If you want to make more money If you want to make more money the thing that you actually want is not the money the money is actually not your main goal You think that it's your main goal Sure You know the money can buy you the house that you want it can buy the car that you want the Trips around the world it can buy you pretty much anything that you want a lot of times it can buy you those things But you're not actually trying to accumulate Assets or things that are expenses what you're actually trying to do is you're wanting the thing that you think that money will give you Right and what is that? freedom Freedom is what we're all searching for right and Success means something different to every single person But for me when someone says like like first off if you're wanting to be successful Successful is just a very relative term. So you've got to define what success means to you Maybe to you success means making ten million dollars. Maybe success means to you having an incredible family Maybe success means to you that you can you know own a t-rex Skeleton and put inside your house.  I'm gonna tell you something that I've never heard anybody talk about before your freedom comes from your discipline Right now you might be thinking about this and when you think of the connotation of discipline when you think about it Usually discipline is like a bad word like to be disciplined as a child means that you did something wrong So to discipline yourself Seems like it's got a bad connotation Most people would think that the opposite of freedom would be disciplined because if you're like I'm free I don't need discipline discipline when when I think of the word of what most people think of Discipline itself. It seems restrictive, right? It seems like you're stuck in some sort of way But freedom the freedom that you want is inside of the discipline and the structure that you don't currently have in your life Right now, you're gonna sit there and be like that doesn't sound right at all like freedom seems like there'd be no discipline Freedom seems like there'd be no structure and I get it But there's a couple different ways where this works, right? When you have discipline and when you have structure in your life, it creates freedom later on down the road So we're gonna talk about a couple different aspects of freedom We're gonna talk about a couple different aspects of discipline and also a couple different aspects of just structure itself When you have discipline in your life When you have structure in your life, it creates freedom later on down the road, right? The freedom once again to do what you want when you want with who you want Discipline and structure also create freedom in the moment. You haven't be like, I don't know how that works. Well, let me explain that, okay? So first off, we're talking about the future, right?  If you hit the lottery, then that's just a fluke, you ended up hitting the lottery, but that's like a one in 22 million chance to hit the lottery anyways, right?  So you're gonna need that, and not automatically, for a lot of people, I already know how you're feeling, it feels restrictive, but I'm gonna tell you why it's not, okay?  I promise you, in the grand scheme of your life and the potential that you have, that's not actually what you're searching for. You're searching for much, much more than that, much, much more of a beautiful thing. But if you can wake up, and you can have no schedule, that's freedom, but you can't wake up right now, most likely, and just have nothing that you need to do, because your life might not be at the point where you can do nothing, because it's a pretty good chance that if you were at that point where you could just do whatever the hell you want, you probably wouldn't be listening to me, right? And to wake up and have no schedule, there's freedom in that, but that can also really stress people out. There's a reason why people who retire end up going back and working again within 90 days is because most people, like the inherent feeling in a human is to be productive, to have progress in your life. As Tony Robbins says, progress equals happiness. So to think that you would just wake up and just lollygag all day long and that would bring you happiness is probably not going to happen, right? You feel like you should be doing more, right? You're searching for what you should do to fill that time, knowing that there's more for you. But when you have structure and you have discipline, there's the freedom inside of that structure. So most people think, I want the freedom to just wake up and if I didn't have anything to do today, oh my gosh, I would feel so free. Promise you this, after a while, it gets really boring and you're not going to want to do that. But when you wake up and you've got a plan in place, like today, I was back to back to back to back to back on calls, on recording, on planning podcast episodes and getting all of this stuff done. I've been back to back. I've already had, you know, what do we have? We're at two o'clock, I've already had four phone calls and we've recorded three podcast episodes, right? So there's, but the beautiful thing about it is in that structure, in the discipline of getting those things done, there's a whole lot of freedom. I woke up and I had a team call at 7 a.m. for me, right? I had a team call with my team. You might be like, oh man, wake up and be on a call at 7 a.m., that feels restrictive. But for me, when I wake up on a call and I'm running a team call with my entire team there, there's so much freedom in that for me because I can move and shift and do what I want and show up as the version of me. Why? Because I'm not stressing about what I need to do because I've got it in the schedule, right? Then I woke up, then after that I had another meeting. I'm in the middle of writing a book. So we have book pitches next month. Next week, excuse me, where I'm meeting with seven different publishers next week. So I was on the call for an hour with my book agent. And in that time of going over everything, for me there was a lot of freedom because I was able to figure out how I want to pitch it, how I want to talk about it, what I'm going to say to these people, how I'm going to come up with a marketing plan. And for me, there's freedom in that because I can come up with whatever it is that I want to. So there's actual freedom inside of my structure. Then sitting here, recording these podcast episodes and I usually record three to four episodes at one time. So we just sit here and we just batch them and get them all done. There's freedom. I know what I'm going to say to you guys. I have bullet points, but at the same time, there's also a lot of stuff that comes out on me that just isn't on there. There's freedom in that. And so, and I had this conversation with one of my sales reps and he was like, he's a very much like his personality is an innovator. He loves to innovate, do things differently. And I said, what you have to realize is within the structure of doing the same things and having some phone calls that are very similar. Is there so much freedom in it? The problem is, here it is, you're not searching for the freedom. You're searching for the restrictiveness in it, right? Of waking up and having to do what feels like the same thing. But I was like, every person that you talk to is different. And if you search for the difference in each person and the difference in this conversation, created this conversation, you'll find it. In the innovator inside of you, that innovator that's inside of you is going to come alive because each person's different inside of that structure that you have inside of the discipline is the freedom, right? Now, he's locked in, he's been doing this for a while. He agrees and what's cool about it is when he is disciplined and structured from Monday to Friday, Saturday and Sunday, he's free. He makes great money. He can do whatever he wants and he has fun in those times. And to be able to make good money Monday through Friday, affords him to be able to do whatever the hell he wants to on the weekends and that in itself is freedom, right? And people, so that's the freedom in the moment, right? Now let's talk about the freedom that the future can bring you from having discipline and having structure, right? So people underestimate, severely underestimate what locking down for a couple of years can do for your future, right? As Tony Robbins says, one of my favorite quotes because the longer I run my business and the older I get, the more it gets true. People overestimate what they can do in a year but they underestimate what they can do in a decade. And I will even take that and say, they underestimate what they can do in five years. So people think that, oh, I'm gonna start this business that's gonna be a massive success. I'm gonna sell millions of t-shirts or I'm gonna sell millions of records. I'm gonna sell millions of these things. I'm gonna make so much money and then within three months they're barely making any money and they might even be losing money and they're like, I don't know if this is for me. You're most likely, if you're 99% of business owners, you're not gonna see much success in the first three months.  You're gonna have a completely different life. I can't tell you how many people I've seen, their lives changed, they started a business today and then three years down the road their life is in a completely different place. Why? Because success takes time. And once that time has passed and they've been working and they've been disciplined, they've been waking up early, they've been putting structure inside of their life.  Right?  If you treat your business like a business, you're eventually going to get paid like a business, right? So when I say freedom comes from the structure in the discipline, one thing, like a perfect example for someone who's a business owner or a solo entrepreneur, solopreneur, one thing that I always say to them is like, when you wake up in the morning, force yourself to have a morning routine. Force yourself to go through the morning routine and then when you're done with that morning routine, what do I want you to force yourself to do?   The structure and the discipline of waking up and making yourself shower and making yourself go through your morning routine and going through your morning routine and then shower and then getting dressed makes you have the freedom later on down the road to create the life that you want, right? I also say to people like have working hours. If you're an entrepreneur and you're working from home, you have to have working hours because when you work from home, a lot of times people will try to impede on that working from home and your mom will call you and be like, honey, I need you to go pick up some laundry for me.  All right, I'll go get it.  She'd be like, hey, can you pick up after work? Yeah, of course you can't. So you have to have working hours. And what happens is by having those working hours, you're creating structure. And if you have the discipline to actually make sure that you have those things done and you get the things done the way that you're supposed to, you're creating discipline, you're creating structure and in turn creating more freedom in your life down the road. And so there's freedom inside of the structure that you currently have. And you can always find it if you're searching for it and you can have fun with it if you're searching for it.  I'm gonna put some structure in my life. I'm gonna actually start to plan out my day every single day. I'm gonna have the discipline to wake up every single day, to go through my morning routine, to shower, to get dressed as if I'm leaving to go to work, to maybe go to a coffee shop and work there so that I feel like there's a difference between working at my house and working at a different place. And that's more where my office is to the coffee shop. Whatever it is for you, of having the structure and the discipline in place and having the discipline to make sure that you do those things and to do it day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out for years, locking down for a couple of years once again is severely underestimated for the future that it could create for you. Severely underestimated. And here's the thing that I always say to people, everybody wants to make lots of money. Cool, it'd be great to make $100,000, $200,000 in your business, $500,000 a million. And are some of you going to do that? Absolutely, right? But if you're working at nine to five right now and you're getting paid $80,000 a year at your nine to five and you leave that nine to five to go do the one thing it is that you're truly passionate about, whatever that thing it is that you're passionate about and you put work into it, you put work into it, day in, day out, day in, day out, I guarantee you you can eventually get yourself to $80,000 a year doing that thing that you're passionate about.  And here's what's beautiful. If you really put a lot of effort into it what you're going to find out is that eventually you're going to build it to make you way more money than what you did in the past. Freedom is what you're searching for and freedom comes from your discipline and it comes from structure. Habits are very important. I'll say this before I talk about habits. They're important, but they're not the most important thing. People don't talk enough about the standards that people hold themselves to. And if you can understand this and you can hold yourself accountable to the level that you really want to hold yourself accountable and the level that you need to be at in order to create the life that you want you will create that life. Habits are important, but habits are the children of standards. Standards are way more important. And so if you can learn to hold yourself to a higher standard then you'll have to force yourself to grow.  And in this episode, I'm going to give you tips on exactly how to do so. But first off, let's get really clear on what a standard is because sometimes people like to ask that. Standards in the simplest form, the way I like to explain them are what you deem acceptable and fully unacceptable in your life. And these are levels that you will not let yourself drop below. At all, ever. You won't let yourself drop below the standard. And your standards are attached to your identity and what you think about yourself, right? So, you know, when you look at your body there's a pretty good chance that for most people listening your body has been very similar for the past two, three, four, five, 10 years for some of you even longer, right? That's because that's the standard that you're holding yourself to.  But you're probably also not going any further in getting any better in a lot of cases. You might be in some cases but this is the reason why people can lose a bunch of weight and then they can go right back to gaining all of the weight back. Just standards that they have. If you look at your bank account you probably have around the same amount that you have for years, right? Tends to be very common. If you're used to seeing $5,000 in your bank account you've probably had around $5,000 in your bank account for years and years. Why? Because it's simply just a standard. And if some big bill comes in and you have to pay that bill and let's say your bank account goes from 5,000 to 4,000 well the standard is that you're used to seeing 5,000. So that's when you'll buckle up. You won't go out to each. You won't see your friends. You won't go to the movies. You won't spend any extra money until you feel safe and at that same place that you're normally at, right? So your life, where it currently is is because of your standards. How you look, how your body looks, where your business is at, where your bank account is at, where your friendships are at, where your friendships are at, where your relationships are at, where your marriage is at, where your relationship with your kids is at. The cleanliness of your house, everything comes down to the standards that you hold yourself to. And a standard is something that you will not drop below. But the thing about that is that's basically like the ground floor, which means that there's always levels above it. And those levels above it, in order for you to go from ground floor to the next floor, you're gonna have to raise your standards in some way. So I'll give you a quick example. If we're talking about not falling below any standards, let's go really drastic.  Why? I would assume that for most people listening to a motivational podcast and a mindset podcast and trying to improve yourself and get into personal development and growth, you're probably not shooting up Black Tar Heroin on the weekends, right? The reason why is because that's probably below your standards.  I know there's a lot of people that listen to this and you stop short just a little bit short of your goals before you actually get there. That means that it's a standard for you to not hit your goals. What if your standard was, hey, I'm not going to ever stop until I hit my goal, right? Or giving up short on yourself, giving up just a little bit too early. How common, it's so common for me when I work with people to hear how many people get really excited about something some goals, some New Year's resolution and then they give up in the middle of it and they're done with it, right? How about this? Is it your standard to wake up the very first time your alarm goes off or do you hit snooze three times before waking up? See, that's a standard.  That is a standard, right? People love to focus on habits and like I said, those are important but your habits are just the offspring of your standards. So if you have a habit of waking up and having a morning routine, it's because your standards are I will wake up at six a.m. or five a.m.  That is a standard and the habit of the morning routine is an offspring of that standard, right? It makes sense. I don't know why nobody talks about this because your standards are actually more important than your habits. Your standards create your habits. So I'll give you a couple of examples. People want to wake up and have a morning routine like we're talking about. They want that to be a habit of theirs but they don't have the standard of waking up when the alarm goes off. They don't have the standard of going to bed early. They don't have the standard of doing what they say they're going to do. They don't have the standard of prioritizing their sleep. They don't have the standard of making sure everything in the morning is ready for the morning before they go to bed. There are standards that assist in making sure that those habits are executed correctly. And so what are your standards and where do you need to improve them, right? You won't go and shoot heroin but you will struggle getting yourself out of bed in the morning. Why? Standards. It's all standards, right? You have to, and here's the interesting thing and this is gonna sound very drastic to most of you but when you get it, you'll get it. As drastic as it seems of like I would never shoot heroin, right? Like if you think that to yourself like I would never shoot heroin. The mental, the same mental disgust that you have towards shooting heroin you should have towards sleeping in. That's a standard and that's what I'm talking about. Now you might be sitting there going, well that's pretty damn drastic Rob. Shooting heroin, sleeping in, those are not the same thing. I know they're not the same thing but can you make them the mental equivalent where it's like I do not sleep in? There is no way on God's green earth that I freaking sleep in at any point in time. I get up when my alarm goes off because that's what I'm supposed to do. The same way that there's no way on God's green earth that I'm gonna take heroin and shoot it into my arms, right? The same way there needs to be a rock bottom for you, right? Shooting heroin would be rock bottom. Not actually waking up and having your morning routine and the habits and executing the way that you want to should be a rock bottom for you. So let's give another example. Look at your body. Is your body right now your dream body? Or could it be better? Well, it is what it is because of your standards, right? What about the food that you eat? Do you eat fast food?  Wings? Pizza? All of that is a standard that you're sticking to.  And you drop your food in the parking lot and it falls in the concrete. Are you gonna pick it up and eat it after it falls in the parking lot that everyone's been walking over and cars been going and birds have been on, right? Probably not. Why? Because eating food off of a parking lot is probably below your standards. But eating McDonald's when you know that you should isn't below your standards, right? You see how these correlate?  There's no way I'm gonna eat this greasy food because I know what I do. It's number one, it's gonna make me fatter. Number two, it's gonna make me tired. Number three, I'm not gonna feel good. Number four, I'm probably gonna fart a lot, right? My wife isn't gonna love that.  Right? Look at your body again. How often do you work out? How many times a week do you work out per week? What's your personal standard? What is it? I know people that work out twice a day. I also know people who haven't worked out in 10 years. What's the difference? Standards. The standards that someone's gonna hold themselves to and the level that they will not drop below. If you wanna know how to change your body, what do you need to change? Your standards. Change your workout standards. Change your lifestyle standards.    Whatever it is.  They make the life that you have.  That's the truth. But those standards are not going to get you the life that you want. So the only difference between you now in this moment listening to those podcasts or watching this podcast, the only difference between you now and you in 10 years and having the perfect life and the perfect body and all the money in your bank account and the love and the happiness and the success and the traveling, whatever it is that you want, the only difference between you now and that version of you is that the two versions have two different levels of standards. There's you now and there's a perfect you.    All of your goals.  Do you give up too often? Or do you not stop until the goal is hit no matter how long it takes, right? Come up short, give up. Don't quit no matter what. What's the difference? The standards, right? What about the relationships that you have? Do you cheat on your significant other? Or do you have a date night every single week, right? Do you turn off your phone at 7 p.m. So it's just enough time for the two of you to hang out. The difference is standards. Cheating on somebody is one standard and you were like, well, I'm okay with doing that. That thing, cheating on somebody. Or I will turn off my phone at 7 p.m. every single day so that I can have some time with my significant other that's uninterrupted. And you know what? I'm also gonna take her on a date every single week. Difference between the two of those? They're vastly different. The standards that I'm willing to hold myself to. Standards that you're willing to hold yourself to, right? What about your family? Do you have a standard of, you know, hey, I do work so hard that I usually miss dinner with my wife and kids? Or do you have the standard of I disconnect at 6 p.m. no matter what so that I can be a fully present parent because being a present parent matters more than all of the money that I can make. What's the difference? Standards, your body, do you work out every single day? Do you follow a healthy lifestyle? Do you eat a lot of fast food? Do you skip workouts often? What's the difference between those two scenarios? Standards, what about your bank account? Right, you have a lot of standards for how much that you make, how much you save, how much you spend. If you're a saver, that's a standard. If you're someone who spends a lot of money and you're not really good at saving money, that's a standard. All of these things can be changed at any point in time.  All of that is a standard. If you have a business and you have people that work for you in your business and you feel like they're lazy, that's a standard because you don't hold them to a high enough standard. Then usually that means that you're not holding yourself to a high enough standard. If you want people who work really hard, you better be the one that's working really hard first. People follow leaders. Are you a good leader? What about your personal growth? Are you reading often? Are you skipping it?  What is it? All of them have to do with standards. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. There's no way that you're slipping on standards in your relationship and cheating, but you happen to be having this business as crushing it.  The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.  They make the life that you have. They will create the life that you want. So the only difference once again between you, now and you in 10 years, and the perfect life that you want is a standard that you hold yourself to. So take a quick look around your life and start thinking to yourself, what are the standards that I typically hold myself to? What are the standards that are great standards? What are the standards that I need to keep? Okay, I'm really good at going to the gym. Let's say you're good at going to the gym. Ah, I'm not the best at eating healthy though. And I know that if I really want to get the body that I want, well, I'm probably gonna have to start eating better. Okay, so now I've noticed where I do well. I've also noticed some place where I need my standards to be better. So what about you? What are places where your standards are good and you would like to keep those? What are the places in your life where standards are not where they should be and you want to improve those? Maybe you have the standard of, oh man, my relationship with my wife, it's doing great. We're doing good, but you know what? I'm missing my morning routine almost every single morning. You want to miss my morning routine? It stresses me out a little bit because I feel like I could have done better. I feel like it was something that I needed. You know what? I'm gonna have to go ahead and figure out how to make my morning routine be better. How to make sure that I show up. And if I'm missing my morning routine, there's, once again, when you do one thing is where you do everything. There's probably other places that I could make my relationship better with my wife where I could make my relationship better with my kids, where I could show up as a better leader in my business. The way you do one thing is the way you do everything. So there's always going to be other places. So take a look around you and start seeing where you have good standards and where you have standards that need to be improved.   And for me personally, the way I see everything is I see life as this big game. I feel like it's a game. I'm just playing this game. In every game, there's just a new level, right? There's just new levels that you get to and with the new levels, there's always new challenges. And I see everything as life as just a test to see how I'm going to show up as if God or the universe or whatever it is that you believe in is watching me at all points in time. And if I have low standards, and let's say God's watching down on me, the universe is looking at me, and I have low standards as to sleeping in, not holding myself to a high standard, not showing up in my relationships, all of this stuff, I'm gonna stay where I am. Why would anybody reward me with anything great for not doing anything great, right? It's like you don't play, could you imagine how boring the video game would be if you didn't have to accomplish anything but you were just rewarded with gold coins for just kind of doing nothing and meandering all over the place? No, you've got to accomplish something, right? But if I hold myself to a high standard, huh, that's interesting because the universe tends to reward me every single time I hold myself to a high standard. If I push myself without anybody else needing to push me, if I treat people the way that people should be treated, if I show up for people the way that I should show up for people, if I work harder than anybody else, if I mentally take care of myself and build myself up, it's like the universe just gives me gifts. It's like the gold coins just start falling from the sky, right? But it all comes down to the standards of what I deem acceptable and what standards I'm going to hold myself to.  It's good, but you know that there's more inside of you. That more inside of you is going to take a shift in your standards.  It's a top-down effect, standards to habits to actions. That's what you need to focus on. So as you're looking at your life, ask yourself once again, this life I have right now, the standards that I'm holding myself to, where do I need to hold myself to a higher standard and how should I pay attention to myself at a deep level and become very self-aware if my standards happen to dip so that I can make sure I pull myself back up and not allow myself to dip below? Because the only difference between you and the life that you want is the standards that you hold yourself to. It seems obvious that every single person should want to build a life that they love, right? So many people should, every single person, not even so many, every single person should be building a life that they absolutely love they don't want to try to escape from. But if that's the case, why do so many people not love their lives? Because if I look around in the people that I've coached, the people that I've talked to, it seems like most people are slightly content with their life and sometimes maybe even a little bit agitated with their lives.  And so I want to ask you before we dive in, do you love your life?  We're like, yeah, I don't really like that. I don't really like that job that I have, that person to my life. I don't like any of that because for me personally, I think that I should be and I think that you should be building a life that I'm in love with in every single aspect. I think you should be building a life that you're in love with in every single aspect. And there shouldn't be any pieces of your life to be honest with you that you don't love. And I don't know about you but I want to be working towards building a life that I love every single day.  Absolutely, but over the past 14 years, I feel like I've been pulling out the weeds, the things that I don't want in my life and replanting flowers in places of all of those weeds. So if your life was a garden and you're looking at it, would you see more flowers in your life or would you see more weeds in your life? And if you see more weeds, what are you gonna do to go through and actually start to pull them? Because there's nobody else that can pull those weeds whether that's the job that you have, the family, the people that you surround yourself with, the person that you're in a relationship with, all of those things can either be flowers or weeds and you need to go through and take an actual assessment and figure out exactly what it is that you want in your life and how you need to get each of those things as well. And I'm gonna say something I think that that might kind of surprise a lot of people. Built, like waking up one day and having a life that you want and love is not going to happen. A life that you actually love is built. It's something that you have to put a lot of intention into. It's built intentionally and it's built meticulously, like going through every single aspect of every single day and going, do I wanna keep this here? Or do I wanna get rid of it? A perfect life is built.   No, you have to plan it. You have to plan it, you have to check it, you have to check it every single week, check it every single day and you have to execute on everything that you want in your life.  That's what's beautiful. Because one of the things that really holds people back from building the life that they love is that they feel like they're stuck in the life that they have.  It's gonna seem like it's near impossible.  I guess I'm not gonna get it this round. And you've heard me talk about a friend of mine who was the number 30 employee in Facebook and he was fired from Facebook a year before they went public and he missed out on about $180 million because of the fact that he was fired. And he started to go into a depression. And when he noticed he was going into a depression, he was there for a while, he started sitting around and going, man, I don't like being depressed anymore. I'm gonna figure out a way to be happy. And so what he did was he made a happiness list. Every single thing that makes him happy, it could have been music, it could have been walking his dog, it could be certain food, it could be certain people, it could be conversations, it could be a movie. He made a massive list of every single thing that makes him happy. And what he did was every single morning he would look at that list and then he would look at the things that he had to do today and he would say, how can I bring as many of these things from this list into my day? And the quote that I love that he told me was that I will not leave my depression or my happiness left up to chance. I'm gonna be in control of it.    If you were to build a life that you love, what is a essential piece that you would wanna make sure that you have?  So let's do it together. If you have a pen and paper, this would be a really good time to pull it out. Let's go through as many aspects of your life as we possibly can, right? So let's bring the first thing in. Let's just go hard from the very beginning. Your significant other, right?  Be honest with yourself. It's okay, you're the only one that's here that's talking to me and listening to this, right? So be honest with yourself. Are there, maybe you do love them, but maybe there's certain aspects of them in certain aspects of your relationship that you wanna change, okay? So what we wanna do, we take a list and we make a list of everything that we love and then we make a list of needs to change, right? Maybe the person needs to change. It needs to be a completely different person or maybe you and that person need to change a little bit in the way you show up to the relationship.   So, okay, what do I love about this person? What are the certain aspects? I love their adventure. I love how they're so goofy, I love these things. Okay, I wanna deepen these things that I love and if I have a needs to change list, I need to bring this up with them and actually start to figure out what we need to do together to change it, perfect. Now we've at least got a little bit of a plan, don't we? Now we can start to build a relationship that we love. Great, let's go into our friendships. Let's look at all of our friends. Who do you love? Who are the people that are there for you? What do you love about them? What are the ways that you wanna show up to that relationship with them even deeper? Let's go deeper into it, okay. Now, let's go into the needs to change list. Well, you know, there is this one friend that's always negative. I can try to change them, but I probably can't, so maybe what happens is I spend less time with them. Okay, so you go through each person and you think about the relationship that you have with them and you start thinking to yourself, is this somebody that's going to be playing an integral part of my life 10 years from now and where I wanna be 10 years from now or is this someone who's actually kind of pulling me back into being my old self that I'm trying to grow away from? Is there certain aspects of this person or this relationship with them that I wanna change or maybe just change it completely and spend less time with them and start spending time with maybe a new acquaintance that will pull me into the person that I want to be, right? Something to think about. All right, let's keep going. What about your family?  What do you love about them?  And then on the other side, what are the things that you don't love that you do want to change? Oh yeah, well I feel like this person I feel like my dad's really surface level and he doesn't really go deep with me and he's not really an emotional guy and doesn't really open himself up. Is there a way to crack him open and maybe start to have some real, actual legitimate conversations so I can feel like I know this person, right? You can go through every single relationship and start to ask yourself, what is it that I love about it? What is it that needs to change, okay? All right, let's go to the next aspect. What about your job or your career? Okay, what is it about your job or your career? Do you love your job or is it just something that you're doing to make money?  Like why would you just automatically go, yeah well I hate my job but it's the way that I pay the bills, right? Okay, I understand that but can you make a transition plan and say okay, I can't leave today but I could come up with a way to be gone and to be doing something different in 365 days. Okay, that makes me feel good. Okay, so let's come up with a need to change. What is it that I would like my job to look like? What is it that I would like my career to look like? Maybe I do like where I am but maybe I don't like the position that I'm in. I wanna actually get a promotion. Okay, what do I need to do to change that? What do I need to do to get a promotion next 365 days? And you start coming up with an actual plan to get you to where you wanna go and your career and your job as well. Perfect, let's keep going. Let's say that you have a business, okay. What do you love about your business? You know, what do you hate about your business? What are the things that you wanna change about your business, think about that. What about the people that you work with?  You know, you start to think about that and you go, yeah, maybe I do have these people on my team that I'm not really 100% in love with. They're not really the best person, but I hired them a couple of years ago and when you look at it, you're like, actually, this person could be producing way more if I had a better person in that position. Hmm, maybe I should let this person go.  Maybe I need to let them go, right? So think about that. What about the house that you have? Are you in love with your house? Maybe you are, okay?  Oh, yeah, there are certain aspects of the house that I wanna change. It's always too dirty. Oh, okay, well, that's something that we can work on. All right, so what do I need to do to change it to make sure the house isn't as dirty as it is? Maybe you don't love your house. What is the house that you love? You know, how much would it cost to buy that house? Maybe you don't have the money for it right now. What do you need to do in order to figure out how to get that money? And what you do is you start going through every single aspect of your life and you make a plan. You just figure out what needs to be done. What about the car you drive? Do you love the car you drive?  What do you need to do to figure out what is the car that you want? Okay, figure out what it is, how much does it cost you?  And then you're more likely to work to try to get that thing. Okay, great, that's the car that I want. I know what it is. I know how much it's gonna cost me. I know exactly how much monthly payment's gonna be if I were to put down X amount of dollars. Okay, what do I need to do to get that money to drive that car? You know, it's not about just acquiring but it's also thinking, you know, maybe I feel better about myself when I'm driving this and I show up better to where I'm going. Your car's a part of it. What about your clothes? Is there clothes that you don't like?  I haven't bought clothes in a really long time. Okay, well, style's changed in the past 10 years. Maybe you don't look as good as you thought you used to back in the day and you're like, I need to change this. All right, well, let me change exactly the clothes that I'm wearing. What is it that you, how much does that cost?  I don't know what it is, but figure out what it is that you want. What about your mindset? What are different aspects of your mindset that you don't like, ah, man, you know what? I talk negatively way too much to myself. I need to stop talking negatively to myself. How come I come up with a plan to not talk as negative to myself, right? What do I love about the way that I talk to myself? Well, I build myself up. I'm a positive person. I'm more optimistic, whatever it is. Figure out what you love about the way that you talk to yourself, the way that your mindset is and then figure out what you need to change. What do you love? What do you need to change? What about your morning routine? What's your morning routine look like, right?  You just go through with a fine tooth comb and you figure out what you like, what you don't like and how can you make sure that you're building a life of just the things that you want?  How can I make sure that every single thing that I do is something that I love?  How can I make sure that every single action that I take is something that I absolutely love?  How can you make sure that every single person that you come in contact with is not somebody that brings you down, not somebody that's negative, but somebody who you absolutely love that wants the best for you and empowers you to be better? perfect. What about every thought that you think from the moment you wake up to the moment you get better? What it requires is absolute full awareness. And I know that some people listen to this. It's going to go in one ear and out the other. And you're not going to make a plan. And you're just going to go, ah, yeah, well, this is a great episode on to the next one instead of actually taking a plan and figure out what it is. Realize that you can go through every single aspect of your day and start to make changes in everything that you do. Start to make change in every single thing that you have. And realize that your life is not going to change right away. It takes time to change the person that you're with. It takes time to change the place that you live. It takes time to change the career that you have, the job that you have, the employees that you have, whatever it is, it takes time for change to happen.  Would that excite you?  Would that excite you? Hell yeah, it would. Well, it's absolutely possible, but it requires you to step up to figure out what you love, what you don't love and start to work past it. What's crazy about is that some people, like if you really think about it, some people are more intentional about putting hard work into their jobs and many people hate those jobs.  It blows my mind that some people take their jobs more serious than they take their life. Right? So imagine if you and I are creating a business. We're going to go in as business partners. What are we going to do? We're going to create a business plan first. We're not just going to go, hey, we're just going to sell this product and see what happens. No, we're going to come up with a business plan and figure out exactly, okay, what's the marketing look like? What's the sales look like? What's the shipping look like? What's the this look like in the pictures and photography and all of that stuff? We're going to have a business plan. Right?  Think about that for a second. That's the first thing. Now, if we're business partners, we're going to at least have quarterly reviews, aren't we? If you work for a business, you guys have quarterly reviews in what you do. So do you have quarterly reviews in your life? No. Well, what are you doing? Why don't you try to figure out a way to start coming up with quarterly reviews? See if you're on track to hitting your goals, the same way that if you're on a sales team, you're going to have quarterly reviews. What else are you going to have? Weekly meetings. See how today, how this week went. You're going to look back and look forward. See what you're working for. See what's going on. And then what are you going to do sometimes? My team and I have a morning huddle every single morning. Every morning I talk to my team.  Or you just kind of see in what happens. If you're not fully satisfied with your life, it might be because you've just not been intentional. You haven't been having quarterly meetings. You have no plan. You have no quarterly meetings. You have no weekly meetings. You have no morning huddles. Of course, you're not where you want to be because you might not even know where you want to be at this point. And it's some, it's just, it's just so crazy that some people take their job that they hate more serious than the life that they have in the life they're trying to build. So what would happen if you took your life as serious and planned out your life as serious and as intricately as you do your business or the company that you work for? Where would your life be in a year, five years, 10 years down the road if you took your life that seriously? And it's simple. It's not hard. But it takes time. You have to plan it out. Figure out what you want. Make a plan. You have to work for it. You're gonna have to review it often. And then you're gonna have to adjust. Things are not gonna work out exactly the way that you want. It's gonna take some time. But isn't it worth it? If this is your life? Shouldn't you be taking this more serious than anything else that exists? Because this is your life. This isn't anybody else's life. And the more that you take this seriously, the more it affects every single person you come in contact with. So if you want to build a life that you want, it doesn't you don't just wake up and it's given to you. It's something that's planned meticulously, it's reviewed often, and it's going to require you to execute every single day.  And that's all that really matters.


Well, hello there. It's Sandy and I'm going to make a beautiful soft floral card today doing some airbrushing and Copic coloring The stamp set I'm going to be using today is from pink fresh And it's called just because his beautiful sentiments that go with it and the flowers are delicate and so gorgeous And I'm going to airbrush my background right over top of the stamped image it was stamped in VersaMark and then heat embossed with white detail embossing powder and Don't worry that you're not going to really be able to see very much of it while I'm doing the airbrushing I'm going to do a rainbow ish background on this and if you decide you want to do something perhaps with Some some blending brushes and distress oxide inks or something I think you can do a similar kind of a look if you don't have airbrush to Work on with this, but I know a bunch of people just bought airbrushes because of all my crazy alcohol ink stuff So I figured I will show you some airbrush things that you can do. It'll be kind of fun It's always fun to watch magic happen anyway So I'm just picking a bunch of different random colors to make a rainbow ish I'm going from a greenish color to a an orangey to a pink to a purple and then I'll do a blue on the other side I'm not going with a strict rainbow Just something happy for my card in general with airbrush You want to use darker colors than you want it to come out because it's going to go down so light and it'll help you to Be able to see more color. I find that if I try to use really light colors Then I have to get the airbrush really close to the paper and then I end up with sploogees I'm a little better off if I can hold it higher up and be able to use a darker color and The spray goes out a little wider and then isn't as bloopy on me And airbrush does not use as much color as if you just sat there with the marker nibs trying to make this a Blended background it uses less ink because it doesn't sink into the paper So now I have my beautiful airbrush background done And I'm going to use the colorless blender to open up some areas and the colorless blender. I've got a little bit of Scrap paper off to the side in case my marker seems to feel like it needs to be scribbled off a little bit I'm trying to basically lift up some of the white lines and What this colorless blender does is just take the color off of the surface of the embossing powder Now in the past I have told people not to use markers on top of embossing powder many years ago there was an embossing powder that no longer is made which was the one that I used at the time and It just flaked and did all kinds of weird things to your nibs For the most part I find that the embossing powders that at least I own Do this just fine. You may want to test it on a scrap first to make sure that nothing funky happens But as I go over some of these you can see that when I go over a wider area like a petal of a flower Not only does that white line appear again, but I get a lighter color in the flower itself So you can get this really beautiful tone-on-tone look by just doing this step and not going on to do the coloring That I'm going to add to it later so you can choose which way you want to go But super soft super elegant and really easy to do because you're really just Removing color from off of that embossing and Here you can see even more of the flowers just start to appear as I go over it with the colorless blender Doing it really gently. I'm not trying to Trace anything and and be real specific about it if there's areas that remain with the airbrush over top of them That's just fine because I'm looking for something that's just gonna have a really soft feel to it And I was really surprised that this worked as well as it did was very very nice Well next I decided to try to add a little bit of color And this is where you'll want to add some lighter colors Instead of going with anything heavy because you could scare yourself real quickly Even this green was potentially a little darker than I should have necessarily used with it So there's that I can go back in with my colorless blender to soften out some of that which I'll do later But then I decided to add a little bit of color maybe to the base of each one of the flower petals To add just a little bit of dimension as the color moves into that area where I've already put that light color the colorless blender and That starts to create a little depth for my flowers And you can decide how much you want to do or not do on top of all of this again You might want to test it out But here I'm gonna go over some of these areas where I was like oh, I might have done a little too much Just go over again with the colorless blender Lift the white back up to kind of clean it off and then blend in some of those areas Where some of that darker color hit and I was like oh look at that I started getting more of it a feeling of depth from my flowers because now I've got a little bit of color in the Leaves a little bit more in the flowers themselves So then I got daring and I decided to add a little bit more color to it So I grabbed a pink and started putting a little bit of a darker pink in some of the very darkest areas and This is one of those places where you can take baby steps so that you don't scare yourself too much And add some color in go back in with the colorless blender to soften it and to lift those white lines back out because some of what you're seeing is the white line disappearing and When you go back in there with the colorless blender, it'll start to soften everything up But again as you go over any of this make sure you just take a look at your nibs that you're not like picking up any of the Embossing powder or anything that things flaking off in your nib and just scribble it off and you should be fine remember if anything does happen to your nibs you can always do the bag trick on them which I have a whole video on I will Link it at the end of this one in case your marker nibs need any assistance and Yeah, so this came out really pretty I love this look and I might have to try Some other interesting things. I want to do a fine art piece that kind of has this feel to it But I don't want to do it with stamps. I have no idea how I'm gonna do that But I'm gonna try it at some point so keep an eye out to see if I come up with how the heck to replicate this without a stamp But I've just used a sentiment and then I put it on a black layer That's popped on a black card base just to set it off almost like an elegant frame So that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed this video The links to the stamps and all the stuff are in the doobly-doo down below and I will see you again very soon Have a great day


This review gives an overview of the developments in the analysis of drugs of abuse and other illicit substances by Raman spectroscopy for forensic purpose. The review covers the brief overview of basic principle and instrumentation of Raman spectroscopy along with selected and recent applications for characterization of drugs of abuse using this technique. These applications show the potential value of Raman spectroscopy in the qualitative and quantitative analysis of trace amounts of drugs of abuse and other illicit substances on different matrices such as cloth, currency notes, fiber etc. without extensive sample preparation in a non-destructive manner. This article was authored by Gervinder Singh Bumbra and Rakesh Mahansharma.


So, I just wanted to start by thanking Justin for organizing this day. It's already been interesting and I'm sure it'll continue to be. And certainly, nice of him to... Raise it up a little bit. Nice of him to coordinate this to match my visit and to flatter me with a keynote. I should say I don't hold any illusions that I deserve a keynote in a room like this with the other speakers and the happy audience who's probably forgotten more on these topics than I already know. I'll accept the keynote on the basis I've traveled before this to be here at least officially I'm facing the Stanford and now in Brisbane. So I am at sabbatical, I'm pretty much in the middle of my sabbatical so the talk today I think will have a bit of a sabbatical feel which is to say kind of half-baked ideas that I've been having some of which may strike you as completely obvious and some of which may strike you as completely wrong and maybe there'll be something in there that's neither wrong nor obvious and I don't know which parts those are but you can look for those. And really, when Justin told me about what he wanted to accomplish today and the kind of discussions he wanted to start I pulled together some thoughts I've been having and tried to draw lessons from the Australian experience for the types of things I've worked on. I don't really work very much on Australia although I've been participating in some projects. But certainly I came here with the idea that I would learn a lot that would be relevant for a lot of systems around the world and I think there's lots of lessons that are held here for others and I'll try to at least explain my thinking on that and why I see it as an important source of expertise and technology for the rest of the world. And I was getting in Brisbane and you become like I said any Australian city you become a sports fanatic. So I think that influenced my title a little bit but I'll talk in general about what I mean by Aussie rules of agriculture and why I think the rest of the world is essentially becoming more Australian over time or has Australian characteristics. In terms of Australian characteristics this is probably a plot many of you are familiar with this is something I use in teaching quite a bit because there's lots of good lessons to be seen in the history of agriculture in Australia. Certainly in the history of wheat this is a plot of wheat yields over time and as I said there's lots of lessons to be learned according to different phases for example you can make a lot of analysis here with the current situation in Africa back in the early days of Australian settlement but in particular what I'll talk about today is what we've seen recently in Australia which is really two things from my mind tremendous progress on the one hand in wheat productivity, average productivity essentially going up by double over this time period even in the last 20 years we're going up by very significant amounts so that's on the one hand. On the other hand what we see is remaining very high levels of variability and even potentially arguably higher levels of variability than we've ever seen before and this idea of pushing forward the yield frontier but at the same time being prone to big setbacks is something that I think in Australia is very well understood that agriculture is a very risky business. In the rest of the world as I'll try to argue that agriculture is becoming a riskier business for various reasons at the same time that we try to push up yield potential. So just to reiterate what I've been talking about Aussie rules agriculture, Australian agriculture essentially I'm thinking of frequently water-limited crops Australia is very low amounts of irrigation which is true in parts of the world but even for European parts of the world they're becoming increasingly water limited. And the second characteristic is that variability of yields is already high but is also seemingly increasing over time and essentially this is not so much that we're getting worse at dealing with adverse weather but we're getting so good at taking advantage of good weather conditions and so in a sense it's a success story it's a relative success being slower at the partial conditions than in really good conditions and that leads to a situation where you have increased variability with all sorts of strategies then to deal with variability including some of the work that's been done here to try to breed varieties that maybe trade off a little bit of yield potential for much greater resilience or stability whatever work you'd like to do. Now why do I think these are becoming common around the world where I think it's actually a bunch of things actually one of the things I won't really emphasize today is climate becoming more variable I think that is a component in some places but I think even without that issue of is climate becoming more variable are we having bigger swings in temperature or are we having bigger swings in rainfall even without that component I think lots of regions are set to see more variability. Why? Well, a couple of reasons in terms of water stress and the average state of water stress I think that this is becoming more common will become more common around the world partly because of rise increasing temperatures this is a summary plot from the I'll just use the mouse here rather than try to turn a point I'm not blocking the screen even then not that tall. So this is a plot out of the latest working group 1 report of the IPCC again this should be familiar to most of you but just to make sure historical changes in global mean temperature up until about 2010 future changes projected for different scenarios of emissions so this would be more like a business as usual this would be a very optimistic mitigation scenario but as sure as anything in this world we can expect warming over the next few decades especially in the 50 years the probability of not warming is extremely small and the degree of warming will potentially be different but that warming is really baked into the energy and climate system and it's something that we know very well will raise the saturated vapor pressure of the atmosphere this is Clausius Clapper on its base in physics it's something that drives a lot of what we see in terms of the climate projections but it also has this effect that it will increase this factor at least by itself will tend to increase the vapor pressure gradient between the internal leaf and the atmosphere causing water to be lost at the fast rate so this in general increases water deficits a second factor which is I think something not as appreciated something I didn't really appreciate until about the last year is that relative humidity is also declining over many major agricultural regions this is another figure out of the work of the one report showing you for different seasons I'm used to calling this winter and summer but now I will not because I've learned better this is December through February we'll call it summer and June through August we'll call it winter what you can see the story of the global scale has always been relative humidity doesn't change much these were very early projections based on just simple models that you would probably maintain relative humidity you would increase specific humidity or absolute humidity but in general you'd rate maintain relative humidity that's true with the global scale but actually what it's mainly true is why it's mainly true is because there's some increase in relative humidity over the oceans which is compensated by which is counteractive by decreases in total land and in particular if you look at some of the key regions that we're going to grow food and what I've done is actually try to highlight that here by taking the projections just four places in the world where we grow a significant amount of food and then looking at the main growing season so this would be June through August in the northern hemisphere or December through February say in the southern hemisphere this shows you the mean projected change in relative humidity for a 50 year period 2060 relative to 2010 and you can see that in some of the bread baskets like in the US and throughout your and in eastern China you're seeing decrease in relative humidity expected on average to be on the order of 10% 5% to 10% say Australia is kind of in the middle ground there are parts for example in India where we don't expect very much now I shouldn't reiterate that the physics of this is actually quite well understood I just didn't appreciate it at least in the sense that most moisture in the atmosphere is last sort of evaporated over the ocean surface and because with climate change what happens is the ocean warms less quickly than the land you're tending to increase the saturation pressure over land more quickly than increasing the water vapor content in the air and that leads to a decrease in relative humidity over land especially in continental regions or intercontinental regions another interesting aspect of this is that depending on which model you look at you obviously get different answers but the change you get in temperature is very much highly correlated with the change you get in relative humidity and again the physics of this is well understood related to the amount of evaporated versus sensible late versus sensible heat flux but this is showing on the bottom here the correlation between out of 30 climate models a model's projected change in the daytime temperature versus the projected change in humidity and it's extremely negative high significant correlations throughout so what this means is that not only on average are we getting warmer and less humid but the models that get the warmest are actually the models getting the driest and for a cropping system that has very big implications because you're really ramping up the saturation pressure at the same time you're really turning down the humidity so this creates this huge vapor pressure deficit which could potentially drive a lot of water stress another factor separate from this so I'm going to start with the factors contributing to greater variability, greater water stress then I'll acknowledge some of the factors that may be working in the opposite direction and I should have made it for now and then I'll talk about essentially why this is an empirical question which one wins out and why I think it's going to be more the and so again I think this audience will be well aware that water resources in many key irrigated regions are stressed and especially in places like part of the Central US not our main rainbow but a significant amount of agricultural grade in North Texas and that area certainly in South Asia this is showing that groundwater depletion rates estimated by recent study really very very high rates on the water so you can see here the scales which is millimetre per year very very high rates in the North China Plain as well so this is going to lead to just generally more water stress a separate factor which is I think one again not why we appreciate although people who work in raising their potential very much recognizes is that any increase in biomass that you can achieve is going to come with an increased amount of transportation that there is a very fundamental link between how much carbon you can take in and how much water you get out and that depends a lot on vapor pressure deficit but for a given vapor pressure deficit this seems to be a very well conserved property of a given flow of synthetic type so Maze will have a particular coefficient we will have a very good coefficient but it's a very fixed quantity so that as you try to get higher and higher yields, higher and higher you're going to require higher and higher amounts of water this is a summary of that relationship from one of Thompson-Pair's recent papers and he's been aware of this for a very long time but certainly you have more efficient water use in Maze than the rice or soybean but the point here is that as you try to push yields higher the amount of water that you require is going to necessarily be higher which as you require more water the chances of you being short of that requirement is going to grow ok now the factors that we would think to be making the world less Australian or less water stressed certainly higher CO2 is a big deal it's again something that some people have appreciated for a long time some people are a little slower to recognize but there still are some interesting questions about how important this effect will be this is just a cartoon from a review paper by Andy Leakey just kind of giving you the sense that the idea is with higher CO2 plants are able to improve that trade-off between carbon gain and water loss by closing their storm out of that you have essentially for a given amount of photosynthesis or potentially for a C3 crops and even greater amount of photosynthesis you lose less amounts of water that's again you can see this in any sort of experiment that's wrong with high CO2 over and over again and so yes it's true that higher CO2 it's not necessarily as big of a factor as we in some places it will be a huge factor in other places it won't be as big of a factor as some of these other changes I've already talked about and as an example of that I'm just showing here some simulations we're doing with Graham Hammer and others looking at main systems throughout the world and what the projected changes in temperature and humidity and CO2 imply for the amount of water stress which is a very close predictor of the amount of yields that you get so I'll take a minute just to explain here you have just looking at the temperature changes predicted by the miles over a 50 year period you have a projected in this particular site say in Nebraska which is a very dry site you really exacerbate water stress you have an average yield loss of about 20% projected by this model now if you look at the humidity changes on top of temperature the humidity changes again in crop studies you actually increase that to about 30% and you also significantly widen because as I said there's a negative correlation at play here where the hotter models are also much drier so you're actually making the downside projections much worse now if you then introduce the CO2 changes we expect corresponding to these climb scenarios you certainly have a beneficial effect relative to say temperature only you reduce the losses but you reduce them by about the same amount that you would increase them if you were accounting for humidity so the net effect of accounting for both humidity and CO2 is something that looks a little bit on average like what you have before but with a wider distribution again because of this correlation between humidity and temperature now it depends on site so there are some places and I haven't fully unpacked why there are places in France for example where the humidity changes although they're significant but the CO2 is certainly enough so CO2 here is actually driving this particular system in France say to a less water stress situation even though temperature is going up and humidity on average is going down but throughout the corn belt of the US the net situation is negative in other words CO2 is not enough to overcome these driving factors towards more water I should say that I think one of the reasons I say these CO2 issues are still slightly on the top is that there's a lot of interesting interactions between chemistry temperature and CO2 obviously as you change the transpiration rates of the canopy you change the temperature of the canopy as you change the temperature of the canopy you change the vapor pressure surrounding the leaves as you change that so there's a lot of intricacies that are not necessarily capturing the experimental data or in the models and if anything these are going to push the CO2 effect to being smaller in terms of the net season there's also increases in the leaf area that again most of this audience is well aware of and this is maybe beyond the simulations I showed you why the models can capture and the reasons we don't think CO2 will be able to help as much as might appear in the context of humidity changes this would be an additional factor that's not in this model the other thing I think counteracting a lot of these other trends in terms of more water stress is that autonomy continues to change and often cases become more water efficient around the world so in the US we've had a big introduction of no-till lots of improved weed control so there's less evaporative losses or transpiration losses associated with weeds you have better earlier ground cover which limits evaporative losses so these are all going to in general make a system more able to capture rainwater and make it into useful production less likely then to fall short of the water you need to meet your target okay so this was all by way of kind of explaining the types of things that will drive systems to be more or less water stressed and more or less variable in terms of yields given the variation in water stress that happens from mid-year but I haven't yet sort of made a firm conclusion I showed you some examples from the US and the West from simulations but I think that overall this is an interesting question that you have factors pushing both ways and how does it all play out and so what I would like to do is explain a little bit of some recent results we've had and I think that in deciding what to talk about there's always the opportunity to keep it very broad but I'm going to use this chance to present some research results which may seem a little now for a little while but I'll bring it back at the end and hopefully this is not in the category of being either obvious or wrong because these are recent and peer reviewed results so in the US we grow a lot of corn and we grow it throughout the country but especially it's in the central United States mostly rain fed systems very high yield and very productive very deep soils and very high yields except when you get a year like 2012 so this was a big drought in the US now I've heard Australians kind of stop at the drought that we had in 2012 as you know we're a bunch of whips and we call that a real drought but in the US it was a big deal it was this is a picture taken in July which is this is not what corn should look like in July this is right around when it should be flowered and this is a nice picture because you know ironically there's a lot of interplays between supply and manufacturers that we were talking about this morning ok but corn largely in the grain fed and in the corn belt of the US one thing that we have in the US which doesn't exist in Australia is subsidized insurance and one of the benefits of that so we can talk about the downsides of that but one of the benefits of insurance in the US these records are now made public and so what this is showing you here is out of the three big producers and three biggest producers in the US a plot of field level yields that we have records for and the color is an indication of the level of yield so red is high yielding green would be sort of average yielding and purple would be low yield and this is for a particular year in 2012 through 2010 we have these records going back to the mid 90s excuse me so what you can see here and I talked to you yesterday a lot about satellite based appreciation of heterogeneity let's say and you can here see this an insurance based appreciation of the tremendous amount of heterogeneity yet within a system even within say an individual county you'll get a lot of variation in yield that will surprise people who study these things but it's a very nice example of how variable productivity is even in a very productive very well managed system now this is a movie showing you all the data and I like this I like this because it took me like an hour to make it so I want to make sure it's easy but I like it because it really demonstrates the the difference in the spatial patterns from your years so there's not a single spatial pattern that repeats itself the amount of temporal variation you get depends a lot on where you are and from an analytical standpoint this is really great because we can do a lot of rigorous statistical analyses without worrying that we are confusing cause and effect or at least confusing one factor for our left factor and so what we've done is now pair this data with lots of really high resolution weather data that exists in the region and ask questions such as what are the key factors environmentally that drive yield variations and then back to this key question are we getting any better or worse over time at dealing with drought in the US and this is the question I want to talk about today and this is an issue that somebody raised this morning about needing to rely on I think this is Eric needing to rely on really good data not an anecdote so in the US we are a wash in anecdotes of how clever farmers are and how great seed companies are and how better at dealing with drought now I don't necessarily disagree with any of those statements I mean seed companies are clever farmers are great and we've gotten better as I said at dealing with bad years but we've gotten potentially even better at dealing with good years and so this is an empirical question of how is variability how is sensitivity to bad conditions changing over time okay so first what we do is we link this with all sorts of other temperature data so that was supposed to be an animation but it didn't translate this is just two snapshots of two different years and I'm highlighting here a variable that seems to be quite important which is daytime temperature in the flower room or 60 to 90 degrees after so and actually what's even better than Tmax but this slide I just had is Tmax is the vapor pressure deficit so there's a high correlation between daytime temperatures because again the daytime temperature is driving the saturation and empirically that correlation is well about 0.9 and so we can build very I would say models that are maybe half as sophisticated as some of the genomic models that you guys are using but that are able to deal with lots of potential variables lots of data avoid overfitting and we can actually ask the question what are the key drivers of variability and it turns out that it is vapor pressure deficit in the ASCII window and even more than rainfall variation what drives water stress in the U.S. is high vapor pressure deficit this is different than Australia my understanding of Australia is the soils are not very deep there's a lot of in-season rainfall there's a very high variability in that in-season rainfall and so rainfall is driving a lot of variations but the U.S. is actually a vapor pressure deficit story which has been a hard story to tell to the people who are used to talking about rainfall but I think it's borne out in lots of different ways because the rainfall isn't important but above a certain threshold the rainfall doesn't matter nearly as much as the high vapor pressure deficit okay so what we do is we use all this data we use all this weather data we use this technique called Mars or multivariate adaptive regression splines to try to figure out what the two relationships are we're going to use that all to define what the exposure of each individual place in each end and year what was the exposure to drought for that particular environment and then ask how are they performing the indifferent drought conditions over time okay so this is a summary of for corn we've done this for soybean as well of what variables emerge is really important and as I said the most important is vapor pressure deficit in the window of 1690s after selling this is the relationship it picks up so it's able to pick up non-linearities it essentially fits piecewise linear functions and what you see is a declining yield with high vapor pressure deficit and then a really quickly declining yield with very high vapor pressure deficit penalties associated with late sowing in the US this is something that's well known and it emerges as very important and then again as I said we have some role of precipitation but it's actually not a very significant factor in corn because we have these deep soils that are pretty much starting at saturation in most years okay so what we do then is for each place and year as I said we know what the weather was so we can actually say according to our model is this a good or bad situation for maize in this case or for soybean and this just shows you for each place and year whether we think it was particularly bad which would be a red dot or particularly good which would be a blue dot and you can see again variation over time you can see 2012 is a particularly bad year and this is years like 2004 and so the idea is quite simple I think which is that well we have in every year at least we have a few well maybe not every year but most years we have at least a few or say at least a hundred fields that were exposed to a particular type of drought stress and we can say okay how did it do under drought stress in 1995, 1996 and we can do that for different levels of drought stress so even though this year was very heavily droughted there would be some locations that didn't have very severe drought and vice versa and this is what we see in the data so this is plotting now the average fields four fields exposed to a particular set of conditions over time so red would be the most stressful conditions blue would be the least stressful conditions and as you'd expect the more stressful conditions have lower yields and this tells us that our model is sensible that if you fit a trend to these different sets of conditions or these different levels of stress you see yield gains throughout this 18 year period for all levels of stress but you see yield gains that are faster at the higher yield levels or the lower levels of stress then at the lower yield levels or the higher levels of stress you can see 2012 really it's a severe yield loss but even if you remove that yield from the analysis you retain this kind of spreading of the difference between a good and a bad condition and you can see that a little bit more clearly if we take some of the key individual components of stress so for example the key one for drought would be high vapor pressure deficit this is what I showed you before and I've split it up into quintiles of this so these colors indicate the quintiles of vapor pressure deficit in region and you can look at yield trends associated with high vapor pressure deficit and again we have lots of yield progress in cool conditions or low vapor pressure deficit conditions but we have essentially no progress under very high vapor pressure which is the more stressful condition and interestingly for sowing dates it's kind of the reverse story where actually the less advantageous sowing days or the late sowing days we've actually been making quite a good progress there so there's a couple of ways we've tried to make sure that this makes sense the point was to take the apps in the model many of you are familiar with very good at simulated water stress compared to most models at least in my opinion and actually simulated some of the management changes that have been going on so what I should say is that this story of greater increases of yields overall is very much a story that has been associated with increased planting density of maize in the US this is kind of a well known thing that over time the planting density has increased in the US what's surprising to me or what was surprising to us people is that even over this very recent period there's been about a 25% increase in sowing density of corn so what we did was take an option and run it for a 25% increase in sowing density and what you see is that you get higher average yields but so these green lines of a higher sowing density relative to the control of higher average yields but you get actually bigger drops so in a dry year you're not able to produce anymore sometimes you can even produce less if you're over stressing individual plants and they move though and their harvest index goes way down this just shows you a scatter of vapor pressure deficit and interestingly versus yielding interestingly the increase of slope from about 15% to 28% so almost a doubling of the sensitivity to high vapor pressure deficit matches very well what we see in the empirical observations and another thing we did as a test was we just each year independently fit a regression let's go back here if that's alright fit a regression between the basically the high amount of vapor pressure deficit areas for that particular year there's lots of reasons you wouldn't want to rely on that as your estimate of sensitivity to vapor pressure because we know these different places for example southern Illinois has very poor soils has high vapor pressure deficits in this year you don't want to attribute all of those yield drops to the high vapor pressure deficit but what you can do is do this over time and see is there a trend in the spatial relationship so you're not now relying on looking at temporal trends and yields for different levels you're just looking at each individual year and sure enough what we see is some variation in that inferred sensitivity but a steady decline and again you get that very strongly if you include 2012 but you also get the stash one shows you it's very statistically significant these red dots are showing you what absent showed as the inferred sensitivity so if anything the empirical data shows something more extreme than what absent shows now one implication of this in relation to my original sort of thesis I guess is that you have a higher sensitivity to drop or in this case a higher sensitivity of vapor pressure deficit which is the main driver of drop in the US and what's shown here is a projection of vapor pressure deficit in this region over time driven again both by higher temperatures and by lower humidity so we expect average vapor pressure deficits for example in 2050 to be almost as high on average as they were in 2012 this is a dot here this isn't an unusual feat this is actually a dot hidden by a poor placement of the but you can see that there's been a historically if you include 2012 historically certainly a trend and that trend is expected to continue the bands here show the span from the 25th to 75th percent out of the 5th to 95th percent out of the mouth so there's some uncertainty associated with individual projections for this region but certainly the way this towards higher vapor pressure deficit now again the implication of being more sensitive to this is that this increased frequency of drop will actually be a bigger deal than we thought because rather than being more adapted and much better dealing with these drop conditions we're actually becoming more and more sensitive to these drop conditions so if you project out the implications of this for yield using current sensitivity you get something like a 15 percent yield loss but using the trend you get something like a 30 percent now this is not a prediction this is not to say we think this historical increase in sensitivity will definitely continue over time of course we would hope to do something about that but just to kind of drive home that this trend is not a small trend this is a very almost a doubling of the sensitivity over time in these last 20 years so another way to think about this and this is again I think it's going to happen in a lot of places and I haven't again this is not something that's fully fleshed out but if you look at a lot of places like in Iowa what's happening is yield potential isn't increasing in this case often driven by an interaction between the cultivars and an increased sowing density so you have very high yield potential and increase over time and what happens now is if you look at average yields of 10 tons per hectare or more the water demands of that crop are approaching the amount of water available in the system in the range of the system so what I'm showing here so again there's very strict relationships between carbon uptake and water loss which are governed essentially by the type of crop which in this case is corn and by the vapor pressure deficit which depends a lot on temperature so you can look at the simulations and see very clearly this type of relationship in terms of efficiency and so what I'm showing you here is if you take the amount of rainfall that falls in this county and you look at the efficiency that you can expect the maximal efficiency of all well actually kind of an upper limit is a rule of thumb at least according to Scott when I was talking with him and I still have to track this down a little further but say that almost you'd expect 75% of the annual rainfall to be consumable by the crop and you can only do so much of making sure the water gets in the soil and doesn't evaporate and doesn't go out for a few weeks and in the US for example we have a lot of runoff under the hiring minutes which Australians know something about as well so if you figure you can get 75% of the rainfall to the crop at best and there's a certain maximal efficiency of converting that to biomass and there's a certain maximum efficiency of maximum fraction of biomass you can get to yield then what you get is sort of a maximum possible yield for a given amount of rainfall and this is showing you the lines for the historical 5th percentile of annual rainfall and the historical medium of annual rainfall and so what I think the story is here is that first of all we start lowering our efficiency of water use and that drives water stress because for a given amount of biomass you need more water so that's the shift from they say the dash lines which are representing an average temperature of 28 degrees to the 29 degrees and at the same time what you're getting is yields pushing up against what the dry years can support and again this is the Australian story that the dry years can only support so much biomass as you can imagine for that amount of rainfall and so you wouldn't expect the bad years to get much better than they are right now actually don't have up to 2012 which was a little bit worse in terms of combinations of rainfall and temperature and eventually you can continue to increase under good years but even eventually you're going to hit some wall in terms of advocates because of the water bill now of course there's interventions that can be made on the water side and there's already reports of increased irrigation in the Midwest which is a novel but I think that there's a lot of indications that what you'd expect to happen in the US is something very similar to the last 20 years of what's happened in Australia continued progress but increased variability and again this is without even considering changes in climate variability and for that matter without even considering the increase in DPD just even if you state at a constant temperature you're already very close to what you can expect out of a dry year now I haven't I haven't got the data or the time so I'll blame the time but I haven't gotten to talk about other regions but for example we have a study going on in the Chinese systems which shows that as a combination of better yields over time higher yield potentials and also climate change which are increasing again in vapor pressure deficits that essentially the ratio of rain-fed to irrigated yields which you can consider kind of a measure of the importance of water stress has been declining over time but we're now in this situation in this region where it's becoming much more frequent in water stress not necessarily because water well it's partly because the temperature changes and mostly because of the yield potential increases not necessarily because rainfall itself is changing that much rain-fed European systems I would say as I showed you in the beginning have this very large humidity signal especially in southern Europe decline in rainfall this is one of the areas where decline in rainfall is quite robust one of the few areas in the world where we have a general expectation of decline in rainfall higher temperatures and higher vapor pressure deficit or lower humidities and on top of that we already know relative humidities yield potentials are quite high so again that system is set up for not being able to improve much in the four years and maybe all the gains will have to be associated with increased variability and then as I said this is not even counting the issue of increased rainfall variability increased temperature variability which will drive that further okay so that's sort of my argument or my thought process for well partially for coming to Australia besides the cricket and the football that I wanted to see but in terms of trying to learn about how how people here have thought about these issues of how to cope with increased high variability and how to cope with water stress and from my perspective this has always been a mecca of dealing with of crop growth under stress and continues to be although yesterday he said I should never have come here to destroy my great visions of camera but it's still re-examining after periods and in Brisbane as well I'm learning a lot about this but certainly there's a lot of lessons to be held I think for the research side of things but also for the farm management side and for the farm policy side of things and I don't know exactly what those are I'm still thinking through those but I think that there are a few and one is simply that we may make that not have this mindset which exists in the US and I think exists in a lot of systems that I've worked in which is that farmers will think about a new technology if there's no trade-offs associated with yield potential because they make most of their money in a really good year and that's sort of been the starting point for a lot of discussions about adaptation climate change because you don't want to sacrifice what you can do in really good conditions but I think to some extent in the story of Drysdale and other things in Australia as I understand was very much making a trade-off now I'm happy to be correct about that but there is certainly a point where a trade-off makes sense when you look at the value of more stability as opposed to higher potential certainly diversifying activities within a farm I think that this might be a topic of Bob's talk later I'm not actually sure but there is certainly you see in Australia a tremendous amount of diversification within farm that we don't have in the US or a lot of systems around the world certainly more grain storage will be a rational response to more variability at this aggregate scale and I think the beginnings of that can be seen already and I think one of the big things obviously in Australia there are huge land holds whether that is you know there's lots of reasons for that it's not just dealing with variability but certainly having large land holds is one way to do a very high variability and then the only thing now Australia is I think leading the edge on which holds a lot of lessons is actually decision support systems for farmers getting on the the leading edge of seasonal forecasting and being able to inform decisions and one of the responses to high variability is to essentially either become very, let's say conservative in your input because you're not sure what are your record conditions or to become just very inefficient because you're applying so much so I think there's as I look at the landscape there's lots of lessons and lots of technology being developed in Australia that are going to be and I think you know above all it's the at least from my perspective what I'm interested in learning throughout this Chicago it's about the development and the management of drought-powered crops and what that means and how much does it mean I started off with a picture of grain sorghum how much does it mean switching out of the crop into something like grain sorghum and we talked a little bit about this this morning maybe wholesale shifts in the clocking system are the I'm going to steal Mark's words here and I'm not even sure I'm going to use it correctly but this would be a more transformative change than just trying to be incremental adjustments to the systems that exist maybe that's the strategy to deal with with the prospects of much higher variability is to switch out of a given system that's exposing it to that so nothing else I didn't go over time and hopefully I stimulate a little bit of thought and I'm happy to receive my time for Mark because I know he tends to go on and on where I can take questions it's up to him I've got a few mics here John Evans, probably Graham Fakwa I'm done with this here, would be asking this question but I don't know whether you're aware of the papers that he's published with my project on the decline in pan-evaporation which is somewhat counter to the story of the decrease in relative humidity equate to drying so in Graham and my projects experience in fact it's not supported the long term observations of evaporation do not support any dry world with warming yeah, good question I'm aware of the work I have to say that I'm still wrapping my head around the differences between well, I know I have the differences between pan-evaporation and transpiration efficiency on the other hand the differences between kind of an absolute view of the world which I've been maybe falling into which is that BPD is what drives transpiration and there is no consideration of sort of boundary layer effects of greater wind speeds just in general the effects of wind speeds so it is it is a puzzle in my mind of why you don't see observational that you might expect it but over the time we have observations there's lots of explanations that you can encode for why you haven't seen it even though it's what you expect but you know I would hope to resolve that in my mind at least it may well be resolved in the notion that looking at humidity and temperature is not going to tell you the whole story from a plant's perspective just like it will tell you from a pan-evaporation that on that point we haven't seen big changes on the bottom can you hear me now we haven't seen big changes in BPD in Australia over the last 30 years I think it's fair to say the reason for the reduction in evaporative demand has been a mixture of reduction in wind speed as we discussed yesterday and then some places dimming as well this is my quadric alongside me backwards I wanted to ask on the diagram you showed us running into a limitation by water in the May sites in the Midwest that horizontal red line is the upper bound the upper bound was horizontal yet it must increase with increasing CO2 certainly it does that was a lazy way of just showing a reference point for current CO2 levels and for the 5% rainfall where would you expect that line to fall but you're right it should be slanted with a slope according to the situation yeah and at the risk can I pass this to Mike to finish the question I was just interested in the numbers in one of your slides the one where you had a BPD of 2.2 kPa so could you go to that slide it was about 10 bank was it this one or I think one bank yeah this one here it's probably been that one it's the one also I could rate sure well this is the same panel so you have this one yeah so I'm wondering how that is going to be calculated okay the yeah that one this one here yeah so in absent the way that BPD sort of the average daily BPD is calculated is you look at the BPD at the at the peak of the daytime maximum and you look at the BPD at the minimum which is typically very small or even zero and then you take the you take 75% of the difference I'm just trying to be sure so essentially it's kind of a weighted average of the peak and the daily it's not a sort of an hourly calculation of BPD it's something that's so what's the temperature the roughly ballpark those numbers if I look correctly you're going from 2.2 to 2.6 kPa on though this is yield here this is log yield this is BPD on the x axis here so these are average daily BPDs over a 30 day period and what are those numbers these numbers go from about 1 to 2 kPa