We've got Josh Hudson, he's the son of the internationally recognized portrait photographer, Bruce Hudson. He runs and manages the day-to-day operations for a person called Portrait Project Design. He's the top one percent located in South of Seattle. Josh was spoken in professional photographer groups in North America. On behalf of the New York State, he's an age follow-up, marathon professional, and he's a mo-ro. He's also a public columnist for smartshooters.com, a frequent speaker for the New York Times, and a selling author, Sarah Levy's Small Business Marketing Web Summits. He's a co-founder and educator of the website ClemsonSuccess.com. Josh is also on the PKA social content committee, and has been featured in numerous PKA magazine articles, as well as classes on IPS mastermind. Lastly, and maybe best known for it, has created an educational DVD series called Facebook for Photographers, which has sold thousands of copies all over the world, and has helped photographers embrace the profit from social media in their business. In 2009, Josh started a social media management and marketing consulting business called H5 Creative, which gave us the needs of small media businesses in all industries. A husband and a father of three, Josh stays pretty busy with his endeavors. Ladies and gentlemen, Josh. Well, a company you showed up, so I feel like I'm winning now. You don't have to be shy, but you can come up a little closer if you want. I tend to not speak from the stage. I don't know. It just kind of feels like I'm lording over you, and I don't like that. So I like to move around, be mobile here. So yeah, I am doing the power photography while your client should never settle for the same old stock images on their websites. Kind of a collaboration between my company, H5 Creative, and also my dad. He's one of my dad's companies, one of his brands. That's controversial. So you're probably thinking, well, it's said Bruce and Josh works for Bruce. Well, he got pulled into a big job in Chicago. He's there shooting right now. Anyone familiar with Dan Kennedy, Bill Blasher, marketing, anything like that? Nobody? Nobody? Some of the top copywriters in the world. The guys behind some of the most profitable infomercials, direct response marketing campaigns. Anyone under here have also run some click phones? Yeah, it's going to be eye-opening for you. How about a digital marketer that will never hear about Rindice? I actually had the opportunity to speak before Rindice at an event in San Diego last year. My dad and I were featured in a book called Bill Blasher's Outrageous Marketing Campaigns. And marketers from all over the world submitted their ideas to him, and he chose 60 of them. And then the ones that were chosen will put the book, and we did the presentation in San Diego. And I'm on stage with the guys at Russell Runston and ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is like a hundred million dollar a year company. And here we're just getting up photographers to see how they're just hanging out with them, so it's pretty cool. So Bruce is actually photographing this event right now, so I need to apologize if you're not being here. But I've got a bunch of other stuff in the slides here. I've got a quick two-slide by-law to get into the good stuff. I'm really a product of these two people. My dad, Bruce Hudson, and my mom, Sue Hudson have actually passed away in 1996. When they started our studio in 1982, I wasn't even born yet. Three months later, I showed up. I was actually the first employee of the month. They still have a plaque from the newspaper, you know, that was in it. So that's up in the studio right now, actually. So every time I do a program like this, I'm always dedicated to not only my mom, who's no longer with us, but my dad as well, because it's taught me a lot about entrepreneurship and starting businesses and being profitable. I'm also a Washington State University grad, so go Cougs. I didn't see the final score, but I heard they were up at the end of the fourth quarter today. So if anyone has a Coug update for me, they know if we want or not, I'd really appreciate it. Did they? Did they? Did they want? Nice. If they lost, I'd probably just drop this mic and get out of here, because it's the deadest day of the night. So I actually went to Los Angeles later. I have a degree in political science. Also, I have a minor in Middle Eastern Studies and American History. So I was not really in the trajectory to go this route of photography and marketing and owning an agency and all that stuff. I actually wanted to be a lawyer. Thank God I came to my senses. A lot of that had to do with this cute blonde that I was dating named Melissa, who was now my wife. We've got three great kids, Reese Wyatt, and they're my twins, and then Natalie Wu is going to be 16 next week. And that's scary to do car shopping for your 16-year-old. But let's get into some of the business stuff, file care. Like they said, I'm an author, photographer, educator, studio manager, and I'm still a lighting boy that will go out and light my dad still. That's what I've been doing since I was nine years old. I'm a speaker, producer, blogger, agency owner, real estate assistant, and my wife is a realtor, so I ended up putting up open house signs. I did it this morning for her without a lot, and also an entrepreneur. So you can see here a lot of the different brands that we operate out of our core business of the studio. We've had a web TV show, Photo Entrepreneur TV, the 105 episodes of that. We have Hudson's Photo Workshops, which was named Seattle's best mobile class. We actually teach workshops out of our studio to beginners and also advanced photographers. We've got a bunch of different volume brands that we operate for sports photography, school photography, dance. Our main studio, Hudson's Portrait Client, we specialize in creating large, custom canvas wall decor for clients' homes. Seniors by Hudson's, it's the high school senior portrait, it's not the other kind that people always mix it up with. And then we actually have a radio show that's on every Saturday at 4 p.m. It's called Photo Talk Radio Northwest. It's on both stations, a lot of girls with KKM and Carl, everybody. She's actually our executive producer, the one who's going to stop to do this program here for you. But what we're going to focus on today is really our Hudson's commercial brand, which partners with web designers in creating really cool designs based on the photography that we create. So it's kind of marrying them too. And I've lived in both of these spaces. Being an agency owner, I used to build WordPress websites, I currently don't. I got tired of all the phone calls two years later. I broke it, we fixed it. So now I outsource a lot of the web design stuff. But I was in that trench with you guys for a long time. So I kind of understand both the web developer side of things, but also the photographer as well. So what we're going to cover today is why photography plays a key role in website development. I'm going to show you some examples of some recent stuff that we've done. They're a little secret about stock images and why you should never use them. It's also a good sellable benefit for your clients as well to give them the higher photographer or for you to take that on yourself. Maybe white language will talk about that. What criteria you should be using when looking to partner with a photographer, three ways to partner with a family. Creating stories and how you can use them in your designs.  And then I could bug them for content. I could bug them for content. Hey, you got that content?  And now I've got this beautiful website and crap the images. Don't tell a story about this brand or this company at all. And then you put them in there. They go, I don't really like the pictures. Well, yeah, no kidding, right? So we're going to talk about that. And then we're going to wrap it all up with seven elements that needed to produce images that have intent and impact on your websites. So with that, let's get started. And we got to what they talked to me. Oh, okay. I'll have you guys out of here plenty of time to go party. And I'll see you there, by the way. So why photography plays a key role in website development? Well, it's all about images with intent. Okay. Now there's two ways that we can do this. One, we have a WordPress designer who contacts us. Hey, I got a client. Here's a website I built for them. Can you please create images that are dynamic? They look good. They can fit into these specific areas of the website. So then we'll go out to, like this is XGM. They've got a location in West Seattle. I think one in Kirtland. So we went out into the photo shoot for them. And knowing what we know from the WordPress designer, we're out there and we're creating different images and looks. They're going to fit on that site. So this is Jillian. She's a seagull. I made a great model for the shoot. But this was kind of what the look they were going for. XGM, the type of working out that they do. Not that I've climbed or anything. But the stuff they do is kind of non-invasive and kind of crossfit type stuff. So we wanted to kind of convey that a little bit in the imagery. So this is the one they selected for the homepage. But you can see here, by leaving half that space because we knew there was going to be a graphic there put there by the web designer. So it's not just going on having a photo shoot. There's been tentative purpose for it. So you've got to be able to communicate back to the photographer that you're working with or even your client. Another way to do this is to have the photographs done first then design the website around it. This is a company called Outside the Box Manufacturing. They do microchips and all sorts of cool stuff. I actually went to high school with the owner. We kind of rekindled. I hadn't seen her in probably 20 years. She called up one day and said, I saw you guys at the Kent Chamber thing. Yeah, we need images for every website. Our web designer told us to have the images taken first. So that was kind of cool. It doesn't usually happen that way. But this is kind of what we suggest for our clients is have the photography taken first and then we can design around it. You can see here that the web designer, we reversed the image. We dropped in for him and created a really cool kind of synopsis of what they do on the homepage there. It's also good for brand continuity. Here's a recent headshot we did for Seattle Reproductive Medicine. We had up there about once a month to photograph all of the new doctors, nursing staff, any new staff members that they have because they're really big about putting that kind of personal face on their website of who's going to be working with you when you show up for your treatments. With our great photographer and us working with the web people, we would go out and create a similar look every time with the same lighting, same pose, same size. So that continuity on that page looks really nice and crisp. It doesn't just kill you when your, one of your clients sends you, oh, we have a build this, got a new headshot and sent it to you and it's like a selfie and all the other ones look nice and here's the one. It just stands out and looks horrible, right? Makes the whole website look unprofessional. It's a big thing that we do as well.  Let's bring in your cancer center in Tupola, just down the street from our studio. So they kind of are tasked with creating a new website and so we're working with the web designer back in Atlanta and saying, okay, we're kind of looking for what you guys are going for and they sent us some examples. I said okay, do you have kind of the website piece together and they did and so based on what they sent us, we were able to create images for specific pages that they were going to need. So we went out, did a full day shoot for them and then it's bringing it all together. Creating an image for our clients that we actually ended up printing a 40 inch portrait of and putting in the lobby but then also being able to extract by cropping the exact measurements needed from the web designer and then also placing some of these other kind of more established and shop territorial type stuff. Showing them doing their thing. You lose, harmonizing, just a very pretty clean web design and a lot of it had to do with the photography. It's working directly with that designer. Now a lot of times people say, well can we just use stock images? Can't you just go find stock images and then you spend hours and hours and hours looking through stock websites trying to find that perfect shop. Time is money and if you're not building for time and you're building for projects, you're losing money. What I suggest is, why do you want to be one of many when you can stand out? I love when I'm out bidding a job for a client. I love going to the current website and pulling up images right on their homepage and running a Google image search and showing them that, well, Dr. Peterson, that really cool image that you like is shared by 25,000 other doctor's websites in the US and no by the way, 400 competitors are using the same image. Doctors, surgeons, dentist, lawyers, a little competitive. It's a great way to, for us as photographers say, this is why we want to create something original so you really stand out. Because the consumers out there looking at a lot of different websites, they start seeing that same image. Wait a minute. People are smarter than that.  So what you can do is you can work with a photographer to create that stock image look for a website that you're building but make it an original image. It's Bellview Family Medicine on the right there. That's exactly what we did. Their web clienter said, hey, we need some kind of more stop looking and engaging. We're a family doctor, family practice. We can see here that we can create something that looks stock but makes it original. Okay? Once again, another stock image. Here's the original image that we created for this is a Radar Cancer Center again. And actually, Quince Denley, the gentleman posing there, was actually a client of ours. He was actually getting treatments done there. We kind of found out about it. So that was a great way to sort of integrate him. He was already a client of ours, trusted us. We could do it. And if you guys are even a model, you just talk to me. I'm super cheap. I am the face of a lot of different websites around the Northwest. Actually, this is Bellview Family Medicine on the left and that's the managed orthodontics on the right. So sometimes if you need a model, you just jump right in and get it done. But one thing I would suggest is when you're working with your clients or patients or customers, clients, leave that definitely to the business to coordinate that. But say, you know, we're going to need three or four people there. Sometimes it's, you show up and well, we don't have a model. Okay, well, I guess I'll do it. But anyway, you need a model. So here's a little bit of criteria of partnering with a photographer. We are not all created equal. But I'm not going to stand up here and say one of only a handful of master craftsmen photographers in the entire state of Washington. We've been in business 36 years. But there's a lot of great photographers that are just going to start to have great eyes as well. But just realize that not all of us are created equal, especially when shooting with intent for commercial purposes like this. Things you need to focus on would be experience. Experience in this realm, they're great wedding photographers out there. Great family photographers, great baby photographers. It's not the same thing. You want to see completed projects, not just a portfolio of their best. This goes for wedding photographers if any of you are thinking of getting married. When you sit down at the consultation and they show you the best of the best, say, I want to see an actual album of an entire wedding start to finish. So, and that's a great way to avoid a photographer going out and shooting 500 images and you only get three that you can use. It can be very frustrating. So make sure you see a completed project from somebody, not just a portfolio of their best. Equipment, what kind of lenses? What kind of lighting? I'm not a big equipment guy. Nikon, Canon, Sony, it's all a camera. It's just the tools my dad would say. But make sure that the look going for can be achieved by the equipment that he uses. Different focal lengths, the lenses, the type of lighting. Had a guy just show up in the studio randomly on Thursday who wanted somebody to do product photography with these really fancy headlights that he enforced in Japan. His web designer said, go to a photographer, have some product shots done on the transparent background. I don't want any glare on the lens which is kind of tricky to do. Went and bought the little studio kit thing at Best Buy, right? You know, you put your ring in there and you photograph it. Came by the studio and he's just like, I can't do it anymore. So imagine if you went and just came two weeks ago instead of spending all that time and money trying to do it yourself. He goes, yeah, you're right. We have the equipment. We can create that. But not all photographers do, so make sure you check that out. There are commercial guys that charge 10,000 a session. There are also people that charge 50 bucks. I do believe you get what you pay for. So if you have a client that's very price conscious, maybe remind them that this is an investment. It's an investment in not only the website, but being able to use those images as content for future marketing campaigns, a lot of other different things. I would look for someone full time. If you have somebody that does it kind of as a side hustle, they may be great. You might be waiting four or five, six weeks to be sure of this. They get busy with Boeing, they get busy with Microsoft or they work for Facebook and Google or something. I personally prefer somebody full time. That way I know I'm going to get what I'm paying for. I'm going to get the time allotted and get it done as fast as possible. Photoshop skills. Once again, time is money. If a photographer is going to go out and just send them to you, now you've got to process them. You've got to go through and problem. I wouldn't recommend hiring someone like that. I'd hire somebody who is going to give you a finished image of the specs that you guys want. Okay? And believe it or not, there are a lot of photographers out there that are not very Photoshop centric. My father is one of them. That's why we hired a gal named Amy who is our Photoshop designer. She does everything Photoshop related at the studio. A morning photo shoot to finish afternoon to the WordPress designer ready to go. And our clients really appreciate that. And the web developers appreciate that to get it done quickly. And that's because we've got a full-time gal that does it for us. Professional associations. A lot of people don't know that there are actually some pretty big associations for photographers. PBA, Professional Photographers of America. They kind of mentioned that in my bio a little bit. There are photographers that are a part of this work. This is kind of our governing body for our industry. So I would look and I would ask, are you a member of PBA? Not all legitimate photographers have to be a member of it, but I would say it's a pretty good benchmark if you're a member of PBA. You're paying the dues. You've got insurance.  Here more locally, professional photographers of Washington have an offshoot of PBA. Or you can actually search for a photographer right there.  You can go there. Five minutes legit, it lives by you. Call them up, say, hey, I've got a project. I'd like to see some of your work. Maybe you can be a part of it. One thing last day I would avoid is the no cell phone zone. You're going to have people show up and meet with your clients. If you're the one giving the recommendation, make sure to put the cell phone. It's a no-no. So make sure when you're finding a photographer you bet on it. You want to make sure the equipment's correct because if they show up with a cell phone, your clients should go, what the heck is this value you guys sent me? And it happens more than you would think nowadays. Everybody thinks you're a photographer with portrait mode on the iPhone. Here's the partner. This is how you get involved with people like me. Either the client can hire you and I actually recommend against this. I think that any time you're doing the web project, the more control you can have over the content, the better because we know when we leave that in the hands of our clients we usually get crap. So I like being in control but if your client wants to hire and they can, I would go more of the white label type scenario. Where either you're going out and hiring a photographer or you're building it into your vids and your jobs and find someone that you like to work with and make that sellable benefit to your clients. Not only am I into web design, but we're going to have professional photography and when you file a photographer for a negotiator, I've negotiated these down pretty darn cheap based on volume with a few web designers that send us 5 or 6 gigs a month. Yeah, I'll cut you a break on the price. You just keep those clients coming because it's also a great way for me to meet new businesses, new companies, they're going to need things besides just web set photography in the future so it's a win-win. Or yep, exactly. That's right. Or learn how to do it. Okay? I wonder if there's a place that teaches photography. We've had a ton of creatives come to our classes out of the studio and so much so that we're actually developing a class that's for web designers. Better website photography. So Carla, who she's not here now but she's running around, that's actually how I met Carla. She came to one of our photo classes. She stayed after and said, hey, I'd like to learn more. And my dad goes, okay, cool. We'll be on 152 hours for private lessons. She goes, well, I've got a whole bag of skill sets and actually we use her for all of our video editing now and graphics and stuff. It's sort of an anytime trade. But now we actually work with Carla on a more professional level. She's the executive producer of our radio show. We've done some website projects together and she's currently building a new website that's in photo workshops for us right now. So we've actually become one of her clients which is kind of cool. There's ways you can learn how to do this yourself and that'd be pretty cool if you could just go out there and do the website photography and then build it and you get exactly what you want. So that's what I recommend as well. Think of images as a way to tell a story. Guys, think else. That brand of that nonprofit of that mom and pop shop business in Capitol Hill that you're building a website for, okay, the images can be used to enhance that brand but also tell a story behind it. You know, Century Security. We actually went out and did a whole night shoot with one of their security guards while he was on duty which was kind of fun actually. He was in White Center. So it was very exciting. People trying to break into the McClellan's out there. But basically spending an evening with one of these guys and sort of capturing who he is and what he's doing and then the brand of we're here to help and we're here to protect that kind of stuff. Or Orion Industries which, anyone ever heard of Orion? Anyone? Very cool. It's a not-for-profit company that actually builds parts for Boeing. They do some factory assembly for companies like Comcast and they hire people that are disabled, have learning disabilities, have physical disabilities or people that are getting out of prison that are looking to kind of put their life back together. My brother-in-law was a counselor for them for a long time and he got us hooked up with them and we spent three days documenting two locations there of all of their employees telling the stories of each one of them for their quarterly report also for their new website they were building. But I mean, does that image just tell a little story there? This guy is so happy. He's got a job. He's making money. He got a purpose and in Orion, that's what they give is they give people a purpose in life again. So it's very cool to spend time with that but being able to tell that story through images is very powerful. You know, how about the history of a business or a trade? Once again, here's Orion. The gentleman on the right is the trainer, the gentleman on the left actually just got out of prison wants to get his life back together. So he was vetted, he was hired and had a second chance at life again and just showing the mentorship and him working with him and telling that story or Jorges and Ford which is just down here kind of by Museum of Flight. Many people don't know that a lot of the big components on ships and submarines and airplanes still has to be hand forged. There's no computer program, model, anything that can do that. It's all going to be done by hand. So we got ourselves up, started to shoot at 4 a.m. That's when we opened the kilns where they take out these huge humps of steel and they've got to go and it's like 30,000 degrees. It's crazy. And we documented, all warning, this kind of forgotten trade that most people don't know is still around and the guy's behind it. So just kind of an iconic image here of those guys pulling the thing out who got some really cool shots of the hammers pounding the metal and everything. Personalize, don't commercialize. So many times your clients are like, I don't want to put my picture on the website. I don't want to put my team. Personalization is key, I think, to an effective website and effective web presence. I really do. So being able to get a client where we're going to go, this is actually outside the box manufacturer, that's Allison right there who started the company with her husband out of their garage 10 years ago. Now they've got this huge facility, we did a whole photo shoot there and then we ended up on a lift doing kind of the shot of the whole company. And this is kind of the iconic shot on their website of this is who we are, this is the team we built and the story behind them starting in their garage and now being where they are. Very cool. Or a lawyer. So instead of just doing a stuffy headshot at the studio we're going to go out to work. He does this thing which is his name's DUI attorney, his name's DUI Joe. He's hilarious, by the way.  But if you ever did, he would be the guy you'd want to call. We wanted something that was still professional portraying him as kind of the man in charge of control, but also personable. He's got the jacket off, kind of holding onto it, kind of semi-casual, that's the brand that DUI Joe goes for. But still semi-serious. What? Still semi? We had some of him smiling and he was like I don't want to look like a pushover. So that's kind of how we took the jacket off and of course again working with his web designer there was a spot on the website for kind of a tall skinny vertical so that's kind of the look we went for and you've got the pillars back there parallel lines, right? Okay, coming to the end here how are we doing on time? Oh, we're doing great. I wanted this to be about 45 minutes so we're right on time. So here's some elements needed to produce images with impact and intent for your designs, okay? Things to look for. We're going to go through each one of these individually. Exposure. Proper exposure. We're going to show you some different examples of that. Images that are properly exposed have a pop to them. Not a darkness or an overexposed image which you'll see Composition. Leading lines in the rule of thirds. Certain impact points on an image, right? Remember the girl with the XGM web page? That's a very strong impactful image because the rule of thirds. Okay, we'll show you an example of that. Lighting. Effectively say eyes, not eyes. I think it was not late enough to do that slide. Anyway, it wouldn't be a Hudson Crease and Page if you didn't see at least a typo. So we used to have a thing if you can spot the typo and buy your beer after class but I've spotted this so I guess I might have myself a beer tonight.  I'm going to show you an example of that. Lighting can be key especially if it's like a headshot or a portrait. Let's see an example. Let's perspective. Look for depth and dimension. You want to take a 2D media and make it look 3D. There's different ways you can do that. Body language. Once again, telling a story. Furthering that brand that you're working with. And then color. Do you want things to harmonize or do you want things to have attention to that? We can do that with color as well. And then lastly texture. So here let's move to exposure. So, here's an image for a restaurant. And with the lighting here if we have a light stand you can see that the image is a lot better but it's very dark. Very dark. Not proper. Properly exposed. A lot of times when restaurants you get out to work with them they'll show us images that were created by another photographer and I can tell right away if they weren't using A in lighting trying to do more of a natural ambient type thing. B or if it was exposed properly. So you get kind of the dark look on it contrasting all that gray. Or one that's over exposed. Okay. Somebody doesn't know what they're doing with the lighting doesn't have it exposed properly. An image that is properly exposed is going to have that pop to it. Okay. You can see here kind of the finished product of that restaurant. I've ended up putting it on the home page of their site. Their chapino to die for actually. Anyone from the south end? Cantharia, Renton? Yeah. You ever go to Paulos? Paulos and Kent? Yeah. That was their chapino. So, they started to enter. Hey Chef Paul, I saw you in the presentation. Good body of yours. So composition. Leading lines create depth and dimension. You take an image that is a 2D medium, right? And with leading lines you can create that dimension to it. You can see here kind of the focal point that my dad was going for. Okay. Your eyes drawn to it. So there's a lot of different ways in composition you can do that. The rule of thirds. Think of the impact points on that image. Okay. So when you're working with photographers with your designs if they don't already know this explain this to them. This is kind of what we're looking for. We need images that are high impact but also have intent for this design ability. Lighting. So here's Breanna one of our old employees in the studio modeling for us. You know, pretty girl. Pretty image. This was the ambient light. Here's the kiss of flash. See the difference there?  That's actually the flash in her eyes. Okay. Rembrandt when he used to paint would always paint backlit in that flash. So he always paint like a little bit of white in somebody's eyes to give that eye to pop a little bit so it's not dead. Okay. Been doing it for hundreds of years. And if you get a photographer that's doing more of an ambient light situation you might be able to get something that looks okay but it's not going to pop like something that's properly lit. It's where the equipment comes into play. And lens perspective. You know you've got something that's more of a full length here. That exact same pose with a 200 millimeter. You know lens perspective can change the look or feel of an image big time. You know depth of field. This is kind of that iPhone portrait mode thing. Well you can actually do it with a real camera too depending on the lens you use. You know here right here at Cancer Center again. You know they're looking over a case that's the lead doctor there trying to convey that they care they're professional and this image had a major intent because they had a graphic that was going right here. Once again food photography zoom in really close with the long lens get that good sharp crisp field to it. With a lot of depth of field behind it and the body language. Here's an image that we created for resort to Jamaica. We actually photographed this couple down there and the resort contacted us and said hey did you guys get anything really good? I think we could use it on our website. And they of course gave us permission but you know it tells a story. You know Sunset they just got married around the beach he's kissing her and I mean it tells that story of the day for that. You know more Dr. Cashner who's more of a Doniston Covington. You know he's very personable. The guy who's hilarious is Jerry Seinfeld. Hilarious. We had a conversation with him and we just sat in consultation and just and let him do his thing. We had the lighting set up and everything and said just do your thing Dr. Cashner. But it conveys a story.  It tells that story. Once again it's an image with intent a calm feel. So if you've got a a client who may be able to get spa or maybe it's a dentist and they want to go for that kind of calm feeling in that well the type of color harmony that you have in your images can do a lot for that. You know here's a photo shoot we did for some rum company I can't remember. You know my dad's there and he goes he found this really cool orange car and it looks orange under label kind of set the bottle up there and create kind of harmonious look to it some other stuff he was doing nearly last year. A color harmony for a calming where with color contrast you're going to draw a lot of attention. So depending on the business you're working with and their brand and what they're going for maybe this is the direction you want to go something that really just stands out amongst everything else. And then there's texture you know wedding dress this is for I forget her name a wedding designer dress designer you know but kind of going for that soft kind of silky kind of smooth texture right or resort up into Fino. Kind of want to show off some of the different textures the different rocks and the topography up there you know or a home restoration company that wants to kind of show some before and after type stuff really rough hard texture so thoughts and closing photography should be part of your design shouldn't be an afterthought shouldn't be a client will send me some stuff it should be part of your designs from the very beginning work directly with a photographer you know and I would build it into your bits make yourself kind of a one stop shop okay I've had a lot of success with a lot of web designers where we're kind of like white labeled behind the scenes we go into the shoot clients are super happy he gets more referrals in turn we get more business okay so I think if you work directly with a photographer it's going to help out quite a bit on old ends like I said white label or learn to do it yourself but keep that control right because we know when we let the clients go rogue content stuff never usually turns out all that great remember that the images on your designs should have impact on intent okay once again that goes back to working with a photographer either showing them what you've already done or building it based on what they send you as far as a finished image with that said thanks everyone if you have questions I'll be here if not I'll see you tomorrow


from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. Hey, welcome back everyone, live here in Silicon Valley in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, coverage of DevNet Create. This is Cisco's cloud developer DevOps, cloud native developer environment. This is different from DevNet, that's their Cisco developer conference, so we're here covering it. This is where all the action in Kubernetes, DevOps and a lot more. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Heidi Waterhouse, developer advocate for LaunchDarkly. Welcome to theCUBE. Hi, thank you, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for coming on. So first of all, take a minute to talk about what you guys do as a company. Then we'll talk about some specific DevOps questions that we have for you. Excellent, so what we do as a company is, I summarize it as feature flags as a service. We are giving people a control surface to be able to deploy their code safely in the daytime so nobody has to stay up on a deploy bridge and then control who sees it very precisely and roll out individually or do work to do like intricate testing with user groups or we sometimes use it like imagine if sales could turn on a feature, a test feature for one client without needing to go to development and get approval for all of that. So it gives us the ability to let people be richer in their expression of software. Is it software as a service? Is it cloud-based? It is 100% cloud-based. We charge by developer seat and all we are saying is like go ahead and use it. We have the capacity to handle it. We're handling about 25 billion flags a day right now. Yeah, so it's a great tool. So it's not like a big over the top feature cost. It's like a nice lightweight usability. The more you use it, the better utility. Yeah, it's very light. It's like a couple SDKs and then a code snippet about this long, depending on your language. Java one's a little longer. And what it gives people is the ability to do feature flags which lots of people are already doing in a manageable way with a structured API so that people can keep track of what's happening and make sure that they are only allowing the right people to turn flags on because you don't want everybody to be able to hit the kill switch.  I think you also want it to be consistent in that environment and those environments where the developers are trying to understand what that looks like. Right, and auditable. We give you the ability to see every change that's happened to a flag and who made it. So DevOps is going on almost a 10 year run now. If you look back at the original kind of DevOps ethos, it really was kind of coming in late in the 2007 timeframe, real hardcore DevOps were building their own stuff. So we're 10 years into what I would call the true DevOps. Maybe early, you could argue a little bit earlier when Amazon hit the table, but you're talking about the kind of things that you guys are doing is really large DevOps environments where you want agility, you want real time, push code all the time, but be reliable. This is more of a mature looking dev team. How has that evolved and what are some of the key things is this is kind of probably an indicator of where everything else is going. What are some of the developer concerns? Is it A, B testing? That's kind of a trivial example but I often imagine all kinds of new software methodologies are coming out of this. What are you seeing? So what we're seeing is for 20 years we've been teaching and preaching branch based development. But it turns out the very largest software organizations like Google are doing trunk based development because branches are just a way to cry. Once you try and merge something back in you find out that you have conflicts and then you have to have more discussions about who gets cherry picked and it's catastrophic. I've said for a long time that maybe my second career is just going to be a trauma therapist specializing in GitHub. And I think I can make money at that. So we have this inherent belief that branches are just how we code. And what we've been seeing is people are pulling back more and more into trunk based development so that everybody's aware of what's going on all the time and you can just have one through line in your code and not have people squirreling off into branches that are unproductive. And how do you manage that? So your tool manages that or is it more of a philosophy? It is a side effect of our tool because the reason we have branches is because we don't want to show people our work in process. But if you can hide it behind a feature flag and only deploy it, only activate it when you're ready it gives you a good chance to like test it in production. Like there's nothing that says you can't build your feature, test it in production at full scale with all your microservices distributed, all of the data flow, everything. But you're the only one who sees it. And being able to target that is really important. It's going to give you a lot of capacity to test things. Yeah, and we've seen that too all the time where people are saying, hey, you know what? I want to test it before I invest in it. That's a big thing. Yeah, it is. And internally being able to test things is going to give you a lot of capacity. So we find that it is not our, we're not enforcing anything on anyone. That's not our role or our goal. What we're trying to do is offer people a tool that helps facilitate the best of what they're doing. Yeah, and when you look at developer tools, I think that's absolutely critical in bringing that to the table for different environments and things along those lines. And one of the things I was going to ask you is when you look at the developer environment, is the developer environments in your mind in a spot where people can do this? In other words, will they be able to pull it off and open source? Because if someone's got all this open source information going on, let's just say hypothetically that you have the trunk thing going on, but you've got a lot of open sources driving this. So there's some discipline involved. There's some psychology counseling, as you mentioned. So how do you pull it off? And what's the best use case? You have to make it advantageous. You have to make it work for them because people aren't going to do things that don't work for them. I teach a workshop, I was doing a workshop here about documentation and people are like, how do you get developers to document? I'm like, well, have you ever fired a developer for not documenting something? Have you ever given them a raise for documenting something? If you haven't, you don't actually care about them doing documentation. In the same way, moving culture means that we have to incentivize doing the right thing. We have to make the barrier to entry low and we have to make it possible for people to just do the right thing more easily than the wrong thing. The other thing that I was thinking about too is this is just kind of my personal opinion. Because the things you mentioned are really important and that is that doing testing at scale is a big deal because if you think about all the wasted time that goes into like just putting just the politics, whether it's politics or lobbying to get something in a feature bill. I mean, you're talking about months, weeks. I mean, it's a nightmare. So imagine a capability to say, and this is the promise of DevOps. This is ultimately why this is so awesome. So this is like move fast and don't break things very much. And I like to think of every plane you get on is a little bit broken. It has an error budget and if it exceeds the error budget in any direction, even if it's like an overhead latch bin, they ground the plane. But our organizations also need to be that resilient. We need to have that flexibility. And I think the way we can do that is by being able to instrument our features and turn them off if they're causing problems or turn them down if we're getting flooded or whatever it is we need to do, we can need to do it at a finer grain than we've currently been doing. I don't ever want to have blackouts, like maybe a brownout. You know, Heidi, the other thing that I think is interesting what you guys are doing is that this whole event here at DevNet Korea and all the other events that are, I call cutting edge developer events, the vendors who sell stuff, like Sicily, whether they're big or new vendors, the old model of preaching and jamming solutions down your throat is not the way it works anymore. All the enablements has to be there, but the co-creation's happening really from the people who are building their own stuff. So that's kind of going to have to be a dynamic, creative environment. So you need to have a really pure DevOps environment. Yeah. What not pure DevOps? I mean, an environment that's going to be facilitating creativity, risk-taking, experimentation, building concepts, not, oh, I'm constrained because this circulation doesn't support. Yeah. It's hard to do advanced thinking when you are not psychologically safe, but I do think that you don't have to be like operating in the purest of DevOps in order to be taking in some of these tools and techniques and using them effectively. I think there are a lot of people who have, for instance, taken up blameless post-mortems, even if they're not doing anything else in the DevOps sphere.  And I want us to say, like whatever you can do, that's going to improve your environment. I don't want people to feel like they have to absolutely transform everything because that's too big an ask. Yes. It's disruptive too. To operations. Do you want to be just enough disruptive? All right, I want to get your thoughts on something that I've been thinking about for a while, but talking about in the queue. And that is, I come from the old ball. When I was growing into the business, it was all waterfall-based. Software development. Agile comes along and de-risks everything. Because the old days was you created a product, you crafted it, you shipped it, and you don't know if it was going to work or not, right? And you did QA, all that, and you prayed. Now with Agile, that's got de-risks. So now when you're shipping code, you're iterating, but I'm arguing that the craftsmanship has kind of gone out of it because you're constantly programming. And so that's kind of my opinion. Simple debate that. But now we're seeing a move towards with the Agile methodology, which I love, and a role of craftsmanship, where cloud is kind of going to the next level. You start to see people think about crafting the products. So as Agile goes to the next level, what's your opinion, view of crafting processes? Now the user experience has gone beyond just looking to feel and being good. Mission-based application, just seeing new kinds of psychology of how people use things. So diversity becomes important. The role of crafting in the methodology. Is there a spot for that? How does that fit in? If you're constantly shipping code, push, push, push. Are you crafting it? Is there an art? Where's the artistry of it? Where is the artistry? Well, artistry isn't replicable. So this is sort of a problem because what we really want is consistency. So I think eventually it will become sort of like novelty ice cube molds. There's somebody who carves the original novelty ice cube mold and then we all use it to make novelty ice cubes that fill our heart with delight. There is an artistry, but we're going to have to pay people to do it and currently we're only paying them to cool our drinks. And until we really make some time to say like it is saving me time, it is saving me money to have a well-crafted product, we're not going to change. And I think that's an interesting thing about serverless and function as a service is it really pays to have a super well-constructed system. Like those microseconds do count there in a way that they haven't in the age of eternal storage and basically all the bandwidth we can consume. And I'd like to see that applied backward toward people who have very low bandwidth. I would love it if like one day a month, everybody dialed down their corporate internet to the speed that rural America is getting and see how they feel about their apps then.  And also outside of the United States too. Again, I'm not saying that there's not good software. I'm just kind of seeing a trend where certainly I've seen this in DC and outside of the US where mission-driven enterprises are have completely different criteria for the product. And so I'm just trying to, I'm seeing some early signals around that the software methodology might not shift, but it just feels like it's some action there. And I always kind of keep an eye on that. So the thing that I think is going to happen, and this is my like weird futurist hat, is I think we are going to have more and more modular snap-together assemblies and the product manager is going to rise from the ash heap and be the person who says, look, these are all the things that we need to assemble. Please go find the parts so that we can build this that we want in a way that we haven't prioritized in a realm where we're like, well developers tell me how to do this. So componentize future. Componentize future, I see us really moving strongly toward that, I think that's a lot of what we're doing with serverless and software as a service is like, why build it yourself if somebody has already done it? Like please don't roll your own. Don't roll your own authentication. Don't roll your own LDAP. Like it's a solved problem. Buy it and snap it together in the way that serves your customer. Well, Jim Zemlin said this at the open source summit in LA last year, he said, you call it the open source sandwich. Only 10% of the solutions are unique IP. 90% of it is the bread that's from open source. So you don't, to your point, this is already kind of going there. So the exponential growth in open source is becoming significant. So with that in mind, that's going to play a part in that futuristic view that's happening now. Your thoughts on open source, you mentioned that you could be a crisis counselor, a therapist or whatever. I mean, there's a lot going on. It's now tier one, it's multi-generational now. It's not the old days renegade second tier citizen. It's open source is powering the world. Your thoughts on the current state of open source. I think open source is a fascinating example of doing what we need and how it helps other people. And so almost all open source projects even now start with personal pain and then we expand them to other people. And I would like us to remember that the reason it's open is because we care about other people's pain. And it's really easy as we like corporatize open source to forget that that's where we came from. And it's community driven and it's done in the open. Yeah, exactly. And like revealing everything that we're doing is an excellent value even if we're not necessarily licensing it. Like you can go and look at all of LaunchDarkly's APIs, we have them out there, but we're not an open source company. We're just like, those are values that we have that we want to be able, we want people to trust us so we're going to show them. Yeah. Well, congratulations. It's great to have you on a great conversation. Love the future of you riffing on some concepts we've been thinking about also got a great service and making possible to operate at scale, get new features tested and buy those capabilities. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. We're here at DevNet, Create, Cisco's Cloud DevOps developer, get together. I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more coverage after this short break.


What's good? Josh boros back again with another video. So we're gonna check out 10 reasons why you should buy WWE 2k 22. This should be a an interesting one, man I know you guys have been telling us we got to get it. Hey, we got the gaming PCs at the studio So we're definitely gonna be playing some WWE 2k 22 for you guys because you guys have been asking for it for years. We got you guys I know y'all been saying to skip a couple of these because past few years they haven't been that great But you guys are hyped about it. We're actually hyped about it. I haven't played a wrestling game in so long So this should be something quite interesting. Let's check this video out. Appreciate all the love to support Let's do this thing. I make a video listening 10 reasons why you should or should not buy the newest WWE 2k video game. I've been typically excited about each year up until 2k 20 I had a strong feeling that that game was going to your ass and boy was I right It was the biggest letdown in the history of WWE games Wow, you can say that it was even worse than 2k 15 That games engine was so slow and it pretty much ruined the fun of that game But at least it was a functioning video game 2k 20 wasn't even playable And I said that in my video when I originally uploaded it some people disagreed and I got a couple thousand dislikes But I was right 2k just did not have enough time to create a new engine from scratch Thankfully they took a year off and 2k 22 looks promising I haven't been this hyped in a long time and I got a good feeling about this one therefore today I'm gonna list 10 reasons why you should buy WWE 2k 22 number 10 the graphics in my personal experience of gaming I never really cared about graphics too much They never made or broke a game for me However, you can't talk about 2k 22 without mentioning the stunning graphics most of the models in the game looks so good It is unbelievable. I'm literally excited to play as pretty much everyone on the roster Just so I can see how they look for example Incredible Seamus looked great Roman Reigns has a fantastic model Sasha Banks also looks really good In fact, most of the women models a little bit got in a huge upgrade except for maybe charlotte's the hair It's also hit difference The lighting makes a big difference as well for the first time ever the graphics may have extremely hyped me up over a video game Number nine the entrances another thing that I never really cared about in the past WWE video games were the entrances I would just skip them and turn them off because I just wanted to get into the matches faster It's a little different this time around 2k has made efforts to make the entrances better by adding brand new camera angles And I will say that that makes the biggest difference The entrances of the past games were very generic and that is another reason why I didn't really care about the Presentation of those entrances with the new angles I'm eager to see everyone's entrance similar to their models these little differences add up to an overall Pleasant experience from what I'm seeing I feel like the new entrances will make for a better experience And I feel like I can see myself watching them before the matches, which is something like I said, I never do It is I will say this is is looking promising not gonna lie to you the height for it seems a very real and From what just a footage that I've seen it is looking pretty promising So I am somewhat somewhat excited to see how things are gonna play out this year number 8 dodging moves Decided to make drastic changes to the controls for this game because of the new gameplay engine that I'll discuss later on in the video One of the coolest additions is that you are able to now dodge moves You can still do the old-fashioned reversals that is still in the game But there's also another way to avoid a strike and that is dodging This is a great feature because it's going to make some matches much more interesting It won't just be your typical reversals. You can now dodge and hit your opponent with a unique strike I think this is that's gonna be pretty cool Many people are not really talking about too much on top of that you can also block strikes That means there are three effective ways to avoid the offense from your opponent and that will make up for fresh matchups Number seven the Ross or finesse people are concerned with their roster for WWE 2k 22 Because the company fired so many people since Duke has been working on the game in 2019 The good news seems to me that it may be too late to remove those wrestlers 2k already finished most of the game and take the For example, there's a critical part that includes Seth Rollins and his former buddy buddy Murphy He's been seen in the trailer and Jeff Hardy was also in a different video They released across social media as well I believe that most of the wrestlers that were released will still be in the video game due to time constraints That is a nice finesse because we don't have to download all these other guys I'm not sure who will make it and who won't but hopefully top guys like the fiend and Jeff Hardy will be in the game I mean granted WWE still is on the rights to those characters. I believe so. So well not well Yeah, in a sense in what they got going on like character-wise storyline wise and obviously In a sense where it comes to like Them releasing people and then they're still working on a game It would make sense if some of these people that were released are still in the game because they were obviously meant to be in there So I wouldn't have a problem with it It would just be how they set it up How how would they go about it would it be DLC or whatnot, but granted you could be like well That's kind of scummy. They're still making money off the image. That's WWE They're all about the bottom dollar. They'll make money off you even after they let you go Maybe 2k will just exclude them from the promo work and the Ross reveal number six Mysterio showcase 2k showcase mode isn't something that's going to make people buy WWE 2k 22 It's really not. However, it's a nice addition to the game Especially for younger fans who didn't really witness some of these matches while they were happening Choosing Rey Mysterio as the main focus of the mode was a good idea. He's one of the most beloved wrestlers in WWE they got any one be fun to see his career unfold with him narrating It's what makes this even better is that we're going to have so many classic attires That's because of his showcase most of which come from the ruthless aggression era And that is my era and that is going to be a fun throwback for me So you'll be able to go play through his greatest hits. I like that. That's cool I'll definitely be down to do that man From the Eddie Trippin show looks so incredible as well. I just want to throw that out there number five My faction for the first time ever 2k has added a brand new game mode into the WWE game series It's going to be named my faction and it seems like it's going to be very similar to my team from their NBA series I absolutely love playing my team. It's essentially going to be opening packs and Randomly getting wrestlers to form your own faction To get us not really talked about it too much yet, but it seems interesting if they're going to be anything similar to the NBA version. I think this will add a lot of longevity to the game number four my rise 2k is rebranding my career mode and it is now called my rise now We don't have too many details on this mode either or any of the changes that they made to it except that the developmental team did Confirm that it is going to be different from 2k 20 in the former game There was one storyline that followed a male and female wrestler It was an interwine story that lasts about 24 or maybe 25 hours 2k has stated that in the new game There will be two separate storylines for both male and female wrestlers It should last about 25 hours for each story, which means we got a total of 50 hours I like the idea because it adds a lot more to the game And it's probably better to keep these storylines apart to make them very unique number three GM mode We've all been asking for it to return for a decade now and 2k has finally Oh, so they brought it back. GM mode is finally making a return to the WWE video games Like I said, it only took 10 years, but it is finally back It's going to have everything from the draft to booking the show to pay for promos and matches and receiving ratings for the shows Something tells me that'll be pretty cool. A lot of people are going to be playing for a long time It's nice that 2k finally listened to their fans. It really is That's cool, man. Being able to create your own show Book it. Hey, who would be interested in seeing in a clutch GM mode, man When we booked the shows and see how the ratings go, I think that's pretty cool, man I'm it's a lot to take in because I haven't I've never played any of the 2k wrestling games But this is I'm actually it's definitely peaking my interest even more It's like there's a ton of modes that will make this game last for a while Number two the new gameplay engine earlier in the video I talked about the new gameplay engine that 2k is introducing and I thought I should talk about it more because it seems like it is the Best change that happened to this game. One of the biggest reasons 2k 20 sucks so much Is because of the glitches and the errors outside of that They tried replicating the old engine and it just did not work out I like the idea of moving away from that engine and introducing something that has more of an arcade style to it It looks more fluid quick and has a fighting game feel to it And I think a lot of people are going to enjoy this compared to the simulation we used to get from the past I really do and it's gotten me very excited And number one cross platform community creations The last reason you should buy ww 2k 22 is that they have confirmed that there will be cross platform community creations I cannot believe if they finally done it users can now upload all their creations to every platform And anybody from a different platform can download it. That is epic Oh, man. I already know y'all gonna make some ITC ones. You know, we're gonna make some ITC Characters. We've got to put ourselves in the game. You know what I'm saying the ITC crew We're going for the championships. We're taking down everybody. Oh, that's gonna be so cool Can't wait and then y'all gonna be able to download it too. Oh, that's gonna be awesome, bro This is seriously one of the best additions to the game. This is going to lead to the best cause we've ever seen In the history of the ww 2k series. I am so this is cool, man. Anyways, that is it for the video guys. Hey I'm I'm interested. I'm hyped. I can't wait to get the game. We're gonna have it on pc So it's gonna be all cool We'll probably be setting up our stuff and you know, we're trying to we want to want to be able to Start streaming relatively soon. Hopefully the next month around the time the game starts You know release or so It's this gonna be great. This is going to be great, man. I know you guys are gonna love this 2k streams Is it gonna be lit? We're definitely gonna have to create the ITC Crew we're going at it.  So comment down below. Let me know if you guys are at height for wwe 2k 22 are you guys excited for it or you guys not excited for you? Think the the hype is is unwarranted I really want to get your opinions on it But I think a lot of you guys from what I've been hearing on social media, twitter, instagram You guys are really hyped for this game. So let me know down below How hyped you are for this game to drop and how after you will be for us to start streaming this and playing this, man But I appreciate all love and support roll to 70k appreciate y'all kicking with me. See y'all next one. Please


Hi there, and welcome back to 19th and 20th century philosophy. I'm Matt Brown, and today we're talking about William James, Anna Julia Cooper, and American Pragmatism. So what I want to do today is talk to you a little bit about these two figures. I give you an introduction, but also start to talk to you about the philosophical tradition known as American Pragmatism. American Pragmatism is the first philosophical tradition that originated in the United States that wasn't super dependent on ideas coming out of Europe. The Pragmatist tradition, like any philosophical tradition, is somewhat difficult to characterize. It concerns in some ways the connection of knowledge and agency. It concerns the analysis of philosophical problems through the lens of practice and of experience. So that word pragmatist or pragmatic is meant to tie into sort of agency and practice. It's a post-Darwinian philosophy. It attempts to grapple with the philosophical meaning of Darwinism and biology and the Darwinian conception of the human being. Pragmatism is now no longer just an American phenomenon, and it's seen as a major alternative in the philosophical world to both the analytic and the continental philosophy traditions, though in some sense it's both influential on and older than both of those traditions. Now, many figures that we think of as pragmatist, but some of the early figures were part of what was called the Metaphysical Club. The Metaphysical Club was the name of a discussion group about philosophy in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1870s that included among its members Charles Sanders Purse, who's often credited as the originator of some of the main ideas of pragmatism. William James, who we'll talk about today. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who would eventually go on to become the Supreme Court Justice, and a number of other figures, including the lawyer Nicholas St. John Green and Chauncey Wright, who was a kind of scientist and philosophical thinker as well. Now, the Metaphysical Club was most active during the year of 1872, but it was active on and off throughout the early 1870s, the pragmatist version of the Metaphysical Club. One of the early ideas that was very popular in this Metaphysical Club was due to the psychologist and philosopher Alexander Bain, and it was a particular notion about the nature of belief. Charles Purse later credited Nicholas St. John Green for bringing this to the club's attention as well. Bain really emphasized the importance of a direct connection between belief and action. As Purse described it, although this is not exactly the way Bain himself described it, belief is what one believes is a matter of what one is willing or prepared to act on. So, Bain was a Scottish thinker, a Scottish philosopher and psychologist. Of course, although we say pragmatism is the first truly or uniquely, we say that pragmatism is the first philosophical tradition of American origin, the members of the Metaphysical Club entertained a variety of ideas from European thought that were interested in Bain. There was some interest in the British empiricists and utilitarians. There was interest in the work of Kant and the German idealists. William James was particularly interested in the French philosopher Charles Reneuvier. So, of course, it didn't happen in a vacuum. The New England transcendentalists were also an influence. So, one of the views that many think of as sort of characteristic of pragmatism is a kind of methodological view about the analysis of philosophical problems or concepts. And one way to describe this is captured in what Charles Purse called the pragmatic maxim. So, Purse says, consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. So, for Purse, this is a way of analyzing concepts, of analyzing ideas and making them clear. And was particularly applied by the members of the group to philosophical problems or philosophical concepts, not exclusively but primarily. Another thing that the pragmatists are well known for are various pragmatist theories of truth. Now, I say theories here, advisedly. Sometimes you hear talk of the pragmatist theory of truth, but different pragmatists have thought about truth in slightly or more significantly different ways. Here are two interesting statements about truth. Purse says the opinion which is faded to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth. And the object represented in this opinion is the real. So, this is a kind of sort of analysis of the meaning of truth and real by Purse. Here's William James in a somewhat different vein. James says the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good too for definite assignable reasons. I hope it's clear to you that these are actually fairly different ideas. One concerns sort of the inquirers and what they will agree to in a kind of long run possible scenario. The other is more maybe less or less tied to the sort of the end of inquiry and more immediate perhaps. Okay, so those are some distinctive ideas from the American pragmatist tradition. You may have heard of them before in some other context. But now I want to back up and focus on our two philosophers, James and Cooper, and talk a little bit about their backgrounds and their philosophical thought. So, starting with William James. So, William James' father, Henry James Sr. was an independently wealthy theologian and a kind of member of the intellectual elite of the northeast, east coast. His brother, Henry Jr., was of course the famous novelist you probably have encountered in English class. You know, it's funny, it's sometimes said of the brothers William and Henry James, one of them was a great psychologist and the other was a great writer. But unfortunately, they both picked the wrong career. Or another version of that joke is William James was a psychologist who wrote like a novelist and Henry James was a novelist who wrote like a psychologist. Their sister Alice, by the way, was also a brilliant writer, though as her diaries were not published until after her death, this was only kind of known widely posthumously. Now, William James studied in both America and in various places in Europe. He received an MD degree, but he never practiced medicine. He was originally appointed at Harvard to teach physiology, human physiology or comparative physiology. And then he was later, he started teaching psychology. He was appointed as an assistant professor of philosophy, primarily to teach psychology, and then later began teaching more widely in philosophy, various areas of philosophy. In 1890, after he'd been doing psychology for a long time, he published the two volume work, The Principles of Psychology, then and for many years, the most important textbook in the field, the most important early textbook in psychology in English, for sure. The essay we read today was published a few years later, The Will to Believe was published in 1896. In 1898, he published a lecture called Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results, where he was the first person to use the term pragmatism in print to refer to that particular philosophy. He credited Charles Purse there, of course. In 1902, he published the lectures on the varieties of religious experience, kind of the first attempt at a real psychology, sociology and philosophy of religion combined, empirical study of religion. And then in 1907, quite late in his career, he published the book Pragmatism, a new name for some old ways of thinking, kind of definitive statement of his pragmatist philosophy. Now, Anna-Julie Cooper was not a member of the intellectual elite, nor was she a member of the inner circles of pragmatism. And yet, in many ways, her philosophy fits with that tradition. In some ways, in fact, I think she outdid William James being more consistently pragmatist than he was. Now, Cooper's work has also been classified as a contribution to feminist philosophy, to standpoint theory, to critical philosophy of race, and to African American philosophy. Her thought is, I think, deep and interesting, and has well been well worth the recovery work that's gone into it in recent years. Cooper was born into slavery in 1858, and she received her PhD in history from the Serbonne in Paris, France in 1924. Much of her life, she worked as an educator, as well as an activist. She was a leading black liberation as well. She engaged directly or indirectly with figures like Frederick Douglass, Debbie E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells. Her first and best known book is The 1892, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, which the essay that we're reading for today, The Gain from a Belief, is included. It's included in that volume. So that's Cooper. Let's talk a little bit about the two essays that you had to read for today. So first, The Will to Believe by William James. So the kind of orienting question of The Will to Believe is, is it permissible to believe something on insufficient evidence? And here he's directly responding to a philosopher named Clifford, who argues that it is always impermissible to believe something on insufficient evidence. Now, James specifically focuses this question in on a particular type of question. So you might ask about any kind of question, could you believe on insufficient evidence? But James is particularly focused on what he calls genuine options, right? That is, where you have a question of belief that is living, right? That means that, that you sort of as a psych, just a psychological matter could, could entertain either believing or disbelieving a claim, right? It's forced, right? That means that there's no kind of way out of the question. There's no, there's no, it's a true dichotomy, you have to believe or not believe.   It's not already decided by a matter of either evidence or prejudice, right? One way or the other. And in some sense, you have to make a choice. Sort of withholding judgment is in the case of a genuine option, sort of the same as not believing, right? So it's forced in that way. Now, one of the key sort of starting points of James argument or key elements of James argument is his claim that there actually are two epistemic commandments, right? Two, two laws governing the ethics of our belief, right? One is that we should believe the truth. And the other is that we should shun error. And I think one of James's great innovations in this essay is to argue that actually these are not the same thing. These laws pull in different directions. They can conflict with one another. If one has a really permissive notion of belief, right, then one is likely to capture more truths, but also to capture, to believe more errors, right? If one is very obstimous, really only believes things for which there is overwhelming evidence, the likelihood of error is much lower, but also the chance that you'll fail to believe a truth is also higher, right? So these things pull against each other. And so, you know, I think it's worth thinking about here, what is the real scope of James's argument, right? Does it only apply to religious belief? He spends a lot of time in the essay talking about religious belief. He has other examples that obviously aren't religious belief in focus, but I think we should ask ourselves, what is he really, what is really the scope of his argument in the final analysis? Is it really on religion or more practical matters as well? Now, Cooper's, the gain from a belief also, I think, has significant pragmatist element to it, although it's perhaps not stated in the same kind of way that James states it. So, for example, Cooper says, faith means treating the true as true, right? So what does it mean? Faith means treating the truth as true. It sounds kind of, you know, circular, right? But I think what, I think it's clear from context what Cooper means here is really acting on the belief, right? Not just entertaining it intellectually, but acting as if you believe it to be true, right? To connect with this, she also says life must be something more than dilettante speculation. I think those two notions are connected. Life must be more than dilettante speculation. It must be something that we act on, right? Our intellectual life has to have meaning by virtue of its connection with our practice. And I think Cooper really disdains a kind of intellectualism that doesn't touch on action. And obviously, she has in mind a kind of theoretical commitment to things like equality or human rights to civil rights without being willing to act on it. And that's the sort of thing that Cooper really has in mind, I think, in making these criticisms. So that's a taste of the two essays and sort of some of the background. I look forward to talking with you about these soon, either in class or on Discord or in the comments here in the videos on the videos. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.