ISE 2024 Day 2

In this podcast Walt Zerbe, Sr. Director of Of Technology and Host of the CEDIA podcast talks with Rich Green of Rich Green Design, Leslie Shiner of The Shiner Group, Kris Hogg of Samsung and Amanda Wildman of TruMedia about their experiences at the ISE show on Day 2.

Podcast Transcript

Walt Zerbe  0:01  
I am CEDIA, I am CEDIA, I am CEDIA, this is the CEDIA media, CEDIA podcast. Hello, and welcome to another CD of podcast. I'm Waltzer be Senior Director of Technology and Standards, and your host for the CD podcast. And this is day two at the ISC show 2024, in Barcelona, Spain. And it was a really great day. I don't know about all of you, I got a full house here today. We I was super busy. It was just I don't know, it feel felt like I woke up and it's already, it's already almost six, six o'clock in the evening. That's at least my take. So let's just go around and see who's here. And then we're just going to commence our discussion. So I'm going to start with my left and my good friend rich, rich

Leslie Shiner  0:43  
green coming at you live here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm an integrator in Palo Alto, California, and I'm proud to be a CEDIA Fellow.

Walt Zerbe  0:52  
Thank you, Rich, Leslie. And

Leslie Shiner  0:54  
I'm Leslie Shiner. And I'm thrilled to be here. I'm a consultant and I focused mostly on profitability. And I too am a CEDIA Fellow. And I've been teaching CEDIA class business classes. Let's just say for many years,

Walt Zerbe  1:08  
they're like amazing, amazing classes. And Leslie will talk about a little bit. But you and I were on a panel today talking about people. And I learned stuff every time. It's super, super, super cool. So thanks for going all the Angoff

Kris Hogg  1:22  
Hi, I'm Chris hog. I work for a small electronics company that most people have heard of called Samsung. And I am proud to be an ex-CEDIA chair.

Walt Zerbe  1:35  
And Chris is also a good friend and EC has been in industry a super duper long time. Yes.

Kris Hogg  1:41  
I'm not going to disclose.

Leslie Shiner  1:43  
He became an ex CEDIA Lazy Boy

Kris Hogg  1:45  
was a lazy boy. I thought I was a

chair. Nevermind. This is

this. This is this is a difference by the way between American and English. You guys speak English?

Walt Zerbe  1:57  
I am English.

Leslie Shiner  2:00  
Yeah. And now for the rocking chair. Yeah.

Walt Zerbe  2:06  
As a lot of us in this room, you were an integrator? Yes. For what ended up being a manufacturer and all

Kris Hogg  2:12  
that integrated for 25 years. Yeah, it's not on us. Yeah. You know, got the got the scars to prove it and still got the log of the phone calls on 4pm on a Saturday afternoon, when the client cinema is not working. And he's ranting down the phone at you. Yep. So Been there. Done that. Got out of it. Okay.

Walt Zerbe  2:30  
And then we have Amanda.

Amanda Wildman  2:32  
I'm Amanda Wildman, I am still an integrator, still lots of scars to prove it out in the field every day. I'm an integrator out of ADA Michigan in the United States. This is my third ISC that I've actually attended. And I am super humbled and honored to represent CDM members on the CDA board of directors.

Walt Zerbe  2:52  
Yes. And you are Vice Chair? Correct? I am. So you're not just the one on the board. You're you're quite a bit up. So

Amanda Wildman  3:02  
again, just an honor to hang out and represent all my members. So well.

Walt Zerbe  3:06  
Thank you. And you come down from the honest to gosh, I mean, that's it. You do your I've seen you back you've been on calls, where you are in a closet on the tools as the Europeans will say on the tools participating in a call while you're working

Amanda Wildman  3:22  
on a rack. Yeah, now that was before I realized that you guys actually sometimes video those calls, like when we're doing those calls. And I was like, Oh, crud, I still have those videos. Yeah. So there's proof out there that I actually do do work. Yes. Sale. Yeah.

Kris Hogg  3:36  
Just for the record, by the way in Europe in the closet has a very different

Amanda Wildman  3:39  
than the US to not in the closet.

Walt Zerbe  3:45  
It can be about anything rich. You had you had an idea. You want Do you remember it?

Leslie Shiner  3:51  
Once again, I was trapped in the classrooms. And I love being there. We had a great class this morning on humane technology, a different view of AI and what I call slow technology, a way to remember our humanity and to design systems with grace and dignity and allowing people to remember their their family, their community, and just to slow down a little bit. So that's always a fun one. And then we I raced to the stage talk. We did one with you. Yep. And with Lesley that I thought was really very interesting. Yeah, I learned so much or

Walt Zerbe  4:32  
expensive and stuff was cheap. And what was so cool about that talk and a lot of our talks, the title might be one thing and we kind of start there but we ended up somewhere else which was super, super cool. The way we tied a bunch of subjects AI got tied into this ai m HR HR personalities. Retention and

Speaker 1  4:52  
that was a lot of fun. It was cool. Is it recorded and available for anybody that's interested.

Walt Zerbe  4:57  
Yeah, so all I'm glad you said that Lesley all the Stage talks are recorded will be on our YouTube channel. Did you just give me the money sign? Me I just said, I will also take these casts and strip the audio off. And I will I will rebroadcast a lot of these as podcasts. Because a lot of this a lot of this stuff is really good information. For those that don't work, Chris, say

Kris Hogg  5:20  
that again? Have we got a YouTube channel? Yeah,

I didn't know that

Walt Zerbe  5:25  
it was a CTE YouTube channel. You can see, in fact, the talks from last year and other shows are all posted up there.

Kris Hogg  5:31  
Oh, that's my next three weeks gone.

Walt Zerbe  5:34  
Now, this is so interesting. We did this talk last year. And I wanted to do it again, because people still exist and stuff still exists. But AI came into the picture. And we just, I don't know, we went down different rabbit hole, which is cool. So it's a completely different talk than last year's talk.

Leslie Shiner  5:50  
And we didn't talk about ai m and what what impact? Is it going to have an HR in in the office? And how can it contribute to operational efficiency in the office and how to get the most out of your precious employees. The point of this thing is, the most valuable thing that we have in our companies is the talent. It's the people we hire. So we talked about the possibility of maybe working with fewer people that are more qualified of higher quality, and enhance and augment their abilities with AI. And that's really where AI has its most value until you don't want to replace people. You want to make them powerful, amplify them make them more effective. Yeah,

Kris Hogg  6:33  
it's not such a big thing rich. What we're seeing in the corporate land is this drive back to the office. You know, I was sitting with the CEO of one of the big global corporate engineering companies the other day, over a beer as we kind of do in England. And become I asked him, What's the biggest problem he's got? And is he called it the ideas drain?

Walt Zerbe  6:55  
Oh, yeah.

Kris Hogg  6:58  
I laughingly call it the coffee cooler moment where people are not actually communicating. They're doing transactional meetings, because online meetings are transactional in nature. There's no conversation, there's no what ifs going on. So how do we get people back to the office, and there's lots of phrases bandied around about it, but the best one I've got is earn the commute, make the workplace a better place to be than sitting at home in your pajama bottoms, or your workshop?

Walt Zerbe  7:28  
You know what else? I think I think a side effect of us going to remote is a lot of management is super focused on metrics, and less focus on camaraderie and free think, and there's people feel like I need to be doing so I'm perceived and I'm doing well.

Amanda Wildman  7:44  
That's all about these shows, just in general, right. I mean, during the pandemic, we all had that fear, where shows going to come back, right. And everyone's sitting here at this table, you can feel energy, and you can feel synergy. And you don't get that one, we're not together. I mean, you just said you did a podcast or a stage talk a year ago. Now you did the same one this year, but it completely evolved. And it completely changed. And because your experiences have changed, and it's been able to grow, and it's been able to develop. And that only happens when we have those relationships. And when we have that togetherness, that you can just spout something off and someone picks it up and it becomes a bigger idea or a better idea or all of these things. That's what like the show is about that's what these people around this table are about we've we're better together.

Speaker 1  8:32  
I think if you if you look at this, the integration industry and the integrators, there's a whole series of employees that are never in the office, they're always out in the field. And pre pandemic, we always had production meetings and staff meetings and ways to get people back pandemic, they still kept working. Many of them, some didn't, some did. But they continue to work. And what we lost is the company culture. And that I think, is what's lost. And so people work in an office. It's different if I'm in front of a computer all day for eight hours a day in my pajamas versus in office, and you have to earn the commute and all of that. But for integrators, there's a huge component of the staff of integrators that were never in the office in the first place. Yeah. But what you have to do is find a way to engage with them, and to make them want to come back and have company meetings and be part of a team as opposed to just going out every morning and going to different jobs. CEDIA

Leslie Shiner  9:27  
has a new director of education for conferences. His name is Jonathan Toomey. i Yeah, so I've been on calls with him. He's awesome. And it was really, really great to meet him in person. He's a bit overly caffeinated. He's a very intense guy

Walt Zerbe  9:42  
now drinking caffeine, even I know I know.

Leslie Shiner  9:46  
I love him. He's love the guy but what he is working on for for Syria for education is where we came from. And we're coming back. Thank God. We're a tribe. It's always new again. He gets it he gets that we're a tribe. Bennett's the face to face encounters. It's the sitting around a table doing a podcast, it's being onstage together at a stage talk. And it's collaborating as subject matter experts, where we can play off each other go out and have a beer afterward. And he gets that, thank God, it's really feels great to have that coming

Walt Zerbe  10:18  
back. That's happening in product too. You know, now you're seeing TVs back in that stands with legs, or wall boxes, sometimes it or you know, older school aesthetics being brought back the audio products, you know, speakers and big knobs and the YouTubes and all that. I mean, it's so funny.

Amanda Wildman  10:38  
To Oh, yeah, teenage kids are making runs on like, turntables again now and all of this kind of stuff. Like I don't know if you guys know this, but these are the things that

Walt Zerbe  10:46  
have never been stronger. Yeah, history record sales. Yeah. And so our whole people buy.

Kris Hogg  10:52  
Those record sales are based on the fact that most of us will like me rebuying the stuff we gave away years ago. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  10:59  
I still meet the Beatles. Um, do you want it? Yes,

Walt Zerbe  11:02  
please. Chris also hired. The pressings done today a really good and a lot of times those records you bought weren't weren't so good, right. So that good quality to

Leslie Shiner  11:12  
actually some of the highest fidelity you can buy right now is with 180 gram. Good pressing from original masters. And even even better than what then what you get from a high resolution stream. So the audio files are buying up records. And they're claiming that is their reference sound. So cool.

Kris Hogg  11:35  
It is interesting. I still think there's a lot of snake oil in that industry, though.

Walt Zerbe  11:38  
Oh, go?

Kris Hogg  11:43  
Let me find that. $20,000. I've got outside for a power cable.

Leslie Shiner  11:48  
Power cables make a difference? Yeah, okay.

Walt Zerbe  11:54  
Yeah, there's differences. You can't bend them, and you can't move them in, in the breaks or out

Kris Hogg  11:57  
when they pull themselves never show that look of division.

Walt Zerbe  12:02  
Leslie, what did you What were you involved with education wise today? Well, I

Speaker 1  12:05  
teach the business classes. And I always try and find some way to approach it new. And each time each year, I sort of come up with a theme. When one year I was, well, previous years, I've had different themes about what I see out there, and what makes the biggest bang for the buck for the least amount of change, right? So if I'm going to make you make a gazillion changes to reorganize everything, and you'll see wonderful stuff. That's a big commitment. And a lot of companies can't make that. Yeah. And the commitment that I've been looking at is really an eye it has to do with some of the numbers, but in particular, so many people think the only way to make more money is to sell more. And that is absolutely wrong.

Walt Zerbe  12:42  
See, I told you this, he always comes up with this stuff. You're like, what? That's

Speaker 1  12:47  
counterintuitive. It's counterintuitive, yeah, the way to make more money is to do what you're doing now cheaper, better, faster, and raise your prices. And you may find that you can actually do less work and make more money. So many people think, Oh, I just have to sell more. And then of course, when you sell more, your quality goes down, you go nuts, you lose your work, life balance, everything falls through the cracks, and then you start losing money. So unless you have a really good process in place, got to do that first, and then you can sell. But I think if I wanted to look at what I'm doing for the next year, and the economy might be loosening up or maintaining up a bit, you know, we might be having some I would find ways to make do the work I'm doing now. But better do it more profitably, keep on budget, manage my costs, do all of those things that I talked about? Before I start to think the only way to make more, sell a bunch more

Walt Zerbe  13:42  
stuff? Yeah, I would, I would imagine a lot of people are just distracted and don't take the time to really look at the internals of their business. And you always preach rightly. So you have to pay attention to it. But there's a reward for paying attention to it.

Speaker 1  13:57  
Right? And so if I could ask you to tell you, I always ask how many people want to make 10% more, and everybody raises their hand. And I say by working 10% harder, and everybody's hands dropped? How would you like to make 10% more by working temporarily. And again, this seems counterintuitive. But my point is that if you look at your processes, and you look at the way you sell the work, and then the way you do the work and focus on that, instead of just randomly trying to get more work, yeah, you can actually work less and make more

Leslie Shiner  14:29  
a lot of these are powerful nuggets that we're hearing right

Walt Zerbe  14:33  
here and they're endless. We have a whole you got to watch the talk we did on stage. No.

Leslie Shiner  14:36  
So I'm walking around up and down the halls and people are tackling me to the ground. Rich green. Can I talk to you please? Could I talk to you? Like yeah, fine, what's up? And I've had probably four requests today for people with all humility to ask if I would mentor them. Well, I said of course I will. Here's my sorry, I can't get my car down fast enough. Here's my car. If you call me anytime I am here to help you, what do you need? And I've had some very soulful, heartfelt conversations people practically in tears, saying I'm I'm at a crossroads in my career I've got, I'm interested in so many things, I want to learn everything that I don't know what to do anymore. You know, that's where a mentor can come into place. And so that's who we are. That's what the tribe is all about, come find us. Go ahead and tackle me in the hallway. That's great. I want to help you. And I've got, we all have a world of experience that we can share. Let's share it. Yeah,

Amanda Wildman  15:35  
Amanda, and am I gonna say something to piggyback to off of what Leslie said about the, you know, work 10% Less, make 10% more, but that's also going to really speak to your staff. And as we're looking for people in the workplace, this next generation that's coming up and working, they're not living to work they're working to live, it's a very different. And so if you take the time to pause, and put together that plan, which can be difficult to do, because you feel like you're wearing all of these caps, as an integrator and all these things you have to do. But you can put that forth, you're going to have better satisfaction with employees, you're going to find that you can bring on more employees or better employees, you know, as a thing, they're going to have better satisfaction so that they don't leave, because nobody wants to sit there and have a boss that's like, on them all the time. Like gotta go, go, go, go, go, go go, you know, but if you sit down, and you have that plan, and if you can incorporate your people into that plan, I would argue that it's probably making even more than 10% You know, then through that, because you're gonna make that customer satisfaction and an employee satisfaction or less turnover.

Walt Zerbe  16:35  
I love that virgata Chris, I love that lift to work. But it's really for them to work to live, which which brings in that whole empathy discussion that we talked about earlier to maybe understanding employees a little bit more, Chris.

Kris Hogg  16:47  
I mean, that goes back to what Lindsay was just saying, you know, the old phrase I used to have was turnover is vanity. Profit is sanity. But, but but you're dead, right? This and we all should be working, you know, working to live not living to work. You know, it's good for longevity.

Leslie Shiner  17:07  
Yeah, well as an older person. Now,

Kris Hogg  17:09  
what you

Speaker 1  17:12  
know, I know, it's interesting, because I'm five years into being a grandma. And I'm watching my daughter raise her children and sort of comparing to that, and I think I worked really hard. And I worked a lot of hours. And she is much more. She lives in the UK. So she has the more UK attitude. She has a her her maternity leave is a year, not six weeks. And so as a Granzow. Basically, she is so much better at work life balance. And I think that I didn't have enough work life. And you have newer younger employees. They understand work life balance. And I think too, and again, I sort of just look back at me and what the way I raised my kids and running a business and all of that, but sort of in the battle between family and business. I think business one too many times. Absolutely. Then and family.

Walt Zerbe  18:05  
I wised up to it as I continued to overwork it. Presley, would

Leslie Shiner  18:09  
you please mentor me?

Kris Hogg  18:10  
Yeah. It's interesting. Going back to that mentorship piece as well. So I have a number of people that I mentor, and, and it's I get really proud watching them develop. But I also have a mentor. And she is 23 and that that whole mentorship program is about teaching this old dinosaur what it's like to be 23

Walt Zerbe  18:36  
Point crests. It doesn't mean older people need to always teach younger people. Yeah,

Kris Hogg  18:40  
because I sometimes feel a wash in the world. I sometimes wonder what the heck's going on? You know, these conversations that go on around gender and I just I'm like, what? So I get somebody of that generation going Chris that wise up this is what it's about. This is what's going on. This is how we think. And then I go oh, okay, I might still think you're barking mad. But at least I understand that's

Walt Zerbe  19:04  
totally cool.

Kris Hogg  19:07  
Child or related is not my child is not related to because if they were they would be so the documents, but

Amanda Wildman  19:14  
I think that's such a good point is like the whole mentor mentee thing. It doesn't have to be you know, older versus younger or whatever it like we learn from everybody and I think that's what makes the CEDIA community so great is yeah, this is such a thought tank of different ages, different genders, different races, different countries, and we're all represented here and like we all share, and make each other better.

Speaker 1  19:40  
Well, I this this month was difficult for me in my business because January is always rough. And I work with different software products and I do a lot of different things and people would ask me questions and I give them the answer though. Leslie, you were so smart. And I would say no, it's just you the second person that asked me that question because the first This person has asked me I wasn't so smart. But now I know the answer. And that's what happens in our business. See, if you get to repeat stuff over and over again, you just get so much better and better at it. And that's what's helping the younger people. That's what's helping your employees is to realize that if I'm so much faster than you at something, it is also because I've done it the second time instead of the first. Yeah.

Kris Hogg  20:22  
Let's do this part of the mentorship piece, which is, I've done it. I've done it wrong.

Walt Zerbe  20:27  
Yeah, yeah.

That's super important. You have to know when you've done something wrong. And failing is really important. And a lot of people get upset about failing failings. Good. I always just need to learn from it and not repeat it.

Speaker 1  20:41  
I would say it's great to learn from your mistakes, but it's a lot easier to learn from somebody else's punch,

Amanda Wildman  20:46  
and I always call it our stupid tax. We paid a lot of stupid tax over the years, but sometimes when you Yeah, but sometimes when you call it that, like it's a stupid tax, you're like, Okay, it's done. It's over with and I can move on sort of allows you that freedom to of saying you know what, maybe I made a mistake maybe I didn't know everything, but it's over and it's done with I can learn from it. It was a stupid tax. Now let's move on. And let's do better.

Leslie Shiner  21:08  
On the spot today up on me. Who me? Yes, stuff is cheap. People are expensive. Talk. Yeah, I went through a really difficult time I used to have now my that I had a very big company and I wanted to you the user was okay. I had a very big company at 35 people. And I was really proud of the company. And then the world economic collapse happened. And I had a completely upside down accounts receivable problem. And my clients stopped paying me. And I couldn't afford the receivables. And I had to close the business that was very, very depressing, and hard to take. And then I pivoted, I recovered, and I became a company of one and my mantra, my philosophy was, how do I build the smallest possible company, which is counterintuitive to everything that gets said in Silicon Valley, they're all talking about scale,

Walt Zerbe  21:55  
and had a goal. And I think that's really neat. Yeah. So it's

Leslie Shiner  21:59  
building the smallest possible company doesn't mean I want to don't want to make profit, I do want to make profit, but there's a way to do it more efficiently. smarter, work a lot smarter. So yeah, we've all been spanked and banged and got our scars. But the point here is pivot and keep going. Yeah. Now, I did not

Walt Zerbe  22:17  
call out that you had your hardships. I just said you decided to pivot. That's right. Lauren.

Leslie Shiner  22:21  
went fine. Walt, it was, you

Kris Hogg  22:24  
know, I've had my business go down. You know, you get back up again, you keep going, you learn. Now, one of the one of the joys of my past life with Samsung has been the fact that I've been working within the supermarket. And when you get to sit and sit with these owners who are exceptionally wealthy, the you know, you get you get to that conversation around, you know, how did you get here? What happened, that are not met one of them that hasn't had at least two spectacular business failures? Yeah, they've all failed and failed in a big way. But they've come back from it, and they've learned from it. And I guess my advice would always be, you know what, if you make that mistake, it's fine. Get bounced back. If you make it a second time, we'll come on down and ritual tackle you're

Leslie Shiner  23:12  
in Silicon Valley, we say fail often, but fail forward. You have to learn from it pivot, move on

Amanda Wildman  23:17  
and keep moving. Yeah, keep moving.

Walt Zerbe  23:18  
Lesley handed out Hershey Kisses. Mr. Hershey failed twice, in a big way, did he? And yeah, he failed having any candy store. He failed doing. Doing another thing, even borrowed money from a family and all kinds of friends and lost it and couldn't pay him back. And then he had a very successful caramel business, or caramel, or whatever you like to say it. And all of a sudden and it was going gangbusters. And he's like, You know what, I think chocolates, the future. So that was an issue. That was a point where he took something incredibly successful, decided to stop and put risk into something brand new. I had no idea it was gonna succeed. But so

Amanda Wildman  23:59  
I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for pivoting. I mean, I was in the satellite business. Yeah. 00 you know, being here being in this room. I mean, we were on satellite we own before that I pivoted from jewelry to satellite. That was a weird transition to but we didn't see the writing on the wall of technology changing and having to adapt for that, where people were cutting the cord and that was not going to be the same business model we pivoted and and we came into this industry and if it wasn't for CDO with the education, I a pivot later in life, I had to fast track my education. And CEDIA was a huge part of that. Rich has been one of my mentors and education. Lesley has been one of my mentors and education. And if it wasn't for their knowledge and their sharing with me to fast track my business, because I pivoted a little bit later in life. And I'm still going back to school right now and I'm learning and it's like you got to keep that like you said fall forward. Keep moving forward. Keep that forward momentum.

Leslie Shiner  24:57  
In the Design Thinking workshop, Peter and I talk about A book by David and Tom Kelly, who founded the d school, the design thinking process that the school is Stanford University. And their book is called creative confidence. And what their premise is, is that we have agency in the real world, we can make it happen. We have good ideas, we can go do something with it. We can build companies, we can hire great employees, we can find great customers, and we can make a lot of money. There are a lot of people who are beaten down in today's world, they're beaten down by social media, they're depressed, they're committing suicide. It's like, come on, use the creative confidence that we have. That's a gift of being a human being, and just go kick some butt make something happen.

Walt Zerbe  25:44  
All right. So that's a really nice way to end this podcast. But I did want to ask, Chris, since you are our manufacturer in the room quick, everybody ganging up with Chris. Yeah, you've been stuck doing meetings and in the booth and everything I just want to add. So our audience is more than integrators. We have designers we have, we have manufacturers we have, you know, other adjacent trades. I just want to hear from your perspective, what's the show been like this year for you representing a manufacturer?

Kris Hogg  26:10  
You know, it's been incredibly busy. And normally confined 20 minutes to just run off and come to see my friends. And you know, that's, that's my takeaway for the whole show. Yeah, we haven't had time to breathe. We opened our booth up this year, last year, we had it closed off, you couldn't get on without a Samsung employee. We've opened it up. We've got footfall that's through the roof. Bs, we've got some pretty incredible stuff on there. It's amazing, where we're throwing smart things out into the open now that that's the expect some development of that, particularly into the commercial space. We've brought the transparent micro OLED from CES. Yes, I saw that. And I do a I do I do a keynote thing around technology? And who invents the technology? Where does it come from? And I use the I use the example of the chapter name escapes me now but he was the guy who came up with the first Motorola StarTAC. And he freely admitted that he designed it based on the Star Trek communicator. And you have these conversations where you see devices and products come through that were in a film or a or a movie or a movie out and years ago. And this transparent led to me is basically Minority Report. You're the windows from Iron Man. Yeah. And the one of the use cases we're showing is there's the screen behind it. Yeah, give it some depth. And there's a football game going on. And in the on the glass, and that would be effectively on the the box, the the owners box or whatever, you've got all the stats of the game and the data coming up. And it's just like, honestly, I, I work for Samsung. And every now and then you walk into a booth or you see a product and your chin just hits the floor. And you realize what an amazing business that's businesses.

Walt Zerbe  28:08  
Yeah, what's neat is you're showing yet more tools, and yet more applications. And it's it's up to you to do whatever the heck you want with all this stuff. And I'm just there's so many tools now. And more coming. You

Kris Hogg  28:20  
know, the bit I'm gonna finish on because you kind of came up with that bit. And I'll allow this into celebrities mix as well. Where we as we as animals are naturally storytellers, we react to stories. Well, what we do a Samsung is allow you to tell the stories, we give you the canvases, we give you the ability to tell that story. But you know, architects, interior designers exist for a living, or legal exist for a reason. Because most people can't picture what the end goal is what the end thing is going to look like. And you know, as an integrator, our job should also be to paint those pictures. Yeah, this is how you could live this is how you know how technology will enhance what you do. You know, it will allow you to live to work, not work to live, it will facilitate a better standard of life. And, okay, if you're if you're if you're if you're if you're disabled, or something, boy, can we help but just for anybody, what we do within the CDO world can really help to do it. And I think, at Samsung, and most of the other companies that you're seeing around here, they allow us to tell the stories, but it's our job as integrators to actually put that together and paint our pictures, because we are our own artist.

Leslie Shiner  29:40  
Man Oh, Chris, you just painted a picture for the human of the for the future of the human race. And I call that imagination. And it's a very powerful word. And without imagination, we're not going to make it.

Kris Hogg  29:52  
I absolutely agree with that. All right, so

Walt Zerbe  29:55  
I'm going to end this podcast because this is a completely different direction than yesterday. As far as cast, which is doom and gloom and AI and all that stuff, so this

Amanda Wildman  30:03  
is your positive people in this room. I don't know who was here yesterday.

Kris Hogg  30:08  
And when you really look at AI, it's not doom and gloom. No, it's exciting. It's a new normal.

Walt Zerbe  30:14  
Yeah, it's not there's, there's, well, that's another cast, we need to end this one. But we can we can explore all the different areas on that one. And the stage talks are also available, which we do talk about some of this. Yes. Pros. Yes, cons. But yeah, it's it's part of our lives. It's here to stay. No question. And it's gonna affect your business and affect our channel and you better get involved if you're not,

Leslie Shiner  30:37  
right. It's the future of the human race. All right. Yeah.

Walt Zerbe  30:41  
So thank you very much to rich and Lesley and Chris. And oh my gosh, Amanda. No, I just had a brain fart there senior moment. Just because it's been a long day. Long day. Yeah. And while the cast tomorrow,

Kris Hogg  30:55  
thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you guys for listening to us.

Walt Zerbe  30:58  
Stay curious. I love I love the way this one down. Be inventive. Imagine, but you got to come to the shows. Because what you the other help for the imagine is the people you imagine much better when you get to meet and sit with new people and old friends. And that just sell goes instead of isolation. So absolutely. All right. All right. Thanks, everybody. As always, I'll ask you to please keep an open mind and we will have another cast tomorrow. I still away go. Okay, bye. Bye. For more information on CEDIA visit CEDIA dotnet