Just be yourselves. Be your fantastic selves. I think we're getting ready to gear up for the broadcast, so if we could have our panelists for today, come on down. And you guys can be together. I don't need a mic, I'm just gonna project. I need your mic and my mic. You guys can hear me, right? I don't need a mic. There's nothing we can do about it now. Where's the camera anyway? Oh, here's the camera. You know if you look this way, I can't see you. I'm looking at it. Are you two ready? Okay, I'm just getting my questions on here. I love these cables. Well, good afternoon everyone. My name is Eliza Bent. I'll be moderating the panel in pursuit of a dark euphoria. Since we're broadcasting today, it was encouraged that I introduce each of our panelists with a full bio, so I'm going to quickly move through their bios before we get to the questions. So to my left here is David Newman. He is the Artistic Director of Advanced Beginner Group, and his work has been presented in New York City at the kitchen. This is the S-122 Dance Theater Workshop Central Park Summer Stage and Symphony Space. These are all very important fancy locations, in case you didn't know. Also the Walker Center in Minneapolis, Jacobs Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts, the Maggie Alicey National Center for Choreography, among many others. As a choreographer he most recently worked on Robert Woodruff's adaptation of Fastbenders in a year with 13 Moons at Yale Rep, and David Newman is also currently on the faculty for the theater department at Sarah Lawrence College. So David, thank you for joining us. Thank you. Sybil Kempson over here in the green is a playwright living in New York City. Her work has been presented at New York Live Arts, the Chocolate Factory in New York City Dixon Place, Soho Rep, PS-122, Little Theater, Brick Theater and the Fuse Box Festival in Austin, Texas. She's also had work here at the Great Plains Theater Conference and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Some current collaborations that she's working on is a piece with elevator repair service called fondly Collette Richland, a dance theater and Sybil collaborated on a piece called Ich Köbesgeist. I hope I said that correctly. Danke Sybil. And also Sybil and David worked together on a piece, Restless Eye, and that was at dance theater workshop slash New York Live Arts. It's always a curious title. And another big collaboration Sybil is at the helm of River of Gruel, Pile of Pigs, the requisite gestures of narrow approach. And that's with a group in Austin between the Rude Mechs and Salvage Vanguard Theater. So thank you Sybil. Welcome. Happy to have you on the panel. And last but not least we have Justin Townsend at the far end in the white t-shirt. And Justin is a recent drama desk winner. Congratulations Justin. Justin is a lighting designer and his design has appeared on Broadway including Vanya, Sonya, Masha and Spike, the other place, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. He's also worked on some New York shows that have been off Broadway such as Here Lies Love currently running at the Public Theater, Juan and John at the Public, Galileo and Unnatural Acts, Milk Like Sugar at Playwrights Horizons, Luck of the Irish, and On the Levy at Lincoln Center 3. Regionally Justin's work has appeared at the Arden Alliance, ART, Bardsomerscape, Boston Court, Baltimore Center Stage among many other notable regional locations. Well then, and I'm Eliza Bent, I'm not just a Joe Shmo that they pulled off the street. I'm a journalist for American Theater Magazine as well as a performer and a playwright. Anyhow, moving on, let's get to the questions of the dark euphoria. So I think it's interesting to think of the description of today's panel which is a new wildness in imagination, form, collaboration, rehearsal and production and the spatial challenges that this work brings. Just so that we're all on the same page here about what this panel really is. I'd love to maybe just start with defining our terms. What in your minds is a dark euphoria and how are you pursuing it? Feel free to take a liberal stab at that question. We were saying last night it sounds like a run drink. I'd like to use it as a drag name. I got nothing. Well, it is a little bit about collaboration. Know the wildness of collaborating. How we can wildly collaborate. I kept reading wildness as wilderness. So what are your takes on collaboration in today? I mean Sybil, you have a ton of collaborations happening at the moment. Maybe you could kick things off. I think for me it's about resisting not organizations like institutions, although it's good to resist those to a certain extent, but to resist over organizing stuff. I guess whenever I'm writing something and a lot of times when I've performed, if I've been performing something, I am looking for ways of problematizing, of making problems where problems may or may not already exist. And so in the collaborations that I'm doing I guess across the board, if there's anything, they're all very different. But across the board I think the thing that I'm really trying to keep intact is a sort of lack of organization. So that in some of the projects, the roles like the Austin project that I'm working on. I was going to ask about that. So we've been working on it for I think two or three years now. And for the first year and a half the only thing that had been established was that I would be the one that would be at the computer writing stuff down. And that I would be generating the text. But I also even opened that up. So that ideas and thoughts and good and bad and input, associations, images and different connections between and among material I was bringing in. So that was open to everybody. And we didn't have someone who said I'm going to step up and be the director. I'm going to be the producer. I'm going to design the costumes.  There are representatives from four different theater groups in the city of Austin. And they've worked a lot as individuals together on each other's work but they'd never come together before to make a piece together. So there are four different ways of working. So like the Rude Mechs they have I think four or five main original members. And with every show they make and every decision that they make in every single one of those shows, they must come to consensus. So it's not even democratic where the majority rules. They must arrive at consensus. And that's right down to the writing. And then Salvage Vanguard Theater is more, they'll have guest artists and guest shows come in but they establish what the, they'll work within a hierarchical structure. So there'll be a director and then there's a stage manager and actors and it goes from there. Rubber Rep is a partnership of two guys and they collaborate together sort of as one really crazy organism and then they bring people in to collaborate with them. And Physical Plant is Steve Moore's and it's mostly, he's at the nucleus of it and then he brings in collaborators around them. So we sort of found our own way of working and allowed it to emerge. And so that the decisions that were being made we were really working to be very patient and let those decisions sort of make themselves so that when it was time to choose roles, the roles had already sort of started to happen on their own. And it's a confusing way to work. It can be really frustrating and it takes a lot of patience and trust but I think it, and we're still not finished the piece that we've made. We're still working on it. It's very confusing. We put it all together for the first time at the Fusebox Festival this year. And some people loved it and some people just felt really lost, including myself which and I felt both. And so we have another year now to work on it and now roles are established. We're doing what is more or less established so we'll be able to sort of shape it and either give it like an exoskeleton or a frame or find something that holds the whole thing together through the middle but really working to allow that to come forward on its own rather than deciding ahead of time and imposing that upon it. So there's whatever is darkly euphoric about that. I agree with the idea about walking into a process without a predetermined result. I think it's an important part of a lot of this work, how this work is made. Pardon my voice. And the other word I was going to bring up is hierarchy. Another thing that's resisted is our traditional hierarchies so that the conversation, in an effort to make a conversation a little more richer and even less predictable. What was a project that you were recently involved in where the hierarchy was non-traditional or Well I think for Restless Eye for instance That was the piece you did with Sibyl. And another important collaborator on that was Tay Blow who was a sound designer and did video projections. It was an interesting process although the piece was initiated by me and I sort of was at the helm in that way as a director and a choreographer. The way that we worked, I know that Sibyl would respond to she would sit in the room and watch rehearsal and respond to some of the things that were being made and would send writing and response and then that would inspire me to change what I had made and in those ways we really lost the clear defined boundaries of who made what and who was responsible for what. And the lighting designer was involved equally also. Yeah, she brought in a very important element that really radically changed the way the piece was being staged and we were using these things called the Neuro Sky Scanners where they read the brain waves and she found a way to take that information and have it affect the lighting so that the brain waves of the performers were affecting the intensity of the lighting and even the direction of one of the intelligent lights where it was based on the stage. So that was a stochastic sort of a random kind of event was happening while the piece was going on. Is that then part of the darkness question? The lack of ownership? Is that sort of into the darkness the wildness? The releasing of that? Is that important in that conversation? I would think so. Because it's the part that isn't organized, the part that isn't predictable and that confusion that you have to sort of go into when things aren't as organized. And when you have a hierarchy it's really simple and in a lot of ways it's easier because everyone knows what their role is and they know they have a job and it's really defined but then like working on David's piece I had a really crazy idea about a sound thing and I said this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm supposed to be writing written text but I ended up working on this sound piece anyway and it ended up getting used in the piece which wouldn't have happened if in a regular situation you're not the sound designer and of course I did a terrible job. We'll consider that. But then how does it happen? You know the question and we have our own ideas but I'm curious to share is how then if we all can do whatever the heck we want isn't it great? Well then where is the there there? How do we eventually come to this consensus or how does it actually merit into something that we want to put in front of our peers and say hey what do you think? We actually made something. How has it worked in your experience Justin? Collaboration for me is a funny thing I'm always amazed by the Root Mechanicals to hear about them say yeah we all circle our hands and say yes we agree and I'm sure that's not what happens but to some degree about that I've been in a situation where best idea rules and then we sort of know the Ouija board of idea making we know you're pushing but as soon as the group starts moving that direction we'll call out yes indeed or ask again perhaps so I mostly trust putting it up on stage and testing it that we can sit here for days and talk about all of our lovely staging ideas and I want to write a play about or I want to do this thing but until Sybil brings in the lousy sound cue that's earth shattering that no one ever thought about that we're all sort of having lovely ideas and so it's that action and I'm always curious what manifests that action how do we get to the I was just thinking about the sound thing so I brought it and who knows if it's good or not our teammates can have it but what manifests that initial impulse what does that taste this is what I want this is how I get to and that's what I'm sort of interested in pursuing or chasing is identifying that spark that unique spark I like red but we all like red okay I think it's very impulsive and it's one of those things where I feel like this belongs here and I don't know why but it just is right here for some reason and I feel that I could be wrong so you're approaching with sort of you're laying something out on the table and saying this feels right to me what does this feel like to you guys and then you try it right because that's one of the first rules of collaboration as somebody brings in an idea you don't poo poo it until you try it and then if it feels right to everybody else then you keep it and if it doesn't then you talk about where did that come from okay so I've been reading for a long time a lot about but a lot about chaos theory in physics and it's the part of physics that they started looking at in the 70's where they're looking at stuff like turbulence and stuff that can't be measured that physicists have traditionally just sort of swept under the carpet because they can measure it but why bother because we can't predict or control turbulence so why would we mess around so they really started looking at it and there's a couple of physicists that have been writing for almost 10 or 15 years and they've also done a lot of work with Native American cultures interestingly enough to find where our recent advances in modern physics intersect with the Native American worldview and it's actually really surprising they're coming at it from completely different directions but in a lot of cases they're coming to the same conclusions and so they talk about the patterns that are implicit in nature the way things are made however we subjectively feel that that happens that there are patterns at work and that there's patterns at work in behavior of groups of human beings that are disorganized that aren't easily predictable and that aren't controllable and it's the kind of thing that happens when children are playing together they don't always make rules and say I'm going to be the boss and we're going to follow you and they're not deciding ahead of time but they're making creative decisions and somehow it finds they call it there's a point of bifurcation and amplification that's the point where one person starts just doing something and then other people start gathering around that action it's not even a decision or maybe it is you decide you're not doing this but it's not based on a committee that decided this is what we're going to do so you just start doing something and then others gather around it and then they're not really sure how it happens but suddenly it's happening it's like the hundredth monkey all of a sudden everybody's doing it and so they're not really sure why or how but that's what I'm interested in and I guess if we're talking about the dark euphoria this sort of dicey area where stuff happens that we don't decide ahead of time for me it's just about like stepping back and saying I'm going to allow something to happen here and inevitably it does something happens whether it's in time for your deadline or not is another question like we got done with that restless eyepiece and we were talking the other day it was like the show having the production sort of ruined our research it was like shut it down shut down our process we couldn't rehearse anymore because the show was up Peter Cassander a colleague he calls it a heavily researched gut instinct and I like that combination that idea that we have to be of the most knowledgeable to trust that something will come up and also this notion about the way that children play and studying the ways in which children play are not a journalist I perform with a group called half straddle and we're a company we're an ensemble and we have a very peculiar way of going about business and often it resembles somebody telling somebody else how to say a line and we'll know why don't you stand over there and then somebody kind of fooling around and doing a weird gesture and then the weird gesture gets put into the play somehow and it ultimately feels a bit like like we're messing around and we're in somebody's basement and we're a team. But something ends up happening I mean I've seen those shows there's so much happening that couldn't happen if someone said if someone tried to envision what would happen ahead of time. Well I guess maybe that leads to my next question and we've kind of touched on this but what in your opinions do you feel is essential about collaboration I mean obviously hierarchies work well there's a reason why these hierarchies usually exist with sometimes exist with director playwright actor so what do you feel theater gains when you collaborate in this in this darkly euphoric way Well for me I do trust a little bit of hierarchy and I like when the baton gets tossed past I don't think it needs to be only one person and I worry because I worry I do I worry about mobs of people telling me what the right answer is inherently so the idea that we can that there might be someone who says no this is the right idea even if it isn't the person we traditionally know I respect and am excited by because I do think there needs to be something brought to the table that when work is being made sometimes we just sprint one direction and maybe enough to initiate something I really just personally for me I just love the feeling of having made something and feeling like I can't take credit for it for some reason that feeling is so satisfying to me and I often feel like it's like that will be the thing that saves me from going to hell or something that I can't like that I won't be the one taking credit for all of the stuff that I've made but it's that's very personal so I what is what is there to be gained I think that's a question everyone would answer for themselves like whether it's their thing or not and I don't think it's for everybody it can be really frustrating to work that way and it can be really frustrating to see the stuff that's made that way for some folks and for some folks really love it I think it depends on the type of work one is after I think this process leads to a certain kind of work and I enjoy the collaborative process because of the rehearsal process itself the way that authorship is shared and the kind of permission that brings to the room everyone gets a chance the brain trust grows then and with time the decision making gets a little more specific with experience it's like an improv group in the dance world to improvise with a group of people seems sort of you can just do it but actually the most effective kind of improvisations require months and months of rehearsal and it is also related to play I love making theater and I want to have fun doing it and so this is a way of working with colleagues and friends that who inspire me so we can have a great time in a way not just fun like a frivolous sense but rich enriching fun my mind is spinning I'm sure everyone in the group also has some questions that they'd like to ask shall we open it up to the Boston Christopher has a question for you what I'm curious about is how after going through the dark euphoria that you might take the same approach in a collaboration I think Justin was touching on this a little bit maybe but in terms of how you would then apply that to the more traditional structure and can you apply those same rules or at least open up that release the pressure of that using some of these skills and have you been able to do that and maybe an example of how that might have worked in terms of the way people think I would say right off the bat I think it's very possible inside of a more traditional hierarchical structure for these dynamics to exist and I think it does depend on the people in the room the producing organization or institution that can allow that kind of dialogue and I think more and more people are moving in that direction I recently worked with the director Robert Woodruff at Yale Rep and it's pretty amazing that regional theater would give a ton of money based on a Fossbinder film a very dark brutal piece of work and you know it was an enormous production and the way that Robert worked was he came in with a lot of really clear ideas he had to it was a four week schedule so we had to adapt a feature length film for the stage in just a few weeks I mean when I worked on Restless High it was two years, two and a half years to develop it off and on but what he was able to do was create something of that nature of a collaborative nature he asked the opinion of just about everyone in the room about decisions he was making as a director even on the design, costumes and everything else inside that very rigid, rigid hierarchy with which Yale Rep works I found that really inspiring I think as a lighting designer I try and work very agilely and very quickly similar to the way an actor might work in the first rehearsals so trying to figure out instead of how to paint painting that we all will now think well that's pretty it's rather how can my work affect the action and participate as a scene partner so that all of a sudden there's this big energy in the room and it might affect how things move or you know maybe it's wrong and I turn that off but so that I'm constantly providing and challenging what has already known in the hall and moving it into performance so that and you know sometimes people just want to get out of the way and make sure I can see them and that's alright we do that kind of play sometimes and sometimes there needs to be an agile way of looking at what is the event that we're making and there is some more momentum to that and I think that's where I like to be the most is offering and instead of talking about it again putting it up on its feet and saying well here's a big light through the door oh my gosh well now you're entering in over there even though we've been rehearsing it for four weeks the other way that simply seeing an architecture and seeing time and space happen in front of us hopefully there's a group of folks that I'm working with who can nimbly adjust or say oh Justin get out of the way I think it could be something as simple as just having more awareness for like if you're in one role or one job in a production having more awareness and just developing more of a sense of responsibility toward in some way everything that's happening and that's what I've been working on trying to sort of engender with the elevator repair service project that I'm working on because they make work together but there's one guy in charge who really makes the decisions and there's a lot of group generating stuff but there happens like this feeling of passivity that people are being waiting to be told where do I go how do I do this what do I do and maybe taking more initiative along those lines and maybe opening up awareness to what is that lighting guy up to and what are the signs that we are making what are we saying by what does this line actually say what does this mean if I stand this close to this actor instead of over here and you're at the risk of becoming a little bit of a pain in the ass to the director but I think that if you're just bringing questions to the table and an awareness to the table that you're all and if you're also willing to take on more responsibility for the thinking about what are we saying what are we signing up for when they come and see this show and starting a dialogue and that's a small adjustment but I think that that could be a good way to bring it into the regular way of doing it. I'm curious about the ways in which you've or some collaborative skills you've developed over time that you may not have had 5 or 10 years ago and what are the areas in which you still have as a collaborator what are you working on? Well I think that's what's so great about doing collaborations is that there's always you never become an expert at it. There's never like John Collins the artistic director of elevator repair service who I've been working with has been getting so mad lately about people are everyone's talking about devised theater it's the new like latest thing everyone's talking about it it's getting all this new funding and all this new recognition because he feels like by giving it a label like that that we're standardizing it as a way of making theater and he really is bulking against the idea that that is like one way there could be one way of doing it and so I think that you're constantly learning because every time you step into a new group your process is going to be as different as are the people in this group from the last group that you worked with so it's you're constantly learning because you're constantly working with new groups of people or even if you're working with the same group of people a group of people changes over time and so you're adjusting whatever your practice is and your process is with the passage of time and with everyone else's development as well so you're constantly having to grow and expand your thinking and I think mostly I've just learned how to work with people which is a lot of people don't know how to do that and I think most theater people do but if you go outside of theater in a lot of cases people have trouble working together and dealing with other people so theater in general is good training for that I thought immediately about one thing that I've gotten much better at is listening and one thing that still needs improvement is listening and that really sums it up in maybe a too cute way but that really is true listening is a fundamental piece and the other response that I keep coming back to is improv 101 but it's a continued reminder of the yes and the how can I the most offensive or most upsetting or downright wrong idea how can I open my heart to it and that moment I think is when there's sort of grace in the air when we sort of say okay let's move and maybe in a different way than I expected to and I find that's where the surprise turn happens or the oh yes and then it will allow to the hook back that I was trying to find but until those two energies deciding to move together or three or five that starts to create momentum and I think in the individual it's a willingness to let go of your idea as the right idea like my way is the right way and why won't you guys see it my way and to be willing to just really let that go and it's so painful but it's so great when you can do it it's interesting too because I feel like I work in a fairly collaborative manner but a play of mine that recently had a production in New York I was amazed one of the actors one day we were talking about an idea the director was kind of describing what it was that we were going to try and the actor said I know my problem with that idea is and I kind of blurred it out I said before you talk about your problem with the idea let's try the idea so it's sort of I think that's always sort of an interesting thing and it's really dealing with people and the individuals in the room and clearly this particular actor wasn't so used to trying stuff out I guess which was strange but anyhow what are the other questions that people have do you guys having worked with a number of different companies around the country and having friends and people who are doing different types of dark way of work do you guys recognize or spot any social generational energies that seem to be curious of your observations of what might be generating I have been noticing I feel like it's tied to the economy crashing a little bit not a little bit but a lot and I've been going to a lot of talks of artists who were making art in the 70s in New York when times were really tough and talking about the transition from making work in that era to the 1980s when all of a sudden everyone was making a lot of money and how there was so much less interest in art and all of a sudden funding was really scarce and you had to make a piece you know make it already and then they'll tell you whether they're going to have you at their venue or not but there's no help to develop the piece and when I moved to New York it was the mid 80s and there was a recession happening and there was so much great work it was such a great time to be there and of course there were no like I had a really hard time finding a day job and I didn't have any money but it seemed to be kind of exploding like everything that I went to go see seemed so rigorous and had so many wonderful ideas behind it and everything was like exploding something and again people were saying the internet saved our generation from poverty but I think it also destroyed a lot of the art making that was happening or a lot of the rigor and the focus of the art making that was happening and great work was more scarce and I watched it happen and then now we've had this economy crash again and it's like it's the best thing that could have happened at least for the art world and that's kind of across the board because suddenly everything that I'm going to see is an incredible piece of work and that's in New York and I don't know I haven't heard a lot of people say that in other cities that I visited but I've seen it happen and I've also heard about it happen from those artists from the 70s into the 1980s and I don't know why I sense a resurgence of a kind of a DIY approach I think that's where that term devised theater although that was around, has been around I think for a while but that sense of I can't find work or get produced or enter into the traditional commercial theater so I'm going to do it myself and I get a sense of that happening a lot more now We've heard it talked about before and I think it is something that should be brought up too though Kevin is to say that I think that as I watch newer generations behind me come behind I think they're dealing with a lot of student loans that someone has told them they need to have to enter into this business so I'm really aware of a lot more money or a lot more debt being put on for theatrical education which means a less nimble generation as they try and figure out how to pay first for these expenses and then start to make work so that's something I'm aware of and checking as we figure out how we support our younger artists too We have a few more minutes perhaps we have time for one more question Is it on? I have a friend who's a songwriter he works with the guy who does all the musical backup in Nashville and they have a friend who does all the mixing in New Zealand The question is is there a lot of collaboration in an internet world in an interconnected world from your perspective and how do you think it might work in the theater? I recently saw a show in Austin and it was done by a British theater maker it was a very strange performance it was about 20 minutes long it was almost not even a regular play but it was an audience of two and the two audience members had to sit facing each other and there were screens in front of our faces and the actor in the piece was a man in China who had worked in an Apple computer factory and suffered terribly from the various factory conditions there and it was sort of back and forth narration between the audience listened in these headsets and so you'd hear the British man speaking but then you'd also see the man in China waving on Skype and telling his story and there were subtitles so that was I mean I think that's part of the future is certainly having like Skyped and teleconferenced performance styles really thrilled in a bizarre way that we have all these technologies because I think it will be the savior of our business in the sense that our gathering together in a room and hearing each other becomes somehow more important if we spend our days hooked up to these screens and so we may or may not use them and successfully or unsuccessfully I'm not really worried about that but I do know that gathering in rooms to hear stories will somehow be a strangely unique thing that we'll be I'm excited about I know a guy named Whit McLaughlin he lives in Philadelphia and he has a company called New Paradise Laboratories and he was a teacher of mine when I was in high school and he's still making work but he's been making internet theater and he's talked to me about it a bunch and for some reason I don't I think I need to be in the room with people and it might be because I live in a place where there's plenty of people that I can be in a room with there's a lot of people living there to work with so I don't need to do internet theater but his argument is that we have to start making theater like on Facebook for example because before Facebook gets completely taken over by advertising and marketing and corporate interest that we have to take hold of it and start making artwork so that it stays as a medium that belongs to everybody so that it doesn't just become about marketing and advertising and so making stuff for Facebook that people are looking at it and they're not really I mean I interpreted as you make something and I'm looking at it and I can't decide what it is I can't easily discern what it is what the post is or who the person is or and he's doing crazy things like you go and you get a different identity and then you show up at a party wearing this badge and that's like these things the lanyard but it's not your name it's someone else's name and it's this internet personality that you have done so it becomes like a video game but then they'll have like a party and people show up and it's like a masquerade ball because people know you as this other person and I don't know what the implications are how that's going to play out but that's one idea anyhow. Well that sounds like at the perfect end of a dark euphoria conversation the internet masquerade so onward pursue it thank you everyone thank you


In 2017, 50 Nobel Prize winners were asked what they thought was the biggest threat to humankind. Nuclear war came in second. And the number one response? Population growth and environmental degradation. That's right, instead of being treated as separate issues, they bundled them together. It took us 125 years to get from 1 to 2 billion, but only 12 years from 7 to 8 billion. And if the weather events are any indication, the planet is not holding up. And it seems to only be getting worse. The US had 18 different billion dollar weather disasters just last year. And experts say this year won't be any better. So while population growth may not be the sole reason for climate change, I think the Nobel Prize winners were onto something.


Hi guys, see who we have here. The one and only, the superstar, our super actress. Yani ako na kila kitu, urembo ako nai oki? Hey! Yani kila, urembo aki wacha tu? Nyuele. You're too kind. Smile. Nini. You're really doing an amazing job. Thank you. How are you, dear? I'm good. Thank you so much. Thank you guys for coming. You're welcome. The dress got nai, me kill. The dress too. The Beatress from Stitch Fabrics. Really amazing. So how much did it cost, maybe? I'm big as him. We've seen, we've seen Zarin clearly. It's a nice one. You've really delivered. Na tumeku zoe awe ni mtu ako deliver. Atatu semia tini. Maybe how does it make you feel yuki ona? Anything that you do in a kwa fiti. I'm appreciative. It all boils down to the story. It's a group effort. So it's not seemimi peki ango. So it's all of us who've come together to create something that is amazing. So it's a group effort where you're tuna shukuru sana. When you watch and you say it's amazing. Tara, maybe you could tell us how it was just being on set and being a main character on this particular movie. It's been amazing. I love the role. It has many layers to it. And it's very fast-paced. Zarin is a very intriguing show. Ki wachu kishitukau kaya Tuesday, Wednesday of your watch. Ya Friday nasema Allah. What just happened. So it's really exciting to be part of a show that the story is really good. It has amazing cast. It has amazing crew. So I'm really grateful for that. Sara, it's not the first time you're working with Jifi Pictures.  And what do you think is the one thing that you always do when you're working on a project? They look for you. So this is the second project of work with Jifi. I think I would say being consistent in your work, being disciplined in your craft, coming on set, having prepared. So basically it boils down to discipline as an actor. I think that is what would make a producer come back to you.  You have discipline, your hardworking. So I think that's just the basics. Ya we've seen you're an amazing actress since Tahiti Hai. And what makes you unique? What makes you think into your character? Wow, I don't know how to answer that. But for me every role is different. A lot of research goes into every single role I do so that it's an individual. So for Zari I play the role of Nina. What I usually do with every character is create this character as a human being. Walu kuwadi ya kia wa toto. Where do they go to primary, high school, university? What motivates them to do the things they do? And this differentiates all the characters that I end up doing such that each character is unique and has their own voice. So I would say that makes it really fun. So you as Sarah Hassan, what is your end goal? Maybe we've seen you in Kenyan films. Are you maybe seeing yourself in international films maybe? Ya wani mungu aski. Ya for sure we all have big dreams and it's good to have big dreams because it pushes you to do more. So I'd say that's why I even got into producing as well. So ya I would say, I'm not going to say my dreams here. Aki ni kubwa. Ya you know Sarah you do quite a lot. You do quite a lot.   How do you balance? I think it's the love for what I do because if you're passionate about what you do you're really working. I would rather be doing what I'm doing and waking up at like 5am coming home at midnight as opposed to doing an 8-5. It makes me happy. It makes my soul happy. How do you balance all that? It's time management. Ya it's time management. It's about prioritising the time that you have to work. It's literally about prioritising. Ya so behind the scenes Sarah we see that still your friends with most of the cast on Zari and I'm referring to Brenda Way, Rimo and people like Rashid. So how would you describe your relationship behind the screens? Brenda and I, this is actually the first project we have ever worked on. We have never been on a set together. We've been in the industry together for a long minute but last year November was the first time we actually like hang out we went to South Africa together for something and we're just hanging out, our vibes just they blended, our energies just clicked and in May I actually posted a picture and I wished her happy birthday and I said you know hopefully we've never been on a set together hopefully we will be on a set together and then even she was like yes you know with the red project God's timing and then fast forward we're on set together on a long term project with amazing bosses like Lulu and Rashid so it's fantastic. We also know that you are majoring on a very huge TV show that was Crime and Justice and it's kind of disappearing from our screens right now so would you talk more about that tell us more. Oh wow, for Crime and Justice we did season 1 and season 2 I was part of the cast, I know after that they did an adaptation in Nigeria which was Crime and Justice Lagos but I don't think that it's coming back for a season 3 unfortunately. So that's official? Our producer Adam he told us that it's not going to be coming back since it was adapted to Nigerian market So when I look at the movie you've been featured in you look so natural if it's crying if it's being a bad person it'll be a bad person how do you do that? It's all about investing in the character if you there's different techniques in terms of acting but for one I would say a lot of research and also being able to immerse yourself in that character every actor has different methods that they use in terms of delivering and in terms of bringing out that character so that's very individual in terms of actors some use specific techniques so for me I would say a lot of research and also I went to film school so I do have techniques that I use in terms of acting but I'll say just basically if you do your research and immerse yourself in the character if you're going through your own experiences they come out more natural so if you make this person a whole being then what you're doing is reacting you're not acting, you are them so then that's it we can talk to the young actors out there who really look up to you just a few words I would say be consistent follow casting directors online those are the people who will most likely get you into rooms that you need to be as opposed to actors because even us we are called by the casting directors so if you follow them for Zari our casting director is Lorela and she is always casting because it's an Zari is an ongoing telenovela meaning down the road in like two weeks you never know what kind of character she will be looking for digital age it's much better it's much easier to see because they post online and I would say just keep at it, don't give up maybe up to date me moving up here Sarah Hassan ame poa future hi ya mani siyes yanda kuka and approximately because I know you inspire so many people by the including me after kishasem ata kama in approximate kuna mutupale mabinu anafkiri aku anza atajiwa one day they are quite a bit and before you go Sarah I think this is something that is a challenge to most actresses who have been on screen for so long and we think we have seen you so much ya and I think people tend to ask this we have familiar faces on our screen throughout you being one of them do you think that gets to you or how do you face that um not really I remember before before I came back and did crime injustice in Zora I wasn't on the screen for about 7 years ya I wasn't around for 7 years but then you know I come back and I do crime injustice in Zora at the same time and for like but I was not there for all those years and it's fine it's fine no not really at the moment no because what you put out in the universe is what is what comes back yes so for me I'm usually happy to see people that I know you know get new gigs and stuff because I know they've worked hard to get where they are um but no it's life and Sarah how do you handle fame how do you handle you are famous you are someone who is famous how do you handle such I would say having family that grounds you for me is a big thing um because we've been at it since Tahiti and stuff so I think just having something someone people around you that's that's key thank you so much


You know, these old Dragon Ball games really still have some charm to them. The great music, the sound effects, everything just comes together to really serve the core focus that is the fighting.  And for a guy like me, that's Vegeta. Now while I can't pick him in this game, it is pretty simple to get him. You just have to charge up your key, land this move, simply click the right but- simply click the right- simply click the right but- I'm going back to fighters. Okay, so now that we've switched games, getting Vegeta was actually super easy. All I had to do was put $5 onto my Steam account, and bam, he just showed right up, simple as that. And now that I've paid the $5 price, I can finally find out if Vegeta was worth it. I just realized it's too late. I already paid for the character. But while it may be too late for me, it's not too late for you. The viewer. Thanks, Mom. So just like last time with Super Saiyan Goku, we're gonna go ahead and start off with Vegeta's cons, then go into his pros, and then wrap it up by talking about where he fits on the team. I'm gonna go ahead and start off the cons for Vegeta with one that isn't really that tied into his gameplay overall, but Vegeta has a lot of traits that really differs him from the rest of the Dragon Ball Fighter's cast, meaning he's not that approachable for new players, which is a very interesting decision considering he's Vegeta. You know, he's the character that a lot of people are gonna pick first when they load up Dragon Ball Fighter on a friend's console, and Vegeta won't help you get comfortable with the majority of the cast just by playing him, like a character like, say, Super Saiyan Goku, for example. Things like the way his buttons go into each other, his down-heavy not operating like most other down-heavies in the game, making it so you can't do the usual combo off of it. I will say, though, it does keep you in the air for a crazy amount of time, so it's perfect for that situation you always get into online. When you're just randomly super-jumping and a team gohan decides to random level 3, you can just down-heavy right over that sucker. Makes for a great and usable punish. 10 out of 10, the Vegeta tech doesn't get better from here. As far as other cons go, Vegeta is once again another character that really suffers from not having a down-light that hits low, meaning once again we have a character who suffers on offense because he doesn't know how to kick while crouching. I'm usually pretty forgiving when it comes to this, you know, the technique is very hard to master what with the whole crouching and then kicking part, but in Vegeta's case, it really is unacceptable considering that 100% of Vegeta already knows how to do this. Both Goku Blue and Vegeta Blue can do this on a whim. Not really sure what Vegeta chose to do with that information, but it's pretty much been trashed at this point. And I know when hearing that it sounds bad, but it's not really as bad as Super Saiyan Goku's case because Vegeta actually has some really interesting block strings. Because of the way Vegeta's attacks work, you're actually gonna want to supplement your lack of mixups with just trying to bait your opponent into unsafe decisions. Hit him with a light, hold it, and then get that second light in there. Or hit him with a light, once you condition him to keep blocking, just drag and rush him. It's these kinds of things that you're going to want to implement onto your offense when playing Vegeta. The last con I wanted to talk about before moving on to the positives was Vegeta's assist. It's not really too great. Vegeta just kind of leaps up in the air and throws five fireballs. It wouldn't be too bad if they were more focused like Vegeta's assist, but in this case, Vegeta opts to go for the shotgun strategy, meaning most of them miss, and the ones that do hit are very hard to actually get conversions off of. Far from the worst assist in the game, but pretty hard to use nonetheless. Unless of course your opponent's down to like a very small amount of health, then I guess it's actually really good. And now we can finally start talking about what makes Vegeta a really fun character in my opinion, starting with his insane corner carry on his combos. If Vegeta hits you anywhere on the screen, he can get you to a corner if he wants to. These combos won't always be the most damaging, but they will get you into the corner to set up for even more damage. Unfortunately, you know, we don't have the best mix-ups in the corner, but you know, we take what we can get. Vegeta also does a pretty healthy amount of damage too. Even the suboptimal stuff with no assist is going to net you below 5,000 points of damage. They even set you up to add on supers if you would like to. Now it is important to note that in order to do a lot of these combos and keep the opponent in the corner, Vegeta does have to spend some bar to perform a vanish, and I can understand how that might seem like a negative, but I didn't put it in the con simply because Vegeta actually builds a ton of meter with his spirit sword. So I figure you know, it's kind of like a net neutral, so... Not a pro, not a con. Just a fact I can take up a lot of time in this video with. Moving on. I also want to give credit to Vegeta simply because of how flexible he is. Not a lot of characters have a level 1 super and a level 3 super in the air, and those can come in very clutch if you have the meter and need to pick up an important kill. Funny enough, Vegeta is also flexible in the traditional sense, that being that his body contorts in all sorts of ways to make his normals have really decent range. I can't tell you the amount of times I've been hit by his light jab simply because I wasn't ready to block anything at that range. If you take all the pros and cons I've listed in this video so far, I think you can get a pretty clear picture that Vegeta is probably a character you want to run at the point position, what with his lacking assist and great block shrinks. Any assist that can help him put the pressure on and ease the pain of not having great mixups is a great addition to Vegeta. There's also some teams out there that allow Vegeta to have access to a double super, so I think if you want to run those teams, that's definitely something to consider. If you want a team specifically picked by me, I do have a couple I can list off here for you. We've got teams Super Saiyan Blue, the Goku Black Arc, so can I call you dad or...? And an actual really good Vegeta team that I strongly recommend trying out. Regardless of the team you play, I think you'll find Vegeta Blue to be a really fun character. And I would strongly recommend you play him if you're into extremely flashy combos, normals that come out extremely fast, and really over-the-top animations. And I guess if you're not into those, then I don't recommend playing him. I mean, he's pretty good, but if you don't like that, I mean, you could play Kid Buu. He's a pretty good character. That's it for me. Let me know what you thought of the video down in the comments below. While you're down there, if you liked this video and want to see more like this from the channel, make sure to hit the like button and subscribe. I'm Dato Doya. Feel free to let me know your character suggestions for the next one, and I'll see you in the next video.


I am a freelance developer and like every other, a lot of WordPress developers got their start kind of bootstrapping their skills and business, learning on their own. I don't have a degree in software engineering and I've learned as I go along. Yes, I've taken courses. I've done a lot of client work and learned along the way. And I'm continually learning and I really enjoy learning, but I find it very difficult to communicate my value as a developer. It's a bit different than perhaps a designer, you know, with a nice portfolio, beautiful pictures, something that you can easily wow and woo a client. But how do you communicate the value of your code as a developer? How do you communicate? Hey, I'm the one you want to hire as opposed to that person over there. And so I want to try to keep this kind of brief because it is two o'clock on Sunday and it's hot in here. But I'd also like to hear from your perspectives as well if you have any and you want to contribute. So I'd like to tell you a story of the devalued developer. And so this happened to me years and years ago. I was pretty proficient in my skills working with WordPress. Comfortable in PHP, comfortable, you know, writing a plug-in, you know, custom themes. Pretty excited about that stuff. I had a client I was really excited about and we had some problems with their site.  They're not doing anything like and queuing their scripts correctly. Maybe there's some hard coded menus in there, the kind of stuff that you see that you want to address, you know, and you make known to your client. We fixed that problem and this was before WordPress menus before 3.0. And, you know, they had like this hard coded menu and then I upgraded their WordPress site and then put in the menu and made it, you know, so they can edit it and everything. They were really excited, you know, they were super excited. They had some more work to do. They wanted a landing page, you know, it was very promotional, very marketing, had a video. And we kind of, I sat down with them and went over the most important parts of their business and we identified, you know, the things that they wanted to communicate to their crowd, their main audience. And we put up this landing page and they were really excited and so they were like, you know, we're getting ready for this big new site that we want to do. And I was like, oh yeah, this is going to be great. Custom theme, you know, this is what I want because I had this like kind of mangled, you know, marketplace theme that they were working with. And so they were like, yeah, just let me know how it's going to be, like how much it's going to be. And I was like, yeah, you know, I'll just give you a price. And so I talked to a designer, like a local designer in my town and came up with an estimate and I gave him some number. I can't remember what it was. It might have been like $5,000, something like that. You know, I was excited to get any kind of work and I had other client work as well, but I was, you know, growing my own business as a freelancer and never heard from him again. So I was like, what, you know, what did, they were so happy like, what did I do?  And so there were a couple of things that I didn't do. And so I'd like to talk about some of those things. And see, these are some things that have worked for me. So clearly defining everything that you do. Remember where I said that I sat down with them and talked about the things that were important in their business, their key audience and doing. I didn't communicate that those are the skills and things that I do as my business. I'm just a developer, right? I just write code, hire me to do that. But turns out I was not charging for a lot of the things that I was doing. And so what happened was a long while went by and I get a call from a fellow web shop in town. Really great people, love them. And they're like, hey, can you help us with this project? And I was like, sure, because they knew that I knew WordPress very well, right? And I was like, OK. And they pointed me to the site and it was my old client. They already had a new site and like a little sniffer than I am, I opened up the inspector tools and found out what theme they were using. Very popular marketplace theme from a very popular theme marketplace. And so I was like, yeah, sure, you know. OK, but it still just drove me nuts. Like, why did they abandon? I mean, I'm like the WordPress guy, right? And then they just hired someone to buy a marketplace theme and install it for them. So was it the changing market of services or was it me? Like, what is going on here? So explaining your skill set, do you sit down with your clients in the beginning and kind of map out what's going to happen with their new site? Do you even ask them why they need a new site? A lot of times clients come to us and they're like, you know, we want to do this, this, and this. But are you providing some value, some business consulting? You know, you're the liaison between their business and the internet. And you should be there to serve them. Is that part of your services? I wasn't defining that. I also wasn't defining that, hey, you know, maybe I followed the WordPress coding standards. What does that mean, you know? I hired a consultant. You know, this was years later, but I hired a consultant. His name is Matt Medeiros, maybe you've heard of him. And he just kind of laid out, he was like, go through a difficult project with me. And I was like, OK.  And I wasn't laying out any proposals. So what happened? Here, let's go to the next slide. So here's the story of the value developer. This is years later. I've had plenty of successful projects. I had someone approach me and it was kind of an enterprise level client in my book at least. And they had a pretty high budget for web development. I was like, great, this is awesome. And so I was like, what do I do? OK, you've got these, I'm a developer and I've got these sites that do for maybe like, you know, five to $8,000. And then here's this site for like $30,000. How do I make that jump and how do I justify it? So we laid out everything that I wasn't doing, basically. But then I wasn't writing down. I wasn't clearly defining. And it was a lot of stuff. So I wasn't really communicating the value that I'm going to provide to them. Not only my skills like I followed the WordPress coding standards, or I am going to sit and do information architecture, help map out their site, their staging and deployment maintenance. I was just giving them a number. Just dropping a number on some people. Being like, oh, it'll cost you this much. Kind of trying to do the value-based pricing without like reading much into it and really having a methodology for it. So clearly defining what you do is very important. And as a programmer, as someone who writes code, it's hard to do that. So you can't communicate the value through code. You can to some extent, but to your clients, you're going to end up sounding like this guy, a space robot. I use Gulp as a task manager. All the assets will be concatenated and minified. Aren't you excited? Your site's going to load so much faster with fewer HTTP requests. I've seen developers talk to clients like this.  Whereas they might be like, this guy's, I don't know what's going on. It's confusing. There's this other price over here. Let's just go over here. That doesn't make any sense to me. So there's another thing that I think is very important to communicating your value as a developer. And that is passion. If you're passionate about what you do, if you're passionate about making a business more profitable about providing good services to your client, building them a solid platform on which they can build their business, you're going to succeed. And that's also going to communicate to the person. If I walk into a meeting without any passion whatsoever, and I'm sitting there like, yeah, but that's going to be harder because we have to build a custom plugin and it's going to take so much time. That's going to communicate this is a chore. He doesn't care. But if I'm passionate about it, it's going to communicate and people are going to say, hey, this person really cares about my business as well. They're providing that value. They have a stake in it as well. And that's something that speaks. The next thing is being completely honest about what you do. And this is super important. I don't want to come to a client and say, I'm this full-stack developer. I do all this. Yeah, I know Rails. If you're a freelance WordPress developer, a lot of times we are also learning PHP at the same time. We've learned HTML and CSS and JavaScript. Maybe we're taking classes. And you can get really, really, really good at doing those things. It takes a lot of time. But I'm, be honest about your skill set. If you're, this comes to, are you a WordPress developer or are you WordPress implementer? And this kind of goes full circle to that first story that I told because the web shop that took that job, that took my client that I like so much, they were implementing WordPress.  And then when they had trouble with that, they asked me for help. So I don't know whether or not they were saying they were doing development, but it's very important to be honest about what you do. If you're just installing themes and plugins, say it. I mean, that has a lot of value too. There's nothing wrong with being a WordPress implementer.  You know, you're proficient, you're comfortable writing plugins, custom plugins for clients. You're comfortable doing custom themes and that's what you specialize in. You can also troubleshoot a lot of those pain points that come from sometimes people who implement. The implementers are very comfortable, perhaps with HTML and CSS. Maybe PHP snippets will drop in the functions file and it works, I really know why. But if you can put together a site like that for your client, be honest about it. And I found that being honest about your skills helps communicate the value you're going to provide. Price appropriately. It's something I wasn't doing either. You know, all those things, those clearly defined things that I was doing, they have their value. Taking time and understanding WordPress coding standards has a lot of value. Why? Well, if I'm following these standards and I create a solid plugin, it's going to make maintaining that a lot easier for people down the road. It's going to make it a lot easier for my client because they're not going to have to spend money and time fixing a poorly created solution for their website. You know, if I've spent so much of my time fixing problems with websites that were pieced together, you know, and so that has a lot of value. If you are trying to build a solid solution, communicate that. And price appropriately, you know, those things really do have their price. So I'd really like to hear from y'all if you feel inclined from a client perspective on developers or from a developer's perspective how you communicate value to your clients. Does anyone want to have anything to say? Better than other people. Everybody can be better than everybody. So, I mean, one of my, I know my most valuable things I bring to it is I'm usually friends already with my clients. So I don't necessarily get that question why should I hire you over somebody else. But I'm just so, some of it has seemed impossible to find for everybody. Yeah. Why you would, about your situation, did the client care that they hired and implemented? Did they need more? They may not have really been aware of it. You know, that maybe they were just shooting for a lower price because they couldn't afford it. But they had to, but whoever they were working with had to come back at some point and fix a problem that was there. So it did cost money, you know, in the end. And that's the thing you have to communicate. You know, if, how solid can you build a solution. But going back to what you were saying also is that you have like a friendly relationship a lot of times. And that also to me, maybe that also means hey, maybe I'm great to work with also. That has a lot of value, doesn't it? You know. That's it. I'll tell them I'm funny. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sure, you know. But, yeah, so. And developers that don't even know how to do a child theme and just customize within the theme options and like, ooh, do you find yourself a developer? Wow. But, and I would consider those information if they were test developers that do more interface design and can make it look pretty like through CSS and child themes.  And when we really meet them, we go to them. But I wouldn't say it's necessary to build, you know, those sites that other people can't really afford. You know, the full scale Ferrari kind of deal. So that's just my take on it. That's, that's really, that's very valuable because, exactly. You know, and that's the kind of thing as a developer when you price appropriately, you'll price out a lot of the people that can't afford you. But you'll be doing projects that you really enjoy doing. You'll be doing things that you want to be doing. You won't be kind of like, oh, I got to fix another thing. You might be doing those solid solutions and you might be at a higher price point.  Right, and it must, I mean, it's got to be hard finding a good developer that'll be at that, you know, at that level, so. I can troubleshoot and do some of the stuff and fix some code, but I can't write the code myself and scratch it. One of the troubles that I find, or the challenges that I find with clients is they don't know the difference. So what terminology do you use to help pull the, I mean, if I use developer, they're looking for designers and they don't really know what they're looking for or what they need. So how do you find that middle ground? Wow, that's a good question. You know, a lot of, for your clients, yeah. There's at least five different terms, at least. Well, you know, I would say as an implementer, my suggestion is as an implementer, you also have a major responsibility to understand what's going on in the WordPress community. You're here, thumbs up, you know. You're doing the right thing. You're at a WordCamp, you're here to learn, and you're doing the right thing. So I think implementing is something that is very, very common. A lot of people built great businesses on it, you know. But there will be a time when you need to hire a developer when something could come up, you know. And looking for those skills, you know, find out if the developer, you know, follows coding standards, find out, you know, if they've built plugins, how comfortable are they with PHP? If they're not comfortable with PHP, it could be a really big problem. I understand that part of it. The challenge is how do you get to the clients when they don't know what they're looking for and they're putting in the Google search term as developer. Someone told them they needed a developer when they don't necessarily need a developer yet. I can speak to some of that and how you might filter out some of it, but I know exactly what you're saying. I don't have the end-all, be-all of all businesses. By choice, I tend to be more of an implementer, but I have heavy, solid marketing and communication strategy behind it. But because... I was talking to somebody about this yesterday and I don't know if it's a big, ziggler thing or whatever, but you have to sell them what they want, so you may have to use terminology.  I'm a designer, I'm a developer, whatever. I don't need to be dishonest, and I am honest about my skill set, they don't even get that. So there's a little bit of education going on there, but you need those terms, yes, they're search-wise, but what I'm finding is there's so much out there that if you're looking at search traffic for your clients, you're really going to struggle with that because there's so much out there that for that kind of person, they're not even going to look at you unless you're charging $300 or something like that, so I can't feel to that. I'm appealing by word of mouth, and I had a client tell somebody last week that asked why I charge and what I charge. She looked at this person that questioned her about knowing she was working with me, and she said, you don't even know what you don't know. I haven't found a way to articulate that yet, but it's again, you're selling them what they think they want, and my price captures my value, and by the end of the process, hopefully they get the difference. Any developers in the room? You're part of explaining exactly what you do as part of educating. I'm a graphic designer, it does much more print design. So it's the same then, educate them and break it down. My thought, I like to point out literally defining what you do and don't, like you said, when I had a large project come to me, I defined everything I would be doing for the project. I wasn't a super nine page proposal or anything, but instead of just kind of like really nonchalantly shooting off a price point, I defined what I'd be doing and I defined what standards I would be following, and they saw the value in that. I'd be working through them with information architecture, content strategy, and everything they want to be there on the table. So... While everybody's just ability to solve somebody's problem, you can just find, through the developer, you still got a coordinated solution. So it doesn't really matter. Exactly, a lot of times the implementer and the developer work together on finding those solutions. It's very common. A lot of implementers, they're doing a lot of stuff on the admin side of the site. They're communicating with the client. A lot of times developers don't want to be doing that. It's different for someone like me as a freelance developer because I communicate a lot with my clients, but some developers are kind of more on the behind the scenes with agency work. Maybe not behind the scenes so much, but the implementer is kind of communicating what they need as far as functionality and the developers putting that forth. As a freelance developer, I try to do a thorough discovery process and find out what their goals are. What is the end goal? And try to define my proposal around they're going to make money from this thing. Because I've found over the years that clients don't care whether my PHP was fast or not. Am I going to make money from the contact form? Am I going to make money from this e-commerce store? So I try to find a proposal around that value when it comes to any client, but that's where you can get for technically your hedge. Yeah, I've found that communicating that technicality to the client has to be done in a very specific way, like performance. If you think about web performance, how fast does your site load? That can have a huge return on your client, for your client, as far as the value goes. Maybe that means one more person going to the checkout and putting in their credit card information because it didn't take them five minutes to load or something like that. So there's that communicated value, too. If you say, I'm going to spend this much effort on performance, then that has that added value, as well. I find sometimes a lot of people go to Wix where space are weekly now, and I started investigating those CMSs to see what they're offering because people are telling me they're offering more and more and more just like WordPress is. It's kind of scary, but since there's part of me that's like, okay, well, that's what they need, and they want to go pay for that, then let them. And then usually what happens is when they do need more functionality or want to pay for more and are limited in some way by their CMSs, then they come back to you many years later. So maybe your target audience is dealing with lower-end programmers that can't do the high-end stuff that people like maybe come to you when you do need that kind of functionality. So maybe that's your angle of getting the types of clients that you need or something. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times I'm dealing with agencies, so I'm in a very similar position, but I do have some clients I've retained over the years, and it's been interesting watching my communication with them evolve. At first, I get real techy, and I want to talk to them techy, but you just can't do that. All right, so our challenges, we had one, I wouldn't say they were client, they were potential client. We talked to them about the site elsewhere. It looks great. Technically, it's a disaster. One, I don't even know. I'd like to help them because they built a new URL with the build-in and iframe over, and just weird. I wanted to tell them how you should have used us. But it's more articulating that ahead of time. Yeah. We won't screw up, but I'm sure the other guy will screw up either. Our challenge is proving that we know, we try to articulate that. That's our biggest challenge. Yeah, it's all... We won't screw up, and they won't screw up, and they'll have to price up, and then they can do it. Yeah, and I think if... I've just had luck communicating, clearly defining everything I'm going to be doing, and in that communication talking about following some best practices in WordPress, and maybe simply writing out what those are, and perhaps the other shop that put it together and kind of piece-mealed it, maybe they didn't do that, and that might communicate to the client, oh, they're going to do this, follow best practices and standards and that sort of thing, and they wrote out why. Maybe it's worth that price. Maybe it's going to go down the road with maintainability and updates and all that kind of stuff. That has a lot of value. Yeah, you know, a common... the scalability is kind of a cliche term, sure, but, you know, a common thing that I don't see as much as I used to was the very popular and queuing your own jQuery library and a plug-in or theme, and I just spent so much time fixing that problem, and that's what it means to the client, you know? So having a solid, you know, following best practices and having a solid solution goes a long way. And communicating that... Show them the client. It's much more meaningful. My code will load your page faster. Mm-hmm.  Or someone abandoned their shopping cart and someone else made a purchase. If you can show them why and you can quantify it, you know, two seconds versus 24 seconds gets you this. It's much more meaningful than telling them you're great at PhD. Absolutely. That's a really great insight because something like performance is, you know, that's a metric that we can use. That's measurable. And a picture is worth a whole lot of technology. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. I was just going to say I've been listening to a lot of value-based podcasts recently and one of the things that they say is the more you can position yourself in the conversation in your services in the long-term investment and not as an expense. So how much, some of those examples and stories and case studies that you shared, how much more will those add to the overall value of their business, the longevity of their websites, some of those kinds of things that are more of a long-term investment and not just a short-term expense that should be decreased to as little as possible. That made me think about the passion part because if I'm passionate if I'm really excited about, you know, helping your business-term profits and I'm going to be there for the long haul, then we're both really making an investment together, you know. So...  I need that.  Listening. Yeah.  How does their content fit into the architecture of WordPress? Do you know the template hierarchy, how that works, how that's going to be used to leverage their content and use WordPress's data architecture to present their content? It's very, very, very helpful. It seems very simple but as soon as you do that they disengage from you but if you can take the time to understand where they are and then position your conversation to that point you go so much further and you really can connect with WordPress. Yeah, I think there's, you know, there's a lot of developers will use a lot of technical know-how to intimidate it happens, you know, and they'll that's kind of like a cop-out really because it's like saying, okay, I can answer your question really easily by just talking really technical, making you feel stupid perhaps and you should just do it this way when really what you need to be doing is listening to your client and figuring out the best solution working together essentially. Exactly, and that's how you build relationships and that has a lot of value, yeah. You sit down and you listen to your client about what their needs are and then you see if your skill sets match their needs and if they do you can take back and key back to them exactly what they told you they needed I have the ability to do e-commerce and whatever so you're listening to them and then feeding it back and then freelance developers and small businesses people who are trying to do this need to be very aware of is that there are people out there that will sit you down and talk your ear off and you have to limit that and you can have an initial conversation but if somebody's trying to figure out I want to do a website how much do you charge it's like going to a home builder and saying how much is it going to cost me to build a house and the question is what kind of house do you want to build well if you sit down there and have that whole conversation and figure out everything they need and build a checklist of what you got to do so you can figure out the pricing you're going to waste a lot of time with people who have no money so one of the things that we found is very easy to do is we'll sit down and have an initial conversation and then we'll say we will sit down with you and build you a detailed checklist that you need to have in a website there's a fee for this but then you can take this checklist if you don't like our price and you can shop it to somebody else and now you know what needs to be in it because if you know a quote is not always the same quote depending on where you go because they don't know all the things that you need to have done and sometimes the clients aren't educated enough to know what their needs are so we'll educate them as to what's possible they tell us what they need and then we can give them an accurate quote if they don't like our quote as a result of paying for our consultation they have a document they can take and go out and shop on the streets yeah I have a lot of people approach me and I set up a consultation time for a fee and we kind of map out their problem see what's going on and there's a lot of people that don't want to do that and that's fine there's a lot of people that do and they're willing to sit down and pay for that because they see the value in that I relatively do and the difference I think is there are a lot of very small businesses that need implementers they don't need nor can they afford a developer but the general public doesn't know the difference or individuals are providing quote unquote web design being an implementer they don't know the difference they come to developers when they have big issues but don't know what they're doing they're just using it like you use Photoshop or like you use Illustrator or like you use any other tool and they're just making any other developers have any developers in the room have any insight to the work through an agency which is run by a graphic designer she claims to have developers on staff but she doesn't she's an implementer she has an implementer and they claim to have developers if they have a client and they can meet the needs with a theme and some plugin they do it and if not then during that consultation they explain that this is going to be a little bit more expensive I don't think the client ever knows that the site needs the agency but they outsource parts of the site sometimes more parts than others to me or another developer and that I think is a really good solution for some people who are implementers but if you build yourself that way you won't get any business that kind of goes a little bit into the honesty thing I agree I've worked with an agency that openly says we have a handful of developers that we work with they don't say they're on staff there's a lot of pictures on people's staff websites that are there every day right and that's fine and that makes sense if you have a solid group of developers that you can call on but even as implementers you need to vet those developers you need to see what their skill set is and you know and see how they're communicating that we're going to work with I think that's a more honest approach I guess my perspective is I'm not sure all of the customers really even care I think they just want somebody who knows how to manage the process but they need yeah I think we've heard that echoed several times and I think that's they just want a solid solution and again I'm talking about communicating the value as a developer sometimes I do that to clients and sometimes most of the time is to agencies but again those agencies or small time shops, implementers they also have to find developers and so how do I communicate that value as a developer to those people I find really great designers and really great photographers if I can't do the implementation how how smart I can for if they need it they might for you first and you end up with me and I end up with you I think you call yourself an advanced developer because I feel like that's what you are is it okay? some people do that they need an advanced developer and that would be the audience I think some of the stuff you use the house analogy you're a general contractor and that's it you hire a plumber they don't care if people walk in their house and help that's right as long as the house stays on the floor when the shower is on do you have any strategy with that? absolutely alright I think we're just going to close it up there and I really appreciate all of your insight I enjoyed speaking with you and I enjoyed hearing you thank you