Hello to you our lovely patrons and welcome to another episode of our prestigious pint series. This episode we've got an absolute global agile superstar Lisa Adkins, author of Coaching Agile Teams. I shouldn't really need to say that, obviously probably don't. But we didn't really talk a huge amount about coaching agile teams. We actually started talking about the accumulation of anxieties as Lisa called it as a result of the pandemic, which was quite timely given that this week is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK. And that led us naturally on to talking about the difference between coaching and therapy and whether there is a line and whether we need to add to our skill set within our organisations, which funnily enough led quite nicely into a couple of our questions from our patrons. So Andreas Wittler asked us to ask Lisa, how does she recommend we look after ourselves after an emotional involvement? And interestingly she didn't answer the question as it was asked, but incredibly useful answer and interesting answer. And also who are her inspirations then and who are her inspirations now before giving us a bit of an insight into what she's what she's doing now and in the future. So she's putting the agile coaching side of things to one side and starting to coach leadership teams to make a more positive impact on the planet. Fantastically interesting and fascinating and enjoyable conversation for us. We spent well over an hour talking to her, which flew by. Hopefully it will fly by for you as well. So yeah, enjoy a chat with Lisa Atkins. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Pouring myself a drink. You got one there, Paul? Already poured, my friend. Already poured. We're ahead of the game. Well, Lisa's got hers. That's an interesting colour there, Lisa. Mm-hmm. What have you got there? Well, I guess I could say whiskey because it's sort of that colour, but it's simply iced tea. It's an orange and clove iced tea. Yeah. Okay, with sugar? Sugar free? No sugar in this one. Nice sugar. Wow. Hardcore, man. Sounds healthy. Sounds like it's good for you.  I was, yeah, I actually quite like iced tea. It was something that I only introduced to a few years ago. It's the thing I missed the most when I was travelling around the world is that really it's only a thing in the US. And so, you know, you just can't get it easily and I don't think about it much, but along the second week of being without my iced tea, I start to want it. And then when I get home, I'm like, the land of iced tea. So do you make yours stronger than you would normally get? I make it quite strong. Quite strong. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, if you hadn't already guessed, that is the voice of Lisa Erkins, our guest today, and she started off by introducing what she's drinking. Paul, what are you drinking? Well, just for a change, Geoff, I thought I'd have a pint of cider. Okay, yeah. Just for a change. It's not a change at all, Lisa. I drink it all. It's only a thing I can drink. But it's one of my favourites. It's a can of Stoford Press. Old school? Old school. It's exactly what it says on the tin. It's sparkling apple juice that's a little bit alcoholic. So yeah, that's me, Geoff. What about you? Very good. Well, I've got something a bit weird. I'll put this up so you can see this on the camera. Oh, it doesn't come up. I kind of read something. Yeah. So it's called... Oh no. It's called the theory of continual improvement. No. It's a can band can. It's an agile drink. So it's subtitled as Dr. Domingo's elixir for aches, pains and strains. You're supposed to take two tablespoons every four hours. I probably might exceed the dose. But it is an 8% beer. So it's a bit strong. But yeah, it's a double IPA. Wow. What's a double IPA then? Just double strength? Double hops. And yeah, usually double strength. So this has got Citra, Motueka and Vic secret. Not Victoria's secret. Vic secret. Vic secret. So yeah, it doesn't taste that strong, which is probably not a good thing really, is it? But it's nice. It's sort of like Long Island ice teas, you know? They taste like ice tea. They taste like what I have on my glass, but ooh. And they've got like five spirits. They do. Well, cheers to you. Cheers to you. Yeah, cheers, Lisa. Thank you very much. Cheers. Cheers to Paul, to Geoff. I'm thrilled to be here. One of the advantages of remote working is that we can connect. And we've been trying to connect with people remotely like this. And it's great. We've forged some new relationships, but also reignited a lot of the old ones. So it's great. It's great to see you again. Yeah, it's great to see both of you. So yeah, this is part of our prestigious point series where we're catching up with people who've been an influence to us, but also the whole community. And just, well, as with most of our chats, they are relatively free form, but just finding out a little bit more about, you know, your journey, what's inspired you and what's going on for you at the moment, that kind of thing. So what's new with you? Well, I'm successfully shifting my work life to work more with leadership teams, which has it's, you know, I think everyone knows it's challenges, which is great. It's a totally different thing, you know, because working with helping people build agile coaching skills in the last 10 years or so, you know, it's the willing that come to work with me in that case. And with, you know, working with leadership teams, it's whichever leader brought me in, that's the willing. And then everyone else sort of comes along for the ride. And there's a way to build a lot of willingness and, like, you know, like genuine desire for them to be involved, but they didn't get to choose initially. And that's really, really big difference. Yeah, I guess, did you ever get that? Not, let me say people come to your agile coaching skills workshops willingly, but I imagine you get people coming saying, I've got people back at work who aren't particularly willing for what I'm trying to do. And have you had a particular piece of advice for those people? Yeah, I think the biggest piece of advice is just helping those people get in touch with why they want to do this work themselves. You know, what they're in it for, and letting that be their guide for how much patience they can create for other people, how much compassion they can create for other people, and also for knowing when it's time to go. For making that discernment. Yeah, yeah. The Esther used a phrase a while ago, don't go around inflicting your help, which is stuck with me for my work as a coach, I presume that's something you would. Now Michael Spade says go where you're wanted. Yeah. And I think that both are sort of the same piece of advice. And I think that's a really good piece of advice. If you found that different sort of, you didn't say the word resistance there, but maybe the people that haven't brought you in aren't as willing as the people that have brought you in. Well, they just don't know, like they don't know what they're in for. Yeah.  It's not that they've had a conversation together and said, no, no, we should get a coach. It's one person thinks, I think we could probably do with a coach. I'm going to find someone. And that one person may have done a very good job of talking with all, you know, kinds of folks enrolling people in it. But that's not the same as choosing yourself, you know. Do you think, Lisa, that's changed over the years? Do you think that the appetite has shifted more towards proactively coming to you and asking for these things compared to where you were five, 10 years ago? Yeah, I think so as a whole. I'm doing some work now with about two dozen enterprise agile coaches. Michael Spade and Michael Hammond have a cohort program for developing like the IC agile expert level competence in these folks. And I'm hearing that from them. So I would take their word for it more than mine because they've been in that enterprise coaching game a lot longer than I have. I've been busy, you know, developing agile coaching skills in the public at the same period of time that they've actually been doing that work. So yes, yes, it's sort of like how yoga is sort of acceptable now. You know, it's not weird anymore. And not everyone wants to do it. But I think certainly during this, it can't help but come up in conversation, but obviously it's been a very strange 12 months for more or less everyone. But I certainly think it has emphasized looking after yoga and my wife, I can talk from a person experience, she's well into and she's become a Pilates instructor and she really believes in that. Looking after yourself, I think has become even more on the radar than it ever has, I think, and rightly so. Yeah, rightly so. Yeah, I tell you, so from a personal standpoint, I am certainly feeling what I what I view as the accumulated effects of this last 12 years. Feels like it, doesn't it? It feels like it. Oh my gosh, does it feel like it for 12 months? And to be really fair, if I think about what I've experienced in the United States over the last four years under the Donald Trump administration, that was a lot of stress and anxiety and daily outrage sort of building up over a long period of time and then bam, the pandemic. So I don't think it's just the last 12 months for me. And I think that obviously not everyone has had that same experience, but a good number of people have experienced, even people who don't live in the United States have had that experience of just like, Oh my God, what has happened to the world? You know, like that question over and over again for years on end. And I think it's just, it's, if we think about like the long arc of history and the very recent spikes in how the human presence is affecting the planet and our ability as humans to thrive on this planet, I think that what's under the surface of a lot of this is existential grief.  But that factoid, at least for me, is in the back of my mind going, Oh my God, really? Is that what we're doing? Oh my God. And I can't do anything about that directly. And so it does create, I think that as human animals, we can't help but feel on some level, our effect on on the living web of existence, of which we are just a part. Yeah. You know. And so I think that's that's like the the base tone or like the drumbeat that is going on all the time. And so I think all these things are combining to create a significant dip in mental and emotional and physical health. Yeah. That word accumulation, I think it's key because each one might not be huge, but if we haven't cleared it out, and we build on top of it with another little one, it doesn't take a huge amount of time for it to become quite meaningful. And we start to unconsciously rewrite our scripts about what's going on. And we don't perhaps notice it a little bit like that boiling of frog analogy. You don't realise what's going on until the water's too hot. And I think a lot of our gel teams have a similar kind of thing around that as well. I know it's on a smaller scale, but just from a work environment, just those little things that happen on a daily basis. Just accumulating. We're brilliant at building coping mechanisms that way. We're brilliant at building walls in our mind to try and shut that off rather than deal with it. But that's that can only go on for so long. These is also what makes me think of as well is with obviously the like you say the last 12 months has kind of amplified and put everything into that microscope. Why do you think that is? What is it in my mind? It's that everything kind of has kind of stopped and it almost lets you look a lot harder into yourself and analyze maybe even overanalyze what about yourself and makes you feel a little bit insecure. Certainly in the first few months of the pandemic and the first probably three to six months, certainly me and people that I know with those stress levels increase massively. Do you think is it just too much time on our hands to analyze things too much? Do you think? Or is it something else? Okay, so obviously it's going to be different for different people, right Paul? So if you're saying that, it sounds like there might be some truth in that for you. Maybe it's like, oh have I overanalyzed? Another aspect in what's in operation for me is the encounter with impermanence and lack of control. Yeah, so like in the United States right now, we're experiencing a significant interruption in supply chains, all kinds of supply chain. Now, okay, I just had to deal with this myself because we had to buy in a dishwasher. It was incredibly hard to buy a dishwasher. It was incredibly hard to get it installed.  So now let's be really clear. When I say that sort of thing, I immediately feel sort of like the guilt and shame of, oh my god, Lisa, you're so like dishwasher really like that. So that is such a privileged problem, right? Yeah, exactly. And my daughter who's really skilled in these sorts of things would say, mom don't compare pain, right? So whatever you're experiencing that's not comparable with the pain that someone else experiences who doesn't have running water in their house, both are pain. You know, both are stress, both are anxiety. And I think that, so here's the thing, it's never the dishwasher. No. It's what's the underneath current. And I suppose you've never had to, just talking from my own experience, we've never, I've never had to deal with that type of situation before. Like you said, it's completely new. These are completely new feelings.  But like you said, there's people who have to walk to get food or water every day and they're walking miles to you. And then that's their normal. And I think, like you say, it's, I think it's a lack of control. These are things that I'm sparring. I have no control over these things. But also, they're just completely new problems that I've never had to deal with before. And that can fair enough, fair enough. And where I expected to get a little more relief from being vaccinated and initial.  I don't want to say that that has not happened. It definitely has. I've been fully vaccinated now for about four weeks. Oh my gosh, we went back to the swimming pool. It was amazing. We actually ate in a restaurant for breakfast the other day. And so those things are relieving because of the level of social anxiety I was carrying everywhere. And I'm still doing, you know, my civic duty of wearing a mask and protecting the people who aren't vaccinated because we're not, we're not there yet to where we can take the masks off. But just the fact of sitting at the table 10 feet away from other tables and I can not have my mask on and not worry about killing someone else. I mean, that has really been a huge toll. I mean, also worrying about bringing this virus home to my husband who's quite a bit older than me. So, so that, so there's a relief in that there's definitely a relief in that. But I kind of expected it to be a little more relieving. I'm a little disappointed. Because you put too much hope into it, do you think? Well, I think I expected to feel sort of a resurgence of energy and a movement toward, I don't know, toward some sort of future and what I feel is sort of like a stalling out. Now, that's also what's happening in my own personal, physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual bodies right now. So that's, that's what's happening for me personally. But I also feel it in sort of in the, in the overall emotional field. What do you all feel? What's happening in the UK? In the UK it's, I think there's a localized level of relief, like you said, relief that we're quite lucky in so much as within the UK the vaccination programme has advanced quite fast in comparison to most, most of Europe. Did you say Jeff? That's probably true. So a lot of European countries are way behind the levels that they use. So there's a sense there that a collective sigh of relief that things are relaxing, we'll be able to do some of the things that we couldn't do before. And that's, like I say, there's a sense of families coming back together. But at the back of our mind thinking, you know, we're not going to be out of this, we're not going to be out of this really until the world is out of this, until, until the rest of the planet is able to, to, to vaccinate as many people as the UK. So it's kind of a mixed emotions for me personally is that it's not, yeah, it's somewhat reassuring, but we're not out of the woods by any stretch yet. And we've just had a local, a very local school near to me that closed. And it's that front they had like eight, eight to 12 cases out of nowhere. And it's just that sudden realization that, hang on a minute, this could quite quickly still, the virus is still there, things could still revert back to how they were. And it's quite scary to think about that. I think we're very tempting to oversimplify, but sort of two types of people, if you like, I'm seeing in the UK one is the, the, the still skeptical in that almost no matter what happens, I'm still going to be worried. Even if 100% of people were vaccinated tomorrow, and we went a week without any cases, people would still be very over cautious. And then you got the, the other end of the spectrum, which is as soon as you see a glimmer of hope and the restrictions being eased, it's parties. And it's, it's, and it's people, I think, just depending on how far they've gone one way, tend to, tend to rebound, but there's also a self-defence mechanism in there as well. I think of, well, I don't want to let my hopes get too high because I don't want to be dashed again. So I'm not going to get ahead of myself. But there's, there's, there is only so much anxiety that people can take, I think before the coping mechanisms just don't work anymore. The, you know, for me, the, the big thing here, as well as the, the lack of control was for me just an absolute eye-opening smack in the face for everybody that actually we are living in a very complex world and highly interdependent world with lots of things that we don't understand.  And while when we had our routines around us, we could kind of ignore that complexity if you like. We had those routines to keep us in a sense of normality. But then all those routines were stripped away. And so we were left very vulnerable, very isolated, very exposed in this complex world without the safety net of our routines. And that being in that state for quite a prolonged period, I think has really taken its toll. And you can, I said, you can, you've only got a certain amount of energy, I think that you can expend on these things.  Well, I'm nowhere near as effective as, as I would be if I didn't have all these other anxieties going on, right? And that's not just me. Yeah. No, it's not just you. I mean, I'm definitely feeling, what I've been telling people is just I have less capacity right now. I really do have less capacity and speaking of privileged places, I get to choose how much I want to work, right? So I can, I can titrate how much I take in so that I have enough to give for that. And so far, you know, I'm still really functioning quite well for my clients and, you know, for the people I'm collaborating with. But I could also feel the edge of like, how much longer can this go on? And, and, and how much more capacity reduction will I experience? It's a real question in my mind right now. And I think, and the reason I'm, I'm, I feel a little bit sort of like I'm putting myself out there and maybe people won't want to contact me for work. And I'm like, don't do that. I love to work. I would love to work with you. You know, I want to, and at the same time, I just want to take that risk, because I think that as you said, Jeff, like, you know, I'm not the only one. And I think this is a growing elephant in the room. And, and how horrible, like I talked with my doctor, she's like, you would not believe how I am prescribing anti anxiety and anti depressants right now. Really? He said it's unbelievable. And, and we were already in the US at like something like 50% of adults before the pandemic, so like 50% of adults are on some sort of medication like that. And so now it's got to be a lot more. And, and so I think that would be horrible if that were the only avenue. So I want to just open up the conversation and start talking about what is going on for people.   Because the moment is not like all cylinders firing and we can just keep on this mythology of growth forever. It certainly put things into perspective, isn't it? And what I found is that it's quite easy to get absorbed into the opposite of that.  And the number of I think I'm getting more emails now on a weekend than I ever have with people and strange hours of the day thinking, no names, Jeff, but people that working, I'll put you on the spot, Jeff, but you do you work weekends and you it's not uncommon to see you emailing strange times in the evening or first thing in the morning. Yeah, I mean, I found there has been so I'm going to put a slight positive on this, not from my own benefit, but it has given people the opportunity to to fit their work around their life. So they can a lot more easily say, well, I'm not going to work during the school run, I'm not going to work during kids tea. And to make up for that, I'll work a little bit when they gone to bed. And that's that's a lot better work-life balance for for me. And if that's a choice, and it works for them, then I'm all for that. But that feeling of obligation. And I think a lot of that obligation comes from the uncertainty of am I adding value? Yeah, yeah. And in a compulsion almost, you know, that's what I'm seeing in my clients is this compulsion to be on all the time. Yeah. Do you think that's because, like you say, Jeff, adding value or being watching or you're being observed or you're I genuinely think it's an insecurity of I don't I don't I can't see I don't I don't have the same sort of feedback loops feedback mechanisms that I had before. I'm not getting as much sort of acknowledgement of what I'm doing. And also, I'm probably not working at full capacity. So I'm not as being as effective as I used to be. So I'm going to make up for it in terms of output rather than outcome. And it makes me feel more secure that I know that I've worked hard, even if I haven't got the right result, you know. What do you think about this? This came up for me recently, Lisa.  And it sort of made me a little bit uncomfortable because I'm conscious to not cross that line. So it's something I regularly talk through with my supervisors and things, but it has it's increased a lot more recently. Now, the rationalization that I've gone through to my with myself on this one with my supervisors is very few people at work get listened to like truly listened to without, you know, someone thinking I'm gonna hear what you say and then I'm going to point forward genuinely listening to them. And that's probably what they assumed therapy to be. And so do you get that kind of thing as well? Yeah, I do. And, you know, one of the things that that is a little bit of a essentially misleading is that it looks a lot like therapy. I mean, you're sitting down and talking, you might be using other modalities like bringing someone through a process helping them ground in their body, noticing the wisdom or the sensations in their body as well as their mind like so all of that would feel like therapy to someone who hasn't actually had therapy before. If someone has had therapy before and they know that where the focus is on, you know, sort of the past and how did I get here? What do I need to unknot from the past? Then they can see the distinction. But looking from the outside, like if you were just looking through soundproof glass therapy session and coaching session, could you tell the difference? Maybe not. So I mean, I do see that that is so. And the other thing is that, yes, I think it's because as you and your supervisors are saying people are not used to be listened to, not used to that. But I also think people are not used to a modality in which the purpose is for them. Because so much of our interaction in other kinds of setups is, you know, two people have agendas, they may or may not match. And so it's always like this jostling of like, am I going to get my am I going to get what I need or are you going to get what you need? And most of that stuff is implicit, not explicit. And so it's a very, that's that's much more anxiety producing situation. And I think that's people's normal baseline everyday interaction. And so when you're with someone like a coach who is for you and for your goals, that's a really different container to be in. And of course, I like therapy, right? Because that's what therapist is after. But for me, it's a very crude distinction, right? It is a lot more nuanced than this, right? But coaching, you're assuming someone is whole therapy, you're trying to help someone mend very crude distinction. But if we were to to look at it through that lens, and we're kind of assuming that more and more people are, if not broken, then close to breaking point, because of the accumulation of anxieties, does that mean actually there's less scope for coaching because people need to be in a resourceful state before they can make use of coaching, if you know what I mean? That's a good question. And you're making me realize that it's probably why I have been I have been picking up some other modalities lately. So I've been doing a lot of study of somatic coaching and trauma informed coaching. I think I just, it wasn't any like big strategic plan to do that. But I think I got attracted to those things because of what I was feeling in the ether is that, you know, we are headed toward this place where resourcing ourselves again and again is going to be a necessary skill. And so I don't necessarily think it's going to reduce scope for coaching. I think that what's going on is that we're all expanding our capability to be with a wider range of things. And not just coaches, but all of us in the sort of the spheres that we work in, in the spheres of business and the spheres of people who are who have enough to eat and who have shelter and all that sort of stuff.  And I don't think I need to be a therapist to address that. I think there are plenty of coaching modalities that are appropriate for that. And I have had a couple recently where I've asked them the question, do you think you're depressed? And, and we've had a little exploration of that and some of them have decided to contact their doctors. So I think, I think that's a, you know, like an appropriate referral out, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that someone needs a therapist to function in the modern world, which let's just say is more uncertain now than it ever has been and humans aren't built for uncertain, you know? I think you're right, Lisa. And what I have seen is certainly is that a lot of the agile teams that I've been coaching and working with is that, and it's, and it's very timely at the moment because this week in the UK is Mental Health Awareness Week. And it's not that there should be only one week for it and not advocating that, but what I have seen genuinely over the last few months is team members that are much more interested and prepared to talk about emotions and prepared to name how they're feeling, what's going on. Because you do have that, teams have got that little bit more insight now. And I appreciate we've got virtual backgrounds here, but on a camera on situation where you can see people's faces, you can see perhaps what's, or hear perhaps what's going on in the background, it, it just, it's opened a little bit more of an insight into people's lives. And, unlike you said, Jeff, work has become part of your home life and vice versa. So people have found it, in my experience have been more, or more intrigued and interested to discover a bit more about people, what's going on for them in this, in this, in this climate at the moment.  And this was early in the pandemic.  And so we did this really cool, easy thing that I just want to talk about, because I think other people could do it, where we just present the idea of resilience, the presence of idea that we're the beginning of a pandemic, this is back in March, this is a year ago. And now, so now you could say we've been in the pandemic for a year, right. And all we did was two simple things. We made a list of, of solo resiliency practices, so things I do for and by myself. And we made a list of group resiliency practices, like things that we could do with each other. Sure. And that it was, first of all, amazing to me how fast they could fill out those two different lists. I mean, it was really shocking. There were about, how many of them were there? There were about 20 of them. And there were 60 entries on each of the lists. And how many beautiful group resiliency practices there were. So they said things like, take a minute to breathe together at the beginning of a meeting. Notice when people seem checked out or emotions seem high, and don't cruise through it. Stuff like that. So I don't know what happened for them. I hope they didn't forget that. I hope that at least some of that held them well. But I, you know, this is a time to turn to each other. So maybe, maybe this sort of crisis that we're in is what's required for us to not only take care of ourselves individually, but to turn to one another and take care of each other in the groups that we're in. Yeah. I'm really pleased to say that I am seeing a lot more of that. Just little slack messages. How are you doing today? That kind of thing. Reaching out little, just little surprise care packages to each other. These just little things like that, that I think people are really valuing and taking the time to think about. Yeah. Do you think we need to add another skill to our skill set as our child coaches? So, you know, I asked this because I think when I first started as a scrum master, I hadn't had any kind of training in facilitation or active listening other than the stuff that I'd done outside of work in my sort of night school stuff. Do you think there's something else that we need to add to our skill set? I, maybe not everyone needs to add this, but I think a number of us Agilists need to add trauma informed to our skill set. Not that we're like, not that we're going to become experts in helping people process trauma, but we're going to become much more aware of noticing when trauma is present or it's getting recapitulated for someone. Not pushing through in that moment. So my daughter actually at her school, she was all of her, she's now 18, a couple of years ago, maybe it was a year ago, I forget, but they were offered the chance to become what they called mental aid, mental health first aiders. Wow. And I quite like that analogy because you're not there to be a surgeon, you're not there to be a paramedic, you're there for first aid, right? So you can notice the signs and you can you can keep them going until they get to someone who can really help them, that kind of thing. That sort of analogy came to mind when you were talking about that. That's nice. That's really nice. Yeah. And yeah, I think, right, I don't think I can only be taught from my experience, but I think I would certainly benefit from just like you said, at least about recognizing patterns or recognizing responses where you think, do I need, you know, does this person need more? Does this person need to need additional help? And I think I'd like to think that yeah, there's something we can we can offer or we can put in place to help people find that. Yeah. I got it. This might be a good point, actually, Lisa, because we got some, so a couple of people knew that we were going to be talking to you and it's all, would you mind asking a question? So tell us and we'll see. We'll see if we can stick it in. And one person said, what they really like your opinion on is dealing with emotional work. So when you're, you set your boundaries and you get yourself in the right state, but it takes energy out of you to deal with emotional work. And then at the end of the session, you sort of recalibrate. Do you have any particularly good tips or tricks for how to cope with difficult moments? And I'm now reading into that in terms of self-care, in terms of that kind of self-awareness. So what I'm taking this question to mean is, so when I'm working with someone and, and we're encountering a range of emotion or a depth of emotion, then once that interaction is over, how do I take care of myself? Yeah. Yeah. Is that over? Yeah. Well, you know, I love my early training with the Coaches Training Institute on this actually, because it's not the question of what I do after. It's the question of what I do before. Okay. And so one of the things that I'm reminding myself a lot of these days is the one of the foundations, the cornerstones of co-active coaching, which is people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole. So this is back to like, there's nothing to fix, right? Even someone experiencing a moment of amygdala hijack because there's a trauma that's been recapitulated. That person is still whole. That person is still capable and resourceful and creative. And so my job in the, in the interaction with them is to help them explore, but to keep them at choice. Okay. So that when I leave the interaction, I feel really clean that I didn't force anything on them. I didn't try to do a sell job on something I thought they should do. I didn't even vote one way or the other on the thing they decided to do, but it really was something they owned so that when I leave, I'm not asking the question, oh, did I harm them? Right? So I think that that, that is a way of keeping, I guess, clean as like emotionally clean as though is the word. Now, having said that, I am getting much more in tune and I'm opening myself up to much more of my natural empathy and intuition, especially as that shows up in my body. And so I am, this is not so much with my coaching clients, but in other interactions, I am realizing that I'm starting to carry a little bit of, this is especially the larger client systems, like the larger organizations, I'm starting to carry a little bit of their stuff. Now, and so for that, I use something called cord release, which is, do you want to know what, do you want to know what it does? I didn't even know what word you used there, was it cord release? Cord, C-O-R-D, cord release. This is something my energy healer taught me, which is, oh, so good. So in a nutshell, what you're doing is you are releasing the cords or the connections that you have put into the client or the clients put into you that no longer serve. You're releasing anything that does not serve your highest good, this is for your benefit.  And what my energy healer taught me to say is, I might easily let go of anything that is not in my highest good, give it back to the ground. And so once all that has happened through your, you're using your physical body as a way to have, to allow your imagination, really, to release these things in your energy body. And if you don't believe in your energy body, no big deal, just say in my imagination, I'm releasing these. So once that happens, you imagine that the other person or system over there is doing the same thing, because they've got to get rid of the shit that you put in them. And so I'm doing this a lot more than I've done before. And it's because of my growing capacity of me using my multiple intelligences, but it's also what we talked about before. There's just an accumulation of anxiety, you know, that I think creates more of those chords than would normally. Yeah. And I was going to add to that Lisa, is there also tying these things together? The fact that back to the COVID, the pandemic, if the issue is around, like you say, mental health, stress, anxiety, worry, is there a risk that we see the same things in ourselves as a coach that we're thinking, well, that's true of me. So it's harder to stay neutral. It's harder to be it to remain objective, because we think, well, that's happening for me as well. You know, we're all in this together. So it's harder to keep that distance. It's harder to strip some of those chords away. Well, it's actually not hard to strip the chords away, Paul. Just try it. Just try it. It's like so easy. So, so easy. And the intelligence of your body knows which chords don't serve and which chords can stay. And like you don't have to logic it out. It's just it's super, super natural. It's not supernatural. It's just supernatural. It's a natural, like we know how to do this. Empathy is a good thing, right? We want empathy. We want to be able to feel that pain almost. Yeah, of course. So what this is not doing is creating a disconnection between you and that thing you're you're dropping your chords with. It's not creating a disconnection at all. It's just getting rid of the entanglement that's not serving. So you're staying with it for the whole session and being able to disconnect. Yeah. And actually, it'll help you serve that person or that organization better. Because because you won't, as you were talking about, Paul, you won't be tied up in your own thing. Yeah. Right.  It feels solid to us, but it's actually really not. And I do believe, Paul, that we get involved with clients and organizational systems because there is an entanglement. So for sure, for sure, I see the same things my clients are working on. I'm working on. Perhaps it's at the same level or the same scope. Sometimes it's not, but it's a very similar refrain. You know, and I've always noticed that and coaches have said that forever that, oh my god, things my clients work on. I end up showing up in my life in some way. And so now I think about the quantum world, it makes total sense to me. We get attracted and they get attracted because we're entangled somehow already. Deep. Well, I guess it feels deep to us now just because this is new information. But later people will think about quantum mechanics like we think about gravity. I'm going to change the subject slightly, but I think, well, in my mind, I think it's related, but on the surface, it could look like a complete change of subject. Are you inspired now by different people to whom you were inspired by when you were when you wrote coaching agile teams, for example? Yeah, I think I definitely am inspired by different people. So this is a really lovely question. Let me just sit for a second and see what's so. So, you know, at the time I wrote coaching agile teams, professional coaching was fairly new to me. And the idea that someone could be of value and of use without being smarter or knowing more than the other person was like mind blowing, right? And it essentially paved the pathway for me to move from a transactional work life to a relational work life, which was so much richer and also so much more effective. Loved it, loved it. So those influencers were definitely inspiring. We're definitely people in the professional coaching world, in the facilitation world, in the leadership world. Anyone in particular? Oh, yeah. So I can think about my teachers at Coaches Training Institute and Center for Right Relationship Global, CR Global. Yeah, so let me just name some of them. Lovely. Yeah, it's great to invoke them. Cynthia Lloyd-Darst, David Darst, Merida Frijohn, Faith Fuller, L.A. Redding, John Purcelli, and more, you know, of course, as soon as I start naming names, and now I'm more of who I'm excluding. But the good news is none of them listen to this. That's probably true. That's probably true. You know, and now who I'm following and learning from are really in two different veins. One vein is sort of like the vein of essential wisdom. So following like the woman who's my Zen teacher, Diane Musho Hamilton Roshi, and the lineage she represents and then the related wisdom traditions that we've always had that are essentially saying the same thing. So, you know, and if I think about, so there's a lot of very ancient masters that I'm in touch with there, like the people, ancient people who created the I Ching, you know, and Lao Tzu, Dogen Zengi, you know, people who lived centuries ago. And then the transmission of them to our current teachers. So that's one path that is really inspiring me and creating more ease in my life, actually. And the other is complexity scientist. I just like so geek out. And the one I'm loving these days is Glenda Ouyang, who's been around forever. But I just, I mean, so she's not new on the scene. I'm just new to her. You know, I'm the late comer. And I love, I love the work that she's created in the world with Roy's holiday and with other people who've been involved in the human systems dynamics Institute. So I mean, it's not just Glenda, but there's a body of work there. That's very inspiring because it totally matches the time we're in, where we're recognizing that we can't control change, we can influence, we can influence complex systems, but we cannot control them and we can't even plan them. Yeah. That's cool. What about you? I'd love to know who, like if there's been a change in inspires or maybe who your current inspirers are. I like to look in all sorts of different fields. I'm one of those geeky people who maybe geeky is not the right word actually. But just as me and Paul would fail to go to a pub and, well, we'd go to a pub and fail to have a conversation that didn't somewhere relate back to agile. Equally, I can't watch a TV show or a film or something or listen to a song without actually interpreting it through my lens of sort of agile or coaching. So, you know, I look at all sorts of different things and think, wow, there's something there, but equally, equally anti influence as well. I find the people that I think, you know what, that's something I really don't want to become or be associated with in any way. So, almost I'm going to try and move away from that more than I am moving towards someone that I particularly respect. So, I mean, I take this view that I can always take something from everybody that I meet. I'm sure somebody famous said that once. I couldn't remember who, but yeah, that idea that I can always learn from everybody that I meet. And that, so whoever I'm with at that point in time is going to inspire me in some way, either to be a little bit more like them or try and model myself on one of their traits or the opposite. Thankfully, it's a lot more the positive than the latter. Yeah, I'll read you, Paul. Yeah, I suppose I've always been, I've always looked from as a software developer in a previous life, I always tried to move to see what I can see from outside the software industry that's inspired me and looking for other coaches and other, and just the performing arts is something I've always took a lot of interest in. And just how other just more artistic industries can actually inform what would, you know, the software and engineering industry. I think it's quite interesting that a lot of discipline can actually be, can be used in different ways. So yeah, standard comedians, performing arts actors, actresses and yeah, teachers, school teachers, if those people inspire me, the people that have had to muddle through this pandemic and managed to still inspire children to want to learn in a completely different environment. I think we can learn a lot from people, key workers that have just kept this country and the planet moving. It's incredible. And what's on the horizon? What's new for you? What's your current area of focus? Well, there are some new creative endeavors starting to brew, which feels really good. You know, since closing off the chapter of my life where I was training and developing agile coaching skills and people, I haven't really created anything new for public consumption. So is that behind you now? Would you say the agile skills for the coaching skills for agile people? Yeah, the piece. Yes, it is. It is. I'm not doing any training in agile coaching anymore. And yeah, and I don't have any desire or plans to create more curriculum or development programs or anything like that. I am a mentor in Michael Spade and Michael Hammond's enterprise coaching cohort, but that's all their content and I'm helping people express the competencies. I mean, I love that role. I love that role. So what is starting to brew? Oh, you asked if that was done. So here's the piece that's not done. Is that the coaching adult team's book is still going like gangbusters. And so I feel a bit of like there's a privilege I have of honoring that work and honoring what it still wants to do in the world. And the piece I'm picking up from that is creating ways for more people to experience that content more deeply without having to go to a course. And I'm thinking about people who are in lower income situations and people who even though the world is online now, in Asia, for example, most of Asia, time zones are really still not very conducive for people in that part of the world. So there's something brewing right now, which is a coaching agile team's book club, which will be something that I take a group through and record it and then it can be available for a solo journey. It can be available for a group of people moving together as a cohort and doing the exercises together and supporting one another. So that's the piece that's still there from agile coaching and from that decade or so of that mission. But what's coming into focus for me right now is is my deep despair about where we are as a human species and on a planetary level. Deep, deep despair. And the stake that has come really clear in my mind is this almost ridiculously simple statement. Conscious leaders make healthy choices. Conscious leaders make healthy choices. And so for me, what's coming online is all of my work is arrayed around that phrase. And so whatever I'm doing, it's going to be to help people become more conscious, help them know that every decision they make is actually a choice, you know, and have greater skill and ability in doing so. And and just offer the skills that help all of that work better. And so, you know, I'm thinking about apps now. I mean, do you notice that there's like psychology based apps going on in the world and they actually work really well? And so if we can do that, I'm thinking, why can't we have an app that would help someone through a difficult thing like having a crucial conversation like that information has been out there in books for years and years and years and I know very few people who are actually good at it. You know, so why can't there be sort of like there's this great app called Noom for I've been really enjoying using it. And that provides a great model for like community based support, but also knowledge also challenge at a different level. You know, so anyway, I'm thinking about those sorts of delivery mechanisms. And also in this period of time, this just happened two weeks ago, y'all, the audio book for the lead together book came out and I narrated that audio book. Nice.  I plan to become like a professional narrator. It was really yes, I love narrating my own book. And then I was talking with one of my friends colleagues, the Susan Bastropield, one of the three authors of this book lead together that came out in November. And she was just talking about the fact that so essentially here's that here's the here's the crux of that book. There's a great aspiration. And many of us have a value set that matches the teal altitude. Right. And most structures and most interactions revert to green, orange, amber, because the structures are not well known. Structures processes, you know, that sort of thing. So that's what the lead together book is. It's like, here are the structures of an organization that is focused on self organization and self management. You know, and it's like super practical. And so I loved it from that perspective. And you know, those conscious leaders make healthy choices that phrase came in later than me deciding to narrate this audio book where I see how they're related. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So is that is that a phrase that you created? Or is it something you've picked up and adopted? Or it was a long time and coming. I'm sure someone else has said that phrase in the world. So I'm not, you know, it's not it's not a thing that I'm just not aware of as a social media trend. No, no.  So planning on helping save the planet through through coaching leaders of organizations. Leaders everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, leaders of organizations, that's the logical place for me to focus because their impact is so much greater. Yeah. And because it's time for them and all of us to wake up to the fact that there are very few inconsequential decisions in business. So are you targeting your work more organizations that have a bigger negative impact on the planet or ones that have a more open to change mindset? Probably the second one. I think I'm targeting my work toward any leaders and leadership teams that are welcome, that are welcome. That's a good, that's a good Freudian slip, that are welcome to look inward. I was going to say that are willing to look inward, but welcome to look inward is probably good too. Yeah. So basically, you know, if a leadership team is willing to say, you know, we could be part of the problem of why things are showing up like they are in the organizations, I could probably work with them. Okay. Sounds exciting. I don't care so much about industry, don't care so much about size or whatever, certainly not going after the worst polluters in the world, because those more than likely have leaders, they're like, oh, yeah, that's an externality. It's not even on our balance sheet. That's definitely not my client. But leaders that want to make an impact, I suppose organizations that want to make an impact. And so many do. I mean, so what I'm noticing is that our hearts and our value system is more toward holistic, systemic view of things. No one really wants to screw anyone else anymore, like the, that don't, I don't find that in leaders, but I do find them not knowing how to make it so. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think that's, that's a good point to finish on. Yeah, nice positive finish on. It's good. So we're looking forward to hearing all about that. And the, and the kitchen. You'll find out when I do. Yeah. So just, no, just one more, one more time on behalf of the whole community. Thank you for everything that you've done and everything that you continue to do. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. And I think of the long lineage behind me that made that so as well. So we'll stand on the shoulders, don't we? Yeah, we do. Brilliant. Well, thank you, Lisa.  Hey, it's been fun. Cheers. Cheers.


Thank you. This is a joint work with Shaalevi, Yudalinda and Tarabin. I'm going to speak on privacy-preserving search of similar patients in genomic data. Secure computation enables us to compute some joint function. We have several parties and they want to compute some joint function of their inputs without revealing two inputs to one another, and nothing is learned by the output. We have tons of potential applications for secure computation. We can run learning on distributed databases, think about two hospitals that want to have some research on the patients, and they cannot reveal the patients the data to one another. We saw today applications of secure computation in blockchains. Secure computation is useful to protect credentials, cryptographic keys, and so many nice potential applications. There's a lot of interest lately in secure computation. We see some startup companies that actually implement this secure computation. It becomes much more practical. In general, in secure computation, distinguish between generic protocols, these are protocols that we develop techniques that give some function, some problem. We have generic ways to solve that problem, provide a protocol that computes securely that function. But unfortunately, this generic technique doesn't scale for very large, it does not scale for large inputs. On the other end, we have protocols for specific tasks. In this case, we look at some specific problem. We study the problem. We utilize some of the applications domains, and we can come up with very fast solutions. In this talk, I'm going to show we are going to design a secure protocol for specific tasks in genomics. We are going to demonstrate by that several design principles. Most importantly, we are going to see most of the computation can be sometimes. This is a very specific task, but in our case, we are going to push most of the computation that the preprocessing is going to happen in the clear, and this will enable us to run very large-scale computation that seems very expensive. In the generic protocols, it would have taken hours to run, and now it's going to take only several seconds. The problem that we are going to consider is the following. Suppose that we have a doctor that has the genome sequence of his patient, and there is a remote database, there is an hospital that has a lot of patients and the sequence data of these patients. The doctor wants to identify the very few sequences in the remote database that closes to its own patient. Why we want such a computation? We want sometimes it will help us to find the right treatment to that patient. Of course, the problem is to do all of that, or the challenge is to do that by protecting also the privacy. We care about the privacy of the patient. We don't want to reveal its own genomic sequence, and we care about the database and the other patients. Genomics genomes are very sensitive information. It affects not only my genome sequence, doesn't affect only my privacy, it also affects my parents, my kids, and this is very sensitive information. Why we care about such a task? Today, unfortunately, in cancer, we don't necessarily know what is the right treatment for the patient. Sometimes patients receive treatment that doesn't suitable for them, and using genomic sequences, we can actually come up and see what are the other patients, what treatment they got, if the treatment was successful or not, and it will help us to which treatment to select or avoid. It already happened today, there were 50,000 genomes that were sequenced for that task today, and according to this organization in the future, it's going to be in much larger numbers. So, we got to this problem through the I-security and privacy workshop. This is a competition that is ran by I-dash. I-dash is a biomedical organization. They are the domain experts in the new genomics, and they run an annual competition on genomics where they ask cryptographers, they give them the problem and they ask them to solve, they give databases, and this was the problem, the challenge last year. They have several tasks, this was the task, the track of secure computation, and the idea that the problem is to find the K closest sequences in the database where K is a parameter, fingers K is something like five or three, and we want to find the closest genes in the database which the added distance is the closest to that of the patient that the doctor holds. Just to recap what is added distance, so added distance is a way to measure how two strings are similar. We count the minimum number of basic operations that require to transform one string into the other where basic operations are the insertion deletions or substitutions. It takes, it's very, very heavy computation. It takes, it's quadratic in the length of the sequences, and it's something like n times d, we can reduce the amount of computation if we know some bound on the maximum, on the added distance that we expect to have. So just a few words about the challenge database that Itash gave in the competition. So the database consists of 500 sequences, each has the size of 3,500 characters. So we are looking at some specific region in the genome. These sequences were taken from high diversity region. The distance between two individuals were around 5%. So we have a lot of mutations, we have a lot of insertions and deletions, and this means that it's roughly harder. We cannot just do M in distance or something like that. We actually have to compute added distance. Also in genomics, 5%, it's very high diversity. When you take two individuals, the added distance is usually, their genome sequence is similar in 99%. Here we have a lot of differences in that specific region. So the added distance that is required just to answer one, one added distance between one sequence and the query in one sequence in the database requires something like 700,000 comparisons. This is because we have a bound on the added distance, which translates in terms of complexity of the problem. We look at the Boolean function that computes this particular task. So this Boolean circuit is going to contain 50 million gates, which means this is just to learn one added distance between one query and one patient in the database. If you want to compare 500, because our database has size 500, this is going to be 25 billion gates, which translates that if we use now the generic protocols for secure computation, it's going to take several hours to compute. What we did in our work, we came up with a domain-specific added distance approximation, and we actually utilized the fact that we have here genomic sequences that have come from particular distribution. We can come up with a much faster solution. We designed a secure protocol for computing it in the semi-honest model. It's an approximation algorithm. It's not exactly added distance, but it's very accurate. It was tested on several different regions of the genome, and to return the exact set, meaning we asked for the K5 closest sequences in the database, it returns the exact 5 in 98% of the time, and the 2% it returns something which is very close to the right solution, which returns the 4 closest and 1 which is 1 far from what was supposed to be returned. It's also very fast. We managed to push almost everything to the pre-processing, do everything in the clear, and then it takes only... we are answering a query in less than a second and a half after something like 11 seconds of pre-processing. So we pushed almost everything to the clear, and then we can answer any query in something like a second. And this solution also won the high-dash competition. There were eight submitted solutions, all were evaluated on the same databases, same environment, and this was the fastest. Some of related work. There are other works on genomics and secure computation. There is also other work that solves the same problem, but they focus on other regions that are much more... they have low diversity, which means that you can solve this kind of edit distances. This edit distance almost has an aiming distance. Most of the mutations are substitutions or not insertions and deletions and this becomes a much easier problem. And so they can work on much larger regions, and these things are a bit incomparable. There are surveys on genomics and crypto. There are also some security implications when we use approximation and not the exact result we are not... I'm not going to talk about in this talk. There are several concurrent works that were other competitors in the high-dash competition. So our protocol. So the observation is the following. If we take edit distance and try to break it into very small blocks, then everything becomes much faster. You just, by the fact that you just take your two strings, break them into blocks and then compare edit distances, block-wise edit distances, sum up the results. This is going to be very fast and it's fast because we have this amount of blocks. This is our edit distance cost. If B is something like 5, it becomes almost linear. However, it has very bad approximation. We tried it, we tried it with small blocks. It doesn't work very well. If we increase the blocks, it still doesn't work. And why is that? So it's not hard to see that sometimes you have some small deletion over here and because of that, everything moved around and everything was shifted and because of that, we recount this deletion again and again and again. If we somehow knew that here there was a deletion and we could push and choose this block to be only of size 3 and not of size 4, then the approximation would have been much better. In this case, it's even the exact result. So we need to know where to break our sequence into blocks. In particular, it also means that our blocks are not going to be all the time of the same size.  So the question is how to break into blocks. This is actually the problem because this is edit distance. We don't know where are the insertions and deletions. So the way we break into blocks is that we utilize a reference genome. So there is a reference genome out there. It was publicly available online. There was actually organizations that maintained it. The idea of reference genome, it was assembled from several donors and with the aim to use a single preferred tiling path to produce a single consensus representation of the genome, it's out there and we're just going to use it. So what we do, we run a full edit distance between each one of the sequences in the database and the reference genome. Now we have the actual alignment between our sequence and the reference genome. When we break our reference genome into blocks, the blocks of exactly the same size, we can align the sequence according to that reference genome and get the alignment of the sequence. We break the sequence into blocks. Now the hope is that if we align one sequence according to the reference genome and another sequence according to the reference genome, when we come to do the block-wise approximation, the approximation is going to be much more accurate. So we tested it and it was amazingly accurate. It was very exciting. At that point I thought, OK, so all the problems we're going to take on our database, just break all the sequences into blocks and then we are going to have a lot of small edit distances. We are going to parallelize everything and that's it. However, before we started to implement that, we took another look on what actual the values that we are getting and it turns out that genomic distribution is so... there are very interesting things that are happening over here, particular after we break the sequences into blocks and we look at specific block and we ask ourselves what are the values that happen to be in that block? It happened to be that there are very few distinct values in each one of the blocks. It's not 500, even though we have a database of 500, the number of distinct blocks in each one after breaking them into blocks is something like 10. Most of the time it's just one. Sometimes it varies between 1 and 10. And this is because genome sequences don't have so many mutations. So in a database of size 500, you're going to end up with very few blocks. Very few distinct values. Moreover, almost always the query is also one of these values. What it means, it means that at the online time we don't have to compute any distance at all. All we have to do is simple comparisons. We're going to compare the values of the query to one of the values in the database. We can do much more in the pre-processing. The pre-processing is going to be heavier but at the end of the day we kind of reduce any distance to just comparisons which are very efficient, secure computation. So how the server pre-processing works, so it breaks each one of the sequences into blocks, then we are going to see what are the values that happen to be in each one of the blocks and the server is going to compute a very large vector. The vector is the size of the database. And for each one of the possible values in the block it's going to compute if it happens to be that the query value in this block is this in this value then what is the contribution of this block to the edit distance? It computes that for each one of the possible values, compute it also for each one of the possible blocks. In each one of the blocks these possible values are different. And then what is left to do at the online time, we take the query, we just also break it into blocks by comparing it running edit distance to the reference genome, breaking it and then we compare each one of the blocks of the query to the corresponding set of values in the database and kind of know which one of the columns to select, what is the contribution of that block to the edit distance and we just sum up over all the blocks. And then we get the approximation between the query and all patients in the database. More formally what we compute are bits that tells us whether this value of the query is this value, is this possible value of the, is this one of the possible values in the database and what we compute is just this approximation. We sum up, we multiply each one of the bits with the vector and we just sum up over all vectors and all possible values within each one of the blocks. Okay, so the secure protocol for it is almost nothing.  We compute these bits. Then we have another trick to get this multiplication of XIU and delta IU. Then we just, using local computation, we can get this approximate, the vector, a sharing of this vector. And in order to find the five closest or the three closest, we run another Yau that actually computes with the minimal values in that thing. Again, using Yau garbage circuit, note that all the crypto that we have over here is Yau garbage circuit here on a very small, it's small circuit. We have some oblivious transfer over here in order to compute this multiplication which can do very fast using OT extensions and we can have again here Yau garbage circuit, again, it's going to be on a small circuit. So, I want to say just a few words about accuracy and performance. So we tested this on various databases, different sizes, different genes. Accuracy, it was very accurate, it returns 98% of the time, the exact case set. And I gave a few numbers of different genes, how many, what's the size of the database, what is the size of the genome, what's the length of the samples. Query time, and I think what is most impressive is the fact that we took a computation that was supposed to be 25 billion gates. We managed to come up with something which is so small and it's approximation, it's not exact, but in most cases hopefully it's good enough for the application. So some conclusions. So we demonstrate here in this talk that MPC secure computation achieves such high performance, but it might be that these tricks are also possible in other problems or in every problem that you face. Maybe there are tricks that can actually also do stuff like that. And it's just encourage, my takeaway message is to encourage to consider using MPC in places where initially it looks too expensive. Few acknowledgments to people that helped in the implementations. And thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, questions for Gilad. Yes. I agree. So the question is exactly what we are looking for. In many cases you look and want to see, it's a Boolean function, even though I retrieve the K-closest sequences in the database that are closest to my genome, I want to see if the treatment that they got was successful or not. So at the end of the day it's a Boolean function. So even though you've asked for the five closest, and we return the fourth closest, and the fifth one was one just after it was the sixth one, it's happened to be that it also has the same condition most of the time. But we don't have a real data to actually test that, even further. Other questions? So what happens if the query block isn't one of the blocks you saw? That's a good question. So the protocol, as it describes, what happens is just... Everything is zero. We just ignore that block. So it just happened to be that the accuracy is not degraded by doing that. If you want to consider that block, it means that you have much heavier circuit to compute over here, because you need to hide also that it happens in this block and not in another one. Also I want to say that this thing can also be proven theoretically. So if you have some distribution that happens to be on 10 values, and you take someone else which is coming from the same distribution, you can prove that he's also one of the set with very high probability. I'm just worried if you have a weird outlier. That's probably really relevant, and ignoring it is probably the opposite of what you want to do. Yeah, it's probably not such small probability for 500. You need to increase the database size, but it's not supposed to... And what is the size of each block and how many blocks do you have? So we have something like... We choose small blocks, like three, five, eight. We didn't see difference in accuracy when we choose them. If you have larger blocks, it's faster because you have fewer overall blocks. Right. Okay, any other questions? Good luck. Okay, thanks speaker again.


Every Wednesday at 2, we do something here and today we got something a little bit special, a little unique. I'm going to be answering questions that our audience has submitted, either on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube and we're going to be or email or phone calls. We're going to be responding to those questions live on camera today. But also, as we're doing this, we're live on Facebook currently, you might as well, YouTube will be watching later. If you're watching and you got a question, you might as well ask. We're going to be answering some. Duker, the new guy, is going to be asking some questions. He's going to be commentating the show. And so we will answer the questions. If you have a question to ask or also if you have future questions that you want to ask and you want us to address Wednesday at 2 o'clock, then ask them on YouTube or Facebook and maybe we'll use them. So let's do it, Duker. What do you got, bro? In your 3S system, how long should the six shots take? Oh, that's okay. That's really good. The six shots should take no more than 72 hours. You should have, I believe you should have at least three calls in the first 24 hours. I believe you should have at least two calls in the next 24 hours and at least one call in the final 24 hours. I want to cram it all into that first 72 hours. And the biggest reason why is when you think about leads, when you think about their memory, when you think about them thinking about whatever they did for you to get this lead, it's a busy world, commercials, phone calls, direct mail, radio, all these other social media stuff, all this different stuff online, digital advertisements, Google, everything else. It's a busy world and you want them to be responding to you and ready. So, and you want them to remember, three touches, two touches, one touches, all within 72 hours. So that's a great question. That's a really, really good question. Explain the pros and cons between preneed insurance and final expense. Preneed and final expense. I don't have a lot of, I can't just get up here and say that I do. I don't have a ton of experience with preneed, but I know with final expense there are some pros and cons.  Final expense. I mean, the con is it's like a small, super focused niche, but that's also the pro in it as well. It's a small, super focused niche. They always say riches are in the niches. I love focusing on a niche no matter whatever you're doing. Focus on a niche. Focus on type of person. Focus on a product line. Focus on, I mean, PNC agents, they focus on home or auto or both. Keep Medicare agents. They focus on Medicare and then they fact find annuity agents. Maybe they'll start looking for annuities. Maybe they'll write some IULs occasionally. They start focused on a niche. So that's why I always think about a niche. Some of the big pros, it's fast. It's easy. Easy for people to qualify for. Easy for you to write and get paid. Easy for you to make six figures. Easy for you to go in and sell it. It's not a complicated sell. You can keep it really simple and learn it really quick. I would imagine pre needs pretty similar. Just has more to do with the funeral home and protecting the family that way. So what IMOs do you recommend for final expense tele-sales? IMOs do I recommend for final expense tele-sales. That's a good question. Question. I'll probably dance around a little. There's a lot of goods ones out there for instance. Vince with North Star was at our conference. Jeff Root was at our conference. I mean there's a lot of other companies. A lot of people do that. We even do some here. But it's not all we do. And so the biggest thing with tele-sales and to kind of answer that question is the biggest reason why insurance agents fail with tele-sales is they don't have a steady flow of people to talk to. And because they don't have a steady flow of people to talk to, they end up not talking to enough people. Very similar to face to face in tele-sales. Tele-sales is tougher. I believe that if about 100 agents had to get into tele-sales and had to figure out tele-sales, had to do tele-sales all on their own without help, at least 99 of them would fail. Now fortunately for you and for me and other people, there are places for you to go and actually learn about tele-sales. There's companies. There's training. There's scripts. There's all these different things to help you learn tele-sales. That's a super, super, super great question. Would you still be an insurance agent if you were given a billion dollars? 100%. I said this before. Person didn't believe me. So then they questioned it. Apparently this is the one. I like it. I like it. Thank you for asking that. If I was given a billion dollars, and I don't even know how many zeros that is, but dang it's a lot, right? It's like nine zeros. I would still be an insurance agent. We would still run secure agent mentor. We would still generate leads for agents. We would still have an agency. We would still focus on content. I would still do videos. I'd probably do more videos because I'd probably drive into a freaking Ferrari and own a plane, man. If I had a billion dollars, every insurance agent in the world would know who I am by the end of the year. But that's a great question because a lot of people would say, a lot of people say this all the time. If I won the lottery, you wouldn't see me at work tomorrow. These guys know I could win the lottery. I could win a billion dollars. I'd still be at work the next day and I wouldn't change and become complacent and work less or less hard. And I know these guys believe it and they know it's true. It wouldn't matter, but I love the question, all the curiosity. I love how unique it is. I'm telling you what, that's when you know if something's a passion, right? If you love what you do. Derek's been here to like seven o'clock at night every single night. The dude loves what he does. A lot of people here traveled to Nashville for a few days for a weekend. It wasn't about the money. It was about the cause. It was about the passion. It was because they like and they enjoy what they do. So at the end of the day, it's so much less about money and more about the fact that you need to love what you do and have a passion for what you do, even if you get handed a billion dollars. Do you actually take anything to the appointments? If so, what do you take? This is kind of funny. When I run appointments, I take a literally like a little padfolio, little binder. And the only thing it has, it's got some business cards. It's got a pen and it's got some paper. Like that's it. I keep it super simple. One thing I did start to use later in my career was a sheet that I could leave behind and that sheet would also be tucked in there. I was big on keeping it really simple because I personally still believe the more information you give to a prospect, the less likely they are to make a decision because it's sensory overload. You've given them too much. So I want to keep it super simple.  I want to walk through it as if it's brand new, as if I'm doing it in real time. And also, I don't want them to skip ahead down the paper. I want them to be following along with me and what I'm writing. So when I go into an appointment, I keep it super simple, super basic. I barely take anything. How do you transition from dropping off info to reviewing slash replacing their current policy? Yeah. So the big thing is, and most people, they forget them dropping off. So I show up.  I'm here for a two o'clock, you know, or whatever. Sometimes you don't have to say that. You're just showing up and they just know. And you're walking in. And the biggest thing that I stress when I'm looking at replacing another policy is quick story. I was in Joplin, Missouri, several years ago. I was training a brand new agent. And these guys will laugh because I did this all the time, but I was sitting there with the prospect. The prospect was on the couch. The new agent was in a recliner. And I was sitting in like an office. I was sitting in his little office desk in his office chair in the living room to kind of give you a visual perspective here. And I asked the, I mean, the gentleman kept talking about how he had another policy. And I like seeing if I can put people in better situations and beat other options and beat policies. So I asked him, like, hey, dude, it would be really helpful if we could find, you know, if you could look for your policy, you know, do you have your policy? And there's better ways to ask questions. It was several years ago. And the dude's like, yeah, I don't know where it is. I don't know where it is where most agents would have stopped and said, you know what? Okay. Well, that's all right. That's okay.  And so I always take one more question because normally when you ask them when a question wants, they never know the answer. Even if they know the answer, sometimes they'll respond so quick that they'll just be lazy and not really, and they'll act like they don't know. And a lot of times they'll still know the answer. So I said, okay, hypothetically, if you knew where it was, and this question doesn't even make any sense, but it worked. So I still use it. Hypothetically, if you knew where it was, where would it be? He just said, I don't know where it is. And I'm asking the guy, if you knew where it was, where would it be? And it ended up working because, for some reason, it at least gets an answer. It at least gets them to think, at least gets them to guess and try to get close. And the gentleman said, if I knew where it was, it would be right over there in that filing cabinet. I'm sitting a foot away from the filing cabinet. I open up the filing cabinet. I'm like, perfect. I'm just like, okay, if I look, yeah, I open it up. It's right there on the top of the filing cabinet. But if I wouldn't have asked an additional question, I would have never known. And so that's the biggest thing with replacing policies is you want all the information. If I've got to get them to call the insurance carrier to learn more about the situation, I will do it because the end of the day, it's about helping them. I want all the facts. I want coverage amounts. I want, I want it if it's a whole life. I want cash value. I want cash surrender value. I want premium. I want to see if there's a chance of the price going up in the future. I want to make sure that everything was answered honestly, just in case you don't want the policy to be rescinded. There's all types of things you got to be looking for. The big thing is, when you're looking at replacing a policy, know the facts and be sure that you're comparing apples with apples or at least a better apple. Right? So that's my answer to that. How important is it to call a lead immediately? Speed is what you need, baby. It's imperative. It's so freaking important when you get a lead and it comes to your email. From now on, I want you to do this. If you get a lead and it comes to your email and you see the email come in and you don't open the email and click on the phone number immediately, I want you to just smack yourself in the face. Every time from now on, because you're wasting money. You're wasting money. They've got a better chance of literally remembering if it's right there in front of them. They just did it. You just take up a mind. And you want to send an appointment. If the goal is to send an appointment, which is the only goal of getting leads, then call them immediately.  I don't want you to be lazy. Call the lead as soon as you freaking get it. It increases your chances. I've read that if you talk to a lead within the first five minutes of their response, it increases your appointment setting ability by like 30%, 40%. Play the numbers and just call. Make the call. Should agents sell to a lifetime or at some point build an agency once they really learn the business? It depends on the agent. There's a lot of people out there to say, hey, dude, go re freaking, recruit and recruit everyone and recruit more than you sell. Like I'm not sold on that. We're here to help people and sell insurance, right? So if you want to sell insurance forever and build a client base and residual income and renewals and get referrals later, excellent. If you get to where you tap out your income and you're not adding renewals and you want to build a team and a downline and build an agency, great, more power to you. There's no, that's the thing about this business. There's no perfect path. Everyone's different. Every path is different. Some people could not manage an agency. Some people can't recruit because nobody likes them. Some people can't recruit because they don't lead by example. Some people should never build a team because they're lazy. Other people should maybe never build a team because they don't know anything about the business. The easiest way to recruit and build a team is to lead by example. When you're talented, when you know what you're doing, when you can say, hey, I did this and I can help you do this, then it's okay. But at the end of the day, you don't have to do anything, do whatever you want, whatever your goals are, and whatever you see your path to multiple six figures or even seven figures or eight figures, whatever that looks like for you.  That's not, it's pie in the sky stuff. It's not real. Let me say it again. There are more millionaires in the financial services and insurance industry than any other industry in the world. Did you know that, Duker? More than anyone in the world. You're in the right vehicle, you're in the right place. It doesn't matter which path you want to take or what you want to do. At the end of the day, be passionate, love the business, be happy with whatever you do, and do it well. Think big, spend some money, take some action. Whatever that path leads, if it leads you to building an agency, if it leads you to selling, I heard of an agent last year selling $750,000 in commissions in one year. What percentile is he in out of everyone in the country?   That's all the questions. I love that, man. Hey, if you, do I have any questions on Facebook at all? Before I jump off, all right. Derek says, how do we get your leads? You mean the leads that I set 40% appointment ratio without making more than one call? You mean the leads, I just talked about the phone with an agent that literally made $3,000 off of a few leads. You mean the leads that come in real time, I mean within freaking seconds, they're hot. You mean the leads that are exclusive and you mean the leads that help agents make six figures. Here in a future show real soon, I'm going to break down how to make $152,000 consistently and what that looks like and why agents use our leads to do that. Now, we're not someone who says, hey, you ought to buy our leads because they're the greatest in the world. Arguably true and I can't think of anybody else that's better right now but what I can say is that they're extremely good but they can only go as far as the agent. So when we preach, hey, speed, shots and skill, be fast, take shots, don't be lazy, call it within seconds, get to six calls on every lead unless they tell you to get lost or they said an appointment and skill up. Leads work for us. Leads work for me. Leads work for about a thousand agents a month that are part of our corporation that buy leads from us but they don't work for everyone because even just like no lead is created equal, no agent is created equal either. If you think that you'll call quick, that you'll call six times and that you'll read our script and actually role play and care and want to succeed, then if those things are true then you will have success with our leads. I mean that's it. We keep it simple. Any other questions? What's a good phone number? 833-40 agent. Again, keep it simple. Have a system 833-40 agent.<PHONE_NUMBER>. Call into our office. Our lead guys are helping people all day every day. They helped like a dozen agents yesterday. As a company we probably helped, what would you say, probably 40, 50 agents yesterday as a whole with new leads. They're fast. They're ridiculous. We'll give you leads and fill those suckers within a lot of times we'll get you 20 leads in like 48 hours. It's ridiculous.  It's so amazing that I'm jealous that I was when I was a new agent. It wasn't available for me because Cody Askins hadn't created a secure agent mentor yet. So there we are. Now it's easy for you. All right, everyone's here. We're going to answer some questions. So ask some questions. YouTube, we get comments questions all the time. Facebook, we get some comments questions all the time. Do that and we'll address those. Everyone's here too because at the end of the day what we do is to help you and we're not going to help you. There's no reason to do what we do. So that's what we do this because you ask questions. I want to answer them. I want to hang out with you. I want you to try our leads and I want you to be at Aperture Nation when we throw it in 2019, maybe in Dallas, which has never been said on video yet. So there you go. All right. Any other questions we good? Thanks for watching. Thanks for the questions. Have a great rest of your week. We'll see you Friday.


Good evening. Recently with the help of my friend Wolf Clock, I got my hands on a digital copy of the collector's edition of Half-Life 2. This includes the day 1 release builds of Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, and Half-Life Source. In fact, the build of Half-Life 2 was actually compiled on September 29th, 2004, over a month before the game's launch date, so it's technically a negative 48th day build. Anyway, being the giant nerd that I am, I was super excited to play through the original build of Half-Life 2 to see what's so different about it. Over the past 15 years, loads of changes have been made to the Source engine and to Half-Life 2 itself through the orange box update, and the steam pipe update, and Lord knows what else. Textures and models that got revamped or updated in Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Episode 2 were backported, particle effects have been changed, player movement has been patched, and so on. So, now that I've played through it all, what's different? What's better? What's worse? Half-Life 2 better on day one. Well, kind of. You'd have to be a real Half-Life freak to notice most of the changes, and there definitely isn't a clear cut objective answer to a question like this, but overall, the game did feel just a little bit more immersive to me. So let's start with the good. First, the ragdoll physics when you kill enemies feel more responsive. They hit the ground faster and harder, while in the later builds they're kind of floaty and slow to drop. 357 kills really send enemies flying, too. Overall, I'd say that killing NPCs feels generally more satisfying in the original version. Second, the atmosphere of the canals seemed foggier and more dense. I'm not really sure if anything is actually different about them. It might have just been me gaslighting myself, but the water hazard and root canal chapters felt a lot more immersive in the moment. I'll have to look more into it later. Third, the files for the day one build are not encrypted at all, which means modding this version of the game is a lot easier since you don't have to use GCF to access the game's assets, which is a giant pain in the ass. And finally, you know how a lot of people have a bone to pick with Half-Life 2's weapon sound design? Well, I think it might have possibly been gimped in a patch at some point. On this day one build, the SMG and pistols sometimes sounded way beefier to my ears. Wolfcloch said this might have had something to do with the files being more heavily compressed and bringing out the base more, but I don't really know. Either way, something was definitely different about them, and I would definitely say they sounded better in the day one build. Before I get to the bad things, let's talk about the mixed bag. Stuff that some people might like and some people might hate. First things first, the day one build uses specular mapping instead of thong. This means that the reflection on your guns will sometimes look much different. In my opinion, it was a real hit or miss. Sometimes everything looked great and I wondered why Valve ever changed the system. And sometimes it looked like everything was coated in grease and oil. Second, the day one build of the game has different fire particles. Personally, I prefer them. I think they're a little bit moodier. But since they are a lower frame rate than what runs in current Half-Life 2, I can see how some people might feel differently. Ultimately, up to personal preference. Third, this version of the game is totally unpatched in regards to player movement, which means that bunny hopping is easier, but accelerated back hopping isn't possible. There's a reason that old Engine Half-Life 2 and new Engine Half-Life 2 were split into different speedrun categories. Player movement between the two is just flat out different. And finally, the old Vortigaunt textures. These puppies were redone in Episode 1 and their original textures look much grittier and nastier.  Once again, it's up to personal preference. Anywho, with that out of the way, let's get to the bad. This is the stuff I thought was worse on day one than in the modern build, and there's more than you might expect.  Maybe it was something I was doing wrong, I mean the mudskipper segment felt fine, but I found it harder to steer the car, and it made the Highway 17 chapter a lot more annoying. I even, for the first time in my life, missed one of the dramatic stunt jumps. No?  Second, for some reason my mouse input felt weird and kind of jittery. Like, if I dragged my mouse directly to the left or right, it would slowly notch up or down as well. I don't know how to properly describe it, and while it wasn't a huge game-breaking problem, it was noticeable, and hurt the experience just a tad. So yeah, mouse input was a little bit strange, and I didn't like it. Third, no graph out of date rebuilding. On every single level. Fourth, there's no visual indicator for which Combine soldiers are shotgunner troops. They all have the same textures. The shotgunner variant textures were added in episode one, and I think they were a great inclusion because it helped with reading combat encounters a lot. It's harder in this version to tell at a quick glance who's gonna pepper you with Nerf darts and who's just gonna walk up to you and BOW! BOW! BOW! So in that regard, I think the latest build takes the cake. And finally, there were some visual glitches I occasionally encountered throughout the day one build.  And while these were few and far between, it is a sign of a rougher and jankier product. But with all that out of the way, was Half-Life 2 better on launch than it is nowadays? Well, I hate to be a fence-sitter, but I feel like while the atmosphere of Half-Life 2 was definitely more cohesive in the original version, the new builds are undeniably better polished experiences, and the gameplay feels more refined. They both have strengths and weaknesses, but at the end of the day, I think I'd still recommend people play the Steam version over the original. If someone can find a way to port the old fire into the modern build though, I'd love to see that.  It's an interesting and slightly surreal experience. It gives you a better idea of the experience Half-Life 2 offered to people back in the day. Anyway, thanks for- Oh, what's that? Alright, I almost forgot. Half-Life 2 Collectors Edition also comes with Counter-Strike Source and Half-Life Source. So, what was different about these other games on launch? Let's have a quick look. Counter-Strike Source, as it came packaged with the Half-Life 2 Collectors Edition, had a couple of interesting key differences to the version we know today. However, before I start on them, I want to put a disclaimer that early CSS builds are on an older version of the Source engine that is unsupported and considered less secure for online play. What exactly being less secure for online play means is not something I fully understand, but it's also not something I want to test given the scary nature of remote code execution bugs. So, if you want to try out day one CSS, I recommend limiting yourself to fooling around with bots and single player like I did.    Or with friends on LAN. I strongly recommend against joining an online server. That being said, yes, to my surprise, there are people still hosting online servers for this build. At a quick glance, they seem to be either on other continents, hence the high latency, or have Spanish operators, meaning they're likely hosted in Mexico. And there's even a couple of people still playing on them. How fascinating is that? Anywho, the actual gameplay of day one CSS is pretty much identical to the experience you get with the modern build of the game, but there's a few interesting changes. To start with the menu differences, you're given the option of buying ammo before each round, which I don't think is present in the current build of the game. However, you have no choice of selecting your preferred player model after choosing your team, which is kind of sad. The player models themselves are also interesting. They're the beta models, which are a lot simpler looking. They're more cartoony, and I kind of like them. These models are also the models used in the strange test underscore speakers map that I talked about back in my CSS creepy video. Meaning if you boot it up in this day one build, you won't see any error signs.  Other than that, the crosshair looks slightly more narrow and the game lets you launch Half-Life 2 maps but not play on them. That's about all the differences I noticed. While this version of the game is novel, and I find the original player model cool, it is still objectively jankier, less secure, and generally worse than the Steam version. While I recommend playing the day one build of Half-Life 2, the world probably wouldn't be much worse off if we lost this. But with CSS down, it's time to talk about the Half-Life community's second favorite punching bag, Half-Life Source. Half-Life Source in the present day as a reputation as a broken downgrade to the original. And it's earned. However, after booting up Half-Life Source as it launched on day one, it was increasingly apparent to me.  Yeah, there are occasionally some kind of shiny floors, but they're nowhere near as egregious as the freshly mopped, sopping wet ones that appear in the modern build. The lighting and shadows look nice, or at least much nicer than in the retail build, and the animations seem to be working fine too. No one's floating above their chairs five feet in the air. It's not perfect. There's still some visual clash between the Half-Life 2 assets and the Half-Life 1 ones. But in every regard I can think of, this version of Half-Life Source is objectively better than the Steam version. That being said, you should still really just play the original. So altogether, was Half-Life 2 better on day one? Maybe?  Was Counter-Strike Source better on day one? No, I wouldn't say so at all. It is novel though, but Half-Life Source? Yeah, 100%. That game has been beaten and bruised by updates repeatedly. I almost feel bad for it. That's all I've got for today though. If you enjoyed this video, you should consider joining my Discord, following me on Twitter, and or supporting me on Patreon so I can make more videos like this one. Take your pick.  Thanks for watching. Have a good day. It's been a real honor. I'm looking forward to working together.