April 7, 2025 • 16 mins
In this episode, AREA Executive Director Mark Sage chats with AR/XR expert Dr. Brent Dingle, Applied Research Engineer and Consultant at Raytheon, an RTX Company.
Brent describes how the XR work of his team is helping to drive Raytheon's vision. He talks about lessons he's learned to overcome challenges in AR implementations, such as how to successfully incorporate change.
Brent discusses insights he has gained over time, such as the patience required to find the value in AR, and offers advice to organizations launching their initial AR efforts. Please visit thearea.org.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
Hello, I'm Karen Quatromoni,
Director of Public Relations forObject Management Group, OMG.
And welcome to our OMGpodcast series. At OMG,
we're known for driving industrystandards and building tech communities.
Today we're focusing on the AugmentedReality for Enterprise Alliance
, AREA,
(00:29):
the only global nonprofit member-basedorganization dedicated to the widespread
adoption of interoperable ARenabled enterprise systems.
Today we have the area'sexecutive director Mark Sage,
who will lead the podcast. Mark?
Thank you Karen,
and thank you for that introduction andactually the podcast is all about our
(00:53):
members.
So I'm really excited to introduce,
or I'm going to let himintroduce a longtime friend,
industry expert and a superblyknowledgeable person in the
XR and AR space. So Brent,
please introduce yourself and tellus a little bit about your company.
(01:13):
Thanks, Mark. It's a real pleasure to behere and I'm glad you asked me to talk.
So I'm Dr. Brent Dingle.I work for Raytheon,
which is an RTX business. And as you know,
but listeners might not Raytheon's a hugeinternational company and I'm going to
say I'm just one individual in it. AndI'm part of the immersive design center.
(01:33):
It's based out of McKinney, Texas.
And in that it's important to notethat I'm just one team in Raytheon
and RTX, which workswith augmented reality.
So everything I'm going to say is kindof my opinion from my perspective.
So if you find other people,
they may have other opinions andother views on what Raytheon does.
But from my group,
(01:54):
we actually explore ways to advance anduse business technologies and improve
business and manufacturing processes.
So what we're really trying to do ismake everybody's jobs a little bit better
or easier using the new technologies,
which includes a lot of use casesfor augmented reality or ar.
(02:15):
Fantastic. Thanks Brent. And sincerely,
I know we've known eachother for a number of years,
but some of the work and the insightsthat you've provided over the years have
been amazing. So to that point,
can you tell us a little bit aboutwhy Raytheon joined the AREA,
Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance,
and what did you hopeto achieve by joining?
(02:38):
Yeah, well from my perspective, I'msure others have other opinions,
but from my perspective,
being a member of area allows us to meeta lot of people doing the same thing
that we're trying to do.
So other companies or universitiesor even some private individuals.
And having attended a wholebunch of meetings over the years,
which have been amazing, I haveto say, they're really amazing.
(03:01):
It's been a wonderful experience hearingfrom others and listening to what
they've had to experience,what they've tried to do.
And I think the real gain,
I'd like to believe it wasthe original reason we joined,
was to build a sense of community really
because just listening to othersor even talking with them,
(03:23):
it reinforces that sense of purposeof why we're actually doing stuff.
And in a lot of ways Ithink it helps inspire ideas
how to solve challenges because we'reall facing more or less the same things.
And on top of that,
it also keeps us aware of what allis going on in the AR world and the
(03:43):
advancements that continue stilltoday. So it's been really great.
No, thanks Ben. I really appreciatethose kind words and it's interesting
echoing what you've said and putit in a slightly different way,
but people have often said the area isalmost like a kind of a self-help group,
a chance to go and speak to peoplethat are gaining the same benefits and
(04:08):
deploying the technology,
but also overcoming those challenges andhaving that opportunity to speak with
like-minded experts really helpssolidify your thoughts but grab those
new thoughts and understandwhat other people are doing.
So I'm glad that's one of thebenefits that you are receiving.
Yep, absolutely.
Perfect. Yeah,
so tell me a bit more aboutthe company mission and vision
(04:32):
and maybe try and relatethat bit if you can,
into your work within XR and how youare kind of helping and enabling that.
Yeah, as I said, I think the vision,
at least in my world isthat we are a huge company,
but the employees are important.So it's not just the products.
So you could process theAR using the products,
(04:55):
but from where I'm standing it'smore helping the actual employees.
And since we focus more on the businesstechnologies rather than putting AR into
our products, it's how do we useAR for the business processes.
And so from my world,
that's the vision is improvepeople's lives really
(05:17):
the tricky part.
And I think that the important part isfiguring out how to use that technology
to improve the manufacturingand businesses processes.
So some of the things we'vetried include the training and
the safety processes andwe've even gone into remote
collaboration and inspections andsimilar stuff like that. And again,
(05:40):
back to the vision idea, that's all inan effort to make people's lives easier,
make the processes easier using AR.
Technology. Brent, I love that.
And often you hear kind of theterm, it's a little bit funny,
but augmenting the humanand stuff like that.
But your kind of focus on the kind ofperson comes first and is using this
(06:02):
technology as a tool is again insightful,
but something we hear a lot from.
It's not something you just useto improve, as you say, processes,
it's actually helping the individualenriching their job and helping them to do
things quicker but better and moreeffectively. So I absolutely love that.
(06:22):
Thank you for that amazingkind of description.
Of course it's not all rosy out there.
So can you talk a little bit about someof the challenges that companies face
in enterprise AR implementations?
Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, it'snot always easy. In fact,
it's almost never really easy.
(06:45):
I think the largest challenge or thecontinual challenge is incorporating
change.
The change in technologyrequires, as I said,
we're trying to change theprocesses using the technology.
And a lot of people don't like change.
It's hard to convince them to change.
So showing the value ofthat change is really,
(07:09):
really important just to the people.
But then there's anotherchallenge also involving change,
which a whole bunch of people in thearea have expressed multiple times.
And it's not just thechange at the human level,
but at the business level as wellbecause bringing in brand new like the AR
headsets and you got these glasses andyou got all the wiring and all the tech
(07:32):
that's behind it. And a lot of industries,
Raytheon in particular is concerned aboutthe security and the safety of people
using the devices.
And one of the continualstruggles is actually getting
the approval or setting up the processto bring in that new technology.
So I think that overcoming it,
(07:55):
I think showing the value of thatchange is really critical to the
adoption of it. So that'sprobably the biggest challenges.
Yeah, I agree. It's often not only atechnology problem but hearts and minds,
which is that kind of changemanagement piece. So maybe Brenda,
you can give us a few insights andwhat you've done and the company or
(08:17):
probably the company toaddress these challenges.
The first lesson is have a lotof patience and perseverance.
Finding people to help youis unbelievably important.
You get leadership behind you that if youcan get them excited about what you're
(08:39):
doing, that's a major gain,
but you have to remember that youhave to push the change forward.
You can't just say, oh, the ARis out there, we should use it.
You're going to have to actually
find and show how it'suseful to the company.
So the company won't adopt itif you don't have value to it.
(09:00):
And if you really want them to do it,
to overcome this,
you're going to have to first show peopleprobably leadership that it has value
and it's worth doing and youget them behind it and you keep
going.
So the brilliance of how acompany might address it, we have,
(09:21):
I am fortunate enough to be inthe immersive design center,
so Raytheon has acknowledgedthat this stuff is important.
So they created our littlegroup, we're very small team,
and they had the foresight to know thatwe'd have to go exploring this stuff.
So that's helped a lot. Soagain, patience, perseverance,
leadership backing,
(09:42):
all these things are useful andif a company wants to do it,
they're going to have to have such orsomething similar. And successes help.
If you can find little areas to dosuccess that'll help demonstrate the value
as well, overcome the challenges.
Absolutely. No, I couldn't agree more.
And I guess just going offpiece a little bit here, Brent,
(10:04):
but it's probably the same for anykind of evolutionary or revolutionary
technology. It does take time. Youneed to get your stakeholders in place,
you need to show benefitand things like that.
It's not just ai. You look at othertechnologies and it's a similar process.
So I think often for us who's beenin the industry for a long time,
(10:27):
we think is AR is sometimesdifficult to implement,
but so is other technologies and peoplelike yourself that are really driving it
through and showing thosebenefits show that it can be done.
Yes, I agree totally onthat one. If you look back,
think about cell phones or pagers oreven computers when they first came out
(10:48):
became popular back in theeighties or whatever it was.
That wasn't easy. They were all new.
Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Let meask you another question then.
What insights will your companybring and how do you see your
insights driving enterprise AR adoption?
(11:09):
I think the biggest insightis finding the value
to your own company or to other companiesand areas helped a lot with that.
We have a lot of meetings and theyshow that maybe someplace it was useful
for Raytheon or maybe it was useful forBoeing or Lockheed or Caterpillar or
any of the other, oracademia, it doesn't matter.
(11:31):
And so finding the value
is probably the biggestinsight to adopting the
technology. I think. Let's see.
The other one is the businesses,
as I kind of alluded.
I guess what need to actually understandis they need to be prepared for that
(11:56):
coming technology. As youjust said historically,
who gained the most when theyfirst came out with computers,
the people that were prepared for itor the people that started using them
earlier and figured out how it wasgoing to flow up into a bigger use case.
Another one I suppose is thatyou don't want to isolate the
(12:19):
technology.
I was just talking to Jamesand Nick the other day,
and if you just think aboutAR as a singular technology,
you might miss some of those key values.
And this was particularly on the
incorporating AI and other things.
So augmented reality is just one ofthe new forms of technology coming
(12:44):
and understanding not just how it worksbut how it's going to work with what
else is new is comingis also really critical
to seeing how you might be ableto use it in your business.
And I mentioned ai,
but you could go with roboticsor mechatronics or other use
cases or other new tech thatwe still are waiting to see.
(13:07):
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you'vepicked on a couple of things there.
It's about solving business problemsand that often can be multiple
different technologies. It can often bemultiple different use cases within ar.
As you well know in the area, we spentquite a bit of time defining use cases,
but actually when you look at solutions,
(13:28):
they're often a combination of thoseput together. And on the AI side,
to your point,
we're actually within the area focusingmore now on that intersection of
XR and AI.
Really the kind of role of the workinggroup there is to look at the different
use cases and look at the case studiesand what people are actually doing and
(13:49):
then maybe diving into that little bitmore detail and identifying some of the
possible challenges. Itcould be around ethics,
it could be around the technology itself.
And so all of those things, again,
area are beginning to focuson those things as well.
Cool. Brent, thank you very much.I've got one last question. And again,
(14:13):
using your sagelike advice,
aside from joining the area of course,
what advice can you offer to companiesstarting with their journey in enterprise
ar?
Well area is a good choice. Patience,
I would say it goes back to thepatience idea. Change takes time.
(14:34):
And just because you can see the valueof something doesn't mean everybody will.
And so you're going to need peopleto help you within your own company.
You're going to need to findothers outside your company.
You'll want to talk to all of the peopleyou can find and kind of build your own
community.
And from there understandwhat'll best or most
(14:58):
benefit your company.And again, be patient.
You're going to have to explain it,
you're going to have to show the valueand you're probably going to have to be
able to demonstrate how your companyis going to be able to achieve
it.
And so in that you can't forget whatthe past was because there may have been
bad experiences, there mayhave been good experiences.
(15:20):
And remembering how other technologiesgot incorporated is also important.
I think the harder challenge,you can see the future,
you might overlook the past andsometimes you get ahead of yourself.
So you also have to stay in the present.
Don't get too far ahead on a project justbecause you think it's going to work.
(15:41):
And in that,
remember that the small successeswill actually build into larger ones
and focus on that. Sothat's my sage-like advice.
Perfect. That's great Brent.
I think there's a lot of knowledgethat have gone into those insights,
so thank you very much.And I think that's it, sir.
(16:03):
I want to thank you very much for thoseinsights and thank you for Raytheon to
continue to fly the flag as avery active member of the area,
but more importantly,
delivering some great XR solutions andsharing that with the industry in the
ecosystem. So thank you very much, Brent.
Thanks, Mark. It's always a pleasure.I look forward to the next time.
Hello, I'm Karen Quatromoni,
Director of Public Relations forObject Management Group, OMG.
And welcome to our OMGpodcast series. At OMG,
we're known for driving industrystandards and building tech communities.
Today we're focusing on the AugmentedReality for Enterprise Alliance
, AREA,
(00:29):
the only global nonprofit member-basedorganization dedicated to the widespread
adoption of interoperable ARenabled enterprise systems.
Today we have the area'sexecutive director Mark Sage,
who will lead the podcast. Mark?
Thank you Karen,
and thank you for that introduction andactually the podcast is all about our
(00:53):
members.
So I'm really excited to introduce,
or I'm going to let himintroduce a longtime friend,
industry expert and a superblyknowledgeable person in the
XR and AR space. So Brent,
please introduce yourself and tellus a little bit about your company.
(01:13):
Thanks, Mark. It's a real pleasure to behere and I'm glad you asked me to talk.
So I'm Dr. Brent Dingle.I work for Raytheon,
which is an RTX business. And as you know,
but listeners might not Raytheon's a hugeinternational company and I'm going to
say I'm just one individual in it. AndI'm part of the immersive design center.
(01:33):
It's based out of McKinney, Texas.
And in that it's important to notethat I'm just one team in Raytheon
and RTX, which workswith augmented reality.
So everything I'm going to say is kindof my opinion from my perspective.
So if you find other people,
they may have other opinions andother views on what Raytheon does.
But from my group,
(01:54):
we actually explore ways to advance anduse business technologies and improve
business and manufacturing processes.
So what we're really trying to do ismake everybody's jobs a little bit better
or easier using the new technologies,
which includes a lot of use casesfor augmented reality or ar.
(02:15):
Fantastic. Thanks Brent. And sincerely,
I know we've known eachother for a number of years,
but some of the work and the insightsthat you've provided over the years have
been amazing. So to that point,
can you tell us a little bit aboutwhy Raytheon joined the AREA,
Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance,
and what did you hopeto achieve by joining?
(02:38):
Yeah, well from my perspective, I'msure others have other opinions,
but from my perspective,
being a member of area allows us to meeta lot of people doing the same thing
that we're trying to do.
So other companies or universitiesor even some private individuals.
And having attended a wholebunch of meetings over the years,
which have been amazing, I haveto say, they're really amazing.
(03:01):
It's been a wonderful experience hearingfrom others and listening to what
they've had to experience,what they've tried to do.
And I think the real gain,
I'd like to believe it wasthe original reason we joined,
was to build a sense of community really
because just listening to othersor even talking with them,
(03:23):
it reinforces that sense of purposeof why we're actually doing stuff.
And in a lot of ways Ithink it helps inspire ideas
how to solve challenges because we'reall facing more or less the same things.
And on top of that,
it also keeps us aware of what allis going on in the AR world and the
(03:43):
advancements that continue stilltoday. So it's been really great.
No, thanks Ben. I really appreciatethose kind words and it's interesting
echoing what you've said and putit in a slightly different way,
but people have often said the area isalmost like a kind of a self-help group,
a chance to go and speak to peoplethat are gaining the same benefits and
(04:08):
deploying the technology,
but also overcoming those challenges andhaving that opportunity to speak with
like-minded experts really helpssolidify your thoughts but grab those
new thoughts and understandwhat other people are doing.
So I'm glad that's one of thebenefits that you are receiving.
Yep, absolutely.
Perfect. Yeah,
so tell me a bit more aboutthe company mission and vision
(04:32):
and maybe try and relatethat bit if you can,
into your work within XR and how youare kind of helping and enabling that.
Yeah, as I said, I think the vision,
at least in my world isthat we are a huge company,
but the employees are important.So it's not just the products.
So you could process theAR using the products,
(04:55):
but from where I'm standing it'smore helping the actual employees.
And since we focus more on the businesstechnologies rather than putting AR into
our products, it's how do we useAR for the business processes.
And so from my world,
that's the vision is improvepeople's lives really
(05:17):
the tricky part.
And I think that the important part isfiguring out how to use that technology
to improve the manufacturingand businesses processes.
So some of the things we'vetried include the training and
the safety processes andwe've even gone into remote
collaboration and inspections andsimilar stuff like that. And again,
(05:40):
back to the vision idea, that's all inan effort to make people's lives easier,
make the processes easier using AR.
Technology. Brent, I love that.
And often you hear kind of theterm, it's a little bit funny,
but augmenting the humanand stuff like that.
But your kind of focus on the kind ofperson comes first and is using this
(06:02):
technology as a tool is again insightful,
but something we hear a lot from.
It's not something you just useto improve, as you say, processes,
it's actually helping the individualenriching their job and helping them to do
things quicker but better and moreeffectively. So I absolutely love that.
(06:22):
Thank you for that amazingkind of description.
Of course it's not all rosy out there.
So can you talk a little bit about someof the challenges that companies face
in enterprise AR implementations?
Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, it'snot always easy. In fact,
it's almost never really easy.
(06:45):
I think the largest challenge or thecontinual challenge is incorporating
change.
The change in technologyrequires, as I said,
we're trying to change theprocesses using the technology.
And a lot of people don't like change.
It's hard to convince them to change.
So showing the value ofthat change is really,
(07:09):
really important just to the people.
But then there's anotherchallenge also involving change,
which a whole bunch of people in thearea have expressed multiple times.
And it's not just thechange at the human level,
but at the business level as wellbecause bringing in brand new like the AR
headsets and you got these glasses andyou got all the wiring and all the tech
(07:32):
that's behind it. And a lot of industries,
Raytheon in particular is concerned aboutthe security and the safety of people
using the devices.
And one of the continualstruggles is actually getting
the approval or setting up the processto bring in that new technology.
So I think that overcoming it,
(07:55):
I think showing the value of thatchange is really critical to the
adoption of it. So that'sprobably the biggest challenges.
Yeah, I agree. It's often not only atechnology problem but hearts and minds,
which is that kind of changemanagement piece. So maybe Brenda,
you can give us a few insights andwhat you've done and the company or
(08:17):
probably the company toaddress these challenges.
The first lesson is have a lotof patience and perseverance.
Finding people to help youis unbelievably important.
You get leadership behind you that if youcan get them excited about what you're
(08:39):
doing, that's a major gain,
but you have to remember that youhave to push the change forward.
You can't just say, oh, the ARis out there, we should use it.
You're going to have to actually
find and show how it'suseful to the company.
So the company won't adopt itif you don't have value to it.
(09:00):
And if you really want them to do it,
to overcome this,
you're going to have to first show peopleprobably leadership that it has value
and it's worth doing and youget them behind it and you keep
going.
So the brilliance of how acompany might address it, we have,
(09:21):
I am fortunate enough to be inthe immersive design center,
so Raytheon has acknowledgedthat this stuff is important.
So they created our littlegroup, we're very small team,
and they had the foresight to know thatwe'd have to go exploring this stuff.
So that's helped a lot. Soagain, patience, perseverance,
leadership backing,
(09:42):
all these things are useful andif a company wants to do it,
they're going to have to have such orsomething similar. And successes help.
If you can find little areas to dosuccess that'll help demonstrate the value
as well, overcome the challenges.
Absolutely. No, I couldn't agree more.
And I guess just going offpiece a little bit here, Brent,
(10:04):
but it's probably the same for anykind of evolutionary or revolutionary
technology. It does take time. Youneed to get your stakeholders in place,
you need to show benefitand things like that.
It's not just ai. You look at othertechnologies and it's a similar process.
So I think often for us who's beenin the industry for a long time,
(10:27):
we think is AR is sometimesdifficult to implement,
but so is other technologies and peoplelike yourself that are really driving it
through and showing thosebenefits show that it can be done.
Yes, I agree totally onthat one. If you look back,
think about cell phones or pagers oreven computers when they first came out
(10:48):
became popular back in theeighties or whatever it was.
That wasn't easy. They were all new.
Yeah, absolutely. Cool. Let meask you another question then.
What insights will your companybring and how do you see your
insights driving enterprise AR adoption?
(11:09):
I think the biggest insightis finding the value
to your own company or to other companiesand areas helped a lot with that.
We have a lot of meetings and theyshow that maybe someplace it was useful
for Raytheon or maybe it was useful forBoeing or Lockheed or Caterpillar or
any of the other, oracademia, it doesn't matter.
(11:31):
And so finding the value
is probably the biggestinsight to adopting the
technology. I think. Let's see.
The other one is the businesses,
as I kind of alluded.
I guess what need to actually understandis they need to be prepared for that
(11:56):
coming technology. As youjust said historically,
who gained the most when theyfirst came out with computers,
the people that were prepared for itor the people that started using them
earlier and figured out how it wasgoing to flow up into a bigger use case.
Another one I suppose is thatyou don't want to isolate the
(12:19):
technology.
I was just talking to Jamesand Nick the other day,
and if you just think aboutAR as a singular technology,
you might miss some of those key values.
And this was particularly on the
incorporating AI and other things.
So augmented reality is just one ofthe new forms of technology coming
(12:44):
and understanding not just how it worksbut how it's going to work with what
else is new is comingis also really critical
to seeing how you might be ableto use it in your business.
And I mentioned ai,
but you could go with roboticsor mechatronics or other use
cases or other new tech thatwe still are waiting to see.
(13:07):
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think you'vepicked on a couple of things there.
It's about solving business problemsand that often can be multiple
different technologies. It can often bemultiple different use cases within ar.
As you well know in the area, we spentquite a bit of time defining use cases,
but actually when you look at solutions,
(13:28):
they're often a combination of thoseput together. And on the AI side,
to your point,
we're actually within the area focusingmore now on that intersection of
XR and AI.
Really the kind of role of the workinggroup there is to look at the different
use cases and look at the case studiesand what people are actually doing and
(13:49):
then maybe diving into that little bitmore detail and identifying some of the
possible challenges. Itcould be around ethics,
it could be around the technology itself.
And so all of those things, again,
area are beginning to focuson those things as well.
Cool. Brent, thank you very much.I've got one last question. And again,
(14:13):
using your sagelike advice,
aside from joining the area of course,
what advice can you offer to companiesstarting with their journey in enterprise
ar?
Well area is a good choice. Patience,
I would say it goes back to thepatience idea. Change takes time.
(14:34):
And just because you can see the valueof something doesn't mean everybody will.
And so you're going to need peopleto help you within your own company.
You're going to need to findothers outside your company.
You'll want to talk to all of the peopleyou can find and kind of build your own
community.
And from there understandwhat'll best or most
(14:58):
benefit your company.And again, be patient.
You're going to have to explain it,
you're going to have to show the valueand you're probably going to have to be
able to demonstrate how your companyis going to be able to achieve
it.
And so in that you can't forget whatthe past was because there may have been
bad experiences, there mayhave been good experiences.
(15:20):
And remembering how other technologiesgot incorporated is also important.
I think the harder challenge,you can see the future,
you might overlook the past andsometimes you get ahead of yourself.
So you also have to stay in the present.
Don't get too far ahead on a project justbecause you think it's going to work.
(15:41):
And in that,
remember that the small successeswill actually build into larger ones
and focus on that. Sothat's my sage-like advice.
Perfect. That's great Brent.
I think there's a lot of knowledgethat have gone into those insights,
so thank you very much.And I think that's it, sir.
(16:03):
I want to thank you very much for thoseinsights and thank you for Raytheon to
continue to fly the flag as avery active member of the area,
but more importantly,
delivering some great XR solutions andsharing that with the industry in the
ecosystem. So thank you very much, Brent.
Thanks, Mark. It's always a pleasure.I look forward to the next time.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!