Sleep, sustenance, sex, my favorite things in life, all require shelter. Having somewhere safe and affordable to live is the literal foundation of our existence and yet, everywhere across Europe, it's getting less and less affordable. When I see homeless people on the street, I really can't imagine how you can survive like that. We want to have them integrate in the society. Just because you say that everyone has to have a home to live, that doesn't have to mean that it is free. That feels like quite an elementary expectation. Now it's worth like 30 million euros. We could sell it and all become rich, you know? The good conscience is the one thing that these huge real estate management agencies don't offer. This is nothing we want to have, I think. We really have to work against that. So you want oligarchs to pay more? Yeah. Okay. I would just really decommodify housing completely. Welcome to Standard Time. I'm Mereika Kingopop, your host and the editor-in-chief of Eurazine, the online magazine presenting this show. Eurazine has a network of more than 100 cultural journals, whose publishing we present to a global readership. We're also proud co-founders of the Display Europe platform, showcasing diverse content from across Europe in 15 languages. Now a home isn't just a roof over our heads. It's a necessity and many of us think of it as a basic human right. As a millennial, I've had ample time to understand that I will never own one myself. Today, building wealth through wages is only available for a very select few high earners. The only tenable means to settle down seems to be inheritance. But what if your ancestors, like mine, didn't leave you with a countryside villa or a downtown loft? Across European cities, real estate markets have turned into a hotbed for speculation. From 2021 to 2022, in a single year, residential property prices increased by more than 9% on an EU average. But some countries experience the brunt of this rise. For instance, house prices rose by over 20% in Estonia, Czechia, Hungary and Lithuania, closely followed by the Netherlands and Slovakia. Okay, so I won't be able to buy an apartment or a house, but that doesn't mean I can't rent one, right? Wrong. The rental market is in even more turmoil and those affected by it tend to be more vulnerable financially. In Estonia, prices more than doubled since 2010 and in Hungary, Poland and Ireland, the rise for rent was over 75% over the past eight years.  In 2021, 17% of the EU population lived in overcrowded households. Nearly 7% were unable to keep their homes adequately warm and 8.3% experienced explicit housing poverty. That means they spend 40% or more of their whole household income only on housing. Homelessness is increasing and a great many political actors abuse this situation for fear-mongering against those who are forced to sleep in the streets. The public hatred against the visibly poor has roots reaching back at least 500 years of European history. And real estate ownership is becoming a political watershed in many countries again. This is especially notable in England where the most likely determining factor of a voter's party reference is whether or not they own a home or have passive income from real estate. But there are solutions. Many European countries have a lot of experience in social and supported housing from the 19th and 20th century. As the Industrial Revolution brought great masses to urban centers, this pressure ignited public housing, first as tenement blocks and boarding houses. Many of the historic city centers we admire today were actually built under this pressure. But housing investment exploded threefold in the aftermath of the world wars, as nations had to find rapid solutions for large numbers of people displaced by the war and for those who lost existing homes in the destruction. And that's where housing projects were born. They may not be the greatest tourist attractions, but I for one loved those concrete monstrosities. I spent most of my childhood in the concrete jungle of Örökesvöld, a 1980s mega-project housing 10,000 inhabitants on the eastern grazing pastures of the then-expending Nyeret Hässe, my hometown in the northeast of Hungary. I fondly remember those big ol' stretched-out playgrounds, the dark staircases and especially having a roof over my head as a child. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone. I live in a similar concrete blockhouse here in Vienna, where I rent an apartment built in the 1950s. I have to say it hasn't disappointed me. I can wash my person in there, sleep without freezing to death.  But as firm as many of these projects still stand, social housing is not as popular as it once was. Many nation-states subsidize middle- and upper-class wealth-building instead of solutions for the poor. But there are remaining devotees. Finland, for instance, has introduced a method to cut the Gordian knot. The policy of housing first deals with homelessness by, well, providing homes to the unhoused. What an ingenious idea! You can read about this and much more in yours in Focal Point room temperature. In many other countries, municipalities and NGOs are at the forefront advocating for more humane policies, innovating in technology and in ownership structures, and some of them even build their own houses. And we have their colleagues with us today. Ekker Out is the editor of the urbanist magazine Deriv, whose collective is behind the Urbanize Festival. They build this housing block, Bikes and Rails, here in Vienna, a project whose apartment units cannot be monetized. We'll talk about what this means with LK in just a minute. And in true Eastern Europe style, we have two ladies from Budapest who will be crashing on my couch tonight, here in Vienna, after the stock. It's not like we have a budget for hotel rooms or anything. Lenke Palfi and Adi Achurek are the colleagues of the NGO From Streets into Homes, pioneering the housing first method in Hungary. They help rough sleepers move into affordable rental housing. They also advocate for affordable rental housing provision to become the institutional national policy solution to homelessness. So let's curl up on the couches of Bikes and Rails and talk shelter. I would like to start the conversation by asking the three of you to clarify what housing first as an approach as a methodology means. We can see in Hungary in the institutions that deal with homelessness, the main process that they follow is the staircase model, which means that hierarchy of shelters from the ones that are very low threshold and you can only spend a night there. And then there are the ones which are for longer term, but two years maximum. And as opposed to this, housing first says that housing should be given to every human. It has to be applied to the special needs of that person and it has to be provided for however long that person needs it. For some it might just be a year or two, but for some people this might mean that they need it till the end of their lives. Could you tell me about what are the exact sort of services and support that you provide in your daily work? Yes, so when we start working with our tenants, usually we start social work before they move into a municipality owned or a privately owned social housing agency flat. We want to help them integrate in the society by organizing these community events and like self-help groups maybe or like community groups. We have like a women's group, we have a group for like new tenants and old tenants to help each other out. Our social workers go to trainings so they can help our tenants deal with their trauma. Peer support is pretty important and it's something that we only recently started to do in our organization. Elke, your focus is very broad in terms of imagining and understanding cities but this staircase model applied in many cases in dealing with homelessness or an approach to housing poverty. This sounds like a 16th, 17th century approach to thinking poor people have to work to become sort of worthy of having housing. Is that completely mistaken or is that really somehow this prejudice included there? No, I'm sure you're right.  It can also be the other way around to cope with this stress. So I think it's very important and actually more and more countries I think go into this direction of the housing first programs. It's an NGO in Vienna. They run a housing first program and it's scientifically, you know, so the universities are in as well to do research on it, how it works and to really monitor it and as it seems the results are brilliant, like overwhelmingly brilliant more than they expected. So just get back on track and can like get into what you would call a decent life again through giving them like a company by social work, but just providing housing for them. I always think when I see homeless people on the street, I really can't imagine how you can survive like that, you know, to have a room of your own, you know, or a flat or apartment of your own where you can lock the door and it's your home and there you are safe and you know it is like an essential part of human life, I think. I agree. I really prefer having places with like a toilet to use so that I don't have to do this in the street or as you say, just having a door that sort of delineates a personal space that feels like quite an elementary expectation. So I often wonder why our societies don't think that people should be entitled to this. What I've noticed pretty recently is that when you just describe this model to someone they very often misunderstand it either on purpose or like actually just because you say that everyone has to have a home to live that doesn't have to mean that it is free from streets to homes, associations, all of our tenants pay for their housing and I would guess it is the same ratio of their income as most people on the market do. So it's actually a completely fair model. Sir, can we stop there? Because I think that being poor is really expensive, right? So how does this play out when you are living in housing poverty? What's your experience? One thing is that you cannot make long-term investments in any part of your life, be that your home improvements or electricity or gas bills or anything. Many of our clients have these meters that you have to put money in and then you have the electricity until it runs out and it is also a more expensive system. So I think most things are cheaper when you can invest in them for a long term and that is something that they cannot do. Also their health, the conditions that they had to live in made it a lot worse than the rich persons and like being unhealthy is obviously a costly thing. I think the government funded a research lately that showed that the housing first model is not effective, which I don't know how they did because also in our organization. I have a couple of guesses how the Hungarian government comes to its data points. So even our success rate is somewhere around 90-95 percent, but obviously it's very... Resource intensive? Resource intensive, yeah. This is EU speak for costly, right? But not really like expensive, like insanely expensive but needs investment and presence, right? I think there is like this concept in people's head that it's more expensive to run this program but if they spend this amount of money into like housing first programs, there would be like more people who would get out of homelessness. Now let's talk a word about who made this discussion possible. We owe a big thank you to our partner journal, Deriv and the housing project Bikes and Rails here in Vienna who are housing us right now. If you are around, check them out and now back to the conversation. Elke, your scholar obviously studying this, we also have personal experience with this particular housing project. Please explain to us how this works with bikes and rails that it cannot be monetized. Bikes and Rails housing project, it's a project that was completely planned and also is still self-organized by a bunch of people who got together. We were like 30 grown-ups and around 14 kids. We really wanted to make sure that we can sustain affordable living here. One of the models we found, we knew it before because in Germany it's actually active. It has been implemented in the beginning of the 90s. It's a special legal construction. The people who live in it have got complete control over this house. So there's no third party who makes money with the house which keeps rents really low. We sort of copied this model, this German model. In Austria it's called Habitat and the model is like every housing project is autonomous but is also part of sort of a roof organization, the Habitat. And this roof organization actually has got only two tasks to fulfill. One task is to sort of check beforehand when projects start to support them on one hand but on the other hand also check if they have got a solid financial plan, development plan, whatever. And also help projects with that, you know, to go through that. And the other task is okay, we built this with 5 million euros. That's what it costs more or less, this house. But now it's worth like 30 million euros. We could sell it and it all become rich, you know. And so in a case like that, the Habitat would say, no, it's not possible. You can't sell it. And what comes out of this construction is that you actually live in a house. You pay rent. You also pay from the very beginning. You pay a very small amount in the beginning of your rent goes to the Habitat to make it easier for next projects. On a long perspective, you really can build up with these autonomous housing projects. You can sort of build up a whole pot where you can finance other housing projects like that as well, which actually starts to happen in Germany in the moment. It's sort of like an evolution of the old-timey Sparkase logic and the Gemeindebau sort of meeting in the middle, but in like the 21st century to my understanding. So what's the main difference? Can you maybe explain what the Gemeindebau is because it's so sort of iconic of Vienna? Yeah, the Gemeindebau is a very special type of social housing in Vienna. It came out of Red Vienna in the 1930s where the Socialist Party took over power and started a huge housing program right away because it was an incredible need of decent housing in Vienna at that time. Only a few years they built 60,000 homes for people which were at that time like really luxury homes, they had running water, they had a bathroom, toilets. And this was embedded in a complete idea. Red Vienna was not only a housing program, it was a program to change society into a direction of fairer society. They implemented kindergartens. And the laundries, like the general laundries, which is, let's be honest, the invention of the general laundry and the shared laundry spaces is a really big change. I mean the whole program was actually to make it possible for women to take part in society, to start working on their own, have an own income. It wasn't only like the day-to-day needs, but it was also culture. I think that's very important. They really followed this slogan, bread and roses. You know, it's not only about bread, it's also about having access to education, having access to culture, to theater, to cinemas. So it was a really empowerment program for the workers, for the working class. So this is the basis of the Vienna Gemeindebau. The difference is probably that Habitat really comes out of the squatting scene in the late 1980s, where squatters in Germany... Now I'm even more interested. No, squatters in Germany, just some people, actually in Freiburg, just got together and sort of like, hey, okay, you know, we are squatting. We are always in this precarious status. When the political program or the government changes, we are forced out again. But we do need space for subcultures and for different models of society, etc. So they actually went into the archives and found a lot of material from the very, very first, on one hand, the Settlers movement in Vienna, which was like, build your houses on your own after the First World War movement. And on the other hand, from the very early cooperatives, you know, where cooperatives weren't like big tanks and companies as any other company, but still a very democratic and empowering sort of form of organization. And out of this, the Mitzvah-Sahson-Dekat was sort of, you know, sculptured or sort of thought up. Yeah, quite, I'm very happy that they did this work in the 80s, because I still think it's a brilliant model. Can I just have a very profound question as where did the initial capital for this whole building come from, for this whole construction? I mean, 5 million euros. That's not some crowdfunding type of thing, I guess. Yeah, it's a good question. And this is actually, we follow sort of a solidarity financing model in the habitats. The costs were exactly 5.5 million, actually, and it's a big number. None of us had this money, I mean, clear. The city of Vienna in sort of new urban development areas, they give away a small amount of plots to building groups, like we are, to housing projects, for half the price. And what we had to do is bring up a concept that does more than just say, hey, we have this nice architecture and we will build nice flats, but you have to think up or bring up a concept that will sort of cater the surrounding area, you know, and in our case it was, it's called bikes and rails, because we are near the station, rails and bikes, because we sort of are a hub of climate-friendly mobility. We have got a cargo bike sharing model here. We've got a bike shop in the house, et cetera. Yeah, we briefly stole one of the cargo bikes waiting for a pair to bring us lunches. Yeah, and so we won this. It was the first step that was important, because that's a big part of the costs of a housing project. And then we decided that we will do like social housing. And if you do that in Vienna, you are obliged for a loan from the city of Vienna, which is quite cheap. And then we did a campaign, and we are still actually, we are in a permanent campaign in a way, because we are asking people to lend us money. People just borrow, like, give the house the money for a certain amount of time, and they can choose their own interest rate between zero and 1.5 percent. And so we did a big campaign. We went out, we sort of lobbied for the model, we made workshops, a lot of lectures, end and end. And in the end, managed to raise 1.5 million euros by that. And then we have got a bank loan, which is another 2.5 million. But these direct loans, these private loans, they are very, very important for us. This direct loan model just means like you have some money on your bank, you don't need it in the moment, maybe not for the next two or three years. So you give it to the project, it goes into the spot, and when you need it back, you get it back again, and somebody else puts its money in, and so it flows through all the time. That's insane. But the thing is, you build up this parallel structure, but so do you. Your NGO is pioneering a social sort of, how would you translate it into English? Like real estate management, housing management agency? Well, the concept itself, the program we call social housing agency, we wanted to buy some apartments of our own in the near future as well, and try to apply it for like a social bank loan, and the interest rate was 18%. So that's not going to happen anytime soon. So whoever wants to, they can support from Streets to Homes organization, and the link is in the show notes, and the QR code is going to be on the screen. So please do, and you can also get the latest issue of Deriv, which deals with homelessness in a very broad sense, mainly in German, sometimes also a little bit in English. But let's check this out, and I'm pretty sure that on Eurozone, we're going to be grabbing some articles from you if you allow us. So what does the social housing agency do? It deals with private property, right? It involves private property, mostly the apartments of people who move the road, but they have their apartments vacant at Budapest. We are responsible for that there will be no harm done to the apartment, or if there is, then we will fix it. So you are the guarantor towards the owner? Yes, in a way also that we guarantee that even if the tenant is not paying, we will take responsibility to pay the owner and help the tenant out with whatever their financial issues are, so that next Monday they can pay again. When applied on a bigger scale, it really can take out private apartments from the market pool and bring the prices lower. For the owner, it's worth it because they don't have to do with a lot of paperwork, they don't have to worry about the state of their apartment, or the rent coming in, or the bills being paid. They can just lay back and also have a good feeling about themselves that they are doing something good. So having a passive income with a good conscience, basically. The good conscience is the one thing that these huge real estate management agencies don't offer. What investment property offers is passive income without you doing much, just by this and it's big in Vienna and elsewhere where the rents are just through the roof, because these developments also drive prices up. And then basically the owner most often doesn't even see the property, like ever in their life. They never meet the renters. We have an article detailing this, which we published in collaboration with Deriv that you can find in the show notes. And this completely removes this human element of seeing the tenant as a human person that you may feel empathetic to or have a connection with. It just makes them very quickly replaceable. And I believe this is this sort of quick commodification that you already mentioned, right? Yeah, it's just housing has been for decades. It's a human need and housing sort of fulfilled this need. And since the 1990s housing became this commodified. It became a commodity like any other commodity. And people are making, it's not like houses, meanwhile houses, many houses or big emo projects are not being built for to host people in there and to give like flats to people, but only to park or make even more money. You know, I mean there are housing store money, right? Like this is the type of investment that became especially popular after the financial market crashes of 2008. And people just don't trust investment products, which I mean fair game in a lot of ways. But this also results in a lot of apartments just not being available. Like in Budapest, for instance, we have an especially high ratio of apartments that are not used for housing, either because they're being used as offices, but also very often that they're just standing there empty. And I understand that the social housing agency is offering a model to deal with this, right? So this is kind of the invention or sort of the crux of the service that you want to offer to the owner some kind of a shortcut that is more humane, right? How do you find these clients? We also try to start like working together municipalities that have like apartments that could be rented out. So we want to help them find the best way to use their property. And we have like two or three municipalities in Budapest that own people in their own district to help us and start their own housing agencies. We also have tried to pull in like companies and like other NGOs that have more money to buy homes as an investment, but also they give us the right to choose out of the tenants. So we have like more homes in our housing agency. The whole idea behind this agency, I think, was that we had to do something with the fact that more and more average people who were previously middle class, they cannot rent on the market anymore. So yeah, housing poverty is not limited to a small proportion of the population. Although I would argue that's big enough a problem to deal with, even if it's not the whole middle class. But now most of the middle class is very much affected. And also if any of the viewers have a couple of apartments to offer up for rent through this agency, please let us know. You both have brought up the social work element and how peer support for people living in housing poverty or previously unhoused people is just so incredibly important because you don't have to invent hot water. You don't have to invent everything. These people understand each other's problems and have a really good grasp of what the others are dealing with. What would be the community aspect for a housing unit like this that you want to introduce that you think city planning, urban planning has to keep in mind? For us it was clear in the very beginning that we wanted to provide more than just beautiful flats for ourselves. And also although the situation in Vienna is still quite good compared to other cities like Budapest. Actually nearly all the bigger cities and even middle cities as well, you know, it's just a huge problem. We just thought it's very necessary to provide space for initiatives where people can meet and talk to each other and sort of find out that they probably share the same views but also maybe the same problems. We wanted to have the café as a very open and welcoming space like a sort of living room space as you said but also our community room which is for the house, for the housing community but it's used meanwhile by external users who do all sorts of things here like political groups who meet here, social workers who are doing yoga here. To come down and talk to each other. We have got a sort of music school. We had exhibitions here from external people already so it's just an open space for people to use and I think that's very important because with this commodification of space not only for living but also for nearly for everything, for working together, for culture, for sort of civil society engagement. I think it's a real danger also for democracy in our society as a whole. If we haven't got any space to meet anymore everything breaks apart and this is nothing we want to have. I think we really have to work against that. We have the magic wand. You can make one sweeping wish for something to be realized as of tomorrow. I mean talking of housing I would just really decommodify housing completely. I think housing should be accessible for everybody to look for a low rate as a human right and it also has to be democratized like tenants who live in the house should be able to like also organize how they want to live together. Okay let's build this up. So beyond that what would be your wish Adia? That all all municipalities owned flats that are vacant now would be turned into social housing. Okay just like that. Yeah okay like that. For me I think it would be to have some sort of regulation in which everyone has to pay for their housing according to their income in an all sort of the equal ratio and if I can dream of something bigger then this could be applied to all sorts of things like healthcare and bills and food and everything so. So you want oligarchs to pay more? Yeah. Okay I can get on board for that. But they don't like it's still this is still not enough because obviously they don't pay rent. But we already have housing decommodified so I think you know yeah that's a good point to start. Thank you ladies so much. This program is brought to you by Eurazine. Your go-to place for engaging rates from over a hundred partner publications across dozens of languages. To support our work and enjoy special benefits visit patreon.com slash Eurazine and become a supporter starting at 3 euros a month. This talk show is a creation of Display Europe a new content sharing platform that respects your user data. We cover politics culture and more so keep an eye out for that across 15 languages. We also say a big thanks to Bikes and Rails for providing the venue for this episode. This program is co-funded by the European Cultural Foundation and the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. Please note that the views expressed here are those of the authors and the speakers. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the European Union or their European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Even though in the question of housing we think it would be pretty great if they shared our position.


Welcome back everyone, theCUBE's live coverage here in Google Next in San Francisco, Moscone. theCUBE here with John Furrier, me and Dustin Kirkland here, co-host of theCUBE. We also have theCUBE team coverage, Rob Scherche, Lisa Martin here. Our next guest is Surab Mishra Global, head of Google, business for Quantify, a breakout company, multiple awards here at the show. Obviously Google Cloud really expanding their ecosystem and you're starting to see a lot of winning companies popping out on the more cloud goodness. Surab, thanks for coming on theCUBE for your time. Thank you so much for inviting me. So before I get into your company and what you do there, I'll show you your role. I saw you at the partner of the year, I had to weave that in. You guys won multiple awards in multiple categories. Quickly give the news on the awards. On the awards, this year was phenomenal for us. We got four awards. The biggest one was around winning, breakthrough, partner of the year for North America. This was our second year in the row. We won the same award last year as well, so we're very excited about it. In addition to that one, we also got award for the expertise that we're building in the manufacturing domain. We did a lot of good work with our customers in the manufacturing industry last year. So we got that award. The next one was around marketing analytics. How can customers of Google Cloud understand their customers better? So that was the other award. And the last one was around talent development. So we know Google, there is a lot of demand for Google, but there are not a lot of practitioners. So we've been able to upscale our team, and we have at this point of time more than one certification per person who focuses on Google Cloud. So congratulations on the breakout thing. Obviously we've been saying on theCUBE, you know, get that data get free, let it be scalable. And really the industry verticals are all impacted. It's very clear, and there's no really debate. Every single industry is impacted by AI. Take a minute to explain what your company does and what your role is at the company. Sure, I can start by first my role, and then I can get into a little bit more about the company as well. Like I said, my name is Saurabh. I lead Quantify's Google Cloud business globally. That's focused on our Google Cloud partnership. When I joined the company back in 2016, one of the co-founders, Asif Hussan, and I started this partnership. Now the team of two people have grown to be a team of 2,200 people, spread across US, Canada, UK, India, and we recently expanded to Singapore as well. Now talking a little bit about the company, we're an award-winning AI-first digital engineering company. We've been premier partner with Google Cloud for seven years now. So AI-first digital engineering company, that's an interesting string of words. What does that mean to you? And out of that fit into the whole ecosystem we have around us here at this Google Met. Sure, definitely. I'm happy to talk a little bit about that. So part of the reason that you've not heard about this, because we believe we are defining this category, where we are helping customers harness the power of data and AI on cloud. Machines today have ability to see things, hear things, understand language, and process patterns. Now using these powers of machine, we are solving for four classes of business problems for our customers. The first one is around Solvage for Knowledge and Discovery. These are systems of search and retrieval built on large corpuses of data. Think of these systems like GPD and Bard, which we are all familiar with. So second class of problems that you're solving for is solving for experiences. Think about speech-based interfaces, gesture-based interfaces, conversational agents. We've all used virtual agents. We've done spoken to voice bots, chat bots. So these are the types of solutions we're building for our customers. The third one is around solving for automation, where we are helping our customers process documents using Google's Document AI, find anomalies in their manufacturing lines using visuals quality inspection. The fourth one being solving for simulation, where we are helping technology to generate synthetic data, build digital twins, industrial metaverse, et cetera. Now these models to build these types of applications are neural nets, which are very data hungry and compute hungry. Now for customers to be able to take advantage of these applied AI solutions that I just talked about, they need to modernize their data fabric and revamp their infrastructure to have GPUs and GPUs to be able to run these models at scale. Now this is our second side of the business, where we are helping customers move their cloud infrastructure from on-prem to cloud. Sorry, move their infrastructure from on-prem to cloud. So that's one, build security around it so these models are secure and are not having any attacks. The second one is around data modernization, where we are helping customers move their data from legacy systems like NetEza, Teradata to Google Cloud, build intelligent data lakes in a way that they can basically take advantage of building these models. The third one is around application modernization, where we are helping customers take their legacy application and rewire them in a cloud native way so they can support the performance that the customers expect. And the last one is around BI modernization, where we are helping customers build dashboards using Looker. I want to get into the role Google Cloud plays in the partnership, obviously, many years, but I want to first, on that first segment you went through there, I wanted to ask, what's the drivers behind that transformation of your customers? Is it because they have an old legacy environment?  What's the core? We got a lot of services. So what's the driver? Just modernization, what's the main pain points is there any pattern to the problem, or is it more pretty wide? What's the driver? So I would say there are definitely a few themes, right? Over the years, a lot of our customers have built different systems, have acquired different data sources that are basically in silos, in disparate sections, right? Now for us, for them to be able to build a robust system, they need to be able to bring their data in a way that those data pieces can speak to each other, right? So we have a unified data record for us to be able to build intelligent systems on top of that. This is one of the very common themes that we are seeing with the customers that are starting on their digital transformation journey. So that's the first part of it. The second part of it is the customers who are already on cloud, who are already currently on the legacy systems, right? Those customers, for them to be able to harness the power of AI, they're starting to move to cloud, right? And then if your models are sitting on cloud, they would prefer to eventually move their data to cloud as well. So we're seeing a lot of these customers move their data from legacy systems to Google Cloud, BigQuery, et cetera. So those are some of the patterns that we're seeing. Yeah, that's a great lead into the next question, which is around the Google Cloud collaboration. Where do you utilize Google? How do your customers experience that? And what problems does Google Cloud solve for you? That's actually a very good question. Google Cloud is actually a core to our business, and it helps us in multitude of ways, right? So first of it, Google helps us provide scalable and reliable infrastructure so we can build solutions, the AI systems that I talked about, that are high-performance and are basically giving customers what they need, right? So that's the first, the foremost part of it. They're helping us with the infrastructure side of things. The second part being around data and AI services that they offer for partners like us to build these systems. Two of them that I mentioned is Vertex AI and BigQuery. Now, these services provide us technologies that help us build these sophisticated models, understand the large corpus of data, and make meaning out of it. So that's the second part where Google is helping us with these technologies, right? The third part is a large variety of pre-trained models, APIs, and developmental assets, which are able to help us accelerate our journey to Cloud. So this is how I believe Google fits into it. They've been instrumental to us. Great, great. Pardon John, Google's obviously positioned well. Dustin used to work there. He's an ex-Googler. He knows. A lot of AI jobs, obviously bringing that to the table, which we heard a lot of the executives that we've interviewed, they're bringing up the best of Google's jewels into the clouds, that's cool, they're cloudifying it. But the big upside is the generative AI conversation. So can you talk about Quantify's view and role in contributing to this wave? Because developers love it, the boardroom loves it, the minds of business loves it, software loves AI. So what are the opportunities and challenges that you guys are pursuing with generative AI? Sure, definitely. So let me, so state of AI has evolved significantly over the decades, right? Now I'll go back to the days of pre-TensorFlow, which was open sourced by Google in 2015, right? AI was limited to mostly structured data in rows and columns and predominantly used for doing predictive analytics. With AI, with TensorFlow, the new class of AI came across, which is around deep learning, which gave machines the ability to see things, hear things, understand language, right? Now it's been five to seven years that TensorFlow was launched, but these models were still cumbersome and expensive, right? Because you had to develop a separate model for every cognitive task. With task, right? Now building these models was cumbersome. Now as the AI ecosystem evolved, with valuable contributions from open source, the art of the possible will AI expand, right? I still remember getting our hands on Google's research paper around generative network architecture. That was one of the big things that happened for the AI community and we knew it back then. It was obvious, the paper. Yeah, exactly, we knew it back then, right? That this is going to be revolutionary and it's only a matter of time that the impact of generative AI will become real for customers. And because you also mentioned like how does Google helped in this journey? I would say that TensorFlow was open sourced by Google. This research was published by Google and these two things have basically formed basis of how generative AI has happened over the years. Yeah, so the positive aspects, the possibilities are endless. What are some of the limitations and challenges of this technology from your seat and where you see it? Thanks for bringing that question, right? So these generative AI, everybody's talking today in today's world about the hype of the possibility of what generative AI can do. But there are a lot of challenges and people who are leveraging this technology need to understand that and basically address those things and use this technology in a little bit of a responsible way. Now talking about some of the challenges that we are seeing the first one is around accuracy. Now these models are trained on large copies of data and follow complex patterns. So they have a tendency to give erroneous results or what we call hallucinations, right? So these answers may be good semantically but when put into a context in which the question is being asked, they may actually not be correct and which is basically questioning the reliability of these generative AI. I think all of us at this point have asked the AI an obvious question and gotten a straight face lie to our face at this point and it breaks a little bit of the trust that we have in it. So what are you doing about that? So for this, what we are doing is we are basically, we've been working on ethical principles of responsible AI. So the systems that we are building, we are ensuring they are free of bias. They are fair, they are transparent and explainable, and they're secure and have privacy baked into it. So these generative AI models that we are developing for our customers are being used by them in a way that they are intended to do so. So these are some of the principles that we follow. They are like eight principles that we have curated in our labs and that's what we are basically doing. We've actually published a paper on that one as well. There's a huge skill gaps too and depending on which age group you talk about also the younger generation are all over this. I mean the startups in Silicon Valley alone is like highly concentrated. There's more meetups than ever before. There's definitely excitement in the open source. So you're seeing a lot of action. What's percolating up in your view that you see from as AI starts to hit that first organic wave of adoption?  I mean integrations. It's kind of like an interesting formation going on. Will something have to emerge out of this wave before the big enterprises jump on it or people's going to ride their data on their way or how do you guys see that adoption? Because we're seeing a lot of experimentation. Not a lot of production mostly integrated into an app but not a lot of net new production yet. So we expect it to be coming. So for this question, actually this is a good question because again going back to the hype that the generative AI has created we're having a lot of conversations. So I will tell you in the last four months we've spoken to 300 plus customers who want to understand the possibility of generative AI. So what we are doing to help customers embark on this journey is first we build like a four step process for them. The first one is help them demystify this generative AI. What does it mean for them? And what does it mean for their industry? So that's the first part of it. Now with our conversations that we've had with so many customers we've been able to come up with some patterns of what customers are trying to solve for. The second one is basically doing the rapid prototyping the thing that you mentioned about experimentation. Now what we do is we work with these customers to first curate the use cases that can be solved for their industries because we want to make sure that they have the right data set to be able to solve the problem that they're looking to solve for. They have the right infrastructure to be able to do so. Now once the prototype is successful there comes the big part which is what your main question was, right? How will you see this experimentation go into adoption? Now for this to happen there have to be some considerations where we have a package for our customers where how do you take the prototype to production? We talk about the data considerations we talk about the infrastructure considerations we talk about the security considerations which is very, very important. Then the other two which have become very, very important in context of generative AI is legal implications. And the last one is around change management which people just normally end up missing about because these systems are going to fundamentally change how industries function. And all the process. There is going to be a lot of effort that needs to go on change management for these systems to actually get adopted within the enterprises. So very briefly can you tell us specifically what are your product offerings in the generative AI space? Sure, so today our generative AI offerings revolve around integrating generative AI for domain specific tasks to enhance productivity for knowledge workers. At the forefront is our enterprise generative AI platform which we are calling as Bionic which is a combination of Bionic plus AI plus Quantify and Bionic enables enterprise to access and leverage fundamental models that are available in the market to be adapted for their own domain to solve wide variety of use cases. What's unique about this platform is that this enables customers to plug in their own data, instruction fine tune them for their own tasks that they are looking for to bring generative AI capabilities within this organization. In the true sense, what we believe the Bionic is helping customers unleash the power of LLMs and do this in a safer way within their environment. So that's basically our offering Bionic and we're helping customers get onboarded on this journey. Well, sounds like great growth. Congratulations on all your success in the company. Again, the wave is just beginning. Sounds like you guys built that big surfboard to ride the big wave, big wave riding going on here with AI. As we close out, take a minute to explain and the quick story, the bumper sticker for the company, the value proposition, and then any advice you'd like to share to aspiring AI folks out there, entrepreneurs, developers, companies who want to jump in, jump in the deep end of the pool, start to swim in fast. Quick summary of your pitch, bumper sticker. So I can talk about, so we've been focused a lot on talking to the executives and leaders. So I can talk about what leaders need to think about in terms of what's happening to take the advantage of this approach. The first and foremost thing is to accept and realize that there is a paradigm shift in AI with generative AI. We are not going to be anymore training one model for a task. There will be a foundational model that will help enable a lot of tasks, right? This will require different types of skills and engineering capabilities and customers will have to invest in upskilling their team. So that's the first part of it. The second part of it is basically understanding within their value chain. Where do they see the maximum value, maximum ROI or maximum impact of generative AI and start focusing on them? And the last one I would say is to find a champion within their organization because any big thing like generative AI applications will need a champion within the organization to move it forward and that's going to be a very, very important feature. It won't be hard to find a champion in the company that anyone who's got tech chops to go all over AI. I mean, I wish I was 25 again, Dustin. I mean, we love it.  It's really exciting. Yes, definitely. For sure. We are very excited about what the world is going to look like in the next three years and five years. Our industry is going to adopt a technology and have a new way of working. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. You know, we're Chile's AI. We love AI. We're Maximals on this. We think it's going to be game change. We're seeing here already at Google Next and we're looking forward to checking in with you guys later. And here, what you're hearing from your customers, we'll come back on theCUBE another time and we'll check in with you. Thank you for coming on. So definitely. Thank you for inviting us and we look forward to conversation again. All right, good job. Well done. CUBE here, live. Get all the data, laying out the frameworks, his best practices, his new ways of doing things. This is a way that's going to change new values, going to create process change, create opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to navigate the complexity of the legal and compliance. That's going to be done very easy. It's going to be done in a way like this. AI is here to stay. We've got coverage here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.


Welcome to all of you again. We're so glad that you're here. Julia and I show up each and every day to have these thoughtful conversations and insightful conversations. And today we were really excited to have another nonprofit Power Week episode with Ida Bailey and we're talking with Kyle Hendrickson today all about cybersecurity insurance realities. And for those of you that have joined us earlier in this week, we launched the Power Week on Monday with Kyle in person, live in studio in the Phoenix office for Ida Bailey. Yesterday we had another very insightful conversation but Kyle's here to talk to us about the cybersecurity insurance. And again, I didn't even know this was a thing. So I am definitely learning as we go with the nonprofit Power Week. So as we jump into today's conversation, we wanna remind you who our voices and faces are that you're seeing and hearing. Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jarrett Ransom, Julia's personal nonprofit nerd but I can be your personal nonprofit nerd too, CEO of the Raven Group. And we are always so very honored to have the continued support and trust from our very invested presenting sponsors. So thank you to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, fundraising academy at National University, Be Generous, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader and the nonprofit nerd. These companies, many have been with us from the very, very beginning March of 2020 and have helped us produce over 700 broadcasts. So thrilled to have their support. And if you missed any of those broadcasts, you know where to find us, Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo. And for those of you who are podcast listeners, you can go ahead and queue us up there wherever you stream your podcast. So again, Kyle Hendrickson is back. We haven't scared him, he hasn't scared us and we're here to talk more, dive deeper in cybersecurity. So welcome back Kyle. Thank you.  And so I was actually more scared of having everything in my teeth than I was of talking about cybersecurity insurance. I have a question. Are they the Halloween Oreos with the orange filling? Are they the regular with the cream or white filling? Double stuffed regular. Okay. And do you turn them and lick them? Like now you're really getting into like the detail. I mostly just shove them in two at a time as fast as I can because I love them. Yeah, they are pretty tasty. Well, we love getting to know more about you because cybersecurity is not a light subject. It's really scary in and of itself and you have helped us to really understand this in layman's terms. So I wanna say thank you for that. And again, we're gonna dive into, what is it we need for cybersecurity insurance for our nonprofit friends across the country? So. You know, Kyle, one of the things that Jared and I were like, oh, I don't know if we can have a whole week with somebody who's, you know, in the cyber world, he's probably not gonna be very aligned to the nonprofit world and understand what we all do. Or fun. Like your own chest. Or fun. Okay, I didn't wanna go there, but thank you. And so we learned at lunch with you earlier in the week off camera, of course, that you know about the nonprofit sector. Will you share with us the amazing story about starting your own nonprofit? Yeah, so starting in the fall of 2020 when our girls were going back to high school at that time and everything turned into a learn from home situation, we realized very quickly that they were taking care of on technology. They had everything they needed with the dad having access to plenty of computers. But their friends and their buddies at school weren't in that situation. There were a lot of kids in our area that were left out even with school provided devices. They just didn't necessarily have everything that they needed to be set up for success in a all remote environment. And so we took the retired computers out of where I worked and we were on a three year replacement cycle. So they're all good computers still able to do anything they needed to do, me and my wife. We cleaned them up, we got them ready, we fixed what needed to be fixing and we were able to give them away. And no questions asked, just took care of people. And whether it was kids, whether it was parents now suddenly working from home and needing to do that. Veterans, people going back to college, we just found a lot of need in our community and the surrounding communities. And it felt really good to be able to help out. It's fantastic to hear that. I myself, very fortunate my son's dad works for very large computer companies. And I joke, I'm like, my 12 year old has more computers than I ever have in my entire life. And again, we had talked about earlier in these episodes where our children and other individuals are learning so much about technology and the acceleration through COVID. And I commend you and your wife for that because we also learned it's not just in the Dakotas you're sending this across the country to other individuals. And I didn't know it was adults as well. So that's really, really amazing. No questions asked, wherever someone has found a need we've just stepped in not worrying about exactly everybody's personal situation. If they come to us, obviously they need help and we're able to just provide help where we can. And it's been a really fun adventure. That's really cool. And tell us the name of your nonprofit.  All right, well, we love it. I think that I've heard about this very interesting competition of sorts, the resourcefulness awards presented but I Bailey, hmm, there might be something there. But yeah, I love it. I'm really proud of you. I think it's cool. And Jared and I are very fortunate. We get to hear these amazing stories from founders day in and day out. And it's really powerful and it's something that is just an amazing thing to witness. So congratulations. And how many devices have you worked with so far? So the first year we were right around 500. So that 2020, finishing out 2020 in the fall, we were able to do about 500. This year we're on target for about 3,500 devices to either sell or place to people in need. Holy smokes. And you're doing this out of your garage or your home or something. Garage and home. So yes, my wife is awesome. I love it. Shout out to her. Absolutely. This is really cool. And so now, if you ever needed to think, wow, does this techie dude, can he really understand my nonprofit pain? Yes, he can. I am excited. So let's get into this, Kyle. Whew. Deciber security insurance. Is that something we need or can we wait? I mean, talk to us about this. Yeah. So again, I'm going to use a made up word, cyber risk. And I don't know that cyber risk really is a thing, but cyber risk really is business risk. So insurance is there to help us mitigate risk to all of our businesses. And so specifically, we're talking about how do we help ensure that our nonprofits are able to survive a disaster around a cyber security incident? So yes, I believe that cyber security insurance is a requirement for nearly any business that I talk to, nonprofit or otherwise. This is just about business risk management. That is so fascinating to me because before Monday, I didn't even know cyber security insurance was a thing. And one of the insurance we talk about often is directors and officers insurance. And we really waive that flag a lot. So I'm curious, is cyber security included in D&O insurance? And is it an add-on or is it a separate policy? So this is typically a separate policy. This would be sometimes combined with business outage type insurance or errors and omissions type of insurance. Sometimes it's additive to that. But typically, cybersecurity insurance is its own separate policy with its own analysts and adjusters and making sure that they're sizing things appropriately for the size of your organization. And does it vary by sector? And we always think of the nonprofit sectors having nine major subsets. Let's say you're running a museum or a cultural institution. Is that cyber security policy going to differ from that of maybe somebody in health care or human services? Yeah, so it depends on what we're trying to protect. So some of us are trying to protect monetary assets. Some of us are trying to protect personal health information. Some of us are looking at just private information for donors or those people that we're serving. So it's going to depend on the type and amount of personal information or the kind of information we're trying to protect along with the size and complexity of our organization. So if I'm a tiny organization, I have less things to protect than a large health system that may be a nonprofit. And so I'm going to have less, as far as premiums, less, as far as coverage. But it's going to impact me less on the bottom line. That's a great way to look at it because it can kind of help you shop the market, so to speak, or to understand why, if you talk to a counterpart, but they're in a different sector, their insurance costs might be quite a bit different. So yeah, that's really interesting. Talk to us a little bit about along that line and understanding that we need to have this policy. And Jarrett, I love your question. This is a separate type of insurance. So it's not just going to come under your general business umbrella coverage. What are some of the challenges to renewing? This isn't just going to be something that you get in the mail and you check the box or you send a check, right? Not quite. There are some requirements. So a little bit of history here. So starting around five, six years ago, this used to be a check the box type situation where you could just, hey, do you want to add this to whatever policy you have going on? And insurance brokers would just include it. Carriers would cover you. It was just a thing that you added to your policies. Starting about four-ish years ago, ransomware became big in the news. And we started hearing about that in the headlines all around us in our communities everywhere. That took the insurance industry a little bit by surprise. And so suddenly they had to pay out on a ton of claims as a result of ransomware and as a result of these large breaches or extortion attempts from ransomware actors. Insurance companies make money when they don't have to pay out claims. And so they have actuaries. They have really, really smart people that can look at all the bad things that they've had to pay out on claims in the past to know what are the key things that need to be in place so that they can keep making money and keep serving their shareholders. And so now it's not just a guarantee that you're going to get your renewal or a policy in the first place. They're looking for key things in your environment. And so I'm referencing something from one of the largest cybersecurity insurance brokers in the United States. When I say they're looking for five key controls and then above and beyond those key five controls, they're looking for how comprehensive is your protections that you have in place that lines up with their best practices to understand how big of a risk are you going to be to them? And so the better your cybersecurity program, including those required items, the less your premium is going to be and the easier time that you're going to have for renewals. And this is for any size. And I love that you really do say business. And I just want to remind everyone, nonprofits are businesses and we need to stay in that mindset. But this is for any size business. Is that correct, Kyle? Yep. So this is from small to big, whether it's for profit or nonprofit. We all have the same requirements being placed upon us by both the cybersecurity brokers and the cybersecurity insurance carriers. Okay, so I got to ask, I mean, this is like kind of a left field question, but in the past, you could even today go online and pretty much within a few minutes be fully covered on whatever it is you're looking for. I would imagine going into the marketplace which is probably still somewhat limited. This isn't going to be a quick go online and you're covered in 15 minutes kind of purchase, right? Not typically. So you're going to be wanting to work with a broker that shops multiple carriers and is going to tell your story or help you tell your story around where you're at in your cybersecurity journey and make sure that you're as accurately portrayed to the carriers that they work with as possible and understanding what is that risk that you pose to them by them extending insurance to you. I'm curious, Kyle, has any of this changed over the last three years with a lot of remote working now? Like there's a lot of staff working remotely, but a lot of systems that have been integrated. Has the cybersecurity insurance and the policies, some of the requirements, have those changed you think because of the increase of remote working? So I don't know that answer, but I do know that when we start looking at those five required controls that need to be in place, things like multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection and response. So the next version of next-gen antivirus, secure and encrypted and isolated backups, making sure you're managing your administrative privileges across all of your computers and then implementing email filtering and web security. These are all centered around things that would affect us in a remote work environment. So the challenge to an organization as we're in a hybrid or a fully remote work environment is when we're talking about cybersecurity controls, how are you making sure that you're effectively implementing all these things across all of your computers, regardless of where they're at? We wanna be comprehensive and holistic and manage risk across our entire organization, not just when they're on site and in our office. I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, I was gonna say, I have to admit that two-factor authentication, it's a really hard word for me to say, it's annoying as heck, but I understand the need of it. But oftentimes what I find is I'm working with a client because I'm a consultant, but working with so many other people, it's like, well, where did this go? And is the staff still there? And so there's a lot of kind of nuance in that. And it's an easy thing to just kind of turn off and say, we're not gonna worry about that, but are you telling me we need to worry about that? We need multi-factor authentication everywhere and for everybody. But when we start talking about multi-factor authentication, we should be looking towards solutions that we can use that we can integrate in with a common multi-factor authentication platform where we have one way for doing that challenge response that's something that we have and making sure that it is legitimate. So we don't have 14 different things that we're using for multi-factor and making it even harder to manage. And when we get down onto one platform, then we have the ability to start creating custom rules like, do I know this device? Is there a location specific attribute that I can tie this to somewhere that is connected before with that trusted device? Is it within the normal working hours that I normally work? Are all of these things that are true enabling us to make risk-based decisions that maybe I don't need to be doing that challenge every single time I check my email? Got it. That makes my life a little easier. Reducing the friction of cybersecurity. You want to be comprehensive and make it even better, but then make it less painful to use everywhere. You know, Kyle, this is like one of those things that if I didn't know about green dog tech, I probably wouldn't have thought about this, but I hear you saying, you know, with this work from anywhere concept and all of these different devices that we have, in the past, we would share our devices with our family members. So it sounds to me like in the nonprofit sector and probably in the for-profit sector, of course, as well, that we need to start investing in dedicated devices that are not being shared. Would that be an accurate thing to help reduce some of that risk? So I would always recommend anything that is doing anything financial for your nonprofit, be completely separate from anything the rest of your family is using for non-business purposes. So that's the first step. And then from there, as we can, knowing that some nonprofits are small and working with very little means, from there, then I would separate out business activities from personal activities. So if we can isolate that and make it, so we have dedicated devices just to support the nonprofit, knowing that our personal life blends over sometimes, I'm not so worried about a individual that works on the nonprofit's behalf that also does some personal on the same device. I would be more interested in making sure other family members are not getting on that business device to do whatever they need to do in a personal setting. Smart, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think that's why. Now, this is a curve ball, and I don't know if you're gonna know the answer Kyle, but you've known with us now three days. And I'm curious if these cyber security insurance policies, if they also cover board members and volunteers, because as I think of committee members and they're working in the donor database, are we covering them in these policies? Yes, so we're gonna be covering anybody who's working on behalf of the organization. And we just need to be clear with our, when we're getting that policy, that this is our world of who accesses this data and this is who needs to be covered. So yeah, that's all part of this. Good, I just had a bit of a panic because I know it's event season right now and events are typically heavy, heavy dependent on some amazing volunteers and event committee members. So I wanted to see about that. I love that you asked that question because yeah, absolutely, Jared. I hadn't thought of it in that, quite in that perspective, but yeah, absolutely. Well, of course now you're gonna, as we look forward and I love that you're like, we can bring messages of hope. I'm gonna ask you to kind of walk us through, don't let your hair on fire, go any further.  Messages of hope, actions to reduce risk. What does that mean and are these achievable for us? So I kind of cheated. I already gave you the answers to the test here. So again, I'm gonna look back at those five required controls because the insurance carriers know that these are the things that need to be in place and done well so that they don't have to pay claims. That directly translates into less risk for all of our organizations. So again, those five required controls are gonna be centered around multifactor authentication. Next-gen antivirus, EDR is what we call that now. Secure tested and isolated backups. So when things like ransomware take a hold, their threat actors typically will try and disrupt your backups so that they can force you into a payment situation. So we need to protect them. We need to make sure that we're properly managing administrative rights both to our computers and to the systems that we're using to support everyone we need to support. And then we need to implement email filtering and web security. And that's just the minimum. That's just the minimum, bare minimum. One of the things I know to be true for so many of our friends is, the person that's in charge of IT is literally the person that knows how to plug in the right wires into the right sockets, right? So who should be overseeing cybersecurity? And is that, is it a staff position? Is it, you know, a partner like I Bailey? Where does this sit? Yeah, great question. I think that the questions should be asked of the leaders within the organization. So that might be on the board. How is management taking care of this? And it isn't necessarily that management within the organization is doing it, but they may have a partner like I Bailey or another partner that can assist them with both implementing these controls and then the ongoing monitoring and maintenance of things. But I would expect that from a leadership perspective that the board or the founder or executive leadership committee, just like within a business, the people that are tasked with keeping that business successful should be asking these questions because again, this is business risk. And then is the policy a year? Do we renew it annually or is it a multi-year policy? It's typically a one-year policy and the guidance I would give people is talk to your broker early and often to know what's gonna be coming for next year's renewal. So if the things have changed, you have time to plan to make sure you won't have a lapse in coverage because again, this is helping manage business risk. That's exactly what I'm thinking. And so, Julia, you always share a lot about that leadership list, quarterly updating your fast facts, things like this. I feel the cybersecurity insurance has gotta go on this quarterly list because with the acceleration of technology, the access to technology across the globe, there's just so many new nuances within the technology realm. Yeah, it's a changing landscape and because of that, I would imagine that the insurance companies are changing their parameters all the time and then to Kyle's point, finding new avenues of extortion, ransomware, all of these different attack and threat positions, it's a changing target. I thought it was interesting, Kyle, that you mentioned tonight and I'd love, we don't have that much time, but I'd love for you to kind of amplify that point of renewal and that we need to be looking out. I mean, 12 months goes by like that. What does that look like if we're trying to plan and put this on our calendars to start moving forward on regaining that? I mean, I don't think we can just rely on our insurance brokers to call us up and say, okay, we need to start planning and we need to be ahead of this as well. Well, and so this doesn't need to be something that is a week-long event with your insurance broker, but asking them what frequency that you need to be working with them and touching base to see if anything has changed. And for a lot of people, that means either at six months out or quarterly. So understanding, okay, just a quick 15 minute or a half an hour touch base and make sure that, okay, this is what we've accomplished over the last year in improving things. There's this lineup with what we would expect and then asking the question, are there things that we can do that would potentially reduce our premiums? Because there is. If the better the program, the less risk you are to the carriers and so that should be reflected in your premiums. So asking those questions and making sure that you have a broker that you can work with and establishing a frequency that works for both of you and knowing that this doesn't need to be a ton of time invested in checking in, just making sure that you're keeping a finger on the pulse. Great advice. And again, continued messages of hope. Day three with Kyle Hendrickson as we talk about cybersecurity. And again, so grateful that I'd Bailey has the foresight to include this in their services. This entire week is dedicated to the nonprofit Power Week. Again, with I Bailey, you can find all of these episodes that we've had with Kyle starting on Monday with our live and audience episode, cybersecurity again, as we said, it can be frightening, but Kyle is here to deliver each and every day this week some messages of hope. And speaking of questions, if you have questions, send them to us. Friday also referred to as Friyay. Kyle and I will dedicate that entire episode for I'd Bailey and these cybersecurity questions that you or viewers and our listeners might have and might want to ask, so make sure you send those over to us. Yeah, it's gonna be really great, a lot of fun, and I think a lot of opportunity. Again, Kyle Hendrickson, Director of Cybersecurity for I'd Bailey. What a great way for us to get a better grip on this concept. It's not an easy topic for a lot of us in the nonprofit sector. It's a new concept and yet incredibly perilous if we don't know about it. So Kyle, thanks to talking with us and spending so much time on this deep dive. If you go to I'd Bailey.com, there's quite an extensive selection of information about cybersecurity. Many of the things that Kyle has been going over, you can access that. You don't have to be a client of I'd Bailey. You can get that free information, a lot of resources, and you can even learn more about Kyle Hendrickson on that. Again, I'm Julia Patrick. I've been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared Ransom, which has the perfect name for this week of cybersecurity. I don't know if I do. I think it's a horrible name this week. I don't know. I think it like is just serendipitous. I actually have loved that, but yeah, it's been really a lot of fun to have Jared on this road with us. And again, we wanna thank all of our sponsors who continue to join us in these conversations. Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Your Part-Time Controller, Be Generous, Fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader, and the Nonprofit Nerd. These are the folks that join us day in and day out. Hey, everybody, as we like to end every episode of the nonprofit show, we want to remind ourselves, our viewers, our listeners, even our guests, stay well so you can do well. Thanks, gang. We'll see you back here tomorrow.


Hello everyone. This is Dr. Ahmed Ergin. I'm an endocrinologist and today we are going to talk about When to check the blood sugars. This is a very common question in my practice that I hear every day Now rightfully people ask how many times should I check because it hurts Especially if you're doing finger sticks that sucks.  So basic let's talk about a patient who just got diagnosed with diabetes They're super nervous. They're checking their blood sugar seven eight times a day Well, initially that may be exciting and you know, you're you're you're worked up You want to get this under control? Great, but eventually you are going to burn out So there are easier way to do this than just doing seven eight times a day Now if you are really wanting to you know, still have an understanding of where your blood sugars are without doing eight times a day Do the scattered matter so scatter your blood sugar checks, but make sure that it's organized So your doctor and yourself can actually look at it and have an understanding now For example, if you want to check your blood sugar twice a day, this is how you can organize You can do one day First thing in the morning at fasting, which is important and then the second blood sugar check could be an Hour or two after breakfast, but make sure you're consistent Let's say if you want to do one hour after breakfast keep doing that one hour after meals if you're gonna do after lunch or after dinner and Keep it make sure that it's one hour after So because if you're doing one hour one day and then two hours one day then then it becomes confusing so Let's say one day you do it for breakfast on Monday on Tuesday you can do a blood sugar check before lunch and After lunch one hour after on a Wednesday you can do the same thing before and after you just change the meal time But still stick to the two times a day That way you have an understanding of what your blood sugars are before and after breakfast before and after lunch Before and after dinner now what a lot of people do they start checking their blood sugar first in the morning and then before bedtime And they keep doing the same thing Now if your blood sugar is especially similar in the morning similarly high or similarly low Now some people say oh my blood sugar was 180 yesterday today is 160. Why is that? You know what another big deal is still highs Of course what you eat and what you do physical activity everything affects it but the bottom line you're running overall high So there's no point of rediscovering or trying to get hung up on 160 165 175 Don't worry about it. It's high It needs to be fixed to move on to see where the other problems are now what people think that the 160 for some people it's Okay, I can live with that, but then when they check their blood sugar after eating after breakfast They realize that they go sometimes up to 250 and and then they don't know that unless they check it now That is the scattered method and method and I think that's the best way to do it Especially if you have limited amount of strips if you cannot afford strips or just you just hate your pricking your fingers Then try to be wise and try this scattered method Especially if you're new now if you are not so new and you're on certain medications or your diet managed and you're doing well Now how many times do you really check your blood sugars? Well in this case you don't really have to do too many times if you just do if you if it's gonna make you comfortable Once a day in the morning just to keep a trap on it tap on it. You can do that But on the other hand if you want to you know occasionally you check after meals or let's say you think that you had too much carbs You want to check for it be my guest check for it So you understand how food affects you and so forth But if you're overall well controlled and you are waking up with you know say 100 You know 110 and then occasionally you check after meals and you never go more than 160 170 after meals Then you are pretty well controlled again for some people. It's not well controlled But I'm talking about the general purposes, you know because our goals for diabetes depends on the age Depends on the patient sometimes we are very strict with patients. Let's say a pregnant patient We want to keep him less than nine in the morning. There's a different beast I was on a bay beast in terms of the disease state. This is a different beast for a pregnant woman Then a 80 year old frail women So we don't tell them oh you have to wake up below 90 because we know that they're gonna be at risk of dropping their blood sugar And at date age it can be very hard on them and it can actually be very dangerous So what we try to do here? We are trying to manage risk based on the patient So that's why your doctor should give you the goals, you know exactly what your goals should be or you should just Understand the guidelines well, so what does your personal goal should be between you and your physician? typically Although we'll make a video right after this about what your general guidelines are for blood sugars now in summary We recommend checking blood sugar a few times a week if you are very stable Just to keep an eye on it because sometimes people totally drop Checking blood sugars and the next thing they know that they're in the 200 again. You don't want to do that either. So don't be too obsessed Don't be too Lose just find a middle ground But I would suggest that break the habit, you know if you're checking it every morning and if it is every morning 120 Just stop it just because it's not changing. You're not really discovering anything new So and then your diet is not changing nothing, you know Then you can check it in different times a couple times a week just to have a general idea But overall that is what I would recommend now, of course if you're on insulin, that's a little different story So if somebody is on basal insulin, this could be Lantus. This could be levemir This could be terceba or to J. Oh, whatever you're on or MPH In this case, I would suggest checking the blood sugar before you go to bed and then before you wake up Now the reason for that and especially initially especially in the titration stage where we don't exactly know how much Insulin you need but we start you from somewhere and we titrate you to the goal In that stage you always have to want to check the blood sugar at night and in the morning Now what a lot of people don't understand with why we're doing this is that the Reason is the long-acting insulins guys are designed to keep your blood sugar stable now overnight And during the day as well your liver is constantly making blood sugar now that is regulated by insulin and insulin sensitivity When you're insulin resistant when you have diabetes, you know your liver does not realize that there's some insulin So it keeps making too much sugar. So to overcome the resistance, you know If you're not able to exercise and did good dieting etc. Or it may not be enough just simply that an exercise is just sometimes not enough In those cases we start a basal insulin just to keep the blood sugar stable That's why a lot of people wake up with a high blood sugar in the morning Just because their liver constantly makes sugar, especially after four o'clock at night or in the morning In the morning for four o'clock in the morning I would say, you know the growth hormone kicks in on all the other stuff kicks in and then you wake up With a very high blood sugar. That's very depressing for a lot of people So what we do is we just put a basal insulin and that way we really what we are trying to do is the bedtime blood sugar And the morning blood sugar should pretty much be similar now you will never wake up with the same blood sugar. So forget about You know keeping your blood sugar like on a flat line. That doesn't happen You don't see flat line in any human body. So everything constantly is changing Everything affects your blood sugar.  But we don't want to start at 200 at night time So we want to make sure that your blood sugar is similar Now what a lot of people do wrong they try to give too much basal insulin to try to control morning numbers Well, that's a problem because we don't want you to go down Like this overnight. That's very dangerous. So we want to keep your blood sugar very stable when you are when you are sleeping We want to keep it like as straight as possible. Now if there is 20 30 plus minus difference, that's very acceptable Because that's not going to put you to danger zone. Let's say you go to bed with 120 You know, if you wake up with 90, that's not a big deal But if your blood sugars are typically dropping 100 points overnight Because of the insulin then you are putting yourself at significant risk Of going very low With the insulin so the goal of the basal insulin again is to keep the blood sugar stable overnight So that's why checking blood sugar at night time and in the morning is extremely important Now once you're stable and you know, you're a pretty regular person and nothing is really changing in your life You don't have to keep repeating that cycle You can maybe just check your blood sugar at night time to make sure it's not too low before you go to bed And people are really scared of insulin because most of the time they are prescribed too much insulin Or patients sometimes do their own thing Based on their own ideas and they just increase their insulin thinking that it's gonna They're gonna have a better blood sugar.  We try to keep it to minimum So I tell them that and then they bring it And if I see blood sugar spiking more than 180 200 after certain meals, that's a red flag We try to adjust their diets Of course reduce the carbs or exercise more etc If they can't great if they cannot then we have to do something about this We have a lot of great medications as well That help control the blood sugar spikes after meals Again, not everybody is the same some people do great with diet and exercise But depending on the disease status, you know some type one diabetics for example They have to take insulin with meals some patients with type one and a half diabetes They have to take insulin now some people think that if you stop eating sugar Your diabetes will be fixed. Well, that's not the case That's that's the case for I will say, you know quite a bit of people maybe 50% of people But that's generally true at the beginning stages of type 2 diabetes And even like if you have been diabetic for 20 plus years of type 2 diabetes It becomes hard to control your diabetes just with diet and exercise guys So in my practice, I see a lot of complicated cases Those cases that people discuss on the youtube and other places They're simple new diabetics, you know, they just stop eating carbs and they think they're fixed But diabetes is not a disease like that It's a very philosophical disease. Most people don't understand What it is really entails everybody thinks it's just a sugar problem It's not and we'll talk about that in other videos But the bottom line is if you're checking your blood sugars Twice a day you can stagger it And if you're on insulin one time a day at night and in the morning to kind of make sure they're stable And then once you're fasting blood sugars are stable We look at your blood sugars after meals again by checking your blood sugars, you know after certain meals Now who needs to check their blood sugar four or more times? Those are the people who really take insulin For three times a day with their meals and four times actually the one basal insulin and three meal time You know for type one and a half diabetics sometimes or type one diabetics or some two of course advanced type two diabetics Do that some multiple injections a day And the reason they have to do multiple injections a day multiple testing a day actually Is the fact that they only need to know their blood sugars before they take insulin Because the fast acting insulins actually drop your blood sugars very rapidly So there are two ways of taking the rapid acting insulin one is for correction And the second is for the food for the carbohydrates now Of course, you know if you're going to Be like 200 before you eat you need to know that so that actually you can take a little bit of extra insulin to correct the 200 number so And then the same thing applies if your blood sugars are down to 70 You may want to take a couple units off of your regular schedules those so that you avoid a low blood sugar So monitoring also helps you understand overall how you're doing Let's say you check your blood sugar before breakfast one day and then Second day, you know After you check it Before lunch, right? So you check it before breakfast and before lunch If you're on insulin before meals. So let's say your blood sugar goes up quite a bit every time After you eat so you have a breakfast but by the lunch time it should be down But you're still at the 160 170 range by the lunch time Then you know that you actually need to take more insulin So that's very important to be able to adjust your insulin to be able to give your doctor some data To have him or her understand what's going on with your blood sugars If your blood sugars, for example, are all over the place Then maybe maybe you need to pay attention to your diet a little bit more to try to fix your, you know A consistency problem or a carbohydrate counting problem You know because if you're taking say 10 years of insulin for every breakfast and then your blood sugar one day Drops down to 90 by lunch time and another day goes to 190 That means that what you're eating probably is very different. So you have to understand the consistency of your Your of your eating etc. So this is a different topic we discussed earlier But that's why checking blood sugar four times a day at least is important Sometimes we tell patients to check it after meals as well if we are suspecting certain high blood sugars And in a necronology practice in diabetes practices, we sometimes Perform a professional glucose monitoring, which is a short term cgm short term continues glucose monitoring to see where they're spiking That kind of helps us a little bit more than just relying on patients now Now also in my practice what I really love about is is those cellular meters So because every time they check their blood sugar comes to me, so I don't have to really bag for the numbers I find myself you can you can call my second name as a beggar because I really bag for these numbers like hey Did you bring your blood sugars? Oh, I forgot at home. It's on the desk. It's on the canopy. It's on somewhere It's in the car, uh, or I didn't write it. I forgot I checked. I didn't write it, you know Etc. So all these excuses just used to drive me crazy But now we make patients with diabetes life easy, you know, either we give them a cgm You know, they carry the cgm now Since we jump to cgms, let's talk about when to check your blood sugars when you're using a cgm now the cgm Companies like dexcom or freestyle libero or metronic. They advertise no finger sticks no finger sticks just use no finger sticks Well, that is true to a point But they don't really tell you the downsides of the product they sell Now here's what happens if you're in a cgm like dexcom or freestyle libero Since dexcom or any cgm is somewhat delayed After you know when the blood sugars are changing rapidly and and if you look at the fine print You will see that they actually warn you about that If your blood sugars are changing rapidly your dexcom is not going to be true Like one typical example that a lot of people do wrong The dexcom will show that their blood sugar is low and it's true. It's typically low. It's generally correct Although freestyle libero has not been the most correct cgm when it comes to low blood sugar alerts and stuff But um, and they don't even have alerts, but you know, sometimes they tell us low, but it's not low with the freestyle now with the dexcom Let's say you have a low and then you eat something and then the dexcom keeps showing it slow And they keep eating more and more and the next dexcom shows like your blood sugar is 300 now Well, the reason for that is There is a delay as we discussed on our previous video on the dexcom d6 versus libero video or dexcom or cgms are explained video In that video We tell you guys that there is a delay so you cannot really rely on a cgm when you have a low blood sugar So what you do you eat something 15 20 grams of carbohydrates like simple carbs candy, etc And then you check it in 15 20 minutes with a finger stick Then your finger stick may tell you your blood sugar is 120 and your dexcom may still say your blood sugar is 75 So so as a result guys So this is the point where I want to make if your blood sugar shows that your dexcom shows that your blood sugar is 300 You decide to take some insulin. Okay, so half an hour you check it one hour after you check it You want to check your blood sugar with a finger stick? Yes, dexcom will show the trend, you know, that's always A good thing to know that your blood sugar is now rising or going down Based on what you have done But the exact numbers is not going to be true when your blood sugar is going really high or really low based on what you have Done in this case when you have a low you ate something your blood sugar is going up Dexcom is going to be way behind when you took insulin your blood sugar is coming down fast Your dexcom is going to be behind So as a result in those cases where the things are extreme or not right not not normal You want to do your finger sticks? And then rely on that a little bit more If you catch your low blood sugar like when dexcom tells you your blood sugar is going to be low and you catch it before it's low Then then you're much better luck But when you're bottoming out or you're already down to 50 Or you already 300 You may want to go with the finger sticks at that stage Now I hope that video was helpful guys and make sure you give us a thumbs up And make sure you subscribe now We are going to move on to a stage where we discuss patient cases like real patients real treatments real outcomes And although I may not be able to reply to you in person To your case Because I have to take a lot of information and that requires time and energy You can be our patient, you know if you're watching us from florida and new york sign up to our services in florida We accept insurance in new york.  We can present as a anonymous case Just because it's the legal issues where well when we don't really know you well We cannot give you a medical advice So but I will definitely pick up cases from my practice and will present to you And maybe it will be a similar case to you and you may learn from that And that is the goal we will do that at 30 000 subscribers So make sure you have more get more subscribers for us So we can get to that stage where we can be a lot more useful. Thank you for watching. We'll see in the next video