn't go quite to plan that didn't feel OK, what could be different next time. But we can also use this question from a proactive problem solving point of view, because what you wish would have happened differently this time is something that we can try and enable to happen differently next time. I hope there are some ideas in here that you can pick up and take into your own conversations just to take them a little more deeply. And just remember entering those conversations with the mindset of listener rather than active talking participant is one of the things that will make a big difference as well. If you found the content that I've shared today helpful, then please like, subscribe and share. If you would like to support my work more generally, you can do so in a number of ways. The first one is just simply to share it the wider reach that my work has the happier my heart is. So please do go and use it and share it. The second is that you can join me over on Patreon, where for a pound a month or just over 10 pounds a year, you can support my work in a small but growing community of people there who get to see everything a little bit earlier than everyone else and get to help contribute to my plans about what I'm going to create next. And then finally you can take the nuclear option of booking me to come and speak at your next event or in your setting or to do so virtually online. I go all over the world both face to face and from the comfort of my home via the power of Zoom. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting my work. Thank you for all that you are doing for our children and young people each and every day. Until next time, over and out.


Hi everyone and welcome to another show of staying young and hard. My name is Maria Mera. I'm your host. I'm also a financial advisor with Edgar Jones. And one of the things that I was thinking that we really need to stay young and hard is creativity and what a better way to just work on that creativity that market. And I brought my guest today. His name is Curtis Bruder and he's a marketing specialist. He's been doing this for many years and he's here with us. So hi, Curtis. Thank you very much for joining us. Hey, Maria. Hey, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Oh, our pleasure. Well, let's go into what is marketing. Tell me what is marketing and how long have you been doing it? Well, I've been doing marketing over 25 years and basically sales and marketing. It's a company. You have a product or service and you need to get people to know about it and you need them to buy it. And so through sales and marketing, promoting what you do, that's all part of your business plan. So that's what I've specialized in. So that's what I do. And you are the owner of Bruder Associates and the owner of Fusion, Hawaii, Fusion Marketing, Hawaii. Correct me if I'm wrong. So what is the difference between both companies? Well, Bruder and Associates, I started that in 1995. And so I've been doing that a long time. And I specialized in marketing, consulting and media buying, which is kind of old school. That's, you know, when companies need to buy newspaper, TV, radio, stuff like that. Fusion Marketing is just over five years old. I have a business partner, Steve Underwood. And what we primarily do is we do events at Pearl Ridge Center and Kamakana Elite eShopping Center. So we are seeing some pictures of your events and your fairs. So who do you work with? Who's your client here? Basically, you know, the shows will have different themes like we had a home improvement show recently. And we'll have like a Loha Pacific FCU, Atlas Construction, My Key Closet, Solutions, insurance companies like National Life Group. So everybody in the construction industry, really, for those. And then we do senior fairs also. And that's more people that have products or services that service seniors in medical and things of this sort. Okay. So these are the small owners who are your clients more than they are. It's a mixture. Yeah, we, you know, we have some small business owners, but we have corporations do and that's a mixture. Okay, I think that we have some videos that will enlighten and we will give a more clear picture of what we're talking about. Okay, so there was a little bit that that was Kamakana Elite. Yes, that was our event that we had in June. And it was like a fly video. I was pretending I was a fly and I just had my camera and I walked down so you can see all the booths and all that. So did it have a topic or was it some sort of specific? Yeah, that was a home improvement fair. So we had the improvement guys out there. And we just did a one day event. We did a Saturday only. Some of the purge events we do today. So how was, and we'll get to talk a little more, but how was the welcoming of this event this year? It was really good. I mean, the folks that live out by Kamakana Elite, they're over by Kapolei and Ocean Point out west on the island of Wahoo. That mall was cooking. They had tons of foot traffic. The selection of restaurants they have now is, I mean, it's one of the best on the island. So we scouted all that before we did the event. We knew there were going to be people that are walking around. And we were real happy with the results we got from it. Okay, excellent. Let's see the other one, the one on Pell Creek. Okay, we're going to have to, St. Young and Hart should be in the senior fair. Maybe next year. So when was this one? Okay, well you probably could tell because people didn't have masks on. This is 2019. This is the end of 2019. And that was a senior lifestyle fair. We had a purge. So are you going to hold that one this year as well? We are. Yes, we are. Okay, so when is that? That one's going to be October 16th and 17th. It's a Saturday and Sunday. And, you know, we're obviously we're following all the guidelines that the state and the malls, the properties have rules on what to do for COVID as well. So tell us a little bit of those rules. How is that different? I think it was, it was responsible on their part. We basically are all masked up. So the exhibitors are all have masks on. And then we do the social distancing as well. And they've been good about that. So, you know, when you look at the footprint of our fairs, usually we had people much closer together. So we have less, less exhibitors in the same space, but it's the right thing to do, I think. Yeah. What about vaccinations? Are they requiring vaccinations or? Yeah, no, there isn't any requirement to have a vaccination to take part in the fairs or to be, you know, to work with the mall to put on an event. So there's nothing like that. Okay. So back to when you were doing it in previous years, because probably now you don't have those many numbers. But how do you follow the metrics? How do you know if it's successful or not? Well, I mean, I think the main thing is that these exhibitors, they entrust us with getting them leads for their business. And if we're not successful doing that, then we don't get repeat business. So the main metric is the satisfaction of the exhibitors. And if when they're satisfied, they keep coming back. And that's, we've been good at doing that. So basically, you're trying to do the marketing for them, right? Not only with their own clients, but also with their prospects. Yeah, I mean, well, some of the people that exhibit with us, we also, we do consulting with them too, as you saw my business partner Steve, he was, he did the interview with the TV station. So we do have some clients, we do both those things, but a lot of the businesses, they just want an event. They want a good event, they can take part in, get their salespeople out there and get some leads, you know. So it's very, it's very clear this one time and let's see how many leads we get. And that's how we measure this success. That's basically it. I mean, yeah, I was going to say because, and correct me if I'm wrong, but for my time doing marketing as well, consistency and long term, same as with finances, right? It's one thing that pays, pays off. Oh, yeah.  If you do that well, you're going to be successful. And yeah, yeah, it's a lot of, it doesn't, it doesn't seem intuitive, but, but marketing and sales, it requires a lot of discipline. Totally. Yeah. I mean, and it's difficult sometimes because you might, you know, be, be, have your mood where you're like, Oh, things aren't going well. And you've got to be out there, you got to be doing what you're doing, you know, got to keep looking for leads, right? Yeah. Yeah. So how do you see the business changing or do you, do you see the same moving forward? Well, you know, obviously I'm not that young a guy, but, you know, I've seen a lot of changes in marketing in general. And a lot of it had to do with the media that people use. You know, because when, when you're a marketing consultant and you're going to use media to reach potential customers for a client, you got to figure out with, with media, who uses that media, who uses it and how do they use it. And the traditional media, a lot of the stuff that were the mainstays in the past are losing an audience. Okay. So, so the social media is the paper click and under websites, all this are used to be, okay, be a good thing to do. Now it's essential. All the digital stuff has to be on point. You don't have that on point here in trouble used to be have a yellow pages ad and a newspaper ad and a landline phone and you're in business. Yeah, more. Yeah, more. So, yeah, and the, and the pie, right, the budget for the companies is kind of the same. It's just the pie is more split before, as you said, it's just maybe the newspaper and the TV stations and the radio. And now is Instagram and Facebook and think it in. And yeah, so yeah. So within your business, do you work with all those strategies? Oh, yeah, absolutely.  And then the other thing is with the different companies, it depends on who their customers are. I mean, I have a, I have a hearing aid company I consult for. And so, you know, you're looking at people that are, we're targeting people that are 55 and older. You can get away a little bit more with the traditional media, you're going to want to do that newspaper, you know, you probably want to have a little bit of a yellow pages ad still, even with Google. I have other clients that they're targeting people much younger. I mean, they're under 50, for instance. And that's a whole different, that's a whole different thing. I mean, if you don't have your social media and your website and the rest of the things correct, that you're not going to capture that younger audience. So, yeah, but it depends on who your customers are on what you have to totally make sure you have correct. So, unfortunately, before we go to the break, do you do you cover every sector or do you specialize in it? Do you like to specialize? Yeah, I have a I have a pretty diverse portfolio like a different different business categories. I have a bankruptcy attorney I'm consulting for a hearing aid company I have an estate attorney. And we have construction company. So it we have varying categories of businesses, which means we got to learn all those business, you know, learn, you know, who their customers are and what are they, you know, what's it like if you have a construction company what's important to the customer. Now, what do they need to feel comfortable that's different than say a bankruptcy attorney. So it is interesting but it is a lot of homework. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's a lot of work on your part and and extremely fascinating because you're learning from every single business out there, right. You need to learn it. Oh, yeah. Yeah, let me let me stop us here go to the break and we'll be right back. I'm Mitch Ewan, host of Hawaii, the state of clean energy on think tech Hawaii. Hawaii, the state of clean energy is about following the many clean energy initiatives in Hawaii. Hawaii, the state of clean energy appears weekly on think tech Hawaii at 4pm on Wednesdays. Thank you so much for watching our show. We'll see you then. Welcome back to stay any other hard today we are talking to our marketing specialist activities for their owner of their associates and corner of fusion marketing Hawaii. So are you are we before we went to the to the break we were talking about all these sectors and all these businesses that you're working with. Are you are you focused on Hawaii or are you working also in the mainland or anywhere else. Yeah, you know, I'm focusing just on clients in Hawaii and basically my whole career. I basically done that my whole career. I mean I've had clients that they had multiple locations on the neighbor islands and stuff. But this is the market that you know I feel I understand and So when when when we are sorry I keep interrupting you. But I never do that. It's like my biggest blow but sorry. When when we're talking about how why are we talking about all the islands as you were saying or just. Yeah, all the islands. And you know there there were some companies I did in the past where they had multiple locations right and so they needed a comprehensive marketing plan.  Yeah, in which in which way will give us an example. Well, I think, you know, basically. Like, when I think like Hawaii, for instance, why is beautiful people are super nice. The community is really strong there. And I was doing some consulting work with the credit union.  They actually did that they'd have a big party for the, the people that were customers of the bank and they'd be giving stuff away. Very, it was nice. It was really fun to take part in that but that, you know, that was the way they did it on Kawaii, I think we should all do it that way but but. You know, not these days. Right, right. Yeah, but I mean a lot of it, you know, I've been in Hawaii a long time that I'm working with the business people are working quite ago. Hey look, you know, we ought to do this and this and this would work well with the customers and back and forth thing, you know. And again, I'm coming from Spain, right? But then from the mainland, I live in Ohio, in San Diego, in San Francisco. The way things are done in Hawaii are so, so, so different and either you adjust or because no one is going to adjust to what you're bringing. Where are you originally from? I'm originally, I'm from Delaware. I'm on the East Coast. And, you know, so it's, if you went East from Washington DC, you would have run into my hometown. I grew up at the beach on the Atlantic Ocean. Yeah, me for it. Yeah, so East Coast is very different from Hawaii, yes, very much. Yeah.  When I got out, I went to University of Delaware, I was a communication major and my first goal I wanted to be a professional broadcaster. I was doing radio. And so I got my first job on the East Coast. I worked in Atlantic City, New Jersey. And my career was not going great. And so my parents live in Hawaii. And so I came out to see him and I actually got a job at AQMQ. I was just like a part-time guy. But that was the old timers will remember like when Lily Moku and Michael Cusang and those guys are big. And so I was over there, I worked at AQMQ and I was filling in for people. And then I said, hey, how about sales? Would you teach me how to be a salesman? And so they did. Then they said, look, you got to choose. You can't be a salesman and on air. And I knew my radio career wasn't going to go anywhere. So I was like, I'll do sales. So they taught me how to sell. And I went to KGU a couple years later and that's when KGU AM 760 used to have UH sports. So I was selling advertising for the radio broadcast of UH sports. And I did that. Then I started my ad agency after that. But yeah, it's been fun. So do you work on the content for the ad? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, throughout the whole process, when I was a disc jockey, you would be doing, you'd be creating the ads with the salespeople. And some stations would have copywriters that would help write the ads up. So I was on the actually the creative side of the business. And then when I became a salesman, I still had knowledge of how to do the creative stuff from what I've been doing before. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like you had the perfect, you, you are the combination of the perfect, everything that requires, that is required from your job, right? Like your small business owner, you work on content, communication, marketing. I mean, it's like the perfect combination. Yeah. Well, it was weird. I, you know, I thought what I wanted to do was get into management. I actually thought I wanted to be a manager, one of the radio stations. But when I got into sales, I loved it so much. There's, there is freedom with it. You got to work hard. And it's, it can be emotionally difficult at times, but I really loved it. There's freedom in it. And, and I never wanted to be in management after that. So that's why I started my own ad agency because I didn't, I wasn't looking to go up the ladder and radio after that. Yeah. So do you have any weakness for any of the, of the tools that you have?  Yes, because you work there.  I have clients that do quite a bit of that because it's my background. I have people I work with. My business partner in Fusion, Steve is a, he's a graphic artist. He's the guy that did the down to earth logo. I don't know if you've seen that. Of course, yes.   And Steve, Steve's amazing. We're all happy to be working with him at Fusion. Yeah. Okay, well, we'll have to have him sometime also. He's an interesting guy. Absolutely. Definitely. We like interesting people here. That's why you're here. And I'm here. Good. So I was going to ask you, so who are your competitors here in the island? Well, you know, it's interesting because it used to be, you know, not that long ago, maybe, maybe 15 years ago, there were just tons of ad agencies in town.  When we went through, I think it was like 2005 or something. This was a while ago. There was, we had a recessionary period and that kind of thinned the hurt. Some of the, some of the companies went under or so on and so forth. The social media became like the big deal. Okay. And the public relations firms grew during that time because social media was is a cousin of public relations, you know, and public relations would be instead of running ads, right? You're trying to get news coverage, right? So, so that, that leaned out the market. And so there are, I have competitors today, but I have, I feel like I have a lot less locally than I used to because people got out of it. Yeah, because the, it had to do with social media companies doing their own stuff and then the PR firms were doing it, but the advertising part, which used to be traditional became a lot less a piece of what was going on. And so, yeah, that's, that's my kind of arbitrary look at it, you know, that's kind of how it looks to me. So, let's say I'm coming new to Hawaii and I have a small business. Do you have a process that you would recommend to go through or like an SOP? Yeah. Yeah, I think basically, you know, the first thing is like with your business, and it's tough. Hawaii is very difficult because a small business here, when you take a look at the expenses of a small business, it's not like in most places. Usually where you're at, where, you know, your office space, and that that's changing to a COVID, right? Less people are going to be using office space. But, but that there are a lot of things, employment costs, and how much it costs to rent and all the rest of it. The advertising budget gets squeezed over here, I think more than, than maybe some other markets. And so the business owners have to be disciplined in, you know, what they're going to spend. They got to set aside some money that they're going to use to get business in the door. Okay.  But you need to be disciplined enough to set money aside. And then the other thing is with the plan is like, you don't want to pay for people. The people laugh when I tell them this usually, we want to find out who your potential customers are. We don't want to spend any money on people. There's like no chance they're going to be your customer. Just cross them out, you know, and so if it's a certain age group or whatever, you just say, okay, we're going to, you need to be very smart about who you're targeting as your customer. And the better you are at doing that, the more efficiently that money you set aside is going to return an investment. If you try to reach everybody all the time, you're going to go broke.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the main thing. Okay. Any other words of wisdom that you want to share with us today before we say goodbye? I don't know if it's words of wisdom, but I, you know, any, any of the small business people or even the bigger businesses out there, congratulations on it looks like we're getting through COVID. And I mean, I just, I have never seen anything like that. You know, pat yourself on the back, because, you know, that was, I've been in business over 25 years and that was a real challenge last year, really a challenge to congratulate yourself for that. And I think better days are ahead for all of us.  Those are awesome words, very positive. And I completely, I cannot agree with you more. Yes, sometimes hanging in there is good enough, right? It is. Good job. Yeah. Yeah, that's an A plus. If you made it through last year, you get an A plus. That's what I think. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you so much, Curtis. Thank you for always being so professional. So on top of things, and for me, at least that I've worked with you, I definitely only have good words and experiences. Same for me. Same for me. Yeah. Let's bring you, let's bring you and Steve some other time and but not your dog. We won't bring your dog next time. Yeah, you heard her dog. Yeah, it's my dog. I'll talk to my dog after this. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you everyone. And we'll talk soon, Curtis. And thank you everyone. We'll see you next Tuesday on another episode of Spain.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Getting to the end of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage for two sets. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host, John Troyer. And for those of you that haven't attended one of these shows, sometimes like, oh, you're going to Vegas, this is a boondoggle. But I'm really happy to have, I've got a customer and one of the Dell EMC employees here. A lot of stuff goes on, there's learning, there's lots of meetings. There's, you know, you come here, you kind of get as much out of it as you can. So first, Stephen Herzig, who's the Director of Enterprise Systems at the University of Arkansas. You've had a busy week so far. Thank you for joining us. Look at that. Also Andrew McDaniel, who's the Senior Director of Ready Solutions for VDI with Dell EMC. Thank you for joining us. Thanks guys. All right, so Stephen, first of all, give us a little bit about your background and, you know, University of Arkansas. I think most people know the Razorbacks, but talk about your organ and your role there. Yeah, I'm Director of Enterprise Systems, as you mentioned. We're an R1 University. We have about 27,000 students, about 5,000 faculty and staff on the university. And so my organization is responsible for maintaining, as I said, all the enterprise systems, essentially everything in the data center on the floor to support all the educational activities. Now there are some distributed or commonly known as shadow IT organizations throughout the university, and we work quite closely with them too. Okay, you stamp out all that shadow IT stuff and pull it all back in, right? No, no, no, absolutely not. We'll get into it. Drew, before we get into more about the university, tell us a little bit about your role in your work. So my organization basically develops the end-to-end VDI solutions that Dell EMC sell globally. So we work with partners such as VMware and Citrix to put together the industry-leading solutions for VDI. Okay. They're tested, validated, engineered to give real good confidence in the solution that the customer's going to buy. John and I spent many years looking at these, you know, the memes in the industry, all that, you know, but Stephen, before we get into the VDI piece, give us, what are some of the challenges that you're facing at the university? We've had, you know, from an IT standpoint, we know the technology requirements are more than ever. Well, tuitions go up, budgets are always a challenge. So when you're talking to your peers, what are the things you're all commiserating about or, you know, working out? Like any IT organization, it's a challenge to do more with less. We're constantly being required to support more systems, more technology, and technology is becoming more and more an integral part of the educational process. We also have students coming from very diverse backgrounds, and so the kinds of computing devices that they're able to bring to the university with them, some can afford high-end, some not, and so it's a challenge for us to deliver that the applications to them no matter what kind of device they happen to bring. All right, so it sounds like VDI is something that fits there before we get into the actual solution. Tell us, what was the struggle you were facing? What led to that? You know, was there a mandate? How do you get to the solution that you were looking for? Well, really, we were struggling with those challenges. We were a very small IT team, and as those things grew, we knew that we had to find a way to reduce the number of resources that were supporting all the endpoints, all the machines in the labs, all the machines on faculty and staff desks, and again, like I said, the students bring their own devices, which we had to support as well. All right, so you ended up choosing a Dell solution, maybe give us a little bit about that process and walk us through their project some. Yeah, we really needed a solution. We could not go out and assemble pieces parts from a lot of different vendors, and we needed a solution that was tailored to our needs, that fit, VDI is complex by its nature, but some vendors made it really complex. So we had to find one that was right for our environment, for what we were trying to achieve, and of course, at the right price point. Higher education, we're not flush with cash. That's always been really hard. I think that's been the hard thing about VDI, right? It's always been kind of complicated and hard to do, or at least back in the day, and then when you did it, half the things didn't work, and the things that didn't work were really weird, and the end user was very confused. This application works, but this one doesn't, and where's my cursor, and everything went wonky all of a sudden, and I can't log in at 9 a.m.? I mean, I'm kind of curious, so what is necessary maybe from a high level in a modern VDI solution stack that makes it easy? The hypervisor, I mean the end clients? I think, John, we've seen such great advances in the software side of it, right? So, if you look at Horizon as a broker, VMware Horizon, the advances that they've made in things like protocols, right? So Blast Extreme, for example, one of the big challenges that we've always had is things like Link or Skype in a VDI environment. It was an unmitigated disaster for many customers, right? So that has been solved by VMware and the advances that they did above and beyond what was capable in PC over IP, right? So that's one of the things. From a hardware perspective, one of the challenges we frequently had in VDI was poor user experience, right? And it was typically because the graphics requirement for the application could not be delivered by the CPU alone. So GPUs, Nvidia, K1, K2s, now into the M10, M60s and moving forward into the P4 and P40s, they've really helped us to improve that user experience. And it's starting to get to a point where GPUs are a standard delivery within any VDI deployment. So you get really good user experience moving forward. And as you know, if you can't deliver the good user experience, the project is dead before it even starts, right? So that's a big challenge. Stephen, do you have a commentary on some of the challenges that we've faced before? What was your experience like? Yeah, that's exactly right. We made the decision early on to include GPU in every session that we served up. And we weren't quite sure because it is an additional expense, but it was one of the best decisions that we made. It really does make all the difference. Was there something specific from the application or user base and how they were using it that led you to that? Well, we are all Windows 10. And Windows 10 just looks better and runs better. The video, the scrolling through a Word document, the text, some are very nuanced, but it makes a big difference in the user experience. And then of course we have higher end users using CAD programs, things like that, in the School of Engineering. They needed the GPU for what they were doing. All right. Yeah. Andrew, I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of the up and down on the stack. So I think back to on the EMC side, I watched everything from the Flash and Convert side. On the Dell side, there's the Wwise acquisition, of course, EMC and VMware coming together. So a long journey, but even the first year we did theCUBE, Dell had some big customers doing large scale cost effective VDI because you had that, you know, to give some of the marketing terms I've heard here, it's end to end, but you had the devices all the way through. So bring us up to 2018. Yeah, so I guess, you know, one of the challenges Stephen spoke about is the previously, the hassle of having to go and buy each of the individual components from multiple different vendors. So you're buying your storage from one vendor, compute from another, GPUs from another, hypervisor from another, broker from another, and so on. It's very complicated to manage all of that. And so we had lots of customers who'd run into scenarios where, say, a bias firmware and a driver revision were not compatible. And so we'd run into those kind of problems that we were talking about earlier on, right? So I think, you know, bringing all of that together in Dell Technologies, we can now deliver every single aspect of what you need for a VDI deployment. So we created a bundle called VDI complete. It uses VSAN ready nodes or VX rail, right? So hyperconverged, massive from a VDI perspective, and I'll come back to that in a second. It pairs then Horizon Advanced or Horizon Enterprise with those base platforms and the Dell-wise thin clients, right? So every aspect, true end-to-end is delivered by Dell Technologies. And there's simply no other vendor in the market who can do that, right? So what that basically does is it gives the customer confidence that everything that has been tested can be owned from a support perspective by Dell Technologies, right?  Or lay blame on somebody else. It's fully our stack, and as a result, we take full responsibility for it. And that's one of the benefits that we had with customers like the University of Arkansas. And that was important to us. That single point of contact for support was really important to us. Steven, I wonder if you could talk about from an operational standpoint. You said you've got a small team. One of the challenges at least years ago was like, oh wait, I had the guy that walked around into the desktops. Now I centralized it. Who owns it? You know, how do we sort through this? You know, we've got a full stack there. Simplicity is one of the big messages of HCI. But what was the reality for your team and the roles? How did you change? Well, one of the first areas, or actually the first area that we implemented VDI in was in the labs. Hundreds of endpoints across the campus. And before VDI, you would walk into a lab and a certain percentage of the machines would always be down. They needed updating. There was a virus. Somebody spilled the coffee on the machine. You know, that kind of thing. After VDI, when you walked into the lab, 100% of the endpoints were always up. And there was no noise in the lab, except when somebody printed. So the maintenance required, the resources from my team and these distributed IT teams was reduced drastically. As a matter of fact, some of the distributed teams had 50% of their resources reduced. That could then go and do more high value projects and deliver high value services to their colleges. From the student and faculty perspective, it sounds like the uptake has been good and the satisfaction level high. I mean, user experience is everything with VDI, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The students came, we installed during spring break and they came back from spring break, went into the labs with these beautiful new 27 inch monitors, sat down, logged on and it looked almost the same as before, which was exactly what we were after. We wanted that same high quality experience in VDI that they had with a laptop or a desktop. The monitors are an important thing to consider, right? Because a lot of customers will think about the data center side of VDI, right? So get lots of compute, good high performing storage, good network, and then they put a really poorly designed, thin client or an old desktop PC or something like that on the end and wonder why they're not getting good performance, right? So we just launched yesterday, the Dell Wise 5070. It's the first thin client in the market that can have six monitors attached to it. Four of those can be 4K and 2,2K, right? So it's immense from a display perspective and this is what our customers are demanding, especially in financial services, for example, right? Or in automotive design. In CAD labs, for example, you need three or four really good, high quality screens attached. Well, yeah, I'll say, I'll date myself. I wish I had that when I was playing Doom when I was in college. That too, yes. That does bring into question that your upgrade and scenarios are moving on to the future, right? You used to have all those janky old PCs that you'd kind of, maybe they'd slide out the back door, maybe they'd get recycled or whatever, but now it's probably a different refresh cycle and maybe even a different use case. The lifespan of the endpoints is much longer with the VDI solution. That's got to be good, yeah. I was curious, you mentioned the converged infrastructure too, Andrew. I mean, how does that play into it? I'm just back to the balance. Yeah, so I mean, you know, traditionally a SAN infrastructure was used in VDI, right? So for us, that would have been ecologic, compelling historically, right? Now we're seeing that VDI market almost totally transitioned to hyper-converged, right? So VSAN has really revolutionized VDI, okay? I'd say a good 35% of all VxRail and VSAN deployments that we do are in the VDI space. So it's really, and I would say about 95% of our VDI deployments are on hyper-converged rather than a traditional SAN infrastructure. That's really where VDI has moved now because it gives customers the ability to scale on demand. Instead of having to go and buy, you know, another half million dollar storage array to add another thousand users, you can simply add in a couple of more compute nodes with the storage built in, you know? For us, hybrid works very well. So a hybrid disk configuration is working very well in most VDI deployments. Some customers require all flash. It depends on the applications and the other kind of performance that they want to get from it. But for majority customers, hyper-converged with a hybrid configuration works brilliantly. All right, so Stephen, I want to give you the final word. Sounds like everything went really well, but one of the things we always like to understand when you're talking to your peers, they said, hey, what do you learn? What would you do a little different, either internally or configuration-wise or rollout? What would you tell your peers? Well, when we implemented VDI is just before VDI complete came out. So the work that's done in the VDI complete solution, we didn't have. So as we look to the future and we want to expand and grow our environment, VDI complete will be a huge help. Had we had that, it only took us about four months to stand it up, which considering what we accomplished was a very short time. But if we had had VDI complete, that time would have been much more compressed. So looking to the future, we're looking to expand using VDI complete. Okay, and just to Andrew, maybe you could tie the knot on this bow for us. Sounds like this could, if I've got VDI, I don't have to start brand new, that could fit with existing environments. How does that all work? Absolutely, I mean, we've got lots of customers who've already done Citrix or VMware deployments, right? Ideally, you want to connect with one broker, so you want to stick with one broker. But we can bring in a hyperconverged VDI solution into your existing user estate and merge into that. So that's pretty common. All right, well, Andrew and Stephen, thank you so much for sharing this story. Really, really, really great to always get to customer stories. We're getting towards the end of three days of live coverage here at the Stands Convention Center in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.


The big plays that you guys gave those communication problems, are they just occasionally getting beat on a plate?   So that's just hopefully why I take it, you know, hopefully we can get that thing going.


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Since 1938, the Celebrity Series of Boston has introduced the city to some of the world's most renowned performance artists. To celebrate their 75th anniversary, music will be in the air all over Boston. With 75 pianos placed throughout the Boston area, including Greater Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, local musicians are now taking the opportunity to express themselves. I think that whenever this kind of street art that's really interactive happens to anywhere really, I think it's a really great opportunity for people to show their creativity. I think it brings a lot of livelihood to campus. It's a nice touch. I heard somebody playing that song, Hallelujah, today and I thought it was really nice. It brightened my mood for sure. I think they're fun. They're interesting. They're all different colors and stuff, so that's really cool. No two pianos are alike, with each one being personalized by a different local artist. The pianos are all part of Play Me I'm Yours, an artwork by British artist Luke Jerem. Boston now joins the 36 other cities worldwide that have been hosted to Jerem's 1,000 plus pianos. I hope they don't get damaged or if it were to rain or something. I don't think anybody's going to try and steal or vandalize a piano. It just seems like a positive thing. When I went to New York City this summer they had them there as well and I heard some people playing, which was really fun. The pianos are set to remain in the city for the next two weeks, with October 14th scheduled as the day of their removal. For BUTV Channel 10, I'm Peter Czenski.


Hello and welcome back to the craft box. My name is Brenton today. We're doing just a little bonus episode for the death walkthrough thing So at the end of last episode if you haven't checked that out it was episode 3 we got to level 7 and We got a spell quest. So let's do that now as they say knowledge is power I think it's about time you do some research You'll need to go to the haunted cave that is if you're brave enough What's there search around the graveyard for where the elder seer is buried remember a graveyard wouldn't scare a death student At least not a brave one Okay So yeah, I'm gonna be doing these actually Flip that for a joke. Let's just go to the commons. Let's not walk all the way around that stupid I'm gonna be doing one of these for every like a separate episode for every single spell quest that we get If it's just a normal spell that we can train through our teacher then obviously I won't but Since this one requires a quest and it has dialogue I thought I might as well just split it up into a wee short video that will probably go up on the same day as the actual video that it was like that we reached level 4 so yeah It's just just because like it's easier to do it Just on its own then put it into a video Put it into the walkthrough video. So That's just my opinion. So yeah, if you if you guys don't want to see this then I mean I'm gonna do it anyway because YOLO That sounds so bad No, I'm gonna probably do it anyway just for just for fun But obviously you don't have to watch this so yeah Um, but I'm gonna be studying Cyclops Lane next after this So just a few want us to know where I'm actually going next it will be Cyclops Lane. Okay, I have Just arrived at the gravestone place thingy You hear a strange noise Welcome student of the death school. I shall now bestow some of my knowledge from the beyond upon you train well Okay So that was cool And we need to go right back to where it is. So yeah that seriously the haunted cave is way too far away from everything like Too far too too far just way too far But you know this should be good and we should I think it's Death trap first or is it death blade? I don't know. It's one of the two or maybe it's prism It's one of the three. I don't know which one of those but it's one of three I can tell you that for sure. So we'll find out in just a sec. So let's talk to Malone and finish this off Congratulations on entering the haunted cave and learning from the elder seer It is a tradition to seek it out in order to grow in power. Hmm.  Okay, so we've already got deathblade which is kind of cool So, yeah, thank you for watching remember to leave a like and subscribe Make sure we're gonna put this up enough in our dorm room of death banner. It's kind of cool So you remember to leave a like and subscribe and if you've already subscribed pretty sweet little well So you know exactly when I post another video and Remember I know let's put it above the beard that might be a good idea The beard isn't even synced it like what the hell. Let's put it over here then. There we go and river craft Outside the box


I think come from a quite different background than I do and so it's very exciting for me to to learn from what you can get out of more experimental settings but with a lot of theory and strong modeling that's that's very exciting for me and and so I apologize if I'm using a slightly different terminology to to describe some of the things as I come from biology and and medicine and and and a lot of the focus here will be also on technology. So I'll talk about the human gut microbiome and how it can impact the the serum metabolize that we are measuring in humans and how that all together connect to insulin sensitivity in humans. I would also like to say that that I work at a consultancy company called clinical microbiomics that is a contract research but it we work pretty much as an end as we would do in academia but we of course do it for clients which the clients are both academic and industrial. Okay so in analyzing and understanding the microbiome on humans the methods the preferred method has recently been to do metadynamics and and doing that with a deep sequencing and and and we have learned that you can get a lot of precision out of using shotgun metadynamics over 16s metadynamics. I think that is now fairly established in the literature and and I think everybody that works with this are aware of that and some of the limitations you have from 16s amplicon sequencing so that if I just back up a little bit 16s amplicon sequencing you sequence one gene that has a good resolution in tax taxonomical resolution and you sequence that and then you compare all of those sequences you get to databases. There are a number of problems with that one of the problems is that you have a PCR step and PCR is an exponential amplification of your signal and that's known to have a lot of biases in it so the different taxes will amplify to a different amount. Also 16s you have a lot of problem in resolving the lower level taxonomy so you in most cases can get to a genius level taxonomy but in many cases you can only get to family level taxonomy and only rarely can you get down to species and certainly not strain level and most of those things you can overcome by random shotgun metadynamics sequencing where you sequence the whole thing and also in addition to to to having a good taxonomical profiling you will also get knowledge about the functions the proteins that are in the system with the shotgun metadynamics but there is a big problem in this and this is a general problem for our metadynamics is that if this is all of your sequence reads from a sample you will be able to account for about 20% of those sequence reads by mapping them to reference genomes so you have the majority of the sample you don't know what it is and obviously that's dissatisfying more over if you use reference genomes for measuring the abundances of of your species you'll sometimes be very confused you'll see that some region of the chromosome appears to be in a large and a high abundance whereas other regions of that chromosome seems to be a lower bun so you sort of confused is this species here or is it not here and this these differences can be dramatic and of course the reason for that is that there are in addition to those known species there are a number of unknown a lot of unknown species in the system and they may look even identical to your reference genome at certain regions and of course you get a confusion of signal there and and all together we call this the metagenomic problem back in 2010 when we first got a very large data set of metagenomics from human stools we we were we started out to try to understand this and and one of the ideas we came up with was that of course the genes that are from the same chromosome they should be approximately at the same abundance in our sample and if we had a lot of samples they should follow each other in abundance across those samples and that that we call that the co-abundant principle so and and that principle you could say that's a very simple and even naive principle but it turns out to work extraordinary well so I'll give you show you an example of that so here is the abundance of one gene across 1200 human stools samples okay so in some sample this gene is highly abundant and other samples it's absent or very low abundance and this gene doesn't travel alone it travels together with all the other genes from that chromosome and here now I'm showing you actually 4,000 genes rather than just one okay one gene 4,000 genes the genes are shown here with extremely thin lines okay so you see here's an extremely coherent signal and and at such a signal we call metagenomic species okay now these are these are relative abundances but we yeah they are relative abundance so so what you get out of this sequencing machine is you get a number of reads say 10 or 20 million reads and then you say how many of those reads can I map to an entity and that's of course a relative because also you know how much thesis should I look at so yeah so it is relative yes sorry and gene what copy number yeah yeah right so so occasionally you have genes that are duplicated in the chromosome right so in order and and that should sort of distort this right so in order to capture these signals we use Pearson correlation which doesn't care about the absolute abundance but it's cares about the profile so it's in order to do this and make this work really well you need many samples in order of and this depends on the complexity of the system of course but in the order of hundred samples then you can you can capture a lot of those pieces and so we built a pipeline for doing this and I don't want to go into too many details about how that that works but body you take a number of samples a large number of samples you you assemble genes in that and make a number done in gene catalog and then you you take the reads from the original samples and measure the abundance of all of those genes in a gene catalog and then you have we have an algorithm we call a canopy clustering that's able to sort of segregate these signals out and then we got we get what we call metagenomic species and they account they they they are we believe that most of them are a species but we also see smaller entities that are phages actually it's not true that the majority are species the majority are certainly phages and plasmids and things like that but you know those those metagenomic species are mostly what is interesting and we identify them by basically by size and and here you can see that from using reference genomes and to using metagenomic species you can suddenly account for in order of 73 percent of your content okay that's pretty good actually because if you if you look at bacteria chromosome about 85 percent of it is coding and we're only counting for coding region so but we're still missing some percentages and that's mostly very rare things if you look at the size distribution of these metagenomic species in terms of number of genes you will get a distribution that's bimodal and here it's it's plotted in a lock lock scale so you get this bimodal distribution here where you have what we call metagenomic species then you have in addition to that we have the smaller metagenomic units or CAGs but we have we can identify in humans we can identify 1500 metagenomic species so large entities that we believe are bacterial genomes in in most cases now this segregated extremely well as I said and and you have probably seen some of those plot that tries to segregate genomes using this method based on two samples or or a very few number of samples or or alternatively using base composition etc and now you get these islands of genes that are that can be segregated but if you use many dimensions like in this case we use 2300 samples from humans so you get a hyperdimensional space you can separate things extremely well and so this plot sort of illustrate that so here here are our 10 million genes and and they are plotted in a space where you have the correlation to the profile of one of the metagenomic species here and a correlation to one another metagenomic species here and these are the genes that belong to that one of those metagenomic species and the genes that belong to the other one so you see a very strong segregation and it's not you know it's not so critical where you put the cutoff for that you get a very nice segregation you benchmark those on on taxonomy so you take one of those metagenomic species see what it looks like they'll there will be some of them that looks like this so this the metagenomic species number three has a lot of genes that are similar to a blastocystis hominensis that's an alkyd and and so it has a very high similarity to 15,000 genes of that species and that correspond to 99% of all the genes that are in this metagenomic species and this is with a high threshold for similarity and you see that that's the number of those that are almost identical to reference genomes however this is the minority of the metagenomic species in humans now with all the accumulated data and that has been generated and I know there are people papers that say oh we have thousand reference genome yes you have thousand reference genomes but most of them are for the same species so the actual number of species that we can recognize in the human god is 300 all with all the effort combined and this is of course only a fraction of what was there and so if you look at this picture and this now I'm showing you the same measurement as I just showed you the percentage of the genes from a metagenomic species that is similar to a to a reference genome and you see these are the ones that just showed you here those are the ones that are almost identical to a metagenomic species sorry to a reference genome and here is all the those that are well completely unknown or or similar to something so that may be similar to to the reference genome at a genus level or something and and so you can you can work with this in different level of sensitivity and you get the coherency at different taxonomical levels if you look at a human stool samples you you'll see that this action to describe quite a lot of the data and so this is this is 300 individuals where we are account so this is the richness of those 300 samples in terms of how many metagenomic species we can identify in those samples and we I've colored them those that are similar to a reference genome in color here based on the phylum and then the black part is the unknown species right and and what you can see here is that the richness at the species level here actually correspond quite nicely to the richness at gene level gene level is of course in a different scale here that the blue line is the gene level and also if you saw as I did here sort the samples based on on the number of species you can also see that individuals with the Crohn's disease are secreting very clearly with a very low richness this this can also be done this segregation of Crohn's using other methods but it's much clearer if you have this complete view of the system this this gives you as I said more much more comprehensive overview of the system but it also gives you a much more precise overview of the system and in in a number of cases we have looked at the intervention studies where people were eating a probiotic and using reference genome for exactly that probiotics it was very hard to tell whether that probiotic was actually in the system because it has all of this cross signal to other related species in the system but if you use it if you if you designed a metagenomic species for that reference genome you get a very clear signal those that didn't take it didn't have it and you can even see the different abundances that people had of this and that goes down to to about five parts per million this accuracy it also can be used to to go even even further down in taxonomical resolution so we're aiming for what we call ultra high-resolution microbiomics and I realized yesterday that that that's not a proper term actually because I was thinking that ultra high would be that we could account for the SNVs of the samples but now I realize that people here actually wants single cell genomics and we're not there yet so but anyway if you if you take one of these metagenomic species and this is the one that's correspond to our convention municifila and map all the SNVs across that chromosome you will we can find that there is about 21,000 SNVs across our cohort and this is the different samples here so 700 samples here and in these samples this species is very low abundance but up here it's pretty high abundance and you can see that it there are what I will call a subspecies population structures here and and you might may want to call this a strain or or a clade and something up here we have something that's that's more complex but clearly different from this one of the the interesting things here is that up in this block you have a lot of of the individuals that have IBD so the chronic disease alters colitis where there there are conventional strain apparently seem to be more sort of but they have different strains and we can use all of this information to build for the genetic trees of those of this species in directly from the gut data and actually we found that rather than trying to call these for strains it's much more informative to use a tree for doing our association analysis and this this picture is trying to show an attempt for an association analysis between the this this structure and human phenotype so what you can do here is you can label the the notes of this tree according to human phenotype for example and then you can you can make an association between the distances in this tree and this phenotype and potentially you can even zoom in to which SNBs are associated with that phenotype I'm gonna switch now on to focus on diabetes so diabetes and when I say diabetes I mean type 2 diabetes okay it's not type 1 diabetes it's as as you probably know it's it's a global phenomenon and it's it's it's a very substantial problem and and actually it's not only in in the rich countries but it's very severe in the Arabic countries but it's basically everywhere and and it's it's one of the biggest sort of cost problem for for our health care systems worldwide and it's increasing so so type 2 diabetes is if you break it down it's basically two things you have a B cell dysfunction so lower amount of insulin produced and then you have also insulin resistance so lower level of sensitivity to insulin and the number of factors have been associated with insulin resistance age, obesity, your diet and how much exercise and of course genetics but also recently recently there has been a number of papers indicating that the gut microbiome could be a factor in this the first the first paper that actually made a real association study between the gut microbiome and and any human disease was actually this paper that that showed that there was an association between type 2 diabetes and in the microbiome and there's been a number of study since that that has confirmed that among them the Swedish studies that also showed that this was indeed the case also in elder women but then in 2015 we observed that that the treatment that the diabetes patients was taking namely or in most cases the first line drug against diabetes is metformin and that that drug actually seemed to influence our signal so much that that was basically what we would have been seeing in those papers so that they actually effect of type 2 diabetes was much harder to to observe and actually very recently there's been a paper that actually claims that part of the mechanism of metformin is to change the microbiome in such a way that it's more healthy for and elevating some of the gut microbiome problems for in type 2 diabetes anyway all of these problems with the people that was using metformin made us go for people that were pre-diabetics and and instead of looking for it actually people that was classified with type 2 diabetes we were looking at at pre-diabetics with and using their insulin sensitivity measures to to associate with the microbiome and to further get into a mechanistic understanding of this we also looked at the metabolome of the serum of these individuals and and and in doing this relatively complicated association or work we we we came up with this outline of our association so we get around 1100 metabolites from 300 patients or across those when then we can we're doing some effort to redundancy reduce this this data for in the metabolites we do co-abundance clustering and this is this is a classical way of dealing with metabolites it's known that metabolites that come from the same pathways they sort of have similar abundances and very similar metabolites also tend to have similar abundances across a cohort of individuals so so in order to reduce the complexity we did co-abundance clustering of that and reduce that to 74 metabolites and similarly as I just explained we did with the microbiome we use this co-abundance clustering to identify a little more than 700 species here and also a number of functional groups here and then next we use the clinical data to filter out those metabolites that were more interesting and also those species that were more interesting to look for and then it reduced that further to 19 metabolite clusters and 81 species that were associated with the phenotype and and after that we were trying to see if we can make association between those domains of data at the so connecting species to metabolites and that could explain the human phenotype now in doing that you're you're getting into a huge complexity problem here with the many different species that are able to actually produce the same metabolites and the host is also able to do that and you're eating food and and probably a lot of this is going on in the small intestine and we're measuring in the stool so you know we're pretty far from from from what we an ideal situation but so in order to to deal with this we came up with with a new concept we call the functional species concept and this is chopped off a little bit here but anyway so the idea is is that across different ecosystem you may have different species that can feel the same ecological niche or the same function as for example in in macroscopic ecosystem you could have different top predators in across different ecosystems or on a savanna you can have a lion or in in in the jungle maybe a tiger and the ocean in a shark and if you were trying to do an association to the top predator effect across those systems you completely miss it right because with three different species but if you could somehow group those species that shared a property in some way you could you could use that grouping to make your association and this is sort of and this is then what we we did here so it looks like this in the microbiome so for example here you have a phenotype that a human phenotype that could be the BMI and you have a number of species that that you can associate it to that but maybe they are each of them has a weak association because different people may have different species that fill that function and if you didn't know that they were shared a function you'll you'll only have these level of association but if you're able to group them you will be able to find we believe a stronger association and in saying that I should say if you and some of the early papers in microbiome association were we're just trying to combine random sets of gene a species in this and remember we have in the order of 700 common species in the gut so if you combine just three of those I'll be 700 times 699 times 698 right you have approximately 300 million combinations and that's not good for your multitesting but by using a system where you're looking for shared properties or just species have an autolook then you reduce that complex to by about 500 times 500 thousand times down to in your order of a couple of thousand groups of species and these groups also can vary in size so there's some have 50 species in and some only have very few and so it looks pretty much like this you the symbols form of this is that you use the eggnog annotation so that's autolook annotation of the genes and you can just group those pieces and this this is maybe a little bit similar to guilt building guilt but but here any one species can actually be a member of many groups right and and many of those groups are not meaningful or not relevant for this case but you can do association with them and and here's an example of such an association where you see that this is an association to BMI and and where we we we here's sort of the expected association between BMI and and all species and here's the association of the group of species that can deconjugate bile acid there's a first step in degradation of bile acid and and and so that shows a very nice association between the ability or between species that can degrade bile acid and being lean and and and in addition to being a nice way of of doing associations these association also comes with the legend right they also come through the description that these species are the ones that can degrade bile acid here right and and and if you ask a physiologist bile acid would be one of the things that you see that are key for regulation of of satiety and a lot of the the metabolism in humans in addition to this there is there is a big problem in in annotating functions in for genes you would think maybe that the similarity of of a gene should indicate its function you can be you can transfer the function from one known gene to another gene by its similarity and it works pretty well in many cases but there is a large false discovery rate on this and and because we have these metagenomics species and we have some complex pathways systems like for example the Keck we're able to look for pathways completion in species and this is this is an example of that this is the LPS pathway and you see that there is a huge number of species that have annotated just one gene from that pathway this is likely not you know maybe it's a false annotation or that function is also used in another pathway that's likely but you see that there is a bimodal distribution of of these the number of genes that you find in this pathway and and so we believe that that it's a much more accurate description of which species are actually able to to do this function if we require a certain number of of the genes in a pathway to be present in that and you can see this is a nice little bimodal distribution and so we did this across all functions and association to the metabytes of humans and what we found was that there were a number of sort pathways that could be or a mid sorry functional species group that was defined based on pathways that could be associated with metabolites and in very many cases the the the product of those pathways actually were some of the elements that were in these metabolite clusters for example the branch genome amino acids metabolites were nicely associated with the by the capability to biosynthesis science those and it was inversely correlated to the bacteria's ability to optic branch genome acids branch genome amino acids already a known indicator for a pre-diabetic okay pre-diabetic individuals that have elevated levels of branch genome amino acids in the serum has a higher chance of becoming type 2 diabetics it's it's funny note here that if you go to a gym one of the things you they will sell you it's exactly branch genome amino acids to build muscles right and and so I think actually it's it's very likely that branch genome amino acids is a good thing to have if you exercise a lot but if you don't it's probably not such a good idea so the model we we built based on this was was like like this that you have some got microbes that are able to to produce these branch genome amino acid and they are contributed to a metabolite pool that will in term influence the insulin resistance of the host on the other side you also have some bacteria that can uptake branch enemies unit acids and consume them and they of course count in a different direction of this in order to zoom in on which species were sort of the the worst species for doing that we we made a leave one out analysis of this and that basically means that we repeated the association and else but just taking one species out and so how much worse were the association and so you for example you you say here if you have you have a correlation between human phenotype and and the presence of the species in such a functional species group you if you remove some species you get a much reduced association and if you do if you do that for the branch genome amino acids we found that there were a lot of species that had a very minor effect on this association but there were a couple of species that had a quite dramatic effect and one of those were pervetella corporeal and another one was specteritis vulgatus and then there were another couple of pervetella that were important for this association and also however for the branch genome amino acid transport we didn't find some any species that were really strong for this it was seemed that there are a lot of species that can uptake this and that can be important for the system and and so to to sort of conclude on on that and all of this is I agree this is all associations and and things that fits nicely together but it's just you know associations so so to go further with this we we isolated the private teller and and and gave that to to 12 mice on a high fat diet and we could see after I believe it was so we could see already after three weeks we could see elevated level of the branch genome amino acid in the same of these mice and we could also see that their insulin sensitivity were significantly higher and actually a number of those species are sorry a number of those mice actually had what you would classify as type 2 diabetes after four or five weeks so it this should suggest that that this study is not only association but you can actually inoculate these bacteria into at least mice and see that the phenotype occurs so this was this was my main story and and and I have very little time for additional stuff here so if there's questions I could take them


Oh, oh, can you be can you be my attorney? Yeah, we're for defense or prosecution. You need legal aid No, this is for the treason case. I want you to protect me for what I'm not sure I'm being questioned regarding it by Barrick and flop You don't need me to defend you. You just need me to be there for questioning. You're still defending him technically please But yeah, you tell me when I answer Right, I might I might get Miranda is here, right? So I need to make sure that whatever I say ain't truthful and to the point But at the same time you're my lawyer to make sure that you hear the question first. You tell me answer I don't know if I'm conflicted or not Corvid at it It kind of slacks waves conflict you can be his lawyer because this is not a this is not a criminal proceeding at this time If it goes to court, you cannot be his lawyer in court be clear. Okay. Hey If you wave conflict then I can I can also help and I can't defend you in court But for questioning you can have grace primary and then I'm like secondary Well, it's just here. Let me I'm bringing down Okay, so um captain Turner and captain Ruth We decide to meet up at city hall sat down and had a conversation with them there don't conversation We brought the reasons why things were moving slow captain Ruth raised a question asking that She raised a question Well, the city council can vote on who's gonna be in charge of PD or something like that Can the captain just vote and sit above the city council? Obviously, I did not agree with it It was an unprofessional thing to say in front of mayor being the same. It's not better. I'll be honest I was in a state of disarray. Just it's not somebody who I expect to be like this My interactions with the mayor have been very extremely positive and very very good. Okay, so what's going on? He's being questioned about Ruth being charged Yeah, hey, buddy. Oh, yeah, we're ready slacks. Okay. Here's the thing when you guys are in the other room He's covering. I don't think so.  Do you understand your rights? I've read them to you today. Yes, I do Captain slacks, I'm gonna be asking you a series of questions today Some of these are related to an incident specific that I'm thinking you are aware of with that involves captain Ruth And some of them might be outside of that scope on the date of February 24 2024. Did you attend a meeting in the mayor's office? Yes, what was the official purpose of your visit to the mayor's office that day discussion about PD matter activity numbers hiring firing Disploring action also the PD legislation that the mayor was planning on proposing City Council, okay, and that legislation was the now known as the police continuity act. Is that correct? Correct? Let me take you back to captain Ruth's statement to keep mentioning that it was hyperbole and it was hyperbolic and that She didn't mean it. How do you know that to be true because at the city council is heavily discussed And the chief justice himself said it was not treason based on the what transpired the mayor provided He saw the story myself and captain Turner provide outside story and the chief justice Agreed that it was not treason based on what transpired Did you participate in or overhear any discussions or comments that indicated that the police department would be Considered an equal branch of government. Oh, I believe that Captain Ruth has brought something like that up. I think something about the PD being like a branch of government I don't remember the exact wording. I'm just remembering I'm not sure actually as far as that because having to see it the city council I thought we were a branch of government, but it was explained to me that that was not the case afterwards No, no, I'm just saying no Kind of clarify real quick. Yes. Do you do you understand being a government employee doesn't necessarily mean that you're Specifically part of your department's a part of one of the branches one of three branches of government I understand that the way I see myself as, you know, local authority and this is says Andres Yeah, I would I would argue that the police department falls under the department of justice, right? Or the you're the officers of the peace and lawyers are the officers of the court and then you have this No, that's good because I because I clarify I was helping him with that being said I'm gonna ask you about another scenario. Does the police department generally provide security details when there's a credible threat against an individual? If you could just give me an example be great But if requested and if that's right, yes, are you aware that there's a security detail applied to a city council member as early as yesterday? Yeah, that was correct. I was the point of contact. Are you aware of any other requests? Yes, I get a branch of government. Yeah, but not not in Los Santos If you don't I ask him, what does he have to do with the investigation? This is all tied to captain roof and I have reason to believe based on statements collected at this point in time That there may be a crime that was committed And I have questions about it quick question for my clarification What's the difference between somebody being recommended for it and somebody specifically asking for it on their own behalf? In this case an officer made the recommendation that a council member should be protected by a security detail by the police rec Okay Oh, I don't want to speculate in a matter I know that threats have been made to multiple members city council because because if people are trying to overthrow him You're aware of so far then Define credible someone who has a history of Violence who has perpetrated crimes against people in government before There were threats being made and it seemed like the threats were being fall They the fall through and people got hurt and that's all I have to say as far as the investigation because it is ongoing It's an ongoing investigation. Okay. Yeah, because chavon wasn't it like a take it up the chain of command pause the recording for a moment True thing she oh my gosh Audio recording is being no no no no no 40 a.m. EST Yeah, you're right. Ruth told chavon is 14 27 that she could not have a security detail I just want to cut through After the kidnapping that we have like um like three weeks ago many things that are going on And so I was at four point. Are these threats? Are these threats the open investigation? I'm not asking for Yeah, yeah, so details about it. Yeah, so so so I mean I heard about this with them and one city council members are said a city council member has been hurt and one is One is um, you know hiding right now a fear for her life Can you just tell me which city council member it is? All I'll say is if it's the person that you mentioned in the hallway Xavier is not them It's not them. Okay. No, okay. Perfect. It is not the main two fish Whatever you're talking about with these other city council members I'm not looking for answers for them. The one I'm referring to specifically is for chavon Has there been anything like that for her? I mean Chavon has been attacked on multiple occasions and multiple times by different kind of people in different kind of groups Unfortunately, she's been a target Often and um frustrating. I'll be honest. All right. I'm gonna I'm gonna we're gonna share the recording back on I'm gonna resume this on a questioning with chavon in mind and uh, hold on Can I can I have a moment with uh with cam slacks before we turn the recording back on two minutes?  Uh, I have no idea what that's that's not what they think That's not that I That's what in my mind when when they're talking about city council getting hurt Yeah, no, uh, I just had like a huge epiphany and I'm trying to be Very wise about How am I gonna say this because I just piece together like six different things over the course the last like month and month or so Maybe it was three four weeks. Did you call to have uh, PD presence at the town hall meeting whenever he was having the conversation with people at city hall like he does Yeah, yeah, I did I did So that was your call you personally made that call to watch for chavon and watch for the mayor Correct. Yeah, of course.  You just need to know that All right, we're ready Holy dude. Oh my gosh.  No, I know it like cornwood would never I think I know we're going with this Because it bring keep bringing him shabon and effect. She's being attacked.  Keep in mind Slacks is the only captain who's actually had it had corns back I'm just gonna get back into it because we are strapped for time So are you aware of any requests made by officer louise cambell for a security detail for one shavon thoroughbred? I don't usually um interact with the louise cambell, uh, but I do Remember ever since the couple instance after a fingled an has been and bingo Oh my gosh Oh And uh, when the public announcements are being made that we send officers down there to make sure that we're being proactive Hell, I've been down there myself twice I've called people down there on the radio when they do those public announcements because a lot of times folks do use them Holy shit kidnap somebody or hurt somebody. Yeah, what do you know about officer cambell? Is she an officer? Absolutely. I mean, she was one of the police looks for skeleton crew Do you trust her judgment? A thousand percent if she brought a request to have a security detail for a sitting city council member Would you honor it? Yeah, I mean if she brought me information, it's incredible. Threatness happening. Absolutely. Okay. Are you aware that? Captain ruth was presented with this exact scenario, but declined said security detail That is new to me captain who's never made mention of this I don't recall ever having a conversation about something like this. Oh Is that something that? Oh Something that could be handled is from shift to shift to shift Because things kind of change depending on the environment we deal with and what kind of criminals out there So I can't really answer much on that because I don't have much detail as far as what you're talking about right now That would be more of a shift one matter that I don't really attend too often because I'm a shift to a guy Okay, this might have been answered already, but Dude, he might have been actually What was the atmosphere like between the three you upon exiting the mayor's office? I was in a state of disarray.  Let's get out close traders captains He'll have our badges. I'll have our job in a week things like that. I mean Everything kind of came out. We discussed the conversation to the whole pd I felt like at the moment we had to be very transparent because the last thing we want is To have it come up as a cover-up for what transpired to The mayor is saying well, they said this and I was saying no this never happened, right? And I think that's the last thing we want to have in in the pd So we want to make sure that we wanted to give our perspective or The captain's perspective as far as what happened and make sure that anything did transpired was there on paper Have you ever seen characteristics or attributes of being vindictive or seeking revenge from captains? I don't think I've ever seen her do anything Like that. No, I don't think I have ever exact examine behavior of revenge Like I said, I think she's somebody who's um by the book somebody who's very textbook and likes to follow the rules That's all the questions that I have for now Captain slacks. We will let you know if we have any additional questions or need any additional follow-up I would ask that between now and when we speak with captain turner If you could refrain with some speaking or letting him know any of the questions that we've asked you about All right, thank you. John captain slacks. Thank you. Appreciate your professionalism and your integrity. Of course.  I mean Come with me Yeah, you're welcome by the way. I caught on as soon as you said something like that. Did you catch that shit?  Come here. You definitely Literally it was the next question.  I mean there there's a reason why you were clear this call were to ask why right Uh-huh. That's right. Hey captain slacks Uh-huh.  All right. We'll see you in court. Dude. I'm so glad I was there. Oh my gosh