That was a lot of work. Thanks for the help. I don't think I would have done it without you. I'm glad it's out there. Oh, that? Oh, you didn't get a Ted too? Yeah, check it out. Yeah, it goes right to it. It's awesome. Well, it was a lot of fun. I just hope everyone else likes it too. Chicken wing, chicken wing. Hot dog and below it. Chicken, chicken, chicken wing. Hot dog and below it. Chicken, chicken wing. Chicken, chicken wing. Oh, hey, I had this great idea. Maybe you can help me. We're gonna make an animated musical for Thanksgiving. All right? It's... All these holidays have these have these songs and movies and all that, but where's the Thanksgiving musical? We need one, right? So I got this idea last night, and I think it's going to be epic. Here's the, here's my problem. I don't know how to make a movie, and I want to show it in a theater. So we got to figure that out, too. So, right? I mean, like big screen, everyone Thanksgiving, come rolling up into theaters and watch this movie. It's going to be sweet. So yeah, I'm just, I'm going to research a little bit. I'll let you know what I find, okay? It's gonna be great. Just trust me, all right? Okay, so I've been researching a lot. I watched six YouTube videos. I know, six. I think I'm an expert at making animated films now. Yeah, so there's a lot involved. It has to do with different departments and how the film goes. Here, it's easier if I just show you, all right? Take a look. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in the case of a movie, we have a lot of pictures that happen that we call frames, that typically there's 24 frames per second, which are really just pictures flying past your eyes to process it and make movement out of it. And every minute that gives us 1,440 pictures that our eyes process to kind of piece together parts of this movie, and a typical movie being 90 minutes long gives us 129,600 total frames that we're looking at this entire time to make sense of and make movement. And if we want to tie that back to how many words we have, that's 129,600,000 words, not including spoken dialogue. But let's actually look at how movies made. What are the parts that go into it in departments that make up animation? So the typical movie is made up into three acts, and these acts each have different parts that tell, you know, the story or conflict and world building, which then each act kind of breaks down into smaller pieces, which is what gets processed and moved through in the story. The smallest piece we call a shot, and a shot is kind of like a camera angle for one piece of a scene. Multiple shots make up a scene, which drive the story forward somehow, either character development or whatever. And those scenes kind of make up a larger sequence, which end up making the shots or the acts as a whole. But what goes into these shots specifically, as we move through and animate the film, we have to do different things to the pictures to make them look realistic on scene. So what we start with is what we call the layout department. And layout is typically just getting the story pieces together with camera angles. And it's really a blocky character. It's pieces in the movie that aren't realistic looking necessarily, but it gets the sense of what the entire layout of that picture will be, which then moves into animation, which where we actually get more emotion from the character, we animate the characters more, we give them more personality and how they react to things and how they move in the scene. That's a lot of the animation pieces there. We're going to move into a little bit more of what we call FX or special effects, which is basically animating anything that's not a character. Things like water and smoke and fire. These are all elements of the story that need to move as well, but aren't directly tied to a character themselves. We'll move into the lighting department, which actually brings life to a lot of this stuff. It gives shadows and lighting and makes it look very realistic and usually one of the final stages in making an animated film. The very last step is also what we call stereo or 3D, which literally takes the entire movie and renders it twice. So we have essentially the right or left eye and we shift everything a little bit and render the other side. But let's look at how these different departments affect what our infrastructure looks like for rendering. So as we go through these different departments, our difficulty for what we need to render in our compute resources goes up pretty drastically. From layout to animation, we're going to get some complexity just in making these scenes, but really around FX and lighting and in stereo is where we get a big spike in the amount of compute resources, the amount of machines and computers and stuff like that that we need to kind of make this film. And that happens at the shot level, but also at the entire movie level. As you complete more shots in story, not all the shots are completed at the beginning. You complete them as you go. And so at the beginning, you might have 10 or 100 shots ready to kind of animate and go through this process, but you don't get all of the shots until much later. And so you're going to get this huge spike of a lot of shots being worked on simultaneously, which means we're going to need a lot of infrastructure later on in the film, not as much early on. And if you remember the amount of frames we had, there's some data out there that a shot or a frame typically takes about 24 hours to render, which means if we did this all upfront, it's going to take us about 355 years to complete rendering this film, not just making it. So we have to do a lot of stuff in parallel. But that also means that we need all this infrastructure around this point and not so much over here at the beginning because it's just not needed. At the end of all of that rendering, we essentially get a movie. And that's the thing that we take that's the master that we send to a movie theater. And that's what they play on their screens. So in a lot of cases, this is a physical piece of media that we take as such as a hard drive. And sometimes it's digitally sent through different secure mechanisms and encryption. But that's essentially the whole piece of how the movie gets made and where some of this infrastructure fits in. So it seems like a lot of work. But it's doable. I think between the two of us, we can we can make this happen, we'll get it done in time. And it's going to be amazing. I just think everyone's going to love this movie so much. Okay, still a few things with infrastructure I need to figure out and just the process in general. So I'm going to go get some stuff. Okay, so let's look at those compute resources we need, because this is going to get complex. If I'm a single artist with a single machine, it's pretty simple. I render a frame. I use all the CPU, all the memory I need. I just wait for it. I render the next frame. I wait for it. I render the next frame. This is a linear process. This makes sense. Where this gets complex is if we have lots of artists doing lots of different shots in parallel, we're probably going to need more machines. So if we if we take more machines and add them to the equation, it helps because we can we can distribute this work all over the place. We could say, Okay, 123. But it's not that simple. Sometimes we we do need to coordinate this a little more than just throwing jobs out there. It's not just going to work. Great to collect everything into a single movie at the end. If we're just, you know, if we don't organize this. And so we need something some intelligent scheduler that is going to coordinate that force as a shot comes in. Not only do I need to track where that's going to go how much resources it needs. But I need to track assets inside of the shot itself. Here. Let's say I want to render this bear. Right? It's a vacation bear or whatever in the story. It's fine. But I need to know which version of the shirt I have because the shirt goes through different phases of cycles of being complete with different textures and patterns. The bear the character itself will have different rigging mechanisms and animation. So the bear might change and I want to make sure when I render it's finally I get the latest version of the bear the latest hat and the latest shirt. But what if what if we just change it in the middle of the movie somewhere later on they say, well, it's not a vacation bear anymore. Now it's a skateboard bear. Or we change the genre completely. And it's not a skateboard bear anymore. It's a, you know, it's a superhero bear. I don't know. These things change as story progresses. So we need something that intelligently tracks all these assets, some sort of asset management system. And we also need a scheduler that can schedule these jobs. And looking back at the compute side of it, if I say I want to schedule, you know, this frame over here and this one over here, usually that's fine for smaller systems that have a handful of cores and memory. I can just use the whole system. But if we get larger systems, we can actually cut those up into smaller pieces and render two frames at once or three on a single system. But we need to be able to isolate that compute and resources separate from each other on the same system. And containers are a perfect fit for that, right? We can we can tell it how much CPU, how much memory can use, what sort of mount file system it can use to get to track the assets and to mount volumes into it. All those sorts of things will work great. And so we can use those containers on top of this with these high CPU memory jobs. And and then we can use our orchestrator to to put those jobs out there in order based on when an artist finished shots or when a shot is done ready to be rendered. There are a couple of things that are still questions here. Like how do I get metrics from from these jobs? We probably want something that scrapes them, whether that's an agent on the box or something like Prometheus or something pulling that information. But I think I think we're we're on our way to have something that we can render a lot of this stuff at once. Yeah, so I think this is a good call. I mean, we'll look at Kubernetes. We'll look at Prometheus. We got to find a custom scheduler. There's there's other ones out there that aren't just these aren't web services. They are not horizontally scalable. They take up an entire system. So if I want to add more systems to the to the render farm, I can't look at CPU and memory usage because in an ideal state, 100% of my CPU and memory is being used. So an auto scaler is not going to work for that. I'm probably going to have to look at something like Q depth. How many jobs are waiting to be rendered? And if if I have too long of a queue, maybe I add more EC2 instances or I add more pods to the cluster and able to I'm able to scale up that way. That actually seems like a great idea. Yeah, let's let's try that. So remember all those assets we're tracking and rendering at it's going to take a lot of storage. The assets before we render them after iterations and it's everything's just going to add up. We need a lot of disc for this. Oh yeah, and remember that a scheduler we might need to make for the rendering. We got to put it in order and everything. I think for our movie, we can find one off the shelf. There's a couple that exists that'll make basically graphs of assets and dependencies. So at a larger scale, it probably wouldn't work because you're going to have multiple movies going on at once. So you need something custom. But for us, I think we're okay. Cloud storage? I don't know.  There's you know, plenty of different things we could try. As long as it's you know there's it's scalable enough. So that makes sense and yeah, it's just a bunch of files and as long as the artist tools and the rendering engine can access the files and is fast enough. Yeah, cloud storage actually makes a lot of sense. It's a lot easier than this. All right, well I think we have everything then. Let's let's just try the cloud storage. It's got to be easier, so let's get to work. All right, let me tell you a little secret about how movies are actually made. First, you open your app. Second, put on your headphones. Third, cut to a montage. It's done. Ah, well that work. We gotta get to theater. I'll be back. Okay, we're gonna do it. We're gonna make it. We'll get the movie out in time. Yeah, this is it. This is oh no, they're closed. Oh, how could they be closed? No, no! Yes, of course I'm eating my emotions. I thought people would like the movie. It's a bummer that all the... I mean, if they're closed, what are you gonna do? You think so? I don't know. That streaming, it seems so much work. Besides, how would you do that? I don't... like we just built all this stuff for making the movie. Like, how are we gonna stream it? I don't know. It doesn't seem like it would work out. Can't be too hard, right? I'm still bummed, but I don't know. Maybe it's an option. Oh, look. Oh, good you're here. Yeah, so I was thinking about what you said, and I think streaming might make sense. I mean, it's a lot of other stuff to do, but I've been researching it a lot, and it kind of just picks up where we left off. So I think we might be able to do that. Here, let me show you. This is what I think so far. This is what we got. Okay, so we have this movie file now that we made, and we were gonna send it to a theater, and since that's not gonna work out, we gotta figure out how do we get this to a TV? And it turns out that TVs aren't movie theaters. They don't play the same formats, and who knows how to work those remotes. So what we need to do is figure out first just what's a common format that we can play for, let's say, this TV here. And they're a little tricky because there's different models and different formats that they support, but let's just go with something that's a little bit standard, I guess, or common for this use case. That's just so how we get media in there. So let's transcode this movie file into something that we expect the TV can play. So we'll use this movie, and we could send this to TVs right through the mail. We could actually just like copy these a bunch and put them in envelopes and send them to people and let them play them, but we don't want to use that. We actually want to stream this online. So the first step we're going to need is some sort of like storage of what movies we have. We need some sort of metadata server, some database somewhere that we can put all of these files in all these movies and store this metadata so we can get that later and people can look it up and say, okay, what's your catalog? Where's this information? So let's just have some database and put it in there. And then what we actually want to do with the file itself is change it and chop it up into little bits. This is easier to kind of push over to TVs, sort of like packets on the internet, right? We can store all these little files with some reference data, what movie it's in, which part of the movie it is, and essentially where it's stored. And let's put all of those in a bucket somewhere, somewhere we can access online, put all these together into what we call a playlist. And this playlist is we need to store it in our metadata server as well, but it's going to give us the order for all these files so that when someone requests it, they can they can get those files directly and we can stream it to them. And there you go. We have a stream on a TV, which is awesome, but not the whole story. If we have a TV way over here on the other side of the country, how are we going to get the files to them? We could stream them and send them all the way across from our centralized buckets, but that's probably not the most efficient way to do it. So what we probably want to do is have a bucket that's close to them as well. And we can say, okay, well, if we put it here, and we synchronize this data, we just put all the files over there, then we can send it and it's a lot closer. And again, this sort of makes sense. But not when we have TVs all over the place, we can't just put buckets everywhere. And so for that, we're going to have to figure out something else. But we can rely on this thing we call the 2080 rule, where 20% of our content is viewed 80% of the time, which is actually really helpful for us. Because instead of using these larger buckets with all the information, we only need to actually synchronize 20% out to smaller edge locations. And these edge locations, we can use a CDN and just put them all over the place, which is great. And 20% of our data goes here. And the other 80% can still be fetched from these centralized locations. And as the media gets more popular, we can sync it out somewhere else. But now we can sync some of the larger content between these buckets and then from there synchronized to the smaller CDN cache locations and all the TVs can access it. Now what happens when we look at a global view that still kind of works, we can still store 80% of the content centrally and 20% all over the place, which is actually really great. So this, I think that would scale for us over the globe. We have the TV here. And if you have a TV, you probably have a phone too. And there's also a good likelihood that you're going to have a tablet or something. And, and then maybe even a game console. And so how do we get files for all of these things? We can't just send the same files to all of them. And we can, you know, make multiple copies of them. But your TV is probably going to have something like surround sound. So we need another version for that. Oh, and maybe you have HDR. So we might need another version for that. And what if you have a low internet connection, you can't use the really big files. So we need another version for that. And this just keeps going on and on and on. And it gets really messy. But we have to track all of these files in some in that metadata service so that when the right client tries to access them, they get the file that they want. Let's simplify it, though, just that's too much. So now let's look at what it actually takes to open the app from a user perspective. What sort of infrastructure do we need? And we're going to need a few things up front for like a sign up service, as I need to be able to create an account. I need to be able to pay for this accounts. And I need to probably set up some sort of profile. So we're not going to focus on these, but this has pretty standard user databases and PCI compliance for payments and some other metadata for which sort of profiles are part of a larger account. But let's let's focus in on just let's pretend someone has an account already and they're just going to open the app and try to play a movie. What does that look like for the infrastructure? So first step, we have the app, go ahead and open it up. And the very first thing, of course, when you start an app is you need to authenticate. So we need an authentication endpoint that we're going to get either a token or username and password just to prove that you are who you say you are. And this service is going to talk to what we call a session service, which will actually make a temporary session for us to allow us to get access to the other back end pieces that we might need. So it's going to send basically just some sort of hash down to the phone that we'll use later. And the first thing that after we've authenticated is we want to load our home screen or the main page. And so we'll look at a list service is what I'll call it here. And this is just going to provide us all sorts of information that goes directly on the main screen. List is made up of multiple different pieces. And it combines a lot of this information from that metadata service and other places. One of those things that it's going to create or use is a CDN mapping of which CDNs are we using for which locations? Because if we want this to be all over the world, we'll probably need more than one CDN. Multiple different CDNs will use different networks more efficiently based on peering and partnerships. So we want to make sure that we're giving the best CDN for the network and client that someone's using. So the second piece here is the client. And that depends on what type of phone you have, what sort of files format does it support, what DRM does it support? All that kind of stuff comes into this client piece where I can see from a request, okay, you're going to want either fair play or some other DRM with this sort of file with this sort of audio with HDR or not. And then this list will also look at personalization, things like what's on my playlist, what's on my watch later, which things do I recommend to you? And personalization is such a long word, let's not write it that way. Usually people write it as a number NIM, which is P13N, which is 13 letters in between. So that's our personalization piece. And the final one is this license service, which will depend on where you're located. If you have if we have a partnership or media rights to play that in your country, things like different files for different countries also matter. If you didn't know, a lot of animated movies have a different version for the United States versus, say, China or Japan or Canada. And so we can fetch some of this stuff properly depending on where your geolocation is as well. So all of these things will work together. So first, our personalization and license service will give us some content based on where you're located and what we think you'll like. And then that CDN and clients will give us what playlists match those files. And so we can say, okay, I'm just going to send you these files and it's going to have all of the playlist information right embedded into it so that when I go to click to play it, it's already there. And this is going to repeat for all these different files that we want to show on the home screen. We could do that for this, you know, hero bar here, but also for all of the other bars that we might have on the home screen to get you the information you want. So you can just start playing it right away. What happens if you want to search for something? That's a slightly different problem for infrastructure. So let's say we want to just text search for a movie. And the first thing search is going to do is it obviously going to work with that list service. And the list service also can have collections that are either automatically or curated by a person.  This is great because we can return all of those if I search for one, hey, you probably want to see the other ones as well. So list is great at that. But the full text search is a little bit more tricky because we need to rely on what you're typing to not only get the words that you wanted, but maybe something similar to those words. So if you type in a search, let's look at how that flows in this text situation. We'll use that metadata service that we had before, and we can probably just put solar or elastic search in front of it for a full text sort of view of that metadata. But just we can dump the information in there based on ingest. So when we pull in a file, we can throw that into elastic search. But a full text search of that is going to be a little cumbersome sometimes. So we might need to change that and use something custom. GraphQL API probably makes a lot of sense here because we can more fine tune the query that we want to make. And the big benefit here is that 80 20 rule is we can cash it. So 80% of our searches will probably cashed. And we only have to rely on Alaska search for the last 20%. So I type something in here into the text field, go to GraphQL, that's going to look up in the cache. If it's there, if it's a cache miss, okay, now we need to actually fetch the full text and get the result that you are looking for. So we can combine both of these backend APIs into this main search API. And whenever I search for something, send them the one or two files that we actually want for a result. So here comes our results. And once we get the movie that we actually wanted to watch, that shows up here. And what does it look like to play a movie? Finally, we're there, right? And again, this has all that information of a playlist for where it's located. I can just go access those files directly, but we're missing a step here. There's DRM on these files. How do we understand and read these encrypted files with the DRM? So again, these files are just stored in this bucket, DRM wrapped depending on the clients. And so we need to talk to some DRM service. And remember our session token that actually is what we're going to use. So the DRM backend knows that our session is going to be valid based on their own communication, but also which token we get. And it's going to give us a key that will allow us to locally decrypt those files. We don't want to do that prior to this. So once I finally get that key from the DRM service, I can access those files and there we go. Now we're loading. Now we can press play, except for a couple small things. While I'm playing this movie, I'm going to have a heartbeat service, something that's actually going to call out to some other back ends just to kind of let us know where we're at. And the first heartbeat that we're going to actually want to send is back to that session service. I want to refresh this session service occasionally just to make sure that my session is valid, that I still have access rights to, you know, get this content that I can still do things. But that new session also works with this DRM service to make sure that if the DRM key changes for certain files or certain formats, I'm still able to decrypt those. And all of that works in session, in session works in concert together to make sure that I'm getting the right information. And so if what happens if I go offline, right, like my heartbeat stops, now what do we do? This is exactly the same problem as say, download and watch offline. In this case, I get a slightly different DRM key probably that will give me a longer lease on watching those files. So I can prefetch all of the files from wherever they're located in the best formats, and my DRM key will expire at some point, but it'll be more long live than if I'm watching with internet connection. So this is great because once I come back online, I can refresh my session and DRM token and everything else just works. The final two pieces here that we want to actually heartbeat to are what we're just going to call the watch endpoints and the metrics endpoints. So watch is super critical for things like continue watching. As I'm watching this movie, I'm constantly sending back a little bit of information where I'm at in the file, which movie I was watching, which timestamp I'm at. That really matters for when I want to pick it up later either on another device or just later in the day or tomorrow or something like that. And then this metrics endpoint gives a lot of performance about what it looks like to stream this movie. Is my network still fast enough? Is the device, is the format good for this device? Have I had any latency or issues? And being able to get that from the client side and match that up with what the back end is seen is hugely important to be able to understand the performance of the entire stack. And so I can get metrics from both sides and then get a bigger picture, a better picture of what's happening in the service. And that's just a huge win. So there we go. Now we're watching a movie. All of those pieces come together to put this movie together and stream it to my phone. Okay. So I mean, that's a lot, right? There's a lot of stuff going on there. We have to track all the assets. We have to distribute them, but we can rely on cloud services for that. There's CDNs that just exist and can distribute it. And we already have the file. We can just upload it and it does all that, you know, transcode it and cut it up. All that stuff's going to make sense. It's going to be a little tricky with all the different platforms and endpoints, but I think we can do it. And the infrastructure, do it all in the cloud, use the services that exist, RDS, Kinesis. And of course, we'll use some Lambda and step functions and Kubernetes and all that stuff. That's all going to be there. But really the end of the day, we just want to get the movie out there and this, instead of the one theater, we can go everywhere, right? Directly to the consumer. Oh, and think, they'll pay me five bucks a month. I mean, that's not bad. I think we should do it. All right, let's go. Let's get started. Yeah, no, I think it's ready. The website's up. I mean, it's going to go live here. Look, that's it. I mean, you can get to it right there. Here we go.


I'm Rusty Kamori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou School Boys Varsity Tennis Team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game, and it's about inspiration, leadership, and building a superior culture of excellence. My special guest today is the author of Amazon's bestselling book, Get Up Girl. She is Sarah McFarland, and today we are going beyond empowering women. Hey, Sarah, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Coach Aloha, thank you so much for having me on board. I've been watching all of your episodes for several years, and I've been learning so much. I'm excited to be on here and be part of this incredible community of business leaders that you continue to champion.  He did. It's been such a harrowing tragedy, what's gone on in Lahaina, as well as Kula, and our hearts have just gone out with the Maui community, and my husband ended up going, he has such a big heart, and he ended up going out that weekend after the fires just to support and help with one of the local churches. He did what he could, and that was to just help with some of the supplies that came in to distribute them and help as a security guard at night so everybody could sleep peacefully, and that was definitely something devastating that we're all going through with Maui. Well, that's Patrick for sure. He's a man of great character, and Sarah, you have a beautiful family.  Well, thank you for that, Coach. I think I'm always trying to strive to do better. I think we all are, so that means so much to me that outside looking and that you can give me some credit there, because I think as moms we're always feeling like we can do better, right? It really takes a village to raise a child. They say that, and it's true. I come from a blended family where we've got two moms and two dads, and we're all working really hard to raise our kids. And I think being on the same page coming from divorce has really helped to kind of set the tone for our family. And so I'm very blessed that I have an incredible other mom, and the kids also have Patrick as their dad and Corey. And so we're really blessed to make it work as a family. I think something that I've always taught the children is to think for yourself. I think that's the most important thing that we're all on board as parents to teach the kids to think for themselves, to think outside of the box, to be independent of thought, and to really make sure that we're instilling value to them as individuals so they can be courageous in this era and have the value that they need so that they can, like my book says, to roar loudly and find their inner voice. Well, Sarah, as you know, I teach tennis to your two kids, Regan and Victoria. And they are just absolutely wonderful kids. I mean, you're right. I mean, it's teamwork as a family to really raise kids. But I also train you in tennis. And what do you what do you feel what do you love about our tennis lessons the most? I think for me, I I think I just really love playing with you. And we've kind of revolved our lives around that. I think it's important to note that when you can play with the champion, play with the champion. And so we revolve our life around the opportunities that we have. And it didn't come in another sport. It came in tennis. And we have been very, very grateful to be able to do that as a family together. And, you know, Patrick can even get on the court. Sometimes the kids are there. We've made it a family sport. And so I enjoy everything that we're doing together from the team effort as a family that we are able to do with you. And that's on the court. That's off the court.  So it's more than just the game. It's it's everything that's involved in it. So thank you. Well, yeah, Sarah, we know each other for many, many years now. And can you share with our viewers just about why you've had a successful background in business and what that background in business was? Yeah. Well, the background in business, I used to I used to work in politics from a young age. I did media relations, legislation, drafting bills and came from that and then went into being a chief of staff for one of the state local state representatives from there went back to school. Originally was at Shamanon University for my undergrad, then went back to school, had had kids in the process, had my masters. At Hawaii Pacific University for business and then started two companies back together back to back. One was called Landmark Logistics. Another was a distribution company that I did private label for private label brands for two of the largest grocery chains here in Honolulu and was mass distributed on all the outer islands. After that, I moved to Nebraska with my new husband, Patrick. And he has a his family has a large manufacturing company over there. And so I came to he came to support and spend time with his family and I picked up a development project ten acre parcel. I rezoned it, annexed it, did the entitlements, worked that project through and with the utilities, the grading, the sewer, the paving, all of that and sold it and somewhere in between I decided to write a book. And now I currently do consulting for M&A as well as succession planning. So, Sarah, I've I've seen you in action through many of those years and many of those businesses. I'm very impressed with you. Everything you do, you just make every every business better. I mean, that's that's your track record. And I want to know what what compelled you to write Get Up Girl? Um, Get Up Girl is is written. The inspiration behind it is to reach a demographic that for women and to offer within business to offer. Perhaps a different approach to some of the modern day feminism that is out there right now. It's a book that inspires the courage. It's a book that teaches how to get up, you know, it embraces healthy femininity without having to embrace the emasculation of our counterparts. You know, and I think women are looking for something to pivot that's healthy. You know, originally feminine, modern day feminism has has definitely changed and become a little bit more polarizing. But traditional feminism is really was a movement for equality for all. And that includes men as well. And I think we don't I don't think we have to have one to have the other. You know, I don't think that femininity and being a strong woman are antithetical qualities, I think. And I believe that you can have both. But I also think that it's important to raise up everybody around us. And that includes men. That includes other demographics and everybody around us. And I think that we can do that when when we come from a healthy place within feminism, you know, I don't embrace the victimhood mentalities that come with it in certain regards. I champion getting back up. You know, that's why this book is called Get Up Girl and and really being able to find your inner voice. And we do that through it's done through identity and purpose and balance and addressing boundaries and what those healthy boundaries look like and how to implement them and, you know, getting knocked down and having to come back up time and time again and what that looks like and not to take things too personal in business but to really just be able to champion your voice and finding yourself through the process and really allowing yourself to go through that process. And Sarah, what I love about your book, too, is it's great for men because men can have greater understanding about women. And Sarah, right now the the big popular movie is Barbie. Can you explain what the differences are in terms of the actual reality for women and feminism? Well, I did enjoy Barbie, you know, I liked some things at it and I and I maybe didn't some other things. But overall, you know, I loved to see the shift in femininity being embraced again. And I love that because I like I said, I don't think that angry feminism sells anymore. And I just don't think it's something that our younger generation is willing to embrace or to champion because it's angry and we're all looking to be inspired. We're all looking to be hope filled. We're all looking to go on a journey together and lift each other up in this moment in time. And we're looking for those healthy leaders. And so what I really I, you know, I take I take things out of it. I've written my book three years ago and rewrote a lot of it this year. But I do I do take some of the healthy things out. It kind of came out during the launch of my book. So I did include it just just so that I could be modern and relevant in the times right now. But there are some things and then there are some things that I think we can do better. And and it's always important for women to be able to evolve. And so my book is really a stance of evolving within that modern femininity. Well, Sarah, you are definitely a role model for women empowerment. And what do you what would you say are some keys for really finding your true identity? Identity is a lifelong journey, I think that we go on. I think there's never been a greater moment in time to know who you are. We have an identity crisis with our youth. We have an identity crisis that is very prevalent in society today. And that's why Instagram and social media and all of these outside marketing companies and platforms really are able to monetize on that. You know, identity is a monetizing tool out there.  And then and you'll be categorized and you will be labeled. And I think it's it's important to know who you are, you know, why you take the way that you take. Why you think the way that you think what's your purpose, which is correlated to to identity, you know, I think people are looking for leaders in this moment in time. And we've got to be able to give them something that's healthy, you know, as we're continuing to grow up, as we're continuing to to get older. You know, there are others that are looking up at us and what do we want to reflect in society today? And how does that how does that look, you know, purpose and identity? They they go, they should go hand in hand. And for me, I think throughout the journey, I didn't really know who I was. I identified as a woman in business. I I'm Korean, you know, and my father's, you know, was in special forces. And so I was just raised a certain way, you know, I'm the daughter of a first generation American Korean woman.  So for me, there are good things that were taken from that as well. But I I think a lot of who I was was wrapped in what I could do and what I produced. And the amazing thing about COVID-19 was that it gave us a time to pause. And if you were running so fast like I was from one thing to the next, you had to be forced to just stop and and and go through the process.  You couldn't really hide behind things in COVID-19. You have to really embrace who you were. And so for me, that was extremely healing. And I I took advantage of it. I I I went and I was on the mainland at that time. And I I went from one one corner of the US to the next. And then back again, we did the whole van life thing to reverse the US. And this was at a very difficult time for our country where it was on the shootings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. And for me, that was a really harrowing moment. I like it in the Lahaina fires and the and the cool fires for me. Just such a difficult time, you know, you want to do more and you want to do what you can to help. And that was such a such a hard time for me in the same way. That time in our history was such a divisive moment was very difficult for me to overcome. And I really needed to understand it on the ground level and so I went on this journey and this trip and we went to those places. We went to St. Louis, we went to Louisville. You know, I I went to the Colorado Mining Towns and the little towns in Tennessee. And we went to LA, you know, we went everywhere just so I could gain a better understanding of the moment that I was living in.  I mean, it was just such a remarkable moment in time. And and as free as I ever would be in that moment is kind of where I found a little bit of my identity, where I was just unhinged from the mechanisms of control that really had me, where I always had this this idea of what I was supposed to be. And it was kind of the first moment in my life where I was like, I I want to break free. It was my very big, big girl break free moment of work. And everything that I thought that I was supposed to be. And I found a greater purpose on that journey. And that was where I had birthed Let Love Be Greater, which is the 501C3 Foundation for me that helps to empower women through education. And it's, you know, along that along that path is where I found that. And sometimes we need the calm and we need just the stillness to be able to allow ourselves to go through that process. And that's what it did for me. Well, Sarah, you're obviously very adventurous and very cultured for sure.  I've faced a lot of adversities. I think as women, we all do as people, we all do as humans. We all do. And I've tried to buy companies. I've put eight months into things. Didn't work out, you know, only for the door to be slammed in my face. I've been sued. I've had to lawyer up at times. I've been backstabbed. I've been had distributions just stopped in one season of my life and had to sell a development during COVID. The list, you know, I could go on and on and on. But I think as women, we all have to go through those things, you know? And as business owners, we all have to go through those things. And to find ourselves pitting or to find ourselves backed up into a corner and, you know, not not being able to move and find ourselves in an inability to mobilize is not where you want to be.  And it's an it's an important part of life.  If you allow it, they will indubitably be your end story. But you can also use what's happened to you to be the beginning of your story. And I think adversities are great like that. I've been through some things, but they don't make me. They they have given me a voice to promulgate what I want to champion in this season. And I think that's what we, you know, we need to do if we're pioneering. And that's what it is to be a leader. You know, you're going to you're going to be able to pivot and to find these areas that you really want to champion. And it's it's going to be from coming through some gritty things. You know, we've gone through some stuff.  And so the adversities are really I feel like it's just a platform to launch into, you know, all the things that you want to become. Sarah, I love hearing all your insights. And, Sarah, you have both of my books. And I love how you just mentioned about adversities and and, you know, obviously, you know, that I talk about welcoming adversities and looking forward to challenges, because when it happens and we deal with it, we become a stronger person for that experience. We become smarter. We become better. What are some things that stood out to you in the books? So much stood out in the books. I think I told you before, but I love I love book number two. You know, I love I just I felt like things just continued to get get better, you know, from beyond the lines, beyond the games. And I think one of the most impactful stories for me reading it, because, you know, I'm I'm basing my my book on getting up is when you were in your Missouri Championship game. And I think you had you had a rolled ankle. You had something that was going on with your ankle and you were winning up until that point. And then you started to lose because you were in a lot of pain. And the coach ended up coming out and saying, you know, don't look at the things that you don't have, you know, begin to see what you what you've got. And I thought that was so profound because so often we're looking at what we don't have, you know, versus what we do have.  You know, you began to shift the way you're hitting the ball and the way that you're holding the racket and you began to use what you still had to be able to produce momentum in the game. And you ended up winning that championship and you ended up having that goal become that reality. And I thought that was so powerful because you persevered through something that was seemingly impossible and extremely excruciating and difficult to do. And yet you didn't allow your circumstances to dictate how you were going to win. You chose you you you focused in on what you wanted to do. And that was the outcome. And I love that because so often we get down. So so often we've got issues and things that we can't do because we're looking at, well, I can't do this. I can't do that. I don't have this. I don't have that. You know, I don't have the proper funding. I can't get the bank loan. They're not going to do business with me. I'm not enough of what they're looking for. I don't have the talent. You know, we're always looking at what we don't have. But it's a great reminder to just focus on what you do have. You know, I am going to be this. I am going to fit the role. I can win the end game. And I think having that just that self-fulfilling prophecy ends up coming to pass. Well, Sarah, I love that you love that story about me playing against the University of Missouri. And yeah, that's what Coach Ed's advice to me was. He said, you know, instead of worrying about things that you can't do, focus on things that you still can do. And that was probably the biggest best advice I ever got. And I'm sharing that with so many of my teams that I was coaching. And, you know, I could have easily fell into the victim mindset.  Now, what are your thoughts about trading in victimhood and fear for a healthy mindset? I love the, I'll start with this because I really loved it. I loved the Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary in Netflix. And Arnold shares with you his past. He's like, I've been abused and I've been all these things. And he's like, boo-hoo, you know? And I was like, oh, my goodness. But he said, you know, he used what happened to him. He said, you have a choice. You can either use what's happened to you to break you or to make you. You have a choice. You have that choice. That's powerful because I don't think we realize how powerful we have our abilities are, you know, the power of our own choice, the power of the way that we look at each other and how we view our own selves. And he said, so I chose to take everything and use it as the fuel. And that's exactly what he did. He used everything that happened to him to be the fuel and the driving motivation for the success that he had achieved. And obviously he succeeded in everything that he did. And I feel like that's something that's very related to our life. You know, we can choose to have fear. We can choose to be the summation of the things that have occurred in our lives or we can choose to overcome them. We have that choice, you know? We can choose fear or we can choose to have courage.  And you're gonna have to be willing to face those fears and to overcome victimhood. Because victimhood is soul-crushing. There is no end game in victimhood, you know? It's, yes, you can embrace these ideas, but ultimately you're embracing losing, you know? And as you know, coach, everything about your books is about winning and being the champion. You know, it's not about being good. It's about being great. It's about being the best. And so victimhood is ultimately soul-crushing. It leads to nowhere. And we need to begin to champion winning. We need to begin to champion champions. We need to begin to champion something that will be able to lead this generation out of so much of that type of thinking and that fear. I totally agree with you, Sarah. And Sarah, what would your advice be to women or just people that are dealing with failure? You know, I wrote in my book, get up, get up girl. But get up, fight, get beat. Rise, repeat, fight, overcome, win.  It's important to choose to persevere. It's important to allow that momentum to go forward. And if there's a mountain in front of you, find a way to get through to the other side. Crawl, dig through it, go around it, climb up it, some at the top, but whatever you need to do, get over to the other side.  Don't allow the closed doors to be the end game for you. Out of every hundred deals that you've got, you just need one. And that's statistically within PE, private equity, a lot of times you've got a hundred deals going through and just that one goes through that you need. And so even if you get the door slammed, somebody's gonna eventually say yes. It goes to the persistent victor. It goes to the one that has effort. Intellect means nothing without effort. I tell that to my son all the time.  But as we've seen at times, I tell him, it means nothing. It means nothing to have intellect if you can't persevere, if you can't get back up. And I think have that effort. I reward the effort, I don't reward his intellect. And I think that's important for our younger generation because a little bit of wind, a little bit of storms, just knock us off our feet, you know, a little bit of rejection. And we're not able to get up and go forward, but being able to push through those moments is so invaluable and so important. Now, Sarah, in terms of finding balance, I mean, being an entrepreneur and balancing family, personal life, what is your advice for people to find balance with their career and their family, personal life? Well, I think balance is like a seesaw. And, you know, nobody has fun when there's too much weight on one side. And so you just have to reshift. You have to refocus. You've got to reapportion those things. And I think it's important to know your boundaries. No one to say no, you know, saying yes to everything doesn't make people value you more. In fact, it's the opposite. If you say yes to everything, people end up taking you for granted, you know? So having healthy boundaries is extremely important. And when balancing, don't get your blueprint from social media because it's not true. It's a lie. You only see what they want you to see, you know? That mom that's baking those cookies, eating them and running her empire and raising those kids, she's probably got a team to run that empire. She's working out for five hours after she's baked those cookies and ate them, you know? And she's got a hired au pair. So, you know, don't compare yourself because comparison truly is the killer of dreams. Don't compare yourself to social media. Don't get your blueprint from it. Balance will not be found from it. And no one, when you need to rebalance, just shift some things. No one the season to build is. No one the season to focus on your family or your health, your spiritual, mental, physical. No one it is time to make that company again. And so knowing the seasons and understanding how to say no, I feel like is extremely important in balancing. Sarah, I gotta say you nailed it right there. I mean, you're so right about saying no. So many people wanna say yes and that just kind of wears on them. And I mean, I know that you and I both, whatever we do, we wanna do it to the best, the highest quality that we can. And Sarah, I wanna really thank you for taking time to be on the show today.  And just wanna thank you for taking time to be on the show today. Thank you coach. Well, I'm honored and I've gotten to learn so much from you. And like I said, you've been an incredible coach and counselor and friend. And so it's been invaluable. Thank you. Thanks Sarah. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit rusticamory.com and our books are available on Amazon. I hope that Sarah and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.


Musicians have essentially been the canaries in the coal mine. What's happened to creative artists, to journalists, to photographers, to some other professions I'll talk about is an early sign of what could happen to the whole of society. Now the reason for this has to do with the onset of what we call automation. The idea that machines can do work that people used to do. Now, this is a fear with a very long precedent. The idea, one animating idea was that as technology progresses, people will be needed less and less. And so there's actually a funny, you know, if Marx had this idea that at some point in the future the machines would do a lot of the work and people would be freed in a communist utopia to lounge around. He had this image that you'd relax reading the classics in beautiful gardens, this sort of thing. He had a sort of an image of it. Now, this notion that machines would put people out of work was proven wrong again and again and again. What seemed to happen instead of the terror of the Luddites was that when there would be new machines and factories or elsewhere it would create new kinds of employment that required more and more skill. And so we started to accept this idea that actually rather than better and better machines putting people out of work, better and better machines instead create new kinds of roles for people that require more and more education and that everything's good. And I still think that's true in terms of fundamentals. There's still reason to believe that in terms of the basic foundational truth that is a reasonable way to understand the world that could continue far into the future. However, something changed. And what changed was this notion that software should be free, that intellectual property should be made free. If we pretend that people aren't needed and we don't pay them, then obviously we create a distortion in the economy and obviously we create an unsustainable pattern. So what's funny is that this thing that started off is like, well, we want free music. It's turning into a pattern that could potentially undermine the whole idea of a market economy at all. Now I want to say a little bit more about how this idea took hold. I have tremendous sympathy for people who say, I don't have to pay for music. I don't have to pay for movies. And the reason I have sympathy for them is that we've broken a social contract with them. If we go to the period before the internet, it's true we expected them to pay for these things. But on the other hand, the production of these things created so much employment. It created so much wealth in the society that went around that it was a two-way street. If you go back to the music business, at the turn of the century, there were hundreds of thousands of recording musicians in the United States alone who were making upper middle-class incomes, which is astounding. It's like a whole industry that's essentially vanished. It's almost entirely gone. And so what we're telling people is you will no longer receive any of the income, no benefits. Oh, but we still want you to pay for this. Like the point I want to make here is that if you want somebody to pay for something in a market economy, there has to be an underlying social contract in which they also have opportunities. It can't be a one-way street. And in order for the tech companies to grow as quickly as they did, as we did, if I'm counting myself as part of it, we had to offer all this free stuff. We had to have this incredible efficiency where we didn't negotiate with anybody. We just plowed ahead. That was our method. But the problem with that is it broke the social contract on both sides. The critical point that has to be understood is the method by which wealth is concentrated these days, because I'm making the argument to you that it is the concentration of wealth that is unsustainable. So how is the wealth concentrated? The wealth is not concentrated by people gaining monopolies about who gets to sell things. That's the old-fashioned way. That is not what we are doing. Instead, wealth is concentrating by forcing everybody who doesn't own one of the biggest computers to take all the risks in an economy and whoever owns the biggest computer takes no risk. So it's actually the risk distribution that causes the concentration of wealth. And so this is a process I must explain to you if it isn't immediately clear, because it's absolutely crucial for understanding modernity. Just beforehand, we were talking about Uber. And Uber defends itself from criticisms that it's destroying middle-class aspirations. And Uber will say, no, no, no, we're creating new options. We're creating more of a demand economy. We're creating efficiencies. All of those things are true. Just as with language translation, I think the fact that you can get a quick approximate translation is fantastic. I just want to pay the people who make it possible. I think the actual program and the actual service are fantastic. I don't think there's such a thing as an evil program. So it's not the software that's the problem. It's denying that the people exist whose value is being regurgitated by the program. In the case of the Uber driver, the problem is not with the nature of the service. I think it's nice to be able to have used a phone to call a car and to have the efficiencies of the network unite people who want to drive with people who need a ride. All of that's great. That's not the problem. The problem is that Uber never takes any risks. The driver takes a risk. The driver self-finances. The driver doesn't know where the career is going. Once the driver gets older, there's no more responsibility to that driver. So Uber and Facebook and a big hedge fund on Wall Street, all of these entities that use the biggest computers, what they do is they start to operate like casinos and all of the little people in the network take risks to do things with each other, but at the center there's no risk taken. And so it's that radiation of risk away from the biggest computers that is the problem. If we look at where we are and where we might go, we face broadly two choices. There's two roads. Now, this is oversimplified because actually there are many variations of each, but very broadly speaking, we either move towards some sort of a society in which people are no longer first class economic players, but instead they just are supported by the society. This could take the form of the basic income model, which has many proponents in Switzerland, of course. It could take the form of some sort of socialist or communist experiment. There are variations on that, but basically instead of people being entrepreneurs within a system, they become supported members. Now the alternative is to try to broaden the idea of intellectual property to become fine grained and distributed enough to apply to all kinds of areas where it hasn't before. To apply, for instance, to somebody who plays a go game that's grabbed into an algorithm that's then used to create a so-called automated go program. Why isn't that person compensated? That person provided data that was critical for the program to operate, and yet we think it's okay just to steal it. Now, when you talk about this idea of a universal data rights system, it brings up many interesting immediate questions, and I'm sure if anyone who encounters it for the first time, they might think, wow, this sounds incredibly complex and difficult. Let me address a couple of the questions that might be coming through your mind if you haven't thought about this before. One question you might ask is, wow, it sounds like an ambitious, complicated thing to do, and here I can speak with authority as a technologist. It's easy. I mean, compared to the stuff we do all the time, this would be relatively easy, compared to just an everyday project in Silicon Valley. We already track commerce to billions of a penny all the time for other reasons. We already track provenance of information for other reasons all the time. This would not be that hard. I think it's totally doable. So the way I would imagine it working would be approximately this. Any time any pattern of bits comes into existence, whether it's a game of go, an example of natural translation, music, a movie, whatever it is, whether it was put there on purpose by somebody or whether it was just measured off of somebody involuntarily, the provenance of that pattern of bits, its origin point, would be noted. And then downstream, as it's used in different algorithms, as it's used in any way at all, there's an estimate created of how valuable it was, relatively, in the function of that thing. And then a micropayment would flow backwards to the point of origin. Now, if this sounds exotic or strange, I have to point out that the original proposal for digital networking at all, the thing that started it all, which was Ted Nelson's idea for Xanadu before the ARPANET, before the Internet, the original model, which was also called Hypertext, which is where the HT and HTML comes from, included this. So I'm not talking about some radical addition. I'm talking about returning to the original idea that seemed obvious for how a digital network should work back when it was fresh. We've only become hypnotized into thinking it sounds strange because we've gone down this very weird road. I think in the future people will look back on this and think, why did they think this was weird? This is natural. We can imagine a future in which people are constantly getting billions of little tiny streams of income all the time. Right now, the way we think of our economic lives is we earn money in fairly big chunks.  So you have more fine-grained spending than earning. In the future, everybody will have fine-grained earning, where you'll constantly be getting little payments from all over the place from different algorithms. Now, why is this important? Algorithms are becoming the new societal control paradigm. Algorithms from Facebook can not only can causally get people to vote or not or to vote for certain candidates without those people being aware that it's happened. Facebook can demonstrably change people's moods without them being aware that it's happening. We have this, if you remember Skinner, we have a Skinnerian box that everybody's in now where whoever controls the central computer potentially has the power to simply control society. It's far transcending the power of money or the power of votes. It's a form of direct manipulation by measuring people and then changing the feedback to those people. Now, as it happens, we're very lucky in that the current generation of people who control Silicon Valley are, I think, unquestionably the nicest, best-intended, best-educated, most pleasant ruling class in history, which is great. But here's the problem I have. Whenever you have a tremendous concentration of power and influence, even if the initial people are attractive, that will tend to be inherited by people who are less attractive. So whatever you thought of the Bolsheviks, they were far more cute and attractive than the Stalinists, right? And so there's this tremendous danger that this concentration of power we've created will be inherited by people who are less and less attractive. And so I just don't think it's a tenable way to run human affairs. If we look at the history of societies in which there's some entity that doles out benefits to people, that tends to be associated with petro-states or weird dictatorships or communist experiments that become extremist and violent. Again and again, we see many, many experiments that really do not preserve individual liberty, even though they might seem to at first, even though they might be put in place through a popular movement at first. I'm deeply concerned about the long-term fate of a basic income model. And that's my motivation for looking at this alternative. So now we come back to some kind of vastly expanded version of intellectual property. If such a thing were to come into existence, it's crucial that it go both ways. People have to feel that they're part of a social contract in which they will benefit as well as spending money. We cannot expect people to only pay, pay, pay and never benefit from the Internet. Right now we're seeing in all of the developed societies a situation in which young people are experiencing, they're witnessing their own prospects narrow while they're looking at an incredible concentration of money around the biggest computers. A comment about optimism and pessimism. When I talk about this in Silicon Valley, I often, I see jaws drop. Like you said, what, what? Because I'm challenging our state religion, if you like. I really am. And the retort I always get is, you're such a pessimist and we're all optimists, how can you be so pessimistic? But I reject that categorically. To me, the person who's the optimist is the one who feels that problems can be addressed and are worth addressing. I feel that what I've just given you is the most optimistic possible speech about technology. The pessimists are the pan-Glossians. The pessimists are the ones who believe that everything is as good as it could possibly be. Now, we're facing a whole world of challenges right now. We have climate change, we have freshwater crises, we have immigration crises, we have political instability. They're all of these things that are all very, very hard. In that spectrum, I actually think this is an easier problem to solve. And it's absolutely crucial that we aggressively solve the problems that we've created ourselves because we need to reduce our problem load. This is going to be a hard century and we should not be compounding other problems with this thing that's really fixable. So, save intellectual property, broaden it, make it much more fine-grained, make it much more accessible to more people, make it apply to a million other things, including people whose work patterns help inform industrial robots and factories, anything like that. Broaden it, broaden it, broaden it. Save the middle class. That's my talk.


If you're looking for a video on a specific topic, simply type in what you're looking for in my channel's search bar, and if I have videos addressing that topic, it will take you right to them. Enjoy!  It's Adana. Welcome back to another Q&A Tuesday! Thank you guys so much for joining me on this journey and coming to my channel to see what this is all about. If you don't know what Q&A Tuesdays is all about, well actually it's PA Q&A Tuesday, so you can ask your PA related questions in the comment section below. Just leave that there. And if you haven't already done so, go ahead and subscribe to my channel! Alright, so let's get into it. Excited about these Q&A's, exclamation mark. My question for next time, how and where in the CASMA application should withdrawals be explained? Do they always look bad to admissions committees, especially if they are not prerequisite courses? Thanks Adana. So, how and where should your withdrawals be explained? So, it's not really like a designated place per say in the CASMA application. There are, as the specific schools will have secondary questions or application essay questions where they give you the opportunity to explain that, but not all schools do. With respect to CASMA, no, there's not truly a designated spot. However, if they do give you the opportunity to explain any like laps in your schooling or any dips in maybe your GPA, you can explain it there on that designated section. For me, I don't know if it really looks bad to admissions committees, especially if it's not related to one of your prerequisite courses. I think that's something that you should just go ahead and ask the committee's admissions directors at the schools that you're trying to apply to directly because they'll be better able to answer that. But I don't think that it would look bad. I mean, I don't know if schools even look at your entire transcript like that. I think they more so look at your prerequisite courses, what courses you deemed as prerequisites to meet those requirements, and then any additional science courses for your science GPA. But I don't, I mean, I don't know. So, the best thing to do when you don't know is just go ahead and ask the school directly. That's what I did with any questions that I had and anything CASPA related. I kind of like just bug CASPA and I call them all the time. They were like my friends. So, if you have any questions about CASPA and that application process specifically, go ahead and call them. They're usually really helpful with answering those questions. Since PAs don't have to do a residency in the field they want to specialize in, does that mean they get on the job training? What are the advantages of doing a residency? So, with respect to that, yes, you don't necessarily have to do a residency, but there are a lot of PAs that do do residencies. And then now that more doctoral programs are starting to pop up doing a fellowship or a residency is kind of becoming like a thing. And there's probably going to be like a drive towards that in the future. But yes, we get on the job training and not just on the job training, but in rotations when you're going through trying to figure out, hey, do I want to be an ERPA or a surgical PA or a family practice PA? That's what that rotation is for. We're doing a lot of it in school as it is. And then when we're on rotations, we get a lot of training, shadowing, we're able to like practice a lot of our suturing, that kind of thing. And then when we apply for jobs, there's going to be an extensive training period where you're getting, you're on the job training, and then you're kind of just like sit off to off to work. So that's usually how that whole process happens. As far as advantages of residencies go, I mean, I just feel like you're just more marketable. You're just a better fit for whatever particular residency you did. If you did a surgical residency, I think that that would look a whole lot better than somebody who's coming straight out of PA school, just maybe doing two surgical rotations. You've had extensive training in this. You've spent months just in and out of surgery rooms and, you know, performing or first assisting on surgeries. So I feel like it just makes you a more marketable, marketable PA. And it's only going to be better for you and beneficial for you in the future. Do you have to become a CNA or MA prior to applying to PA school? So not necessarily. You don't need to be a CNA or an MA before applying to PA school. You can be an EMT. You could be a farm tech. You can be an ortho tech, can be a surgical tech. It's really a matter of getting health care experience or patient care experience. There are two different things. Health care experience is anything in the health care field. So even if you're like answering the phones at a physician's office, that is health care experience during the health care field. But when schools specify and say you need to have direct patient care experience, that is specific to you directing the care for that particular patient. I know CASPA breaks it down a lot easier or they try to do a really good job of explaining what patient care experience is in their frequently asked questions section. But that is one of the things that they state. So there are some positions as an MA or a CNA where you're not necessarily directing the care of your patient per CASPA. However, there are other positions that are. So you just have to be very specific in what your role as a CNA or an MA was to show that you were actually day in, day out like you're seeing patients, you're taking blood pressure, you're doing all of these different things. But no, you don't need to be a CNA or an MA specifically. You can do anything that you'd like just as long as it is getting health care experience and patient care experience. I want to go to PA school. I need one more LOR. Do you know where I can get that? Okay. So yeah, I don't know exactly where you can get one more letter of recommendation because it has to be specific to you. So if you already have one from your PA or your MD, which I definitely suggest that you have one from a PA. If you're applying a PA school, most schools require one from a PA, but some schools will allow you to have one from an NPA or an MD as well or a DL, then go ahead and get one from one of your professors. The professors that I did really, really well in their class in, they already knew that I wanted to be in PA school and I had them as options like backup options if my first choice for my letter of recommendation did not come through. So I would suggest if you're still in school or if you just recently graduated from school to reach out to one of your professors that knows you particularly as a student so that they can get that letter of recommendation from you and then also just make sure that it's clear to them that hey, you know, guys, like it's just an email. They're going to send you a link and you just have to follow that link and it's not really a matter of like you have to do a whole bunch of stuff and mail something off. It's all electronic and that really is my best suggestion. If you don't know where to get another letter of recommendation, just kind of think, think about who you know, ask around, maybe you know a nurse, maybe you know a PA and you don't even realize it and try to get it that way. All right, so that was it. That was our next PA Q&A Tuesday. I love doing these for you guys. Please, please, please leave your questions and comments in the comments section below. If you have any questions that you want me to answer on the next P&A Q&A Tuesday, it's such a tongue twister. Leave your comments and your questions in the comments section below. If you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow me on Instagram at adanathepa and subscribe to my channel right now. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will talk to you guys next time. Bye.