afternoon everybody how was lunch good good awesome so this is the junior developer track and so I'm kind of curious going into this what people's backgrounds are so how many of you came to Rails from some kind of bootcamp okay how long was that bootcamp eight weeks six weeks twelve weeks six months seven months that's a long time that's a degree how many people have a just a traditional CS CS degree okay cool and then how many of you are just kind of learning by doing things watching internet videos stuff like that yeah well that's just so you know that never changes I've been developing for a long time and internet videos and just trying things is pretty much the way you have to roll so behind almost every Rails app and almost every app in general is a powerful language called SQL and I got this the idea for this talk when I was working with a junior developer who was trying to build a dashboard page and try to give some stats on user activity he was using the tools that are built in to Ruby because that's that's what he knew how to use and the problem with that is that when you put that code in production all of a sudden instead of downloading the couple of hundred or couple dozen rows that you have in your development system and doing some calculations on that now you're asking Ruby to pull down millions of rows and do calculations on that this is a situation where clearly the database is the right place to be doing the heavy lifting and so when we started pairing on this he explained the problem and I just immediately jumped into a SQL prompt and started writing a SQL query that gave the answers that we were looking for on the dashboard and the thing that he said to me and this is a key word for me wait how did you do that and I have found over and over again as I've worked with other developers that anytime I say the words wait how did you do that I'm about to learn something and so that was a learning moment for for both of us I learned that you know not everyone has the SQL background and he learned a lot about the tools that are available behind the scenes so we spent the whole hour writing SQL queries and you know I think we both came away from that learning a few things so SQL to put it another way is the hero that Rails deserves something we should probably get out of the way right up front is it SQL is it SQL I go back and forth between both of them it doesn't really matter it's not like we're talking about gifs here SQL is officially the correct way but if you are saying SQL and you know captain actually says well actually it's it's SQL that's totally fine because you can pull out the fact that it used to be SQL and they changed it when they made the standard just because of some trademark disputes or something with an airline or something like that so it's officially SQL but I say I say it both ways all right so today we're going to talk a little bit about the the backstory of SQL we're going to look at some wonderful examples and then talk about where you can go from here a little bit about me my name is Ryan DeLugas I did not sneeze through my name there it's actually pronounced that way DeLugas anyone else here Polish all right we will find some barbecue pierogi after this in this town I've been programming for about 20 years 15 of those professionally I live in Cincinnati Ohio with my family there you can find me on Twitter I'm at Lebowski so I don't need to tell you my favorite movie I'm a consultant which pretty much means I can say yes to things before I actually know how to do them learning as you go is a skill that you'll learn as a developer and recently I have started working as an instructor for Girl Development which is an organization that helps adult women get launched into technology careers so if that's something that's interesting to you talk to me afterwards I'd be happy to talk about it all right so the world before ORMs ORMs that's the the all-encompassing term for things like active record so in the late 90s we were building web applications but we weren't using these these tools like active record we were just putting the the SQL directly in line with our code we were using Pearl we were using cold fusion we were using PHP PHP still is in use today the structure of PHP apps is a lot better today than it used to be though and we would just put these these SQL strings right there in line in the code and it got messy and it was complicated and it was frustrating so let me give you an example of that say we had an application and we wanted to display a list of all the people that are in our system so we would have some SQL that we would write like this a very basic query select the name and some other parameters from our people table okay that's that's great so we've got the query and now we have to execute that query against our database and when we do that we're gonna get back a bunch of data collected into an array of arrays so you have a big array and each element of that array is one row from your database okay well we've got the data but now to use it on our application in our kind of object-oriented way we need to collect we need to build those people and then we need to collect them into a an array in our language so we'll iterate through each row of the results there we'll create a new person and then for every single element of data that came back from our query we need to just manually assign it into the different attributes that our object has and then we have to consider like you see on the last line here things like well in the database it's stored as a zero or a one but our object knows about Booleans and so we need to translate that you have to think about all those kinds of little gotchas there and then finally we'll shove that person on to our array of people rinse and repeat but now you have to do the same sort of thing for every single interaction with the database that your application has it gets very monotonous it gets very error-prone and the code is very fragile I mean if you look at that code there you can imagine if you change something with the structure of that query it's very easy to break that mapping so as a developer I think we all at least I do but I think we all have this proclivity to avoid repetitive tasks and if we see something that we have to type or do more than once we try to find a way to automate it with software and so now is the time where I admit to something that is hilariously dangerous and naive the first application I was ever paid to build again this is late 90s it was a PHP app and it was you know your standard CMSI type of application small business app written in PHP and a lot of the forms look like this we have an HTML form we collect a few fields and we submit it but take a look at that top line there where it's submitting to it's submitting to something called save data dot PHP doesn't seem very specific and it doesn't have to be because my way of getting around the problem was I passed in a hidden field called table name and then on the back end I went ahead and just took that table name and then dynamically built a sequel query to insert data into the database update data delete data whatever needed to be done this is very very unsafe if you don't understand why this is unsafe may I suggest that you attend some of the application security courses that are later on this week I think you will find them very interesting my solution to the problem was you know please don't hack me on the submit now this was behind an admin interface and stuff so I guess you could kind of justify it like that but really this this is no way this is no way to code so fast forward a little bit to the mid-2000s and ORMs are starting to become popular so in the Java space we had hibernate and OJB and in Rails we have active record so with active record you you know you take this giant mess of code that's that's here and you replace it with a one-liner that's great so if active record can replace all that why should I bother to learn SQL well one reason is because SQL is everywhere SQLite which is the database that ships with Rails for development is the most if not top five most popular widely installed software in the world SQLite is installed on every Android phone every iPhone every Mac every Windows 10 PC every flavor of Linux Chrome Safari Firefox it's in a bunch of cars it's in airplanes it's literally everywhere right but so what you can still talk to it with active record and ORM tools why do you need to learn SQL it's because ORMs come and go I've probably used three or four different ones they all have a different API it changes every time and once you finally learn how to do something beyond the basics you're looking it up in the documentation and you don't get to retain any of that so three to four years from now maybe you're using a different language and a different ORM well you're not going to be able to use all those things you learned about with active record there's going to be different structures there's going to be different gotchas there's going to be different things that oh if you do this in hibernate everything goes very badly if you do it in active record it's fine but the thing about SQL is that it's pretty much always the same so apps they come and go frameworks databases to SQL live on if you think this poem is incredibly cheesy you can thank Chris Nelson my friend back in the Cincinnati user group he is at super Chris please tweet at him and tell him how how great his his poetry is you do have to print out SQL the the unofficial way to make the the syllable count work out for the haiku there but so the real point of all of this is that you want to learn the native language wherever you are Richard hip he's the creator of SQLite he was on a podcast recently and he started talking about being a tourist and the thing that he said that really struck me was as a tourist I can get around by pointing at things and I can pick up a few keywords and I can communicate roughly with the people that are there but unless I know the language I can't start a business I can't really succeed on a personal level with people and have have good relationships I have to learn that native language and so by learning SQL which is the native language of any database that's going to help you transition from being a junior tourist programmer to someone who is a seasoned pro who knows when it's the right tool for the job so that's the main point today we'll look at a couple examples in order to do this we need to create a few things basic schema we will create authors and books we'll do this stuff in active record because active record is great for this kind of thing so we have an author which has many books we have a book which belongs to and then here's the migration so you can kind of see the fields we've got obviously an incomplete list from what you'd have in a real application but for authors we have a name a country an email and a birthdate and then for books we've got titles pages a publication date topics an ISBN number and most importantly an author ID so this is how inside the relation of the database the authors or the books are tied back to their corresponding authors so say you're on a new project or maybe it's an existing project and your your boss or your client wants some more information about the data that you have maybe they want to know how many books you have okay obviously very simple there's the SQL for that and likewise there's the very simple active record call that you would use to get the same thing how many authors do we have same thing simple select the count of IDs from the authors table and in active record you would just do author count okay so let's look at how we would type this into our database so if you were at your terminal you would type this depends on your database but if you're using Postgres which I would suggest you do Postgres is a great database but almost all of them have a command line tool like this we would launch it against our database and then we're dumped into yet another prompt where we can type things that are commands directly issued to the database and so we will type in our query and we'll get our results and so we've got 4,000 books likewise we'll do the same thing on our authors we'll type in our SQL query and we'll find out that we've got 500 of those okay that's all very basic but we need to get more in depth here we could have done all of that with just active record so how many books do we have in each topic okay that's getting more interesting we need to use a tool that we haven't used yet called group by so we'll select our topic and the count of those topics from our books and then we'll group it all together by topic and so what this is going to give us is a set of results that just includes one line for each of the topics that are in our database in account of all the books that go along with that topic does that make sense to everyone you could also do that in active record of course it's still simple but these remember are very simple cases as you get more complicated with these these queries and like the one we're going to do in just a minute by the time you figure out how to write the active record code to make this stuff happen you might as well have just done it directly in the database so let's look at something a little more complicated so let's ask how many books do we have in each topic and let's find the minimum maximum and mean page count by topic okay hmm I don't know how we would do that in active record you might have to inline some SQL to be able to do that so we'll start off with our SQL query select topic the count of the topic and we'll give it a familiar name for us using that as keyword and then we'll select the minimum pages this is using minimum which is a function that our database provides to us the database provides lots and lots of these kinds of handy functions that you can use to do things like minimums maximums averages standard deviations all sorts of statistical functions and other calculations summations so then we'll get our max pages and then we'll get our average pages and we'll round it off to two decimal places so you know so it looks reasonable again we'll get it from our books and we'll group it by topic again and when we look at our results you'll see that we've got our topics our topic count that's the number of books for each topic and then we've got the calculations that we did on the pages that are in our books now are you gonna be calculating number of pages and books probably not but you probably have users hitting your systems and you're probably tracking events that those users are creating or you're tracking you know the number of likes a user gives to something and someone might come to you one day and say well hey can you give me some basic statistics on this stuff and that stuff might be scattered into a bunch of different tables that you need to to join together and use these functions and let the database do the do the work for you rather than trying to pull all of that data into your Rails app and do the work in Ruby because again you might be dealing with millions and millions of rows here and it's not feasible to pull all that data down locally so let's talk a little bit about how we would join data together so how can we answer the question which authors have written five or more books on a given topic that's an interesting business question because you might want to contact those authors and say oh hey you're really on the ball cranking out these Ruby books you know do you want to come talk at our Ruby conference or something like that that's an interesting business question and that's where you're gonna have to combine your different data together and this is the sort of thing that's a lot easier to explore and do directly within SQL than it is to do within Rails so to quickly explain joins for those who are unfamiliar if you have authors over here in books over here a join combines those two tables together based on some criteria and in our example the criteria is that the author has an ID the book has an author ID in it and if those fields are equal then that's how we know that those records should be linked together that's the essence of a join okay so how do we realize this in SQL so we have the author's name a topic account of the books because remember we need to figure out how many books has this author cranked out we're gonna select from the authors table and then we need to join it to the books table and that's how we specify our join criteria there so we're gonna say we're gonna select this stuff from the author's table join together with the books table based on this criteria and then we'll group these things by the author's name and then the topic so the same group by concept we had before but now we're just extending it a little bit and using two different criteria two different fields in that join and then we'll say well we want to find just the authors who have written more than four books five or more or four or more is there five or more is what we're looking for so we're gonna use greater than four having is the same as a where clause which I'm sure you're familiar with in a in a very basic query select the user where ID equals blah right so a having clause is the exact same thing as a where only it applies to the things that are grouped together so since the authors are what's being aggregated here we're going to be calculating that we're gonna be using that the having clause to limit our result set of the total number of books for each of those authors and there we get the data so of the you know 500 authors that we have in our in our test data here we only have a handful of them who have written more than four books and there's the topics that they've written things on unfortunately Ruby didn't show up nor did rails but that is the nature of randomness the test data did not have that many authors writing Ruby and rails books at least multiple books back to back so that's pretty cool and obviously you can take that query and you can build it from there you can take these queries and you can nest them together so you can take the results of one and then apply it to the search criteria that another another query is using we could have joined in another table here say it's a table of sales data so instead of just asking how many authors have written five or more books on a given topic how many authors have written five or more books on a given topic and have sold more than a thousand copies of each of those books those are the kind of questions that you can answer and by understanding how to write SQL you can very easily come up with those kinds of those kind of things on the fly so joining data is it's obviously a thing that you're gonna do a lot of we just covered a very basic join there the kind where you have just the records that match up you'll see that there's a lot of other types of joins we're not gonna get into all the details of those but suffice it to say there are ways to say well give me everything that just matches and then there's other ways to say things like okay well give me everything that matches plus everything over here that doesn't match so maybe some of the authors don't have books with specific topics that you're looking for you could also include those authors if you wanted to things like that and that's all a matter of the syntax and the different rules that you apply inside your query okay so let's talk a little bit about a tool called explain aside from doing like ad hoc searches in your database and exploring data the other reason you might want to have some knowledge of how the database is working behind the scenes is that you can figure out why your app is so slow I'm sure we've all run into the situation where you work on something it works great on your laptop and then you deploy it to production and it's not so great it's very slow on your laptop it's fine because for one you probably have an SSD so that's super fast compared to the spinning disc that might be in your database server and on top of that on your day on your laptop you might have a hundred rows and on the production database you might have a hundred thousand that's a totally different ball game when it comes to searching through things in the database so explain is a tool that will let you understand how is the database trying to find this information what's its plan and it's really easy to run explain on literally any query all you have to do is take the query that you want to test and stick the word explain in front of it optionally on some databases you can write explain analyze and that will go the extra step of actually executing the query and giving you a little bit more information on well explain told me what I think I'm gonna do as the database this is my plan for how I'm gonna find this data and this is how I think it's gonna go explain analyze says here's my plan and then I actually executed my plan and this is what really happened so I tend to use the analyze just because it gives you some more interesting information and what you get from explain is output that looks like this which is extremely dense and I do not expect you to walk out if you're understanding how to read except for one key word or two key words I guess sequential scan anywhere you see sequential scan in an explain from your database that's probably a bad thing and you want to avoid at all costs a sequential scan a C sequential scan basically means the database has to look through every single row in the database one by one and see if it finds what you've told it to look for that's very slow that's as if you were trying to find all of the words rails in a given textbook and if you were trying to do that in real life how would you do it you would use the index in the back of the book and if you had the index you could say oh look well rails is mentioned on you know pages x y and z the database needs the same kind of thing you can add an index very easily to your database and that will help to resolve these issues where you have a sequential scan now there is definitely an art to creating indexes that matter and indexes that improve performance we can't get into the details of those today but suffice it to say the first step in all of this is running explain on queries that are slow or any queries for that matter in your database and just looking for those keywords things like sequential scan oh that's that's a hot spot there I probably want to look to into adding an index on that even if it's not slow on my development laptop rails will dump the output it will dump the actual sequel that's being run into the development logs when you're using your application in development mode so you can just go into your log file and anytime you see the word select you can go ahead and copy that stick it into your database console tack the word explain on to the front of it and check out the output it's a great way to learn more about how the database works honestly because you can kind of get into the database's head of like how are you going to find this information so in short run explain on everything so you might have noticed that I didn't include any mention of how do I directly call sequel from my rails application that's because it's dangerous you can definitely do that and you will do that but to get up here and say well this is how you do it and how you do it safely in a you know 30 seconds that we're on the slide would be a little bit reckless I think and irresponsible because there's a lot of there there's a lot of ifs and edge cases there that you could end up causing problems with and I wouldn't want to lead you in that direction but if you're doing reporting type of queries where you're not using data that's provided by the user that's probably fine you can use that in your app if you do need to incorporate some user data like say you want to do a geographic search so you want to find all of the coffee shops that are nearby a certain location and you've decided to implement this query using raw SQL that's fine but make sure that you are sanitizing those inputs before you stick it into your query you don't want to end up like the school where a little Bobby tables went mom gets phone call says hey it's your son's school we're having some computer problems did you name your son Robert quote semicolon dash dash drop tables yeah we call him little Bobby tables so that's why you have to sanitize your user inputs you never know when little Bobby tables is gonna enroll at your school and start using your application so where do you go from here there's obviously a lot to this sequel stuff if you don't have a book on your desk at work or at home that is about databases and SQL you should absolutely pick one up so those are that's not a list of recommendations or anything that is just there are sequel books out there and they are ranked by reviews pick one you will be able to keep it for a very long time because SQL doesn't change that much there is also gonna be good documentation for your specific database where you can learn about things like the aggregation functions like geographic extensions and things like that that might be specific to your particular database and usually the docs are pretty good for those Postgres has great documentation remote pairing not necessarily remote pairing but pairing in general is I think the best way for a junior developer to level up quickly working side-by-side even with other junior developers working together trying to solve a problem but especially if you're working side-by-side with someone more senior that is a fantastic way to learn very quickly things that you might not necessarily pick up in a book because most likely you're gonna be working on a real production system with real production problems and they aren't going to be demonstrations of two tables with you know five attributes in each one it's gonna be real data real problems in real systems and that's when you learn so absolutely pair program as much as you can and if you don't have an opportunity to do that there are a lot of places where you can do that online and and remotely pair with people on things like screen hero and stuff like that and just because I wanted to squeeze in one more Jeff here is a reminder that you should scour your logs for database queries understand what they do run explain on them and figure out how your application is really working behind the scenes so the takeaways the main one is learn the native language whether you're talking about travel or programming it's it's very helpful to know and speak the native language of the database understand what active record is doing for you behind the scenes and by all means pick the right tool for the job I use active record all the time it is a great tool but I know when to jump in and just use the database directly and just because you have an ORM does not mean that it's wrong or bad to use SQL directly you have a lot of tools and you just need to know what they're good at and what they're not good at and when to pick the one for for the job that you have at hand so thank you very much and if you have any questions I'd be happy to take them we have a couple minutes thank you my recommendation is don't do it without knowing what you're doing you mean executing raw SQL from within your Rails app there's a few different ways to do it basically the one way you can do it is you can get a connection the from the from the active record connection base you can get a connection you can execute raw SQL that's very helpful if you're using it inside of a migration say you need to create a geography type of column in a postgres database if if rails doesn't know how to create a geography column it can't use the normal scheme of migration stuff and so you might need to execute SQL directly so that's the time when you'd want to use connection execute the other time you might want to do it or the other way you might want to do it is using find by SQL which is a method on your model this is the one where you need to be very careful you need to be careful anyway but you need to be careful that you aren't just you know throwing user data at this thing but the nice thing about using find by SQL is that it will automatically instantiate objects for you that are of the type that you called it on so if you have authors and you said author dot find by SQL and you provided it with a query then you will get back author objects and they will have for any parameters that you didn't specify or that aren't really parameters on your model naturally things that you might have created in your query by hand there like some of our count columns and stuff those will come back as virtual attributes attached to your model and so you can just make the calls directly on them just like any other attribute on your model so any questions well I don't have a specific example for that for when table rewrites are necessary right well anytime you have a migration like that you need to be careful that you're not going to like take your app down a good example of a migration that you could add directly with SQL would be if in in Postgres you can create indexes concurrently but at least as of recently you might be able to in five but you couldn't just do that as a part of a normal migration and so you need to kind of create your your migration by hand and you need to say okay I'm gonna create this index and you would use all the same things that that Rails is gonna do for you when it's creating the index but you get to tack one keyword onto the query that says create index concurrently and then the rest of the the parameters there and so then when that executes instead of the rails generated SQL to create the index it will use the string that you provided and it will allow you to create an index on a table that doesn't block access to the table like the normal non concurrent create index does so that's when one example of when you might use it in a migration all right this will be the last one it's not necessarily faster so the question is is it faster to write the SQL directly it's not necessarily faster and you can observe this when you're looking at how your application operates all of those things that you ask ActiveRecord to do translate directly into SQL queries that get executed against the database and usually ActiveRecord does the right thing there are some times when you might find a better way to skin the cat for lack of a better word and that's when you might want to step in and use some raw SQL but typically ActiveRecord does the right thing there the key is to just look at what ActiveRecord is doing and try to learn from it all right thanks a lot


Oh no! Man down! We just made these two standing candy cauldrons. Mine's a witch and mine's a skeleton and we'll show you how we made them right now. What is up? A welcome back. Do you like to do a builder or make it? So do we. And we have a new video each week. And this week it's Skulls vs Skirts. We had a viewer request for a standing candy dish. It's got the little witch legs. It's super cute. So I got a little skirt here and that's what we're making for my version. But Garrett, he couldn't handle that. He's got to make his own version. So I had to get talked down. I did have a big plans. He did. Like a giant plans. Yeah. Yeah. The skull and a motor and it was puking. It was a whole thing and I was like no that's not what we're doing. We're doing easy candy dishes this time. So she talked me down and I settled on a similar candy dish with a scarier approach. He does light up though. We have a new sponsor this week that we're really excited about. This week's video is brought to you by Hello Fresh. Hello Fresh. Step one order online. Choose from 25 plus meals each week. Lots of options. Vegetarian, calorie smart, pescatarian. If you forget to order online one week they'll send you four pre-selected meals. So you may even try something new. We do four meals each week and if you see one that says Hall of Fame that is no joke. Those are the best meals. You can even pause them if you're traveling or on vacation one week. Step two, unbox. The package will arrive on your porch and almost all of it is recyclable. Each meal is labeled and in its own bag. The meats are at the bottom underneath ice packs. Step three, meal prep. Step-by-step instructions are included on a recipe card. All ingredients are pre-measured and pre- portioned so there's no waste. Each meal is about 10 minutes prep time, 30 minutes cook time. Now that the kids are back in school and have extracurricular activities we have even less time to go to the grocery store so these meals are perfect. Step four, cook. Everything is timed out perfectly so it all comes out at the same time looking professional. And it's so easy that sometimes we even have the kids cook dinner for us while we're filming. Step five, finish and serve. The last step on each recipe card shows you how to plate it and put it all together. Step six, taste test. This is my favorite step and this is probably the longest step. I've learned so many new things using Hello Fresh. So many new techniques. My favorite part is that there's always a sauce or a gravy that enhances and changes the flavor of a piece of chicken. A meat loaf, a burger. You name it. Street tacos. I mean the street tacos are my favorite. I've used new seasonings I've never tried before and the most important part is Hello Fresh is helping me teach my kids how to cook. Teaching me how to cook. Yes. You can use our code Kim and Garrett 14 to get up to 14 free meals across your five boxes with Hello Fresh. Visit the link in the description for more details. Don't forget you can use our code Kim and Garrett 14 to get up to 14 free meals across your five boxes with Hello Fresh. Visit the link in the description for more details. Step one, we're going to gather all of our supplies. We needed a candy bucket since we're making a candy stand thing, a dowel, a two by six. This is the shortest one we could find at four foot.  It's a 12 inch circle. Some glue, paint, a little skirt and some screws. I think that's it, right? Yeah, I think that's it. That is it. Step two, we're going to make all of our cuts. I'm going to cut this dowel in half and this will be two legs. Then I'm going to cut some shoes out of this two by six. Yes, we printed this little shoe pattern. We just went over to Google, looked for shoe silhouettes. Which shoe silhouettes? Found this one. Cut it out on paper. We're going to trace it onto our board using our Sharpie marker here and we're going to cut it with a jigsaw. Okay, our feet are all cut out. They look a little rough, but that's okay. Mine's a monster. She's a witch for Halloween too. So now we're going to put holes in the feet so they can put the dowels in there. So I have about a 1 and 1 eighth inch force in a bit. Just gonna put it about where his legs would hit his feet, right? Yeah. Just go to the top of the force in a bit, alright? Yeah. Looks deep enough. Now we paint. I'm just going to paint all of mine licorice with this Country Chic paint, all black.   So I'm going to take some MDF over to the Glow Forge.  That'll look cool. Just give it a little something. You shish it up. Step four. And now we add the accents. It's really just some electrical tape wrapped around these little eggs. Well that's what he just realized. Garrett doesn't have any add the accents for his step because his is boring. I am accentless. Because he is a scary. Mine is not boring. Mine is going to be scary. Slightly scary. So we're going to add some stripes on her legs. She's got her little orange legs but she needs the black stripes to go up them. So we're going to use electrical tape to do that. Alright and then the second accent I'm going to add is we're going to cut some vinyl on the Cricut and put that on the front of our cauldron. It's going to say trick-or-treat. And the third thing is I'm going to make some bows for her shoes. Now I am not putting anything on the front of my cauldron. I don't want to draw attention to the candy. See the goal is to have as much candy left at the end of the night as possible. So I have a snack for a week. Is everyone to walk up and say oh my gosh she's so cute.  No my goal is for them to say ah there's no candy here. Just the scary ghoul. Yeah I was scared to put my hand in there. Alright let's do this electrical tape. I think we need to do this in tag team. I got an idea. Just line it up. Hit them with a pencil where you want them so that they'll be both the same amount. I was thinking it would go like this all the way up. Are you going to try to spiral it? You're going to do just rings all the way up. Oh alright. You can try to spiral it. Alright. Yeah that's not bad. Yeah I do want to cross the bottom. Alright see if we can keep it relatively consistent. Alright. We'll see what we can do. Good to go. No retreat. I made some bows for her shoes. It's so cute. Look at these guys. I'm not really sure how I'm going to attach them yet. Hot glue. We're going to hot glue them on. Yeah everything's getting hot glue. Look at that. Yeah it makes it so easy. Alright and that's the same old bow that I always make so if you've seen any of my bow tutorials we could even post a separate bow tutorial that I keep promising to do anyway. You should do it on a Tuesday. Yeah. Tuesdays tips. Tuesday tip. Step five. We're going to bring it all together. We're bringing it all together with some of that gorilla hot glue. I'm going to see how this one holds up too. So basically I'm just going to glue my legs into my feet and then I'm going to screw the disc on top of the legs but we're going to do it slightly back. And then I'm going to hot glue all of my pieces on there. All my little bone pieces including my feet. He was hiding those feet. They don't make fun of my big feet. The cool thing is look I just guessed the glue for it to hurt the circle. Wow perfect. My toes hang over. This is what his toes look like anyway. Yeah they do. It looks like when I wear sandals. They're so cute. He's a monster. Okay well I look forward to seeing him all put together.  Yeah I'm just going to hot glue the legs on same thing.  Oh I'm not sure. I think I'm just going to add the skirt onto this. I tried putting it on the bottom of the bucket but it's so big it slips off. Yeah a little skirt. Let's hot glue it to the disc. Okay. Give the disc a skirt. Alright how many. Let's do it. Let's do this. Glue them up.  These are going to be this is so quick and easy. I mean if you have a jigsaw this is the hardest part. That wasn't too hard. Well it wasn't hard but you got to have the right tool and we didn't say that at the beginning that you needed a jigsaw. It's the right tool for the job. Alright let's see if that holds. Perfect. Oh man I forgot to put my foot on. Hold on. Oh no quick. Well I'll just do it like this. It's hilarious. Freakin hilarious. That is so funny. It's so funny. Wait don't you want to put a little on his toes? You don't think you need it? I don't know what his toes will be. On the toe. Yeah yeah right about there. Yeah uh-huh uh-huh. Alright you got this let's do it. Oh my gosh I love it. That is so cute. I don't know if you guys can see and get the real gist of how big these feet are. I'm gonna put a screw in the back kind of the back of the circle if that makes sense. So uh most of the circle will be over their toes. My guy has plenty of toes. Yeah a little less toes. Move these down here. I'm gonna put the screws in the board first. Oh okay. And then I'm gonna try to line them up. Well then do you know what the exact spacing is? Let's see six and a half. Six and a half. Great they're like this over here. Do my spooky skeleton guy. I gotta glue him in here. So I'm just gonna kind of make it look like he's holding the bucket from within. It's like his hula hoop. Yeah it's like his hula hoop. Oh candy. In case you're looking for the same little skeleton guy you pick this up at Walmart. He was like $15 so there's not much to him. If you can hear he's styrofoam for $15. There's a lot of glue over on this side. I'm not even turning it that way. So here's Kim's side. Here's my side. You want to see my side? No it's gonna be me. That's his spider hand. You're gonna flip him out of there. He's not in there that good. Skeletons or skirts. My guy gives just enough fright so that you get to keep some of the candy. And she's just so cute. Look at these bows for these shoes. Yeah I'm afraid everybody will come up and stick their hand in yours and you won't have any candy left by the end of the day. She's so cute. These things are I love them. I love them. What do you think about his feet? I think I should have went just a little bit bigger. I think so too. I can't wait till we show you guys final shots and you can see just how big these feet are. All right well we're about out of time so if you're not joining us for the patron after show we will see you next week where we'll do it build it and make it again. Should I balance both? No no come on. Just mine. Yeah I'm not gonna. Balance mine is tippy tail. Whoops. He hit his head.


Blessings, welcome back to the stream. Or if it's your first time here, welcome for the first time I suppose. So we're going to start with a recap on today's video. Last time on SpiritStream, I warned everybody basically that we were going to be producing a video or publishing a video called The Tree of Death. You basically explained that as a warning, you never know what's going to happen when you watch it. Because there's this idea, as it relates to The Tree of Death, that the moment that you think about and invoke even mentally, just conceptualize these frequencies, these ideas, these demonic realms, for lack of a better way of saying it, that they could potentially come into your life whether you want them to or not. And this was explained in the video itself when it came out this past Monday. So if you haven't seen it, go to YouTube or Facebook if you're watching it there and find it and you can see what I'm talking about if you're interested. And the concept is basically this, is that when you look at The Tree of Life as the foundational map of existence, we need a way of understanding and explaining the dark sides as well. There is darkness in the world. So if all of the realms of existence are all pure and holy and good, then where does evil come from? And therefore, the cleaf oath or the Tree of Death is a system by which we can categorize and understand what all of the ancient religions would write about when there's demons and stuff, especially in the Old and New Testament, Satan and those guys, Lucifer and all of them, basically it's a way of mapping that realm. However, what we didn't really get into in the video, like the video itself was an explanation of how to read this map, basically. But it didn't really get deeper into like what are demons? How and why does this work? How do you deal with this? But we left this clue at the very end and said, look, all of these things that the dark forces of existence are outlining are all things that are within us, things that we are creating, right? Like, for example, the one that's associated with Yesode closest to the bottom, but not the bottom of the tree itself, translates to and relates with pollution and we've created a lot of pollution. But this is essentially describing that the pollution is within our energetic bodies, within our bodies of consciousness, right? And if we can clean up our own energetic fields, activate our Merkaba, do that whole spiritual thing, that we clear up our mental awareness, our emotional bodies, we find that inner healing and we cease to create pollution. And the idea then being that if we can heal that individually for ourselves and then we do that collectively, then we essentially solve the root problems of where pollution comes from to begin with. And that's the whole basic idea. It relates with many, many different ideas on the tree of death as you go down that stem into anger and jealousy and duality and things like that. And the more that we as people ascend into the realm of healing those things, the less and less power they have over us, right? Simply by acknowledging it. And so the question of how do you deal with demons or how do you deal with darkness or the tree of death, there's many, many, many different ways and they are all basically love and light, the two forces of goodness in the universe, right? And often described by the tree of life itself, that the creation of all things ultimately stems from love and light, mind and soul, right? And then those things are kind of like as above so below of each other, mind and soul, producing life and light.  It means actually being straight up and real with your perception and your beliefs and the way that you identify when they're not in resonance with your soul. For example, if you are addicted to, let's say, smoking cigarettes because you started at a point when you thought it would make you cool because your friends did it and then it became this habit. The original core root of the reason why you started is not a soul-driven relationship with a plant medicine of tobacco. It's an ego-driven compulsion based on an emotional desire to be liked by your peers. There's a big difference there, right? And so as we grow up, we take on these different ideas and beliefs, these subconscious, unconscious beliefs about ourselves and who we are and it shapes our behaviors and our actions and it shapes the kind of person that we become in life. And usually there's some sort of combination there, like the ego's driving a lot of the ship and the soul is driving the other half. And it's a dance of how much of each is really who's in the driver's seat for which parts of the journey and why. And how often do you switch, right? Do you change out the roles? And so that takes courage. It takes courage to be able to do that. Not everybody does that, you know? Being able to actively and regularly look at yourself in all of the ways that you are seeing who you've become because we often get very attached to the stories. The stories because they make us feel empowered to have a sense of control over what's going on in life. And the amazing thing is right now we're in this period of time where everything is getting mixed up. There was an analogy that I heard recently, and we're actually going to animate it at some point soon, which is that like life before the pandemic was, if you imagine like life in all of the aspects of life as like in society as like a series of boxes, like 100 boxes, and they're all mostly pretty stable.  Well, since the pandemic hit, that's flipped. And the amount of stability that any one of us has with this whole thing is a lot less than it used to be as all of society goes like this and starts shifting around and shaping and changing and moving around and stuff like that. But that means that there's an opportunity with everything moving and shaping and rechanging itself for us to participate in that change and become creators because things are less stable, more transient than they used to be. Things are moving around. You can be the mover and shaker and shaper of life. And that's something really special. And so this is an invitation really for everybody to do that, you know, for everybody to open up to the possibility that you are a creator and that you can do amazing things and step into that life for yourself. And so I have a bunch of notes here of different ideas and things that I wanted to talk about in relationship to this. Originally, there was a much cleaner flow, but it really did become elaborated upon just in the moments right before this stream. There were so many things coming up and I didn't know how to deal with them. But I want to share a couple things here. So I'm just going to read some points, talk about them, and then we'll weave it together into the bigger picture, OK? So right when I started the stream, one of the first comments from some guy, modern day something, I forget what his name was, said that the tree of life does not exist. He says that spirit science has been compromised because I'm talking about things that are illusions. And I loved that from the perspective of saying, well, yes, absolutely. But everything is a hologram. As creators, we are the ones who, through our belief systems, decide what kind of reality we want to live in. If you are believing that the earth is flat or the earth is round or the tree of life or no, just Jesus or more into the Hindu religion, Pantheon understanding of everything, all of those are cohesive systems of understanding life. And you can follow each and every one of them if you want to. To say that, well, my way is far better than your way, and your way sucks, and therefore I'm going to attack you over it is kind of a limited story because it leaves you on a singular path when you could be walking on multiple paths or being aware and expanding into many different understanding and seeing how they weave together to create the ultimate mind of God that makes up all things. I'm going to have to change these tapestries in the near future because there's one that called the all, that really explains it well, that it's a hermetic idea. We'll leave the tarot out of it for the moment. But the idea that's in that card is a hermetic idea that says that all paths to spirit lead to the summit, that there are an infinite numbers of ways of revering that which is divine. And that's a beautiful thing for us to just consider for a moment. Why limit ourselves when all that we know is a grain of sand on an infinite beach next to an even more infinite ocean? And our belief system is that grain of sand. And why not take in the whole ocean? But that means have you ever seen the creatures at the bottom of the ocean terrifying as all hell can be some of those things? Absolutely majestic, but frighteningly scary. And there's that giant alien squid thing that's like a skyscraper tall. That's probably an exaggeration. But still wild. Go and look up the super alien squid thing. You'll find what I'm talking about. The point being that this poultry of death concept is a hermetic, Kabbalistic idea based on the traditional Kabbalistic kabbalah with a K, cleafoat, which is a very similar, basically the same thing, but just depicted differently. And all of these different mystic systems and traditions are building on each other to attempt to describe and understand and map the mystical understanding and nature of reality. So by talking about it, by sharing in these concepts, my intention is simply to say, let's not be afraid of learning. Because at the end of the day, that is the point of the video. And us saying, warning, something could happen. Well, one, things did happen when we made it. But it's all there for us to learn and to explore and to discover deeper and deeper truth about who we are, including if we are looking at these darker parts of ourselves, which is, of course, the relationship when we learn about the tree. You're just learning about the dark side of the self and how to transmute that. And so the way that I've learned personally, my favorite way to learn, to do this transmutation process, is actually the process that has been given to us from Rhythmia. And I say given to us meaning, they share it openly with the whole world. And they facilitate it there in such an amazing way. So I wanted to just share what that process is. Because again, this is something that you can do simply by intending this to be a process that you're walking, which is see who you've become, merge back with your soul at all cost, and heal your heart. And in this process, we talked about seeing who you've become, facing the shadow, and then merging back with your soul, which is when you see who you've become, you're seeing the part of yourself that has become separated from the soul. It's your soul seeing your ego. This is like awareness of, oh, that's who I've become. In that shifting, you're creating, like you're taking this kind of schism of a lens and bringing them together and they're shining into each other with complete whole awareness, and you become whole. And when that happens, there is a healing of the heart that takes place. And when the heart is healed, the wholeness is like, that sphere is like there's a light on in the middle and it's illuminating everything. And that is where the demons disappear. Because as we all know, the only place where battles should be fought with demons is in our own hearts. And I said the quote completely wrong. I think I wrote it in the description better than that. Let me try it again. The only demons are the ones in our own hearts, and that is where all battles should be fought. That was Gandhi. Gandhi would have, if he was here right now, he'd be like, Mike, drop. But he's not, so I'll do it for him.  So thank you. I wonder if he'd approve of this moment. So those are some of the lessons. I mean, there's so many lessons that I've had from the ayahuasca and the plant medicine at Rhythmia. It really is such a beautiful space that I couldn't help but share and wanted to just pass on, again, if you are interested in learning more. There's a link in the bottom of the description about it. But again, it's not, one of the biggest things that I've learned from Rhythmia, especially that I'm feeling right now, is that life is a ceremony. Life is a ceremony. It's not just in ceremony when you're on some psychedelics or some plant medicine, that each and every moment, each and every day, we have an opportunity to grow and to shift and to change and to evolve. And that the things that happen to us in life are there for a reason. They're there for us to learn something. And if we're looking for the lesson, then you really shift into that mindset that it is, of growth, of evolution, of personal evolution, stepping into higher and higher versions of yourself. So if something traumatic happens, I shared this in a couple of streams ago that I got into a car accident, right? And that on top of that, the insurance company was like, hmm, we're not gonna help you because you were traveling at the time. Okay, got it, cool. That whole experience churned up so much for me. And yet every single time that I would just, I would gaze into the totality of what was happening from that bird's eye, spirit-minded perspective, I just saw that the whole thing was in divine order. Like it was actually perfect. And it was, yeah, it's uncomfortable as hell, but it was perfect. And that if I could surrender to that perfection and not be like grumpy, I got car bills, you know, no, no, no, no, no, like all of these things, if I could just step outside of myself and I could just be in a state of surrender, this is what it is. And do your best, you know, moving forward, that everything would work out just perfectly. And that's been what I've been practicing. And it's actually been what I've found is I personally have just grown a lot. I've stepped into just higher levels of both with my work and with my own personal responsibility and my own personal energy and how I take care of myself. All of these things are like taking more refined shape because I surrendered to this experience of having kind of a traumatic car accident experience. It's been quite a journey, you know? And so I guess the invitation here is that if you treat life as a ceremony, that everything that's going on, good and bad, is a part of some bigger picture and a story for you to receive and understand, see who you've become, merge with your soul at all costs and heal your heart, it opens up this path for life to just flow a little bit easier. And I also understand if that doesn't maybe make so much sense, it really probably depends on you personally and what point you're at on your path. And as always, my recommendation is just to kind of get your foot in the door if this is something that's new for you or something that doesn't sound easily doable, it's let's go to Rhythmia. It really is, the space, the way that you're held when you have that experience there is unlike anything that I think I've ever experienced in my life, it is so deeply moving and profound that I can't help but want to share the love that I felt there with everybody. So I had to say that, had to say it. In addition to that, you know, a couple of things just from, I had a three hour Patchtero masters class earlier today inside of Spirit Mysteries. And one of the things that we talked about here was consistent effort. And I wanted to speak to this too, right? Because in that whole like, well, okay, going to Rhythmia is great and maybe I'll book my trip later today, but for right now, what can I do in this moment? And this was something that I wanted to just share with you was like this, okay, there's three points here. There's consistent effort. There's Mr. Miyagi and there's the training room, okay? So consistent effort is being able to consistently show up for yourself on a daily basis in a way that is valuable or beneficial or meaningful to you. And I think honestly, I'm just sharing this because some, like we all know this deep down. Yeah, if you meditate for even 10 minutes a day after a couple of weeks, you'll start to be like, wait a second, this is actually really, I'm clearer than I've ever been before, right? But sometimes it's hard to get your foot in the door to start that. And I don't, you know, we just sometimes need a pep talk.   Like if it's your, well, whatever, just come up with, think of it for yourself. What's the most meaningful thing to you? Where do you want to be in your life? And what is the one thing that you can do every single day just a little bit to get better and better at it, right? If you've been following on the spirit stream, not the spirit stream, the piano time stream on my personal channel, you might have seen like two months of piano practice very consistently. It's actually really amazing to watch what's happening there and it's just about showing up a little bit at a time, you know? And so Mr. Miyagi is, because my friend Nelson has been getting me to watch Cobra Kai and then I've been revisiting the original Karate Kid movies because I've never seen the second and the third ever. And now I've only never seen the third one. But I'm really connecting with this masterful Mr. Miyagi vibe of like it's just wisdom applied to matter through patience and diligence and consistent effort the way that he trains his students is really remarkable to see. And so when it comes to the training room, the concept of the training room is like your own personal dojo. Like where do you wanna spend your time in your personal evolution on a day to day basis, right? What are we actively working towards, right? Do we have like an end goal or even like a vision for ourselves in mind that we wanna be moving in the direction of? And if that's like whatever that is, you know, just again that consistent effort to move yourself there. It's just one of the most valuable things that each and every one of us can do. And I think I needed to hear this as much as anyone. So I think that's why I'm saying it right now, honestly. Cause it's been coming in and I wanna like anchor that frequency a little bit more just by sharing about it, talking about it, you know? Opening up that conversation. So the last thing here on the list is what is a demon? Right, we talked about the tree of death. We talked about the relationship to the, you know, the clefo, these husks, these shells that block the pure emanations of access to spirit. And what exactly is a demon? Sorry, I got a little distracted because I saw this message in the chat here. I said, what are we talking about exactly? Like tree of death or karate kid? And the answer is yes. The answer is yes. And the way that they weave together is very simply that that's a good question. I think it was exactly what I was going with. Hold on, let's come back to this for a moment. What is a demon? Demon comes from the Greek, diamond. Diamond, when you go into the depth of what that actually means, it was more like a tutelary deity of a sort. It was a spirit, kind of like a kami, but a little different from the Shinto understanding in Japan. Demons were never originally considered to be actually like dark, sorry, diamonds originally were never these like dark evil malevolent forces. But when the Christian empire really rose in around 3, 400 AD and was like taking over, a lot of the language was changed and the understanding of what these concepts were also changed. And so all of the spirits basically were reduced and suppressed into the concept of demons. We turned them into something that is not in harmony with us, with ourselves. And so of course we have all got demons apparently because the concept, we essentially created it. We created this concept for ourselves that has become rooted to our existence. So how it relates to karate kit is like, let's just look at the main story, for example, like all the characters kind of have their own demons, right? Both fear, weakness and each other, right? The main character, his demon was Johnny as well as the evil teacher who John Crease was the like another level of the demon on the tree of death, right? And like all of the Cobra Kai when they're all bad guys, all essentially were kind of filling out different roles of the like the darker aspects of the story and the darker aspects of themselves. Now maybe that might sound like kind of a stretch, but that's how it looks to me. So I just thought I'd share that. It seemed like relevant, I don't know, I wrote it down, I wanted to talk about it. So when you summon demons, when you invoke the concept of the tree of death, what's essentially happening is that you're unleashing these energies that are within you because it's like a force, it's a level of consciousness that is suppressed that you're looking at, you're shining light on and it opens it up and it swirls around within you. And some people have that energy under wraps. Some people are already swimming in it. So it may or may not be something that you're directly noticing like you watched that video and something bad happened. That's as far as at least my understanding of it goes is that if you're actively participating in, working with yourself, you become far more intuitive to when something new comes into your field, energetically speaking anyways. And so while yes, it is maybe a pressurized darker force that you're not used to that is being activated or revealed, ultimately it's really just showing you what is already within yourself. It's making that sphere, like from the whole tree of, or the show me who I've become concept, the Rhythmia concept and the merging with the soul. It's there to facilitate you being able to see yourself. And that's really the whole bottom line here. And so if we follow in that path, we follow in that principle, we can merge with our souls and we can heal our hearts. And that ultimately brings us to the closure of today's spirit stream is just knowing that you can live any dream that you want. But in order to live a dream, first you have to dream a dream and then you have to believe that it's possible. And most people, well, many people in life, they give up on their dreams and they give up because they don't believe them and then they stop dreaming them.  And it can be beautiful. But if you unconsciously let life toss you about by what everybody else says that they want for you or however other, whatever other people say, and the other people make up your beliefs for you by telling you what to think and how to feel, then you become an unconscious, swirling piece of consciousness in an ocean of the multi-dimensional reality field that is our existence. So step into something greater. Don't be afraid. You can literally steer your ship anywhere that you want it to go. And with that, thank you. So, so much for watching. I wanna end this stream with another little announcement, just a small, little announcement, which is that very recently you might have noticed that Transcendence Radio, our 24-7 live stream of peaceful, enchanting, deepening, transcendent music, went down. It disappeared and it hasn't been up for about two weeks now or so. And very soon, a new rebirth of this experience is going to be arriving. And this is going to be coming, launching on Monday, so a couple days, but this afternoon, after this stream, sometime in the next half an hour or so, I'm gonna go live again.  And I'm gonna make the animation, the new animation for the next edition of Transcendence Radio. And so it's gonna be like a time lapse in real time where we're gonna listen to sound light, just like tune into the sweet vibes and be creative. And I wanna have just like an open invitation that if you wanna just tune into it, be creative yourself. If you're doing some art or you're just doing something in your world and just put it on and hang out with me, you're more than welcome to come and enjoy. So that's pretty much it. I think I'm going to say thank you for everyone watching and I hope that my rambling made sense this time because honestly, I feel like I was definitely all over the place and that happens. This one, honestly, I don't know the energy, it was difficult to talk about this one, actually, it really was. I missed last week doing a spirit stream specifically for that reason and it took a lot to build up within me and lots of prayer to have the courage to turn on that stream. Cause this was, I don't know, it's a, but I felt like I had to do it, which was also interesting. I didn't just jump to something else. So with that, thank you for watching and I'll see you soon on the next stream. Ciao.


Good morning and welcome to Pathway to Reform, the 2014 edition, the inaugural edition. My name is Grant Hall, and I will be your host for the day.  Thank you for making the effort to be here and to be a part of this important conversation at this critical time in history. Today is the culmination of a huge amount of behind the scenes work by many, many good people, Ia pungaata garaion tu. We started to realise that something special was going to happen today. And we have an action-packed agenda for you. Incredible speakers, amazing experts and exciting debates. Plus, I understand the food is pretty good. Thank you for participating. This event has become way bigger and more important than we ever envizaged. The timing and issues that we all are facing right now make this conversation extremely important. The global commission on drug policy said in 2011 that drug policy reform was the policy issue of our time. These are very strong words. That was the same year that the New Zealand Law Commission came out with their report in 2011 that said we need to look at alternatives to prohibition to address the realities of contemporary drug use. It was a recommendation based on the best evidence and good science. And so it was a world first when the New Zealand Government boldly chose to listen and act on the expert advice that they got and choose to regulate the legal highs industry. The goal of this new approach is something that we all share and that is to create better public health outcomes. And that's the common ground that we always have even with the most hardcore prohibitionists. So it was on July 18 last year that 119 MPs to one voted to establish the Psychoactive Substances Act. Now the one MP that voted against it was John Banks. That's actually a vote for it if you think about that. It was a world leading piece of legislation that has received significant interest from countries grappling with the very same issues New Zealand's had to deal with. And they're hoping that maybe New Zealand gets it right. So let's get started.


Financing and ways of funding a project have always played a major part in how a final film, TV series or basically any media project looks like, production value and structure-wise. Firstly, financing directly influences the way the film or series feels and looks like due to being directly connected to the production value.  Actors, designers, costumes, locations, studios, cameras and so on, can be employed, purchased or borrowed if there is more money there or any money there. However, secondly, even the TV format itself, its inherent structure, has long since been influenced by the way of funding the program. If we look at TV series for example, we can see the act-frags, the halts, the stops, between two acts of each episode, nearly always matching the commercial breaks. If you watch TV series like The Mentalist or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Prison Break on DVD, that means an act ends when the screen turns black and a dramatic tension in the plot is at its high.  Really look at these DVDs. The more commercial breaks an episode is interrupted by, the more acts and with it pre-break cliffhangers or moments of heightened tension you'll find. The cliffhangers before the break are written with the intention of keeping the audience in front of their TVs eagerly waiting for the next piece of information when the show returns after the break. This very well shows how commercial interests have co-shaped the TV series structures and narratives that we know today. As we learned in the last chapter, one hour TV series in US cable TV usually lasts about 45 minutes without commercial breaks. As commercial breaks rarely exist in pay TV programs like HBO, we can find time adjusted shows in these channels that tend to last rather 55 to 58 minutes, up to 15 minutes longer than the usual cable TV one hour show. Shows like HBO's Game of Thrones and Showtime's serial killer Saga Dexter make use of this additional time by allowing more information and many times more major characters to rule the scenery of the show. Although Hulu.com and other online video platforms operate with later induced short commercial breaks, many web formats today make use of a completely different commercial model. Product placement and branded entertainment. Product placement is a way of financing a film or series by visually including commercial products in the work, in exchange for payments by the brands. Although many movies feature product placement, German TV for example has strict rules limiting or banning it. Brand entertainment as another marketing strategy goes even further by including commercial brands directly into the story world. If we look at Ikea's web series Easy to Assemble for example, the show not only features the brand logo or only one product, but the whole series takes place in an Ikea market with all the protagonists being Ikea sales assistants. There's an emerging trend amongst brands to sort of get involved with TV series, classic TV series by sponsoring web spinoffs, which is a class cheaper way of doing product placement to be honest, because you can focus a lot more on the product, you're a lot freer and you don't have to pay the huge, humongous amounts you would have to pay if you do classic product placement, especially when you do product placement you are paid by the seconds that your product is on air and that if you compare it to what you see on the team move, the team move spinoffs or the psych spinoffs or I think covered affairs also had one where the product is on nearly all the time or at least you have like a big brand frame where it's all about that, you still have a possibility to sort of pay for something even if you don't want to spend that much money and still be a really prominent part of content. So it's become increasingly popular over the last few years and it has of course makes that TV spinoffs lose maybe a bit of their charm, however they're making payable which is really interesting and something that you strive for because that's what you want. You want to be able to tell more stories, you want to tell other stories, other stories that you couldn't tell on TV because you have limitations there and you don't really usually have those exact same limitations if you do it online because you can be a bit more edgy when you write stories. Rebecca talks about web spinoffs of TV series that work as branded entertainment. A spinoff is a narrative media format that is based on another already existing format. The spinoff most often revolves around one aspect of the original work, for example a character, location, event or theme. To give some examples, famously one of the protagonists of TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire angel, entered his own TV series of the same name, Angel, which became a successful supernatural detective procedural or as was announced earlier in 2013, J.K. Rowling's book and film series Harry Potter will be followed by a spinoff called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which focuses on Newt's gammonous life, the fictional author of one of Harry Potter's school books. The US serial drama Teen Wolf from 2011 and running on MTV offers such a spinoff with Search for a Cure, a web original series that can also be defined as branded entertainment. The web series focuses on the TV series's protagonist Sidekick. It also includes the protagonist, but he's rather the Sidekick here.  Search for a Cure also shows what Rebecca Ein calls a rather crass product placement, a very dominating brand involvement. Not only is the title directly followed by the line presented by AT&T and therefore declared a production financed by the US mobile network provider, it also very prominently features a mobile gadget with the logo of sad brand in every episode. Although the writers included the branded items very skillfully into the story, the dominant display disrupts the emotional involvement in the story. When at times the show really feels more like an extended commercial, one reason for that being the length of just two to three minutes per episode. That really prevents any deeper immersion and lean in levels before the next episode has already to be started again. To name another critically very well received branded entertainment format, let's have a quick look at The Hire from 2001 and 2002. The Hire was financed by auto brand BMW and features eight 10 minute short films by famous directors like Guy Ritchie, Tony Scott and Eng Lee. All movies are connected by actor Clive Owen playing the driver in each of them, man hired to drive the vehicles used in all eight movies. The major difference to search for a cure, although equally produced for the internet first, is the high production value and cost and the cinematic level of storytelling, personal and visual language involved in this project. Rebecca Irons sums it up as follows. I think in many ways it's win-win situation however if it turns out to be sort of a long commercial then it obviously didn't work. However I see when speaking to brands and presenting topics to brands they're becoming also increasingly disinterested in having their brand prominently featured and being more about our brand is cool and we just want to associate ourselves with this great story or this series or whatever and that makes it much more easier for storytellers to sort of abide by these product placement laws and still be true to your story.


Mariah Carey is one of those artists who's been around forever and she's still known for her infamous voice in five octave vocal range. She's hailed for inspiring generations of singers as well as being a pioneer of pop and R&B music. Aside from that fridge in her video which apparently gives her great selfie lighting, Mariah lives in a mansion in LA with all the features. You would think a person with a fortune like hers would own a house but as far as I know she's renting at the moment. In this video we'll be giving you all the details of the palace Mariah calls home and much more. Mariah Carey is a singer, songwriter, record producer, actress, TV judge and more. Not to mention she's the mother of two which I actually forgot for a second.  There's actually some confusion to whether she was born in 69 or 70. I mean if Wikipedia doesn't know then who would. She's been dubbed Songbird Supreme by the Guinness World Records because of her special vocal style her unique range and more. There have been few artists that could give Mariah a run for her money. I'm thinking nowadays maybe Ariana falls into that category. Mariah's music styles considered pop contemporary R&B as well as some hip hop but for the most part she sings about love. Despite her publicized breakdown back in the early 2000s she was able to bounce back in 2005 with a new album which became the best selling record that year. I mean who didn't love We Belong Together. Miss Carey is one of the best selling music artists of all time and was welcomed into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Among her many accomplishments she's the most successful female in Billboard chart history and has won a ton of awards including five Grammys. Of course she's amassed a huge net worth over her long-running career too which is estimated at $520 million. With that you know Mariah lives in luxury.  I got some requests from you guys for this one in the comments so today we're gonna look at where Mariah Carey calls home including her mansion in The Hills and more. If you like these videos make sure you're subscribed during that belt to be notified when we post so you can always be up to date. We've also done house tours on the likes of Camila Cabello and Brittany Spears and we'll have links to some at the end of this. Follow me on Instagram because I love connecting with you guys. I've also been reading all your comments and I'm gonna be responding to some at the end. I need you to let me know who to do next in the comments down below and whose home you'd like to see. Now let's get into this video. So before I show you Mariah's lavish rental house let's look at her previous mansion. When she was still married to Nick Cannon because who could forget that era let's be real the couple maintain a home in Bel Air. They got this house in 2009 for just under $7 million and once upon a time it belonged to the late 80s poster queen Farrah Fawcett who owned it for over 20 years. Before Mariah and Nick's split became super public they were asking almost $13 million for the home. In the end they sold it for 9 million. Like I said the home was located in Bel Air which is a ritzy residential neighborhood in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. After you pass the two entrance gates off Sunset Boulevard you'll reach winding roads with massive mansions all over. Mariah's previous family home was a multi-wing mansion spanning almost 12,000 square feet of living space and designed in a Hampton style. There were six or seven bedrooms, six full baths and three half baths. Inside their design was a bit all over the place considering there was a Moroccan style room an indoor basketball court that resembled a school gym and even a huge indoor outdoor type room that looked like a log cabin. Apparently this log cabin room was named the Aspen room and it was 32 feet long with stone floors, a massive fireplace, full bar and backyard access made to be an entertainment lounge. Mariah and Nick had a double height foyer when you walked in the house, a games room, recording studio, home movie theater, and of course more than one formal living and dining room. There was a master suite on the main floor directly beside the staff quarters but there was also a second slightly smaller one upstairs. The one on the upper floor had a large walk-in closet, terrace with views of the city and massive bathroom. They also had an elegant nursery upstairs designed for the twins which also had a walk-in closet, private bathroom and balcony. Finally outside Mariah's old beller mansion the estate was even more impressive. There were two gated driveways and motorcourts with room for over 20 cars, a variety of gardens and patios and moving to the back. You'll find an extra long swimming pool tiled with the ex-couples initials something I'm sure the current owners revised. Some additional features include a brick terrace with sunken spa, grassy lawn, stairway leading to the hillside and even a putting green. Post divorce Mariah bounced around from a few properties. Eventually in 2018 she settled into her current mansion in Beverly Hills. You already know this neighborhood is a celeb fave and all the houses are super posh and private. You need to be a somebody to live in this exclusive LA area. I was shocked to hear that Mariah actually rents this house out from a Saudi royal instead of owning it for a crazy 35k per month. 500 million dollar fortune or not that would hurt anyone's bank account. To Mariah this might be seen as a bargain though considering the cold water canyon compound she rented prior cost her 100k each month in rent. Anyways if this house looks familiar maybe because you've seen it before. Before Mariah moved in the previous resident was none other than Nicki Minaj, her arch enemy they like to say. Mariah's mansion in the hills is 10,337 square feet and she has eight beds, four full baths and four half baths. Home is peach colored and Mediterranean style situated in a gated enclave on 1.16 acres of land offering canyon and city views. There's also an additional apartment perfect for guests or staff. The two-story entryway is super dramatic perfect for Mariah's taste and it has super high ceilings. The winding staircase leads you to the top floor and most of the bedrooms are located. Mariah's master suite in this place is pretty impressive providing her with not one but two bathrooms to herself and a private terrace. Everything in Mariah's Beverly Hills mansion seems grand including the multiple living and dining rooms, huge family room and contemporary eating kitchen complete with a separate breakfast nook and fireplace. All of the arched windows and french doors in the home's design make the place look even fancier. Outside of course Mariah's home is securely gated and private including the driveway and there's a five-car garage and additional motor court. Definitely enough space for her to park her lavish cars like her Rolls Royce and $200,000 Maybach. She has plenty of grassy lawn space on that one plus acre of land, expansive terraces and outdoor kitchen and of course a pool complete with a spa and fountains. Looking at Mariah's Beverly Hills estate I can see why it's worth a massive 35k a month. It's certainly fit for a queen. I just wonder if in the near future she'll purchase a spot in the area instead. We all know she can afford it. Mariah also owns property away from LA and none other than New York City. Way back in 1999 they were already reporting that she put down money on a penthouse triplex at Franklin Tower, a 17-story condo redevelopment that used to be the corn exchange bank in 1931. Her place is in the ever-popular Tribeca neighborhood and apparently the main penthouse cost her 5.5 million. It said she also bought the 3.5 million full floor unit just below the penthouse. Splitting both together she spent a total of 9 million on her New York home. Mariah's mansion-sized penthouse in New York City is almost 13,000 square feet of living space and has four beds and 4.5 baths. In 2001 she got the place redesigned and decorated by Mario Buada. Mariah's place is full of glitz and glamour and Mario said he used the art deco influence which was from the architecture of the building itself. Her apartment has bronze limestone flooring and gorgeous chandelier in the entry hall. The living room doors are covered in silver leaf and painted in a leaf pattern. Her master bedroom looks fit for a queen and includes picture-perfect views of the city, a seating area, and her massive and specially organized walking closet. Mariah has also invited Vogue into this closet before in the past and it's impressive to say the least. Her home movie theater here has an aquarium on one of the walls too to give the feeling of a movie theater under the sea according to Mariah's decorator.  I love the way she designed it so feminine and classy too. Besides the spots that Mariah calls home, she also spends a lot on her vacation homes. She used to own a house in Bahamas, bought it after she married Nick and the couple lived there part-time throughout their marriage. The gorgeous beachfront property was 4,000 square feet of living space and had three beds and three baths located on the prestigious Windemere Island. It was only accessible via private helicopter or boat and sat on three acres of land. I'm not sure how much Mariah paid for her Bahamas home but she decided to sell it some years back and put it on the market for 5.5 million. She probably had too many memories with the ex. These days Mariah prefers to rent some epic homes when she goes on vacation. For example in 2016 she stayed in a mansion in Aspen Colorado worth a massive 22 million dollars costing her 10k per night. More recently even Mariah rang in 2020 in the Dominican Republic and posted a video on her IG going in the pool with her dress on. She was celebrating some milestones and brought along her boyfriend and her two kids. The home was located in the luxury community of Cap Cana and covered 40,000 square feet with a private beach, nine beds, a pool and the place was also fully staffed. If you're planning on booking a stay here it'll cost you. Mariah paid 18k a night. So now I've seen Mariah's luxury living situation including her palace in Beverly Hills that Nicki Minaj used to rent, her triplex penthouse in NYC and more. Which part did you guys like the best? Personally I like the design of her New York place. If it still looks like that anyways. Okay guys now read out some comments from previous videos. On our Oprah Winfrey House Tour Giraffe Love Girl said, I love the Colorado and Washington Island ones. I need to get a hold of her and gail and convince them that they need a third wheel in their best friend situation. Those are my two favorite homes too I was so impressed.  In my Oprah voice hashtag goals hashtag love it. I also got some requests for celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio's house, Ellen DeGeneres and more. So keep your eyes out for some of the viz you guys are asking for. All right guys that's all I could find on where Mariah Carey currently lives like her rental mansion in Beverly Hills and more. What did you guys think of her real estate? What did you like best? Let me know in the comments as well as what other celebrity houses you'd like to see. Follow me on Instagram if you want to chat more and I'll see you all in the next video. Bye.