Ryne Sherman, Chief Science Officer, Hogan Assessment Systems

Ryne Sherman is the Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessment Systems. As an international authority in personality assessment and consulting, Hogan has over 30 years of experience helping businesses dramatically reduce turnover and increase productivity by hiring the right people, developing key talent, and evaluating leadership potential.

The Hogan assessments predict job performance by assessing normal personality, derailment characteristics, core values, and cognitive reasoning ability. The assessments are grounded in decades of research and evaluate every major job family from bank teller to CEO. 

Hogan was founded by Drs. Robert and Joyce Hogan in 1987. The Hogans are widely credited with demonstrating how personality factors influence organizational effectiveness.

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Transcript

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to uh record great so ryan great to have you on this episode of leadership bites welcome well thanks a lot guy happy to be here and um you know i've done a little introduction as i do when i do these uh episodes and so i've kind of given people a sense of who you are but it'd be great just to hear from you who you are the role that you inhabit and the organization that you work for sure so um i'm the chief science officer at hogan assessment systems we are a premier provider of personality assessments for personnel selection and leadership development that's the the main area that we work in my background is in personality psychology i have a phd in personality psychology i worked as a professor for six or seven years in a couple of different academic institutions teaching personality psychology teaching what's sort of the equivalent of business psychology um before i i stepped into this role at hogan and started running our data science division and uh you know the basic problem that we work on is uh well i mean there's a whole host of problems that organizations have but the central problem is you know who should we hire who should we promote who should we develop whose high potential who should be in these leadership roles and we help organizations make those decisions using scientifically based personality assessments so i'm thank you for that and i'm particularly interested in this space for for a couple of reasons so it's obvious to people that know me that i deal in leadership development so by definition looking into the assessment space is quite key and i've i don't hang my hat on a um assessment that i use for a couple of reasons some of it i think is just that not all organizations use the same one so from that perspective um it can become quite expensive to try and be certified in everything so there isn't there is an element to that you know um you know i'd do them all if they were if they were you know of of a price and then the other side and we'll get into it a little bit more is um you know which one for what so if i'm looking at hogan it would be great just to get a sense of why would i have you on my radar for what what output and so i can have that thinking around contextualizing hogan yeah so uh when it comes to thinking about psychometric assessments one of the big uh you know one of the big things that we talk about at hogan a lot because to us it's really central to what we do and this isn't true for everybody and for different reasons um but but one of our central um aims and goals is to have the most valid assessments in the business now what does valid mean what does validity mean it basically means that when you get a score on our assessment and we say it it predicts this outcome that that's more true of our assessments than other ones at least that's our goal right so so we have sort of hung our hat on the validity rack we said the validity is the most important thing there's lots of reasons that people might take personality assessments but for us it's about predicting an outcome that you care about and so that's what we really spend a lot of time doing that's why for example on my team i've got about a dozen staff members phds masters degrees in psychology you know that work for me full-time who are constantly updating our research constantly doing new research constantly pushing the boundaries of what can we actually predict from a validity standpoint and making sure that that what we say about our assessments when you get a report back from us that it's actually true it actually predicts those outcomes we care about so i probably know just enough to be dangerous i might be uh i might be in that category so i obviously know a lot more than you know the layman and obviously you know half as much as as you right so well let's hope right so so let's um let's just check it let's just sort of check something out i i guess that validity piece is is absolutely key because there are some people there's a distribution curve i think when it comes to things like psychometrics in people's relationship to them some people you know i'm a believer others are well i'm sure the good ones work through to other you know people well you know they're only as good as what you tell them right so there's there's always that and that's the stuff of life possibly um what i notice is with psychometrics that there is a certain conversation amongst certain people out there that for example the big five traits that those are the only valid ones out there so jordan peterson will you know if for those if you don't know him anybody look him up but you know he's a well-known person and he's kind of in that path of you know if it's not one of the big five then um it's it's not really that bad and i just wonder um when people look at that why they would maybe what they need to consider from your perspective yeah so well i think that the academic community is pretty clear and that's where jordan peterson comes from that's where i come from as well um that the academic community is pretty wedded to things like the big five or sometimes this big six uh sometimes known as the hexaco model that there are these sort of um core traits that really come from descriptions of other people so all of this started with dictionaries we go through the dictionary and we say you know guy is blank and then we every word that could be put in that just stop that there's a joke there somewhere that's right we write down all those words and then we just see in real people how real people describe using those terms and what happens is you can see that some of those terms are used to overlap in overlapping ways some of those terms are more similar to each other and that's where the big five comes from and that's the academic tradition says that you know this is the way that people really describe people in the real world but there are other theories other models of personality i think you know probably the most popular most widely known one is the myers-briggs but but there but there's certainly others that don't don't come from that tradition they don't come from that that tradition of uh what we call the lexical tradition which is about describing other people so while it's in some sense you could say well the big five that's really the most valid set in of course our own assessments at hogan are our big five base where that's that's the the tradition that we come from um there are other approaches to assessment that i think are different but they're really for different purposes right so you know the purpose of our assessments is predicting workplace outcomes um if your goal of assessment and i think a lot of people would think it's somebody like hogan wow hogan wouldn't like uh the myers-briggs at all it i i'm totally agnostic about it myers-briggs could be great depending on your purpose right so if your goal is to get people to understand that people are different from each other if your goal is to get people to get to know each other a little bit better in some kind of a team setting something like the myers-briggs can work great for that but if your goal is to predict performance this is something they don't talk about right because this is something that their assessments aren't designed to do and they don't use them in this way but if your goal is to predict performance then then you need to look somewhere else so this is where i'm either going to make a fool of myself or come across as actually he knows enough just to be able to stay in the conversation with you if we talk about trait and type where does yours sit and maybe for those that don't know what's the difference yeah so you know types are basically saying that um that people are sort of categorically different right so um you know think about birds right there's different types of birds you know there's eagles and there's robins and you know these are categorically different they're all birds but they're categorically different from each other it would be the same kind of logic with with types whereas traits say well you know every uh all people there's all birds but then they have differences in sort of wingspan they have differences in their song you know those kinds of things um and it's measuring them on those dimensions rather than saying these are categorically different creatures or different types they're saying that these are um that that they all have the same set of core features in this case traits um that differentiate and they can all be differentiated all on all those traits um from a from an empirical standpoint it kind of again this is one of those things where it depends on what you're trying to do if your goal is to to understand how people are different from each other if your goal is to make really broad stroke generalizations types can work really well if your goal is to predict you know very specifically how someone will behave on the job it seems like traits do quite a bit better so that that sort of trade approach um so both have their uses uh it really just depends on depends on their goal and again because we're we're in the uh the prediction business or we we usually use the trade approach so for type again for people coming into something like this that they some people will be very experienced but that's more that developmental it's more the conversational it's more it's probably well it might be fixed to a point but if it was fixed then we must almost you know we can't develop it but it it's it's very good for teams it's very good for the individual to have a reflection on the different human beings that might surround them well and and the real big advantage of types is it's really easy to talk about right if i say an eagle you know what i'm talking about right uh you know if if i describe uh you know a person as a type right if i say well they're the pragmatic type you get a sense of all kinds of things you don't just know about one particular characteristic or in the myers-briggs nomenclature if i say they're and actually i'm not very good at i don't know an entp or an esp something like that if i say something like that um then it gives you a really quick sense of what that person's like and that's the beauty of types right i could i can you know give other examples right if i say i had a meeting with the boss or i had a doctor's appointment you immediately have an idea of what happened right it gives you a really broad now there's all kinds of specifics that happen in there but it gives you a really solid foundation of what that person's probably like in a quick in in just a few words so there's real advantages the types from from that point of view but not for recruitment well right if i'm gonna predict how somebody performs the problems with types is nobody actually fits a type perfectly right so you're kind of like everybody's sort of they're kind of close to this prototype right um and but everybody has little differences little ways that they're that they don't quite fit and those are actually turned out to be really important when it comes to predicting performance so if i'm trying to predict you know who who's going to be safe in the workplace who's not going to cause an accident i don't just want to know type i want to know pretty specifically how do you score on a whole host of traits that are related to safety behavior so that's where when it comes to hogan um it's as a predictor it's used in the assessment space yeah for sure so we use it we actually use it in both ways we use it to to predict workplace performance a lot but we also do quite a bit of developmental work and leadership development um actually on occasions we've been accused of both well hogan's i've been told hogan's only for selection but i've also been told like days later hogan's only for development we actually do both um but um you know it's for different um different purposes so we we do a lot of leadership development as well so i'm not in the recruitment space i'm in the one-to-one coaching space i'm into the senior team effectiveness space i'm in the management leadership development arena so if i was going to pull your systems uh into my work one-to-one teams um that's the kind of space that i can i can look to use the hogan yeah so yeah and yeah exactly and one of the things that i would say is a little different from us versus a type based um measure from a development standpoint is again that type gives you that one quick shot of information you know really simply um our assessments so if you take our our core assessments we have three core assessments if you were to take those there's over a hundred subscales but let's just stick with main scales there's 28 main scales um and over like i said over 100 subscales and you know you start doing the math on how many possible quote-unquote types of people you can get with this and it's um you know there there are more types of people than there are uh molecules or atoms in the universe it's really quite astounding um how deep it can get so what i would say is to summarize that with types you get a really simple approach with traits you get lots of complexity and so it depends on what you want to do if you're doing coaching and development and you really like that complexity you really want to get down deep with an individual a lot of the executive level coaches that we work with do this that's where something like us is really useful if you if you're wanting you know much more quick one shot kind of thing uh then something that's type based is usually a little a little easier to work with okay so in terms of how you stay i don't know if i was going to use the right word there but be it ahead of the game or on point what is it that keeps you at the tip of the spear when it comes to the rigor of what it is that you do yeah i mean it's a really important question of course there's something that's really important to us as well um a few things one is that uh as i mentioned earlier we have a large research team we're constantly doing research we do research with clients all the time we do hundreds of research studies a year our archive our criterion related with the archive so what this means is we measured your personality and then months or years later we measured your performance we have over 400 studies in that archive and as i just described that you can see how long each of those studies must take right so so that's part of it is that we're constantly doing more studies we're constantly adding to this archive to our database that sort of just continually validates the the assessments that we're working on so that's part of it but the other part is we also work with academics around the world so people have access to our data people can write us and say hey look i know you've got data on truck drivers and and their safe safe driving behavior and their personality i'd like to do a project or some research on that and we say sure here's our data go ahead publish your paper and i think that's really one of the things that sets us apart is we're sort of like look we're comfortable being independently reviewed right we're comfortable having other people come in who aren't us but who are experts um and and have a look for themselves so there's there's something there about that that reach and that that rigor and that being open to oh not oversight but people's line of sight maybe is what i'm hearing there yeah for sure i think that's really important to us i mean again it's rooted in our in our foundation right so the two people who founded the company were both academics robert hogan and joyce hogan they had long academic successful academic careers i think uh you know robert hogan was in what was 58 when he started when he read when the company really got going i think he was in his early 50s when they started but the company really got going when he was when he finally retired as a professor so you know he had a whole career as a professor and a whole career in that academic tradition of science and um you know being able to replicate what you say having other people scrutinize what you say and say and you know have to almost reluctantly conclude that you're right so the um the assessments that you do just as an overview because you know people can look on the the website of course quite quickly if they want to but we're talking about individual leadership assessment we're talking about team assessment we're talking about 360 or or yes or no give me a sense of the um the buffet um yeah yeah so we have assessments for for pretty much all of those purposes we have assessments for individuals if they want if you want sort of individual personalized development again we have lots of assessments for selection we have assessments for teams several different options actually around teams we just recently built a tool for actually assessing team effectiveness which is which is uh a little different it's not a personality assessment it's a more of a team kind of 360 thing um it's pretty neat um we have assessments for uh there was one more you mentioned oh yeah for certainly for leadership leadership potential leadership development those kinds of things as well so um and and i think guy one and maybe we'll get to this later you know one of the topics that's really important to us and i know it's really important to you is leadership because you know we know just how important that is for an organization's success and that means that's really important for the people who belong to that organization and so we spend a lot of time you know helping companies not only identify those leaders but develop the leaders that they already have in place for exactly that reason so i i wonder if um there's a well there is a shift in society there's there's something about um trust there's something about the surveys that i think it's the edelman trust survey that talks about trust in the world that for the last few years have said trust's been at its lowest in across all um across all factors and there's something about you know i remember that if somebody in a place of positional power at the age of 50 if some if a doctor told me you've got something wrong with you i'll accept it you know now i google it presuming that he might he or she might be wrong there's something about the relationship with positional power and we're seeing that in people that are coming through on social media where social media is giving us a line of sight on people and positional power that for all the 90 percent of the good that's done we see the 10 percent that's bad that gives us a sense that hey you know these so-and-so's aren't to be trusted so i i wonder if um you or within a an assessment like this or within that kind of talent capability i wonder if there's a factor of change that maybe has accelerated over the last few years or actually no that wouldn't be relevant guy because people as human beings are inherently of of a trait perspective and i just wonder if that comes in as well it's interesting but actually doesn't affect what we do well that's actually a really good question and we actually have data on this in part because one of our assessments measures something we call skeptical which uh is essentially to to a lesser degree a little bit of paranoia right so it's a little bit of um i really but it's really about mistrusts right i don't trust other people and through a series of sophisticated analysis we actually have a way of determining is trust is is is skeptical is people being skeptical going up over time and over about the last 15 years we actually do see an increase that's the only scale we see this increase on is that we see this increase across all people right so it's all people of all ages and i think you're exactly right this corresponds directly with these other kind of national surveys people don't trust their political institutions they don't trust their religious leaders there's all they don't trust doctors they don't trust experts so this is a really uh a common thing now and and i really don't know the right way to to sort of correct the problem i i think it's sort of a problem we've made for ourselves um but by being unreliable right by you know finding out about you know experts who lied or experts who were paid off or um you know politicians who aren't you know who are dishonest that that kind of thing has really eroded public trust in lots of institutions i think one of the things it's showing me is that your competence in role is not enough because roles used to come maybe with an inherent respect you've reached a level of positional power slash hierarchy it comes pre-loaded with obedience a level of submission uh etc but maybe with the increase in skepticism and that kind of thing that that leverage or that balance won't work for you in the same way i mean people do it out of fear or the the i have to so yeah maybe it's um that's a data point that says well actually you're in your development you're going to have to get the elegance and the craft to be vulnerable to show your true self because you're combating a level of increased skepticism that is pre-loaded against you regardless of who you are and how great you may or may not be so uh maybe maybe that's a factor yeah no i think you're right i think that that's certainly the case is that um you know expertise is sort of lost some of it's it's um cachet or prestige or um you know the the value that we would historically put behind it and um you know uh yeah i i like i said i don't really know know a good way to fix it except um you know to try to to try to be more honest i guess i think that's what it comes down to is is it's it's about trust and honesty and um your material isn't supposed to have the answer is it it's supposed to you know probably thank goodness but what it's what it's there to do is to be accurate to create conversations and to bring the challenge of culture maybe that says actually if this is true across our leadership community or the people that interact with it then that's and the data solid then that's the conversation that we need to be having i guess yeah that that's kind of it right we this isn't the space we play in in terms of trying to answer those questions but but you know me as you know as a scientist i you know i these are questions that i think are important for all of society to be thinking about like you know what can we do to you know to to recapture the public's trust hmm so that it brings us on to um for me i think people's behavior around psychometrics and we were talking about this just a little bit before we came um online which is that in my experience and this is probably a gross oversimplification but there's kind of two types of people that when they do psychometrics and one of them is the person that sees the psychometric as a tool in their toolbox to be utilized just like a plumber you know which which tool for the job and then there are some people that go um full cult member when they get certified go you know bless them and they start to see the world through a lens you know like you're a red or um you're in you know it's because you're an e isn't it and so you know and and actually in some respects the beauty of the tool is kind of lost in the behavior of the individual because people start to feel pigeon-holed and and and that kind of thing so i i just wonder um when hogan is um i don't know if there's a mitigation against that from your end is it no the tools valid and people just have to behave with it as they will or no we're kind of alert to the fact that the tool might be great but actually it's it's the manner of people utilizing the that we have to be alert to i just wonder if that factors into anything that you consider and work on well it's certainly a concern that comes up uh frequently right so people ask us all the time well wait a minute are you just pigeonholing us or are you just you know if we use your assessment to hire people who are successful aren't we just going to get all the same people here isn't isn't this going to hurt diversity is one of the big questions that we hear okay and actually uh that's that's actually again one reason that you might prefer uh trait based assessment versus the type based assessment because of the type based assessment you really are limited in terms of the number of things that you're going to get out because ours are essentially limitless um there's really no risk of pigeonholing anybody saying well you know this is what makes you different from other people um in a whole variety of ways and so there's no real risk there uh on the sort of the diversity front though it's that there still is no risk here but it's harder for people i think at least intuitively to understand they think we're just going to hire all those same people but the reality is for any given job there's usually a handful of traits that really matter that are most critical and so we say okay well you know this is a customer service role these are the people this is the kinds of traits you're going to be looking for in a customer service representative but all of the other traits that we measure don't matter and that's the beauty of an assessment like like ours or like some or another trait based assessment is that the ones that don't matter are totally free to vary so you don't end up with you end up with the same with the people that you want on the critical characteristic well this is really critical the performance rule so you get that but you end up with total diversity on the other characteristics and one of the real beauties of personality assessments is that men and women get the same scores black people white people get the same scores asians and non-asians get the same sport old people young people get the same scores technically old people get slightly tend to actually fit jobs a little bit better but that has to do with emotional maturity and things like that but the point is that there's really no difference between these groups in in terms of their scores and so you actually end up hiring a more diverse workforce than you might uh than than you might otherwise it's kind of i think i'd fray from your question a little bit guys well it doesn't matter you know we're amongst friends so um but what i'm hearing there is it's almost it's cleaner it's it's more transparent it's it's more clinically kind of non-biased well that's one of the the things that attracted me to personality and actually was one of the foundations of the company the company was founded right after the civil rights act as a part of right so the civil rights act and then there was what's known as the eeoc which was this uh a committee to to create equal employment opportunities for everybody in the united states and um bob and joyce hogan said you know these assessments don't have biases the way for example cognitive ability assessments are well known to show group differences and they said you know these assessments don't and they predict performance just as well i think we've got a real business opportunity here that's essentially how the company started was this is an opportunity to to promote hiring a more diverse workforce in a way that's fair but still valid right that still actually gets highly qualified candidates who otherwise would not have been you know who wouldn't have been given a second thought because they were from a lower social class or they're a minority group member so within what you guys are working on now is there anything and i don't want to say i'm laughing to myself when i say this but when i say new in the pipeline you know are you in that kind of uh new is the new product creation is the you talked about team effectiveness but is it actually you know what it's a pretty solid base of what we do but so what comes new into the arena from the from from your world well it's a really good question and i think there's you know in any kind of business there's sort of pressure to show what are the new products with other new products and the reality is from an assessment standpoint we've already covered the landscape there's really when you're talking about a personality assessment like so we have a what we call a bright side measure we have a dark side measure which is wildly popular because we were the first people to develop one and we have what we call an inside measure which is about your motives and your values so we've got these three measures and it really covers the entire space known space of what is personality um so from an assessment point of view not really but one of the big the biggest thing that we're working on is is like i think a lot of companies these days is improving the technology and that that includes the technology of the assessment the technology behind the scoring of our assessments and uh the technology on the output side like what the what the actual administrator the user gets um and so we actually just launched a new uh thing called the candidate assessment suite that would have been the end of september which is much more high-tech than than this the previous systems we would be using it's way more user friendly my favorite part of it because i'm the science guy is that the algorithms behind our assessments are improved so we got to do some really cool stuff so you know our assessments have always had really high validities from comparatively from a personality standpoint and we took all those old algorithms and said can we make them better can we use new techniques like machine learning ai kind of stuff and make them better and we did um like quite a bit better which is really cool so we had really good stuff before and now we've made it even better and that's all in this new system so we've really so went from a new product standpoint i wouldn't say that the assessments are new what we're asking about isn't new but the way we're delivering it is newer more modern um more more high tech so this is a bit like coca-cola don't mess with the formula and try and bring out new coke they tried that once that's right so people it is what it is so that maybe the delivery mechanism might be different um but basically don't mess with it now if an organization wanted bespoke work with you so that you know we have a very particular role or we want we we know the role might not be inherently um different from anybody else's but we want it to be very real to our environment or our future need can people work with you on a almost role specific basis yeah so i mentioned we've got a dozen people on my research team about half of them work on what we call client focused or custom client kind of research thing so we have lots of off-the-shelf things so if you came to me and said i need to hire sales people we've got some you can buy right now today it's pre-validated we know it works go ahead and go but if you kind of say you know we've got this really unique role um you know we've got you know captains on uh on uh uh commercial uh ships you know uh you know see like barges and things like that and we wanna know you know who really you know this is a real example but i mean we have lots of examples like that that come to us and what we do there is we have a process called the validity generalization process and there's a whole host of ways you can go about and i won't go into all the technical details about it but essentially what we can do is build a custom solution for for any client we can do criterion studies we can do we can actually say okay what jobs do we have in our database that are similar to that and we can just say well that probably also works we do think we do job evaluations which is a sort of a core io psychology function so we say this is you tell us what are the most important characteristics of the job and we have all those characteristics mapped to our assessments so if you say we need somebody who you know instills trust well we have a competency in our competency library called integrity that guess what that's the same thing as instills trust and we so we line those two things up and you know we say okay we can measure integrity with our assessments we can help you get the people who fit that role so custom is something we do a whole heck of a lot and that includes all the way down to custom output custom reporting so some clients to be fair these are usually pretty big clients who have a big spend come to us and say look we want it to look like it's all us we don't want it to look like hogan's involved in this at all okay cool with us um you know we're happy to provide the science that you're looking for um and and it can be on your website um it looks like your assessment uh people get scores and then output that's only says your name on it it doesn't even say us at all it's just it's all you it's like a white label it's a white label exactly yeah okay and does that then lead to um being able to help people with maybe the questions that they might need to ask or the inputs that somebody might need for development so that kind of that's that periphery need around the assessment itself yeah it's it's a space we do get ourselves into we try not to do that a whole lot to be honest um we try not to play consultant that is you know we have we have consultants on on our team who are consultants on our assessments but we try not to play leadership consultant we try not to play organizational consultant um we get those questions from clients from time to time you know like what really is essential for a leader here or you know and we try our best to give that advice but we also try not to play in that space we try to let experts like yourself and other people who who you know do that every day all day make those kind of calls and we just try to help them um if they say this is what we are looking for we try to help them get that out of our tools okay so um in terms of com commercially i can imagine that lots of organizations use you are used by uh used in the military or you used um you know what what other places or spaces that might it be of interest to know that actually oh no we use that uh so about 75 percent of the fortune 500 uses us or has used it so part of the thing is you know you might be used for a little while and then the project comes offline for a while but but about 75 of the fortune 500 at any time we've worked with some pretty high profile sports organizations particularly high-profile sports organizations in the us we have worked with a whole bunch of military things police well more recently since a bunch of events in the u.s now some more police have gained some interest in working with us a lot of military stuff uh i can i can say u.s navy uh we've worked with we've worked with military contractors we've worked with some organizations that i can't say um who we work with uh but uh but yeah but so so um okay pretty much everybody so basically presidential candidates should probably go through a hogan assessment right well i would love that um actually i wrote a blog post uh on psychology today in 2015 yeah it was in 2015 actually it was my most popular blog post i've ever written about donald trump and his personality so he had just the first poll had come out with him leading so this was a republican primary this was not he was not even the candidate yet but the poll had just come out with him leading a republican primary and he was really talking about how i'm going to win now and at the time everyone was like wow he's not gonna win this is ridiculous and um and i thought well i'll you know i'll write up a profile because i had some reporters asking me could you tell us about this person i said okay i'll just write up a thing and just refer you to that and it's it's he ended up winning the republican primary then he won the presidential election and so it's my most popular blog post of all time so but i would love it if presidential candidates would take assessments i doubt they will actually subject themselves to it it should be a criteria that even if you don't we don't publish it could we do the work on it so we could we can actually understand what a good one would look like perhaps but you know and we have done some uh some work where we said what do people want right so what do you look for in a president and we've mapped that to our assessments as well what you know what do people think is an important uh the important qualities of a politician we've done that same thing for lawyer things like that so listen uh time is is a cruel mistress as a colleague of mine uh sometimes says but so i'll put uh links in the description to the website um so people can connect that way and um you're on linkedin as well aren't you ryan yeah sure you can find me on linkedin so i'll put a link in i'll put a link in there as well but just on a on a personal note i think that gives me uh that that's been intriguing for me just to kind of get a sense of where it is that you guys come from what it is that you do and i'll i'll definitely um because i'm trying to decide where to hang my hat so this is um this is this has definitely pushed me down the path of um i may have to have a proper conversation with you you know so so thank you for that but just on a personal note thank you so much for uh coming on and stay on for a few moments when i press stop just to make sure nothing goes horribly wrong yeah sure absolutely thrilled to be on here guy and really appreciate it i have to be careful that i don't press end for the call instead of stop for the recording which is what i normally do okay