Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you, Yumi, for that. Thank you all for coming. America is a special country. It's different than pretty much any other place in the world. And it's special and unique in its founding. It's the only country, first country, maybe the only country, that was founded not on the basis of geography, not on the basis of ethnic group, not on the basis of historical accident, but on the basis of an idea. The American Revolution was guided by a set of specific ideas, of an ideal of what kind of country the founders wanted to create. And the idea is a moral idea. It's an idea about what kind of life is appropriate for individuals to live. America is the only country ever to be founded on a moral idea. Now what is that moral idea? What is the core, the foundation of the American founding? Well, it's in the Declaration of Independence and the American Declaration of Independence. It's the idea of individual rights. The idea that every individual, every individual has a right. What does a right mean? What do rights mean? I don't know what the word in Japanese for rights is. I can't pronounce that. A right is a freedom. The freedom to act, the right to life, which is the fundamental right, is the freedom to act on behalf of your own life, to pursue the values you believe are necessary for your own life, for your own success as an individual. Rights say you are free to act on your own behalf, but what is freedom? Freedom is a great, one of those words that everybody agrees with, right? If I go in front of any group of people on planet Earth, no matter what they believe in, you ask them, are you for freedom? Everybody's for freedom because everybody defines it differently. What is freedom at its core? Freedom means politically the absence of coercion, the absence of authority, the absence of telling somebody, telling you what you can and cannot do, and having the power to enforce that on you. It's the absence of force. So again, rights is your ability to act freely in the absence without any coercion or authority or control in pursuit of the values you need in order to survive and to thrive. America has founded as a country to create a society in which individuals are free to pursue their life free of coercion, where the government's job, the government's only job in its original conception, is to protect you. It's to protect your freedom, to protect your freedom from crooks and criminals and fraudsters and people who would take your stuff, to protect your freedom from maybe foreign invaders or terrorists or people who would hurt you from the outside, and to arbitrate disputes between us, having a legal system. But other than that, the original conception or the original principle is it leaves you alone to live your life based on your judgment, based on your reason, based on your values, based on your ideas. And as long as you don't hurt somebody else, as long as you don't violate the rights of somebody else by using force against them, by using coercion against them, the job of the government is to leave you alone, to leave you alone. Now, that was a unique vision, grounded on two fundamental ideas. Now, when does America come into existence? 1776. What is that period in human history called? The period of the 18th century. What do we call that period in history? The age of what? Yeah, the age of reason or the age of enlightenment. This is a period in which two ideas, two fundamental ideas that are at the core of the founding of America are, in a sense, rediscovered and brought to the forefront. The first is in the name, the age of reason. The idea that human beings, that what makes us human and that the source of all knowledge is reason is an idea that is rediscovered during the 18th century, during this period. Where did, where did truth come from? Where did knowledge come from, supposedly, before we rediscovered reason? Where did people think truth and knowledge came from? Well, ancient books, revelation, talking to the spirits, talking to God. But it came through revelation, not through use of your mind, not through use of your senses, not through use of logic to discover truth out there. But truth was revealed, usually, to a group of experts, call them the Pope or the religious leaders of the period, and then conveyed to the people. But most people, most people had no knowledge of how to live, had no knowledge of what was good for them, had no knowledge of the world out there other than what they were told. Because we were told that the only way to know the truth is through revelation. If you've studied a little bit of philosophy, then this might sound familiar from Plato. Plato's idea is that there's a world of forms in another dimension. That's where truth resides. This world is just shadows. We don't really know what's going on in this world. And we need philosopher kings to commune with that other world to learn the truth and to tell us.  We lack knowledge in order to be able to live our own lives. We need the guidance of experts to tell us how to live our lives. The Enlightenment rejects all of that. It says no. Every single individual has the capacity to reason. And as a consequence of that, every individual has the knowledge to live his own life. All of us are capable of discovering the truth. We don't need philosopher kings. In order to tell us what the truth is. The age of reason is the rediscovery of this faculty that we all have and we all use and have always used. But now identified it as something that is the only mechanism to discover truth and reality. Our ability to be rational, our ability to reason. And who has this capacity to reason? Well, everybody does. Individuals do. There's no collective reason. There's no collective consciousness. Just like we can't eat for each other, we can't think for each other. That is the age of enlightenment identifies the idea that individuals must think for themselves. If truth is something to be discovered by the individual human mind, then individuals must think. And that every individual has that capacity to think. And therefore the unit of importance politically and ethically is the individual. Think about that declaration of independence. It says we each have a right to life. Whose life? Our own. We each have a right to liberty. Liberty means to think whatever you want to think. People can't force ideas on you. There should not be authorities when it comes to ideas who can enforce the truth. You must discover the truth. And you have a right to pursue happiness, your happiness as an individual. So there are two ideas that come out of the enlightenment. A reason as man's means of knowledge and individualism that is moral individualism. The sanctity of the individual and of his moral purpose is to pursue his happiness. And that's reflected in this document that founds this new country. Note that if individuals have the capacity of reason and therefore they can discover the truth, and through science they can know the physical world. There's no accident that the enlightenment is happening just after it overlaps with another age, the age of science, the discovery of science. Newton, Isaac Newton is the same period as John Locke was just a little before. They overlap, right? It's not an accident because suddenly we're discovering that we can explain the physical world using our senses and some math, and it's not that hard. Something that for thousands of years we had no clue how it worked. For thousands of years again we relied on revelation to explain. Now, with some formulas and some experiments, look, this is how the world works. So suddenly individuals said to themselves, well, wait a minute.  Because what was your career before the late 18th century, 19th century? What career did you pursue? Who decided that? You typically pursued the career that your father pursued. You were part of a guild. You couldn't just do what you wanted to do.  It was decided for you. Society, whether it was government or the tribe or the religion, decided for you what you could do and not do. Did you marry whoever you fell in love with? No. Marriage is almost all arranged.  Some of the people woke up and said, wait a minute. I want to be able to pursue. If I have my own capacity to think, I should be able to pursue whatever profession I want. I should be able to marry whoever I want. And I should be able to choose my own political leader. If my life is mine, if I have the capacity to take care of myself, then why does somebody else decide who is going to rule over me? So the American Revolution is a true revolution. It changes the world. It asserts that we're all equal for the first time, right? There are no aristocrats, there are no people who are better than others. Now they were inconsistent because there was slavery at the time and they perpetuated the slavery. But the idea that we're all equal is what ultimately made it possible to free the slaves. We're all equal in our political rights. We all have individual rights. Those rights should be protected by government and otherwise leave us alone. So this is a revolution that happens at the end of the 19th century and really captures or determines the spirit that is America going forward. A spirit of individualism, people taking care of themselves, thinking for themselves, pursuing their own lives independently, limited government and freedom. The freedom to live, the freedom to act, the freedom to think, which at the core of what American ideals were. And what is the result of this revolution in thinking? A revolution that started in America and then spread across the world. If you look at simple measures like income per capita, if you look at income per capita in human history, for 100,000 years it was pretty much flat. We made on average somewhere between, I don't know, $2 to $3 a day for all of human history. I mean if you look at a graph, it goes like this. It's basically flat. In Europe, there were periods when it went up a little bit, I don't know, during Greece and Rome, and then it would go down during the Dark Ages, and then it went up a little bit during the Renaissance. But it was, you couldn't even, you can't even see the variation, it's so small. And then suddenly, suddenly, at the end of the 18th century, at about the time of America's founding, income per capita goes like that. I mean you have to jump to get to the, to how high it gets, because you can't even capture it in dollar terms, because how do you measure the benefit of having running water, having electricity, having computers. You can't capture it in, in monetary terms, because there was, it's not that the, you know, there was nothing comparable before. Think about being the richest person in the world, the richest person in the world 150 years ago.  Who lives better? Somebody poor today has running water, sewage, electricity, access to the internet. Most poor people have smartphones, access to transportation. 150 years ago, the richest person in the world had none of those things. None of those things. So the consequence of this revolution was a massive increase. Innovation, technology, and quality and standard of living. Unthinkable how much richer we are today than what we were before the American Revolution, before the Industrial Revolution, before the late 18th century. And it's not just money. What was life expectancy in most of the world in 1776 or 1800? What was life expectancy in 1800? How long on average did people live? It was under 40. In the best places, it was 39. Some places, it was under 30. Most of you would be middle aged, I'd be dead already. Life was short. It was brutish. It was unpleasant. What did we do? We woke up in the morning when the sun rose. We went and worked all day in the field. We went back home when the sun set, had dinner, and did what? Read a book. Most people couldn't read. 90 plus percent of the people couldn't read. And there was no light. You couldn't keep a fire going inside the hut because it was, you know, polluted the air. So you want to sleep? So the world ended when it was dark. So life expectancy today in Japan is well over 80. That's up from 39 in 1800. By every dimension you can think of that's measurable. Life in every country that has adopted elements of this freedom, elements of this philosophy articulated in the founding of America, has dramatically improved. Dramatically improved. Now, what is the manifestation of these ideas politically and economically? Well, if the rule of government is just to protect you, then for the first time in human history, how did we get all this wealth? Well, suddenly people came up with ideas. They didn't have to ask anybody for permission to publish those ideas. They didn't have to get access, permission from anybody to use those ideas to build a business. Remember, you know what happened to Galileo? When he had an idea, like the idea was what? That the earth goes around the sun, not the sun around the earth. He got into trouble because the authorities didn't accept this idea. So imagine he wanted to start a business based on that idea. No, no, no, you can't do that. You haven't got permission. But even for hundreds of years later, if you wanted to start a business based on a new idea yet get permission from the king, or from the government, or from the tribal leader, or from the witch doctor, from the pope, somebody always had to give you permission to live, permission to build, invest, create. For the first time in history, no permission was needed.  You might fail, and then it was up to you. Nobody would bail you out, or you might succeed. And suddenly you got people innovating, inventing, creating, building. Business for the first time came into existence. There was no such thing as business. There's no such thing as a corporation until really the beginnings of the 19th century, where people started taking in capital, investing in ideas, building things, selling them on a market. The whole idea of consumption really didn't exist until the Industrial Revolution. Because before that we were just subsistence farmers. We grew the stuff that we ate. We didn't have access to go out and buy stuff in stores, supermarkets, malls. All this is a phenomena of this modern society that was being created. What do we call that system where you don't act based on permission, you just go out there and create and build and produce and make? Well, that's really capitalism. That's free markets. And that's what the American system, that's what this idea of individualism and the idea of the efficacy of human reason brought into existence. They brought into existence a system of capitalism, a system of free markets that has made us all relatively speaking fantastically wealthy. They've improved our quality of life and standard of living dramatically. That was the vision, I think, that started America. And that was the vision that lasted in America for about a hundred years. But what does this idea rest on? Again, it rests on two things, reason and individualism. Individualism means that your life is yours. And that your moral purpose in life is to pursue your happiness, your well-being. But both of these ideas go counter to much of contemporary philosophy. Much of the ideas of philosophers over the last 200 years contradict both reason and the idea that what you should do with your life is pursue your own happiness. What are we typically told that a moral, ethical person should do? Pursue your own happiness? Be an egoist? Try to make your life the best life that it can be? Is that what your mother taught you? I don't know about Japan. But my mother never taught me that. My mother taught me that the purpose of morality is to sacrifice for others. Always think of other people first, of society first. If you grew up in a nationalist kind of environment as I did, the country, the tribe, society, the group, you are not that important. You as an individual should always sacrifice for the group and for everybody else. So there is a tension between the individualism that America was founded on and this collectivistic vision of the importance of the group above the individual, of the importance of other people above the individual. The idea that you must sacrifice to others that what's noble, what's good, what's virtuous, what's right, is sacrifice. It's the denial of your own values and what's good for you. So right from the beginning there is a tension between these ideas and even reason. Is reason unequivocally right? Is the idea that truth is really discovered by the individual using his mind? Well that is challenged philosophically. Whether it's by religion that says, oh no, no, you don't know the truth. Truth is up there. Or by philosophers who say, no, no, no, we don't see actual reality. Our minds distort what's real. We don't know what's real. We don't know what's actually out there. Kant, Hegel, they didn't think that we had the capacity to actually learn about reality. They didn't believe in logic. Hegel tells us that contradictions are part of the world. And what is logic? Logic is the science of figuring out that there are no contradictions. It's the science of undoing contradictions because the fact is in reality there are no contradictions. Something is what it is. But philosophers kept telling us, no, and today we have post-modern philosophy that tells us that reality doesn't even exist necessarily. And we certainly don't know what it is. And we all, our realities are all different based on, I don't know, based on our race or based on our genes or based on our something. But there is no one reality. There is no one truth. Everybody has their own truth. That's kind of subjectivism, relativism. There's two co-ideas of the Enlightenment. Almost immediately come under attack philosophically, ideologically, from everybody from the philosophical profession. And you see the erosion in the confidence in those ideas throughout the West and certainly in America. And as a consequence of that, when we start doubting the ability of the individual to discover the truth, when we start doubting that the individual's purpose should be their own happiness and we should give them the freedom to do that. Well, what do we replace that with? With a government that wants to tell us what's good for us and what isn't good for us. A government that wants to control how we behave and how we don't behave. What's right and what's wrong, what's good and what's bad. We now start re-establishing authority over individual's lives. That's exactly what you see in America starting in the late 19th century. You see government bureaucrats, government officials, government politicians. More and more starting to intervene in markets. More and more starting to intervene in how individuals are living their lives. And that only accelerates through the 20th century. So while America was founded on this ideal of freedom and this ideal of liberty and ideal of individual rights, today that ideal is still a large extent lost. Today America is not that different than any other country in the world. The government regulates and controls and taxes and tells us what we can and cannot do and how we should live to a very large extent. And does, seemingly, that trend only seems to increase over time. All a consequence in my view of an attack by philosophers, by thinkers, by intellectuals on the ideas of the Enlightenment, on rejection of the fundamental premises of the Enlightenment that happened starting in the early 19th century and goes on through today. If you can't advocate for reason and individualism, you can't advocate for individual freedom, you can't really advocate for capitalism. Now this is where I think Ayn Rand is so important and the crucial role Rand plays. Because Rand in the 20th century is really the only philosopher, thinker, who is trying to defend these ideas of the Enlightenment. She, again, brings forward this idea of reason being our only means of knowledge. Reason being our means of survival, the individual's means of survival and thriving. And she not just resurrects that idea. I think she provides a powerful philosophical foundation for the idea of human reason. She actually has a whole theory of how reason works, how human, our ability to conceptualize, to form concepts, to understand the world. She has a whole theory about how that happens and how that works, which is revolutionary. And in terms of individualism, she is the first philosopher since probably Aristotle and Greece to actually say, no, the purpose in life is not to sacrifice. Your purpose in life is not to live for other people. Your purpose in life is not to live for the group, to live for the nation, to live for the state, to live for whatever, fill in the blank. Because she asks the question, why? Why should you live for other people?  Isn't your life the most important thing for you? And if it's the most important thing for you, then why not live for yourself? So she develops a whole theory of egoism, a whole theory of the morality of egoism. She doesn't just say pursue your happiness. She provides a philosophical, ethical context for that and a philosophical, ethical guide to pursuing your happiness. So the kind of virtues and the kind of values that you must hold as an individual in order to attain your happiness. So for the first time, I believe in human history, we actually have a full-fledged philosophy grounded philosophically that defends these two ideas that the Enlightenment brought forward, the ideas of reason and individualism. And as a consequence of her view of reason and individualism, she said, what is the only political system that leaves individuals free to pursue their own happiness that doesn't intervene, that extracts corrosion from their lives and leaves them free to live? So the only moral system, according to Ayn Rand, the only ethical system in which individuals should live, political system, is capitalism. Because capitalism is the only system that leaves you free. And again, not the capitalism that we have today, which isn't really capitalism. What we have today is a mixture, right? We have some freedom, we have a lot of controls. And it's the interaction between this freedom and controls that kind of determines the economic world in which we live, the political world in which we live. Now, she said, what has to happen is a complete separation of economics from politics. The government has no role in telling us how to live our lives. Socially and economically. So she was very critical of Democrats in the United States, if we go to American politics, because Democrats wanted to intervene in our business lives, in the economy, regulate, control, nationalize maybe. So the left was bad because it wanted to intervene in our business lives, in our economic lives. But she was very critical of the right. Because the right, historically, wanted to intervene in our personal lives. It wanted to tell us who we could sleep with, who we could marry. It wanted to intervene in our bedrooms. For Rand, the state had no role intervening in our lives other than to protect us. That was the only role. So she rejected Democrats, and she rejected Republicans. There's a famous video, you can find it on YouTube, where she talks about the bankruptcy of conservatism. Why conservatism was completely bankrupt as an ideology. And her argument about conservatism is that conservators relied on the defense of capitalism on religion. She said, you can't defend capitalism on religion. If you're going to defend, we live in the 20th century, 21st century now. You have to defend it on reason, on the basis in a sense of science, not on the basis of mysticism. Conservatives always said that capitalism was good, why? What's the defense of capitalism? Because it helps other people. It's good for society. Adam Smith, the wealth of nations. Adam Smith says, in capitalism, everybody acts in their own self-interest. He says, the baker doesn't bake the bread for you. They bake the bread because they are trying to make a living for themselves. And they enjoy baking bread. And you are the beneficiary. So everybody in capitalism acts in their own self-interest, Adam Smith says. And he says, that's not morally good because self-interest is morally tainted. It's morally bad. We're supposed to sacrifice. We're supposed to help our fellow man. We're supposed to live for others.  She said, if you add a vice to a vice to a vice to a vice to a vice, all these negatives, somehow you get a positive. Now, nobody buys that. Nobody thinks that's true. People want to do what's right. People want to be moral. Ayn Rand says, that is a terrible defense of capitalism. What you want to defend is the right, the moral right, not the political right, the moral right of the baker to bake a bread for himself. And again, her theory is that your life is yours morally and your purpose, moral purpose in life is to live your life, the best life that you can live. Not because it helps society, as the conservatives would argue, but because it helps you. And yes, by the way, it does help. Society is better off. We're richer, we live longer in the aggregate. But that's not the purpose. That's not the reason it's good. That's just a happy outcome. The reason is that it's good for the individual. So she provides this new solid foundation for individualism. She provides a new solid foundation for reason. And that's why I think that if we ever move back towards capitalism, if we ever move back towards free markets, it will probably be on the philosophical foundation of Ayn Rand. Now, she has been quite influential on many conservatives because conservatives have read her works. What inspires them more than anything is her political analysis and her economic analysis. Conservatives have failed, I think, to really absorb Ayn Rand's ideas and to influence them dramatically because they've ignored her more philosophical ideas. They don't want to accept them because, because her philosophical ideas reject religion, because her philosophical ideas reject the morality that they think is right, that the tradition tells us is right. She's too much of a revolutionary. She's too much of a, you know, of a disruptor for the conservatives to actually embrace. So you find today in American politics that a lot of people on the right, a lot of people say that they are inspired by Ayn Rand, but almost none of them have any kind of understanding of her actual ideas. In terms of her influence over the last few decades, her influence has been, I think, dramatic but superficial. So I don't think Ronald Reagan, for example, would have been elected president of the United States if not for Ayn Rand. She set the groundwork for the kind of rhetoric that Reagan had that was pro-capitalism. He didn't do necessarily very much, but the pro-capitalist rhetoric that he articulated. That was, that resonated with Americans because for 20 years earlier they had been hearing from Ayn Rand, to some extent from people like Milton Friedman, that capitalism was good, that capitalism was productive in Ayn Rand's term, that capitalism was moral, that it was the only moral system. I think many people who worked under the Reagan administration all the way up to today have been influenced by Rand in a variety of different ways and impacted kind of the political dialogue in America. But at its heart, at its core, nothing has really changed. We still live in a very mixed economy where the number of controls and regulations and interventions only grows and where the realm of freedom is shrinking. But as I said, I believe that to the extent that there is going to be a move towards more freedom, to the extent that there will be a revival of capitalism, it will be on the back of Ayn Rand's ideas. And just to add to what was said, not only is Ayn Rand being very influential in America, and a lot of people have read her books and have inspired individuals, but globally now, Ayn Rand is really becoming more and more influential in a force. So you've got translations of most of her works in almost every language in the world today. Her books sell more now in foreign languages than they do in English. So Russian, Eastern European languages, Indian languages, Asian languages, all of her books, almost every single one of her books are now in Chinese and mainland China. Vietnamese, in almost every language Ayn Rand is being read. I think her real influence is in our future. I think in 50 years she'll have had much more influence than she's had in the past 50 years. And hopefully, hopefully that'll be true in Japan as well. And we've got books here, but of course the books are also in Japanese and you can pick them up, I guess, on Amazon Japan. Yes. All right, thank you and I'll take questions.


Let's jump right in. So news from Russia, you know, Ukraine's been on much of the defensive at the beginning of this war. It's been on the offensive in the last few months, really since the summer where it's made significant gains on the ground. Well, today was reported that, today and yesterday, I think it was reported that a couple of Air Force bases inside Russia, close to Moscow, one of them actually close to the Ukrainian border, the other close to Moscow, have been attacked by drones, by Ukrainian drones. So, Ukrainian taking the offensive into Russian territory. That is really, that hasn't happened much, not explicitly in this way. They've attacked Crimea, but Crimea, they claim is their territory. This is actually inside Russia. I think it's great news. I think it's good news that the Ukrainian have the capacity. It's good news that they have the guts to do it. It's good news that the Russians start feeling this in their home territory, while the Ukrainians, I think, smartly are not targeting civilians. They're not targeting military facilities. They blew up two bombers, as far as I can tell. And so, you know, good news, good news ultimately. And I think a shift in the war, I think we might be surprised this winter at the extent of Ukrainian advances against the Russian forces on the ground and the weather in spite of the cold, I think Ukraine is far better positioned to fight under these conditions than the Russians. And of course, we know that there's a huge gap in motivation between the two forces, which is crucial and huge at a time of war. We will see how the West, the United States and Western Europe use Ukrainian attacking Russia in Russia. When the United States supplied, the Ukrainians with long range artillery, the Himmars, they adjusted the, you know, they ejected the weapon system so they could not be used to attack targets within Russia. The Americans are not saying they do not want the Ukrainians to be on their offensive, or at least they're saying that they perceive the Ukraine attacking Russia on Russian land would be escalation that the United States would not support. So we'll see if they respond in any kind of negative way to, you know, to these attacks. Hopefully not. Ukraine has to do whatever it needs to do in order to defend itself. It needs to do whatever it needs to do in order to, in order to get rid of the, get rid of Russian forces from Ukrainian land. And if that means attacking Russia where Russia is, then so be it. You notice that the saber-rattling of our nuclear attack has kind of dissipated significantly. So, which is, which is interesting, which I suggested all along, that was incredibly unlikely that the Russians were actually serious about it. All right, we got Tessa from Copenhagen. That's cool. I assume we've got, on these shows we'll get more Europeans. We will see. Maybe it has something to do with the topics I choose, but we'll see if we get more Europeans given the time of day. Okay, let's see. So on the ground in Ukraine, things are very slow. The Russians keep attacking this one city or town in eastern Ukraine. They've been attacking it for months now. This is the Wagner group. This is really a group of mercenaries. So this is kind of a private military that the Russians have used all over the world, particularly in Syria. They've been attacking and attacking and attacking Bakhmut, I think it's called, though, something like that. And they still haven't taken the town. So a lot of fighting around there. There's a lot of fighting in other places around east and northeast Ukraine. Nobody is gaining anything so far. The Ukrainians seem to be chipping away at the Russian defenses, but everybody's kind of hunkered down for winter. But as I said, I expect Ukraine to make real gains this winter. All right, so that's for the Ukraine war. I'll update you periodically about what's going on there. But there's not much to talk about other than this attack. Relatively deep into Russian territory, which is kind of a first for the Ukrainians. And it shows how drones are going to change warfare completely. Drones are dramatically going to change warfare. You've got suicide drones that the Russians are using. And you've got missile-bearing drones. You've got a variety of different drones out there. But drones have been used now for 40 years, but they're really coming into their own. They are becoming a dominant weapon system on the battlefield. Let's see. What else did I want to say about Ukraine? Yeah, the only other thing about Ukraine, as you probably know this, is basically Russia is taking out all the electrical power, all the energy supplies into Ukraine, basically they're trying to freeze the Ukrainians into defeat.  Ukrainians are going to have civilians in Ukraine and are going to have a very, very difficult winter with very little electricity and very little heat. And it's going to be a struggle, but I have a feeling, again, my sense is that this will not defeat the Ukrainians or it will not subdue the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians seems highly motivated to fight back and to win this war. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbrookshow.com. I go to Patreon, subscribe to our locals and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. Also, if you'd like to see The Iran Book Show grow, please consider sharing our content and, of course, subscribe. Press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.


Full disclosure, I am a community moderator for First Contact Entertainment, the developers of Firewall Zero Hour and Firewall Ultra. Hey there lads and ladies, it is Petrifying Pumpkins here and I am here today to tell you that a war is coming. A war for your PSVR2. Unlike anything we saw on PSVR1, the war currently has 5 participants, but I have no doubts that number will increase within the next year or two. Firewall Ultra, Pavlov Vior, Crossfire Sierra Squad, Ghosts of Tabor, will be fighting to be the Vior multiplayer modern combat first person chooser you keep coming back to on PlayStation Vior2 and most of them are set to release this year. Compare that to PSVR1 where we had very little to play in that category until the excellent Firewall Zero Hour came along nearly two whole years after the headset actually launched. Then after Firewall, you had another few years to waste until we finally got Alvo, the only other really notable modern combat chooser on the platform. It was frustrating that a platform that was so well suited to that genre of games was so starved of them, but that's about to change. Already we have Pavlov Vior lined up for the launch of PSVR2. Crossfire Sierra Squad is set for a summer release, Ghosts of Tabor slated for the third quarter of the year and Firewall Ultra is coming sometime in 2023. We also know that Alvo will be ported to PSVR2, but as of right now it's unclear if it will be coming this year or next. Regardless of that, the first year of PSVR2 will have already gone a long way to addressing the shortcomings of the PSVR1. Naturally, talk is already turning to which chooser will be King of PSVR2. Pavlov has manual reloading, therefore it's Bezer. Firewall has triple A polish, therefore it's Bezer etc etc. But before we jump into those rabbit holes, we should take a moment to just appreciate this. We have choice now. Still very limited compared to traditional platforms, but if you're going from PSVR1 to PSVR2, soak it in. Enjoy us. Let's hope these all take off and it opens the door for more development in that genre. We could see some real behemoths taking a chance on PSVR2, a call of Juicy, a battlefield, something like that, and then we're sucking diesel. But for the here and now, if you know me, you know I love Firewall Zero Hour, but that game had almost no competition on PSVR1. That's not going to be true for the next Firewall, at least not entirely. Firewall Ultra will likely be continuing on in the Rainbow Six style of gameplay no doubt slow paced, tense and tactical to the point where you really need communication to succeed in most situations. In fact, I hope Ultra really doubles down on that in any way they can. Firewall is being backed heavily by Sony themselves and you can see us in the production values of the gameplay snippets we've seen so far. So I'm really expecting it to take full advantage of the new headset features while improving on the Firewall Zero Hour experience. Then you have Crossfire Sierra Squad, the odd man house in this list because it's the only game not featuring PVP. Instead, single player and four player co-op will be the main focus. Crossfire is actually a huge IP in certain parts of the world and the short snippet of gameplay and brief overview we've got of the game, both the look and sound promising. It's boasts about advanced AI, a large arsenal of weaponry and over 70 missions to take part in mean that it could be a game you find yourself returning to again and again. Ghosts of Tabor is a game that's designed to scratch the itch of Daisy, escape from Tarkov and Armyfan. You can play solo or in co-op groups of four where you'll be sent into a large map to scavenge for a rare loose, explore, complete missions, fight other players or teams and survive by eating, drinking and healing your wounds. There's a max player count of 20 on the larger maps. There was absolutely nothing like this on PSVR1 and I'm really excited to try it out. It sounds like a game where you could have a lot of fun random encounters with other people online, just like your old lady. Pavlov VR is the one we'll get to play first as it launches day one. Pavlov is more of a known quantity, haven't been out on PC VR for years where it became the most popular shooter there. It features five versus five multiplayer fun across a multitude of modes in a style that's reminiscent of Counter-Strike. These extra modes mix things up however as they include a zombie horde mode, trouble in terrorist town, a world war two mode and many more. There's also the added bonus of crossplay with PC VR players. Finally there is Alvo which will be ported from the PSVR1 to PSVR2, hopefully this year. Now little is known about how Alvo will improve in the jump to PSVR2 as of yes. Of the five games listed I think Alvo and Pavlov are the most indirect competition with one another. They're both faster paced and arcadey with inspiration from Counter-Strike. Alvo has had a loss of update since it launched in 2021, including a zombie mode, manual reloading, crossplay with quest and a bunch of maps. And those are your five games. I began this video by calling these games VR multiplayer modern combat first person shooters, but you can see there's still strong variety within that narrow genre. Whether you want the intense tactical teamwork of firewall, the survival aspects and unpredictability of Ghost of Tabor, the co-op of crossfire or the fast pace of Pavlov or Alvo, you've got something on PSVR2 that you didn't on PSVR1. Choices. And in the end, isn't choices the real king of PSVR2? If you're interested in shooters coming to PSVR2 then stick around the channel for future coverage. Thank you to Decepticon for letting me use his music in all of my videos. You can check him out Decepticon.com. Link in the description below. Thank you for watching. Please stay moist.


All right, I think we can get started. Looks like we have quite a few folks interested in the topic. So I'm gonna be talking about how could we make Drupal a better out-of-the-box product? So that's, we're gonna be focused on Drupal core, some processes and some learnings that we've taken from the last 12 months to how we've approached things slightly differently from the past. If you don't know me, I'm Lauri Escola. I'm a staff software engineer at Aquias Drupal Acceleration Team. I'm also a Drupal core product manager, actually changed from a framework manager to a product manager. So moving from more engineering focused role to more towards thinking about, you know, what kind of a product should Drupal be and how can we make it better? So earlier this year, when, you know, I started being interested about improving Drupal as a product, I started doing some research on how is Drupal perceived in the market. And, you know, I went to look at social media like Reddit and Tech Talk and others. And one of the first things that I actually found was this comment from Reddit where someone described their experience with Drupal so that, so this is a quote from Reddit. Want to suffer the pain of ever changing halftone features? Go with Drupal. I've been doing it for over 10 years and number of times changes are made in core for sake of feeling that it will make more standards compliant, it's crazy. I'm not even kidding. If I can ever do an update without it breaking seemingly everything, I'll be happy. Don't get me started with Contrib. The only reason I'm still here is because of dollars. So this was not necessarily a very good perception to have. Obviously, this is something that we want to work on to improve. So besides, you know, going on social media, we talked to lots of users and figured out, you know, what specific things people would like to say improved. And that's how something that you might have seen on Drupal.org before is that we created a roadmap for 10.2 and 10.3 and sort of beyond. And that describes also what is our strategy for, you know, the next couple of years. We want to focus on three of these areas. So we're going to focus on reducing the time it takes for site builders to become proficient with Drupal. So that's really honing in the idea of the ambitious site builder being able to get started really quickly and achieve great things just by themselves. Second of all, we realize something that is really important for a lot of site builders is that they are, not necessarily the end user of Drupal, they are actually responsible, they're accountable to their editors. And what is important to us is that the site builders can actually achieve what is important to them, which is that they have their editor satisfied. They are satisfied with the tool that they provide for them. So we want to provide site builders with tools that empower them to create the experience that their editors want to have. We also want to acknowledge the fact that reducing Drupal applications can be quite costly sometimes. You know, there's lots of updates happening and a lot of that requires manual work. So we want to take some steps to reduce the cost of keeping Drupal applications secure. All right, so how is change happening in Drupal Core? You may have seen this before. This is the IDSQ process or sort of product management process for Drupal Core. So how it works right now is that we have, in the IDSQ, we have some ideas where we prototype them and then create plans for those ideas. Then in the middle of that, after we've done the validation of those ideas, product managers approve them to be features in Drupal Core and they get built in the Drupal Core issue queue. And you know, why are we doing that? Why do we have some process to manage the product? I have here a picture of something very complex and you can think about, you know, how is that related to what we do every day? But you know, it's very easy to think that adding more features adds more value. There's like clear correlation that we add one feature and it adds value. But that's not necessarily always true because what if one of those features is only used by one of our users, but we collectively maintain that feature just for one of our users? That's not very smart from us to start adding features that only make sense for a single user. If we started making features that only work for single user and we created those features for every user, then you end up with something like this where, you know, there's an extreme amount of complexity and just finding the buttons that you need are going to be really challenging because if you know, there's just overwhelming number of them in this cockpit. So there's a cost to adding features to Core. It adds complexity to the product. It reduces the velocity for us to deliver new features because we have to maintain that functionality. So we have to be very careful about what are we going to add to Drupal Core. We don't want to just, you know, add those features that satisfy a single user. And that's why we have the product managers. We are responsible for understanding how our users work and then delivering features that are most important for them, solving problems that large numbers of our users need. And that's why we use the IDSQ for facilitating that process. All right, so there's two ways of getting things in. Like you can get a feature in is from the Drupal Core issue queue, or you can get it in from the IDSQ. So why would I want to go through the IDSQ instead of just directly opening a feature request against Drupal Core? The benefit of the IDSQ from the perspective of a contributor is that it provides clear sign-off points for that contributor. You know that you can get feedback on your idea before you've actually done the work. Because if you have something in Drupal Core issue queue, usually you get review when something gets in the RTB CQ, which means that you have production level code and that can take a lot of time to build. And that's when you start getting feedback on your feature request. The idea of the IDSQ is that you can just propose an idea and it can get validated before you've even built it. What it also facilitates is the opportunity for us to iterate on those ideas before we've built the production quality code. So the idea is that if we have some feedback about the idea, we can then iterate on the idea and improve it further from the original idea. And we can do that without actually writing production quality code and doing it on that level. Instead, we just ideate on the idea itself. It also helps involve the right stakeholders at the right time. IDSQ is clearly something where the reviews are mainly coming from the UX designers, the product managers, and you're not gonna get feedback on the code itself that you're pushing. So you can have very, if your prototype includes code, it's very clear if it's in the IDSQ that we should not be reviewing the code itself because if it's just to demonstrate this functionality for the product managers and the UX designers. But yeah, we have some challenges with the current approach, all is working as we hoped when this was first introduced. One of the probably biggest challenges we have with this process is that product managers still tend to get involved very late in the process. So there often is lots of production quality code written at the point where product managers get involved. And the challenge is there again, like the goal of the process was to lower that barrier when you get feedback so that you haven't made as much, you haven't used a lot of as much time to build that production quality code. Like maybe you could have built a prototype in one day to demonstrate it for the product manager and get the feedback with that. But instead, sometimes we've had people work for months on production quality code and then that's when they're getting the feedback. And the problem with that is that it makes it really hard for the product managers to say no at that point. It makes any iterations really challenging because of now you are managing that production quality code, even if it's in the IDSQ. Another challenge we have is that approved ideas tend to focus on Greenfield ideas. So adding new features rather than improving what we have. And this is something that is quite anecdotal but it's also I looked at the issues that have went through the process. There's 20 issues, all of them were Greenfield. And then if I look at the issues that are in the IDSQ waiting for review, there is a proportion of that that is focused on improving existing UIs. Actually, I was surprised how high of a proportion it was of improvements there. So there's something off in the process where we're not using it for improving existing things, we're using it more for Greenfield ideas. Then we've had some challenges with ideas being very large in their size. Like we tend to only approve ideas that are like multi-year projects, but it doesn't have to be that way. We could have ideas that are couple more and small projects. It doesn't have to be these big multi-year projects. In the end, the main challenge is that we don't say no often to new ideas. So we just leave them there and then when there's enough pressure, then we maybe say yes. Some ideas for how we could improve this is to make some adjustments to the process so that we encourage more iteration in the early stages of an issue and making sure the product managers have enough information to provide that feedback over there. I'm gonna walk through a project that we did earlier this year on FieldGUI, how we utilize the similar process and how some of those things could improve our existing process. To use that idea skew process for following through an existing work rather than building just Greenfield projects. Also, something that we should do is to continue the discussion about the idea skew and make it more transparent how the process works so that contributors who are interested in user experience or product management can be involved in this process. So like I said, I'm gonna walk through the process in the context of the Drupal 10.1 and 10.2 FieldGUI improvements. This is a sort of case study of how the process looked like from that perspective. We did not necessarily follow all of the things that we have here because the process that I'm now talking about did not exist when we started. So it was kind of created as the next step from this but I'm making some connections there to what we learned from here. So here's a graph of how the product management looks like on a large scale and this is something that I just wanted to find something from the internet that sort of resembled what we're doing and this is kind of the ideal state where all of your ideas are mapped into a strategic vision. So everything starts from your strategic vision which is to empower ambitious site builders. So everything that we do should somehow help that persona. Then you have the discovery team that is responsible for actually validating that whether the ideas are valuable or feasible and how that's done is done by user research so discussing and doing different kinds of studies where you involve your users. Once the discovery team decides that something is feasible and valuable for us to work on then we have the engineering working on that. So this is sort of just from the product management perspective how we think about how should this look like? So I'm going to convert this into like how would this look like from the perspective of a single issue? How would single issue go through this process? So there's a model called double diamond which is introduced by British design council in 2005 which maps pretty close to the ideas Q process that we have. You can only see one diamond there but that's kind of the problem that we have is that we are very focused on the solution stage of the process. So what we do is we explore solutions and then we select solutions for, you know based on what works, what we can implement and then we build those. And so what we know at that point when we've done this stage in the ideas Q is that we have a validated solution. We know that this is something we can build. This is probably something that, you know could potentially have some impact. But the real process actually contains a step before that which is something that the product managers and UX designers are responsible for which is discovery. And in the discovery stage what you're doing is you are first trying to understand what is that the pool of problems that your users are having and then you're actually doing more targeted research to validate which of those problems are valid problems for us to solve. And once you've done that you have validated problems that you work on. So the idea is that you don't even, you don't start prototyping ideas that are not for problems that are worth solving for us. So there's a step before we start prototyping. And this has kind of been done but it's been very implicit. Like sometimes we start prototyping even before we've agreed on what is the problem that we are trying to solve and whether that's a problem that is worth solving. So taking this back to ground and the ideas Q process to take a look at how that can look like in the context of your pool. So the left, we've added now a new step for discovery which is something where you would usually have mostly product management and user experience focused folks be involved. This is not to say that, you know other folks couldn't be involved in that process but that's the kind of skills that are involved in this stage. And once we are done with that stage we move into the prototyping and that's when we start doing actual engineering work. All right, so in the context of the field UI we focus on the reduce the time that it takes for site builders to become proficient with Drupal. So that was sort of the strategic outcome that we wanted to achieve by that work. So we started by doing some discovery in this area. So this is usually very open-ended sort of research where you just see what problems exist in the world. And you know, this is quite specific to product managers.  But when you come from the product management perspective and you don't have as close sense on how is it to use the product then you actually go talk to your users and ask them very broad questions about how has it been to use Drupal for the last six years? Can you tell about the last project where you use Drupal? And then they start talking about things that they care about and you start picking up some ideas on what kind of problems did they have in that project. The great thing about Drupal being open source is that we have plenty of data about problems that people are having online. So we have the issue queues where people are reporting issues. So that's one source of information. There's also lots of information in social media like what we did as discovery. That's a great source of discovering what potential things there are for us to research. And in the case of the field GUI we started with the assumption that the current field GUI is perceived as hard to use. And how did we come up with this was it kind of started from looking at the issue queue we looked at some of the past usability testings that we've done. And we noticed that there's historically being a lot of usability issues in the field GUI but we've not actually delivered a lot of solutions to those problems. So we sort of had a sense that maybe this is an area where we could focus on potentially. There was also other sources of data like I had some interviews that were not necessarily related to this or not even discovery intended as discovery but where I was getting someone's telling me a story that they were in a workshop with their customer and they were using a competing proprietary SaaS CMS to build their content model in that workshop with their customer. And the reason they were doing that even if it was a company that was focused on Drupal was because it was so powerful that they could just build out the content model in half a day workshop and the customers tended to be very convinced about that. And they even told me about in some cases how they went with that SaaS solution because of the client was so convinced that the SaaS solution would be powerful because they just saw it themselves in the workshop. So that's not necessarily what we want to happen. We want people to be able to have the same experience with Drupal. There's other reasons why you could focus on field GUI like it's a very strategic focus for Drupal like content modeling is one of the key aspects why people choose Drupal. So that's another reason why you could say that focusing on field GUI is something that we want to do. So that's how we discovered it. Okay, field GUI could be something that is hard to use we got some data about that but we didn't know what specific problems or whether it was actually even true. So that's when you start doing actual proper targeted user research and that helps you understand who is actually impacted by this problem and why does the problem exist? So what does it mean? Why does the problem exist? That's the specific diagnosis of the problem like what kinds of things do your users run into with field GUI? What contributes to the fact that it's hard to use? It could be also that we just discovered it. Okay, actually the problems are not that bad it seems like people are quite satisfied with this. And then the result of the research would be that we were wrong in the beginning and we probably should not work on this but in this case we, you know we did get lots of data that actually helped us prove that there were aspects that made it harder to use than it should be. Something to keep in mind at this stage is that you are dealing with lots of opinions so it's good to remain mindful that your own opinions might influence findings so we ended up going back to listen to a lot of the sections that we did because of you might find new ideas from those when you actually re-listen to them because of when you, if you just do your notes based on what you first heard it's usually it's just the things that you care the most that you get from there but if you go to re-listen then you can kind of see beyond that. So common methods for conducting user research would be user interviews that could be in DrupalCon just you know, discussing with people the hallway track that's something that I know a lot of people are doing already. So that could be one form of user research. It could be focus groups, that could be buffs. That's a great way to collect data from a large group of people. Or it could be usability testing where you have a more well-defined plan to how you want your users, that you want to walk your users through a certain process where you get them data about usability issues. Usually you have relatively small sample size for this which might be surprising because after you've talked to five to six people about the same problem you start realizing that everyone is maybe talking about same things. And it becomes less and less valuable then to do research because you start hearing like the additional things that you would learn are more like niche things. What you want to focus on is the problems that a lot of people are running into if it's one out of 10 people is like it might not be the most important problem for you to solve. So we at least started seeing lots of repetitions after just a couple usability testing sessions. Some tips for conducting user research. So try to be as open-ended with your questions as you can. So try to avoid leading the user to a certain conclusion. So instead of asking them, is field UI hard to use? Which doesn't give them a lot of answer to explain their thoughts but instead asks something like, how do you find using field UI? How is your experience? And then they can make their own conclusions to how is it to use the field UI. And then something that's very important to keep in mind is that we should not believe in what people believe they will do in future because the best predictor of your user's future behavior is their past behavior instead of what they say they will do. So instead of asking like, would you use this product? You should ask questions like, have they run into some of the problems that your product is trying to solve or have they even tried to solve that problem potentially beforehand? What's also important to remember is that the behavior may depend on the context that they're coming from. So ask lots of follow-up questions like why do you think this is a problem and then they may be able to expand to you like why something is a problem, what is the context where they are coming from? Even if you are in a situation where you feel like your user is not necessarily particularly interested in the problem that you're talking about, just keep your ears open and continue listening because that's the best opportunity to make those little discoveries. That's also how we discovered the page building experience problem. I was doing research on something completely unrelated. It was another project and people were particularly interested about that. So it turned out in majority of those interviews people actually started talking about what kinds of issues they have with page building and that's how we then realized, okay, maybe that's something where we should do some more focused research. So in the context of the field UI, we conducted the usability study that was focused on the content modeling. The goal for us was to hire six users and three users who are new to Drupal. So people who have less than one year of experience and then three users who have extensive experience with Drupal, so over 10 years or even more, like lots of more in some cases. Some of the problems that we discovered were quite surprising to us. We were not anticipating them from the beginning. So things like reusing the fields we didn't even think about that there could be problems with that. So it was very refreshing to see how you can discover very surprising problems when you do usability testing like this. The next stage is that so we've now done qualitative research to understand why and sort of what kinds of people are involved or are having this problem. The next stage is to combine that with quantitative data and that's what helps us put the findings in perspective. So qualitative data is not very good at answering how many users might be having a problem but it tells you the why and how and who. But then with quantitative data, you can see that, okay, these patterns are happening with this number of people. So that's something that helps you and put that in your perspective. This is a really challenging stage for us in Drupal because we have very limited access to analytics which means that we can use surveys mostly and even surveys can be challenging because it might be really hard to actually reach the users that you want to reach because if you want to go beyond the inner circle of Drupal when you're doing this type of research because people in the inner circle tend to have a different perspective on these things. If you want to reach editors in particular that can be very challenging because if they don't necessarily consider themselves Drupal or stages use Drupal as their sort of daily tool. We've been able to get fairly good results by reaching out to agencies or site builders to send surveys to their editors but obviously require some more work and some more thought behind doing the research. Some of the quantitative data that we used was like in form of card sorting so we had some hypotheses for example that the way that the field types are grouped is not working well. So we did quantitative research then to get sort of from a broader pool of users of like how do they think about field types and then we discovered that there were some changes that we needed to make to the field types. All right, so now we've done research and we've essentially validated our problem or it could be that we discovered that this is not a problem that we want to work on. It could be either or at this point. What we do is we provide a brief on what insights did we make during the research who's suffering from this problem that we were researching and what specific problems did we identify that we could solve to address the challenge to have the outcome that we were hoping we have. Is there any data that we collected during the research so we need to publish those as part of this brief and then what ideas do we have for solving the problem? And here I want to emphasize that ideas are our hypothesis for the outputs that could have to decide outcome. So we don't have to know for a fact that these outputs are going to have to decide outcome yet. So these can be quite opinionated. You don't have to put too much thought into researching them.  So some examples of the findings that we made were use a struggle with understanding when they could reuse a field, like whether they should reuse a field or create a new one and whether a field that was available for reusing whether that was compatible with sort of the content model that they wanted to achieve. Some of the common field types were hard to find. So for example, the text field type was on the bottom of the list. There was a very long list and it's a very common field type. So that was a challenge that we identified that maybe the text should be easier to find. And then we found some issues like just pure bugs where when they went through certain steps that some configurations were not as they would expect them to be. So that was also great in terms of that it was not necessarily pure usability issues but we were able to also find some bugs. So then we went into the prototyping phase and that's when we start now validating if our hypothesis for the solution is right. The goal of the prototyping stage is that we want to spend as little time as possible building the prototype. So any code that you write at this stage you should be willing to or that you want to throw it away. Let's put it that way. Any code that you write at this point it needs to be so bad that you want to throw it away immediately and that's how it was for us. And it's a lot of fun because if then you focus on the actual what is in the UI? What does the user see instead of what is in the code? So if you run into any problems on your code level you can maybe document that these kinds of problems we run into but don't focus on solving them now. It's fine if you don't wanna do any coding at this point. If you wanna build a prototype in Figma that's easier for you, go for it. It doesn't have to be all in code. I just noted a lot of folks in the Drupal contribution space tend to prefer HTML, CSS, PHP kinds of prototypes. So that's one way or another but it just needs to be that you don't focus on building good quality code at this point. And it's good to keep in mind at this point is that we should not rush to the next step because it's so much cheaper for us to iterate at this point. So if there's something that we believe we can still improve it's still worthwhile maybe doing another iteration on your prototypes at this stage because it's so much cheaper. All right, so once you've built a prototype then you want to validate them. And how that happens is that you show the prototypes to five to six users again kind of similar story where you start to realize that there are patterns after a certain point that you're not necessarily finding lots of new things anymore. Make sure that you're solving the problem that you are trying to solve but also focus on what kinds of new things can be, what kinds of new problems did we discover that we could still solve by iterating on these prototypes. You can use tools like usability metrics to put your progress in perspective. So usability metrics are things like success rate, the time that the task requires or the error rate or the user subjective satisfaction. And then you can sort of collect those from the different steps of your iterations to help put kind of the progress that you're making in perspective. So you know that you're making progress on what you're doing. And when you're ready to build you can use the prototype as your blueprint for the actual implementation. So do not use the code that you wrote but the actual what you see in the UI is your blueprint. And this helps you avoid writing like a 10 page document to what you want to build because you have that very clear blueprint in the form of prototype. So what is important at this stage is that we should not focus or we should not be too stuck with the solution. We should not feel that we need to deliver a solution. We need to be obsessed with the problem. We need to fall in love with the problem instead of the solution. So if the solution that you prototype doesn't work we need to be willing to destroy it away and start again but with a new approach to try to solve that same problem. It's so easy to be stuck in your head with a certain solution that I want our users to have this but if it doesn't solve the problem that you hope it's solving it's not worth trying to stick with that. It's much easier for us to make business case it's much easier and much more valuable for us to work on those issues that we know that we have confidence that it solves a problem. So in the context of field UI building the prototype for the first round of validation took around one week. So it took around six months of engineering to actually build it out in for a lot of the work to happen in the core queue to make it into production quality code. So that helps you put it in the perspective that six months of work maybe you should be able to prototype in a week. Obviously it depends on what you're working on some things are easier to prototype some things are harder to prototype. But yeah in this case we were able to make pretty fast progress in the informal prototypes. How we built the prototype it was this bunch of hacks on field UI and it was probably the worst code that we've ever written. There was like thousands of lines of commented code in some of the classes and it actually did make it quite difficult because we were actually struggling with some of the early iterations like we did not get very good results on the first iterations. And then we had to do pretty radical changes to the prototypes and it was a nightmare on the fourth round to try to make the UI somewhat functional. So maybe after the fourth round we would have had to do like a rewrite of that but that actually those iterations were pretty quick for us to build even if we needed to make big changes like maybe one day or two days of like making changes. So that was pretty nice. It was like it was low pressure in that way to make those iterations because they were so quick for us to implement. So now we are finally that we have found a solution that we can we can build for that problem we can get into the actual development stage. Now we are in the core queue and we involved subsystem maintainers and release managers and framework managers on our solutions. And now it's the time to do all of the bike shedding that we need. All right, so one of the challenges we have with the core issue queue is that we tend to be very focused on the functional aspects and the reliability aspects of our MVPs.  That's how it works in a lot of the initiatives that I've personally worked on. How we should instead try to approach it is that we built MVPs that have a very limited set of functionality. They solve maybe one specific problem and but they are something that we know are usable and maybe even have something that users find desirable, something that they really enjoy using. There's many benefits to this, even though it takes extra effort to build MVPs. So oftentimes you actually have to invest more to deliver an MVP than it would take to build the whole product. But the reason we do it is because it reduces the risk of your project because once you've shipped something, something is out there, you are no longer in that place where you have two years of work behind you but you've delivered nothing, you've realized that, okay, now maybe we should be working on something else but you can't change your focus on that because you haven't delivered on your previous project. Then you're kind of stuck with that project but if you delivered an MVP, even if it did not solve the problem fully, you delivered some value, you could react to those changed priorities now. So it's kind of our way of have the freedom to move on to other projects once we've shipped the MVP. Another great benefit of this is that you start getting actual user feedback once you deliver an MVP. It shifts your focus from just building something to actually trying to solve those problems that your users are raising. And that's probably the biggest reason why you should deliver an MVP because of just that mindset change that happens after you've delivered something. So keep in mind that building doesn't end when you've delivered your first solution. So remain focused on the problem you're trying to solve. So again, it is easy to think that, for example, in the case of the field UI that we want to deliver a better field UI and that's what we did. But if you've not delivered that, if there's still specific problems that you could solve, it's worth still keep going on that because if you've just established a process, if you know that context very well, you've built up sort of this... Like if you work on a very old subsystem, it is really hard to start making changes there because if no one knows what is going on there. If you've now worked one year on a subsystem, people know roughly how that works. It's in their heads. So you're in the best position to continue working on that right now because people have it fresh in their mind and it's kind of, you know, it's alive in a way. Like, you know, people can provide you reviews and yeah, you're not blocked. Something to keep in mind is that we don't also have to always solve everything 100%. Like we need to think about what is sufficient because if at a certain point the problems can become really, really hard and then it's worked while thinking if those solutions are gonna be feasible. So we need to also evaluate whether the solutions that we could deliver to those problems are feasible because ideally we would be mostly working on problems that are both valuable for us to solve but also feasible. So that's an important consideration to make whether it is feasible for you to actually build something for that problem. If it's not feasible, then give some serious thought whether you want to work on that. In the context of field UI, we kept very tight scope on issues, tried to split it to as many small issues as we can and we tried to stay pragmatic on those issues to help make great progress. That meant that some issues had handful of follow-ups. Like some of the issues had like six, seven follow-ups that we needed to make, which is not always ideal. But in this case it worked well because we were quite on some of those issues where we were quite early in the process so we had a lot of time before the release to fix those things. And in the worst comes to worst scenario, we could have always reverted the original issue later if those follow-ups didn't make it. Something else that we had to do was that because we split the work into so many different steps was that we needed to actually do design work on the individual steps of the iterations. So we needed to do like, okay, this is what this is gonna look like after step two. This is what this is gonna look like after step four. And we ended up even doing user testing on those steps. But that was again, because we believed in that iterative process that we were in, that that's the best way for us to deliver it. That's how we diverse ourselves. That's how we continue getting feedback from our users. And in particular, I think in the context of field UI, it was helpful to start getting feedback from contributed module maintainers early on. So that's also an added benefit once you actually get something into Drupal Core, contributor modules become aware of what is happening and then you start getting feedback from there. So that's one form of user that we have to satisfy. So some of the improvements that we shipped, so this was the first one that we landed. So this is to fix the reusing fields problem. So this used to be just a select list with the field name before this. So what we did was we added, and it was not even actually the field name, I think it was just a machine name of the field. So what we did was we, based on the information that we got from the user research, we knew what types of information users were looking when they wanted to reuse the field, and then we created a table that displayed that information for them before they even had to reuse the field. Some of the things were quite small in their scope. So one of the issues that we discovered was that default value we did was something, because it's very large, people thought it's a preview of the field and somehow they thought that they need to fill that when they are creating a field and that added to some friction to the process. So what we did is we hide the default value field behind the checkbox, and that helped significantly, especially in the use case where people are creating new fields because then they didn't see sort of this default value of the field. And the final improvement was to group the fields differently to match what we discovered in the cart sort, but to also display information that users needed to consider when they selected between different field types. There's a lot of work in this area where we need to review some of the description texts and maybe make the process more smoother so that, for example, when you have a lot of contributed modules, that all of this looks good in those cases as well. So if you're interested, tomorrow's a good time to help with these things. All right, so this all probably sounds like, you know, this is a lot of work. The reason why we do this is that the each hour that we can spend in the beginning of this process will trickle down into saved hours later on in the process. So while we are adding work to the discovery stage of this, if we can prevent us from working on ideas that are not worth solving or doesn't solve the problem early on, it can save tens of hours or hundreds of hours of contributor time later on in the process. And that's the whole idea of the IDSQ to help give that feedback for contributors and avoid them wasting time by building up fully fledged features that won't be accepted. All right, so that's pretty much it. I'm wondering if anyone has any feedback or questions or we can continue the discussion after the event in Drupal Slack and there's also usability meetings on Fridays as well where folks are discussing things like this. So those are great places to get involved.