HomeTech.fm - Episode 331 - AI for the Luxury Home with Josh.ai's Alex Capecelatro

Episode Date: December 11, 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, December 4th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? I'm doing great. Really, really I am. I'm doing really great. That didn't sound so convincing. Well, Jason, if you move to Florida, there will come a time after so many years of living in this state is your body just physically can't handle a five-degree swing in temperature, and you will get sick.

You will get sick for no reason whatsoever other than the temperature's gone down five degrees. One more reason i am not going to move to florida the last i've been asleep the last two days two days yeah you sound a little clogged up yep sinus no not the covid just all sinus related and uh yeah no fever you know the standard stuff that that happens when when you know the the seasons change and uh allergies kick in and that temperature drops from like 75 to like 70 yeah i mean it's been more dramatic than that it's brutal yeah it's 57 out there right now so

yeah get the sweater well you're soldiering through. Appreciate having you here. We got a great show this week. We had Alex Caposolatro on from Josh AI. And I think you pointed out, Seth, after we finished recording with him, this might have been his third appearance on the show. I knew we'd had him on before. I thought it was only once, but I think he might be our first three-time guest. So we've had alex on several times um it's been really fun

to watch josh ai come into the space and grow and and develop as a company and really continue to to push the envelope in terms of uh and rashid is is remembers better than i do yep third time so rashid's in the chat room correcting me um yeah it's been a lot of fun to watch that that company grow and obviously it was timely to get get Alex on given their recent release of the nano and core, a really cool product line. I think that that's kind of pushing the envelope in terms of voice control, especially as it relates to doing it in the high-end homes that I know many of our listeners work in. So be sure to stay tuned for that.

Uh, we had a really fun conversation diving into that with Alex. Well, I, I, I hate to, I hate to look over at the chat room, Jason. There's a Bruno sighting. Oh, Bruno. That's a rare one. So we'll take it when we can get it. Hey, Bruno, how's it going? Yeah. Yeah. Good to see some folks hanging out in the chat. It's always fun. Yep. Yep. Well, Jason, what do you say we get started with some Home Tech headlines? Let's do it. Logitech has quietly revealed a new CircleView wired doorbell camera today, which is notably the first consumer smart doorbell to

support Apple's recent HomeKit secure video standard. The new doorbell is available from both Apple and Logitech's websites for $199. I am ordering it right now. That sounds great. Other than the Logitech part, it sounds awesome. I am excited to see. I like the secure video thing. Yeah, yeah, me too, me too. I'm excited to see what this does and how it's received in the market. Because, man, it actually, if you see the picture of this thing, it actually looks like a doorbell.

It looks like not a robot or anything. I would say it competes with Ring as far as looks go yeah yeah there's a correction uh sort of a technicality in here that that i want to point out some of our listeners may be tuned in enough to know this technically the robin pro line camera was the first to have home kit secure video, but that's more of a commercial solution. This is really the first one focused at the home to have that HomeKit secure video. They also have a $299 bundle that includes home installation. So I wonder how they're doing that.

So yeah, $100 more for home installation. Probably through like a Hello Tech or some sort of service like that, presumably. Well, we'll see how it does. of course with the logic tech name i always put a little star next to that but we'll see we'll see how it goes put a little asterisk on that one all right well back in may hulu started testing a watch party feature and it's now officially available as before it will allow you and up to seven other friends and family members to connect with one another while taking in the same movie or tv show one much appreciated change from when the company was testing the feature is that it's now available to all hulu subscribers not just those who pay for the more expensive ad free tier um these these

little watch party um apps or features are getting pretty popular yeah yeah definitely this thing is going to become one of those kind of table stakes things i feel like though although i will say there is a limitation it's a pretty big limitation here in terms of this is only available through the companies uh through the web app i believe through the like through a browser through through your computer uh is I believe what I saw on the story limitation remains that you can't start or join a watch party through the Hulu app only available courtesy of the company's website. Um, so, yeah, so, so it is still, still kind of limited, but I'm sure they're, they're working on that. Like you said, these, these things are becoming pretty popular and I suspect will become a mainstay even after

we get through this whole COVID mess that we're going through. Well, speaking of COVID, another big trend here in a move that would seem to have been unthinkable before the coronavirus pandemic, Warner Brothers announced that it will debut all 17 of its scheduled 2021 movie releases on the streaming service HBO Max on the same same day seth that they arrive in commercial theaters so this is the uh the day and date release that we've all sort of dreamed of forever coronavirus has has brought that about this is being reported by multiple media outlets entitled such as dune that's cool the matrix 4 didn't know there was going to be another one space jam a new 4. Didn't know there was going to be another one. Space Jam.

A New Legacy. Also did not know there was going to be another one of those. Tom and Jerry. Mortal Kombat. And The Suicide Squad. Will be on the rosters of the 2020 releases. Jason, I'm not sure exactly how excited about many of these movies. But maybe Space Jam.

I don't know. That seems like it could be fun. Dune looks kind of dune looks kind of interesting yeah yeah um but a lot of these are like it's just so there's so many i mean matrix space jam tom and jerry mortal combat those are all you know like old enterprise like those of all everything's a remix nowadays i feel like i mean don't don't tell me dune's not a remake well that's true yeah no you're you're 100 right on that these are all well-tested properties that they knew exactly how

they were going to do when they made them unfortunately they you know ran into a the pandemic uh at the same time so what this is very interesting that how they'll be releasing these though like it'll be the same day uh the movie comes out in the commercial theater if there are any of those left um hbo hbo max will have those on for streaming so you don't have to go to the theater if you don't want to you can um stay in at home and and watch watch it on the tv screen with your own popcorn and horrible nachos or whatever you want to get and and pretend you're at the movie theater and i i think this is great this is this is really cool this is i mean i i love going to the movies and i i will i think i'm going to miss not having a movie theater to go to because i we we're we're

huge movie theater fans in this house and uh not having a movie theater to go to during this pandemic has been really, really tough. We've thought about it a couple of times, actually. It's like, well, do you think it's safe? No, it's not. And I don't think many of them are going to survive this whole crazy thing. Unfortunately, I think we're going to have like the boutiques, like where they serve the foods and the fancy theaters. Those are going to survive. And the big fancy ones, like what do they call it?

Atmos theaters and those kinds of things. Those are the ones, the reference theaters are going to be the ones that kind of hang around. Other than that, I just don't see, you know, the small two screen theater. There's no way for it to survive this kind of thing. Yeah. The story here, last point I'll make on it

is they sort of go out of their way to emphasize that this is a one-year arrangement, so trying to manage future expectations. They're clearly still hoping that theatrical releases will be a thing. But for 2021, we'll have day-and-date releases for

Warner Brothers. They're just saying that until they get their new measurements on how successful a movie can be when you release it and commercially uh both streaming and in a theater and uh once they have those matrix metrics down then they'll be like oh well this is just the new norm moving forward because there's no way they're going to go back yeah yeah time will tell google has announced that apple music is now available on smart speakers and displays that use the Google Assistant, including Google's own line of Nest products, such as the Nest Audio. Owners of Assistant smart speakers or displays will be able to set Apple Music as the default service on the

speakers and use their voice to play songs, albums, or playlists from it, much like they can do with Spotify, Pandora, or YouTube Premium. I'm laughing through all of this because I have these expensive HomePods here that only play Apple music. You've got to wonder if Apple's going to stick to their guns on that or if they're going to have to change course at some point. This began rolling out this week, so December 7th, this started rolling out in the US, the UK, France, Germany, and Japan. Yeah. Apple did announce that they would have support for third-party products. I know Spotify is probably not going to be one of them because they're suing them.

But I don't know. I honestly haven't looked into it to see if I could switch the service over to something else. All I know is when I ask it to play music, it says, I'm sorry, I can't do that, Dave. And I start playing Spotify on my phone and then bop it on the head and it starts playing Spotify because it'll transfer that way. Nice. I caught that reference there too. Nice job. Well, speaking of companies playing nice, Google Nest and Samsung are joining forces to bring Nest's portfolio of products to the Samsung SmartThings IoT ecosystem. According to a press release, Google Nest devices, including thermostats, cameras, and doorbells, will now be Works with SmartThings certified, allowing users to control their smart devices through SmartThings. It's nice when Google breaks things and then maybe puts it back together.

I can imagine SmartThings customers are pretty happy about this and be able to integrate their products that they once had integrated before into their SmartThings system. Yeah. Well, SmartThings has been breaking stuff too, right? Yeah, that's true. That's true. But this was, I mean, I think this was probably caused by Google's, not the works with, maybe it was works with smart things broke it.

I don't know. Now I feel bad. Maybe I'm blaming the wrong party here, but both of them, both of them. Well, no, they both, but I think they're both, you know, jokes aside, I think they were both similar things in the sense that it was both big companies figuring out that, hey, we've got some sort of tech debt here in terms of how we're handling APIs and integrations and things of that nature.

And we got to get to the next level now. And unfortunately, there's going to be a little bit of collateral damage associated with that. But it was the decision these companies felt like they had to make. So I think there were some parallels there, but yeah, there's been some of this griping from both Samsung and Google Nest users. Yeah. Oddly enough, all of that, I would probably classify all of that was caused by privacy and personal information that was embedded in a lot of the API calls. And to move away that, you have to break those. So it's kind of interesting to see how that played out over the last couple of years.

Yeah, definitely. Well, Jason, it would not be another week in Home Tech without another wise story. No kidding. Goodness. These guys are on a roll. Oh, man, I can't wait to see the wise car that they come out with next week for $500 or something. Wyze is now entering the DIY home security market with the new Wyze Home Monitoring Kit. It's available for pre-order today and shipping in March. The company will offer the base hardware for free if you sign up for professional monitoring,

which itself is just $60 per year. $60. Five bucks a month. Five bucks a month. And they'll give you everything for free. This is crazy. Yeah, it really is. I'm still scratching my head over here. I, you know what I'm, I'm really curious about this totally has nothing to do with this product, but like how big of a team do they have at Wise? I mean, they're just cranking out these products and granted, like we've, I've, I'm sure they're, they're not like manufacturing all, they're like kind of re-skinning things and you know like i i still just wonder this is this is crazy the pace uh with which they're coming out this and it's so cheap that i also wonder like do people start to shy away from it just because it's like do you trust

just feels like you the trust issues yeah i don't know it's crazy if you if you were in a um if you were like in an apartment or something i see a lot of people. If you were in an apartment or something, I see a lot of people who are in an apartment, they want to get something like Canary, and they'll put something like that in where it's just like an all-in-one package. This may be good for somebody in that. We know from our own industry's metrics of what what the penetration of like home security is. And it's like super low. Like I want to say like 30% of homes out there actually have a home security system hooked up. So, so I could be wrong on that. And I'm just kind of going off like what in my head,

but it was like well below from what you would think it would be. So there's plenty of market for somebody to come in and you know, and, and, and put in these types of like DIY products. There's plenty of people that will install something like this. And I know, I kind of know how they are doing this. And I can tell you that even at like five bucks a month, it's still going to be highly profitable for them, you know, in bulk. Like they're still going to make a lot of money off this.

Yeah. Robert in the chat room said most of the new wise products are unique design, not saying they don't have outside firms doing all the work, but unlike their first camera, they aren't simply, you know, re-skinning existing products sold under other, other brands. So I thought they were the, what are the Xiaomi or weren't they just basically taking product from. I thought at first they were uh in in any

event it's a really perplexing model to try to figure out um either everybody else who's selling hardware in the home is just like making an absolute killing or uh they're just they're just totally going after like a a volume play here here or something. I just, I don't know. It's really interesting. All of this stuff has come down in, like, if you think about sensors and everything like that, you know,

these types of products have come down in price because like, there's a lot more sensors, these types of smart sensors and in general being developed these days. So it's not like they were always super expensive to begin with. And when you have like bigger companies, like we have like the traditional security companies that were out there, they weren't, they weren't really developing a sensor,

like a wireless contact sensor for something like DSC or GE, which I guess they're not around anymore. So Interlogix, I'm not sure who owns that property anymore, but like they were developing a wireless contact for a niche market that was again not not selling to 70 of the marketplace out there right so price accordingly this stuff could actually you know take off the shelf and if they're reusing product that they're using elsewhere for wireless sensors and whatnot like say these are

just your plain jane-Wave sensors, you know, like they could actually be producing this stuff and just grabbing parts off the shelf and going with it. So I don't know. Like it seems like this is interesting. I don't think anybody else was making a killing. I think that these guys just have volume. I was being facetious there.

Well, these guys have volume behind them that nobody else has. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty fascinating. Ron and Mervine in the chat room says the vacuum they are releasing does look very close to the Xiaomi Rock Robo. So no, no, no shockers here. I mean, this, this stuff happens all the time in electronics. There are few firms doing a lot of the manufacturing and lots of people will you know like legos um build different uh pieces out of that or different parts out of those components so um yeah interesting trend i wonder what they'll come out with next i feel like we need to make a game show out of this well i've got my uh i've got my cars on a car have they done um have they made uh like air an airpod equivalent yet oh a smart like a smart speaker type thing they could they could

well like no the yeah like the ear the in-ear am i drawing a blank on airpods oh okay yeah like airpods headphones and that kind of thing they got. They got to come out with AirPods. I'm putting money on that. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. I don't know. Maybe not a lot of money. Like a dollar.

A dollar. You just don't know with those guys. Yeah. Well, hey, let's put some wise money on it. It'll be like... I got a penny. Yeah. There you go.

Anyways, interesting stuff. All right. All of the links and topics that we've talked about on this week's show can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 331. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you weekly show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great things going on here in the world of home tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 331. And you can join us in the chat room live each Wednesday while we're recording the show. Sometime between seven and eight, it seems to be, PM Eastern, the one true time zone.

You can find out more about that at hometech.fm slash live. All right, Seth. Well, without any further delay, let's jump straight into our interview here. Once again, we had Alex Caposolatro, the CEO of Josh AI. We hope you enjoy. Hey, Alex, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, we're excited to have you back on. It's been quite a while. We had you on the show before, and like I said, we're excited to get you back on. You guys have been busy and growing and developing a lot as a company, so it'll be really great to dive in and catch up on all of that. But before we dive into that, just in case any of our listeners aren't familiar with you and your work, talk a little bit about who you are, some of your background, and give us kind of the quick intro on Josh AI.

Sure. So Alex Caposolatro, founder, CEO of Josh AI. I started the company just over five years ago now, so we're kind of maturing as a startup. If you're not familiar, we are essentially a voice control and an AI-focused home automation platform, really trying to kind of rethink the way home automation works in terms of really natural interfaces, making things really sort of magical. The idea of how do we surprise homeowners with just being really smart, being really intuitive, making things work in a way that you might not be used to with some of the traditional systems. We do focus more on the higher end systems, so the professionally installed channel.

Work with a network of about 600 certified installers around the United States and Canada. And while we're primarily a software company, we really started off focusing on that space. About two years into the company, we realized we needed to start building out hardware. So we released our first product a couple of years ago called Josh Micro.

Josh Micro is a far-field microphone product, similar sort of to an Amazon Echo or Google Home Mini, with the exception of it being essentially a whole processor that does most of the processing on the device, trying not to go out to the cloud, and really smart home focus. So we focus on the integrations and the voice control that you need in the home. But I think part of this show is about we have now launched our newest, or rather we've announced soon to be launching our newest set of product. We call Josh Core and Josh Nano. And it's just, in my opinion, a quantum leap for voice control in the home. And I'm just super

excited. Yeah, we're excited to talk about it. It's a really neat looking product. And you guys had obviously the big reveal, which was great. And there was some speculation leading up to that. And Seth and I were making our bets on the show here beforehand. And I'll toot my own horn and say that I did predict that it would be some sort of a more architecturally friendly, designer friendly microphone. And I was not disappointed. I think it's a great looking product and was happy to see you guys come out with it. I think it's important to keep pushing that aesthetic forward and it's about more than the aesthetics too. There's a lot of really cool technology. So we're

going to jump in and talk about that here. Before we go straight into some of the background and backstory that I want to jump into, Let's set the stage a little bit and just talk kind of at the high level, what's the elevator pitch for the Nano and Core products? Yeah. So I would like to give a little context and then we'll do more background, but I just find to really appreciate what we're trying to do, it needs a little bit of context. And so the short summary of what we're trying to do here is that the entire industry outside of what we do from a voice control perspective is known as smart speakers. You've got the Amazon Echo smart speaker, Google Home smart speaker.

Now I think it's the Nest Audio smart speaker. Apple's got the HomePod smart speaker. And we live in homes and we work with homes where you have really high quality speakers built into your ceiling, built into your walls, maybe freestanding speakers. And we just think what we're trying to focus on is more of the user interface. It's about voice control. It's about automation. And so Josh Nano and Josh Core is really our rally against the smart speaker as a product category

and saying to build a fully immersive environment, use great sounding speakers, use an architectural distribution system. Let's make the device just blend into the room. Josh Nano is a much, much smaller device. It's, I think, about 100 times smaller than the closest competitor in terms of volume as a far-field microphone. So think about it as about the size of a quarter. You wall mount it. There's a little bit in the wall. So you're running it on PoE. It's got some stuff in there. But the part that's in the room is basically the size of a quarter. And this is essentially doing, from a voice perspective, what an Amazon Echo or Google Home would be doing. The reason that we have a second product, Josh Core,

is that's what allows this device to get so small. So Josh Core is your rack mounted processor. It's doing all the natural language processing, all the room control. It talks to all your local devices so that when you walk in a room and you say, okay, Josh, turn on the lights, open the shades and play the Beatles, the microphone takes in that audio. It does a little bit of UI and IO in terms of LEDs. It's got some sensors, got the microphones, but then it passes all that data back to the processor, back to Josh Core. And Josh Core is what's saying, let me break down that text. Let me figure out what you need. Let me talk to your lighting system, your music system, your EV system. And it basically handles

all of that and then processes the response back to your speakers. So there's kind of a lot going on, but from a user perspective, it's happening with a very, very minimal device. Wow. Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned the size or a good frame of reference. And I went back and looked at the website because in my mind, I think I was picturing it even maybe as a little bit bigger. And now indeed, I go back and look at it and you can kind of compare it next to like a single gang keypad and really get a sense for the size. It is a very, very small footprint indeed, which a lot of the homes that I've worked in in the past, and I know Seth has worked in, that aesthetic is again, really important. So appreciate that context. Let's

talk a little bit about, so you talked about your guys' sort of mission and belief in terms of what this should really look like in these high-end homes, but presumably you were also hearing some external feedback that led you guys down this path in terms of developing this solution. So talk a little bit about some of the feedback you've heard maybe from your dealer network, as well as from the design and architecture communities. Yeah. So there's been some really good, but really interesting feedback. And if any of you are on the manufacturing side or product development side, I find it's always fascinating to figure out how do you listen to the right feedback? How do you throw out the useless feedback? And ultimately what

leads us here? And so the first thing is we're just really fortunate to work in an environment where we have a network of reps, which kind of work a little bit like distributors, if you don't know reps in other industries. And then again, about 600 dealers, all of which give us feedback and then customers giving us feedback and they're doing it directly. They're doing it on social media. There are a lot of different channels, but in reality, the feedback that's most important is when you see people actually making essentially their own aftermarket products, because if someone cares so much about a problem that they're willing to invest in a solution, it tells you that you might need to lean into that.

So in this case, there are three separate companies that have made aftermarket products for Josh Micro with the intent of trying to hide the devices. There's a C-List mount that makes it basically flush mounted in the wall. There's a WallSmart mount. And then there's a C-List, WallSmart, and TruFig are the three solutions. And these are products that we see a relatively high percentage of dealers installing, incorporating. And the ultimate vision is they're trying to hide these devices. The other thing that happens is when you're trying to hide a smart microphone device, you tend to put it behind things. So you put it maybe on a bookshelf and you put some books in front and you try to conceal it. Well, that screws up the audio and that makes it really hard for the device to work well. And so we saw these aftermarket products, we saw people essentially

trying to hide the device. But then the other thing is we just kept hearing people say, you know, it would be great if you could install a Josh Micro in a single gang box. You know, we want to basically make it work in this or that environment. And similar to, you know, the old Henry Ford quote of, if you listen to people's feedback around the time of, you know, horse and bogeys, you never would have gotten to around the time of, you know, horse and buggies, you never would have gotten to the automobile. But when you look at what the real problems are, they want a more comfortable ride, they want it to go longer, they don't want to deal with, you know, in this case, you know, horse crap everywhere, you know, it's, it's a set of

problems that people aren't directly enunciating, but but you can sort of read in between the lines. And what we were really getting at was one, people want to hide the device. They don't necessarily have a good means to, so they're trying to come up with these different solutions, but they want the device hidden. And so the smaller that we can get it, the better. But the second thing is more and more, we find that people want to run these devices over PoE as opposed to Wi-Fi for increased reliability. And more and more, we find that people want to run these devices over PoE as opposed to Wi-Fi for increased reliability. And more and more, they want to hook it into a high-end audio system so the responses sound better. And so when you take a look at what we did with Josh Micro, the speaker accounts for

about 60% of the volume. And it's actually greater when you look at an Amazon Echo or Google Home product. The speaker is most of the volume. So you take out the speaker and you cut the volume down by about 60%. You then say, what if we took the processing out? And this is what led to Josh Core. Well, that takes out another roughly 20 to 30% of the volume. And just one by one, we started saying, how minimal can we get this device? We understand the feedback of people wanting to make this really concealed and really hidden. And we came up with an architecture that involved inventing a whole new microphone array, a whole new sensor system. We're running a brand new operating system on the device that's extremely lightweight, basically just doing the wake word detection because you

can't have dozens of microphones all sending audio all the time back to a core processor, you'll just bog down the network. So there were all these interesting problems that we had to solve. But the net result is we came out with what we're terming the world's first architectural microphone. And it's really all about this just absolute minimalism. And along the way, I guess the other thing that we learned and that we're excited about is you have the end customer feedback and you've got the integrator feedback. But we're all aware you also have the desire to really make the architect and the interior designer happy because we're often either fighting with them or we're trying to figure out, you know, how do we speak the same language? And so we actually had a number of meetings with design firms and with architecture firms. And all of that feedback is what led us to this device, which is architecturally stunning,

you know, fits the design aesthetic of most designers. And then from an end customer perspective, it's just this holy grail notion of you walk in the room, you don't even need to worry about where the device is. You're not speaking to a puck. You're just speaking to your room. You're speaking to the very walls or the ceiling of the room. You don't even need to worry about where the device is. You're not speaking to a puck. You're just speaking to your room. You're speaking to the very walls or the ceiling of the home. And the ceiling and the walls are speaking back to you. I mean, it's kind of the Jetsons type moment, which I just love. Yeah, honestly, I'm kind of shocked that there's so much hiding of the Josh Micro. I mean, it's one of the smallest. I'm holding one in my hands right now, and I have a HomePod Mini not too far away. I have an Amazon Puck somewhere too. It's one of

the smaller devices that anyone could come into this type of device that anybody would come across. So I mean, I'm not surprised that integrators wanted to hide it and people were trying to put it into the walls and that kind of thing. But one thing I did notice is that, and I think I've seen you say before, is that typically it's better if you install this device on a wall. And was that like, is that, I guess, is that, did you find that the microphone arrays work better when you have the plane of a wall to work with? So the acoustics of a room and the engineering that goes behind far-field beamforming microphone arrays is very complicated in terms of just giving a very quick answer. a tiny bit around in a perfect environment when you have, imagine a tabletop in the middle of the room with a tabletop device like an Amazon Echo or a Josh Micro, and you're speaking from anywhere around that room, that perfect environment is wonderful. The reality is that's not what happens.

The reality is you put the device in a corner near an outlet on a wall, and once you start getting reflection off of walls, that's when you start to really reduce the ability put the device in a corner near an outlet on a wall. And once you start getting reflection off of walls, that's when you start to really reduce the ability for the device to listen well. And so what we found was once it's on a wall in terms of the way that you wall mount a Josh Micro or a Josh Nano, that orientation has a very clear path to the speaker. And so if you think about standing in a room and saying to your device, turn on the lights, you want to have as clear a line of sight to that device as possible. And so what we found was mounting about 56 inches off the ground, you know, a little bit north of what you'd mount a light switch, close to what you would mount a thermostat. It's almost always

within the line of sight, whether you're standing or sitting. And the way that these microphone arrays work, you typically have sort of a linear array. So the Josh Micro is a two mic system. Josh Nano actually goes to a four mic system. But what you can imagine is, imagine the device is wall mounted in the middle of the room, but on a wall. You're standing on one side,

and there's either a TV or speaker on the other side, the device is able to beam form towards you so it noise cancels on the far side, and it's able to hear you pretty well. The place where this didn't always work as well is if you put it immediately under a ceiling mounted speaker or an HVAC system, because this was a linear array, again, Josh Micro with just the two mics.

The reason that Josh Nano went to a four microphone system is it allows us to beam form not just in the sort of X coordinate, the left-right coordinate, but in the Y coordinate as well, the up-down. And so if you have music coming out of the speaker above you and a TV off to the right, but you're speaking from the other side of the room, we can, again, beam form right towards you, cancel out the rest of the audio. So it's not that a wall-mounted microphone system is better than a tabletop in an ideal environment. It's that in real world scenarios, the tabletop systems just tend to get blocked. They tend to be in corners. And the funny thing is Amazon calls their product Echo. Echoes are the worst thing for these devices. You want no echoes. That's kind of ironic there, but I was, I was curious if there was, um, I was sure of that there would be like some kind of, uh, physics related answer as to why this, this wasn't working. I'm glad, I'm glad there was. Um, so other besides, um, going into the wall, like what other design considerations did you have like on a high level with this system? One of the things I noticed that Josh and I could do a while back was to

take the sound that was coming out of the speaker out physically out of the puck, so to speak, and and pipe that audio through the high end audio, like high end audio systems already in the house. And I've noticed that the core actually takes that to a whole new level. And basically with a rack mounted piece, that audio gets routed directly into the audio. So there's no speakers built onto the Nano itself. It's all going to come from the core at this point. Yeah. So about, I don't know if it was two years ago now, I think between a year or two years ago, we rolled out a feature that we called VoiceCast. And currently this works only with Sonos products, works with all of the Sonos products, but it's limited basically to Sonos. And we're working

with partners on extending this to other brands as well. But what VoiceCast does is it's a wireless protocol for us to send the Josh response over the network to the speakers. And it does it similar to how you would engineer a doorbell, where it basically lowers if music's playing, does a sort of audio over audio stream, and then it replaces or it brings the audio back up. So you can imagine that you're in a house, you've got music playing, and you were to say to Josh, you know, what's the

weather? The music lowers, the Josh response gets sent over the network, you hear it over your rich speakers, and oftentimes in the homes we're in, this would be a Sonos amp or a Sonos port, and so I kind of call this internally the voice of God. Now you hear this great speaker coming out, through the ceiling, and then it brings the music back when you're done. The thing about VoiceCast that's so interesting is it replaces the speakers in the micro with these external speakers, rendering 60% of the micro useless, which is why when we went to Josh Nano, we said, can we build a device that has no speaker at all? And it was definitely not an easy decision to go with, but we said, we believe we can, but we don't always have a Sonos system to hook into.

We're gonna have to come up with a wired system as well. And so this is when we launched with Josh Core, a new feature that we call Voice Link. And so Voice Link is the same as Voice Cast, but instead of a wireless protocol, it's a hardwired protocol, and it allows Josh to hook into an app or a matrix or any type of speaker system so that you get that same voice of God

experience, but you can do it with systems that don't have to rely on Sonos. Got it. Got it. So lots of really cool stuff here that you guys have designed. I'd love to, if there, if you could isolate on one or maybe two of like the biggest challenges, like designing a product like this, couldn't have been easy. There had to be things along the way that, that you kind of had to work around and overcome being really the first to market with, with a product like this. Are there any specific challenges that you guys had to work through that you could share with us? Yeah. Um. I'm not sure these are the hardest challenges, but they're the two that come to mind first. And so they're kind of fun challenges.

The first one is we spent a lot of time trying to design the product, not just for the end use, but for easy install. And we maybe ultimately go overboard with this stuff where we try to make our product just so incredibly easy. You kind of say, why do I need a professional to install it? But it's really because of the integration of the rest of the system and all the programming. But when it comes to physically installing it, we want to make it where you don't have to go through lots of training. You don't need to get special tools. So we designed the device where you essentially just make a one inch hole in the

wall. You can use a drill bit so that it's, you know, very easy to cut out. You run an ethernet cable through, so Cat5 or Cat6. And then the device itself, similar to some remote temperature sensors and other devices, basically has a little spring system. So you plug the cable in out of the wall and then you just push it into the wall and it locks in really easily. In order to make that work, the part outside the wall needs to be a bigger diameter than the part in the wall. And the interesting thing is to make the entire device as small as possible, you basically need to have the microphones as far apart as possible. We have a physical microphone disconnect.

We call it the privacy switch. We've got LEDs. We have a touch sensor. There's a lot that's going on. So we basically designed an ultra-thin PCB that essentially has half of the technology on the part out of the wall, and then the part in the wall is essentially a separate PCB, and it allows us to do it, LED diffuser and some other stuff. on the part out of the wall. And then the part in the wall is essentially a separate PCB and allows us to do it, LED diffuser and some other stuff.

And so we designed and we actually patented, it's currently in sort of in review, but I believe it might be, maybe not the world's thinnest switch ever made, but certainly in a product like this. And that switch basically exists on the, you know, two millimeter part that sticks outside of the wall. The microphones are on that same part. We have a remote temperature sensor living out there, but we even want to step further. And

we said, look, we don't know how often people need this, but we like to build for future proofing. We like to make things as sort of flexible as possible for use cases we've not yet considered. And so the one inch diameter part that goes in the wall actually snaps together like a Lego piece to the part out of the wall. So it's modular. And the idea is that if in a year or two,

we have a better microphone system or different sensors or something else, you just snap off the head end, you put on a new piece, and you have the latest and greatest without a new installation. The second thing that we did there was we said, let's do some really interesting programming logic because we have voice control, and we basically can add in a very simple button. So Micro does this a little bit, but in a different way. With Josh Nano, the very surface acts as a capacitive touch button. And whatever command you give, tapping on that surface basically acts as a binary switch. So for example, if you said to Josh, play some music, maybe you had music playing really loud the night before and it comes on super loud,

you don't want to yell over it, just tap the dog head, the music stops. If you were to say, turn on the lights, tap the dog head, the lights go off. Same thing with a lock, you know, anything that has a binary action, turn on, turn off the TV, open, close the shades, turn on, turn off the fireplace. And so it gives us some really interesting control, which again is another thing that we patented because we don't know anyone else who's done this. But it just makes this tiny device so variable and so sort of flexible for different use cases. Cool. I love it. Let's shift gears a little bit and spend a few minutes talking about lots of integrators in the audience. And I'd love to spend a few minutes diving into some of the sort of design and installation considerations from an integrator's perspective.

You talked about PoE. You talked about simply drilling a hole in the wall. So we've covered some of those things. But maybe speak a little bit about the design, how many nanos to specify. How do you go about thinking about some of those higher-level design considerations know, basic infrastructure and just planning for a successful implementation. Yeah. So in the rack, we've got Josh core, which we haven't spoken a lot about, but Josh core is doing so much of the processing, which is really great from a privacy perspective. Um, and a lot of modern processors are starting to do this. We kind of realized halfway through

the development, you don't need to have a power you know brick and a power adapter in addition to ethernet the whole thing is just run by poe so think of it as like a hyped up micro without the the inputs basically without the microphones and so josh corey simply put in the rack we've designed a special rack shelf with mid-atlantic so you So you can make this look really beautiful with everything else in the rack. We also designed Josh Core to work in an HA configuration or high availability configuration. So you can have two of them side by side,

designed a rack mount to be able to do this as well. And there's a whole failover. So if you're using Voice Link and the audio out and one of the Josh cores fails for any reason, the other one takes over. The whole thing's designed really well to work with all of that. What this means is the processing's happening on the network. And so all the microphones then just get connected over PoE and they communicate over the network as well. A single Josh core is able to run at least 100 Josh Nano microphones. So this thing scales

as big as we think any home is going to need. And then from a Josh Nano perspective, we've engineered this device so that it can basically hear you from anywhere in the room. I mean, we've done testing 40, 50 feet away, and this will pick you up and hear you. But we've also made it discreet and small enough that if you want to put five of them in a single room for any particular reason, you can do that. And this starts to open up some of the real flexibility with the voice control. So with Josh, you walk in a room and you say, turn on the lights. Josh knows you're in the kitchen because of the placement of the microphone and so the kitchen lights come on,

well, we've begun to think about what if I have a microphone on two sides of a room and we can now start to figure out from the microphones where in the room you're likely speaking from. And so we can start to get smarter about you saying, you know, open these shades up. Well, maybe there's a room that has a dozen shades and you're standing on the east end and we know you're on the east end, we can start to get really smart about placement through those microphones. The other thing is we designed it so that you can ceiling mount these devices and so there's certain environments where a wall mount's not the right approach but a ceiling mount's going to be appropriate. So there's a number of considerations that make it, again, just extremely flexible. But again, from a placement perspective, typically you want a wall mounted near a light

switch, roughly 56 inches off the ground. And you want to try to always be about four feet away from other sources of noise. So don't put it right next to the TV, right next to a speaker, right next to a loud HVAC system. It's not that it won't work, but you'll diminish the capability. You want to try to isolate it from noise as best you can. Good to have best practices outlined in any way you can. I know you spoke earlier to this availability. We're thinking towards the end of the year, beginning of the year? So the current trajectory is we should have it available around February. There's a chance that we're earlier.

There's a chance that we're later. COVID's kind of thrown everything for a loop. Right. But the thing that we've been very sort of clear about communicating is we know that we'll generate more sales or sooner sales the sooner we launch this, but we refuse to rush a product. There's a lot of extensive testing that we go through, a lot of beta testing. We really try to make sure that this is tested for reliability and scalability in all sorts of environments. And so our sort of brand promise to all of our dealers and our clients is, you know, look, we might ship it a little bit

later than we would otherwise want, but you know that when we ship it, we're not shipping a dud. We're not rushing out a product that's going to have faulty issues because we don't think that's fair to the client. We don't think it's fair to the integrator. And so again, we're targeting, you know, sort of Q1 of this year, meaning 2021. But until it passes all of our very stringent testing requirements, we get through manufacturing. We're going to just let the process work its course. Sure. That makes sense. And pricing for the Nano and Core, what do you have there for MSRP? Yeah. So we don't publish our pricing publicly, mostly because many dealers have to kind of figure out how it works into their systems and a lot of other parameters. But to give dealers

a rough sense that they are familiar, Josh Nano is going to be priced very close to Josh Micro. Even though it is sort of our luxury product line, we look at it as they serve different purposes. Josh Micro makes sense when you need a speaker, when you want to just plug into an outlet, run on Wi-Fi, and Josh Nano is more of your kind of pre-construction, you know, high-end architectural build. And then Josh Core is very competitively priced with other smart home processors in the market. So to give a rough range, I really, you know, need to be careful need to be careful because dealers have lots of other considerations like charging for their time and charging for labor and running wire and all the other stuff. But just the Josh piece, you can get up and running in your home for a thousand bucks, a couple thousand bucks, just depends on the complexity, but certainly can go up from there. Yeah, it's way less expensive, I think, than most people think. From considering how high end of a product that it looks and feels when you pick up and touch it and how it works, it's way less expensive than I was expecting when I saw the pricing.

So good on you guys for that. I do want to take a step back and take a look at the big picture of the industry, like the entire field around voice control and AI learning and that kind of thing, and privacy. When we had you on last, way back in 2018, I'm looking at the show here, Home Tech 213. This was in June 1st, 2018. There really wasn't a push or any talk in the marketplace about privacy. Everybody was throwing these little pucks in their homes and they were turning on the microphones and having fun asking them to set timers in the kitchen and that kind of thing. And you guys came out with your product. It was all dedicated

hardware in the house. Really not. I mean, I don't think you were marketing at the time that you were focused on privacy, but you had that feature for sure. And then all of a sudden, privacy becomes a huge deal over the last couple of years. And you guys are positioned great to take advantage of that. Let's talk about that first. I think you've even focused more on privacy since that started to come out. What have you seen there and what have you seen from clients and end users in your market when they've talked to you about privacy when it comes to voice control? Yeah, it's a great question. So in many ways, we got lucky,

but in many ways, it's also very strategic. From the very beginning, we knew that we were focused on large scale, you know, luxury projects, but with the intention of ultimately going down market, going into commercial projects and going, you know, really into adjacent fields like assisted living spaces and stuff like that. And all of these markets are demanding privacy. You can't have a commercial install that, you know, is sending audio out to the cloud and you're not going to have a politician or a Fortune 500 CEO comfortable with Amazon or Google or a company like that listening to what's going on. And so we built Privacy really as just a core foundation of our company.

It's always been one of our core principles. But it wasn't until we started seeing just how much some of the mass market companies didn't even think about this stuff, that it was a differentiator. And so 2017, 2018, we started seeing headlines about people getting ads targeted based on voice commands. You see patents being filed from Amazon, Google, and Apple, basically saying, you know, devices passively listening in the background, overhearing a conversation, and then targeting ads based on what they're hearing. This all just immediately was kind of scary to me, but also not surprising because I come from that world. I understand, you know, the data play that a lot of large tech companies are going after.

And I've always really appreciated Apple's approach of saying, we're going to charge a premium for our products because we're going to stand behind the quality. We're going to stand behind what we do. And we took the approach of saying, we're going to not charge lower prices, but sell people's data, which really degrades trust and questions where we can go. Instead, we're never going to sell data. We're never going to monetize our clients' information, but we're going to build a business model that allows us to essentially sell goods for a price that covers the business the way that we need to. And so as we've progressed each year, we look at Cedia Expo as sort of an opportunity

to come out with something new, something big. We always want there to be a headline. The very first year, for example, when we came out at Cedia, I think it was in 2016, the first year that we exhibited, by that time Amazon Echo had come out, I think maybe the first Google Home, I can't remember. And our tagline then was voice control for the whole home. And the idea was that most voice control products really didn't scale to the whole home. They didn't make it easy if you

had more than a dozen devices and routing distributed audio and video. And so that was kind of the tagline. Well, two years years later it was I think 2018 our theme for Cedia was privacy and we went so far as to to this was kind of a funny thing you guys probably saw we're not big on advertising in terms of buying you know printed ads and that kind of stuff we like to really build more grassroots marketing efforts but we we put some resources towards a marketing effort at Cedia, which were privacy-themed, essentially posters that we put in the bathrooms. And the idea was, you wouldn't want someone watching and listening to what's going on in here, nor would you want someone watching and listening to what's going on at home.

And with Josh, that's not happening. And it's really become a core foundation of our marketing. So we're probably a few days away from launching an update to our website, just the main Josh.ai website. And it's probably 50% about privacy now because it's that important. It comes up in almost every customer conversation. It's often what leads clients to want to know more about us. And we're just doubling down on it. We feel like as technology grows, as our medical data gets more connected, as devices are getting more connected, you need to be able to trust the devices around you. And we never want to lose that trust. We never want someone to say, if Josh is in my home, I have a concern. In fact, we want the opposite. We want someone to say,

if Josh is in my home, I know I can sleep well. No one's listening. Yeah, that's great. Kind of along the same lines of just sort of, we had you on back in June of 2018. Here we are a couple of years later. What would you say for our audiences, kind of the big things to understand about the evolution of just AI in general? I know it's still a relatively new field. I know in a lot of voice control implementations like the Echoes and the Googles of the world,

it's still fairly cryptic. We kind of compare it to like DOS commands where you have to just say things just so and get it just right in order to get the device to do what you want it to. And we all have that vision and you guys seem to be closer than anyone to that vision of just really being able to speak to your home, like you're having a conversation. And that's obviously the kind of the Holy grail. So talk about some of the bigger trends in AI and some of the things that maybe our listeners should understand about where we are now relative to where we were two years ago, and where might we be two years from now? Yeah. So it's really interesting to think about, but when we started the company and we started speaking at different events and sort of sharing what we were working on, there was this one slide that I often reuse, which was a quote from a Time magazine article probably

a decade ago. And the quote, I'm going to butcher the exact wording on it, but it basically said that over the next couple of years, at any point in time, technology looks like it's crawling. It looks like there's virtually no improvement. You know, it doesn't look like there's a lot of change, but in any 10 year span, 1980 to 1990, 1990 to, you know, 2000, 2000, 2010, if you were to look back, you go from the invention of the smartphone, you go from, you know, the invention of, you know, in this case, voice control or whatever it happens to be, things change pretty radically. And we basically came out saying, this is what

you should expect with voice control and AI. And I think it's been very true. Year to year, I'm always a little disappointed of, we're not as advanced as I know we could be. Things, you know, that we've been talking about doing for years, we're still not doing. But then I look back and I say, shoot, we've only been in business for five years. Five years from now is double the length of us being in business. And we've completely transformed an industry in just these short five years. And so I'm really excited about the long-term view of what's going to happen in that sort of rough 10-year horizon. And it's going from the command response, very sort of robotic execution of you

say, you know, what's the time? And the system says the time is blah, blah, blah, to we're now all beginning to get better, Josh, you know, for sure, but Amazon and Google and Apple are doing this as well, where we're using a lot more data to really influence the decisions that we give, as well as the follow-on responses and the ability to fill in the gaps. So a couple examples would be, you wake up every morning, you say, you know, to your system, you know, okay, Josh, good morning, and you want to run your good morning scene. Well, Josh is looking at what's the weather forecast. What's the outdoor air quality. Cause this summer we had the fires in California and, you know, all these things and Josh's ability to basically say, oh, you know, every morning they ask for their good morning scene and we turn on

their lights and do their stuff. Let's let them know if certain things that are irregular have happened overnight. So, you know, running your good morning scene and oh, by the way, today there's going to be a freak snowstorm that, you know, no one was predicting yesterday. Like, you know, look out the window. That kind of stuff is already happening, but it's beginning to get better and better. The other thing is Josh's ability to essentially interpret very simple commands and do very smart things is way more advanced than people realize, but still not nearly as advanced as where it's going. So a couple examples, you walk in a room and you say, play some music. Josh is trying to look at what time of day is it what room are you in what past history do we have assuming that you've allowed the system to keep

that record which is up to the user and it's going to play appropriate music and the user doesn't immediately realize it but in the background they're getting the right music at dinner time it's dinner music in the morning it's you know you know, wake up music in the gym, it's gym music. And they're not having to say anything explicit for that. There are all sorts of very subtle ways that we're getting smart around that kind of thing. Love it. Yeah. And I like that framing about just the, you know, every year, it might look like you're not going anywhere, but you then you look back 10 years, and you know, it's like, wow, how far we've come. And that that incremental growth is kind of hard to see sometimes, but you got to take those moments to really look back and take that

big perspective. So we are up against our time. So we do want to close out here. Alex, we've really appreciated it. If anyone is listening that wanted to connect with you, maybe learn more about the product, what would be the best way for them to do that? Best thing is to head over to the website. It's www.josh.ai. We're also on all social media, but probably most active on Instagram. And so definitely check stuff out, send us a note, respond to every email that comes in and just love to chat with anyone. All right, Alex. Well, thanks again for coming on. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right. That'll do it for our interview with Alex. And once again, a fun one,

our first three-time guest on the show, and it's been really fun to watch them progress. And Seth, I'm a big fan of what they're doing with the, with the nano and the core. I just, I think it's going to be a really popular solution, assuming they can execute and get that thing out there and, and have it work as advertised and no reason to believe that they can't. Assuming that they can do that, I think this is going to be a popular line in the Cedia channel. Yeah. One thing I've really enjoyed about watching Josh AI over the years has been how they've evolved the company. It started off as like a Mac mini with an app. Then they came out with the micro.

Now they have the nano. The product line just keeps evolving. The company itself keeps evolving. It's just been an interesting company to watch because I think they, within five years, they started about the same time we started the show here. So it's just kind of like side by side, it's been fun to watch them kind of grow up and become a company while we've been able to just keep an eye on them

the entire time. So yeah, it's awesome. They're coming out with these two products. I think they're, I think those are going to really round out the line lineup and be successful. Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. I'm glad we were able to get Alex on. So coming down the homestretch here, Seth, you got a pick of the week. What you got? I do. So I'm a little, you know, chapped on my nose right here today, mostly because I was blowing my nose, but also because I was outside in this freezing cold, 50, 60 degree weather. This frigid. Frigid. Frigid weather.

57 degree weather. Yeah. Installing my... Go on. Installing my Christmas lights on the house because I still haven't done those yet. Being sick for the last couple of days has kind of put a damper on that. But I guess this is kind of something you need to keep in mind this year.

Around this time of year, according to Chris Kohler on Twitter, around this time of year, people who strung up their Christmas lights the wrong way start wandering into hardware stores and looking for what they later find out is often called a suicide cable. And Jason, these pictures made me laugh quite a bit. This is good. This is too good. This is good. It never occurred to me that people would actually go out and look for this cord. You know, I can't say it's not the worst idea. I mean, it is a bad idea.

But, I mean, if you get up there and you hang your lights up and you go to plug them in and you've got two female ends on one end, you're going to go to the store and not want to unhang all of those lights. And you're going to try and get back and find that double-ended male plug. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. These pictures are great. These are sort of signs up at stores. This double-ended mail plug does not exist. Big red text. These are not made. They should never be made. We will not make them. We will not help you make them. Yeah. That could be a bad yeah that could be a bad that could be a very a very bad thing oh my gosh i think people are uh posting in the comments too that there are okay now i'm gonna have to go real quick to amazon because it looks like people are

commenting that they're actual mail-to-mail extension cords on and for sale on Amazon. Oh, geez. So now... At this time of year, there's one of these signs says, we often get requests for an electrical cord with two male ends. Using a cord like this is very dangerous. It could start fires or electrocute someone. Oh my gosh. Not available for purchase, should not be made at home. Okay. Well, there seems to be people searching for double male extension cords on Amazon.

Oh, I'm sure there are. There's a picture, but I can't seem to find the product now. So Amazon may have wised up to this as well and not allowed people to purchase it. But oh, how much fun would that be if I could find this on Amazon and order it? It would go into the museum in a heartbeat. That'd be up on the museum front and center. Yeah. I'll tell you, I was hyper cognizant of that when I did my lights this year. That would be incredibly annoying to get those all strung up and realize that you did it backwards. Yeah. It's funny. I posted there in the Slack the picture of this thing. It's there. It exists. When I click on it, it doesn't bring me to an actual product.

Oh, funny. All right. Well, that's your public service announcement for this week on Home Tech. Yeah. Hang your lights up right. I have ideas for next year. I think next year we're going to have a Christmas light. I'm going to go all in on Christmas lights next year. Oh, yeah. You're going big. We're going full DMX control. We're going pixel lights. We're I'm doing everything. I'm done with this. Yeah. Start planning now. It's going to, yeah. I'm as I'm like just up there hanging up these old 120 volt lights. I'm like, all right, this is no, this isn't happening anymore. I'm stepping up. I'm going all in. Yep. Yep. All right. I like it. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. We'd love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Home Tech for as little as $1 a month.

Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat at the Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day to talk about how to wire up Christmas lights in Christmas. Yeah, or speculate about wise. Exactly. And if you're looking for other ways to support the show, we'll quickly mention that a review on iTunes or in your podcast app of choice would be tremendously appreciated. Those reviews definitely help more people find the show. So if you find value here

in the podcast, please take a minute to go do that. We, we would appreciate it. Well now, Jason, uh, this is my, my goal is to find a double male extension cord. Uh, he's on a mission. Yeah. And I have faith in you, Seth. My goal is to find a double male extension cord. He's on a mission. Yeah. I have faith in you, Seth. I think you're going to pull it out. It was suggested AliExpress,

so I'm definitely going to go check AliExpress and Alibaba. I believe in you, Seth. Yeah, I will find this thing. It's funny that the picture exists on Amazon, but the product doesn't. I think that's very telling. Yeah, Pulled it down. All right. Well, we are getting to that time of year, Seth. We'll quickly, as we wrap up here, tease that, uh, next week, our plan is to get together with, uh, with Adam and, and Richard. I think Mike Wolf might even make an appearance. Uh, he's been doing some different things in the smart kitchen lately, so hasn't been as involved in the smart home per se.

But I know he's been in on the email chain. So just a little preview of coming attractions. We do have the annual technology fireside chat coming up. Our plan is to do that next week. So be on the lookout for that. Absolutely. I can't wait. It's always fun to sit down with those guys every year and chat about home technology and other things.

So I can't wait to sit down and talk with those guys next week. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Seth. Well, have a good weekend. Stay warm. I'm trying. I'm really trying.

All right. You too, Jason. Have a good weekend. All right, man. I'll talk to you next week.