All right, everyone. Let's get started. So this is the struggle of getting an open source community off the ground. I'm Alana Burke. Alana rhymes with banana, but please do not call me Alana banana. My pronouns are she, her. And I currently work at Amaze.io doing documentation, community management, and developer advocacy. You can find me on Twitter at my personal account, abrx626, or at Use Lagoon, which is our open source. Ah, I touched the cable. OK. Use Lagoon, which is our open source product. And Amaze.io, what happened? And you can also find me on the Drupal Slack at Alana Burke. So today we are going to talk about creating a community. And as I go through this talk, I will answer some of the questions that I ask with anecdotes about my experience building a community around Amaze.io's open source application delivery platform, which is called Lagoon. So for background, just so you understand a little bit. So Amaze.io is a hosting company. And we use Lagoon, the tool that we've developed to deploy and manage our customer's sites. We also maintain Lagoon specifically as an open source product for anyone who wants to use it themselves without our help. So this year, I have been working to plan an official community launch around Lagoon. As our current community is kind of spread out over tons of private customer channels, rocket chat, Slack channels. There's a public rocket chat channel. There's a channel in the Drupal Slack. So we want to try and bring all of those together. And while we'll be talking about some of the issues that are inherent in open source ecosystems, most of this advice is applicable to pretty much any kind of community build. So we're going to break down the community building process into three main steps, planning, launching, and nurturing. So how do you plan a community? There is a lot of consideration that goes into deciding how to plan and build your community. You want to make sure you sit down and really think about all of these things before embarking on your community building journey.  So we're going to ask ourselves these questions. Why do you want a community? So in our case, like I said, we need a space to connect all of our open source users and all of our paying customers. Like I said, we have a rocket chat channel, but nobody really uses rocket chat. And it doesn't have as much reach or engagement as we wanted. Most customers, they just stay in their own channels, same with the Drupal Slack. So it's great to have that there, but we do a lot more than just Drupal, so we're not reaching people outside of the Drupal community. So what do you want your community to be? What kind of community is it going to be? Where will the community live? What's your gathering space? Do you want a forum? Do you want to work in an open space like Reddit? Do you want a chat platform, GitHub discussions? So we chose Discord because we felt that it's a platform that many of our audience already uses. So that makes it a really low barrier to entry. It's also similar to many other chat platforms, making it easy to use, even if you're not familiar with it. We're also going to continue using GitHub because anyone who is contributing to the project or just using it, we'll have to check out the GitHub repo anyway. So that's a place that there are already going to have to be. And go find out where your community is already. What are they using? Where are they gathering? Make it easy for them. Are you going to have community roles or are you going to let that happen organically? For example, the Drupal project doesn't really have any official community roles, but it allows all of our members to self sort into where they want to contribute. And leaders tend to just naturally emerge. Community members benefit from being a part of this community. How are you going to empower them? How will the project or organization benefit from the existence of this community? As an open source project, we want to get as much influence and as many contributions from the community as possible. Making it easier for the community to be a part of the project is ideal for everybody. The more diverse your community members are, the better and stronger your project will be from their input. What goals do you have for the community? What do you want to accomplish by creating this community? And what is the value of this community? So a lot of what we do is pretty specialized knowledge. It can be a really steep learning curve, learning Kubernetes and all of that kind of platform management. Allowing our users to connect with other users for troubleshooting and issues will allow them to share their knowledge without relying solely on us for support, especially as it tends to be the same kind of things that trip people up. So ideally, as users start to support one another, our support team will be able to focus on the bigger issues that crop up and spend less time on minor issues. We also, at Amazio, we don't support the actual applications that people use on our platform. So we deploy your Drupal site, but we don't fix it or troubleshoot it or manage that. And customers, again, tend to run into similar issues with their applications. So letting them bounce issues and ideas around amongst themselves gives them another layer of support. It also gives us an easy way to communicate with all of our users, ideally in both directions. We can share updates and changes and hear about their issues and ideas for the platform. We also wanna know what kinds of frameworks, organizations, or sorry, applications and languages users are interested in and what do they wanna see supported on the platform. So one of the things we do is we create a lot of templates and examples for various frameworks like Drupal, WordPress, Node.js. So when someone says, hey, do you support this framework or organization? We can get it working and put out an example for them. How are you going to define the community? So is it defined by the people? In our case, it is. It consists of everyone who uses our open-source project in any capacity. Or is your community going to be defined by the space that it's in? So we plan to launch a space for the community and it gives us a place to gather, but that's not going to define our community. Is it the work that defines your community? Are you all working towards the same thing? Or is it some shared goals? Your shared goals may be very straightforward. Generally, everyone involved with using a specific product will be invested in its success. Whether you're on the team who built it or someone who is using it, you obviously want it to be successful and flourish. And who is responsible for your community? Do you have a community manager? A DevRel team? Without a dedicated person, communities often flounder, especially when things get busy. So I'm our community manager and developer advocate and I sit on our product team. Also, you don't want to start from scratch. If you build it, they may not come. Utilize your existing community in whatever form that takes. So if your community already gathers somewhere, don't make them go somewhere else. If you have, say, an active Slack channel where all of your users connect, don't decide to shut that down and redirect them to a forum. It can be a bit tricky when you're in our situation and you're trying to condense disparate spaces where your community is currently gathering, but pay attention to what's already working and go from there. In our case, since pretty much all of our existing spaces are chat platforms, we decided to stick with a chat platform. And where is your community? Where do they come from? Are they customers? People interested in doing something specific like finding a new hosting company? Or are they a subset of another community? For example, if we only hosted Drupal sites, we would concentrate all of our community building efforts within the Drupal community. And don't forget to start with your current users and customers. Having a paying customer base means that you have an existing engaged user base. So while their paths may be different from our open source users, their goals and problems are largely the same. The planning stage will have you putting together several different documents. First up is our community strategy. So how do we draft a community strategy? Answering all of these questions will get you a great start on your strategy, defining your community, what your goals are, and how you're going to grow and maintain the community. The foundation of a successful community is a well-defined strategy that integrates social tools and methods with business goals and processes and aligns and organizations' needs with their members' needs. So how are you going to measure your success and growth? Is it the number of members, the number of interactions, maybe you're measuring your GitHub stars or something like that? Make sure you are measuring anything that you could possibly find useful to analyze your growth and success. So what's happening day to day, month to month? Are there numbers you want to hit, like pull requests or blog hits? Do you have a social media engagement goal? Are you looking for brand recognition? Number of users. Another way to measure is to ask yourself, what's going well? What's going poorly? What could you do differently? So consider both qualitative and quantitative measurements. So what is your gut telling you about the community? Is it busy and vibrant? Or do people seem kind of unengaged and disappointed? And don't forget that anecdotes are data too. How often do you have users say things like, oh, this platform is so easy to use. I love it. That's positive feedback that you can use to measure your success. There's also what is called pirate metrics or ARP. So these different, this weird acronym stands for awareness, which is general knowledge of the product and what it does. Acquisition, which is users coming to your site from various channels resulting in some kind of sign up. There's activation, which is product implementation. So for example, this could be your first deployment. Retention is continual use of the product. Revenue is paying for usage. So for example, becoming an Amazio hosting customer. Referral is referring others, becoming a brand ambassador. And finally, we have product, which is providing feedback or contributing to the product. So these are some other helpful ways that you can measure how things are going. And also, we use these metrics because ROI is not really a good metric for measuring community success. Measuring online engagements is much easier. Community is a thing that can be very, very hard to quantify and that's okay. So measure whatever you can and then decide which metrics work best for you. Also in preparing to launch our community and give this talk, I read a book that I think everyone involved in community building should read. And I'll share all my sources at the end. But the following quote is from the business value of developer relations, how and why technical communities are the key to your success by the very amazing Mary Thangval. So here's the quote. The inherent challenge is that when you're measuring community, you're trying to measure things that are mostly intangible. Community building is fundamentally about relationships. So how do you conduct a cost benefit analysis on a relationship? We don't go up to a friend and say, well, he took me a cumulative 68 hours of conversation, 16 cups of coffee and a birthday cake to go from being acquaintances to being a close friend as defined by the discovery of common ground and the mutual exchange of confidences. However, I have derived 1.21 gigawatts of emotional satisfaction, three new friends, eight book recommendations and three homemade dinners in return. Also, if I hadn't been at your house eating one of those dinners, I would have instead been on the freeway during the 13 car pile up last month. It just doesn't work like that. So finally in your community strategy, you wanna ask yourself, what will you do if you don't meet your goal posts for success? What if your interaction isn't what you hoped? How will you improve it? So we're taking a fairly laid back approach to our community, but we do have some scheduled interactions planned like community hours. And to foster more interaction, our plans are to have more topical or scheduled chats via either video or just text chat. Once your strategy is in place, you are going to want to create a roadmap to plan out what you're going to do and when. There's a few things to keep in mind here. You want to align priorities. What does everyone involved, what do all of the stakeholders want out of this? Is everyone defining success in the same way? Make sure that everyone is in agreement on the plan. You want to communicate value. Remind everyone via all of the questions that we've just answered. Why this community is important? And finally, organize your planning. Make sure that you're working with everyone who should have input. Like ensuring that you're working with your marketing team so that all of your messaging is cohesive. You also want to map community activities and initiatives to the key objectives that they're going to address. So for example, if you're planning out a Q2 roadmap, take a look at your organization's plans for Q2 or your OKRs or whatever way that you set goals within your company to ensure that your community plans are in alignment. Having an organized work plan also helps you decide what resources you need and when. So you're going to have to define and assign all of your resources. Who on your team is responsible for what? Once you have a roadmap put together, you have a few more documents that you're going to need. The most important thing is the code of conduct. But you're also going to want member onboarding plans and participation guidelines. Make sure that members know what is expected of them as well as what will happen if they break the rules. A code of conduct helps your community be welcoming, open and safe. This results in a more diverse and inclusive community where everyone feels like they can contribute and everyone knows what's expected of them. Also, online communities, as we probably know in the Drupal community, can be really tough because text is hard and tone is hard to communicate. So setting expectations of what your community members will and won't do and what will happen if they violate those guidelines will help everyone just sort of be on the same page. You also want to ensure that all of your writing is clear, concise and free of jargon. Online communities are international in nature and you want to be inclusive of everyone no matter their native language or their cognitive skills. You're going to want to have a clear read me or getting started guide to welcome your users as well as clear documentation for contributions. So what can contributors work on? A great thing to do is to go through your get issues and label them. Let people know which issues are for beginners, backend versus front end, code or documentation tasks. The more easily people can find a task they can do, the more likely they are to participate. Do you have things that people who are interested in your product but don't yet have expertise can help with? Maybe you have some files that need to conform to code standards or some front end styling work. Make sure that not all of the issues that you have require expertise. Otherwise, you're only going to have a community of people who are already experts at your product and you'll miss out on getting the feedback and interaction with your potential users or with inexperienced users. Our challenge is that developing Lagoon itself requires some pretty good Kubernetes and platform knowledge and there aren't a ton of beginner issues. So we tried to provide as many examples for supporting various frameworks we have and helping to create examples is a great way for us to get people to contribute. And you want to have a community onboarding plan for new members. This can be as simple as an automated message or a more involved introductory process. But it's important to make sure that you are welcoming and acknowledging new members so that their very first experience in the community is positive and it encourages them to stick around. So now, we have everything planned out and written down and you're ready to go. You have done the hardest part. But we need one more plan, your launch plan. How are you going to roll out your newly planned community? How will you get the word out? How will this be communicated to existing clients or users? Where will you go to connect with potential users? You want to make a splash, get attention with your launch. You only get to launch once. But you can also consider a soft launch before the announcement to see how things go. This is a route that we have taken with our Discord channel. And I'm glad we did because we wound up pushing back our official launch because our company had a really big announcement that had to go out the week that we'd originally planned to launch the community. So we decided to delay it so that we could announce our community without it being overshadowed. And finally, when you launch, you want to have rituals, things that happen at the same day and the same time, like community office hours or releases or meetups. Whatever you do, have some kind of a schedule so that people remember it and make interacting with your community a part of their routine. Finally, you need to nurture your community. I personally love plant metaphors for nurturing documentation and the same applies to communities. You have to tend to them, prune them when needed and help them to grow. So we do this by planning activities. Sometimes a community takes off and it thrives without any input or organization from community managers. But more often than not, it needs a little push to get people engaged and to keep them there. Keep things on your community calendar so that there's never a long stretch of time where you're not offering an opportunity for interaction with your community. Remember your metrics. What did you decide on when it comes to measuring your community? Keep going back to your strategy and to your roadmap. Your community may start to evolve over time and you want to remember all of the reasons why you planned and started it the way you did. Some things may continue to work, some things may change, but your strategy will help guide you no matter what happens. And then finally, give back to the community. Hold workshops, sponsor events, invest in the community so that they know you're really in this. Especially in the open source world, people are much more likely to join and engage in a community run by an organization that they're already familiar with. So start a mentorship program or even an internship. Establish yourself as a good citizen in the larger community from which you pull your members. Contribution to open source projects can be a big ask. So remember that make sure that you are doing your part to support and uplift your community members however you can. Always remember that by asking for open source contributions, you are asking people to do work for free just for the betterment of your project and its users. Okay, I wound up going through that a little faster than I anticipated, but here are the sources that I used. If you are planning a community or you're in the process of it, like I said, you absolutely have to read the, it's on the bottom here, the business developer relations. Also, I highly recommend the organization, the community round table. It's a fantastic resource for anyone working in community development. They have so much material, that's where the rest of these sources are all pulled from. And of course, in the spirit of this talk, don't forget to contribute back to the Drupal project. There is mentored contribution if you're new, as well as a first time contributor workshop. These are great examples of member onboarding. You can also join in the general contribution any day of the conference or all day on Friday. I would love it if you can fill out the feedback form, which you can do either, I believe, in the app or from the session page. And I'll open it up to questions. Anybody? We have time to go. Thank you. Hello, I'm Matthew. Do you have any advice for anyone who wants to build a community internally in a company? In a big company with multiple teams, working especially with Drupal, and some design tools that have been to use, have to be, excuse my English, have to be shared, and across multiple teams that don't have the same roadmap. And if there are some kind of advice, general advices are very useful there, and I will learn from it, but specifically in an open source environment in a company, do you have some kind of advice to scaffold the very first embryo from the community? So the general approach would be the same, no matter where you're developing the community, but if you're building an internal community, presumably this is something that you've already talked about and that you already have buy-in from, and you have a captive audience, so you don't have to worry about where you're going to find your community. So I think one of the things you want to focus on that I think can be an issue internally in companies is what tool are you going to use? What is this going to be? Is it going to be another Slack or Teams channel? Is it going to go into Confluence or a Team Wiki? What is it that you need and what is the goal? Is it just because you have a bunch of teams that don't otherwise connect? Figure out, you're sort of more problem-solving, I think, when you're creating a community within an existing company, so you have a problem that you're trying to solve, so I think I would focus it a little bit more on analyzing what already happened, what is going wrong, why is it going wrong, and I think that since you already have your community members, this is a place where I would probably try reaching out to them and saying, hey, this is the problem that we're trying to solve, can we help get some input, ask your coworkers and set up some little informational interviews and say, this is the problem we're trying to solve, if you're on team A that doesn't talk to team B and the goal is to get them together, why don't you talk to team B, what's holding you up? So I think I would focus a little bit more on the why and the problem-solving of things because you don't have to worry about a lot of the other things. Is that helpful? Cool. We are looking to build a distribution for the government, for the Dutch government, and I'm from a governmental company, but my question is, is it the best idea to start with a code base and then build a community around the existing code base to ask for input and stuff like that so that you can set the standards of the code or should we now already go meet all the companies that are using Drupal to build for the government and ask what are you doing, why are you doing it and start the community first and then the code base? I think that totally depends and you're gonna have to ask yourself some questions. Do you already have an idea of who your members are? Do you already have a group of people who are interested in this project and are motivated and want to work on it? Is this happening because a bunch of people came together and said, hey, we want to do that? In that case, you already have a community that's starting, so I would start with those people and then develop all of this, you're sort of scaffolding for your community and then work on the code base. But if this is sort of like a project that you've already started that you want to get people involved in or if you want, if you have strong feelings about how it should run or the leadership, then I think sort of starting with a code base and working on your community scaffolding afterwards so that you're the one that's establishing what's going on. That's how I would approach that. No, there really isn't any right or wrong way to build a community, which is why so many of these are questions that you and your specific situation have to sit down and think about. Why do we want to do this? How is this going to work? What are we starting from and where do we want to go? Hang on until it gives you the mic so we can get it on the recording. Do you think the roadmap is a game changer in building a community? I mean, I don't think you can really do anything without some kind of a roadmap. So if you just sort of launch a community and are like, okay, what now?  But if you've planned out, like, okay, we're gonna do this stuff and we're gonna try and meet these goals and this is what we want to see by this point in time, then you're gonna be motivated. And, you know, if it turns out that your community isn't turning out the way you want, you've already got these plans to say like, okay, well, we didn't meet this metric, so we're gonna try and do this and this is where we want to get to. And if you don't have that, then you're just sort of like, oh, well, our community didn't work. Like, what do we do? Do we just leave it there? Do we let it die? Like, how do we fix it? So you're sort of already defining how you're gonna fix it. So any advice of how to deal with the community that is dying and that need some actions to survive? I think what you would wanna do is take a look at what you expected and what's happening now and see if you can analyze what happened, which would help you see how to fix it. If you don't have a lot of insight there, then I would turn to your community members and engage them and talk to them and say, you know, hey, we created this community and you joined it, but now it's not really very successful and we wanna know, like, what would you wanna see out of the community? Like, you're not engaging, so how can we get you to engage? What is it that you want that we're not doing here? Thank you for the talk. Really, really useful. I'm coming from the local Gov Drupal distribution, which is a community that has evolved from people collaborating and some funding coming in from central government. I'm actually doing a talk on Thursday, growing and sustaining an open source Drupal distribution, so come into that if anyone's interested, but there's lots that you said that's directly relevant to us. However, it seems like you've planned a lot of it in advance. We have sort of stumbled across it, realized that we're growing a community, we need to nurture it and we need to find out how to do that. So lots of the stuff that you have mentioned, I've written down and it's gonna be directly useful. One thing you said was it's important to have a community manager, somebody who's actually kind of in the position to do probably full-time work, I guess, I'm wondering how, is that just one full-time person or do you have a number of people who are helping to manage the community and yeah, how much time is that, is that roughly? So yeah, we don't have a particularly large team, like we're about 30 some right now, so I am the only community manager and like I said, I wear a couple of hats, so I also do our documentation and developer advocacy and some things like that. So because we're just still sort of launching this community and it's not like it isn't anything big that's gotten away from us, we don't really need any more staff on that and I don't devote my full time to it, but I think when you have a bigger community and there's just sort of more work required to continue maintaining it, like if I got to the point where we were scheduling tons of events and doing tons of activities and things, then that would take more of my time and we'd have to talk about whether is this something I do full-time, do we hire someone else? And it doesn't always have to be a paid person. I mean, if you have a totally open-source community that's like Drupal, that's sort of developed without a company or an organization, I mean we do have the DA and we have, there's been various roles within the DA to sort of help the Drupal community along, but I think you'll find that there's gonna be natural leaders and people who want to help, so community manager as a role doesn't just have to be someone's actual job. It can be like, okay, so we're some of the most experienced people in this community and we have really strong ideas about how we want it to go, so we're the people who's gonna manage this community. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I would encourage people to take their bits of leadership, distribute that and facilitate it rather than necessarily centrally control it. And then the other thing you mentioned was metrics and so I guess I'm interested, how big is your community now? Is that one metric of what's your vision? Where are you going and what other metrics do you have for success? So we have not actually officially launched the community, like I said we were planning on it and then we had a bigger announcement, so I don't really have any, oh, sorry. So we don't really have any numbers there yet, right now it's pretty small because we, the big step that we need to do for launching is contact all of our customers and get them in. So we have quite a few of our open source people that we, and of course open source projects are a little hard to track because we don't know who's out there using our product unless they come tell us about it. So a lot of the people that we do know who are using it are already in our Discord channel that we told them about and it seems to be, compared to the number of people in it, I would say that I'm pretty happy with the current engagement, people are asking questions, they're starting to come and sort of troubleshoot. So I feel pretty good about how it's going and I'm hoping that once we do the official launch it's going to continue that way. Thank you. Oh, we've got one in the back there. Hi there, I'm community manager of an internal DevOps community in my company and just a question, do you have any experience with communities which are developing totally different roadmap that you expected or that you planned at the beginning? So problem solving or whatever they tend to is totally different of what you planned and what your metrics has been at the beginning of the community. That's not something that has specifically happened to me but I think no matter where you are in your sort of community journey there's never a bad time to kind of sit down and say like, okay, well, this isn't exactly what we wanted, so let's kind of start from scratch. I don't know if you sort of created a community without having this scaffolding behind it. I think that's the point where you want to engage your, you're the community manager, you want to engage maybe other people in your company or in the community and say, okay, we need to step back and make some plans so that we can kind of fix where this is going. We can figure out what went wrong and what we want to do to change it and how can we get this to what we want it to be? Like I don't think just because your roadmap kind of didn't work out the way it planned you can always just make new plans. Communities, I think people tend to sometimes think of them really rigidly like, okay, well, we started this community and it is what it is, but communities are just people engaging with each other and that's something that you can always kind of continue to shape and change and they should evolve and shape and change over time. If your community is exactly the same on day one as it is five years later, like I don't know that that's a good thing. I think that they should continue to evolve and be kind of an organic thing and all of this scaffolding is just to guide you and say like, okay, well, these are all the things we're gonna try and maybe they don't work so maybe we'll try something else. Anybody else? We have a couple more minutes. Nope. All right, well, thank you everybody. I will post my slides as soon as I am able and again, you can find me on Twitter and Slack and I am always happy to answer questions. Thank you.


In business news, the Association of Bureau de Changes Operators has said it will commence what it called operation No Street Trading to stop the Hawking of Foreign Exchange by BDC operators. The President Ab Khan Alhaji Aminu Guadabé said this was part of the resolutions made unanimously by BDC directors at the meeting of the operators on Tuesday in Lagos. A copy of the resolutions, which was obtained by our correspondent, said all operators were to collaborate in bringing down the forex rates in the market. Street trading by BDC should be discouraged and banned, and Ab Khan would commence operation No Street Trading. BDCs are expected to improve return rendition to regulatory authorities, margin review to meet operational requirements, widening the scope of transactions and digitalization of BDC operations. The conscious currency was currently devalued after the CBN abducted the NAFEX rate of $410 to a dollar as its official exchange rate. Ab Khan had in a statement advised foreign exchange users and the general public to patronize only BDC operators licensed by the CBN in order to get dollars at the approved rate. Get notified about fresh news updates


We're not going to erode readiness while we're doing this, but by the same token we've got to protect this force so we can project readiness into the future. These teams are awesome. We call them task forces. They have commanders and they're going to drive results. They're going to save lives and they're going to uplift the spirits of an entire nation.


I got a lot of selfish reasons of why I want to get this win. But I'm excited to get to go back and see some of my old teammates. I heard champs getting inducted into the ring of fame. So it'll be a good atmosphere, man. I'm excited to go back and kick some butt. What are your memories playing now? It's loud. It's going to be extremely loud, especially if they make some plays. They make any play. The crowd's going to be into it. That's one of the reasons why they win a lot of games there. So we got to go out there and start fast from the jump, man. They keep their crowd out of it. You mentioned champ Boleyn also got under Mr. Boleyn as well. What did he mean to that city in that organization? Man, Mr. Boleyn was a class act. From a guy who did things the right way in the locker room, I saw the locker room. He's a pioneer for getting business deals for the NFL. Just a guy that, if I was one day was ever the stumble upon a couple of billions and own a football team, he would be a guy who I would try to model myself after. You mentioned the atmosphere there. What do you tell these younger guys about what it's going to be like when they go up there and the thin air, the crowd, all that? Don't pay attention to it. When I was there, we used to always joke and say, guys are going to get tired by halftime. But I really think that we're in condition enough to go out there and handle those effects that it's going to bring upon us and just play hard. That's all that matters, man. Keep them off the field and just make plays. That's the only thing you can do in the atmosphere. Limit the amount of snaps you have on the football field as a defense, and that's just playing lights out. It doesn't matter how you take it, we just got to get off the field. What do you see from their offense? Obviously a veteran quarterback has been there, done that guy, two good running backs. Man, I definitely think the running backs is going to be the huge key of focus. They can run a ball there, top targets. Then they have 33 targets per game rushing and passing. So they're going to be a key component to this offense. Flacco is a great guy who can stretch the ball down the field. And at the same time, he's stretching you down the field and checking it down to the running backs in line on the May play. So that's going to be a key for us to stop those running backs this week. A lot of fans that voice their displeasure over the inconsistency of this football team. They're kind of frustrated. Curious, are you guys frustrated? Yeah, yeah. Anytime we lose, we're frustrated. It's just the only thing we can do. We can't complain about it. We got to go over to work.  That's the only way that we can complain is by winning.


Hi, I'm Bob Sione from the I-Institute of Utah in Salt Lake City, and today we're going to talk about IOL exchanges and repositions. It's going to be impossible to cover the entire subject matter because there's so many variations of what can present to you and how you manage that. But we'll cover the general principles of what to do, what not to do, when to exchange, and then we'll hit some video cases so you can see some examples of these. What are some of the symptoms that lead to the need to exchange or reposition an IOL? Well, in 2016, it seems that refractive error is the most common cause for a patient being unhappy with with their vision with an IOL. Much more common than back in 2007 when it was a malpositioned implant. Second to that would be visual disturbances. So we're talking about positive or negative dysphotopsias and they're distinctly different, but they can be present in almost any kind of lens. Some lenses are more likely to give you such disturbances and even though a patient's vision may be 20-20 or better, they may be very unhappy with their vision due to glare or perhaps some negative scatomas that they see. Thirdly, ugg syndrome. There would be uveitis glaucoma hyphema syndrome. That can be caused by iris chafing of an IOL or its haptic. This can lead to inflammation, recurrent hemorrhage, and glaucoma. So when that condition presents, it's less of an option to exchange the implant or reposition and more a necessity to prevent chronic condition that can lead to blindness. So we've seen some of the symptoms. What's the etiology of an implant causing some of these problems? One can just be refractive error due to a miscalculation. That may be an error in the formula itself or the data that you entered or maybe it's just simply a variation in anatomy that doesn't fit well into any of the formulas. Improper positioning of the implant at primary surgery can be another reason for an implant being malpositioned. Most common would be asymmetric haptic placement where you have one haptic in the bag and the other haptic in the sulcus. That's not a good condition even with a three-piece lens, but it's a terrible condition when you're talking about a single-piece lens because that square edge of the haptic on a single-piece lens can cause a lot of damage to the iris. Xionnal dialysis or posterior capsule tear can cause an implant to be malpositioned and certainly vitreous prolapsing around the side of a lens can cause it to go out of position and require repositioning. In addition to problems during the primary surgery, trauma can induce a lens malposition. This can include surgical trauma such as vitrectomy. I've seen cases where the patient was fine until five years after the cataract surgery they had a vitrectomy and lo and behold the xionules were damaged or the vitrectomy in the lens goes out of position or the posterior capsule was damaged and it allowed the lens to become dislocated. Another condition is asymmetric capsule fibrosis. We see this more commonly in plate-style haptic lenses where the forces that hold the bag open are greater in one direction of the lens than the other and that asymmetry in the support for the implant allows the short axis of the implant to collapse and the xionules to break and for the lens to move out of position. We've also seen it more frequently in lenses such as the crystal lens which have flexible haptics. These lenses in time with caps or bag fibrosis can tilt an angle in such a way as to move the lens out of position or cause a lot of astigmatism. And finally there can be xionular compromise before, during, or after surgery that will lead the lens to moving out of position. So those are the basic etiologies of IOL malpositioning. The procedure that you're going to perform on the patient that has this pathology really depends on multiple factors. Is it just a refractive error in which case you're going to take out one implant and put in a different implant? It's in a NUG syndrome where you have to really look at the causes of, of the inflammation. Is it vitreous forward that's tugging on the iris? Is it an asymmetric haptic placement where one of the haptics is rubbing on the iris? It has to be looked at carefully and you have to understand why there's a problem before you attempt to solve it. Are there just visual disturbances such as negative dysphotopsias? A lot of time with negative dysphotopsias, we can simply place a piggyback lens in the sulcus given that there's room for that lens and that can alleviate the symptoms. The risks versus the benefits of each possible procedure need to be looked at. Is the capsule open? If the posterior capsule is already open and not contributing to the problem, then there it's a slightly higher risk because when you go to do anything with that implant you might have vitreous prolapse that you didn't have before. Are the zonials intact? If they're intact it's an easier surgery. If they're not intact we might have to look at stabilizing those zonials with a capsular tension ring. Is the iris normal or not? If it's a floppy iris this may be a more challenging patient. If there's been trauma and there's iris missing then we might also have to do something with the iris and it may make it impossible to suture a secondary implant to the iris. And what's the residual capsular anatomy like? Is it intact? Is it not intact? If there's a large summering's ring that's very hard and calcific it may be impossible to pass a suture through that. Or if you do pass a suture through that it may open up that residual and ticker debris to the rest of the eye which can cause more inflammation after surgery than before. We also like to know what kind of an implant is already in the eye. If you know the design of the implant, the style and the power it'll help you better figure out what you're going to do, how you're going to replace that lens or reposition that lens. Is there vitreous prolapse? If there's no vitreous prolapse it's a much simpler procedure though you have to be careful not to cause vitreous prolapse during your procedure. And has the patient had a vitrectomy? If there's been a complete vitrectomy and let's say for instance you cut the haptics off of the optic, well if you're not careful if that poster capsules open the optic can fall down. Or if there's been a complete vitrectomy and you want a suture and implant to the iris and someone who has a floppy iris syndrome, then post-operatively there'll be a lot of irididinesis and perhaps that can incite a NUG syndrome. The patient's age plays a role as well. Anteur chamber lenses are a great option in someone who's older and perhaps may not need an implant for 20 or 30 years and surgeon experience is also important. With more experience you'll feel more comfortable at doing some of the more advanced techniques with less experience you might settle for something that's perhaps not more what should I say perfect but adequate for the patient in your hands. So with that let's talk about general principles for a single piece IOL that needs to be repositioned or replaced. In general the first step is going to be filling the anterior chamber with a viscoelastic material and my my choice would be a dispersive viscoelastic such as viscote. And then once we've done that we're going to open the capsule bag with the viscoelastic. It's easy in some cases it's really tough in other cases. If there's 360 degrees of fibrosis on top of the optic it may be difficult to get under that optic to allow the viscoelastic to fill the capsule bag. There are a couple of tricks that can help you. One would be using a 27 or 30 gauge needle to tease that fibrotic capsule edge up and off of the optic. Once that's teased up you can then place viscoelastic into the capsule bag. Another trick is to go to the edge that has the least amount of coverage by the anterior capsular edge. If you push that edge of the IOL posteriorly quite often you can snake your viscoelastic cannula underneath it and behind the optic and then when you inflate the capsule bag with the viscoelastic it frees up the remaining adhesions and that's generally my preferred method for opening the capsule bag. Once you begin opening the capsule bag you really need to go all the way out to the periphery and take your viscoelastic cannula right along the haptics and inject as you're moving forward all the way to the end of the haptic to free up any fibrosis at the end of the haptics. With the single piece lenses especially the type of lens that has a bulb at the end you're really going to do a lot of viscoelastic ejection right at the end to break that that fibrotic syneco adhesion. Another general principle would would be how to get the lens out of the bag if you're going to exchange. In general with a single piece lens you're going to do more anterior movement of that lens in the haptics than a rotation as opposed to a three piece lens which is going to be more of a rotation of the lens. You want to bring both haptics and the optic into the anterior chamber if you're planning on exchanging the lens. Once in the anterior chamber you can grasp it with forceps or with the second doll instrument and bisect that lens with eye well cutting forceps. With the single piece acrylic lenses they're not real slippery so it's they're fairly easy to hold on to and the MST style of intraocular scissors work really well to cut those forceps and they're now available as a disposable design. Once the lens is out of the eye and and each half that lens should fit through an incision about 2.4 or 2.5 millimeters. Once the lens is out of the eye you'll re-inflate the bag with visco elastic and place the secondary implant into the capser bag if possible. If it's a single piece lens you're replacing it with it has to be completely within the capser bag. If the bag's not intact or if you're going to be using a three piece style lens then that lens goes in the sulcus and if possible you'll want to capture the optic through the anterior capsuleotomy or through both the anterior and posterior capsuleotomy if the posterior capsule is open. If we're unable to open the capser bag completely and free the peripheral syneco adhesions of the haptic then there are other options. You'll want to bring the optic into the anterior chamber and using eye well cutting forceps cut the haptic as far peripheral as possible. You don't have to be all the way out at the bulbous end you can cut it as close as the haptic optic junction but in general you want to move as far peripheral as possible. Once you've cut the haptics free from the optic you then bisect the optic and bring it out just as I mentioned before. Then you can replace this with a three piece eye well placing both haptics in the sulcus and once again if possible you're going to capture the optic through the anterior capsuleotomy or through the anterior and posterior capsuleotomy. Single piece eye wells are a little more difficult to optic capture because of the broad haptic optic junction. It can be done and it's not uncommon in a patient who has a torque eye well that is rotating and not remaining in position that will simply leave the haptics in the bag and lift the optic in front of the anterior capsuleotomy but that broad haptic optic junction makes it a little more difficult and a little less predictable in terms of stability. Now what are the general principles for a three piece eye well that needs to be exchanged or reposition? Well the principles really are not that much different from a single piece eye well with the exception that you can put the haptics of a three piece implant in the sulcus that is completely acceptable whereas with a single piece lens as I mentioned before the square edge of those haptics will cause iris chafing and they're generally not a good idea in the sulcus so please don't put a single piece lens in the sulcus. Whenever possible with a three piece implant when the haptics are in the sulcus if you have the ability to posterior optic capture the optic then you should do that it provides much more stability long term. It also creates a separation between the anterior and the posterior segments so once you have that eye well optic captured in the posterior capsule or opening or through the anterior capsule or opening there's a seal between the anterior and posterior segments and so you're less likely going to get vitreous prolapse. Now occasionally we'll get a three piece or single piece implant that has really strong fibrosis and you can't really get it out of the capsule bag or there may just be one half of the capsule bag that's loose and you really only need fixation on one side. In that instance it's easiest and quite acceptable to simply lasso the free haptic with some 9-0 proline or some off-label Gore-Tex suture and suture that haptic to the sclera wall. You can place the needle in a mattress fashion right through the periphery of the capsule bag and around the haptic and exit through the sclera wall a couple millimeters posterior to the limbus and tighten and tie that suture and then rotate and bury the knot. It's a very simple solution for somebody that perhaps has had trauma and only has weakness on one side of the capsule bag. Alternatively you can remove the entire capsule bag with the implant in place from the eye and then replace it with a sutured secondary implant or an anterior chamber lens. If you're going to suture a three-piece lens to the iris I tend to use 9-0 proline suture and there's some wonderful techniques that will show in the videos on how to do that. You can suture the three-piece IOL to the sclera wall using 9-0 proline suture or off-label Gore-Tex suture and Gore-Tex is my preference. It's very strong it'll last forever and it's quite inert. The knot is compressible so it's easy to bury and when you place this through a sclerotomy it you can bury the knot and the sclerotomy sites tend to be watertight without any suturing. Some of the newer techniques are glued haptics to the sclera which work quite well and are popularized by Amar Agawal out of India and now there's a new technique that's a non-glued IOL fixation to the sclera wall that was actually a video award winner at the ASCRS this year out of I believe Japan and we'll show you a video that demonstrates my first attempt at this and we'll talk about the nuances of that procedure. Another technique that that I think is a wonderful technique is using a B&L A060 lens in Gore-Tex suture. This is a plate style lens which are not my favorite lenses but for sclera fixation they work quite well because there is a hole in each of the haptics so you can place the Gore-Tex suture mattress style and suture it. It creates a nice non-tilted lens a beautifully centering lens and it works quite well. It's a pretty simple technique. The only negative to that it is is that it is a hydrophobic lens so if you're going to put an air bubble in the eye for let's say a desec or a retinal procedure then there's a high probability that lens will pacify so when someone who's going to subsequently need a desec procedure you might not want to use that technique or that particular lens. The newer style anterior chamber lenses are quite acceptable especially in the older patient so a fallback position would be to make a slightly larger incision about a six millimeter incision remove the capsular bag and the implant complex and replace it with an ACI well. So let's look at a video this is a patient who is 56 year old he has dysphotopsias poor vision after a multifocal lens. During the original surgery the surgeon felt the inferior zonals were weak but that the implant centered well. Postoperatively the best vision was 2060 and you can see the patient has a lot of astigmatism but even if you give the patient that prescription the vision's hazy to the patient and he doesn't want anything done with his other eye until this eye is fixed. This is the implant you can see it's off-centered. I thought there one haptic was in the sulcus and the other in the bag but indeed both haptics were in the capsular bag and the lenses is descentered as you can see superiorly. So what we're going to do is we're going to make a stab incision with a 0.9 millimeter millimeter blade and as I mentioned the first step is putting viscoelastic in and expanding that capsular bag with the viscoelastic. We're going to fill the chamber with viscoelastic agent then we're going to make an opening in the origin where the original incision was. We just make a small little perpendicular incision over top of it find the primary incision that was made previously and go into that incision and this particular lens design it's a technus multifocal has no bulbous ends on it so it actually frees up quite nicely and the primary surgeon did a great job cleaning up the caps or bag there there's no residual debris you don't see a lot of fibrosis. We're going to rotate this lens and make certain that both haptics are in the sulcus. We're going to go underneath the lens and what I'm trying to do now is capture the optic anteriorly in the anterior capsule on me. This in this case is not successful because the anterior capsule on me is slightly too big so every time we bring that optic forward it falls right back into the capture bag so now a decision has to be made notice that I rotated the lens 90 degrees and it's really centered well so is it possible that there is just for some reason some asymmetric capture bag fibrosis and that that lens moved out of position for that reason and now that we've rotated it it will stay in position. Well I think that's the case that's the most likely you can push the lens back and forth and it keeps bouncing into central position so we really don't need to take this lens out. Remember the patient still had some astigmatism but now that we move the lens into a different position the amount of astigmatism may not be the same so we perform intraoperative aberrometry confirm there's still some cylinder there and we'll make some arcuate incisions on the cornea and repeat the aberrometry to see if the astigmatism is reduced and indeed it has been patient did well 2020 very on very happy with their vision after this and so for the second eye we're going to use the same style implant so as I said in some cases you'll get some asymmetric bag fibrosis usually it's because the lens has one haptic in the sulcus and one in in the bag but in this case both haptics were properly positioned and maybe there was some inferior weakness but simply rotating that lens 90 degrees was all that was needed. Now here's a distinctly different case this patient from day one was very unhappy with the vision and she simply cannot tolerate multifocal vision so this lens has to come out once again the principles are the same we're going to put a lot of viscoelastic into the capsular bag in this case the poster capsule is open there had already been a yag capsulotomy so the viscoelastic will serve to tamponade vitreous from coming forward and it's secondarily will help to free up the implant because the capsule is open we don't want to spend a lot of time trying to free up the haptics that's just going to invite more vitreous prolapse so we're going to instead cut the haptics from the optic and then bisect the optic and remove each half half of that optic leaving the haptics in place they will cause no problem if I roast into the periphery of the bag we'll then place a secondary implant first into the ciliary sulcus and this is a three piece implant because remember single piece haptics do not belong in the sulcus but the three piece haptics can go into the sulcus and we're going to dial that second haptic in and then perform optic capture just pushing the optic through the opening and that secures the anterior segment from the posterior segment prevents vitreous prolapse so we can go in and remove viscoelastic safely without vitreous prolapse hydrate the incision with now a single focus interocular lens and the patient is much happier with the vision she's now 2020 although she needs reading glasses she's not complaining of overall poor vision third case is a 60-year-old gentleman cataract surgery in in 2013 dislocated lens which was repositioned twice did well for a couple years and then noticed a sudden change in his vision and it turns out that one of the sutured haptics the suture broke and this is what the lens looks like so when i first look at this patient i thought well why is that lens sutured we we can just optic capture and center that lens through an optic capture so that was the plan here the remaining suture that is still intact we're going to cut that free yet through after a congenital pyritomy place viscoelastic over top of the vitreous and then try to rotate this lens within the sulcus and optic capture and as you can see as we're trying to push the optic through the anterior capsular and posterior capsular opening it's not going through it's staying in the sulcus it keeps coming forward why might that be well the probable reason is that there's vitreous prolapse that we're just not recognizing and the vitreous is holding that optic forward so through a side port incision not through the main incision we never want to do a vitreous me through the main incision through an appropriately sized side port incision where you won't get a lot of fluid or vitreous egress we're going to do the track to me and remove that the vitreous is preventing that optic from going posteriorly and then we're going to optic capture it but once again it's still not staying behind that open capsule and it just turns out that the the capsular opening is a little too big and once again we're not going to get a secure hold of that optic through that large capsular opening so now we have a fallback position and that is put in a little by-call and bring the optic into the anterior chamber and do an iris fixation of this implant we can do this all through small stab incisions so this is a 9-0 proline suture that we will put through the iris around the haptic that's just behind the iris and out through a secondary stab incision and we're going to tie this not with a mechanical style suture but with a modified seeps or not the problem with a mechanical style suturing is that um when you try to tighten down the knot over the haptic you have the width of the cornea that prevents the knot from going down tightly so during the surgery or at the end of the surgery it may look like that lens is nice and stable and centered but in time that lens can that the haptics can rotate in that loose knot and come free again so we use a modified seeps or style knot and this is a technique where the part of the haptic I'm sorry part of the suture is brought out through the incision we tie the suture outside the incision and when we pull both ends it tightens down on the haptic and I don't have a great video to demonstrate that there are some intricacies to the seeps or not but we'll try to get you some uh in a subsequent presentation um Mike Snyder and Gary Condon have some great videos and publications that detail this quite nicely in the journal of cataract and refractive surgery so we do this to both haptics once both haptics are sutured we can cut the needles free from from the knot and then all we need to do is prolapse that optic behind the iris and if you went peripheral enough with your needle passes you get a just a very slight ovalization of the pupil and a nicely centered implant with long-term stability at the end I always like to go behind the optic or remove any visco elastic or as much visco elastic as I can and any any vitreous that may have found its way a little bit forward again we're doing that through a side port incision we then close the conjunctival pyrimine and that patient should enjoy good vision long-term vision stable vision so this is a patient who had uh traumatic cataract loss of virus tissue 30 years previously macro hole repair so he's had a vitrectomy recently diagnosed with the dislocated IOL and the implant is very dislocated you'll see the capsular bag, somerings ring and IOL completely in the anterior chamber and there's very little iris remaining so in this case we're going to plan on an artificial iris with a sutured implant to the artificial iris and then suture the artificial iris to the sclera it's a challenging procedure I'm not showing this video to show you an artificial iris but I'm going to show you a mistake that I made in doing this procedure so we've made a large opening this is a single piece it's not a foldable IOL it's about a set six and a half millimeter optic and as I'm bringing the IOL out of the eye the capsular bag pulls free from it and remember the patient's head have attracted me so where is all this capsular bag and somerings ring material going to go even though I'm trying to get under it to get it out the incision it's going to drop right back into the back of the eye so this was not very well managed and what can we say to the patient is well I think you're going to notice a new floater so that patient's going to have to have a retinal surgeon come in and remove that debris and then we'll plan for an artificial iris and secondary IOL down the road a better way to manage this we'll show in this next video here's a very similar case I believe this is a plate style haptic lens you can't even see it it's so far out of position but as we retract the iris you can see that it's it's just dangling by one or two zonials we'll very carefully bring this up into the interior chamber and you can see in this case as well not only do we have the implant in the capsular bag but you have that somerings ring not as dense a ring but definitely a somerings ring there and this case occurred just a week after the case I just showed in the previous video so I learned my lesson we're going to bring this into the interior chamber and before we try to bring this out of the eye we're going to place a protective barrier behind this implant to capsular bag complex we're going to remove the iris retractors as well so that we can get the pupil to contract in this case the patient had iris tissue so it's nice that the the iris itself can act as a barrier to that lens material falling back and here you see me putting some myacol into constrict the pupil but in addition we'll put a sheet's glide a little piece of plastic underneath the implant in the capsular bag to further protect from any material falling into the back of the eye we can then rotate the implant bring it out of the eye now fortunately most of the capsular bag came with it partially because it has that sheet's glide to allow it to slide but not all of it did and here you see some residual debris that did not fall into the back of the eye because we had that protective barrier there and we can usher that debris out of the eye safely with the sheet's guide in place and not worry about falling to the back and there's the last little bit of it will burp out with a little bit of viscoelastic and then we can place the secondary implant and then we can place the secondary implant the secondary implant is going to be a three-piece iol and it's placed into the anterior chamber first grasped with mst forceps put behind the iris completely holding on to it you don't want to let it go here and then the optic only is brought back in front of the iris this is a technique that gary connan showed me at one of our park city meetings and it really is very simple it's an easy manipulation of the intracural lens and then like in the case before we're going to suture each haptic to the posterior surface of the iris with modified seeps or not once the haptics are sutured securely we can then prolapse that optic back behind the iris and we'll have a nicely centered stable intracural lens let's move on to another case this is a case where a crystal lens an accommodating lens and a patient who had a four-incision rk developed a lot of astigmatism and lo and behold she had what's known as a z syndrome so one of the haptics is angled anteriorly and the others posteriorly the haptics are fibrous quite strongly into the capsule bag principles however are quite the same we're going to open the capsule bag with visco elastic agent and we're going to try to open that all the way into the periphery of the bag and this is the dispersive agent viscote that we're using swinging the cannular around to break break the fibrotic adhesions for 360 degrees and we're going to go right along that haptic and put as much visco elastic as we can to get that adhesion to break and then much like a single piece lens we're going to bring this anteriorly we're not going to rotate this lens we're just going to pull it anteriorly with the visco elastic cannula and you'll see the haptics free up now they don't always free up that nicely sometimes you have to cut the haptics and just like with a single piece lens you can leave these haptics in the bag and they're quite stable there they don't cause any inflammation in the bag once you get them freed from the optic once you have this lens forward we're going to cut the haptics free again using mst scissors and an mst forceps and then we can bring each of the haptics out through the incision the incisions 2.4 millimeters and you can bisect the optic or bring it out in in one piece through that small incision we'll then clean up any debris with some with a automated irrigation aspiration tip this is the polymer tip that alkan has and in this particular patient who wants a refractive outcome or once again you use intraoperative abirometry to confirm lens power and astigmatism and now since the capture bag is intact and fully inflated we can put a single piece lens because remember it's going completely in the bag it's not going in the sulcus the haptics and the optic are in the bag and then we always in these lens cases like to put a little myocall in the end just to confirm that the pupil rounds and that there are no there's no vitreous forward and I do have one final case this is my first case of a patient who's going to have a glue non-glue sclerophyxated lens she had had several lens repositionings before the lens that's in now was iris fixated causing an ugg syndrome she's had a complete vitrectomy so obviously an iris sutured lens in this patient is not going to work well for her she has quite a floppy iris and I think just the the mobility of the iris hitting on the implant was causing some intermittent hemorrhages the haptics can be rotated to free them from their from their suture fixation to the iris and once the lens is free from that we're going to place a 30 gauge thin walled or large board needle at an angle through the scleral wall about two millimeters behind the the limbus the distal haptic is then fed into the needle as you see here and you only really need to feed it in two or three millimeters I go in a little bit further here but again this was my first case so chalk that up to inexperience if you feed it in too deeply it's hard to manipulate that implant for placement of the second haptic the the syringe is taken off the needle so that that needle hub is free holding the haptic and then 180 degrees away from that the second needle is placed and the proximal haptic is fed into the lumen of that needle this is harder to do in a small pupil you see I have iris retractors in place so I can visualize that and because of the difficulty with the angle that I had in this particular case we do get some kinking of that second haptic the needles are then withdrawn from the scleral wall you try to do it in unison so they both exit about the same time here you see that the proximal haptic came out first and I'm going to grab onto that so it doesn't go back into the eye and then I can remove the second needle and as I do so the haptic is exposed now we have both haptics externalized and in order to keep these haptics in place without glue we need to deform the haptic we do that with cotteries so we'll create uh use a disposable cotterie to create a bulbous end of the haptic and do the same thing on the other side you don't need to touch the haptic just get close to the haptic and you'll see it melt and a nice bulb is created and then each of these bulbs is tucked into this scleral wall just barely underneath the top of this scleral wall because you don't want it under the conging taba where it can cause some irritation and perhaps erosion you want it in that needle track within this scleral wall but not so deep that it ends up back completely inside the eye in this case I was a little bit frightened of of of its stability so I put a little bit of reassure sealant and really is not necessary though you can see how nicely the lens centers remove the iris retractors and this patient is now about three months out and well not quite three months but several months out and she's uh got a beautifully stable implant it looks like a routine fecocase now so that's the non-glue scleral fixated IOL technique I don't have a video to show you of the agarwal glued technique but it also is a nice technique so in conclusion IOL reposition or exchange I believe is becoming more common part of the reason is the refractive desire that the patients have with cataract surgery today and part is it is just that patients are living to be older so we have a lot more lenses out there and older patients and in time we're seeing some of the zonials come loose from pseudo exfoliation type of conditions the management decision depends on the patient's complaints and the pathology that's present a well thought out plan is imperative to success I'm Dr. Sione from the Institute of Utah in Salt Lake City thank you


How do you end up dealing with Wildin' Out? How do you end up dealing with 85 South guys like a Chico Bean? How do you end up meeting, did you and Ricky Smiley ever do some stuff together? I'm touring Ricky right now. Okay, let's talk about this stuff. Man, let's get it out here. Shout out to Ricky Smiley. Shout out to Ricky Smiley, man. Pray for your dog. Yeah, he definitely been going through something lately. I was about to say I went down to Mermon Ham and linked up with a few people that he rock with. But let's talk about it. Yeah, we on Boss Talk 101, 101. Man, I gotta put you back, man. I gotta put you back. I gotta talk about your career. I gotta talk about your accomplishments. My people need to know there's a lot of people that wanna, you know, they wanna do comedy.  You gotta give them the blueprint, print, black run to where they can learn, man. And you that, you the go through guy. Don't do what I did. How long you been doing it now? 12 years. 12 years. You waited two years? No, well, that. I felt like I waited about five years too late. But that's just my own little personal thing that I gotta deal with myself because I never thought I was good enough to do this. Like I'm funny at the barbecue. I can pull a girl. I'm good at a job, but professionally, I never considered myself a real comedian. Even after I was the best in Dallas and had been for years, I doubted myself. It's what took me so long to get on the road. It's what took me so long to get into competitions. Well, hold on. Where did that stem from? As a child, were you raised like that to be fearful? No. People say subconsciously, like your mama said something and you see kids hold that and feel, you know, self-confidence is not there because of that. No, that wasn't where my fear looked. Where did it come from? My fear lied in the fact that when you go into something that's popularity-based, you have to be what people like.  But it also puts you in a place where you're scared to go, where you have to get validation from others. So in comedy, as funny as you may think you are, you gotta go on that stage and the people in that room are gonna validate you. They're gonna validate whether or not that's a good joke or not. So I had to deal with that.  I don't know why you even thought to do this with your life. Well, it's because they've been lied to the last 25 years why they was at church saying, baby, you could be a star. You need to be in Hollywood. You need to be on TV. So I never let the locals' people love for me, give me an overinflated ego. Even though they were seeing something in me, I ain't seeing myself like, no, bro, you got it. I'm like, I just got it to you. Because if I go to New York, I go to LA, I go to Chicago, I go to Atlanta, places where comedy was supposedly made and validated. If I don't have it to them, I don't got it. Is it different in every state?  Depends on where you are to cater to the people? Some things are regional. Okay. Certain logo, lingo, certain words that they call this, they call it something else in another part of town. And you have to learn all of that. Right, like down here we say soda water. It's pop in other places. It's coke in other places, you know what I mean? So you gotta learn little interchangeable stuff like that. But for any comedian that's starting out, get away from telling jokes that are funny to the people around you. Because that's a joke you can't use nowhere else. Get away from using stores and places of business that are local to you. Because nobody else knows it. Ain't no Kroger in certain parts of the world. Right. You know what I mean? Ain't no Pigley Wiggler, ain't no Wayne Dixie. You know what I mean? If you ain't never been to Chicago, you've never heard of Jewel Osco. But that's the grocery store, you know what I mean? So get away from that kind of stuff. So then you don't compartmentalize yourself as an act from this place. A local. I tell people all the time, I'm not a local comedian, I'm just from here. I'm not a Dallas comedian. I'm a national, international comedian that's from Dallas.  Yeah, he told me to list my credits in my resume and tell people. So let me write that down real quick. And I really want to just dive into how you met them. The process. That's what I said. I don't want nobody to take my route. Yeah, but the process for you to meet these people, for you to be this writer, for you to be this guy that stands on stage proud of the day, that was a process. Yes. And we need to hear the process. That's all I'm saying. So it may not be a pretty picture, but we don't need to give people a pretty picture cause a lot of times it's not gonna be a pretty picture. So let's be real with the people so that they can learn. Cause it's some guys that they don't think that they can start at an age like you did as well. But then you give them encouragement. Rodney Dangerfield was in his 40s before he started his comedy career. Sally Field was 39 before she ever got cast in her first movie. You know what I mean? 51 Savage was 51 before he ever went viral. You know what I mean? Two chains was damn near 40 before his rap career really took off. So there is no like, no specific time or time in your life to do something. If it's never too late to go back to college, it's never too late to start a new career path. So how old were you? I was 25. Which is good for me. But you could have done it earlier. I was grown enough to have something to talk about. And so when it takes off and you, how do you end up dealing with Wildin' Out? How do you end up dealing with 85 South guys like a Chico Bean? How do you end up meeting? Did you and Ricky Smiley ever do some stuff together? I'm touring Ricky right now. Okay, let's talk about this stuff. Man, let's get it out here. Shout out to Ricky Smiley. Shout out to Ricky Smiley, man. Pran for your dog. Yeah, Pran for you. He definitely been going through something lately. I was about to say I went down to Birmingham and linked up with a few people that he rocked with. But let's talk about it. So shout out to comedian A.G. White from Brooklyn, New York. A.G. White was down performing at Addison & Pryb. Nene Lee was doing Fat Tuesdays. I was a regular at Fat Tuesdays. I'm murdering it. I featured right before A.G. went on stage. A.G. come tell me, dude, you dope. You need to leave Dallas. Year later, A.G. White comes back. I'm doing that same show. He said, yo, you been on the road? I said, nah, I ain't had 10s. I ain't had the money to get out there.  Wow. Right after that, comedian Mario Tory from Atlanta comes and performs at a comedian queue. He used to do a show called We Got Necks at Hyenas. So Mario Tory headlines. I put our feature for him. He said, man, if you ever in Atlanta, hit me up.  Got a cousin that used to live in Atlanta. Said, man, if you ever in Atlanta, you got a place to stay. Got another dude to say, man, if you ever get down to Atlanta, I got $100 for every show you do. Wow. That's big.  Rolled that Greyhound bus 22 hours. Pull up in Atlanta. My man CJ, come pick me up. Boyd me at his house. Go do Mario Tory's room. Go do all these rooms.  You need to come here.  You don't fit it all in some chicken wings. I got a spot for you tomorrow. I got a room, my host.  You know, you do three, four rooms a night, two, three rooms a night for about two weeks and you're in that town. Also in that town is gonna be somebody from somewhere else that's also in town knocking around. So that's why your network starts to build. So I went from Atlanta to Chicago, from Chicago to New York, from New York to Detroit, went all around. You didn't come back home? Didn't come home until almost Christmas. So it was a whole year? No, I just, I would pop back home, pay rent, you know, see my lady, see my daughter, you know, get back on the road. Get home, company club that never gave me an opportunity, called me. The feature that they first called was sick. Second feature they called was out of town. Third feature they called couldn't get a ride. It was two last minute. God's plan. They called me. Hey, Black Run, are you available to feature this weekend? No, the guy before me, he wasn't able to do it all weekend. That's what it was. Are you able to feature this weekend? Yeah. Six shows, you can do all weekend? Yeah. All right, first show is Thursday, eight o'clock. Be here. You'll be featuring for Dick Gregory. Wow, big.


Here come Chelsea down the right now. Rhys James looking to get across it. It's a good ball into Giroud! Off the crossbar! Back to Alonso! Smashing in the rebound! You have to say it's been coming. Giroud with the header off the bar, and Alonso hammered it with his left foot. Frazier's corner in towards the header! Close range, and the Cherries are back on terms. Bourne-McGuine, Chelsea won. And then Lewis Cook's trying to get away from Rhys James. And then Lewis Cook nutmegs Giorginio. The fans enjoyed that, and now Lerner on the attacking edge of the centre-circle. Fantastic finish skill by Lewis Cook. He's really started this half really well. Oh, Billing, what a lovely turn, and now it's played to the right-hand side, where Stacey's in. And Stacey's cross is turned in by Joshua Kidd! Face of three minutes! Bourne with a turn this game on. It's Hakevi a couple last season. Back on the score sheet this time round. It's Bourne with two. Chelsea won. With Christensen deeper. Back it comes to us. The look-out of the captain. Threads it in. Petro Schaer! What a save range now! Alonso! After rounds down, they made a spectacular stop. Chelsea with five minutes left have levelled it up. At 2-2, a brace for Marcus Alonso.


Boom What's up money geeks mr. V here welcome to another video guys so into this video We are going to talk about lucid model tickets and bought L CID Again, this is a company that we've covered here on the channel I've told you guys giving you guys every reason why I like the company and why I think that they stand a chance I gained a monster like Tesla so again, there's some big news and I want to make sure that you guys are aware for those of you guys that are investors in Lucid this is something that you want to stop paying attention to because this is very important So we'll cover that into the video and talk a little bit of price protection and and then see What what happens from there? So before we get started guys if you're new to the channel We took about how to earn money how to save money how to invest and build wealth So that's something that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and a notification bell So you don't miss out on new content. So when it comes to lucid, I've covered a ton of videos I'm not right. I'm gonna create a playlist on the channel I'm gonna hook it up here so you can definitely go watch out at play list Some of the information in that playlist might not be relevant because we follow this the company sequentially As they make moves we did make moves, but if you just want to understand lucid definitely go check out that watch list and You'll see why I like the company So we talked about That they were gonna start doing delivery in the month of October So we went through this momentum in September Really follow that squeeze up to about $28 and they're a little bit of pullback all the way down to about 23 And then now the squeeze is time to move back up and the reason is because if I can bring up the screen here Lucid recently this is just the news Lucid recently tweeted this image that I was image of them shipping out the first batch of the lucid dream a Which is I mean a huge milestone in his company guys We've talked about the fact that we want to see lucid vehicles driving around town like we see Tesla So when Lucy gets that point, it's gonna be a game-changer Things that I want to see right now. This excites me because even though lucid has gone through the process of Doing a lot of the testing internally That's different from actually handing this over to consumers to actually try it So when consumers try it because there's certain things that people just gonna randomly do is push certain Combination of buttons in the vehicle without even thinking and when they do that something is gonna break or something's gonna happen And then they're gonna find out all these issues and then lucid might jump in fix them And they will get a better product but until then it's gonna be shaky or rocky because We want to get full test not just tested by lucid themselves, but tested by actual consumers So right now the plan on actually making 520 lucid Dream air the ones that have the 520 Mal range Now when mostly they're done with that first phase then they're gonna switch now and start doing the other versions of the lucid They have the touring That they can they're gonna be working on and then I think 2022 or 2023 That's when they're gonna start working on the sedan But again guys if you are an investor in this particular stock, I keep telling you Patience it's what matters here because if you're looking for a quick win They're not gonna see in lucid. So unless you have cash that you can feel comfortable Knowing that in five years that cash can triple or quadruple In size then lucid might be a good alternative for you So for those of you guys that missed out on Tesla My I talked about is in some other videos I think lucid is the best logical options here in the United States right now I know in in in China we have Neil where I I'm an investor in Neil because obviously I invest in American companies And I want to diversify a little bit because China is up on coming all the economy The middle class is growing obviously they are interested in electric vehicles as well And I'm an investor. Sorry. I tried to diversify some of that So Neil's got some of some in my portfolio But again today is all about lucid the fact that they are studying to do their delivery They said they're gonna do it by the end of the month. So today We see these Semi trucks like you know going around town already. So hopefully Customers are gonna start posting videos of their lucid air that they got from the company and start driving them and start making a bust on social media and Who knows you're gonna see some celebrities are gonna start doing some promo videos and just hyping it and that's That's what we want. That's what we want to see Tested break it fix it make it solid and they were good to go So again for me if you are currently looking to get into lucid guys Where lucid currently sits right now today just because of today that news push lucid up all the way to about 2740 before pulling back and then this is after hours right here sitting at 2696 so it's probably gonna push up a little bit It won't surprise me that as soon as people get their lucid a This thing is probably gonna go test 30 to 30 between 30 and 33 that is the range that I'm actually looking at right now between 30 and 33 But again, be aware that if there's any bad news you guys know exactly what Tesla went through So this isn't this is no news to you guys any bad news that comes out Be aware that lucid is gonna take a beating because people are gonna post and Ambassador company so they're gonna take a beating but again just like Tesla. They're gonna learn from the mistakes They're gonna fix stuff. They're gonna get back. And I think that they already have learned tremendous amount of Way to navigate his issues from Tesla because Tesla came out. There was nothing like them out there There was nobody to learn from so imagine now that a they've seen Tesla go through it I mean as a matter of fact have people that worked at Tesla now run lucid So if you left Tesla learn everything there and you didn't learn how to navigate all these issues Then it's on you. I don't think it's on The companies of you the guys that are running it would be your fault So I anticipate that these guys are ready. They took the time went through the process They didn't rush to put vehicles out there just for the sake of putting putting vehicles out It it took your time design it make sure it's perfect Build it tested it before they start shipping them out and again That doesn't negate the fact that when consumers that testing it's gonna be a different kind of testing I still know that's gonna happen, but at least it gives me comfort just to see that They've gotten to this point. So let me know again in the comment section What you guys think are you a lucid fan? Are you a lucid investor? Are you excited just like I am right now? I don't have the money to order one just yet, but trust me I'm gonna have I'm gonna have one in my driveway someday So I'm still I got my fingers crossed. I'm gonna have one in my driveway. I want to try it Because I think the vehicles are just just nice and cool Again, they're 520 miles their range. That's excellent I mean for the most part with my kids most of the distance that we drive Around to go visit my wife's parents and everything that would fall within that range so we can drive 520 before I charge it That's awesome. So I do I do like it, but again, that's just my take you tell me what you're thinking If you're not in Lucid Just wait again.  It's fine if you can average your way down But otherwise be patient, you know, don't click that button.  Don't panic right now and jump in. I'm actually helping you all right now I don't think I'm trying to stop you from getting into the stock if you're trading That's absolutely fine. Trade the momentum like hey if it's moving right now buy it sell it and make some profit But if you're looking to invest be patient hold on to that cash It's gonna come back to you. You can jump in so let me know again the comment section what you think If you're new here, we took a bar to earn money how to save money how to invest and build wealth There's something that interests you go ahead and hit that subscribe button in the notification belt So you don't miss out on your content also guys if you sign up to webo and deposit five dollars to get free stocks I'll put the links in the description below get free crypto as well and as always guys Do you do diligence? Don't be greedy savage.