HomeTech.fm - Episode 313 - Taking the Contrarian Position with Brilliant's Aaron Emigh

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, July 24th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Pretty good. Pretty good. I sound a lot better than I did last week, don't I? You do. You most definitely do. So that's good news. I was editing the show and I was like, I don't sound that bad. And then I listened back to it and of course it comes up in the podcast and I'm like, wow.

I sound pretty bad. I should probably take a week off next time I have to do something like that. Yeah, it didn't sound good. No. We've all been there. I've got a little follow-up on my air conditioning rules i have

a new air conditioner now it works and uh the the erica comes out to me and says it's hot in the house i'm like well they just put a new air conditioner thing in why is it hot they go in and like the thermostat's cranked up to 83 and uh 83 in florida it's not a very good temperature to be at me that's when you start to feel it, I think. Right. I think I cranked it down, you know, put it back. Next day, same thing. What is going on?

So I'm running this Ecobee thermostat, and something in the back of my head reminded me, like one day I cranked up the app, it came up with some feature, and I just haphazardly just like clicked yes or whatever just to get the little dial. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Just go away.

I don't want to deal with this. I need to turn down my thermostat to 73 or whatever it's supposed to be at. So I'm thinking there's a feature that exists inside this Ecobee app, right? And I have no idea what it is or how to turn it off. So some Googling, I found out the feature is called Ecobee Plus. Still had no idea where it is inside of my app. Had no idea. So my wife was like, just Google how to disable Eco Plus.

And I did that, and I clicked the first link I came to. Had great directions on how to disable it and turn it off. Went and did that real quick. Turned the temperature back down. And I start scrolling down the article. I'm like, hey, why is Richard Gunther's picture on this page? Oh, how funny. That's great. I'm on the DMZ the entire time. So yeah, digital media zone. They got the scoop on this one. Oh, I'm seeing this now. Ecobee forces customers to enable new EcoPlus features features there he is

there's richard or or if you're just mindless uh like me it wasn't so much forced it was just like yeah next see that little okay button right there i hit that and i and it yeah well it looks like from this article though that what richard's saying is that basically they throw you into this setup user flow and then they don't give you a way to exit out without enabling it so you basically have to go through the flow enable it and then go back in to disable it and that just seems like the kind of thing that would really piss richard off it didn't it didn't make let's just say it didn't make certain people in this house happy but um you know i appreciate the sentiment what they're trying to do but um we're in the middle of a pandemic, too.

And, like, everyone's home all day. So it's not like no one is sitting in the house right now where we have it, you know, cranked down to whatever, like, 79, I think is what we normally keep it at. Like, it doesn't need to go up any further than that. So I don't know. Like, just seems like bad timing for a feature that probably a feature that probably has some merit to it, I think. Like if I was not working from home or if not everybody was not working from home right now, I think I would probably turn that on, not worry about it. Right. Right. Well, there's more than you in the home, right? It's always the case. I have those same battles here. All right, well, let's jump in.

We have a great show this week. We had Aaron Amey on. He is the CEO and founder of Brilliant. Brilliant.tech is the website. Cool product. You'll probably recognize it if you go take a look at their site. It's got a pretty unique design.

And kind of their whole premise or thesis around the smart home is that really there should be smart home control integrated into the fabric of the home. We shouldn't be so reliant on our phones and devices like that to control our homes. And they set out on a mission a while back to make that control more integrated into the home

and to do that in an affordable fashion. And it was really fun to learn about that. And also Aaron's just a really interesting guy, very interesting background, highly successful entrepreneurs, run several companies before this. And so he shares, in addition to the story about Brilliant, shares some of his backstory and some tips and things about where he's found success in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship. So really enjoyed that conversation. Be sure to stay tuned for that. In the meantime, Seth, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. In a strong signal that the housing market is ready

to lead a post-COVID economic recovery, builder confidence in the market for newly built single family homes jumped 14 points to 72 in July, according to the latest National Association of Home Builders and Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, the HMI. The HMI now stands at a solid pre-pandemic reading in March before the outbreak affected much of the nation. So this seems like a good sign. Yeah, I'm glad they're confident.

Like right now, I'm just watching the world burn and thinking I'm glad I don't have to step outside my door. But they're closer to the home building and buying process than I am. So hopefully we get this thing over with quickly and we can get back to building homes because that really does, I mean, in this area, that really does drive an entire, I mean, almost the entire state. A lot of local economies are heavily dependent on home building here in Florida. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the case

probably pretty much everywhere. Story from CE Pro here does say, home building here in Florida. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's the case probably pretty much everywhere. Story from CE Pro here does say, while the housing market is clearly rebounding, challenges exist. Lumber prices at a two-year high, apparently. Rising costs for other building materials and skilled labor shortages were some of the specific issues that they discussed. So not clear sailing here for the home building industry necessarily, but good news nonetheless. There's obviously been a lot of questions on all of our minds about the economy, and hopefully this is a sign. Nobody knows for sure, but hopefully this is a sign that things will rebound quickly as we come out of this crazy phase that we're going through right now?

Oh, I definitely, I think it's a spring, man. It's all like just every time you have to stay home, people just wind that spring up and when they're ready to go, boom, they'll go out. So we'll be ready for it. Well, speaking of staying at home, Zoom has become the de facto standard for online communications during the pandemic, but the company has found that it's still a struggle for many employees to set up the equipment and software to run a meeting effectively. Jason, you and I run into that almost every week, it seems like. Why is my mic not working? I don't know. The company's answer is an all-in-one communications appliance with Zoom software, ready to roll with a simple touch interface. Pretty cool idea. Just plug and play Zoom meetings. There you go.

Not a bad idea at all. Yeah. No, I think this is a cool idea, perhaps not for the more technical audience who's very proficient with jumping onto a Zoom app in an iPad or on an iPhone or on a laptop or whatever the case may be. But there may be people who want the ability to do Zoom calls who would benefit from this.

I think a lot about like my wife and her family, they do a ton of family Zoom calls. And I know some of the folks on that call aren't the most technically proficient. So having something like this, and I think it's just kind of a cool form factor. So yeah, pretty neat device and probably something that, that, um, certainly integrators in the audience would want to be familiar with. I have to imagine clients are going to be, um, asking about stuff like this as, as the work from home thing continues to be really become the new normal. Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I completely agree. It it's a this is a 27 inch touchscreen basically big tablet with some three cameras designed designed for high resolution video and eight microphones basically for that you know um echo cancellation audio um so a nice piece i i think

integrators are probably will want to do something a little more. I don't want to say extravagant, but like something better like this. This should be the baseline. This should be like, you know, Jill and marketing gets right. For sure. This is what everybody else in the company should have to do. But our integrators are usually dealing with like the C-level executives and they're going to want to look good. They should have like the HD cameras and the full lighting and the network that can handle everything. I think there's still a big learning curve as to what makes for a good Zoom meeting and for audio and video. And as that starts to narrow down, I think integrators are going to be poised to take advantage of being able to put in some like almost professional studio stuff inside of home.

It's going to be interesting. Yeah. As you said, as it becomes the new norm. Agreed. Yeah. All good things to be aware of here. So moving on from there, Flow by Moen and Yonomi have announced today a new partnership aimed at accelerating innovation in the insurance industry. The new partnership lowers the barrier of entry for insurance carriers seeking to leverage the smart home by simplifying the smart device installation and verification process for both the consumer and the insurer. Yonomi will automatically show participating carriers if a device with the Flow by Moen smart water security system is installed and active

in the consumer's home. So an interesting story here. I continue to monitor and be intrigued by the insurance industry play in the smart home and what that's going to look like as it continues to evolve. Yeah, absolutely. And two pretty good products. I actually have both of these in my house. Well, you know me because it's on my app, but I've got one of those flows still installed and chugging along out there, turning on and off my water every night. So it's a cool. Pretty cool. Pretty cool update. Well, Jason, there's a surprise. Have you tried the new Peacock app? Have you tried NBC's new streaming service Peacock? I have not. I have not tried that one yet. Well, there's a lot to enjoy, including a show called A Brave New World. Did you read that book when you were in high school? I've read that one.

It's been a really long time. It's one of those high school books where they try and blow your mind away with like, look, they're talking about sex in this book. Books are naughty. And then it's probably one of the more boring books to read. So they made a TV show out of it. And it's actually, it's okay.

It's fun. It's fun to watch. But there's a big special surprise that you can get into in the terms and condition for Peacock. No one reads the small print there. So what they did is they snuck in a cake recipe buried into one of the subsections that explains third-party services and authentications. There are instructions on how to make a chocolate cake that, quote, a beloved member of your family could adore. So, yeah, check that out. There's a nice little chocolate cake recipe down there and uh i i think i'm gonna make it i've been watching the peacock app it's kind of a cool app different it's different jason there there's a there's a there's a it's free i guess i don't know there's commercials and stuff i don't really really care. But what I think is most interesting about this one is that they've got

a concept of channels on there. So if you click, you can watch just a regular show or movie off of it. But if you click channels, it gives you a list of channels, which are just really like TV shows. Right now I just clicked on it and NBC News is playing, but I can switch to the Office channel, which plays office all the time. It's a pretty cool app. I, I'm, we haven't really talked much about it other than like the buildup to Peacock, but, um, I think it's, I think it's actually really done the streaming, uh, and cake baking,

uh, world, uh, a good service here. I think, I think it's pretty good. I think it'll be one of the better ones out there. I will give it a try. And I got a good laugh out of this story. As somebody who has a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit of experience in crafting terms of service language and maintaining terms and conditions agreements, I just have to imagine the people doing this.

Hats off to them. That's great. I legitimately thought you were going to say crafting cakes, but you went a different direction. I have, I have almost no experience crafting cakes. I do have experience crafting terms and condition agreements and it's not fun. No, not fun at all. Mice type is what I used to call it. So kudos to them for, for slipping that in there. That's pretty funny. I'm going to call a little bit of an audible here. And I do want to touch on a quick story that came in through the chat room. Bruno hanging out in the chat room tonight as we record sent this one over from ZDNet.

Chinese security researchers said they can alter the firmware of fast chargers to cause damage to connected charging systems, such as melting components or even setting devices on fire. The technique named bad power, all one word, was detailed last week in a report published by, I'm not even going to try to pronounce that, a research unit of Chinese tech giant tencent um so shuiwu i'll try what the hell no one woo one woo i don't know x u a n w u close enough yeah you can't fault me for that one that one's that's just a tough one uh anyways to researchers, bad power works by corrupting the firmware of fast chargers, a new type of charger that was developed in the past few years, uh, to speed up charge times. And yeah, this can eventually result in your device catching on fire. That's crazy.

I have a couple of those fast chargers, just like the bigger power adapters, bricks, I guess, for your iPhone or iPad. And you can, you can plug it in and like, it'll charge your phone a lot. I mean, it charges it pretty quickly. Like if you're down to 30% or whatever, you plug it in 15 minutes later, you're probably back in 80, 85%. So you get the rest of the day out of it just by plugging in for a couple of minutes. Um, so, but I always like if you touch the phone or you touch the, uh, the power adapter, it's always like warm. I always, I've always wondered about that. So like eventually we're just going to plug the phones directly into the wall. Right. And we won't have to worry about this, um, fast charging adapter. We'll just plug them straight into one 20 or two 40, whatever,

whatever you have, put them into mains and you're good to go. Well, or like wireless charging I think is getting more popular. I don't know a lot about it. I guess everything's going wireless now. Yeah, this is crazy. It's all going wireless, Seth. I thought you knew. Yeah, I don't get it though.

Fast chargers. So these are like the actual charger. It has a network connection? I'm guessing it goes back through the phone. So the fast chargers, the charger isn't just like it is with your car where you just connect the two leads anymore. There's computers on each end that control

how fast you can charge the battery up and how much to basically save the battery life over time. So there's actually computers on both sides. So I'm thinking what they're saying is that they can basically fake out the little computer on the other end saying, I need more juice, you know, constantly. And as it gets hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter, um, it just catches on fire. Got a nice little, nice little article here about, you know, hackers destroying things and catching stuff on fire. so. Well, there you go.

In your, what's the word I'm looking for? Fear-mongering headlines of the week. Anyways, good stuff to be aware of. Who knew five volts could ruin your day? I'm not going to lose any sleep over this one yet. Maybe we'll rush out to buy a fast charger, but anyways, thanks for sharing that, Bruno. It's a pretty wild story. All the links and topics that we've discussed on our show this week can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 313. While you're there,

don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great stuff going on here in the world of home tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 313. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesdays, typically starting sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more on how to do that at hometech.fm slash live. All right, Seth. Well, without further ado, let's go ahead and jump in to our interview. Again, we've got Aaron Amey, the CEO and founder of Brilliant. We hope you enjoy. Hey, Aaron, welcome to the show. How are you? Doing great, thanks. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, we appreciate you being here. We're looking forward to jumping in. Let's do that. Let's get started right away. We've got a lot to cover. Really looking forward to this conversation. Before we dive in and get to some of these other topics, let's talk a little bit about your background. We always like to start with this with all of our guests, and invariably all of our guests have interesting backgrounds. And yours, I would say, is very much right at the top of that list in terms of going all the way back to sort of your upbringing and talking a little bit about how that experience sort of shaped you and some of the lessons that you've taken from the unique background into your work today. Well, I'm guessing that the aspect of

uniqueness you're talking about is the fact that there's a good chunk of my childhood that was spent without electricity or running water and modern amenities like that, which may not sound like the most natural background for a smart home entrepreneur, but perhaps it was an inspiration for me to come a little further forward. As long as I was already going 100 years ahead in home technology, why not add to that? That's right. Yeah, you've talked about that. I've heard you talk about that before and sort of that experience of growing up in, I believe it was New Hampshire, sort of subsistence farming and really how that experience, you've sort of seen more evolution in your lifetime in terms of, again, some of those very basic things that we all take for granted these days. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. And when you look at what Brilliant is,

Brilliant is a smart home control that's built into the home that takes all the different technological systems in the house and gives you a user experience for them that's a natural integrated part of the home. to want to do, having, you know, during some of my childhood carried around, carried in lanterns from place to place for lighting and really appreciating the value of a light switch. And, you know, going out with a bucket to a well to get water and then having a little hand pump at one place inside the house and then having plumbing, you know, and similarly with heat, you know, to go from having a couple of wood stoves around the house to where you just have a thermostat that you can decide what temperature it is. I have probably more of an appreciation than some people do of the value of these things. And as a result, when I was finding the smart home technology to be in that

kind of early stage, it's sort of in the equivalent stage of carrying that kerosene lantern around and really wanting it built into the walls of the house as a fundamental capability that's available to everyone who's in the space. So perhaps that living through that evolutionary process and a couple other critical areas of the house might've made me a little bit faster to feel the same way about smart home technology that I had about plumbing or electricity. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And let's stay on that topic of sort of evolution. I've heard you say also that, you know, in probably 10 years or so, we won't even be talking about smart homes. We won't feel compelled to use that qualifier.

Elaborate on that. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. If you think back 20 years ago, everyone was really excited about smart cars and what that was going to mean. And they were talking about, you know what, in the future we're going to have computers in cars and computers are going to run the engine and computers are going to do this and computers are going to do that. The average car now has, I think the last number I saw was about 45 separate computers in it. And they're controlling various aspects of the engine. They're monitoring all kinds of sensors. They're giving diagnostic information. You've got infotainment centers. You've got all of this processing going on. And no one's talking about

smart cars. It's just that now cars are better than they used to be. They're more fuel efficient. They're more powerful. They're more reliable. they tell you when there's a problem, they're better. That's what they are. Similarly, we're at a stage now with technology being deployed in the home where it's sufficiently new that people are talking about it as a separate thing because most homes aren't smart yet. Now, it's growing really fast and as a result, we can easily extrapolate from that and see that a few years out, we're going to be in a situation where we're not talking about smart homes anymore. Just

homes are better than they used to be. And you wouldn't go and buy a home that doesn't have smart technology built into it any more than you'd go and buy a home that doesn't have plumbing built into it, or it doesn't have heating built into it. You know, or you'd buy a feature phone that doesn't, that's not a smartphone. You know. These are just things you wouldn't do because the value is so compelling. And bringing technology into the home clearly falls into that category. Right. Yeah, that's a good analogy you made with moving from smart cars. Well, what they called smart cars, I guess. I do remember kind of being into a car phase and during that time and, uh,

having an old 1969 Pontiac that, that was completely unreliable. I mean, it was just a piece of garbage, but, um, you know, you get, you get a new car and it has a computer in it and then the computer dies. And that's like, this is the end of the car almost. Right. So it's like, it has many different little things in there that you can't figure out what do because the computer is going crazy or something like that. With the Pontiac, you could fix it. But with the new one, you had to go get this module thing and shove it in between the seats, you know. So it was kind of a weird transition there. And now, like you're

saying, now you just kind of expect your car to go in, you sit in it, you press the button, and it cranks up. So yeah, and I think similar to that box that you just kind of expect your car to go in. You sit in it, you press the button and it cranks up. So, yeah. And I think similar to that box that you might've put in your Pontiac early on that would then die the very earliest wave of smart home technology, you know, wasn't necessarily the easiest to configure or the, or the most reliable, but what we're seeing now is that as it's becoming sort of more mission

critical in the home, that it's, it's getting very reliable and something that you can really depend on, you know, whether it's to give access to your house for people or, you know, package deliveries or your home automation functions or climate control, you know, lighting, all kinds of different functions. And they really work well enough now that it is more like that, you know, lighting, all kinds of different functions. And they really work well enough now that it is more like that later stage as the computers in the car got more mature, that now they just work really well. And it's pretty rare that you hear that an ECU blew up in a modern car. It just doesn't really happen.

Exactly. That's where I was going with that. And it's now you get in, you press the button, your car starts up magically. And, you know, that button it's analog is the key you used to have to stick in and turn. And it works just the same way people expect when they sit in the car, they press the button. It turns on when you go to your wall and you hit, you hit the button on the wall, the light turns on. That's what's always happened. That's what always should happen. Um, so yeah, I, yeah, I totally, I really like that analogy

and seeing how fast the car industry has progressed in that particular space with this, you know, something as what I would say is as simple as turning on a car, because it seems like it's a pretty simple operation. Like it gives me hope for your 10 years there. I was thinking, maybe that's aggressive, but you know, it could be 10 years. We could be about 10 years there. I was thinking maybe that's aggressive, but it could be 10 years. We could be about 10 years out. That leads us over to Brilliant being one of those devices that sits on the wall that I press a button on and something has to happen. What got you interested in the smart home here? Yeah. I think at a high level, just the smart home market is in this amazing place where it's gathering enormous momentum. Everybody sees the value proposition. Everybody, you know, sees the importance of it.

And yet there's no clear leader. There's nobody who's really provided that user interface within the home in a simple, clear, compelling way. And so the personal experience that I had was I was doing a home remodel project and putting in a bunch of smart tech because it had been quite a while since I'd really gone deeply into smart tech and I wanted to see how it evolved. And I found that the devices themselves were now really good and really useful and I liked them. But when I put them in my house and was living in my house, I really disliked the experience of interacting with the technology in my house because I had to do it through my smartphone and a whole bunch of different apps on the phone. And if you're sitting on the couch and you want to dim your lights and what you need to do is pull out your phone or go get it if it's charging in

a corner somewhere, authenticate yourself to it, scroll around to the right app, launch that, wait for it to come up, navigate some menus. By the time you're actually able to do the thing that you wanted to, you're frustrated that you have a smart home at all because it's a lot easier to just go and push the button on the wall. And similarly, it's even worse for other people who aren't the technical expert in the house, who don't have all the apps installed. So if you're a house guest or a kid who doesn't have a smartphone or installed. So if you're a house guest or a kid who doesn't have a smartphone or just a less tech forward member of the household, you're kind of out of luck. And there's a reason why, you know, the point you were making earlier about the car

still seems to work the same way. You still get the push buttons and whatever in the car. You don't control your car through the smartphone just because it has computers. That would be a really awkward way to control the car where now you have to drive with your phone. But that's kind of what that first stage of evolution is with the home where, oh, now you're supposed to control your house through the phone. Well, that's silly. Nobody wants that. It makes sense for remote access and remote monitoring and remote control, where it is just you who should have the right to do that. And you want to restrict that

access but when you're in the house and you want to change the environment that you're in that should be available as an ambient capability to anybody in the space so making that really a part of the home and have it having it as you're saying function the way it always has before in a familiar and comfortable way is really important and that's's what Brilliant is really doing, where we've built, we've made a controller that controls all of your different smart home devices, and it just goes into the wall of the house, but it goes in there replacing a standard light switch or a row of standard light switches. So the wiring is already there. It's already there in locations in your home where you would want to control it. You don't need batteries, you don't need cords. And it's also the light switch is the most used home control in the house. So it's taking advantage of some place that you're already interacting with all the time to control your

house and just making it so you can't just turn lights on and off there. That's also where you can see who's at the door and you can change the temperature and you can lock or unlock the doors. And you can do home automation scenes that will play music and change the lighting and all of these different kinds of functions. And just making that a very easy thing to drop into the home and really transform your home without needing to hold an infrastructure for it. Yeah, that's a I'm still laughing from the analogy you gave about walking around with your phone and trying to crank up your car with the phone. I still, I have that in my head. It's like something that I'm sure somebody has tried or will be trying. So with Brilliant, you don't need to have, you don't need to have that friction of the smart

home because the device is built in to the hard walls of the home where you can go over and press a button, uh, execute a scene, or, you know, like you said, change, change the temperature in your thermostat without having to pick up a phone and navigate and find the app and all that good stuff. Um, which, which I imagine works really well if you're, you're a guest to the house too, you know, like somebody comes in, what is all this technology in here? And that generally happens at my house.

Why do you have so many buttons on your wall? Well, just press one of them and the light will turn on, you know. But this is probably a little more approachable. I was just going to say, the discoverability aspect of it is really, really important. That somebody who's not familiar with it can just walk up to it and easily interact with it. You know, what's the first thing you're going to do well you're going to touch the screen uh and then when you do you'll see the things that are common there and you'll be able to choose the thing that you want which is something you can do with a with a screen um that you can't necessarily

as easily do with a bunch of apps or or running on a even it's like an ipad sitting out there you know each of them has a different ui and you have to select the one and navigate around on it. And then similarly with a voice interface. And we do build in Amazon Alexa voice services and we work with Google and with Siri and so on as well. But, you know, that ability to discover things is really something that a visual interface is useful for. Let's take just a quick step back too. I know we, I'm just assuming that everybody knows what Brilliant is. So let's go ahead and talk about what you offer as a product,

like a physical product that I could go down to the store right now, buy and pick up and put in my house. Yeah. So we have, we have several product lines. The first one is our line of smart home controls. And that's the, that's the one that's been out in the market for about a year and a half now. And, you know, keeps on adding new capabilities and it's got a touchscreen on it. And it shows photos of your family or your pets or your vacations or

what have you when it's not in use, or it can display nothing if you prefer that. But then, you know, you can just tap on it, you can control all of the, all of the different systems in the home. So, you know, someone rings your ring doorbell, you'll see the video on your wall. You'll be able to talk with them. It's a single button to unlock your smart lock and let somebody in. If you have a Sonos system, for example, you'll see all your playlists and favorites on Pandora and Spotify and iHeartRadio, whatever you like to use. And you can reconfigure your zones and do all that kind of stuff. It has smart lighting functions built into it. You can control your thermostats. You can control basically all of the different smart home systems, whether it's a lock or garage door or what have you, are all put together in one single place. And it's got a really nice intuitive UI, both visually, and then it also has touch sliders

for the lights that it replaces. So it's a very high quality dimmer switch that's compatible with modern LEDs. It's got a motion sensor in it that allows you to do occupancy-based lighting for energy efficiency and convenience. And then it also has actually a video camera that can be used for remote video monitoring and for baby cam and for nanny cam and for stuff like that. And there are mobile apps on both iOS and Android that let you remotely monitor and control and walk you through installation and a bunch of different kinds of things like that. And now we also have a new product line of smart

dimmer switches, which are more of a conventional smart switch, but it's sort of, you know, from a design language point of view, very similar to the Brilliant Control and available compatible colors to the Brilliant Control. And it also has occupancy-based lighting. It has a unique feature where you can actually double tap on it and run a home automation scene. So in the same way that with the Brilliant Control, you can define scenes that control lighting and climate and locks and music and anything, you know, so we find as we start to automate homes that there aren't a thousand ways that we use the home. There are about 12 ways that we use the home.

And, you know, when you say like, I'm going to cook dinner now, or I'm going to watch a movie now, I'm going to read a book now, I'm going to bed now, you know, these kinds of things, you know, there's a standard configuration that you want things in and tends to be the most convenient way to set up automation. So the way that you can do that with the switch is even though it doesn't have a screen or a microphone, the way that the, that the brilliant control does,

you can just double tap on it and it'll run that scene. So you do that in your bedroom and it'll shut down the house, lock the doors, turn off the lights, turn down the temperature, et cetera. So this is a new product line there. We also have a smart plug that we're coming out with, which allows you to control area lighting or any other kind of thing that, that you want to control the power outlet to basically. And yeah, so this is, this is basically what the,

what the physical products are for Brilliant. So I just want to clarify on that. So you have the control, which that's like the brain, I guess, essentially. You have to have one of those. And then you can have a switch and a plug and all that communicates back and talks to it. Yeah, a typical home will have two or three Brilliant controls, let's say, although some large homes might have five, ten. I think our record is 104 in one home.

Wow. And then a bunch of light switches, depending on what you want to automate. Basically, the way you think of it is, where are the main places in the house that you want to be able to control things and put Brilliant controls there. And it comes in four different models. So depending on whether there's a single switch or a row of two or three or four switches that you're replacing, that just replaces the light switch just like light switches.

And then anywhere that you want to be able to control the lighting in the home, which is one of the main things we want to do with home automation, then you'd put in a Brilliant smart dimmer switch in there. So, you know, there might be 10, there might be 20 in a, in a house. It really depends. But one of the things about brilliant is you can kind of dip your toe in the

water. You can try just by one and put it in there and see if you see if you like the experience. And then as you see the value, then you add more things in and you might realize that you really want a video intercom capability between your living room and your, you know, your kid's room, uh, and, uh, and put one in there and so on. So a lot of times people will start with one or two and then they'll buy a few more as they realize the value of having them throughout the house. Got it. A few minutes ago, you mentioned a design language and I want to stay on that for a second, because you guys do have a pretty unique physical design. The look of the device is pretty striking. Talk to us about

the decision and sort of what you feel like in terms of the form factor makes the device maybe extra usable or unique. Yeah, I love product design. It's just so fun to think about how a product is going to work. And, you know, to look back at the different design ideas that we were batting around and how different they were, you know, is look like a piece of alien technology that had gotten stuck onto your wall. And we didn't want it to look like a smartphone that was suddenly on the wall. These things are incongruous. They don't really fit with a house. So we tried to utilize the design characteristics of the light switches that are already there as much as possible, while at the same time, updating them to a very different set of functions and constituents. So there is a touch screen there now, which a normal light switch doesn't have. And there are these touch grooves, which aren't there with a normal light switch. But we wanted to be really careful with the designing those affordances so that it's obvious how people would use it. We tried a lot of different designs and

said, okay, you walk in a room, there's one of these on the wall, how do you turn the light on? And, you know, just seeing, you know, making sure that people kind of got it and understood it intuitively. You know, but just spending time on little things make a huge difference, like the edge bevels and the radius of the corners and, you know, all kinds of little, little details that make a profound difference in how you feel about it. We wanted it to look like part of a house. We wanted it to look natural in a real house next to a piece of crown molding and not just in a gleaming glass and steel penthouse apartment built last year. You know, so there was a lot of process we went through to try to make sure that it was familiar

at the same time that it was presenting a lot of new capabilities. And I'm proud of what we accomplished with that. There was so much engineering that went into making it really thin, so it kind of seems like a normal light switch plate there rather than something jutting out from the wall. We had to do custom camera modules and custom PIR lenses and all kinds of work on the thermals and so on to be able to accomplish that. But I think it really pays off, even if you might not say anything if it was a millimeter or two thicker, but you'd feel it. It would seem different on the wall. So there's a lot of engineering work that goes into then fulfilling the design vision that you

have. Yeah. Those details make a big difference, I can imagine. Let's shift gears just a little bit and talk about your guys' go-to-market strategy. I see on the website you work with builders, multifamily owner and operators. You've got a brilliant pro program, direct-to-consumer as well. So touch on each of those different channels and maybe some of the unique challenges and things that you've encountered with your strategy in each of them? Yeah, homes are really interesting because there are so many different ways that people put things in their homes. And you sort of need to be able to reach all of them when you want something that ultimately powers every home. And that's

really what our ambition is. you know we we sell direct to consumers um we have mostly been doing that on our own website but we're actually now also available on homedepot.com and on amazon.com uh and there are more sites coming out also available on crutchfield so there are a number of different e-commerce sites that you can you can buy direct to consumer our own website you know is very information rich and is a good channel there for us. We'll be stay tuned for some experiments in physical retail that we've sort of put off due to the whole COVID situation and just wanted to make sure that that situation is normalized before we're trying to learn too much from it. And then working with builders is really rewarding because builders are being pulled by homebuyers. If you think about who buys a new home,

most of the homes that are bought in the U.S. are used homes. And, you know, that's the bulk of the market. If you're buying a brand new home, you want something modern. You know, you're sort of making a statement by buying a brand new home, you want a modern home. And the home buyers now are largely millennials, like, you know, they grew up with, you know, iPad as their first toy. You know, they're very comfortable with technology. And for them, modernity means technology. And yet, even brand new homes have been offered with very little built-in technology. And even if they have maybe a smart thermostat and a smart lock or something like that, it does, there's nothing that ties it together and they can come and see and make it and have

it feel like a modern home. And that's just a home with a couple of things bolted on. So they have a strong pull there and they've found that when they can put in a brilliant, you know, brilliant controls and have that be an integrated smart home system that people can walk into the home. Oh, wow. What's that? Oh,

check it out. Look, I can control all this stuff and look, Hey, ring the doorbell. Oh, there you are. You know,

that, that, that helps sell the houses. It turns the houses, you know, over more, more quickly. And we're the only company that allows you to do that, to build smart home

control in at a price point that isn't just for a multimillion dollar home, but can actually be for a $300,000 home. And that's kind of a remarkable thing. And what we found working with builders is we initially expected that they would make us like an optional upgrade grade package, like granite countertops or hardwood floors or upgraded cabinets or something like that. Instead, what they've done pretty much across the board is they've made brilliant standard in every single home that they sell because the value is, you know, so outstrips the price that it's kind of just a no-brainer that all of their houses are really differentiated. So builders have been really great to work with. And we're

just, you know, gearing up with a lot of multifamily, you mentioned apartments, apartment living is also very, very important. And similar to with homes, you want to define an ecosystem of devices that interoperate well with one another and have a consistent user experience. So when the apartment is shown and somebody goes and looks at it, they see how it all works. They're excited by it. Maybe they bring some of their own stuff, maybe they bring their own Sonos device or whatever, but it's something that they can easily sort of use and make their own. So that's really the process that we've gone through with those markets. And that's been really, really rewarding.

So we have over 140 builders now who are building Brilliant into their homes, and that's increasing all the time. And we're going to be making some announcements in just a week or two about what we're doing in the multifamily space. Great. We're really excited about that as well. Yeah, that's great. And you guys have a pro program too, it looks like. We have a lot of integrators, residential home technology companies who listen to the show. Talk a

little bit about the Brilliant Pro program. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the key ways that we reach both builders and consumers. So for both retrofit and builders, many of our builder relationships are with integrator relationships where they've got a trusted integrator that's their advisor and brings us in, or we have a builder and we'll bring an integrator in because they want somebody to do that. So it's a very symbiotic relationship

and a really key piece of missing of meeting the demand of that channel. And then as well, obviously for consumers, mostly from a little higher end consumers, end users, the integrators are also doing a lot of retrofit projects with Brilliant as well. It's a little bit of a change from thinking about a system like certainly a Crestron system

or even a Control 4 system or something like that, where, you know, you can do it a lot more quickly and at a much lower cost. But it opens up the access to a much higher volume of business as well, because instead of, you know, one of our large builders, a partner, for example, they used to offer a Control 4 upgrade option. Less than 3% of people chose that option. Now they build brilliant into every single home they buy. And there's an integrator that's just doing every one of those jobs.

So, you know, the individual job is smaller, but there are 33 times as many of them. And that's the kind of thing that we see a lot of time working with integrators that also work with other product lines. Yep. So you've mentioned a couple of times. Let's talk price real quick. What does it cost to get Brilliant started, I guess, in my home? What should I start with? Obviously, you need a control panel. So let's start there. It looks like you have a number of looks like you have a number of model of them. What should I get? Yeah, I mean, the control the you should get whatever fits where you want it so you know if you kind of go and look and go okay i want it right here in my living room and that's got three light switches in a row uh so you get a three gang for that one and then you go out over the kitchen

i've got one that's a two and then i want a one in the bedroom where it's a one, then you want a one and a two and a three. They range in price from MSRP from $299 for the single up through $449 for the quad. So it's basically $50 for each additional circuit that's there. And so that's how you pick those. And then the dimmer switches, MSRP in multi-packs is $59.99. So it's a very, very economical, smart lighting system, considering that that has a very high quality dimming circuitry and it has the motion sensor for occupancy-based lighting and it has the ability to run all the home automation scenes through. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't know if you've been to Florida too much, but we may need some six-game versions down here. You know, there are a few homes, mostly kind of older homes, that have these giant rows of switches. The biggest I've ever seen was in a commercial context where I saw 10 rows once. And I just looked at it.

Who could ever keep track? Who could remember what these things are? But what we found was the vast, vast majority of these are under four. But what you can do when you have more than four is the brilliant dimmer switches will mix and match with those. So you can put that in as many or as few as you want because it just takes up the same real estate

that a normal Decorah switch takes. Right. Cool. Good stuff. I want to shift gears here for the last little portion of our interview and kind of talk macro entrepreneurial stuff. You're a very successful entrepreneur. You've had several successful companies before this one, and it sounds like you're doing great with this one as well. So share, we've got a lot of entrepreneurs and small, medium-sized business owners in the audience. What are some tips that come to mind for you in terms of just generally building effective companies? Yeah. I mean, I think there's so much to say on that topic that it kind of depends from person to person. But the biggest thing I would say, or the first thing, it's not necessarily the biggest, but the first question is, well, if you're going to start a business, what kind of

business would it be? And I think that what's really important there is, particularly for like a tech business or something like that, if it's a services business, it's a little different. Because as a services business, you can offer a service that's already well established. But if you want to build a product company, you need to differentiate. And that means you need to have an idea that's different than the idea that other people have. So you need to be a little bit contrarian. You need to kind of look and go, you know what, I think the way that this market is going is actually not right, or I disagree with some reasonable population of people about how it is. Now, obviously, the trick is, it's not enough to just have it going, everyone's controlling these things through smartphones and iPads, or at the very high end of the market, they have these, you know, multi tens of thousands of dollars, home automation systems.

And that's wrong. Like, it needs to be hundreds of dollars, not tens of thousands. And it needs to be built into the home. And it needs to be an integrated smart home experience. And some people that we talk to, some investors I talk to, and I don't think so. I think the phone is great. Great. I'm glad there are people out there who think I'm wrong because that means that there aren't a hundred other companies doing exactly the same thing. Because if there are a hundred other companies, if you have an idea and you talk to it, talk about it with people and everyone goes, oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. Probably not a good idea to start a product company around because there's going to be a lot of competition and it's going to just turn into an execution game. You know, so that's one big piece of advice. And the other one I would say is to spend some time looking in the mirror and just ask yourself, what do I bring

to this problem? Why is it that I am more able to solve this problem than other people are? Because if you can come up with something that's a good idea, that isn't obvious to people, and you are really the right person to do it, then you're off to a good start. And there's still a lot, you know, that's 1% of the whole story, but at least it puts you down the right path. Yeah, no, I think it's great advice. And you mentioned to me as we were preparing for the show, it's kind of the striking that balance between the courage of your conviction and then, you know, sometimes running up against market feedback that says, Hey, maybe what we're doing isn't quite right. Maybe not. And how do you make

that decision? How do you think about that? Yeah, that's often the hardest balancing act. This is a little down further down the road. So you've figured out your contrarian position, you figured out why you're the right person to do it. You've decided on how you're attacking the market. Now you start getting market feedback. And it's no longer at that point, a matter of opinion where somebody's going, I don't think that's a good idea. I do think that's a good idea. It becomes a matter of our people buying this. And did I price it right? And all kinds of questions like this. And is there a major feature that's missing? Or actually, did I make it more complicated than it has to be? And

people just want something simpler. And that's where you need to keep that north star and maintain your vision of what you want for the company but you need to take that market input really seriously and take it into account in your product thinking and your product plans and this is why launching early and gaining market feedback is so often a good idea. Now that's situational, right? There are certain things like we had to nail the hardware platform before we could launch it because you can't go and replace that. So we had to make sure that was really, really right. So that kind of violates the rule that Reid Hoffman once said, if you're not ashamed of your version 1.0 product, then you launched too late. But that's not true for

a hardware product. For a hardware product, you need to get it out there because it's going to be in the field. But then we've updated it. We do over-the-air updates every two weeks, and there are so many more features now than there used to be. And so much of that is guided by the feedback that we've gotten from the channel, by the feedback that we've gotten from homeowners, and from the observations that we have from just instrumenting things and seeing what kinds of actions people are taking and what they're using and helping that guide our priorities. And without being in the market and getting that input, we wouldn't have had that. But it's really challenging. You end up with a lot of

these situations where you go, gosh, that's really a big change. Is that something that really fits our mission or not? Or do I believe it? So there's a time to be really stubborn and try to sort of impose your will on the market. But there are a lot of times to where the market tells you what it wants and you have to be humble enough to hear it and to do it. So a lot of what we've done, like the smart dimmer switches and the plugs and some of the upcoming stuff in multifamily is a very direct result of requests that we've had from our customers in terms of what they would like to have from us. And you have to take that very strongly into account. Yeah, that's great advice. And I think a lot of the product talk about lean development and getting things out there quickly is very, very valid and

true, but context dependent. And obviously, when you're talking about a hardware product, as you pointed out, that's a different beast altogether. And I'm always amazed as somebody who works in and around product, not on the hardware side, I'm always sort of looking in awe at hardware companies. I know that's a whole different ball of wax. One last question here before we kind of wrap things up. You are a holder of over 100 patents, and that's really an impressive thing, especially for those of us who have never... It's kind of a black box to me. It's an enigma to me how people sort of get into this. But are there any sort of practical tips or takeaways that you might share to people who are thinking about just innovation and ingenuity in general? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that

most invention comes from an interdisciplinary understanding that gives you a unique perspective on things. You know, there are some that are just like there's an advance and I'm a narrow specialist in this one thing and I have, you know, I have an advancement on it. But a lot of these things really come from taking domain knowledge that you have from one area and applying it to another. So a diversity of experience can really help and just an intellectual curiosity about how the way that things work in other fields. I'll give you an example from my last business there. My last company was a company called Shopkick and it was and is the number one mobile retail app and the number one mobile rewards program. And we offered rewards for people walking into stores.

So we walk into a Target or a Macy's or a Best Buy or whatever, and you get rewards there. So we had to invent a way of figuring out when somebody walked into the stores. And this was before BLE and so on. So, you know, we came up with the idea of doing that with ultrasonic audio that's modulating data and picked up through the microphone of the telephone handset. Now, I don't know if I would have had that fundamental idea, and obviously the team of people that implemented it, but the basic idea, if I hadn't just totally coincidentally been on the standardization committee for the VDOT 34 modem, which was like the last pure analog modem standard 20 years earlier, and understood something about modem data pumps and so on. And what we ended up doing was quite different than that, but it sort of was a thing that I might have thought of because of my earlier experience there that turned out to be quite innovative and unique and valuable for this. So, you know, and similarly, we've taken a lot of ideas

and technologies from smartphones and from tablets and so on. And it's a very different technology architecture that we have with Brilliant than the other systems that are out there because we've been able to take a more advanced or different technical understanding and apply it to the domain and come up with something that's both simpler, easier to configure, easier to use, and much, much less expensive. So that's really interesting. And I have to just ask one follow-up on that. Connect the dots for me because I'm not quite sure I'm connecting the modem with this ultrasonic sound that you guys use. So elaborate on that a little bit for me. Oh, Jason. Oh, Jason.

Without delving too deeply into trellis coding, what a modem does is the modem stands for modulator demodulator. And what it means is it's basically translating it's modulating or demodulating data on an analog channel and in particular the early phone-based modems were using an analog channel that was designed for voice transmission so you know the idea is you have a stream of bits and then you have this analog channel how do you communicate between two digital things, you know, through whether it's a wire or in this case, just a room full of air. And given that it was a room full of air,

a natural way to do that is with sound. I say natural because there's this microphone on the built into your, your, your handset. And so the techniques that you would use to translate data through the air is a modem. I mean, it's an open air acoustic modem, which is a different thing that hadn't been done before necessarily, but it's still the fundamental idea is similar to a conventional modem. Love it. Very cool. I'm pretty sure I was a Shopkick customer, consumer at some point. I know my wife was because I remember us talking.

And did Shopkick ship this product or no? Because I swear somebody had it. Okay, okay. Yeah, no, I think at the time I left, we had about 11 million users and all of the major retail chains except for Walmart. Yeah, yeah. I remember my wife talking about it and she was like,

oh, they use sounds. So when you walk into like Best Buy, it would hear the sound coming out. So that, that was a really, that's really cool. Very, very cool. So back on, back on track here. What, what do you, what's next for Brilliant? I know you've mentioned MGU a couple of times, but what, what do you see as the big opportunities here in the connected home? Yeah. I mean, there's tremendous, you know,

just growth potential with what we're doing now because we're just scratching the surface with the, you know, tens of thousands now, but it'll be quickly hundreds of thousands and millions of homes out there. International, obviously, there's a big push there. But then also a lot of people,

you know, live in apartments and not in single family residences and, you know, bringing smart technology to them with probably more of a focus than you might otherwise see on the tenant experience there. Largely just sort of reducing the time to turnover, increasing the turnover of apartment units is really something that we're focusing on. We'll be doing some announcements there. And then as you can see from the launches of the switch and the plug, we have a pretty active product development pipeline and we'll have additional products there as well as just constant updates on new functions. So we're always rolling out new integrations. We just rolled out the integration with the Genie smart garage door opener, for example. And we've got some that are in beta right now.

It'll be rolling out in the next couple of weeks. And it's just a constant rolling set of new features and functionality and so on. But yeah, we really see this as someone you know, someone needs to provide the user experience to enable every home to be smart. And, you know, whatever fulfills that mission is what we'll do. That's another piece of entrepreneurial advice. Like know what your mission is. Like people sometimes think like the mission statement, and it's not so much about wordsmithing the mission statement as it is about really knowing what it is that your business exists for and making sure that everything you do serves that purpose very good very good well how can uh if i'm interested in one i want

to pick up one of these brilliants how can i uh learn more where can where can i go out there on the uh the internet to find out more about brilliant yeah just go to www.brilliant.tech and that's.tech. And there are sort of microsites there for integrators and for builders and so on, as well as the information that's there for consumers and easy ways to reach out to us from there. Awesome. Well, thank you, Aaron.

We really appreciate it. This was a really fun conversation and keep us posted. Definitely wish you all the best with the product moving forward and we'll look forward to seeing what you guys are able to do. Well, thanks so much. It was a pleasure talking. All right. Well, that'll do it for our interview with Aaron. And again, really enjoyed it learning not just about the product and their approach to the market, which I found cool and unique, but also getting to know Aaron a little bit and learning about his, his background and some of his tips for sort of innovation and, and entrepreneurship. I thought were really fun to, uh, to pick his brain about. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant. It's kind of one of those

products. Um, I think you brought this up in the interview. It's kind of like you look at it and it's kind of, I don't know, you can either love it or hate it. And, um, initially when I saw it, I didn't like it very much, but now that I look at it more and more and I can kind of like, I can see what they're doing and they've, they definitely have iterated on the product. Like you can, you can see that they've been putting some time into refining how it looks over time. Now that I can see what they're doing with it. I really wish when I was, when I was running, uh, running these, these jobs, I really wish I had something simple like this where I could just pop it in the house and just call it a day. There you go. You have a

smart home. It's just one device, a few hundred dollars, it gets you in the door and starts going. There were tons of home builders would have just appreciated something like that. And then have somebody like me to come in and set the thing up and program it. So I'm really, really interested in seeing where they go with this thing because it's looking better and better for sure. Yeah, I think it fits into a kind of an interesting

little niche between just more of like a pure play DIY type of product and then not up at the cost or level per se of like a control four system. So it kind of sits in the middle ground there. And I can see that being very attractive to builders and multifamily owners and things like that. So that seems to be the angle they're coming at it from pretty clearly. And again, it seems like it's a good fit there.

So enjoyed chatting with Aaron, and we appreciate him coming on. Let's move on from there, Seth. We've got a mailbag, a good mailbag entry this week from friend of the show, Robert. I am not going to read all of this. It was a very long email, thoughtful email, and covers a whole bunch of different stuff. But a couple of things we wanted to talk about here related to some of the conversations we've been picking up lately around productivity and different apps and things like that. We're getting a lot of good feedback on that stuff, and this was some of it we wanted to share. So a couple of things I wanted to point out here that Robert said that I thought were particularly salient. So one thing, a couple of things I wanted to point out here that Robert said that I thought were particularly salient. Number one, most important thing I've learned is that

productivity tools are very personal. There is no perfect app for every task. Don't feel bad if you don't like an app that someone else swears by. Also, don't be afraid to try something new or different and give it a fair shake. Great advice. Great, great point. I sort of harp on that a lot. I'm a geek for this stuff and I'll talk to people at work and I'll say, Hey, here's how I do things. But I'm always sort of feeling like I have to qualify it a little bit and say like, this may or may not work for you. Um, and so I think right, right on point there. And then he goes on to say, Seth, if you like good notes on the iPad, take a look at notability, very similar, uh, but has the ability to record audio. It's a huge difference for Robert. He says, when I am in client meetings

or vendor training, I record the entire audio of the meeting. So even if my note-taking sucks, I can go back and listen to the recording and fill in what I missed. So a little tip for you there. Notability, again, is the one he mentioned. And then the only other thing I wanted to mention out of this particular email, there was a lot of other good stuff in here, but he did mention an app that I've been hearing a lot about lately called Bear. This is a written, handwritten drawing notes. It's a note-taking app, but one that a lot of people are really swearing by. And he mentioned a couple of things. You can type on it too. It it has like yeah yeah it's yeah thank you for clarifying that i did a terrible job of setting that up but he mentions a few things

in here that he likes about it um can be set to a blank sheet so really focus on writing and nothing else got a tagging system i've heard a lot of people say good things about backup and export options um export to Markdown and PDF files. So Bear's one that I've definitely heard about. In fact, I think it was in the hub that Robert may have mentioned this one to me, and I've heard other people that I work with use it as well. So that's another one to check out. So Bear and Notability, according to this email from Robert, if you're listening and

into this stuff, those are two that you should have on your radar. Yeah, I'm going to give them both a try. Why not? Why not? It looks like it's right. So easy to experiment these days. I mean, like, like you said, there's, there's so many different things that you can get into. Um, it basically what it boils down to me is like, if I have something or a thought, like what's the quickest way I can get it out of my head, uh, put it somewhere where I can get back to it later typically that's drafts just because it's so lightweight um but you know i'm i'm open to checking something else out yeah so he goes on to try to talk me into an ipad i have a lot of people trying to talk me into an ipad now you got to get the 12.9 he says

the big one the big boy and it looks like you're gonna have to get the the nice touch the the the keyboard with the the mouse thing the trackpad on it you're gonna have to get that you're gonna and when you get the the big boy you got to get the you can't get that little chump pencil like i did like a hundred dollars no you may as well spend like two hundred dollars because i think that's not what i'm calling so yeah you're gonna have to go all in skimp out it's all it feels like this is all or nothing. Oh, it is literally all or nothing. Cause yeah, there's, there's, there's no way you can go in between the two. Like if I went now and I said,

Oh, I need the 12.9 iPad pro. I don't think this pen actually works with that iPad. Like you have to have the nice pen to work with the iPad. But what I will say about the iPad pro and the pen, like this one has that ridiculous like charging thing where you have to like stick it in, harpoon it into the bottom about the iPad Pro and the pen, this one has that ridiculous charging thing where you have to stick it in, harpoon it into the bottom of the iPad. That was a horrible design.

And the iPad Pro has a little magnet thing that you stick it on top of the screen, and that's harpooned. Bad choice there, huh? Yeah. Total separate interaction, but with Robert, who's been very engaged this week. Seth, I feel like he's talking me back from the ledge of ripping my Mac Mini apart, which I still haven't done.

What have you done? I am so upset right now. You just don't understand. First, you give me this nice uh amazon one for the museum and then i find out you're behind my back telling jason not to put the ssd in his and no no jason this has taken a year robert it's taken a year to get to this point robert may have just undone a year of progress with like one slack message don't don't listen the thing that keeps playing through my mind that he said in slack he's like even i wouldn't do that oh okay all right i've done it many times

i've done it many times jason you can do it it's not it's not hard and we'll see if you if you copy it and then you you check it like i like i gave you the instructions on how to do it you copy it you very you you trust but verify right like you trust it you verify I gave you the instructions on how to do it. You copy it. You trust but verify, right? You trust it. You verify that it works. Then you take your computer apart, stick it in there and say, boot to this drive and boom, you're done. That's all you have to do. And you're done. When you say it like that, it sounds so easy. Anyways, we'll figure it out. Seth and I have been corresponding. Robert's mentioning using just an external SSD, something he does that says obviously much easier from a front-end initial setup standpoint, and he says plenty fast. It appears my Mac mini might have a PCI compatible SSD. I've looked at several videos and it looks like orders of magnitude easier to install than the one I got.

So it does look like the vendor that I bought this from is going to let me exchange it. And so that's where the process is at now. I'm basically deciding, do I want to exchange it and go the PCI route? Or am I going to let Robert scare me into not taking the computer apart at all? This is going to take another year. I know it is. It could at this rate.

This is going to be another year. We're going to, we're going to come to the show. It'll be show like 413 and we're not even going to be past this. That's the over under. Yeah. I mean, I,

I was like, oh man, Jason's going to have this thing up and going. He's going to, he's going to be like, how fast is my computer mean, I was like, oh man, Jason's going to have this thing up and going. He's going to be like, how fast is my computer now, Seth? And no, thanks, Robert. I appreciate it. No, we're going to get you upgraded. Yeah, you can thank Robert for that one.

We're going to get you upgraded. We'll get there one way or the other. I mean, if I don't do anything, this hard drive is going to die. I can feel it. So you've got that working in your favor there you go there you go you got it you got it you got to move your your basic the the the i think all you do is this podcast on this thing you don't actually do it that's it that's it that's it there's really little motivation other than like one hour uh every uh every week

to do anything that's the problem like if it just survives uh wednesday evening recording sessions i'm good oh man there's there's no urgency oh you're you're gonna you're gonna swap that thing out and you're gonna crank it up and it's gonna be a brand new computer and you'll be like wow why haven't i done this why did i wait so long why did i wait you're right i know you're right. Anyways, the saga continues. Shifting gears here quickly, staying on the sort of productivity front, quick pick of the week. We'll move through this one quickly. A lot of people may already know about this one. Certainly not new, but Grammarly. Grammarly has announced recently more advanced features are coming to Google Docs. So that's

why this kind of landed on my radar. Grammarly is, for those who are not familiar, it's like a spell check on steroids. It's basically how I describe it. So it's that same idea of checking your spelling, but it's checking your grammar. And it does a really, really excellent job as somebody who writes a lot of blog posts and different emails, whatever the case may be. I love it. I don't know if I mentioned this already, but I use the free version. There is a paid version as well. So you can use either and you'll get great results out of it. But I recommend it to everybody who I talk to about any sort of writing. It's an absolute no-brainer, in my opinion, to have Grammarly running because it's going to identify a lot of the things that a spell checker won't, like broken sentences or missing words, things of that nature. And again,

the advanced version is going to detect a lot more optimizations, but even the free version is going to do a good job at finding just broken sentences and glaring sort of grammatical issues that I've found as somebody who writes a lot, it's maddening to me how blind you go to these things, right? You've been staring at the same email you've been writing for an hour and you've looked at this sentence a thousand times. It's missing a word, but somehow your brain just doesn't see it. You're blind to it. So something like Grammarly is a great thing to have running. So that was my pick of the week this week. Good pick of the week. I've been running them, I think, about a year now as I figured out. And, yeah, it makes you sound smarter.

Well, it makes you look smarter because you're not missing punctuation or have bad grammar. It doesn't make you sound any smarter, but it does. One thing I don't like on this thing is the judginess that it has, though. It's like, this sounds very businesslike. I'm like, I'm not trying to be businesslike. And then when I'miness that it has though like it's like this sounds very business-like i'm like i'm not trying to business-like and then when i'm trying to be business-like it's like this sounds fun and playful i'm like i'm trying to sound like i'm trying to write terms and conditions what are you talking about being very judgmental grammarly so

it does help me yeah i think that's like a relatively new thing and they came out with like the tone checker or something yeah it does help me find all those commas that i my wife when you know she used to go through and proofread some things here and there for me and she's like why do you hate commas you need a comma there and that's in the sheet my wife is a an english major from from way back in the day commas that's a that's a delicate one i don't i don't find a bypass them like evidently my brain you just keep it easy just don't use them yeah and then all of a sudden the little thing highlights in red why that word's not misspelled. No, it's, it's the comma. So good, good stuff. Good pick. Well, the big thing here, uh, again, to close out,

uh, I mentioned they're bringing advanced features to Google docs. It wasn't long ago. If you used Grammarly that it didn't even work in Google docss. You had to copy the text out of Google Docs and go paste it into the Grammarly site to have it run and then move it back. It now works pretty well in Google Docs. So that was a big thing for me because we work in all Google Docs at our company. So it appears to be getting more and more functional inside of Google Docs, which is a great thing. So if you're not using something like that, go check it out. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, or ideas for productivity for us, our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online

form. And as we do every week, we want to give a big shout out to everybody who supports and listens to the show, but especially those of you who are able to financially contribute to our efforts through our Patreon page. To learn more, head over to hometech.fm slash support and learn how you can support our efforts here for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over $5 will give you a big shout out on air, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, The Hub, where you and other supporters of

the show can gather every day for inside baseball conversations about hacks that make your devices catch on fire. Yeah, the day was measuring incorrectly. It was not a very good day for James.

He had to throw away about a few thousand dollars in shading because he'd spec'd wrong oh the classic lines yeah yeah biggest fear ever i never i never messed up but you know knock on wood uh broken tape measure oh man that that was that was always nervous measure like 10 times uh but if yeah, as somebody who like struggles a little bit with, um, sort of obsessive compulsive, uh, nature, uh, I never enjoyed measuring shades. No, not at all. Knowing that like any mistake is thousands of dollars and there's nothing you can do. And you like psych yourself out. Like I felt like I was so worried about it that I was actually more likely, uh uh to make a mistake right

than if i just chilled out about the whole thing yep and and you see like the people that do shades they just come in and they're like done and they walk out and you're like he doesn't care about his his money make it look easy uh if you if you'd like to help out but can't support financially we'd appreciate a five-star uh review on on iTunes or positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. We're shooting for those five stars and it helps other people find out about the show. That's really what we're looking for. Thanks very much for listening. Jason, that wraps up this week. It does. What are we doing next week? Are we off next week? So next week, I am, listeners to the show will recall my wife and I took our kids up to the mountains here in

Colorado to an area called Grand Lake about a month ago, a little, I think a little over a month ago, maybe. And we just had such a nice time up there that we've decided to squeeze in one more trip here before the summer ends. and maybe the kids go back to school i think i'm not really sure anyways we're sneaking up to the mountains for a few days again there you go next week so looking forward to that very nice get away get back into nature that's the way to do it that's right totally i'm jealous again i wasn't jealous enough the first time you got to do it this time so yeah it's like it's just, it's just, you know, we had a really busy year of travel planned. We had a couple of weddings on, uh, my wife's family and

friends. And, um, so we've been saving up and we had a budget built up for, for all this travel and then COVID hit and, and all that money is there. And so we're holding on to most of it, obviously, cause those weddings are going to be rescheduled. But we have, you know, we had a little bit of a fund for some travel this summer. And it's just good to get out of the house. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said earlier, it's like your spring. Every day you're sitting at home, you're just winding up. And as soon as that door opens, head on out as fast as you can.

That's it. So those are my plans next week. Well, I'll see if I can sit down and record either a solo one or try and get somebody in to help out with it as well. I don't know. We'll see what happens. I'm going to get hit by lightning

if I don't get off the computer. Holy cow. I don't know if you can hear this thing. No, I can't. We have some, it must be good rejection on the mics in, but like there have been

some really close strikes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I was going to suggest that maybe next week you can get Robert to be your co-host and you guys can arm wrestle over. Only if he has an SSD, Jason. Only if he has an SSD. Anyways, all right, cool. Well, fun episode this week, Seth.

I hope you have a great weekend, and we'll look forward to sitting back down with you here in just about a couple of weeks. All right. Sounds good, Jason. Have, have a good, have a good time. Have a good day. Thank you. Appreciate it.