This is the SF Productions podcast network and so did 24 hours The 60s in the 70s dwelling place of the lost generation We who grew up in this era had no real heroes Our role models came from the imaginations of others our meager lives were formed by and revolved around Weekly installments of our favorite TV programs Welcome to a place that your parents didn't understand A place that exists somewhere between the forefront of Recollectible memory and the edge of everyday thought Welcome to the vast wasteland Welcome home. Welcome to another exciting episode of vast wasteland. I'm your host Mark Schminbauer along with Wilbert Neal and Marty Wiley Here to talk about 60s and 70s television and today It's so close. That's right. It's a live-action super heroes we've seen throughout the 60s and 70s and We're including stuff like the old adventures of Superman series, which really didn't get to its height of syndication until the 60s and We're by the way We're excluding the Batman series because we did a special episode just about them We may mention them in turn, but we're not really gonna spend any time on them We're spending time on everybody else and let's go right out to Wilbert or this this guy over here Decado with our Kato Hornet Kato Hornet with our First point of the evening Anyway faster than a speeding bullet more powerful than a locomotive able to lead tall Billings Basically Our first that we would have come in contact with was Superman. Yeah, yeah That would have been our first show our first big one adventures Superman I've even got a better. Let's see. Well, what do you got? Oh, you got a good picture, but I Oh, yeah, oh, it's his name George Reeves. Yeah, this is George Reeves. Anybody besides me ever noticed that his glasses never had any glass We got we got stills aplenty here, so anyways Yeah, the the Superman series George Reeves, of course man who unfortunately committed suicide at the least The the legend all the reports. Yeah, the legend says that he killed himself thinking he was Superman He jumped out a window or something. No, he was actually shot It was that's now it's come through that he was shot and they're thinking that it was he was actually shot by somebody else because the Angle of the trajectory of the bullet the way it entered Whatever it looked like he would have had to have been standing upside down Yeah, and he would have had to have held the gun out there, which would have been impossible by the way because there's a big That's the big second thing. You know, you know, there's no Courage there were no burns on his hand, you know He would have been our first superhero on TV for people of our age. That's right Let me say the Superman show was produced from July of 1951 to November of 1957 That's a hundred and four big episodes boys and girls, but it wasn't shown till like two years after it They started tight taping them unless I'm a sailor filming them. That's I'm a second. That's that's quite possible. Yeah, that's so so they basically the people who were producing the show decided that it was They looked ahead some something almost nobody else was doing this it eventually we're gonna have color and So they went ahead and taped all the episodes in color, right? Or just part of them quite a few of them We're in black-and-white long before anyone even had color to show they started filming in color because it didn't cost them all that much more and And they figured it would make a more money in the long run which it did of course in the old In the old black-and-white episodes a Couple things people don't a lot of people don't know is the fact that Superman's costume in the in the black-and-white episodes was like brown and gray Yeah, because red and blue the real actual red and blue Costume didn't look right in black-and-white films, so they didn't use it They found the closest thing that looked like red and blue was brown and gray And we're like a leather or something wool. It was wool with leather accrutiments That that would have to be fun to spend a day every day Okay, well, let's see it says now here though the first batch of 26 Superman films were made in 51 series did not reach local stations until late 52 and then from 53 to 57 additional groups of films were made Syndicated right? Yeah, it was never sent to the network. It was not on a network syndicated and Network daytime, but Well, of course I wasn't around so I don't Yeah, everything was soaps in my memories you turned on the TV and it was the soap opera every afternoon And then probably next came along Well, it seemed like there was one year 65 or 66 where Captain nice and There you go, but they did not actually come out until after Batman did really yeah Oh, yeah, so was because it that was their big theory It was like they they saw the they saw kind of like the get smart satire type thing And they saw the Batman campy hero type thing. They said well to like based on people One of them was was one almost written by Buck Henry, right? I'm captain nice captain nice nice. Yeah, my buck Henry So they said well, it's kind of going to that thing and both of them flopped miserably and Let's see here, let me let me run down some things here I'm captain nice and from January 9 1967 to April 28th of 67 So that's basically a whole season. Oh half of a season. Yep, right and hey captain nice was played by William Daniels Who later went on to be the voice of Elsewhere That's fun, and then a mr. Terrific ran from oh my golly January 9 1967 1967 what a coincidence One was on together. Well captain mr. Mr. Terrific was on CBS. Yeah, nice was on NBC We're they all the same night or something. They were both on the same night. They're both on Monday Mr. Terrific was on from 8 to 8 30 captain nice was on from 8 39 o'clock That's how I got to watch both I don't even recognize any names here except for Well dick Godier and Paul Smith if it's the same Paul Smith that I'm thinking about Paul Smith who later went on to become Pluto and This is the I would I would bet I think that's the same possum and big dope dick Godier Of course, we know dick Godier. Hi me Ronald McDonald Yes, he was Things around but he was one of the first well he won the first Ronald McDonald on the commercials But he was a Ronald McDonald Okay, and then um well by golly we've got from the the great Success of sue of Batman also there was the green hornet It's on channel 8 channel 8 is I guess for those of you Unfortunately, if you have a CTV you have cable and hence you can't get well rarely can get I have discovered yeah to get channel 8 you have to have a Like a white television with about a what's a tiny screen about 12 inch screen? Yeah, and It has to be at least 10 years old you have to set it in your kitchen on your stove You'll get channel 8. I think it only come in the kitchen because um we have a well I haven't able to get it up in my bedroom We have a small color TV in the kitchen and it can pick up channel 8 also picks it up well, too Yeah, but you cannot you cannot get channel 8 if you've got cable. Yeah, you got cable on the same TV It's a low power station, and it's not supposed and cable stations aren't supposed to pick it up Yeah, but that's where you can watch Importantly they show quite a few great shows Showed up on Batman one time well. He showed up in the episode where they were up against Colonel gum Yeah, that was this time recently on the on family channel, and then they were on another episode too Where they just pop through the window one time, and yeah, what are you doing here? Oh, what are you doing here? You know that's one of those but then it was a few episodes later that of course green hornet was different from a lot of them where in in that He the public considered him a bad guy well He presented himself as a an underworld figure He was actually a hero right but he presented himself as an underworld figure to get in with the bad guys to find out their Operations and bust them up from the inside right and then leave before anybody before the police showed up or anybody? Basically because the police were always on on the look out for no one ever figured out who it was because I But but he was always Kate. I mean he didn't need it and get to be like, you know He didn't have it No, whatever car you thought someone with car and and all these guys he sent to jail You would have thought they would have said something Well, there's some interesting things about the green hornet that like people don't well There's there's the fact that if you go all the way back to the radio show of green hornet That they made a big they made a big thing in fact the Kato was Japanese until The time of World War two and then all of a sudden Kato was like from the Philippines. Yeah, like think oh, he's not Japanese No, he's not a bad guy. He's Filipino. He's from the Philippines So but they um in the brief they've done of they are doing a green hornet comic book now They started at late last year and they go through and they actually retrace everything and bring it all up to date And so now there's like in the comic book. There's a new green hornet now, which is like the grandson No, it's like a grand-nephew The original one from the from the radio show right because they go through and they actually did they look at the TV one in there, too And then um, yes, they Related to the load rage. Yes, it is related to the long range read was was is the great great grandson or something like that John Reed the lone ranger. He's the lone ranger's nephew They were both actually created by the same guy George Trindle created the great And he couldn't think of any other names in the range you also so he wanted he didn't family intentional Okay Another name other than read. I'll just use it again. He did he was intentionally done Okay, so in the radio show like Brett Reed worked for the Daily Sentinel newspaper in the TV show He worked not only he did not only have the newspaper, but he had a TV station as well Well, no, I can figure out who Bruce Wayne was it was the same thing You never seem to see them together Glasses In that one episode the Colonel gum Batman episode where they Live the Colonel gum said there said well, wait a minute now He's here and these here so that means that the Green Hornet must be Bruce Wayne Brett Reed, yeah, they were convinced that was the case and then they showed up and No After the Green Hornet Batman and everything faded it was sort of a dry spell for a few years Well, because it died so quickly that everyone was afraid of it, but they didn't actually die They went to cartoons and yeah, right, so but we're not going to talk about that now So what's going on next about well, that's kind of we got into the who was first Um, let's see actually well, I technically would be Wonder Woman because because you got to go back to the first to the first pilot of Production company you have to count it Kathy Lee Crosby is Wonder Woman. We can deny it's existed. Well, it exists unfortunately Horrible thing was the Kathy Lee Crosby completely blew off most of the of the the whole war and the whole All the details and basically said oh, she's just Really strong gal, you know, and that was about it And they didn't get to see the invisible plane But they mentioned it and he didn't get really get to see them the right costume and the golden rope until later She pulled it out of her. Yeah, it's like yeah Batman. We'll pull the rope out of her And I just basically didn't work and they and so they said oh, this isn't working that was like 74 Probably it's not in here. Must I think this book would probably Okay, sadly that pops up on TV once in a while. Yeah, I'm sorry guys. We can't watch that. That's all bad guys Yeah, don't bad guys on the floor. Let me see where we're looking they come along and find Linda Carter who well Let's see the Wonder Woman's first telecast was in December of 76 and the last one was in September of 79 in that though. She went through several different incarnations, right? because they started off in the 40s or so Yeah, where she was during it was during World War 2 World War 2 thing and she worked for major Steve Trevor and all and And then by golly she pops up again thing and it's the 70s And it's like Steve Trevor son Because the the the thing they said was well Wonder Woman's like practically immortal So so like she hardly ever changed and and she went back We assumed a paradise island for like 30 years and came back and it's Steve Trevor son and She works for that Quasi CIA type organization. I a DC.  No, I found the probably work better than a real thing. I found the thing here at the Catholic Crosby thing and it's Basically hardly anybody is it and it was 1974 March 12th, 1974. We could like mark it out Nope never with special guests, but but special guest villain Ricardo model by yes It's post-con pre-con. Yeah Pretty much this cons the all-american way anyway Yeah, the so the whole Wonder Woman thing changed because well what happened was it was on ABC and they and It went for a while and then ABC said well We like the show, but we don't want to show it right now We want to wait like a year or two or ten or so and then we'll show it again And the production company said well you guys obviously don't really want to show Because they went to CBS and but CBS said well We like the show, but we don't think it should be in 1940s because that's costing us too much money to be in period So we could make it a lot cheaper of its current time And so they just just change the series and all of a sudden it's current time, but uh, what? Well, I'm just saying because it was just moved to the current time. Hey, I can't find spider-man in here It must be in here somewhere. We know it's in here So so you had so you had the Wonder Woman series and about the same time the Hulk developed, didn't it? I think so well the whole Yeah, he was and then spider-man came out after that they tried spider-man after the hook was already successful the hook dr. David Banner Nuclear scientist wants to try something different. He wants to try to accelerate What was he actually trying to do Answer some sort of deal, but he hooked himself up into this big chair and it kind of just messed all up Well, it doesn't really say what he was trying to do but by going well he was playing with stuff He shouldn't have gotten into he was working there with nuclear stuff and he turned into a big green guy Great big ol green guy Oh, I'm gonna get a good picture of that interesting enough has kept coming back every once in a while Well after the series went off. Yeah here just lately they He's had a couple specials They did do a few incursions where they the big difference was I mean a lot of the other shows were pretty campy and And the new the new movies of the Incredible Hulk are pretty campy They had some at the time it they were really trying to do this very you know, it's like This is dramatic for dr. Banner. This is dramatic. You know, we're doing something completely here. We go. Here's a nice Oh, hey, there's a picture of Lou Frigno and I don't know if we can zoom in on this or not, but This is Lou Frigno Bill's got the white contacts in yeah, I don't know if we can zoom in on that or not There we go. Oh there it is and there's a Say right there. Yes, sir is it black and white? And that's of course Vixby's got the the weirdo contacts in that old There was the last step before he becomes where he goes green Okay, it says let's say David Banner was a research scientist who had been experimenting with various means of determining the effects of Stress on physical strength in a freak accident in his laboratory David was exposed to a massive dosage of radiation that had a dramatic effect on his physiology Normally a quiet peaceful man. David now found that every time he became angered He turned into the incredible Hulk a huge greenish man like monster with a minstrip and primitive passions Not that they got into those really right basically He just became a big green guy Okay, so From there by golly there. Well, you had amazing spider-man which I found the reference to My favorite thing was climbing up the wall. There's spider-man That's a spider-man Nicholas Hammond and there's there's a name. We haven't heard since the series pretty much or they Just basically never never really kept caught on they tried it way They tried it over and over yeah, CBS was just convinced so And they they they tried a lot of stuff and it just never seemed to catch on for some reason And they let me see they didn't they he was Still Peter Parker, but they had him in college and that kind of that was kind of a little different and Jay Jonah Jansen wasn't as mean in the series as he was in the comic book. So They just basically didn't work There was no Mary Jane either. I don't think they had a Mary Jane Parker in this Nope There was Julie Masters a rival freelance photographer. Yeah I always thought the guy that played spider-man seemed kind of tall to be playing. I Don't know. I mean I thought spider-man will be more of a compact kind of guy to be going up the walls and stuff And this guy was seemed so tall and long-legged like like a grass He just really didn't fit. Yeah, he just didn't fit the idea By golly, that's that's um, okay So that's a well basically the the comic book heroes as far as comic book heroes go, but then there were some others I mean, they're still um Well, the man from Atlantis. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, let's let's not forget the man That's a fun guy. That was a wonderful show it inspired us all to go out to the pool and try to swim like that Yeah, you find it really just didn't just plain didn't work Well by golly, you know the man from Atlantis Look it. Oh, hey, there's a nice picture of Wonder Woman. Oh Lifting the car up. No She's living up the back of a tarino it could have been start seeing But you're looking at the man from Atlantis here He's um, just he just one day popped up here on the shore Mark Harris He walked up after a storm and he was found by his doctor the pre Dallas days. Yep. Yeah, we got this great show for you Pat we You got to wear this web stuff and And you're in the water most of the time Learn how to swim Doesn't surprise me. They had to go out like real swimming teacher for him Did you know like contacts or something because they had weird eyes? Well, I think you're more like contacts. They possibly did because he did have his eyes open a lot under water Mm-hmm, but maybe it's just all that Actually kind of relates back to an Irwin Allen show city beneath the sea where they had this one character that was down there Played by bird a bedding His name was a gila a gila swam like that and then these years later They got the man from Atlantis So I'm just wondering if there isn't some connection in there We don't know and then even bird a bedding made an appearance on the man from Atlantis one time They were like two other they were basically were aliens. Oh, okay. They were from well aliens from another planet. Hey, that's Not an idea. Anyway, I'm aliens from down the street. We've got them and then um, should we look at the Bionic man and well, really that was pretty comic book Steve Austin and Summers and let's not forget The bionic dog there Well that was later well true, but he didn't make an appearance in the series. He wasn't actually in the series Yeah, okay somewhere in there. Okay. They had them both Steve was an astronaut and he's going up. He's testing this new I think it was a space shuttle on it Yeah, something like that some kind of a sit one man space shuttle and it goes up and it blows up it goes up It blows up He can't hold it. It's breaking up. It's breaking up and it blows up and then we see all these weirdo diagram He's bringing back in Oscar goldman. He's in there. He's well. We got so much. We've got so much money invested in this guy We're working on these bionic parts. We don't have anybody to put them on Yeah, let's put them on him. Yeah Yeah, and so that's it's like a Nuclear technology to go into these bionics and they make him run faster jump higher and see better. Yeah Red ball jets on you know faster and jump higher. Yeah, that's true a thing for our vision And he he could break things open with one arm at least I always got the feeling wasn't he like Unbalanced, you know, it's like I've got this biotic leg and I've got a regular leg. Yeah Both legs were by but but his arm. Yeah, it's like what no she had the ear didn't yeah Yeah, she had an ear. I mean I'd be going constantly You think like you know you get up in the morning and he'd stretch like Like what if you're gonna do one arm just take the other arm off and make them We need to test both arms that would be so That's such a mess. Yeah, that's wonderful such other wonderful characters in there like bigfoot bigfoot who was played once by Ted Cassidy and the Andre the giant also. Yeah, Andre the giant. That was that whole alien technology People show up and it turns out old Sasquatch is yet another bionic Being and it's like an alien bionic being and all this It was like a there's another storyline that is like the day the earth stood still kind of thing a Clat who tied a character who comes back and comes earth and tries to get people to get rid of their weapons And he's got this amazing sonic whistle that he does. It was funny lots of great stuff on these on these Bionic people shows Bionic things enough. Oh, they were just wonderful see them running around in circles Actually, and the greatest thing about them was when they brought we're running fast That we have to slow it down In the pilot movie and let's see the the whole series was based on I cyborg Martin Caden. Yes, okay in the in the original pilot. He did run fast. He was he was moving across that desert. Yeah Then they put him in the cryo sleep at the end of it and said we'll just thought about when we need it We'll wake him up as needed. Yeah, and then there was another one that had a John Saxon Who's another great one from we and in series that don't last at all. He played a he played a He played a bionic guy. He was totally bionic, too Yeah, so he wasn't bionic. He's just playing robot. Yeah That's right. Well, well bionic guys are cyborgs. Right.  Let's spend it They just wanted a whole team of bionic people that do undercover stuff like the impossible people But it just they haven't done any further with that. So hey stay tuned. They might right. Oh, I'm sure there'll be some more bionic movies There's no question. Let's oh, yeah, this is a fall guy reunion or something coming Oh Well, okay, looks like we've we've run into yet another end of an episode hard to believe and by God We didn't even get to touch on Shazam or Shazam. Oh, oh my God In the life, but I wonder girl whatever we're we're gonna be we're gonna be off for a little while We're applying for series status and hopefully you'll be seeing us in July at a regular time So you won't have to look all over the place for us. So for all of us here at Vaz wasteland. We'll see you. Hopefully in July Goodbye everybody. Good night


service delivery, innovation, we always forget half of the population. Women are not at the center of decision making. They don't have the agency and their voices are often very subdued, if at all heard. What we are asking for is a very level playing field. It makes sense from markets, it makes sense when you think of your consumers and it makes a lot of sense when you're thinking about human rights. So if we are talking about a global world where we want equity for all, then women cannot be left out of any part. They have to be in the boardroom, they have to be at the center of decision making, how resources are allocated and the value add will be 10x. It's already been proved where women have a strong voice in boardrooms, companies perform better. Even from economic sense, it makes sense. From human rights, it's a non-negotiable. It's not easy. We all live with those biases that we have grown up with. They are 5,000 years old or more. We have to break down those barriers, make the world equitable. That means in our sector more than anywhere else. They suffer the most when they don't have it. The problems are magnified because of our biologies and the social-cultural impact of when we get it right is so worth the effort. So there is now in 2019 a non-negotiable. As I hope in 2020 we shouldn't be talking about gender equity. It should be taken for granted in our sector. And I believe water and sanitation can be the exemplar in this. Utilities especially in emerging economies have a problem. They have a problem of a mixture of poor people and rich people. And yet all these people need water in order to be able to achieve goal number 6 of SDGs. So we are looking at utilities being able to discuss with their governments so that they can give them grants to be able to finance those people who cannot be able to get water. And be able to charge those who can pay so that there is some cross subsidy within the system. We are also looking at utilities to be able to use technology because technology is important. Technology helps these utilities to be more efficient. Technology helps these utilities to be more productive. We are also looking at governance. Governance is very, very important. With poor governance, most utilities especially in emerging economies have got a problem. So we are looking at that also. We are also looking at staff. Utilities must engage their staff. There is no utility that is going to make a difference if the staff there are not doing a good job. So I am basing all this on the case study of national water, what we have been able to do in national water, increasing geographical coverage and also increasing the turnover in the last 6 years. We have increased our turnover more than 3 times. We now correct over 100%. The profits have grown almost 3 times. We are also emphasizing collaboration. We need to collaborate. We are no longer talking of best practice now, we are talking of next practice. A practice which is better than the way you are doing things and you can achieve this through collaboration. Utilities especially in emerging economies, they need to know that they can do it. This business of thinking that someone else will come and do it for you is not correct. In national water we have done it. We continue to use a do it ourselves policy and it is helping us. So let us believe in ourselves. Let us know that the utilities we manage are the utilities to serve our countries so that we can help our countries to grow to better standards. Good morning everybody. We are ready to start our third day here at the conference. My name is Tom Kunit. I am the immediate past president of the Water Environment Federation and I come from Chicago in the United States. This is my first time in Sri Lanka. By show of hands, how many people here is your first time visiting Sri Lanka? And keep your hands up if you intend to come back again someday. Yeah, I do too. I was fortunate to be able to have a few days before the conference where I spent in central Sri Lanka in the mountain region. Very beautiful region. And I went hiking up to a mountaintop, a place called Ellorock. It was raining the entire time. Muddy trails, wet slippery, but I made it to the top in order to see a big cloud in front of me. So I figured after a while I'm going to go, but just before I left the wind shifted and the cloud moved away for about 30 seconds so I could look down and see this beautiful valley, very, very deep, wonderful, spread out valley. And I thought, that's what it is like sometimes with us coming up with ideas. We work and we work and we work and all we see is a cloud in front of us. And then at one moment when we're not even thinking, suddenly the idea comes to us. Psychologists talk about the work that's going on in our subconscious to make connections and push it forward into the consciousness. Thank you. I'm a little tall for this. And so when we work towards innovation, we're talking about innovation on our panel today, it is something that was often has to work at and that the connections are not always immediately made. It takes some patience, it takes some effort and some relaxing and letting those thoughts and the ideas connect and make those connections. And we're going to be talking about that today. So to start off this very good session on innovation to overcome global water challenges, we have a excellent keynote speaker who is perfect for talking about the topic of innovation. We have Valerie Nidu. Now Valerie is the executive manager of business development and innovations at the Water Research Commission where she has worked for the past 10 years. And Valerie is also the past president of the Water Institute of South Africa and the previous chair of the Board of the Water Institute of South Africa. And she has her master's and PhD degrees from the University of KwaZulu, Natal. So please give a warm welcome for Valerie Nidu. I'm a little short, so I'm not going to stand behind the podium. And as you can see in the interest of gender equality, the title is in pink. So today I'm going to be speaking about innovation to overcome global water challenges. So if we look at essentially what are the challenges that drive innovation? So we speak a lot about urbanization. So you see the lovely picture of a city and we speak about climate change and we speak about rising sea levels. How is that going to affect us? Increased amounts of CO2 and the ice caps melting. So when we talk about climate change, we talk about all of these things. How do we manage it? How do we prepare for the future? Then we speak also about industrialization and different countries at different stages. But generally when we speak about industrialization, you speak about these massive factories making things at scale. Now we start talking about the fourth industrial revolution and robotics. And at the same time we're also always actually aware of biodiversity. So one needs to protect your biodiversity, especially in the water sector because it's where you draw much of your water from. However, when you speak about these four drivers of innovation, you also have to look at it through a different lens. And the developing world lens is essentially urbanization that looks like that. Lots of informal settlements. Cities growing at a far more rapid rate. Then we are used to. Essentially with climate change in most of these countries, the infrastructure is not there. The resiliency is not there. And so it has a direct impact on livelihoods and people, on their houses. They don't have insurance. And so it has very different repercussions to some of the stuff we talk about in science. And when we talk about industrialization, I mean it's a nice thing and people put growth plans in place, etc. But many countries struggle to actually reach the kind of industrialization and economic growth plans that they work towards. And as a result, they don't necessarily have the sufficient capital to invest in the sort of water solutions that they want. And of course, when we start talking about biodiversity, if you're coming from a science background, you want to protect everything. You want to protect the trees and the forests and the rivers. But there's a human factor to it. And that human factor is around livelihoods. People live off the land. They fish. They chop wood. They basically live off the spaces in which they've been living for hundreds of thousands of years. Sorry. Pressing it backwards. Okay, so if one looks at the space of these four major challenges that drive innovation, if you look through an innovation lens, it's very different to a developed world versus a developing world. And I think we need to be aware of that. So innovations in that space can be very different for these two types of environments. So what are the big areas that we talk about when we talk about research? We talk about the SDGs. How do we attain it? It has a whole lot of things that we're supposed to do and we prepare for it. So do we prepare by learning from others? Possibly. Research is learning from others. It doesn't work for our environment. We don't have the same governance systems. We don't have the same revenue models. We don't have the same economic growth. We don't have the same capacity and capability on the ground to roll out some of these solutions. And we don't have enough water in some areas as simple as that. When one starts talking about climate change, one starts talking about the possibility of vulnerability. And it's good enough to understand what is the vulnerability of the different cities. But we also start talking about resilience. How do I build resilient cities? How do I work towards resilient cities and what actually constitutes resilience? Is it about infrastructure and infrastructure protection in water? It is to some extent. But I would say it's more about how do you build resilient societies? How do societies are able to adapt to some of the disruptions that we would expect in the future? In those spaces, I would go so far as to say therein lies a whole lot of innovation opportunities and potentials. Largely because you're talking about households. How do I prepare households to be more resilient towards some of the disruptions that we see in future? The water energy food nexus, another big area that we actually drive innovations through water security, energy security, food security, through the nexus eye is critical in most of the spaces that we are working with. We know that as our water levels deplete in some of these areas, food security becomes far more tenuous. And of course with food security comes a whole lot of destabilization effects. And the one that most of us have been playing around if you're in the research and development space is around the circular economy. So we all know what the intent is. We want to transform waste into something that's useful, something that's beneficial. But how do you do it? We haven't quite figured out our value chains yet. We haven't quite figured out our revenue models. So in those spaces, how do we accelerate innovations that emanate from those four domains? Now if I look at some of the developing countries the way if we had to use a largely linear process it is unlikely that we would make any significant change in the space of transforming or moving any of those categories forward. And the reason I say this is because to a large extent if I look at the Water Research Commission at our portfolio, and this is a funnel which basically is speaking to the stage gate process. And I can say at the scale up pre-com phase there's a whole lot of tech that just sits there for decades if anything. And so the question is, you know, I've developed this, I've scaled it up, somebody liked it but I can't get more than one municipality maybe to test it. So how do we move it to commercialization? And it's quite clear that we have a problem in the system around innovations. And in this space there's a whole lot if you look at the bottom layer in the South African system at least. The point is that all of them are not aligned. They're all not streamlined. They all don't have the same priority areas and they don't fund critical mass into an area. And so the likelihood is you've got this lone innovator or tech developer and they actually just move through the system knocking on doors and basically never quite gets to where they're supposed to be. Is that innovation good or bad? That's hard to say sometimes because sometimes the technology is not failing. The system is failing. So one of the key things is we don't have enough money for innovation. So if we plot in the South African system itself from where we do basic research and who funds that space. Yes, it's not up there with most of the I would call fast growing economies where they're putting 2%, 3%, 4% of their GDP or maybe their R&D. But we got sufficient in the system. And then if you look at all the other funders and you say, well, is there enough funds for companies, SMMEs, innovators, tech developers to actually move the technology forward most of them would say yes, we have enough funds. The point again is that it takes a whole lot of bureaucracy, a whole lot of paperwork, a whole lot of business cases, a whole lot of proposals and innovators to keep jumping through that space. And so is this the ideal way in which we drive innovation? I would say that for some of the innovation if it is really, really innovative and it's going to be a game changer, you've got enough funds allocated to investors, et cetera, it's going to hit the market. But by and large in the system itself whether it emanates from universities or some of the smaller startups the likelihood is it will fail. We in the research and development space often speak about the early stage value of debt and we speak about the innovation chasm that's the first chasm that you see there. But if one asks the question so how do I take it to the commercial market you start to see there is another chasm in some of the spaces. So what is that second chasm? If you're disrupting a space you actually have to develop a market in that space. There must be a willingness to pay for that, there must be aspirational value in terms of wanting to move there. You've got to move a system in that space. So there it's not just a case of getting the ransom sense right or should I say the dollars right in that space but it's also about how do you create that market around new spaces. And who does it? Who does it in this entire system? Is it the innovator? Is it the public sector? Is it the private sector? Is it the consumer? We all play in the space. And of course industrialization right we all want to move to scale up models we want rather than do one job at a time sell one tech at a time can we move to scale up models? The truth is in the water sector if you look at the level of where we're thinking about some of the technologies the SMM is the tech developers they don't even think at that level so they don't think about scale up differently and if you don't think about scale up differently then you don't explore the opportunities that are already in the system so currently in the water sector we all think about 100 megaliter per day plant so scale up for us is large how about 100,000 one kiloliter plants is that possible? That's for me where innovation challenges need to shift especially around developing countries because again I don't think we have enough money to put large infrastructure in place over this interim period while we're developing so I'm going to use an example here you must have seen quite a bit around the sanitation space but I thought maybe to take you through the process of why we've kind of shifted in there on the top you see some very nice pictures those are pictures of South Africa so very developed, affluent in many of these spaces these are off-grid spaces so either we're trying to force green building spaces either we've got eco estates and holiday spaces or we've got these nodes in South Africa where we call these the gas stations or the filling stations and all of them are looking for either decentralized or off-grid systems so they're all looking for how to move into something that's a little bit more green should I say and right now they come knocking on the door and there's nothing really there other than a smaller version of a centralized plant a decentralized system of course on the bottom end you see the challenges around whether it's informal settlements or the hilly terrains that you have to put water and sanitation in or the very rural remote spaces where to be honest a pipeline or a network solution is not possible so this idea of urban and rural the two extremes what's the missing middle now years of research both globally locally within South Africa led us to believe that there are certain key insights that were coming across continuously and there was an aspiration so in South Africa that aspiration was I would like the convenience of a flushing toilet but in some areas we don't have water and in some areas we're never going to get a reticulated system so what do you provide them in between of course the opportunity that we could have taken here is to go and look for one technology at a time one technology at a time and basically say okay let's keep testing it through these different stages that I spoke about before but the likelihood is you're not going to really transform a system you're not really going to get impetus or critical mass in that area so the way we looked at it was to create a sanitation transformative initiative and in this space we first set a vision the first vision that we set was actually a science or engineering vision one of disruption we said let's disrupt the space and then we set a vision of advocacy and in this space it wasn't just us alone there was a small committed mass of people also thinking a little bit differently in this space so it's about global friends and local friends bringing them together and that advocacy started to grow and in South Africa we said well okay if we're going to move to this awkward situation can we think about this differently is it one tender at a time one spec for one settlement at a time or can we think about this as a potential sunrise industry especially in terms of where we were seeing this technology go and so we actually were able to plot an industrial pathway possibility when we set this innovation challenge and this was linked to things that previously in the innovation space we wouldn't be thinking about from a research development and innovation commission we're thinking about manufacturing, distribution, servicing models and how do I develop the market of course you have to have the right policy right because public sector doesn't move without the right policy in place and there we worked with our department of water and sanitation I'm happy to say their new sanitation paper is all inclusive of this new non-sewed off grid sanitation systems and inclusive of the circular economy concepts that we're driving market development so how do you shift markets in this space well the guys that were doing the ISO standard we quickly adopted that in South Africa so we now have an SABS 3500 standard and we actually envisage a number of other standards that will come in this place standards related to the products that some of these technologies will actually create and then from there I'm happy to say that last week we went into another meeting this time our national department that's involved in building regulations they said well we're happy to now include the standards in the building regulations so now these off grid household systems have a standard and a building regulation attached to it what does this mean? it signals to the sector that they can now go and start looking for the kind of technologies that we want of course the designation and the model tender specification will come as we roll out this program going forward but those are two of the other key components that will lead to a market development process the third one was technology so we didn't again look at one tech at a time we looked at the basket, we've got the gates program we're not going to reinvent the wheel we're essentially going to look inside and outside and we're going to do the connectivity between these processes why? some people were looking at developing the front part of the toilet others were looking at developing the back end of the toilet some would full recycle system, some would systems that were on the sort of thermal pathway of transforming the waste fully so it's about looking at everything that's in the basket and others were looking at how do I actually have the servicing models that is able, if I separate urine for example make that into a product and use it in the agricultural space so there are various other models that we are seeking in that space and it's important to understand that not a single tech but a system of tech that is out there and ultimately our vision is that the strongest will survive the ones where the market actually is able to say that's the kind of product I want will survive and all we are doing is creating the enabling environment scale up becomes important you have to demonstrate why is it important to demonstrate you de-risk, you build confidence but in this space it's also about the interface with the consumer so there's a whole lot of consumer testing that will go in how are people interacting with this and we are happy that we included as well the gender intentionality that Gates has actually asked us to bring in which is important and to some extent we didn't really think about that by design but I think it was a valid sort of inclusion in that space and so we started to say to our SMMEs and our tech developers you need to start thinking about localization you need to start thinking about industrialization we will match make you you need to start thinking about your value chain development and then we had a whole range of other discussions with partners investors and various partners within the sector bringing them all the time towards what we call the shared vision the shared risk the shared knowledge and hopefully in time a shared impact finally we do know that such a system will need a retraining of the workforce so the idea is you will have to build in some sort of academy it's not just simple knowledge dissemination it's actually new practice that will come into being so why did I put this up? this is an example of where you want to make a big shift in the system it's not just about just seeking the one tech it's about seeking a toolbox of tech and toolbox of commercial or business models that may be applicable in the system and in the developing world I do think we need more thinking around the different revenue models the different delivery models and the different institutional models that will actually enable it our CEO coined so when we were looking at the vision we actually plotted the industrial pathway but our CEO coined the term that if we were going to realize this in the future that actually you might have the first as he put it the SaniCon in the sanitation space the first billion dollar company if we are able to get that technology up and running so is that thinking around the framing of the transformative way in which we bring all partners together in which we collaborate, in which we co-create and in which we actually move the system forward it is not unique as you can see guys that study this kind of thing they were able to say okay you have a landscape and you have a current regime and actually every now and then you will have a small group of actors that have a common vision that have a certain expectation of the way they want to see the world transforming and that that small group is the one that actually intervenes and shifts a system and I think that's what that example shows you but there are probably many other examples of how we could actually cluster projects in that space but for a niche to develop and I want to be very clear it must be driven by key insights you must understand what it is you're driving it is not my pet project or anyone in the water sector it is what is good for your community and your society and are they willing to accept that this is a better way forward from where they have come and I think that's the critical thing when you want to make a transformative sort of shift in the system so finally ladies and gentlemen I'm just going to leave you with the following thoughts there's a very nice ideation methodology think wrong by a US company and they often say that sometimes in our technical space we're very quick to say no but you know normally you don't have the technical acumen therefore you should not be designing for that system but maybe every now and then and if you're in the innovation space you should be saying yes and why because your knowledge plus that innovator can actually create something quite significant so stop saying no but let's start saying yes and and then the possibilities are there in the innovation space so with that thank you thank you very much Valerie that was wonderful and well there's a lot there that I think we could continue to listen to her about but we're going to continue now with the panel get some other perspectives on this and I'd like to invite up to the stage now our panel members here so we're going to start with Dr. Mohan she's a fellow and senior scientist in the energy and resources institute in New Delhi and she's also an honorary associate professor at Deakin University in Australia we'd also like to invite up here Dr. Mohan who is a senior professor of environmental and water resources engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology and he is also very well respected in the field receiving many awards including the very prestigious John Penny Cusick Eminent Engineer Award so Dr. Mohan I'd like to bring up to the stage Maria Lara Fernandez who is the deputy CEO of National Research and Innovation Agency in Uruguay Pallavi Bishnoi who is an expert for the World Bank 2030 water resources group and the Norwegian water cluster located in India and she also acts as a technical core expert for the state of Uttar Pradesh government to support policy so let's give all of our panelists a hand please so we're going to build on the things that Valerie talked about and I want to start off asking a question here for Maria Fernandez since you are with an organization and institute with the name innovation is right in the title there why don't you talk about a little bit your perspectives about how your institute and the work that you do the work to actually the measures to drive innovation in the sector first of all good morning for everyone and thank you very much for your invitation to take part of this panel thank you very much for your presentation as you said I am from the national research and innovation agency that's in Uruguay as you know Uruguay is a very small country in health America and basically what we do is ANI is a governmental institution that fosters and promotes research and innovation and the main mission is to apply the knowledge in the productive sector that's basically the main point and the approach is exactly that Valerie explained to us before combining all the key players and we have several tools but basically answering your question we have tools directly oriented to the companies to the productive sector with innovation tools financing project basically sharing with the companies the risk of innovating and also we have the national scholarship system where we try to send students to study in Uruguay or abroad it's a graduate program for masters and PhD and in connection with the water specifically we have a very important agreement with IHE and Delft to send a student to study masters and PhD there in sanitation field wonderful thank you very much for that Nupur I'm going to ask you the next question and if you work in India how do you work towards the SDGs particularly SDG 6 with regard to the water challenges and of course we have in your region a number of those challenges so how do you see the role of technology and technological innovation in overcoming those challenges in developing nations like India good morning everyone and thank you IWA for giving me a chance to answer the question the role of technological innovation as we see in a developing country as Valery has also maintained that for a developing country it has its own challenges and particularly developing country like India having diverse so much diversity and earlier like we had different set of challenges we were focusing mainly on the innovation aspect and building these even networks and all but recently with the leadership and the focus on all aspects of SDG and particularly SDG 6 so our focus is on covering all the aspects and particularly taking technology innovation as you say so we are working in the space of technology and as innovation we are thinking of centralized wastewater treatment systems now we have come up to decentralized systems now then we were working on the latest emphasis on smart cities redefining the toilets then the sanitation needs and covering the different aspects then the technology aspects if you say we are more into looking at different aspects let's say in water sector so the leakage problems or identification or the monitoring system so IoT has a good space in India now so Indian Government and also the corporate so we now in India are focusing more on technology and innovation right into implementation in that space so here the technology has a major role to play. Thank you so I am going to move to you Dr Mohan and we have just heard from about the the technology to drive innovation and you are a person from the university with technical background and you drive technology but is technological innovations enough is that sufficient for solving the water problems okay good morning to all of you so thanks to IWA I strongly feel that technology innovation alone may not be sufficient for solving water problems especially I am taking example from developing countries where we need a good partnership model otherwise we start the kind of system but the operational and maintenance side we are having a break failure and the second one we need a good business model which may be site specific it may not be possible for a business model which can be applicable globally everywhere so we may have to come up with some kind of a business model and third one is finance so finance is very important even though it's part of the business but I think we have to put little more effort on this particular one why I am saying is we have been developing lot of technology and we are still at the initial stage we have not had a full form very much we are now starting only on the data collection on a real time maybe you know we may have to adapt very quickly on the cloud or maybe artificial intelligence or machine learning where we may have to implement all these technologies then only then it will be possible to see the light of the day on the impact of the technological innovations so towards that I would say that we should also make a lot of changes in the system one is I strongly feel that the water requirement per capita per day which is around 135 liters which is really high especially for developing countries and we create infrastructure to carry that much water from almost 120 kilometer from the source to the city on the other hand if I can we know that it can be managed with less amount 70 or 50 or 100 maximum if I can do that then I can reduce lot of losses reduce lot of infrastructure that finance I can use it for operation maintenance so the main problem with the water infrastructure is we have less kind of infrastructure so if we can doubt all these models I think we can adapt to these technological innovation otherwise innovation alone may not be able to sustain in the system for sustainable development that's my opinion thank you and that echoes very well what Valerie had talked about too about looking at those new models the different approaches she talked about in her presentation she spent a good amount of time talking about technologies that are in their infancy and many of them stall and that are not able to move on to the next level so Pallavi I'd like to talk to you and ask you to speak to this issue of how technologies can move into a place of scale up as is necessary in order to get them implemented first of all brilliant presentation Valerie very insightful I love that curve the valley curve that you presented I think it kind of goes very well with what happens on the ground with innovations so and like professor Mohan said it's not just about innovation but also capacity building of the system to accept and adapt innovation the implementation of this innovation on the ground most of these innovations die out because the systems don't have that kind of capacity to adapt to it and when it comes to scaling up I honestly feel the government plays a big role in the water sector and that's something that has to be kept in the loop when we look at these innovations by keeping the government at the bay that's where we get blindsided so in India right now in my state we're running multi stakeholder partnerships to address the key water management issues and we're bringing in the private sector the government the civil society and the academia together and we can come up with solutions which are ground up and which require so when it comes to implementation there's lesser resistance going through the system and the policy making is easier because it's coming from the government itself this question statement is coming from the government and we have the innovators sitting on the other side of the table giving answers to those questions and the private sector to take it up for scaling so I feel that kind of models innovative models for partnerships could really work well when it comes to scaling up of these innovations Thank you so Valerie I'm going to bring you into the conversation here as Justice Pavlavi talked about ground up solutions and you're talking about perspectives you have an urban perspective a developed world perspective versus developing nation perspective so these perspectives all have values but how do you then bring them together and integrate them in particular we also talk about top down models versus bottom up and each one has their own value so could you speak a little bit from your perspective on the top down versus bottom up in terms of driving innovation so I actually think from a world perspective because you're talking about water and sanitation a pure bottom up requires a little bit of a helping hand from a top down system so you do require the signaling the incentives to be in place and it also requires the top the leadership to start thinking around what would enable this environment to develop and grow and so there they can do a lot of work whether it's around policy or incentives or just bringing the right stakeholders to the table we all work in spaces where government departments have specific mandates and sometimes they interpret those mandates in a certain way we also have government departments that have silos within their own organization so there's a whole lot of what I call disruption not only that the technology may bring to the water sector but implementing that technology will require disruption in the system itself to think differently and to come up with the kind of models and enabling environments for those things to happen and again because it's not universal it's not one size that may fit all it may be that the developing and developed take different trajectories going forward and maybe in the future this sort of scaled onsite non-suit sanitation might become the norm of the future what if we are able to find a really sustainable thermal technology that you can put into your house like an air con and it's affordable what if we are able to scale up at that level then you're talking something completely different than planning the next 100 megaliter per day or 400 megaliter per day sort of waste water treatment plan so the economics may shift completely but you've got to allow the incubation space and creative thinkers to actually come to the fore and I think for me that's the biggest message think differently understand that you're not just there about providing services and solutions you're also about creating the enabling environment for innovations to take hold great thank you so let me build on that because in order to have disruptions we want to think differently as you said to think differently and going back to your slide you said talk about think wrong so that means asking these big questions asking the question why or why not what if so I'm going to open this up to the other four panelists here what would be these big why questions that you would want to ask what would you want to say that is going to change and disrupt the status quo so that we can have this transformational change that Valerie talked about what would you say would be some of these big why why not questions that you would like to ask who would like to start Dupur you mean to say like why we have to ask so regarding the technology innovation when we talk about any so the requirement is as very well said the disruption in the thinking first of all at the first place and when as a technology developer we move out so we really need the support the ecosystem and the we need first the end user for which we have developed the technology together with us then as well said top down and bottom up approach so we need a regulatory system and an ecosystem to fund and up scale so in India particularly now we have come up with such encouraging models so we have start up India campaign scale India so with this our government is encouraging us so we have developed the innovation scale and regarding those questions which we as an innovator ask where to go whom to approach now they are being addressed so hopefully innovation space as it is growing we look forward to implementation and development I full agree with the question because that I think that that's the main point I was thinking about that we have different countries and we are talking basically about the same topic how to combine the different actors from the society in order to increase the innovation and through the innovation to go away with our countries and why because in our experience and we are full convinced of that it's the only way to go away and to develop our reality and the main point is how to find the way to build the bridge between the knowledge and the public sector and the productive sector and how to combine all that's the main issue how to combine the actors that you were describing the public sector of course the state the public resources but also the the investors the all the stakeholders and that's the way that we consider that we need to find and the tools that we have in our agency add all of them in order to foster that process thank you I just wanted to give an idea on that the wastewater we always call as a wastewater but it is not actually a wastewater I think there should be a change in our mindset there's only used water and normally it is having only 1% pollution so if I can use this greywater treat it with a simple treatment techniques then I think we can solve the local problem as such so in fact now for the city we are now implementing that we are recycling an apartment so it cannot be sent out so with a simple sand filter and pressure filter and also the zero it's like a zero liquid discharge which will be really reducing the load on the wastewater treatment plant or used water treatment plant in fact we can recovery plant it will be called as a reclamation plant or recovery plant if our mindset changes I think there will be a lot more we can do a rather than sending the wastewater to again polluting the water bodies so that's one and the second one I feel strongly still we have not considered water as an economic good we always take it as a free commodity in many of the countries so I think if we can attach the economy with that I think there will be a lot more change that why not we do that great great so why not treat the waste on site and why are we calling it waste why can we not think about value Pallavi do you have something on this I think we are running out of time but I think my only why is going to be why is it taking so long for us I mean we've been meeting over over the years and discussing these systems so I just want to understand why is it taking so long for us to transform these systems I mean we make the systems I want to ask from how many years did it take for you to establish the sanity all the aspects of it so for that so my colleague Jay over there is passionate about shit and he basically talks about the past 10 or 15 years and out of that came the insight and that's why we talk about sanity insanity is the play on the words because to some extent it's insane we're putting a whole lot of VIP toilets on the ground and they fill up within 2 to 3 years because the design specs are all incorrect et cetera there's pollution happening on the ground there's health and hygiene impacts and so you have to then say is this the best we can offer and once you start asking that question then you start thinking a little bit differently about what could be out there that could actually fit for that sort of community and settlement type and of course then you can think bigger the cities of the future could be retrofitted with these systems if we develop it enough we've sent people to the moon surely we can develop toilets better well with that I think I'm going to unfortunately have to bring this to an end even though it was a very enlightening discussion and maybe leave the audience with thinking yourself about asking those big questions asking those why questions that are going to disrupt things why do we have to do things this way and then continue to probe into that there is something that I learned from a Japanese business culture about the five why's you don't stop by once but you dig down five times asking why to probe deeper and deeper to get to some changes and some disruption so with that I want to make a few announcements before we completely conclude here immediately following this panel discussion right outside there in the lobby in front of the IWA pavilion is going to be the celebration for the world water loss day so today is world water loss and it's our first celebration to recognize the importance of curbing the loss of water so please join us out there front for that celebration for those of you who would are joining us for the Gala this evening and please do immediately following the closing session out front of this hall there will be buses to shuttle us to the Gala so just make sure when you're finished with the closing session just move on out to the front and there will be shuttle buses for you and our next sessions will be starting at 10 30 a.m. this morning can we please have a big round of applause for all of our panelists thank you and enjoy your conference


Yes, comic book haul. Cheryl. Cheryl is in the house. Cheryl says comic book haul. Elder God says comic book haul. We got two months saying comic book haul. We're doing comic book haul. Not bad, good, good. Enjoy your nasty comic book hauling in the year. Fight it out. Chill, brother. Chill, brother. Hope you're doing well. I hope you have a fantastic week. Gang, we got two packages. Two packages. Okay, let's do the small one first. This one, I wrote it down here. What did this one cost me? This one cost me about $25 in cooling and shipping. Okay, and the reason I bought this one is because, as you know, I'm not going to the comic book store anymore because I got kicked out for not putting a muzzle on my face, right? And it was like a week before they took off the mask mandates, right? I was going in there without my muzzle. Initially, I went, okay, I'll put it on, but for a few months, I wasn't wearing my muzzle. And then the last week before they took out the rules to put muzzles on your face to go into a store, they said, okay, if you don't wear your muzzle, you can't come in. So I said, well, it is what it is. The owner was really nice. I like the owner, actually. He said, you know what, she told, you can just, you know, bring the comic books out to you if you want. I said, no, man, this is tyranny rolling out in Canada. You need to, we need to stand up against it, right? So I refuse to abide by these mandates. Cool. Nice packaging. The guys included a Montreal Comic Book Club. See, Montreal Comic Book. You put a little sticker on these. Package, not bad. Thank you. Cool. Nice packaging. Okay, let's put this away. Let me show you this. Okay, liontooth. They also wanted to scan the Navy and style democratic social estate. Bush 1 and Clinton ensured that private capital made Russia a free for all, but as all oligarchs robbed the Russian PIA. Check, check this out. The reason I bought this is because it's a recent comic. Okay, it's a modern comic. It just came out like in the last couple of weeks, two, three weeks. And the reason I bought it is because it's one of my favorite characters from the Marvel universe and it's metal. Now, usually I would have just picked up one copy of it, but I picked up three copies of it because I had to distribute the shipping cost. Okay. And this is Ghost Rider number nine. And check out the cover for this. Check out the cover for this. Very metal. Very metal. Look at that. I love this cover. This is one of the best Ghost Rider covers I've seen. Okay, check it out. Very metal. I like my metal covers and this is a great cover. Really, I really like this cover. I would have this as a poster on my wall. Beautiful cover and I picked up three copies. Okay, just to distribute the shipping. I guess my local comic shop doesn't want my business, so I'll send that out to Montreal. Right? First time chat. Ravine Tahu. Three SOS. I forget how to read that. Hey, everything for your stream.  Nice cover, eh? Nice cover. And three coffees. Okay. And this cost $24. So it cost me a little bit more than what I would buy in a comic book store. Like, the cover price for this is $4 US. So in Canada, in my comic book store, it was costing me, and this is $24 Canadian, by the way. So it would cost me around $650 Canadian. Okay. $6 Canadian. $650, usually. Yeah, $6, $6, $650 Canadian or something like this. So instead of paying $18, $20 to my local comic shop, I ended up paying $24 to a Montreal comic shop that I could have it shipped out to me. Screenshot moment. Hold on. You know what? If you want a screenshot, I'm going to take it out of the bag. That way you don't get the reflection. Check this out. I'll take it out with the board as well. It's a nice looking cover. I really like this cover. Very metal. I like Ghost Rider. Awesome cover. Awesome cover. Come on. Hold on, hold on. Jesus Christ. The board doesn't want to come out. It's modern bags. I like silver age bags. Instead of modern bags. Okay, we're not going to... We'll hold it like this. Check it out. And these are 9.4. Good. Or this one is anyway. Check it out. Nice, nice. Awesome cover. Awesome cover. That's a nice cover. Very nice. I like that. That's a great Ghost Rider cover, really. I looked at it epic. Yeah, seriously. I was looking at it for the longest time on screen. I was like, man, I need that. Because I'm not going to go to a comic book store to pick up comics. Like, they literally told me to get lost. What are you going to do? Okay, I guess I get lost.  Maybe I should wear a yellow star on my shirt next time.  Okay, so let's put this on here. Let's do the next one. Let's do the next one. Cool. Got it, got it. Thanks, Gichang. My pleasure, all the guys. Okay, this one. Expensive. Expensive. I wrote this down. Now, I'll tell you the price on it before we get into it. This is two buys from the same guy. I bought some stuff from the guy and my initial buy from him, total it came out to $173. It was $150 the stuff and then it was like $12 in taxes and the shipping was insane. The shipping because the guy was going through global shipping program. The shipping came out to like, it was like $60 or something. I talked to the guy, said listen, global shipping. Initially, I said, well, you combine shipping. He goes, yeah, you know, it'll be this much. But then the global shipping, he couldn't combine it. So global shipping, people shipping through global shipping. The combined shipping is insane, right? So the guy says, oh, he would refund me. And then he contacted me. He said he had some other stuff that were related to the same thing I bought, right? And if I wanted it, he would put it all together and sell it to me for how much was it? $210. Okay. And I said, I'll take it. Okay, you'll see what it is. You've seen some of this stuff. You've seen some of this stuff before. The business who plugged my access, Eliga says, I have not seen me since and I used to spend $50. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to spend comic shop, man. You guys saw how much comic I was spending a lot. Too bad for them, right?   So this package total was $420. Let's say U.S. Okay. $28 was taxes, duty that I had to pay. The combined shipping with the two packages, everything came out actually to $84 U.S. But the guy, we talked about it and the guy refunded me $48, right? So basically the shipping cost $40 U.S. Taxes were $28 U.S. And total came out to $420. Okay. Let's crack this baby open. You'll see what this is all about. Controllers that wait, why are you guys getting banned from bookstore? Well, the comic bookstore for a few months, I was going in there without wearing a muzzle mask on my face because it became obvious that these masks are doing nothing. It's bad for your health to wear these masks, my opinion, right? And I'm not going to muzzle myself.  And one of the people working there really didn't like my attitude, right? Didn't like it because I had a disagreement with them and stuff like this. And a couple of, I guess, people of regulars there maybe didn't like it, right? Group one. Thank you very much for the stuff, right? And then when I went in, this was a week before they lifted the mask mandates by the way, right? When I went in, the guy that didn't, maybe he didn't like my conflict with them quickly ran to the back and told the owner, hey, Chico's here. He doesn't wear a mask. So he came out and said whatever. And one of the regulars there that nobody likes, you know, got into the discussion and he said, oh, I have a heart condition. I appreciate if you wore a mask.  I didn't say this, but I'm thinking, I said, no, it doesn't. You clown, right? I said, I didn't say you clown. I said, no, it doesn't. I was pretty polite, right? Anyway, that's the reason. So I stopped buying comics on a weekly basis. I was spending a lot of money there, by the way. I get it. Okay, controllers and kebab, kebabs. I haven't sent out your package yet. The mask era. And another thing the government used to divide us. Indeed, indeed, Oscar.  Crazy, crazy. Even if they don't work, right? They don't work. Check this out. Check this out. Check this out. Look at the packaging. Beautifully packaged, beautifully packaged. And let me tell you about this. The guy was selling a bunch of these, okay, with the first buy, right? Groot. I have never worn a mask. Greetings from the Netherlands. Greetings, Netherlands. Netherlands.  Almost, right? You guys played a good game. That tall guy you guys brought in that scored two goals in the last like five minutes, 10 minutes. Crazy, crazy.  And in the first round that he had that stuff, he put some stuff up. I didn't win any. And then second round, I won like 11 of them, right? And then he contacted me said, listen, I have a whole bunch more. Do you want them? I'll give them to you. These are graded things. I'll give you the grade, the ones that are graded at $9 for $10 a pop. The ones that are graded at 10, I'll give it to you for $20 a pop. And the ones that are graded anything less than a nine, you can have for free, right? And this, you know, everything we talked about it, we made a deal, and I ended up getting it. And the guy has a complete set of these things for himself, right? He said, I sent the stuff in to get graded. I have a complete set. And I looked up how many of these cars are actually graded that are in the database. There's only two or three. Okay. And the guy has one. And I have the other one. And then there's another person that has it, right? So check this out. Check this out. Oh, I should bring this over. Hold on. Hold on. These are, these are, these are, these are. Hold on. Hold on. I got, I got to bring something over. Hold on.  I'm just going to reach over and grab something. Hold on a second game. Hold on a second. Hold on a second. Check this out. Oh my God. No mask. I know a few local stores that had full mask hours for the first few of the days. And then optional, the rest of the day. Oh, that's great. I thought it was a great compromise. There are always ways to have people be comfortable and not, that's a great way to do it. That's a great way to do it. Cheryl, I don't know any places here that did that, right? I don't know any places here that did that. Gang. As you know, as you know, I've been buying the rotten to the core trading cards, right? For the Trump card specifically, but because of history as well, right? I just bought, just bought. There are 36 cards. There are 36 cards in this deck, right? I just bought 33 of them graded. The Trump card is not there graded. Okay. The Rudy Giuliani card is not there graded. And the first card, card number one is not there graded. This guy, look at the packaging the guy did. I just pulled one out. Fantastic packaging. Here's one of them. Here's card number 35. Check it out. Check it out. Great. Wow. Now, if you look up the grading for this, and I've talked to the guy a little bit, during the lockdowns and stuff, the price of grading went up to $100 a card to grade. I'm like, what? Because there were low manpower, there were backlogs, so they didn't really want anyone to send the cards to be graded, right? Right now, for the cards to be graded, it cost $15 US to get the cards graded, right? $15 US to get the cards graded. And then if you're going to send it to them, there's shipping costs. You have to have the cards and stuff like this. I ended up paying $420 approximately for 33 cards graded. It comes to about $13 a card graded. And there's like a handful of 10s here, like perfectly graded, right? So we're right into the core, and this is a PSA grading. These are the only cards I have graded. I've never bought graded cards or anything like this, right? And as you know, I do have the trump card, right? So at some point, I will try to get the trump card either graded or try to get a really good deal on one. Let me crack this open. So there should be 33 cards here. Take a look. Like, look at these. Like, the guys package these up so nicely. So nicely. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. That's this one. Sure, some stores here had granny hours where NHS and all popular people, like, okay, cool. Can't believe they got granny hours, granny hour, the perfect hour to go out and look for some hot old games. Here's another one. Check it out. Andy Capasso. Andy Capasso. Look at that. Very nice. These are super nice. Super nice. What is the trump card? Oh, Dr. Schiller. I'm going to show you the trump card. Check it out. Check it out. This is from a pack I have, right? So I don't have card number one, card number 26 or card number 36 graded. Everything else here should be from this deck. I'm going to show you the trump card. This is Trump's rookie card. Okay, this is Trump's rookie card. Now, this is the Rudy Giuliani card, right? I'm assuming this is Rudy Giuliani card, rookie card as well, right? Came out in 1989, right? Came out in 1989. And gang, do not forget, Free Assange, Free Assange, Free Assange. Julian Assange is a publisher and journalist that has been crucified for trying to bring transparency and accountability of capitalist power to humanity. For more information, see wikileaks.org, the fent.wikileaks.org, or our Julian Assange and Wikileaks playlist on Cessar2. And here's the Donald Trump rookie card, card number 26, right? This baby, graded at around nine, sells for a few hundred dollars on eBay. Okay, and as you know, if you might not, you may know, Donald Trump just a few days ago put out his NFT trading cards, right? NFT trading cards. I really like the art style for these cards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's got history in the back who they are and stuff. Donald Trump, real estate tycoon, right? So Donald Trump just put out his NFT, NFT card set, okay? And I didn't know this when he first put it out. There were 45,000 NFTs, 45,000 NFTs for $99 each, and he sold out in 12 hours. Right? Whoa, whoa, whoa. He had hair. It feels good, man. It feels good. Alarious. Here's another one. Ronald Lander. Awesome. I love these. I love these. These are great, great. Gang.  Good God, not NFTs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like literally he sold 45,000 NFTs of Donald Trump dressed up as Superman and stuff like this. Superior, right? $99 apart. So $4.5 million in 12 hours. And then if the NFTs work like this usually, if if the NFT sold, the artists, the owners of the original NFT that put them out, they get a kickback. So they get 10%. So check this out. This one is a 10. Look at this. Perfect card. Great. It is a 10, right? So there's a handful of 10s here. There's a lot of 9s, and there's some 6 and 7s. Not 6, sorry. 7s and 8s, right? 7s and 8s. The other one was a 10. Here's a 9. Awesome, awesome, awesome. The art on the car is absolutely amazing. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. And these cars were put out by an independent comic book publishing company called Eclipse Comics. Eclipse Comics, right? Awesome, greater than 9. And the history, more history here, more truth here than any corporate propaganda and you might read any centralized indoctrination center you might attend, right? So there should be 33 cards here. I'm just going to count them. Let's make sure all 33 are here and then I'll crack them open later. Maybe we would look at them all. If you guys want, we can look at them all. One, two, but we're going to do a reading of these legit straight up just the way we did the drug war trading cards, right? One, two, three, four, five, six. So there's six there. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 11, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 16, 17, 8, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 33 cards. Very nice. Very nice. These controllers, that says. Is there a Jared Kushner card? No, like Jared Kushner card? No, no. I bet it's value is skyrocketing right now. He just made an appearance at the World Cup with Ellen. Jared Kushner? No, he didn't. The controller said.  That guy, no. Kebabs. The thing is, they might be the only NFTs in existence to ever gain value. Kebabs, money. Possibly, possibly. April 15th card. April 15th card. Dr. Skills, the thousands of Republicans that need to watch YouTube videos to see how they can buy NFTs and what the blockchain is in general. It's hilarious. Awesome gang. Awesome. Very happy about these. Very happy about these. These look phenomenal. Like, really? Like, awesome. Awesome. And at some point, I'm going to have to send them Donald Trump cards and the Rudy Giuliani card and the first card to get great. So I have a full set, full set of rotten to the core trading cards. And there's like two, three or four of these cards graded that all of them. Like, no one has a set, except for the guy that sold it to me. Right? Wow. First time chat. Salute, salute. Welcome to our live streams. Hey, from Toronto. Salutations from Victoria.