All right, welcome everyone to the Identity Implementaries Working Group call for July 28, 2022. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Shar Haaland and I'm a co-moderator of this group with Tim Spring. Today we will go over Working Group status updates and then hear a presentation from Marco Lutti, the lead product designer at Percivus on designing an SSI wallet. So as usual, since this is a hyperledger audition call we're following the antitrust policy and since this is a hyperledger call we're following the hyperledger code of conduct which are both linked here. This call is being recorded and will be posted on the meeting page later today. Introductions, would anybody like to introduce themselves if you're new or rejoining the call and would like to say hi. Or a few words about why you're involved in this space. So thank you for the introduction. Hi everyone, I'm Marco and I'll be presenting prospectus of designing an SSI wallet app later on. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Of course, thank you so much for joining us Marco we really appreciate it. All right, and then I will send out the link to this wiki if you'd like to go ahead and put your name under the attendees list. That would be great. Let's see. A few announcements worth mentioning there is an Aries interopathon proposed for August 31. I'm sure we can get more definitive details as that date draws near. And then also to relevant conferences the hyperledger global forum in Dublin in September and then rebooting web of trust in Denhag in September as well and their links if you'd like to learn more. Any announcements anybody else has that they'd like to share. All right. Then I think we are ready to go ahead and go through working group updates. Let's see so the start with hyperledger. The main identity working group have met since we last met and then the Indian contributors working group there, they're active of course but have had their last couple meetings canceled because of holidays so not too much to report there. The Aries working group is anybody involved in this one would like to report. In the Aries working group they've been discussing credential extras specifically adding the fields issuer credentials hash link data and attach this is an alternative to using the generic extra structure instead of a structure for each purpose but I think they've settled on calling them supplements instead of extras. So there's more information on that if you'd like to learn more. Aries by full they've been talking about react hooks. 030 tab config tab navigation configuration and ledger proxy UI discussion. Let's see. ACA pug. This meeting discussed recent merges there was also a discussion about ledger agnostic dids and an encodes objects. Referencing an encodes objects on other verifiable data registries. So there's a desire to support did Indy so that we can have multiple ledgers easily on a single agent without checking all the ledgers. Let's see areas framework go. We've got some work updates there their links to these PRs if you'd like to learn more. Aries framework JavaScripts. See, they've been talking about FJ and areas fabric integration and modularization API. I can, I can say a few words on that if you like. Please thank you. Yeah, the, the, the AFJ areas fabric integration week we had a demo are weekly meeting last Thursday, I think it was from a company called Rubin. I don't know if you pronounce that crub and revolutionizing governance through blockchain is there is their motto and they and their guys have been building this areas fabric layer. The idea there is that you would use the AFJ that to kind of plug in an indie blockchain or a fabric blockchain. It's very, very cool that the demo was fantastic I was very impressed with it and it's great what they do it's a very early stages yet and kind of my worry is that kind of, you know, kind of duplicating all of the masses of sort of indie identity layer is a big task but they've taken it on and they've they've they've they've got they're making very good progress so just just a last point on that is kind of well why would you want to do that and this is a particular interesting topic for me because I spent a couple years working with fabric and I've spent the last two or three years working with Aries so I kind of have a take on both sides of the equation and one of the typical use cases is if you imagine that the sort of enterprise blockchain fabric type thing where you have, you know, all these like big huge supply chain things and all the rest of it that things like fabric are really good at, but it doesn't have a very good identity there because the fabric identity layer is this difficult authority server with x509 and the rest of it. And then on the other side you have indie which is great for identity. I don't know about that but it doesn't have smart contracts tokens and we can't do all the kind of sort of enterprise scale blockchain kind of stuff that fabric can. So, how about we come up last year where we merge all of that cool functionality into one thing. So for example, I always had this dream of building a supply chain, sort of enterprise network where each stage of the supply chain where you needed identity you go off to a verifiable credentials and say hey give me your export license or your VAT certificate or whatever it would be and we'd use verifiable credentials for that and the past you would need to build fabric and you would need to have an identity sort of alongside each other get two blockchains, not a great solution so all these guys have done is kind of basically solve that problem or on the way to solving it whereby you could have all of the enterprise blockchain solutions provided by Hyperlegia Fabric with a really cool Aries Indie type identity Aries not Indie Aries identity layer kind of built into that as well and they're making really good progress. So I just wanted to say a word for these guys because I said very impressed with that so yeah that's what we saw last week. Great, thank you so much for for jumping in with that Mike. I'm glad the demo went so well and appreciate your your explanation of that. Thank you. No worries. All right, looks like we're at the end of the Hyperlegia working groups that we track Hyperlegia Aries has not been meeting recently. Are there any other Hyperlegia updates that anybody wants to give? All right, I think we can move on to trust over IP. They had their all members meeting on July 20. Does anybody attend this one who'd like to report? It looks like they talked about upcoming conferences some new task forces including artificial intelligence and the metaverse task force governance architecture task force mental models task force and then also discussed working on a white paper on biological ecosystems. The steering committee met on July 13. Which was reported on in our last meeting. Let's see. The communications committee. Anybody involved in this one who'd like to report. We're meeting tomorrow. That's best I got. Okay, great. I would love to hear about that in our next meeting. I don't know if Dan or anybody else from TYP could comment on CVS health joining on, I wasn't aware that they were steering committee member now. Yeah, yeah, they definitely joined. I can't remember who was represented. Who's represented on the call. We have to look in the meeting minutes but yep. They joined and yep they're steering a member now yep. Yeah, that's fantastic. They're supporting participation in the did him as well. I, and I understood that they may not have been committed to the TYP direction so that's great to hear. Thanks Dan. That's great. Thanks for that update. All right, governance stack working group anybody involved in this one who'd like to report. Yeah, I can say something to that. I am actually on that governance architecture task force. There's a small number of us. And we were kind of taken it slow through the summer here, but we do anticipate kind of changing the structure of the governance documentation. So really, in a nutshell, it is going to be more component based governance, then layer based governance. The original intention was that it would be layer based based on the four layers of trust over IP, but we're going to be switching that around and doing it more component based. So for example, you could have a governance framework that talks about just schema and credential. The entire layer three kind of piece. Great. Thank you for that updates. Yeah. And it looks like the governance stack working group will take a brief break for the summer and return in early September. That's right. Cool. All right. Technology stack working group. Anybody like to report on this one. We have a stack tech art task force where you have busy on on writing the technical specification shooting for the end of August to to complete that at the well coincident with the hyper ledger global form is I mean, what is it open source meeting and trust so right he is going to have a mini conference there and drumming will present drumming and maybe a when Jane, I think are going to present the, the output of the tech art task force the Yeah, that that text back. At least the initial draft of it. That's, that's what I know. Great, great. planning to go, are you planning to go to that hyper ledger global form. Many some and all that. I personally am not. Because there's my main area is still biometrics and there's a European Association of biometrics meeting that conflicts with it so I planning to go there. Thank you for that update. All right, utility foundry group. Let's see anyone involved in this one who'd like to report. So they haven't met since June as far as I can tell but they reported in the all members meeting that they're ongoing work items are the public utility directory. This is a list of all the active layer one utilities. And then a framework for evaluating layer one utilities. Which is in the final review stages and then in the future they'll be focusing on combining efforts with the layer one governance task force. And then have a specific deliverable on decentralized identity architecture and regulatory compliance. So, that's what they are focusing on ecosystem foundry group. Anybody involved in this one who'd like to report. We had a presentation from Keith Thomas on drone pilot credentialing for air safety in their last meeting. And then concepts and terminology. Anybody want to report on this one. So they are continuing their work on the terminology toolbox framework. Their new work is that they now have a volunteer development team and an architect for terminology toolbox 2.0. They were they're also working on mental models to explain the to create a mini ontology and and this is the group that is planning to start up that mental models task force in September. Great. Any other to IP updates. Next up is the diff. Anybody involved in the did come working group would like to report. It been discussing having a blog post for the diff blog. There's a draft linked there. And then did come users group. As far as I can tell I don't believe they've met. Since we last met. If anyone knows otherwise feel free to jump in. And same with the interoperability group. All right, sovereign foundation. Let's see. I think as far as I can tell again, their last meeting for an early February. Anybody aware of work going on. And either of these groups or in the SSI and IOT working group. I'm a member of the SSI and IOT working group and I think we'll keep the name the same for the time being we haven't really talked about with Michael, but I think we're on the cusp of getting into some really, really cool stuff, especially the communication between SSI. Zero trust IOT and edge devices and digital twins. And we've got a number of presentations and discussions. Regarding digital twins and account, the components of, of IOT into that. And modeling. And on SSI and on zero trust. And on a separate berated note. We're affiliated with the digital twin consortium and their security and trustworthiness working group and there are parallels between some of the areas we're going so to watch this space. I think we've got some exciting stuff coming. Yeah, that's great. I'm glad we're reporting on this group and keeping up with it and appreciate that update. All right. The W3C standard in the did working group. I'm not aware of them. They were from the W3C community. Anybody knows otherwise, feel free to jump in. And the big news there is we'll you have. Do you have it there that it was adopted the initial version? Oh, yes. Yeah. That was the big news out of that right. Right. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for mentioning that. pushing back on that, but either they were lented or were convinced, but bottom line it passed 1.0. Drummond was very happy. They're already working on the next version, but Drummond said he's done, but he spent a lot of, yeah, sweat equity and getting that over the hump, and there was much rejoicing, and he's moved on. Oh, that's good to hear. Yeah, thank you for for emphasizing that. All right, in the Community Credentials group, they met recently, they had a meeting on Refundable Credentials for Education Task Force. Link's there if you'd like to learn more. All right, are there any other working groups or updates that I'm missing for the W3C standard group or any foundations in general? All right, in that case, I will hand it over to Marco for his presentation. I'll pass the screen share over to you, and I think you should have access to screen sharing, but yeah, thank you again so much for being here, Marco. Thank you all. I'm really excited to present. So yeah, let us begin. So I will be talking about designing, designing the SSI while it like perspectives from a designer. So what we've noticed at Preserve is when we talk about the whole SSI space, it's always very technical or conceptual, but we always forget the details of the human interaction. So we thought it'd be interesting to show how we approached those challenges with our current products and ideas that we've played around in our current product. A little bit about Procevis, where a Swiss company founded in 2016, and we want to unlock the venture of the digital in the public sector. So for us, it was always in the center that EID should be the core base of it all, but we also knew that there were principles that we wanted to follow, like we thought a mobile first, we think a mobile first solution is the correct way to approach it, always keeping the user in the center, and of course, decentralized data management and data protection with the highest securities. A little overview of our products. We started out with the EID plus product, which is like a smart government solution where you can order depth registry extracts, and you have a verified EID on it. This is currently running in Switzerland in two cantons. Cantons are comparable to states. MDL, which is our driving license, digital mobile driving license solution. We started that in 2020, and we are in the process of getting it ISO certified. And since last year, the topic we're talking about today, SSI plus, we started working with the Hyperlink, ledger ND, and Aries frameworks. And yeah, it's the product I'm going to be talking about today. Starting point before we get into the product and designs, in our whole process, we decided we should have some guidelines and mantras to follow. And when we kicked it off, we were like, all right, how would we explain this to our partner or to our parents what we're trying to do? And we always have the symbol, we're like, we're trying to take what you have in your wallet and make it digitally accessible, as use it in the physical world, and as trusted and secure as we have it now. So a goal for us was at minimum, it should be as easy to use as you use your normal ID card. It should be as trusted as your driver's license when you show it to the police officer. And yeah, we followed that. The next question, of course, is how do you even proceed to achieve such a goal? So we reflected it back and we looked what Apple did with the touch paradigm over 15 years ago, with the, you know, there has to be a transition. So we call it an evolution instead of a revolution. We're not trying to break this whole world that we have. We're trying to transition the physical to the digital. And the way Apple did it was by using these metaphors or scoriomorphic design and slowly easing the user in. So a notebook looked like a physical notebook. Nowadays, it's an abstract form of it. Or when you had the iBooks app, there was a bookshelf with the books physically placed there. So it was this transfer of, you know, you look at the driver's license, it has all these elements of this haptics, this touch that makes it trustworthy. We said it's important to transition this over. And the other thing we also observed what's happening right now, the physicals, the digital spaces is affecting the physical space. So Mastercard has announced I think last year that they want to issue their credit cards in a portrait mode. And this development, of course, happens because we live on a cell phone now. We consume videos in portrait mode. I mean, some people still roll their eyes, but it's a reality. So all these formats are morphine into that. So with those goals in mind, we started our product and I'm going to jump to the end. So we're going to see a demo video from about six weeks ago, where it shows our video. So important to note about our product, we're focusing very much on the Swiss government. The Swiss government is planning to bring out an SSI solution. They're working on the law. So for example, here we see the onboarding. The onboarding is a mandatory onboarding where we are issuing a base ID based on your physical Swiss identity card. And this is just a demonstration. It's not written. It's just a proof of concept to show what would be possible. We also have different onboardings for different cases, such as a manual onboarding or directly from the QR code. So in this case, this user set up their identity card and got a VC, a rarefiable credential. And in the next case, we're showing another issuance of a VC through our desk. And this is a Swiss driver's license. Yeah. And then in the final step, we're playing through like, how can we do a proof request? In this case, we're doing a rental car demo where we're using that driver's license that we issued before to verify that we're able to drive that category that we still have a valid driver's license. So how did we get to this point? Of course, I waited for the logos. So how did we get to this point? So we tried to keep the wallet as simple as basic. So we have a top-down semantic layout where we're trying to structure the different sections. We start out by being personal and saying, hey, welcome to your wallet. Here's the credential. And then the navigation, how we see it. So you see how these credentials are moving, the shared with are the connections associated with this credential. So we were trying to test and we realized that the user gets very confused between their credential library and their connection library. So we quite quickly got to that point.  So we would always create these rapid click dummies. The first version, of course, based on our EID, we realized the EID context, our setup was not the best. And we, in December, played around with the shared width and the history. The user acceptance was higher. Quickly realized this history part is not, is very confusing. You have the double tap and then move to this current variation where we have a favorites and a old tab. So the favorites is an overall view. And yeah, we were testing with users. The first test we did was for Tender with Luxembourg. Luxembourg was looking for, was experimenting with the concepts of SSI. They wanted verifiable credentials and we got to build a little platform, demo platform, which yeah, got to see, which I'm not going to show today. As I said, there's a lot of things to show in this app. So maybe to break it down, we go over the highlights that might be interesting for hyperledger, you know, perspectives that we had to implement because we needed. So I always like to start this part by saying, what keeps me up at night as a designer or what kept me up at as a designer? So the first question I always asked myself was, how do we share credentials? I mean, how do we share different versions? How do we share if it's a zero knowledge proof? I mean, there are a lot of encrypted complexities. And I mean, if I explain zero knowledge proof to my parents, they'll look at me and be like, excuse me, what? So where's one of the challenges? In Switzerland, we have four national languages. I mean, we're a small country. We have that many languages. And it's always an issue. So how do we handle language? Do we show all the languages? How do they do it now on the identity card? Or do we, because we're in the digital space, change the language by seeing what the user prefers? Then the next question was always, I mean, all these institutes and entities, they're proud of their current credentials and they want to have their designs. They want to see their designs in that. So we're like, okay, we have to figure out a way to solve this. This is important to them. It's a bit of a prestige story. And then the other question, because we are also interoperable, how do we handle external credentials that do not have a design file and make them look good and as good as the other credentials? So simply sharing. So it's not working the way I wanted to. In the sharing flow here, we have an example of someone scanning a proof request. And we're asking for these credentials. So it's easy. We can see there's a lock and all the check marks. So it indicates that they're all required. And you can either cancel or share. Can I ask, when you share those credentials, what protocol were you using? How did you securely and privately share those credentials? So as to mention again, I'm the designer. It would have been great if we had one of our developers here, lead architect. Okay, fair enough. This looks to me like it's Indie Aries. Yeah, that's what I was thinking as well. The whole product is Indie Aries, that's what I know. Okay, so it's probably using a non-credge or something like that. Okay. Yeah. In the next version, I'll go through how we do handle multiple versions. So in this use case, let's say I get my role changes from lead product designer to head of design and they don't revoke my last credential. How do we handle that when we go to the sharing flow? So here we have a selector, which indicates, hey, there are multiple versions. We default by selecting the last issue. So we can then say, no, I want the oldest one and switch and share that with the verifier. And the last one, which we're still working on is the zero knowledge proof. So we're still working out the details, especially the language part, but we've noticed that from the very beginning, we have to somehow communicate that we're only transmitting the condition without calling it zero knowledge proof. So this is one of our current experiments on how to resolve this. We were doing an age check of a driver's license to see if the person's 18. And as you can see right now, we're doing this conversion of, is this date of birth older than the 18 year old limit translated into a date? So because the date was, I think the 25th of July. So 25th July of 2005 or 2004. Yeah, still working on that. Then the language thing. So on the app side, you can switch between two languages currently. We're trying to get more languages on board over time. That's all good and all. The close button there is now Schneese, which is German. But how do we handle the attributes? So we can't really handle the values of the attributes. But what we did is in our desk, we enabled to document different languages. So here we have English in German, English set as a primary. So it always will default to English. And then we can add the attributes we want. We also have attribute types, which is like, do we have a type date? Do we have a type email address? Gender. So we have these standard types that we've seen reoccurring in other VCs. And yeah, we can put the translation in there. So there's no real point of translating the title of the credential much, because it's the same in both languages. But for example, given names is for now, and the date of birth is good. And that's how we can swap the attributes within the app. The labels of the attributes, of course. And then designing for VCs, which is the next step after the translations. So now you set your schema up and you're like, you need to focus about design. We start by defining the credential types. And we made it really simple, because I mean, how do the entities do it now? They send their print files to the printer and they get done. Our hope is maybe in the future to make it more parametricized, so we can have responsive design. But this is for a V1, our way of solving it. And of course, you can design how it looks. So we have the dashboard review, which is the wallet view. When it's minimized only with two attributes in the main, you can combine the name, you can say there is an image or not an image. You can also change the order of how it's displayed in the detail view and then next step, you can publish. And yeah, how do we handle external credentials? In this video, I'm going to show how we get credentials issued by the Lizzie demo site. There, basically what we're doing is where we made a very simple generative design template. So it takes the first letter of the credential, puts it in a pattern, defines a color based on a ratio. And as you can see, it issues the base ID like that. Has no language translation. So we would switch to German right now. I think only issued on an issuer can be translated. The rest will remain the way they were assigned. And as you can see, we can use this base ID. In the next step, put the demo page and yeah, share it. Yeah, who knows where to highlight some quick summary, next steps. The next couple of months are going to be very busy for us. We're validating our eyes with different groups from the mobility and education sectors as well, commercial ideas, validate and most likely reiterate. We'll see what the inputs are. As mentioned before, expand and optimize how we design VCs. We see there's a huge potential that still needs the polish that we're looking for, but we have a good foundation. And another step that we also really want to take is how do we do these verification. So we're going to focus on the usability for developers. And that's going to be documentation, how we set up the schema. So I'm going to work very closely with developers and figure out the needs and wants and how would they prefer to work with such a tool. Also noted some hopes for the future of hyperledger. The multi-language support, I think it'd be brilliant if there was a standard for that. And also if there was a standard for designs. I mean, I think every wallet looks different and every credential looks different. I know it's just a collection of attributes, but I think design is going to be very important for the acceptance for the general public. And yeah, more growth and stability. I mean, what we've seen personally, it's been getting, it feels like it's getting stabbler and stabbler as time goes by and we're really excited what the future brings. Yeah, that was a quick overview presentation and perspective from a designer. Questions? Hi Marco, it's Kyle. I'm working with the province of British Columbia and not my specific project, but we're working alongside a group who's working on a mobile wallet. They're using Aries Byfold in Canada, as well as other provinces in Canada are also using Aries Byfold. One of the things that our team is also looking at is the multi-language, because in Canada we have two official languages, English and French. And one of the paths that we are going down for solving that problem, as well as sort of the issue of making things look nice, is in the Aries world is looking at the overlay. It's colloquially called OCA, but it's an OCA overlay architecture. And the idea there is that it allows for things to look pretty and to do translations, but in an interoperable way. Oh, that's cool. So I can connect you with... Yeah, thanks, Jim. So I can connect you with Stephen Curran or some others who are working through that, but I would recommend and maybe others would recommend the same. Jim, do you have a further comment on... Yeah, Kyle, thanks very much. I mean, Paul Knowles is arguably the inventor for OCA, and as you've probably seen, where they're going to restructure one of the working groups around what they end up calling it, data specifications or something like that, but Marko, what it really implies is the ability to provide granular consent of information exchange in conjunction with your zero-knowledge proof and your credential exchange. Not to say it isn't... I mean, it's technically pretty sophisticated, and there's lots of things to sort through, but it's gaining momentum, and yeah, I think it would be a great idea to be involved there. That would be pretty cool. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. I'll gladly look into it. I think you mentioned this, and I might have missed it, but did you say that it will soon be mandatory in Switzerland to have the driver's license credential? Because Switzerland has a direct democracy, everything takes very long. Right now, they're trying to get the template of the law shaped, so I think it's planned to have the driver's license, but there's no specifics yet until the law has been passed. Marko, I'm very sorry for missing this. Did you say y'all were adopting the ISO 1813 Mobile Driver's License Format, or it's going to be in VCs? Our MDL solution is based on that ISO, yes, the MDL ISO. Thank you. Appreciate it. We also have a blog post on that comparing the SSI and the MDL worlds, and yeah, I recommend reading it. Yeah, where could we find the blog post that you mentioned? I'm copying it right now. Oh, thank you. Oh, interesting. We did one from a not, if I could find it real quickly. We did a blog post as well on, yeah, on those differences, let's say. Yeah, it's interesting. The MDL spec is great because it is, well, it's multiple ISO specifications. Everybody refers to the application, but there's, I think, six parts to that specification. But anyhow, for example, out of scope is zero knowledge proofs. The way that you do zero knowledge proofs in MDL is you have basically have to hard code them. They say out of scope is how does an issuer get an MDL into a wallet? Well, that's out of scope. They refer to another ISO specification, which is not published yet. So anyhow, there's interesting bits like that, but it is an ISO spec, so there's that. I sent it, sorry, a direct message, but let me send it to everyone. That was the blog entry. Yeah, so we got to respect the fact that they spent years getting it to be an ISO specification, but yeah, there's evolution in both the SSI world and MDL world, sure. Definitely. Okay, may I ask you a question? Yeah. Okay, so self-sovereign identity is not and should never be regarded as something that is exclusively blockchain. Okay, there are other ways of doing self-sovereign identity. For example, the European Union's green pass for coronavirus COVID certificates was based on X509 PKI technology, the old standard technology that's been around for a long while. So my question to you would be, why did you decide to base your technology on blockchain and not use that same technology that was used by the EU for its green pass, i.e. X509? What is it that blockchain brings to you that that doesn't? So I think with this project, we were really interested in using hyperledger in these, so it was like a chance for us to test it out, a testbed, but we do realize that a PKI solution is still possible, especially in Switzerland, if there's a channel where these discussions come up and it seems very likely that the Swiss government would follow a hybrid model where they start out with the PKI and then transition over to a blockchain model in their trust network. Okay, interesting. By the way, you said there were two cantons, which two cantons are using this? So the first canton is Schaffhausen, two cities, so I think currently we have over half the cities in that canton, which is Zug, it Zug is the app which was launched by the city of Zug. Okay, the reason I ask is because I lived in Switzerland for four years and I was actually lived in Zug for a while, so it's interesting. So Zug, of course, is a bit of a hotbed of blockchain technology. I've got a feeling that's where, isn't that where some of the Ethereum guys are? The Ethereum Foundation seller, many blockchain foundations are there. Yeah, interesting. Okay, thank you for that answer. Yeah, so if I could jump in, I think it's an interesting question, Mike. It's just a technology to me, but it's an interesting question. I do a lot in border management with passports and IKOs, public key directory, and a reason to have a decentralized, distributed public key directory is, for example, the IKOs, PKD is you have two physical instances of it. They're both in South Asia. How resilient is that? Do you want a more resilient network that's more expansive, more decentralized? Those are some of the reasons to go to distributed ledger, but I'm not saying one is better than the other, but those are some of the considerations as architect we look at. Listen, Dan, you don't need to convince me I was playing devil's advocate there, right? The problem is that my worry about, this is a much wider issue and we're getting a little bit out of scope here, much wider issue than Marco's product. For the whole of us in Hyperledger, Ari's and Indy, the question is, you could convince me as an architect and a technical person, yes, of course, I understand that the decentralized sort of blockchain idea of cutting out that middle man of certificate authority, so all that gets great. Of course, it's better, but we've got to sell this product into the wider world to people who don't understand any of this. I've always thought, is blockchain technology in Hyperledger, Ari's and Indy and the decentralized approach so much better than X5 and IPKR that it's actually going to be able to blow that away and take over. Marco was talking about the Swiss government are going to move towards that and I would be very, very easy to hear the reasons why they were going to do that because I worry that our technology is so much better than what's already there that it will actually take off and move beyond anything other than just being a niche. So, Dan, on your side on this one, that's always been my concern. Yeah, it's interesting. In Europe, they're legislating their European digital identity wallet and they've already established EBSI and ECF and I've asked them, would they have two different blockchains in Ethereum based what BESU and Fabric? I'm like, why didn't you decide to use the one Hyperledger project that was purpose-built for identity if you're doing identity, why didn't you use Indy and well, you have to consider it, but anyhow. So, EBSI and ECF are using blockchain but Fabric and BESU. Yeah, and earlier on I was talking about the fact that there are people who are building the sort of Indy SDK type thing into the Fabric, building a proper identity layer that I mentioned what's going on in AFJs for me so it's really, really cool because you get the best of both worlds but yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, that's the point, isn't it? Yeah, Mike, I think I'd add 30 seconds of support and of course obviously I'm a convert to the Church of SSI and I focus in healthcare and so when I look more to the perfect use case, what I can say over the last two years that I've been involved in this looking at it from a healthcare data standpoint, there are not only as you point out architectural efficiencies around a VC and things like OCA when it comes to moving healthcare data of which both the VC and healthcare data are JSON objects. The second thing really does come down to some of these principles about SSI and zero knowledge proofs and when you're dealing with either disenfranchised communities or I mean I'll put it face to face what we're doing dealing with here in the US where all of a sudden we're looking at an issue of healthcare privacy around reproductive rights that compares with any sort of model in a third world country where we're concerned about excuse me low and middle income countries or we're concerned about preserving privacy in connection with discrimination. We've had a recent use case here where HRD surveillance programs are having problems why because people are like I don't understand what you're doing with your data and why are you telling me and again architecturally it's not perfect but the the Indie areas concept and that decentralized approach to credentials offer solutions in that health equity world that the X509 PKD go out to a identity service provider model do not just for my observation. I'm reassured by your by your explanation there Jim because I'm trying to listen I'm a blockchain SSI fetishist like you know bar none I believe in the technology but sometimes I have these little doubts and when you tell me what you've just told me that I kind of like I'm sort of reassured thinking yeah okay I'm on the right lines here because you know it is it is true the European Union did choose X509 PKI for their green past a lot of other vaccine certificates you know coronavirus vaccine passports and so on did didn't go to the blockchain and they could have done but they didn't and I'm kind of thinking well we've got we've got to win this argument if you like it's all SSI I mean X509 PKI still SSI but a different flavor of SSI I'm kind of like how do we how do we kind of overcome that that that sort of conflict if you want to call it that so yeah I very very good answer thank you Jim just in the context of Switzerland asset we're still formulating the law so what they found very important this time is the second time we're trying to have like a identity is they are not going to specify which technology they're going to specify the needs that they have so security privacy data protection all these needs and then see what solutions they are able to develop and I said in these working get up groups where the discussion is that it's highly likely it's going to start out as a PKI and then transition over to the blockchain I've also looked at I've been working on CBDCs as well you know central bank digital currencies that they're going through the same process I've read a lot of papers from you know the ECB the Federal Reserve Bank of England and so on and they're looking at introducing exactly the same kind of ideas in terms of technology it's not very far from credential it's not identity but it's still do we use blockchain or do we not so this this ongoing discussion that we're having here is going to is going to take place again and again and again it will be very interesting Marco to see to see how that that conversation goes in Switzerland yeah where we're excited to yeah hopefully by by by next year we we we know more thank you for your for your demo as well Marco by the way very good thank you I appreciate it thank you all are there any more questions for Marco in the last few minutes of the call all right well Marco thank you so much for this great presentation great video demos too we really appreciate you joining us and giving your perspective as a designer and thank you to everyone for joining providing working group updates and your questions and thoughts in this discussion at the end so thank you all so much and we'll see you in two weeks make sure thank you thank you thank you bye bye bye


So how do you build an audience from scratch? That's what I wanna talk about in this video. And as you probably know, if you've watched my other videos, I am building an audience from scratch on a secret project that I'll reveal at some point down the road when it has more traction so that I can truly experience building an audience from scratch. But I know a lot of you are in the shoes of, you know, in that situation of starting from nothing, or if you already have an audience, you might be interested in what I'm about to say on how to further grow your audience. All right, so the first thing to think about, to remember is that it's not just about the numbers. When you start reading other articles about building an audience, growing an audience, et cetera, they will tend to focus on tactics such as buying Facebook ads to get people to like your page or guest blogging, speaking on podcasts, and also search engine optimization. And these are all good tactics, and I'll talk about that later. But the first and most important thing to remember is that you want the right audience, don't you? You don't just, because I have seen probably at this point dozens of clients and colleagues who have built Facebook pages of thousands of followers, and almost none of those followers are engaging with their content. You might be saying, well, how can that be? Because it's easy to get a couple thousand Facebook fans. Did you know that? It's not hard. You pay about $100, and you get a couple thousand Facebook fans. Would you like to do that? It's easy. You just start a fan page, click on promote, say I want fans and just advertise to any random audience, people in North America, 18 plus, and you'll get a couple thousand fans with just, well, maybe not, I don't know what the pricing is these days because I don't do that because it's fake fans. But it's not hard. So when you look at people with an audience, please don't be impressed. Unless they're audience, you can publicly see that the audience is actually engaging with their content and finding benefit from it, et cetera. A lot of the audiences out there are just what's called vanity metrics. Have you ever heard that term? Vanity metrics is numbers that look impressive, but if you look under the hood, if you look at the behind the scenes, you realize, oh, it's not a real audience. It's just a lot of visitors to a website or a lot of Facebook fans or a lot of Twitter followers. And this is a real audience member right here, mango. Again, I've been working all morning here by myself and he has not jumped up and he's like, great, I've got an audience now. I'm gonna show up. I'm all about consistency of content. So he's here and I swear once I turn off the video, he jumps off, even though I'm just continuing my work here. He has a very weird sense of how to be on camera. Okay, so now he's jumped off already because it doesn't like how I'm talking about him. So please remember that a real audience is what we're going after, a true audience. I call that true fans or a true audience. And you know you have true fans when you can count on them to engage with your content and to take a real look at your product and services when you are offering them, okay? And how do you build a true audience? You don't just use Facebook ads to buy fans or Twitter ads to buy followers. You don't just do search engine optimization and you don't just guest blog and all these other things. These are all tactics, but it has to be under the right strategy. And the right strategy is this. A true audience cares about what you're talking about or writing about, okay?  They care about your content and they care about you, right? They are not just a, you know, drive by, hey, I'm searching online for a solution to a problem. I found your article, got the solution and I'm out of there. Well, we've all done this. We've all been fake fans to other people and there's nothing wrong with that. It's just we've all been drive by fans for other people, right? Cause we're just searching online for something. We find the solution, we find an answer and we're gone. That's it, right? But it's rare that we find somebody we actually want to follow and keep following. And how does that match happen? That match happens because they are talking about something we care about, number one. And they're talking about in the way that we really find resonates with us. So they're the content topics matter to us and the style really resonates with us. And thirdly, we feel like they actually care about what they're doing rather than trying to put us into a funnel, a marketing funnel. When you're in a marketing funnel, you kind of know that, oh, this marketer's trying to get me to do this and then get me to do that and get me to do this, right? Doesn't feel good, does it? It doesn't inspire trust and loyalty.  So it's first, the strategy has to be right. The strategy has to be, no, no, I just don't want numbers. I don't care about 10,000 Facebook fans. That's easy to get. Couple hundred bucks, 10,000 Facebook fans, the numbers are easy to get. They really are, honestly. To look impressive, it's really, really easy these days. But to have an actual business is not easy. To have people actually caring about what you say and then buying your thing and writing reviews, that's not easy and that's what we're really going after here. So, okay, so how do we get there? So as you probably can imagine what I'm about to say, content is king, okay? Consistent content is king and consistent distribution is queen. Content is king is not something I made up. That's well known. Even distribution is queen is not something I made up. That's well known as well. A lot of people don't know that second part. Content is king, distribution is queen. Some of you aren't even doing either one. You're not doing content consistently and you're certainly not knowing how to distribute your content. So let me talk about this here. Content is king and it needs to be consistent, needs to be authentic and it needs to be relevant. Okay, consistent. Why is that important? It's important, primarily consistency of content is important for you to get better at communicating your content. We all have this fantasy that just because we think something is good idea and we write about it, other people will think it's great content. The reality is that if you don't practice, okay? The reality is that if your content's not going viral, when I say viral, if your content is not being shared or liked or commented on, it's not that good. I'll be honest with you. And I say this to myself too. I have, I do, as you know, eight new content pieces every month and probably five out of the eight don't get much likes or comments compared to my maybe three or four out of the eight. People actually do like and want to share forward. But I'm the same person. In a single month, I don't grow that much, right? But it's because the topic is right or my style or skill of communicating it was good, but consistency creates skill over time. You can't expect to have good content in a month. First month you're out of the gate. Wow, great content. I mean, if you've been writing for a while or you've been making videos for a while, then maybe that's the case that you are skillful already. But most of us need to become skillful at writing or making videos, right? Consistency grows your skills.  If you're doing it once a week, your growth goes faster than someone who's doing it once a month. So consistency is key to becoming skillful and creating content that people find interesting. Okay, so consistency. Authenticity is gonna set you apart from everybody else who's just trying to copy what other people are doing and trying to write for search engines and all that stuff. So authenticity. So, and the great thing about authenticity is it's longevity. If you're authentic, you don't have to pretend and you just show up and you're energized because you are actually following your passion and you're energized from within rather than only seeking energy from outside from what other people are saying to you, right? So authenticity creates longevity and longevity of course creates true brilliance and skill and quality over time. You can't expect to be loved when you're first starting out the gate.  I mean, okay, I should say this. I have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. I don't believe you are smart or dumb. I believe you can become brilliant. That's what I believe, truly. I think you can become incredibly brilliant and skillful at communicating and charismatic and amazing. But you don't start out that way.  Unless you're lucky, you don't start out with fans. You start out with silence, people. Okay, so let me talk about this. There's content creation and there's distribution, right? Of course, if you use money and use Facebook ads and you're smart about how to use Facebook ads, most people are not good at Facebook ads and they're like, George, I've tried Facebook ads, it doesn't work. It's not that it doesn't work. You don't know how to use it, right? So if you learn how to use Facebook ads skillfully and you use it to distribute your content, you can actually build a fan base pretty quickly who actually are loyal and actually like your content. That's what I'm doing with my secret project. I'm almost at 100 fans now. That's the second, I'm only in my second month. I'm almost at 100 true fans because people who don't, I didn't ask them to like my page. I just, I didn't ask them to leave and like my posts. I just shared, honestly, my postings. Didn't even ask for any likes or any signups or anything. Just shared my content. I distributed out there to certain audiences in a very skillful way and I'm almost at 100 fans of my page. They had to manually come to my page. They saw my content and they had to manually click on my page itself and decide that they want to like it, right? So anyway, skillful content takes time and then skillful distribution just takes learning. I have a Facebook ads course. You wanna learn from me how to distribute your content skillfully so consistency of content, authenticity and relevance is the third part. Relevance is basically as you get to know your audience, you find out what they really, really need and want from you. You then tune your content over time to what they need and want. Then that takes time to get to know your audience, right? So really the strategy overall, how to build an audience, George. George, please tell me in 10 seconds how to build an audience from scratch. 10 seconds, ready? Content is king, distribution is queen and the content needs to be consistent, authentic and relevant. Is that 10 seconds? It's about 10 seconds, right? End of video, okay? So that's the overall strategy. Now let's talk about the tactics now and the tactics are basically, it goes like this. What do you do? Now that you know the strategy is content is king, distribution is queen, consistency, authenticity, relevance, great. 10 seconds, strategy. Now what do I do? What do I actually do on a daily basis, okay? Paid distribution is the first tactic. If you have no audience yet, please don't expect that you're gonna post something on Facebook and somehow people will find it. Please don't expect that you're gonna just put a blog post up on your website and people will find it. It doesn't work like that on the internet. It doesn't work like that. You've got to pay money for people to see it. Okay, so that's one tactic. I'll give you several tactics. If you have zero money to pay for distribution, I'll talk about that next, but I please pray and hope that you will please spend at least a few dollars a month. I mean, if you can please spend $40 a month on Facebook ads, it will grow your audience so much faster. It will take you a few months instead of a few years. Would you like to take a few years or would you like to take a few months to grow a loyal audience? $40 a month can do that. I'm spending 150 to 300, closer to 300 a month right now on my new project, but you may not have that budget. So please spend $30 a month or $40 a month and it'll take you a year to build a loyal audience, but it won't take you 10 years. People who are not using paid advertising is taking a lot longer, okay? So paid ads, paid distribution, learn how to use Facebook ads, learn how to use Google. I'm gonna be teaching Google ads later this year, so you can learn from me too on how to do Google ads. If you like Twitter a lot, you can do Twitter ads. If you love Instagram, you can do Instagram ads. Twitter and Instagram ads are much easier, so I don't teach those courses. Honestly, they're really, really easy to use, but Facebook ads and Google ads are not that easy to learn how to use effectively, so that's why I teach courses on that, okay? So paid distribution is the number one tactic I recommend for you to build an audience from scratch. Please set aside some money every single month for paid distribution. Think of it as your ministry. Do you contribute money to a charity to your church? Can you take some of that charity and money and put it towards your ads for your Facebook? Do you believe in your message? Well, benefit people's lives, just like your church does, just like the charity, just like Red Cross or Greenpeace or whatever you wanna distribute, just like Habitat for Humanity. Do you believe your content can actually, maybe even change lives, maybe even save lives? Do you believe that?  It's probably a better spend of your money. This sounds terrible, but it probably is a better spend of your money than putting it towards all of your money towards Habitat for Humanity, which is a worthy organization by the way, right? So take some of your charity money, put it towards your ads, okay? All right, and then, so paid distribution is one, are you doing that? Are you doing paid ads for your content? Not to get people to join your email list, not to sell your stuff for your message, for your, look at my content on my, I'm not asking people to join my email list or anything, I'm just blessing them with content, okay? Paid distribution, doing that. The second one is cross promotion. That's another tactic that can grow your audience from scratch and cross promotion is basically, if two people have a similar audience and they like each other and they like each other's content, then why doesn't person A promote person B's best piece of content and person B promotes person A's best piece of content? So you reach out to a peer and you say, hey, we have similar audiences, I really like your content. Take a look at my content. If you like it, here are my three best pieces. Tell me, if you like any one of these three best pieces, maybe we can trade a promotion. I will promote one of your best pieces to my audience so people can find out about you and you could promote one of my best pieces to your audience so people can find out about me. It's a win-win. And generally, to trade promotion means that you and that person has a similar sized audience, not the exact same number of Facebook fans, but maybe within several hundred. Okay, if you have a hundred Facebook fans and they have 300 or 500, that's similar enough, but I have 5,000, don't approach me if you have 500, right? It's not fair, right? It's not fair, but somebody who has 3,000 might approach me with 5,000. Within reasonable range, the promotion could work, right? So I have 5,000, I might reach out to someone with 7 or 8,000 or someone with 2 or 3,000, within range, right? That makes sense. So cross promotion, please do this. It's how I grew my audience really fast in the beginning before I knew how to use Facebook ads. This is 10 years ago before Facebook ads really existed. That's how I grew my audience the fastest. So cross promotion. Guest blogging and podcast speaking is another way to grow an audience. Podcast speaking less so. I know some of you like to speak on podcasts. The problem I have with podcast speaking is that people who listen to podcasts are not in the position to join your audience at that time. Think about it. When do you listen to a podcast?  You listen to it when I'm walking the dog. I might listen to it when I'm washing the dishes. None of those times are when I am at the computer ready to join someone's email list or to like their Facebook page or to go to their website even. I'll listen to a podcast. I'm like, watching my dishes. Listen to podcasts or, you know, like, oh yeah, that's a really, wow, what an amazing person. Wow, I really wanna follow that person. And then I finish my dishes and then I'm cooking dinner now or whatever I'm doing. I've forgotten. I mean, this happens all the time. Same thing.  So podcast speaking, in my opinion, is really good to network with the host of the podcast. I speak on podcasts on a regular basis because the host tends to then hire me to become their coach or whatever. That works pretty well. But the audience, unless it's a really big audience, actually this Sunday I'm promoting a podcast that I spoke on that had a pretty big audience and a lot of those folks decided to join my, they went to my website and joined my email list without any kind of coercion. They just mentioned, you know, the podcast host just mentioned the website, you know, that's it. It was a big enough audience where that worked. But most podcasts that you're gonna speak on don't have a giant audience like that. You know, they might have a couple hundred, a couple hundred downloads per episode. That's a tiny, tiny audience. But when a podcast has tens of thousands of downloads per episode, now you actually might build an audience doing that. But anyway, so podcasts speaking, not so much, but guest blogging for sure can build an audience. Meaning somebody who wants to create consistent content, but they don't want to be the one to always be creating it, you can then step in and say, hey, I'd love to write an article for your audience. Obviously it'll come from me and I'll put my bio at the bottom and people can then find me or learn about me on my website. So guest blogging is much more effective for building an audience than podcast speaking unless you're speaking to a giant audience on a podcast. But even a relatively small guest blog, somebody who has a couple hundred readers a month, you could build a little bit of an audience that way because guess what? When they're reading a blog post, they're at the computer or they're at their phone. They're reading and by the end of it, maybe you mentioned something, a post on your website, when you're writing a guest blog, I recommend that you try to link to your own website. Try to link to your website at least once during the article itself and of course in your bio as well at the bottom. And so they're reading and they'll click on the link and they'll go to your website. So when they're reading an article, they're capable of taking action, go into a website, signing up for a newsletter or something. Podcast listening, not so much. So anyway, guest blogging or podcast speaking. And then the last thing I'll say is SEO, search engine optimization is another way of building an audience. And the way to do SEO, and I'm gonna teach a whole class on this, but I'll just be really, really quick about it and I wanna end the video. Search engine optimization, first of all, is a black box. You have to first realize that. Google is not going to tell you what their algorithm, how they figure out their algorithm. Everybody is guessing. Just like Facebook does not tell any of us what their algorithm is, we are all just guessing. Why? Because if Facebook or Google or any other site tells us what their algorithm is, if they make it public, you know what happens? Spammers, well, there are very, very smart spammers who will then take advantage of the algorithm and then all the links, all the content will be spam. That's why all these companies have to make it secret. And we are all of us marketers, all of us are just guessing. Did you know that? We're just like, well, based on what we're finding, oh my God, how come this piece of content was so high on the algorithm? Well, compared to all the patterns that I'm seeing, it's probably this. Every marketer, every search engine expert is only guessing, but they're using educated estimates based on the pattern recognition they've noticed. So based on our guesses, our best guesses right now is that Google really cares about other websites linking to your website. So search engine optimization, people used to say, well, it's about keywords and it's about having the keywords and the title of your article. That still does help, okay? So you may want to do keywords research, keyword research, the simplest tool that I can give you is called Keywords Everywhere. So keywordseverywhere.com. Go there, it's a free tool, you install it, and then when you Google, you'll start to be able to easily do keyword research just by Googling once the plugin is installed on your browser, okay? Keywordseverywhere.com. Okay, I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just a user of their service. So keywords, so basically the way that search engines work is people type in what they're looking for and Google wants to help them finish their search as fast as possible, okay? So if they type in what they're looking for and your website comes up and Google notices they click onto your website and they don't come back to Google, Google says that was a success and we're gonna reward this website with higher search engine rankings. In other words, your website helped determinate the search. Google has done its job, that's what Google wants to do. Because if I search for something and I click on your website and I'm like, no, that wasn't helpful and I go back to Google and I keep searching, Google says, wow, that website wasn't helpful because this person is continuing their search. Like it's taking them longer to find what they're looking for. So they will downgrade the websites that don't help them fully, person has come back to Google and they will upgrade the websites that people don't come back from because they assume that they have finished. So that's one factor, that's really, really big. Another really big factor that Google says, well, how do we know it's not just a spam website that kept the person there? Well, we know that because other people, other websites are linking to this website using these keywords to link to that. So therefore we know that this website seems to be valuable and respected because other websites are linking to it. So essentially SEO is about trying to terminate people's searches when they find what they're looking for. You have to first figure out what people are looking for which is what keywords research is and then terminate the search by having such a valuable webpage. It's like, oh, I'm looking for blah, blah, blah.  I didn't go back to Google, I just, it was so great. It was so helpful, so resourceful. That's all I needed, right? So that's why content is king, right? That's why content is king because if the content isn't good, people don't care and they don't link to it, they don't come, they come back to Google, they keep going. And then the second major factor, like I said, is backlinks, right? Which is basically going out to various bloggers and various websites and say, hey, I've written a really, really valuable article here. I thought maybe your audience would benefit if you decide it's valuable. I'd be grateful and honored if you were to link to it. So it's that kind of work, right? It's keywords research, it's modifying your article to meet the keywords. It's not so much the words anymore, it's the topic, it's the idea. Google is smart enough now that you don't have to use the exact words anymore. But if you're writing about that topic and it's really valuable, then they will bump it up in the search engines, right? So, and then if people are linking to it, they will bump it up. So anyway, so to summarize, okay, you first have to get the overall strategy right or maybe it's even values, right? Focus on content. Content is king. Distribution is queen. If you have content but you're not using any of distribution methods to get it out there, no one will ever see it, even if it's the most valuable article in the world, right? Nobody knows about it, right? So content is king, yes, but then distribution is queen, equally important, right? And the content's gotta be consistent for your own skills, really. It's really more for your own skills but also for your audience needs to be able to count on you. Remember an audience, a true audience is what we're looking for. A true audience says, you know what, I feel like I can count on you. I can always count on you to come back and you have got new and fresh and valuable content for me. So consistency is for your own skill building and for your audience's reliability on you, okay? Trust in you. Authenticity so that you can have longevity. You don't burn out. Authenticity, you show up as you are so you don't burn out. You don't pretend to be anybody else. You don't have to put on makeup if you don't like to put on makeup. Talk about women here. Some of you do like to put on makeup. You enjoy it. It's fun for you. Great, then that's part of your authenticity. But if you hate putting on makeup, you like doing it just for the video, it's not sustainable for you to do that. So stop doing it. People will love you anyway without makeup, believe it or not. Your true fans love you if you don't, again, if you don't love putting on makeup, don't put on makeup. Your true fans will love you anyway, okay? Hopefully I've just given you some of you women permission to be yourself, however that means for you, right? Authenticity and then relevance. Learn about your audience over time. Make more content for what their wants and needs are, matched with what yours are as well, okay? Overall strategy and then tactics, paid advertising, paid distribution, cross promotion, guest blogging and search and channel optimization. So those are the four key tactics for growing an audience once you get the strategy right. So anyway, I hope this is valuable and helpful and let me know if you have any questions. Want to thank some of you who are able to join me live. I see Captain and Alejandra, thank you so much. Let's see here, Alejandra wrote, yeah, let's see here, Alejandra wrote that, something I noticed is that the response I get from my Spanish speaking audience is way richer and more active than the English speaking. I may have to do with the fact that the English speaking world, there are many more people teaching what I teach versus the Spanish speaking world that is not saturated. That definitely has something to do with it. Yes, so that certainly in other words, it's less cost for you to distribute your content to the Spanish speaking world, right? It just versus you're competing with many more English speaking folks. So Alejandra says, would appreciate how to engage in English speaking. So Alejandra, the one thing I would say is this, you have to practice, I'm not saying it's you, but I'm just saying that what the evidence is showing is that your English speaking audience doesn't find your communication compelling enough yet, interesting enough. So the homework for you is to keep practicing different ways of communicating your message and noticing observing which pieces resonate with them and noticing the patterns over time. Oh, of all the things I talk about, these two or three things really resonate with my English speaking audience, then say more about those things. So visibility, observation, and then modifying your content based on your observations, right? That's really the thing for all of us to do. But so I'm not talking about you and not being skilled while I'm saying all of us can become more skillful, right? Captain, thanks for your comment says, I recently joined a couple of Facebook groups made up primarily a fellow bloggers trying to help each other get engagement for their content. So yes, cross promotion, right? With them, I jumped from page five, from five page likes to 121 right now. So the question is, this is a good strategy. I understand that not all of them are true fans, but I feel like I'm getting starting to get feedback from people. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, cross promotion. That's what we're talking about here. So however you can, brilliant. Thank you for mentioning. And Facebook groups, joining Facebook groups of peers, you can find people to cross promote with. So yes, no, I think it's a fine idea. But whether or not they're true fans, it's, yeah, I think you have to balance it. It's true.  It's kind of like, that's why I don't invite my friends and family to like my fan pages on Facebook, or I don't send my blog posts to my friends and family, because they'll write back and say, oh, I'm proud of you, great way to go, but they're not my true fan. I mean, a few of them might be, a few of them might actually be seeking out my content, but most of them are just being nice.  That's a thing to balance. Are they just being nice, or are they genuinely like interested in your content?  So it works against you when you have fake fans. That's the irony of it. That's why you have to be really careful to build the true audience, right? So you just balance it out if it's a true cross promotion with a real audience of people who might like your stuff, then I think it's a good idea. So I hope this is helpful, and Ian, thanks for joining and saying hi, and Jill as well. So thanks everybody. Have a great, I wish you a joyful experience and consistency in your joy. Coming back to the reason why you're doing this is to serve people and to become a better person, to grow your own skills. Keep coming back to your purpose so that you can be truly sustainable in your audience building. Be well, take care. Any questions, let me know.


This was isolated between the two students at no time was there a lockdown or any need for a lockdown. There was no threat to the other students in school. It was only between the two that were involved in the actual assault and the threat, please.


Life often presents us with choices. Now, sometimes the choices, although are hard, it's not such a big deal when we choose. I mean like Pokemon sword versus Pokemon shield. Which one do I get? You know, in the end, it's probably not gonna make much of a difference. But in some situations, particularly when money is involved, the different choices, they're sort of a clear-cut best choice, right? You know, if I do this, I have these two options, right?  But it's one cheaper than the other, right? We can often use some type of quantitative analysis to make decisions about what's the best thing to do with respect to money and other quantitative variables of some kind. So what I want to do right here is in this example, I want to present you a hypothetical situation where an individual has to make a purchasing choice and clearly the individual wants to make the best choice so that he can save the most money. So he has two options to do and which one's gonna be the best one for him. So this is the situation. You need to buy chicken for dinner tonight, right? And so let's say we're in a situation where it's like, oh, you started making the food, you threw the marinades and the seasonings or the sauces, whatever together.  Therefore, we really can't stop making it because then all the ingredients we use so far would go to waste. So we'll just make a quick run to the store and purchase some chicken. Well, you remember noticing an ad for chicken on sale at the grocery store that's across town. They're selling their chicken for two dollars and ninety-nine cents per pound. While the grocery store that's really close to you and you usually shop at, you remember, they sell chicken usually about three dollars and fifty-nine cents a pound. So the other store has cheaper chicken, but it is farther away. So there's sort of like these competing forces going on, cheaper chicken, but the farther you travel, the more fuel costs you'd have to spend and there's also usage of time right there. And so what is the best option? What's the best option for for you or for this hypothetical person? Well, we have to actually collect some data first before we can really answer that question because if we just look at the surface value, it's like, well, the other store is cheaper, so maybe we go there. But let's actually stop and think about it. Some questions we might ask ourselves to help us decide whether this is the right choice or not. Which choice is the right choice? Well, first of all, how much chicken will we actually be buying, right? And so with the amount of chicken we already have and the amount of people we have to feed and looking at what the recipe demands, we realize that we still need five pounds of chicken. So we're going to go to the store and buy five pounds of chicken. Well, how far are the two stores away? Well, the local store that you usually buy, I mean, they're both local inside the town here, but the store you usually go to is 2.2 miles away. And that usually takes about nine minutes of driving where it's 2.2 miles one way. But total, it's about nine minutes of driving there and come back, right? The other store, it is 8.2 miles away. And I do love, I love on this problem how the store is across town, but then it's only 8.2 miles away.  That's fine. So it's 8.2 miles away and around trip would take about 26 minutes to drive there and back with the speed limits and things like that. So we have that information. OK, well, does distance cost me anything? Well, not directly, right? When you drive your car, let's just assume the individual is driving a car right here. There's fuel cost, right? Your typical combustion engine will consume gasoline based upon how far it travels. And then there is a difference between driving in the city and driving on the freeway and things like that. So we're just doing city driving here. So what kind of mileage does your car get? It gets 23 miles per gallon when you drive through the city. And so again, that's not exactly the cost, right? There's going to the cost is going to be coming from the gasoline. So we have to somehow convert from miles to gasoline. But then gasoline has the cost. We know our car can hold about 13 gallons when it's full. And the current rate of gas for this town would be $3 and 81 cents per gallon. So this kind of is some data we've collected that's going to be pertinent to the problem at hand. What is the cheaper option? The close store or the far store when it comes to buying this chicken? So we actually want to sit down and think about as we as we look at this problem, what are the actual costs? And so what we're doing right now is essentially a modeling problem. We're trying to model using functions, whether we realize it or not. If if you were actually thinking about this problem, whether you actually come up with here's my linear function, or you just came up with some numbers and crunch them together, we are modeling using functions that are cognizance of that doesn't actually matter here. So some things to consider is there's going to be the cost of the chicken, right? So the cost of chicken. How are we supposed to determine the cost of the chicken? Well, the cost of the chicken is going to be determined by which store we go to, right? So we can think of in the following way, we're going to buy five pounds of chicken that is going to be fixed. And then what is somewhat variable here is our variable X, which will say that X is going to equal the price per pounds of chicken here. Now, one store, we see that the X value, you know, so for the for the close store, we see that X is going to equal $3.49, so you're going to write this way. And so this is of course, if we go to our usual store. On the other hand, if we go to the farther store with the store across town, in that situation, our X value is going to equal just $2.99. So this variable depends on which of the two options we're going to take. Great. That's part of the function. But another important part of the function is going to be the cost of travel, traveling to the store, right? So as we travel, what what's going to be affecting this? Well, some things we can see here, that'll be the same as that the distance we travel is going to make a difference, right? So one store is one distance, one store is the other distance. And we can analyze that real quick. So the locals, the closer store, the usual store, we see that it's 2.2 miles away. And so in that situation, that would be our D value. The fact that it's nine minutes driving doesn't really matter too much because we're I mean, time means something. But is there are we actually going to attach some monetary value to the time? Some people like to say the thing like, oh, pick your favorite rich person. Like Bill Gates is so rich that if he saw a hundred dollar bill on the floor, he wouldn't even stop to pick it up because he would lose money doing that, which, of course, is a ridiculous statement to say. Like you think if he ever takes a moment to like cough or go to the bathroom, he's no longer making money. No, that's not how it works. So yes, he can afford to stop for what, five seconds at most to pick up a hundred dollar bill. Time doesn't exactly work that way. Maybe if you're on the clock with a wage position, you know, taking a break or something might mean you're not making money. But we're talking about making dinner, which most likely we're not on the clock right now with our job. The time is an opportunity cost. Yes, but it's like, oh, you know, the nine minutes here because the other one would take about 17 minutes longer to do. What are you going to do with that 17 minutes play Minecraft or whatever? It turns out, I would say here that the time is really sort of this extra information that's not going to have really any bearing on it. Again, it's about a difference of 20 minutes in time, but that's somewhat inconsequential, I think, in the consideration here. I mean, maybe maybe it'll be relevant, but we'll come back to it later on. The distance is really going to be the big deal here. The distance to travel to your store is 2.2 miles. And then the distance to travel to the other store is going to be 8.2 miles. But that's not exactly true because when you go the distance, you actually do have to come back, right? And so because it's a round trip, it's 2.2 miles one way or 8.2 miles one way. So we really need to take that distance in times by two. So 2D, make sure we're getting the correct value. But that's just the distance traveled. That's not exactly the cost, right? So this is the distance that you're going to have to drive your car. And it's useful to keep track of measurements here. This will be this will be measured in miles right here. Well, what else is going to affect the cost then? Well, we saw earlier, like we mentioned this here, that our car that we're driving to get there, it'll average 23 miles per gallon. So that's going to affect things, right? I can use this to convert from distance to gallons, which has a cost, right? It costs three point eight one dollars per gallon. Well, here's a question you have to often ask yourself, am I going to multiply by this rate or am I going to divide by this rate and how do I even know it's a rate? Well, you'll see that the units right here, miles per gallon. When you see the word per right here, this is in some little kitty cat. This is division, right? Miles per gallon, same thing going on down here. We talk about dollars per gallon, which is very explicit with the division right here when you see that fraction bar. So these these rates have to do some type of vision. And if you're ever uncertain about, should I be dividing by the rate or multiplying by the right, use the units to help you clarify things. If I take something that's measured in miles and I multiply it by miles per gallon, that would give me miles squared per gallon, which is like, I don't think I need that. I would like to have gallons. So if you take miles and you divide it by miles per gallon, you're going to take miles and times it by gallons over miles for which the miles then cancel out, giving you gallons. So if we take the miles we have to travel and we divide it by. So let's actually write this as division here. And if we divide it by the rate of miles per gallon, so we take the 23 miles, whoops, miles per gallon like so. If we take the 2D and divide it by miles per gallon, this then will come together and this will give us something in gallons. Like I said, miles times miles per gallon gives you gallons. But again, gallons isn't the cost. The cost is going to come from dollars per gallon. So we have, we know the cost is going to be three dollars and 81 cents per gallon. So what should I multiply by that? Or should I should I divide by that? Same thing, use the units, right? Currently, what I have built is something measured in gallons. If I times gallons by dollars per gallon, I would get dollars, which is what I want. If I took gallons and divided it by dollars per gallon, that would be given gallons squared per dollar, which is not what I want. You can often use the units in play to help you determine whether you should be multiplying or dividing by the rate. So in this situation, we're going to multiply by the dollars, three dollars and 81 cents per gallon, knowing that the gallons would cancel out. And then the unit here is going to be in dollars. It's money, which is how you measure costs. And that's the same thing we saw over here, right? Because the X value right here is being measured in dollars per pound. And so the pounds will cancel out, giving you just a measurement in dollars. So let's put this together and see what we now have. So our cost function, when we put things together, we get the following cost is going to equal, of course, the cost. Let me make this a little bit bigger. When we put these things all together, it's going to be the cost of chicken. Plus the cost of travel. So those are the things we have to put together when we work with this cost function. And so therefore, when we put these things together, we see the following. I'm going to try to simplify things a little bit. So we're going to have this five X, which came from the cost of the chicken. And then we're going to add this to what I'm going to actually kind of simplify this thing a little bit because we have this variable D. But if you take two times the three dollars and 81 cents and you divide that by twenty three, I'm just putting this in my calculator real quick, you're going to get a rate of zero point three, three, one. And you don't need to have every decimal here. But if you just kind of write the, you know, I'm going to put way more than I need that way. When I'm done, I can round and be perfectly fine. So if you take that number two times and I'll summarize what we did right here. So this number, I just took all the constants here, two times three point 81 divide that by twenty three. That's where this came from two point three point eight one over twenty three. That's this value right here. And so this now gives me a linear function for my cost. It is a linear function with two variables, but we know what the information is in this situation. So there's of course the there's the close store. I think we did that one in green, actually. There was the close store, which remember our X value was three dollars and forty nine cents. And our D value was eight point two. And I'll just double check to make sure that's our data. Oh, no, I'm sorry. The close or was close right for a reason, right? So it's two point two, two point two. And before I forget, then, the far store, it had an X value of two dollars and ninety nine cents. And then the distance was that was eight point two. And let me just double check the numbers one more time to make sure. And I should mention that we we also talked about how the car it can hold 13 gallons, although that is a quantitative measurement that doesn't really have any effect on the decision right here. So we're going to ignore that. So now we want to plug these into our function and see what happens. So the cost of going to the close store, this is going to be five times three point four nine. And then we're going to add that to point three three one times two point two. And so I'm going to put that in my calculator real quick times that by, you know, putting the two point two. And you're going to add also the cost of the chicken. Sorry, I can't really show you this. I mean, this is something you want to use a calculator for. This, when you when you do these numbers, you're going to get. Eighteen dollars and 18 cents. I'm just going to round to the nearest penny because with US dollars, we don't have a denomination smaller than penny. So all these extra decimal places, we can just kind of round. We don't necessarily want to round to the 100th place too early. We want to have at least a thousandth place, maybe a 10,000th place would be good enough so that when we round here, we're not off and I know a penny is not much, but we it's not too much extra to hold on to those extra decimal places. So just do that. If we do the cost of going to the farther away store, we're going to get five times two point nine. That's where the savings will be made. But then we have to do point three three one times eight point two. That one's a farther away store. So the cost might be higher to travel there. So let's take a look at that. If we plug in the numbers, you'll excuse me for one second. As I do that, we get the following again, rounding this to two decimal places. You're going to get seventeen dollars and sixty seven cents. So we can now see that when you compare these things side by side, that the farther away store is the is the cheaper option, right? The savings that you make on the chicken outweigh the the cost of traveling there. It does take another about 20 minutes extra time. But also when you take the difference of these things, right? If you take the difference of the two, how much savings are you actually going to make? You're going to get a savings of, well, point five one. That is fifty one cents, so half a buck. And so that's sort of like the cost benefit analysis that we can make based upon this decision. Is the 17 minutes of extra travel worth saving fifty one cents? Fifty one cents, of course, is not a large amount of money. And therefore, many of us might actually choose the convenience over the price, right? But, you know, if you really want to save money, take the extra time and save yourself the fifty one cents. That we have to make these decisions based upon that. Now, of course, on different types of purchasing, like if you purchase a car or furniture or a home, these situations are just much more complicated. But also the savings can easily come to hundreds if not thousands of dollars. And so this type of analysis is very useful. And I want to mention here that the type of function that was in play here was just a linear function. Well, we had basically this direct variation between the cost of chicken and the amount of chicken we're going to buy or, in this case, the store we go to. And then we also had this direct variation of the cost between traveling, the cost of traveling and then how much we actually travel. And so, yeah, we might have an equation with multiple variables, but we're able to find those variables and we set up a linear function for each of the variables individually and then we added them all together. This type of quantitative analysis, these problem solving skills, are really essential to be a successful citizen in life. And it doesn't often take much more than just a little bit of use of linear models. And so I hope this can kind of prep you for our quiz, which you have to you'll have to deal with a similar problem, helping Alejandro make a decision about a big purchase coming up in his life.


Now, here is another very interesting question says, the ratio of the sum of n terms of two APs is 7n plus 1 is to 4n plus 27. You have to find the ratio of their mth term. So what's given? Let's write there are two APs, first of all, two APs are there, two APs, okay, two APs are there, all right. And it's given, let's say a1, d1 and a2, d2 are first term and common difference of both APs, okay. So first assume this one, a1, d1 and a2, d2 are first terms and common difference of both APs, okay, right. Now it's given ratio of the sum of n terms, right. So let me write it as sn1 for the first AP and sn2 for second AP. And this is given as 7n plus 1 and 4n plus 27, right. First n terms of first AP is, you know, divide by first n terms of second AP, the sum of both these n terms is 7n plus 1 and 4n plus 27, okay. Now what is to be found out? We have to find out ratio of their mth terms. So we have to find out sm, sorry not s, am, am1, am for the first one and am for the second one is what is the question, okay. So now that we have summarized the question, let's try to find this out, okay. So let's first keep an eye on what is to be found out, am1 meaning a plus m minus 1, d1 for the first AP, second AP, a2 plus m minus 1, d2, right. This is the ratio of the mth term of both the APs. So this is what we have to achieve, okay. Now let's see what's given, sn1 is given, what is sn1? So sum of first n terms n by 2 twice a1 plus n minus 1, d1, correct. And the same thing for the second AP, n by 2 twice a2 plus n minus 1, d2, correct. And this is equal to 7n plus 1 divided by 4n plus 27. Now whenever such questions are there where you have to go from this format to this format, it's not a good idea to cross multiply and try and simplify because you see there are four variables a1, d1, a2, d2. So you will not be able to solve for all, that means you will not be able to find out a1, d1, a2, d2 because there is only one equation given. So hence you have to play with the format, that is whatever is required, let's see we can convert one format to the other format or not. Okay, so clearly this n by 2, n by 2 goes. So what's left? I can see I have 2 a1 but there is no 2 in this case, see no 2. So you have to somehow detach 2 from that a1. So what can I do? Can I not take 2 common and write like this a1 plus n minus 1 by 2, d1, okay and similarly in the denominator I can again extract 2 and write a2 plus n minus 1 by 2, d2, right and this is equal to 7n plus 1 by 4n plus 27, isn't it? Now if you see now our this step expression under LHS is looking somewhat similar to whatever we want, this 2 and 2 will go but there is a problem that there is n minus 1 by 2 somehow I want to get it converted to m, right? If that is equal to m then my problem is solved or m minus 1 rather. So can I not deliberately put it, what do I mean? Can I say let n minus 1 by 2 be equal to m minus 1, let, okay, when will that be possible? So this will be possible when n by 2 minus 1 by 2 is equal to m minus 1. That means how do I find n in terms of m? So what is n then? So n by n minus 1 will be equal to twice m minus 1 and hence n is equal to 1 plus 2m minus 2 that is 2m minus 1. So when n is 2m minus 1, right, this is possible, this thing is possible, right? So I am saying when n is equal to 2m minus 1 then n minus 1 by 2 will be equal to m minus 1 simply. So let us put n is equal to 2m minus 1 across the equation. So at n is equal to 2m minus 1, let this equation be called 1. At n is equal to 2m minus 1, 1 will become what? Simply put wherever you see n, put 2m minus 1. So you will get a1 plus 2m minus 1 minus 1 by 2d1, right? So let me just, yeah, so that it is in one frame and this is, second is a1, sorry, a2 plus 2m minus 1 minus 1 by 2d2 and this is equal to, now again here in terms of, in place of n, right, 2m minus 1 plus 1 and in the denominator, right, 4 into 2m minus 1 plus 1, right? What did we do? In this expression, if this is true for any n, I can substitute n for 1, 2, 3, 5, whatever and it will hold because this was given, this is given, isn't it? So if whatever value of n I put in the LHS, if I put the same thing in the RHS, it will hold. So I simply put n is equal to 2m minus 1 and what do I get?  Minus 4, isn't it? So sorry, what was the, sorry, it is 27, it's not 4 into n plus 27, so you have to write 27, so there's a mistake here, this is 27, okay? So you have to write 27 here and simplify, what is this, 14m minus 6 divided by 8m minus or rather plus 23, right? It is 14m minus 6 divided by 8m plus 23 and what is there in the LHS? If you look closely, what is this? Isn't the numerator am for the first AP and the denominator is am for the second AP, right? And this is equal to 14m minus 6 by 8m plus 23 and this is exactly what you had to find out, ratio of mth term of both the APs, right? Hence, this is the, hence it is found out, right? This is what you have to find out, ratio of mth term of first AP and that of second AP, correct? So how did we solve this guys? So I told you, don't cross multiply the first equation which is the given constraint or a condition which you had, don't cross multiply and try finding a1d1, you will not be able to, why? Because there are four variables a1d1, a2d2. So hence that will not be helpful. Instead of that, I tried to transform one expression into the other by some manipulation on both sides and here the manipulation was, if n becomes 2m minus 1, then on the left hand side, you could get am that is mth term and accordingly change the ratio on the right hand side and you get the desired result.


Gary, you often show your cards when it comes to your secret in business.  But at what point do you value hustle at the expense of your humanity? Does your commitment to the former ever impinge on your embodiment of the latter? If so, what do you do about it? And if not, how do you avoid it?


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