Dr. Neil Davis works with the Urban Foundation on Developer Experience in the Urban Web 3 Ecosystem. Trained as a nuclear engineer, Neil now studies the history and philosophy of science and technology, applied high performance computing, and science and engineering pedagogy. Dr. Davis also teaches computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, focusing on applied computer science for researchers and traditional engineers. Water above the laptop may be the most dangerous thing we do today. In the beginning, God created the prokaryotes, and the prokaryotes were without nucleus and organelle, and structural simplicity was upon the face of the deep, and chemotaxis moved it upon the face of the waters. A single-celled organism possesses many advantages, notably simplicity of form. Being largely indistinguishable, they have no differentiation or specialization. Prokaryotes often form large colonies, such as the cyanobacteria. Some prokaryotes discovered early on that it paid better to consume resources that had already been processed into usable form by another cell, rather than to process those resources oneself. Thus, predator and prey were born, and they have always exemplified divergent and separable evolutionary strategies. The resulting arms race means that predators are constantly adapting to better extract resources from prey, while prey are evolving to evade, resist, fight, or poison predators. Selection pressures applied at individual species and clade levels lead to speciation across deep time. At the Mormon Transhumanist Conference, that may be the most controversial take here. More complex forms seem better able to evade predators, and the simple symbiotic alliances between differentiated prokaryotes evolved into the eukaryotes and into multicellular life forms. Simpler forms also abounded, including the liminal virus. Evasion of pathogenic disease, or disequilibrated colonization by simpler forms of life, has been one of the primary drivers towards increasing complexity in multicellular life. The internet began in the late 1960s. It was born in an alliance between the Cold War Department of Defense and the academic research community. This community had a signal advantage. It possessed strong norms of professional discourse, which shaped the way that the community formed. The nascent internet generally functioned as a real-name high-trust environment, if not exactly of peers, at least of colleagues.  And here we'll see it gradually evolve from the early 1970s until I think 1987 is the last picture here. Literally it was a nervous system incarnate in copper and silicon. And this continued particularly through the Usenet days of the 1980s. One hallmark of the Usenet era, as differentiated from the earlier Arpanet days, was a gradually eroding social trust. Spam was invented and internet-based scams started to spin up. Suitability gained in popularity as a countermeasure to both of these as well as to restrictions on discourse. The revelation that persistent digital records could affect real-world reputation further fueled a cyberpunk obsession with identity control and identity subversion, including hacking. Computer viruses could propagate for the first time as we look at this spreading here. Although von Neumann and others explored the possibility of mathematical structures which could emulate life or at least produce self-replication, it was not until the creeper virus of the 1970s that self-replicating code was observed in the wild. Like a bacillus in an immune system free host, code-based computer viruses began to spread from the 1980s onward. The crisis arrived in the form of the World Wide Web, founded initially on the belief of the democratization of information, right? Like we wanted to make information free. The Web rapidly became dominated by a handful of large corporations. The reason for this is that user experience was the predominant driver of consumer preference cascades. Any child of the 1990s or earlier can remember back to eBay and Myspace and Friendster and Napster and these waves of technologies that would come forward and shape the way that we interacted with the Web. Initially, any of these served as a proof of concept that something could be done, and then it either became the only significant player or a killer app came along and started to own the space. In most areas, we don't have significant competition in the same sense that we did in, say, 1996. Search engines drove discovery and then focused attention asymmetrically. The walled garden approach of AOL and then later Apple and Facebook led to concentrations of users which tipped the balance from single web page hosts presenting their own idiosyncratic views, on their own servers perhaps, to corporate approved generosity and ultimately censorship. As internet data sources have overwhelmed traditional media publishing and distribution, the resulting tsunami of information and informatization has swept into every corner of lived human experience in technological societies. The ongoing universal exposure to alien and internally incompatible, incommensurable value systems has undergirded the well-documented crisis of credibility or collapse of meaning that essentially all Western institutions are facing today. The worldwide web and its technological predecessors acted as a cultural petri dish of clean agar which grew every spore engine which fell upon it. The turn towards a low trust than a zero trust environment was inevitable if anything like an analogy with prokaryotic evolution holds true. Mega corporate platforms are in a way worse than a purely zero trust environment because they don't advertise that the world is zero trust. They lure the unwary into transgressing arbitrary social norms that are fixed globally and thereby courting the wrath of social media mobs and the loss of access to data and finances and other things held in quote-unquote trust. The pre-web cypher punks were right. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. If anything, they were too limited. Not only their valued crypto-anarchic open society, but any non-mega corporate society at all requires true privacy. High culture and low culture have both articulated and preserved valuable insights in forms of human flourishing. However, throughout the 20th century and particularly by means of the consumer revolution, our lives have been thoroughly colonized by capital and commercial instruments. So-called economies of scale have disrupted smallholders, artisans, and shopkeepers to the extent that these have been virtually eradicated from the modern landscape in favor of plastic and polluting dark satanic mills. Although small-scale provident living has supported gardening, canning, and home production, none of this has survived across a large enough cultural segment to matter macroscopically. And unfortunately, because it's anti-capitalist, it's been tarred as prepper and antisocial. And in many respects, all of our physical goods and most of our modes of interaction have entered this post-consumer phase. There's essentially no native culture left, only that forged in the boardroom. What cyberspace and human culture writ broadly needed was an immune system. And in good Darwinian form, such an immune system has been evolving before our eyes. An immune system formally consists of layers with increasing specificity. First, surface barriers, then an innate immune system, and finally an adaptive immune system. The objective of the immune system is to protect the organism, in this case, human sociality and agency. In an immune system, the surface barriers are designed to make it hard for exogenous agents to enter a cell or organism. In our analogy, the primary surface barrier was the match of physical separation to psychological separation. Surface barriers have been finally rendered obsolete by the launch of the World Wide Web. They're out of the picture for us now. And to the extent they exist today, it's largely a matter of incredible self-discipline or ignorance or happy accident. You just happen to happen to cross the things that are out there. The innate immune system responds non-specifically to pathogens, right?  Any immune system must have a way of deciding what is me and what is not me. Frames is an identity problem in a zero-trust environment. Users have evolved several ways to uniquely identify agents without reference to legacy systems. Chief among these means is the blockchain. Introduced by Bitcoin for control and transaction of digital assets and since much exploited beyond that initial design intent. Identity is still fluid and polysemas, but it is also indelibly demonstrable. The individual actor has the capacity to express itself with many public faces or with none. One of these typically enjoys government sanction and liability, but it is no more real than the others, only more legible to regulation and taxation. Another aspect of the innate immune system is the public visibility of code. Since the 1980s, the open source movement has developed an ethic of transparency on epistemological and practical grounds. Summing these up is that you have a right to know and change what code you are running and errors are more likely to be detected by many eyes. Both of these are aiming at trying to create an ethos of truth, right, that we're building models that carve reality at the joints. The adaptive immune system, unlike the innate immune system, responds to specific pathogenic incursions. Particular conditions arise, whether through social, regulatory, military, or other requirements, which must be met with specialized forms that thereafter are in competition with the external factor. For instance, one mega-corporate solution to what it perceives as a threat, such as unsanctioned beams, is to attempt to mandate the ultimate traceability of any images provenance. This was a Microsoft project a couple of years ago. The internet immune system thus evolves to further obfuscate legibility and enhance individual control and self-determination by shifting to less traceable technologies such as the interplanetary file system. The point is not whether or not a salient technology such as deepfakes, 3D-printed firearms, deviant scientific or political thought, or even DRM-free sharing of copyrighted material can be contained. Our experience with export-grade cryptography since the 1980s and 1990s has already shown that regulatory attempts ultimately will fail. The philosophical question is, what kind of world will evolve? A FATAC completely driven by factors beyond any office or individual. The practical question then for us is how any particular group of actors can preserve their own agency autonomy and ambit of action. The first decentralized autonomous organization, the DAO itself, was created in 2016 as a way of distributing ownership and stake in a joint venture capital fund. The DAO was a new form of organization in that it was essentially a mathematical entity, a set of smart contracts on the blockchain to which anyone had access. The DAO lived up at least to decentralize an autonomous. No money was held centrally with token-based authentication yielding the right to vote on projects. Having set the criteria for membership and investment, the DAO then operated in truly democratic fashion until an exploit of imperfectly written smart contract code led to theft, crisis, and the ultimate reorganization of the Ethereum blockchain itself. DAO's have rapidly evolved as a way of distributing ownership and stake in a purely democratic way. The word democracy has been much abused over the past several thousand years, but here I use it in a sense much like the Greek original. The holders of an immutable and indelible token cast their secured votes to govern their polis. DAO's represent a resurgence of the city-state, the sovereign city-state, and a new guise. Will this be enough to evade imperializing aggregates which dominate today's web? Decentralized autonomous organizations, zero-knowledge cryptographic proofs, cryptocurrencies, proof of identity systems, and their as-yet-unborn kin represent the evolution of an immune system on top of the Darwinian churn of the legacy internet. The stakes are necessarily high. Possession is de facto ownership, the other end of the stick from not your keys, not your coins. The focus is currently on ownership of money, non-fungible tokens, and similar kinds of assets. But broadly speaking, such systems are going to allow the authenticated ownership of all data and assets one holds, from chat messages to market shares to physical real estate. There may be good reasons to retain the legacy system for some classes of physical or legal artifacts, but at minimum, these will all be an evolutionary competition with purely autonomous constructs. Code is law. Having set the criteria for membership, a DAO can act as the stakeholders direct. The form is still somewhat yeasty today, like a cyanobacteria. It doesn't have a lot of differentiation. It tends to act as a mess. So I predict that we should see further innovation in DAO-like entities. One can imagine hierarchical, concentric, role-specialized DAOs, as well as other taxonomically related forms. Just as one can imagine, progressively less organized instances in a chaos-happy internet. Organization may not even be the word we want to use for a DAO by the end of the day. We must consider all of these modern systems, particularly in a highly connected world, to be competing with each other, interacting at the pinnacle intensity of competence and competition. Any differential advantage that can be exploited to out-compete an adversary in the system not only can be exploited, but should be. Any system which does not have an operational cryptocurrency, DAO-like layer, whatever you want to call it, is de facto immuno-compromised in the world today.  They also need to guard the embers of communities that have survived the advent of the World Wide Web and enable new growth. In a nutshell, the early internet was a cocktail party. By the age of Usenet and the World Wide Web era, the internet had evolved into a player versus player defect-defect equilibrium. In that kind of scenario, brigading, spamming, and anonymity are rational adaptive behaviors, but they're not pro-social behaviors. Most of the mega-corporations that are operating in the world today are operating under a model of reality in which the consumers essentially atomized krill to be consumed, to be guided, to be sent through this churn. Like the model, the vision of human agency has been lost. The legacy internet has in a sense become a crab bucket. It's been building things back into itself in a dysfunctional and frankly satanic way. Communities built on decentralized Web 3 platforms, such as Mastodon, the entire Fediverse, and Herbet, have stepped back from the purely player-versus-player world of the globally-named space social media internet. These today are starting to have more of a block party feel, wherein one can wander from house to house and encounter some of the same faces in the same or new guise. Conversations can drop and resume anew in different locales with largely the same composition. Marrying the underlying cryptographic identity requirements of DAOs to communications tools and databases yields a strong, stable solution to the problem of retaining a foothold of personal identity from which to coordinate one's multifaceted digital life. IPFS, Sovereign Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee's, Solid and Herbet all offer their take on this requirement. In a sense, even a signal chat group running its own server is a kind of token-free DAO. The telos of social computing is to recreate the village green, not the penitentiary. Revisiting this thesis here, right, all tools for the individual and collective need to be architected around using cryptographic proofs to create stable, high-trust havens in an otherwise zero-trust adversarial world. The village is a stable, long-term tribe which shares values and assets in common, from which a member occasionally ventures out into the broader social web but always has a home. Every village will grow its own culture, perhaps even its own cultists, enabled by decentralized technologies to protect their assets and precious peculiarities. The worldwide web has been an extinction-level event for many forms of life, livelihood and culture. For others, it has offered strange forms of life support and even thriving. With a new immune system evolved and now operational, human endeavor stands on the cusp of a Cambrian explosion, unconstrainable by a rent-seeking boardroom and bureaucracy world that never comprehended the light shining in its darkness. Thank you. And they tell me I have about a minute and a half. I can hear you. A question here. Thank you. Now it's on. So, to follow the Eukaryotevolution analogy, would you agree that without a common identity protocol that a single-celled organism is the effective ceiling for each disparate identity system, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solano or Cardano? I've lost my... Am I back? Okay. I think that we need interoperable protocols that at a minimum allow them to talk to each other. What I really envisioning happening is something like the nucleus evolves that controls the center of everything and interacts through interfaces with all of the other services that are out there. But that you do have this core part of you. I mean, this is very Cartesian, right? Like this idea that you have this thing that is immutably you and anything inside of it is you and anything outside of it is not quite you. So you can imagine that there's layers where you do have this nucleus of the keys that you hold that are the actual thing that are you, but you still have an identity that's separate from your Bitcoin wallets or your Ethereum wallets. So it's a lot fuzzier and the analogy starts to break down. Right. I actually think it transfers really well. In the second part of the question, would you agree that a common adoption of a common identity protocol provides a sort of immunological framework where we can implement and backport that definition of you onto existing systems of centralized control? I think that if we end up at that point, we'll end up at that point by consensus and by it being a superior platform and experience to do it. I don't think we should arrive there with regulatory means in particular. Can we escape that as my prime question? Can we actually create the new village green without acknowledging what is? Because what is is currently more powerful. Well, I hope that's one of the things we're doing here today. All right. I'm out of time. Thank you.


Yes, Hockey is back and in the season opener for the BSU Women Friday, ended in a 0-0 tie, still looking for that first goal and first win of the season. Could they get it Saturday at home? Ending the weekend series with Sarah Qs, freshman Lauren Bench between the pipes and she got some help early, just 40 seconds in. Puck loose out front, Bailey right and Emma Therese poke at it, finally goes in, right credited with the goal, 1-0 beavers, then halfway through the period, this time Therese strikes and it's off the misdirection from the point, nicely done. BSU by 2, then in the second, freshman Lindsay Featherstone finishes at the doorstep, that'll make it 3-0 quickly, that was more than enough for Bench, stops all 26 shots, she sees the first career shut out for the freshman, all beavers in this one, 5-0, the final. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


My first time trying Kava experience. Hey, what's up guys, this is Josh here. Today I wanna do a little review on this Kava. Now, I have not looked up how legal this is. It is apparently related to Kratom. They use them kind of interchangeably. So I just wanna say, do your own research before trying this out. I have no idea if this is supposed to be closer to a drug versus a supplement. I have no idea. This is my first time trying it. So if this is unsafe, I have no idea. If there's any dangers of this, I have no idea. Kratom is more of the awakening. And I think Kava is supposed to be the roots of Kratom and Kratom is supposed to be the leaf. So this is essentially the sedating version of Kratom. This increases dopamine and Kratom increases norepinephrine and serotonin, which I found was kind of weird because I always felt like Kratom had a dopamine boosting effect, but maybe it is a little bit of that serotonin and the norepinephrine, I don't know. So when I first tried this, it's supposed to be like a concentrated shot. And the times that I have tried concentrated Kratom, it was just so much stronger than the other kinds. I'm assuming this is gonna be a lot stronger versus if I were to get Kratom powder. Now the first night, I think I took like two sips. It ended up being like a well above the line. They have like a one ounce line. So I took two sips. It was like, I don't know, I'll be like right here. I have a lot of sleep herbs that are very, very, very good. Lemon balm extract, chamomile extract, passionflower extract, L-tryptophan. That's not really like a sleep herb, but that's like an amino acid that in my opinion, it really, really relaxed me. So I had tried a lot of this stuff. When I took this, that day, I probably would have taken some sleep herbs, but as soon as I got there, I was feeling really good, feeling very, not really drowsy, but just like I really wanted to sleep and I had a great sleep. And this again was a little bit less than half. So I don't think it was the next day, maybe the day after I decided to take the rest all at once, so very, very high dose. And for me, all I got pretty much was this relaxing, pleasant ability to go to sleep. Now you could be saying, oh, well, that's what it's supposed to do.  People don't understand when I'm saying these, like they're very, very, very strong. When I take chamomile, when you take passionflower or lemon balm, there's times where I take it and I'm like, it's not something on my phone or playing a game. I'm like drowsy. I'm like, I gotta fall asleep because the lemon balm, chamomile and passionflower, they're so strong. So this isn't really knocking this product. I actually think it was very good. It was very nice. I just don't know if Kava is supposed to be necessarily good for you. And so if it's something you're just taking just to get the relaxing effect, like I've got the same amount of relaxing effect from what I remember from the chamomile extract and the lemon balm extract. Now I do wish I have tried this a little bit more so I can like really cement my findings. You know, maybe if I tried this maybe for 10 nights, maybe I could find something special about it or maybe this would be like once a week where I just use this and I have this great specific sleep that only this would provide, I don't know. But again, I did feel good and I did feel relaxed. I mean, it was a very, very nice sleep but from my understanding, Kratom isn't really good for you. So if this is like Kava's like Kratom, it's just something to take to feel good. Like lemon balm is really, really good for you. It has a whole list of benefits. Chamomile, very, very good for you. This has a whole list of benefits on top of being all natural, on top of making you really sedated. And in my opinion, it was just really in the ballpark of this product. And this is not by any means talking badly on this brand at all, but this cherry cheesecake flavor, the taste of Kava is so strong. It's just like, well, it's not like Kratom but it's overpoweringly strong like Kratom is. It was just difficult to drink this. I almost wish it didn't have any flavor because it was just like drinking straight, like concentrated grains or something. It was tough. But again, I'm not talking badly on the taste. I think Kava itself tastes just really crazy bad based on what this tastes like because you could taste the herb in the background. So it was very difficult to take down. If I were to try Kava, I probably would try more of the powders. Unfortunately, this doesn't make me like really want to buy Kava right away, but at the same time, it's something that I really liked. And if I were to like want something to go to sleep and I had this around, I would totally take it. I really did enjoy it. I really wish I had more more chances with it. But I remember when I first tried Kratom, I was like snowboarding. My buddy gave me three super noticeable effects. I mean, for at least an hour or two, you know, kind of like euphoric, really good energy, all these things. I'm talking about Kratom. And again, this is not a video advocating Kratom. I'm purposely not doing videos on Kratom right now because YouTube hates it so much. Pretty solid product. I really, really enjoyed it. But for me, on the limited use that I had, I found that it was very similar to chamomile, lemon balm, passion flower, and you can maybe toss in a little bit of L-Chipta fan in there. I find that is very natural and good as well. Let me just think of Kava as your go-to. If you tried Kava and Kratom, if you only tried Kava, I'd be very interested to see. Having a great day out here. Hopefully having a great day at home. See you all in the next video. Peace.


Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard. This is Boom Bust, broadcasting around the world from Washington, D.C. I'm Bart Jelton. Coming up, we'll take stock of equities. Get it? Sorry. Probably too soon. We move fast around here. We'll take stock of equities and ask Melissa Armo of Stock Swoosh to do an analysis of some key companies and analyze their performance. Plus, Holland Cook of The Big Picture tells us why baby boomers might be the most money consequential generation out there. And we go to Miami for the North American Bitcoin Conference and then talk to Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research, who is there for the conference. But first, let's get to a couple of stories topping today's business and financial headlines. Net neutrality, the principle that internet providers like Comcast and others and local internet and television service providers must treat all data on the internet the same and not discriminate or levy divergent fees by user, content, website, platform, or the app use, that service providers must not discriminate. That principle was overturned by the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, on a three to two party line vote in December. Well now, Democrat senators say they hold more than 50 senator votes in an attempt to challenge the repeal of net neutrality. That means they have picked up at least one, possibly a few Republican votes. This news represents a small glimmer of hope about the future fate of net neutrality and the fairness principle of access to, well, knowledge. Without net neutrality, we have essentially created a closed and capped media caste system where knowledge is basically being outright rationed. According to a Pew Research study last year, those who live in rural areas are about twice as likely not to even use the internet as urban or suburban Americans which have more choices for news and information and faster connection speeds. The debate will continue and we'll see if those more than 50 plus senators might get a vote to overturn the recent FCC net neutrality pullback. The news this morning is that IBM International Business Machines has reported higher revenue numbers for the first time in nearly two years and expects continued growth this year. On the other side of the spectrum, MX, American Express, saw the first quarterly loss since get this 1992. MX CEO Kenneth Chinalt says the hit was due, like other companies we've discussed in recent days on this program, due to the tax bill that was passed at the end of last year. Well other stocks are making major moves this year. Thanks for bringing in the ever-vested Melissa Armo of Stock Swish who usually tells us about retail numbers but she looks at stocks every day. So Melissa, it's great to have you with us on this topic. Do you want to comment on the IBM and the AMEX numbers? Well good to see you Bart. Good to see you. And yes, well IBM is very interesting because the stock has not made brand new all time high since 2013 and here we are we're in 2018. So to have an earnings miss like this as far as the stock's reaction, like you said they had some good news in the report but the reaction was negative because the night before the earnings of stock was around 169 and then it gapped down in the morning in the pre-market around 164 and fell on the day. So I just think that investors didn't see what they wanted to see with IBM and it's really been lagging and it's had a hard time competing with the likes of Microsoft which has been performing extremely well in this bullish market. And how about Apple stock? You know they made that major announcement yesterday that they had a pullback and they were going to supposedly create all these jobs in the US although some of those they were going to create anymore. Their stock is near and all time high these days, isn't it? Yes, actually Apple hit over 180 which is big news for the stock really getting closer and closer to that 200 level which is I think what investors are looking for. Apple has earnings out February 1st so that's going to be that's the biggest actually earnings night of the season. Google, Amazon and Apple all report February 1st after the bell. So that's going to be a big night and investors are waiting for that but I'll tell you on January 18th Fortune came out and Apple was announced at the top of their list for the world's most admired companies. So Apple is still up there and you mentioned about them creating these jobs the big news too was that they're repatriating $250 billion of their overseas assets into the US because of this new tax reform and that is huge. Not only is it huge for Apple and the growth you're going to see in the US with that money coming back, it's also huge because the government is going to get some of that money taxed over $30 billion and that's all going to go into the US Treasury. Yeah now in fairness I mean they're business they're not philanthropists they're making this move because you know the corporate tax rate was 38% it went down to 21 but that repatriation fee is only 15.5% so while they are going to pay all this money as you say Melissa they're actually saving 50 billion buck a ruse so it's also a big money decision for them. Now we talk about the tax but what about Google and Alphabet for example. How are they doing they were killers last year they're still going strong? Google still stronger than ever again made new highs with the market in the last calendar year as many times almost as the market did but I will tell you the biggest strongest stock in the market is still the beast of Amazon. It seems like that is headed right to 1500 if it has a good quarterly earnings but anybody knows it hit over 1300 went over 1325. I think there's huge expectations for that whole sector tech of this year of 2018 that had a big year in 2017 there's a lot of expectations out for that sector to continue the growth this year particularly with the same needs again with tax reform all these corporations are going to benefit from that and Amazon just continues to expand and expand and expand and although you mentioned about Apple being a company for profit which of course they are they still did not have to bring all that money back to the US because they're going to be taxed on it which if they kept keep it outside of the US they wouldn't be taxed on it so they still did not have to make a move like that. It's probably my you know inquisitive and doubting former regulator mind at work Melissa I just I see all these companies and we need them and they provide the economic engine to our democracy but when they make claims like we saw you know with Walmart that they're going to raise prices and then they're going to under their breath say and we're closing 60 Sam's stores I just get worried Apple was already going to spend I had read several weeks ago 16 billion dollars in the US in a single year so for them to say they're going to spend 30 billion over five years you know that doesn't really start my engine a whole lot but they're a good company they make a great product you know and so finally before we go I want to get your take on GE I mean they're talking about a breakup that would be incredible what's your thoughts on that and on the GE stock well it's like going from apples to oranges talking about Amazon and GE Amazon is one of the strongest stocks in the market and GE is one of the weakest well-known stocks in the market right now and it's unfortunate the last time we're talking about brand new all-time highs the GE saw a brand new all-time highs was back in 2000 so 18 years ago the stock broke 16 dollars it does report January 24th so that will be an important day for the stock however they haven't really performed in this bullish market and they would have to literally gap up to the 36 dollar level stock broke 16 so it would be a tremendous feat for them to get back up in an uptrend GE isn't a down trend and to me it's really not a buy till it hits up over 36 bucks a share right now and I mean that seems unlikely could it happen yes but I think it would be more likely if it had even a good earnings rallies a little bit and then take its time moving back up they had the new CEO came aboard in August of 2017 and you really got to give the guy a chance to see what he can do here he hasn't even been at the helm for a year so we'll see what he can do I mean he's gonna try to turn the company around super that is so fun to do a little round robin we want to do that again we love you on real to retail numbers but we love you on stocks most armor founder of stock swoosh thanks as always thanks for having me


22 After a while Lexman resumed his story. I told you that there was a man at the Palazzo named Salvolio. Salvolio was a man who had been undergoing a life sentence in one of the prisons in southern Italy. In some mysterious fashion he escaped and got across the Adriatic in a small boat. How Kara found him, I don't know. Salvolio was a very uncommunicative person. I was never certain whether he was a Greek or an Italian. All that I am sure about is that he was the most unmitigated villain next to his master that I've ever met.  It was he who gave me the scar, John Lexman pointed to his cheek. In his master's absence he took upon himself the task of conducting a clumsy imitation of Kara's persecution. He gave me, too, the only glimpse that I ever had of the torture poor Grace underwent. She hated dogs and Kara must have come to know this, and in her sleeping-room she was apparently better accommodated than I. He kept four fierce beasts so chained that it could almost reach her. Some reference to my wife from this low brute maddened me beyond endurance and I sprang at him. He whipped out his knife and struck at me as I fell, and I escaped by a miracle. He evidently had orders not to touch me, for he was in a great panic of mind as he had reason to be, because on Kara's return he discovered the state of my face, started an inquiry and had Salvolio taken to the courtyard in a true Eastern style and bastanadeoed until his feet were pulp. You may be sure the man hated me with a malignity which almost rivaled his employers. After Grace's death Kara went away suddenly and I was left to the tender mercy of this man. Evidently he had been given a fairly free hand.  Salvolio began his persecutions by reducing my diet. Fortunately I ate very little. Nevertheless the supplies began to grow less and less and I was beginning to feel the effects of this starvation system when there happened a thing which changed the whole course of my life and opened to me a way of freedom and vengeance.  He would bring up dancing girls from Durazo for his amusement and invite prominent men in the neighbourhood to his feasts and entertainments, for he was absolutely lord of the Palazzo when Kara was away and could do pretty well as he liked. On this particular night the festivities had been more than usually prolonged for as near as I could judge by the daylight which was creeping in through my window it was about four o'clock in the morning when the big steel-sheeted door was open then Salvolio came in, more than a little drunk. He brought with him as I judge one of the dancing girls who apparently was privileged to see the sights of the palace. For a long time he stood in the doorway talking incoherently in a language which I think must have been Turkish for I caught one or two words. Whoever the girl was she seemed a little frightened I could see that because she shrank back from him though his arm was about her shoulders and he was half supporting his weight upon her. There was fear not only in the curious little glances she shot at me from time to time but also in the averted face. Her story I was to learn. She was not of the class from when Salvolio found the dancers who from time to time came up to the palace through his amusement and the amusement of his guests. She was the daughter of a Turkish merchant of Skeutari who had been received into the Catholic Church. Her father had gone down to Juratso during the First Balkan War and then Salvolio had seen the girl unknown to her parent and there had been some rough kind of courtship which ended in her running away on this very day and joining her ill-favoured lover at the palazzo.  As I say the girl's frightened and made as though to go from the dungeon she is probably scared both by the unkempt prisoner and by the drunken man at her side. He however could not leave without showing to her something of his authority. He came lurching over near where I lay, his long knife balanced in his hand ready for emergencies and broke into a string of vituperations of the character to which I was quite hardened. Then he took a flying kick at me and got home in my ribs. But again I experienced neither a sense of indignity nor any great hurt. Salvolio had treated me like this before and I had survived it. In the midst of the tirade looking past him I was a new witness to an extraordinary scene. The girl stood in the open doorway shrinking back against the door looking with distress and pity at the spectacle which Salvolio's brutality afforded. Then suddenly there appeared beside her a tall Turk. He was gray-bearded and forbidding. She looked round and saw him and her mouth opened to utter a cry but with a gesture he silenced her and pointed to the darkness outside. Without a word she cringed past him her sandal feet making no noise. All this time Salvolio was continuing his stream of abuse but he must have seen the wonder in my eyes where he stopped and turn. The old Turk took one stride forward encircled his body with his left arm and there they still grotesquely like a couple who were going to start to waltz. The Turk was a head taller than Salvolio and as I could see a man of immense strength. They looked at one another face to face. Salvolio rapidly recovering his senses and then the Turk gave him a gentle punch in the ribs. That is what it seemed like to me but Salvolio coughed horribly went limp in the other's arms and dropped with a thud to the ground. The Turk lent down soberly and whacked his long knife on the other's jacket before he put it back in the sash at his waist. Then with a glance at me he turned to go but stopped at the door and looked back thoughtfully. He said something in Turkish which I could not understand. Then he spoke in French. Who are you? he asked. In a few words as possible I explained. He came over and looked at the manacle about my leg and shook his head. You'll never be able to get that undone he said.  There was a smart snap as the chain parted. He caught me by the shoulder and pulled me to my feet. Put the chain about your waist offendi he said and he took a revolver from his belt and handed it to me. You may need this before we get back to Duraco he said. His belt was literally bristling with weapons. I saw three revolvers beside the one I possessed and he had evidently come prepared for trouble. We made our way from the dungeon into the clean smelling world without. It was the second time I'd been in the open air for 18 months and my knees were trembling under me with weakness and excitement. The old man shut the prison door behind us and walked on until we came up to the girl waiting for us by the lakeside. She was weeping softly and he spoke to her a few words in a low voice and her weeping ceased. This daughter of mine will show us the way he said. I do not know this part of the country. She knows it too well. To cut a very long story short said Lexman. We reached Duraco in the afternoon. There was no attempt made to follow us up and neither my absence nor the body of Salvolio were discovered until late in the afternoon. You must remember that nobody but Salvolio was allowed into my prison and therefore nobody had the courage to make any investigations. The old man got me to his house without being observed and brought a brother-in-law or some relative of his to remove the anglet. The name of my host was Hussein Effendi. That same night we left with a little caravan to visit some of the old man's relatives. He was not certain what would be the consequence of his act and for safety's sake took this trip which would enable him, if need be, to seek sanctuary with some of the wilder Turkish tribes who would give him protection. In that three months I saw Albania as it is. It was an experience never to be forgotten. If there is a better man in God's world than Hayabalm Hussein Effendi I have yet to meet him. It was he who provided me with money to leave Albania. I begged from him to the knife with which he had killed Salvolio. He had discovered that Cara was in England and told me something of the Greek's occupation which I had not known before. I crossed to Italy and went to Milan. There it was that I learnt that an eccentric Englishman who had arrived a few days previously on one of the South American boats at Genoa was in my hotel desperately ill. My hotel, I need to hardly tell you, was not a very expensive one and we were evidently the only two Englishmen in the place. I could do no less than go up and see what I could do for the poor fellow who was pretty well gone when I saw him. I seem to remember having seen him before and when looking round for some identification I discovered his name I readily recalled the circumstance. It was George Gathicoll who had returned from South America. He was suffering from malarial fever and blood poisoning and for a week with an Italian doctor I thought as hard as any man could fight for his life. He was a trying patient. John Lexman smiled suddenly at the recollection, vitriolic in his language, impatient and imperious in his attitude to his friends. He was, for example, terribly sensitive about his lost arm and would not know either the doctor or myself to enter the room until he was covered to the neck. Nobody eat or drink in our presence. Yet he was the bravest of the brave, careless of himself and only fretful because he had not time to finish his new book. His indomitable spirit did not save him. He died on the 70th of January of this year. I was in January, at the time, having gone there at his request to save his belongings. When I returned he had been buried. I went through his papers and it was then that I conceived my idea of how I might approach Kara. I found a letter from the Greek which had been addressed to Boonazales to await arrival and then I remembered in a flash how Kara had told me he had sent George Gathicoll to South America to report upon possible gold formations.  Even as he had planned my downfall, scheming every step and covering his trail, so did I plan to bring about his death that no suspicion should fall on me. I knew his house. I knew something of his habits. I knew the fear in which he went when he was in England and away from the feudal guards who had surrounded him in Albania. I knew of his famous door with its steel latch and I was planning to circumvent all these precautions and bring to him not only the death he deserved but a full knowledge of his fate before he died. Gathicoll had some money, about 140 pounds. I took a hundred pounds of this for my own use, knowing that I should have sufficient in London to recompense his heirs. And the remainder of the money, with all such documents as he had, save those which identified him with Kara, I handed over to the British consul. I was not unlike the dead man. My beard had grown wild and I knew enough of Gathicoll's eccentricities to live the part. The first step I took was to announce my arrival by inference. I'm a fairly good journalist with a wide general knowledge and with this, corrected by reference to the necessary books which I found in the British Museum Library, I was able to turn out a very respectable article on Patagonia. This I sent to the Times with one of Gathicoll's cards and, as you know, it was printed. My next step was to find suitable lodgings between Chelsea and Scotland Yard. I was fortunate in being able to hire a furnished flat, the owner of which was going to the south of France for three months. I paid the rent in advance and since I dropped all the eccentricities I had attuned in support of the character of Gathicoll, I must have impressed the owner who took me without references. I had several suits of new clothes made, not in London, he's mild, but in Manchester, and again I made myself as trim as possible to avoid after identification. When I had got these together in my flat I chose my day. In the morning I sent two trunks with most of my personal belongings to the great Midland Hotel. In the afternoon I went to Cadogan Square and hung about until I saw Cara drive off. It was my first view of him since I had left Albania and it required all my self-control to prevent me springing at him in the streets and tearing at him with my hands. Once he was out of sight I went to the house, adopting all the style and all the mannerisms of poor Gathicoll. My beginning was unfortunate for, with a shock I recognised in the valley, a fellow convict who had been with me in the warder's cottage on the morning of my escape from Dartmoor. There was no mistaking him, when I heard his voice I was certain. Would he recognise me, I wondered, in spite of my beard and my eyeglasses. Apparently he did not, I gave him every chance, I thrust my face into his, and on my second visit challenged him in the eccentric way which poor old Gathicoll had, to test the gray of my beard. For the moment, however, I was satisfied with my brief experiment, and after a reasonable interval I went away, returning to my place off Victoria Street and waiting till the evening. In my observation of the house, whilst I was waiting for Cara to depart, I had noticed that there were two distinct telephone wires running down to the roof. I guess rather than knew that one of these telephones was a private wire, and knowing something of Cara's fear I presumed that that wire would lead to a police office or at any rate to a Guardian of some kind or other. Cara had the same arrangement in Albania, connecting the palazzo with a gendarme post at Alesso. This much Hussein told me. That night I made the reconnaissance of the house and saw Cara's window was lit, and at ten minutes past ten I rang the bell, and I think it was then that I applied the test of the beard. Cara was in his room, the valet told me and led the way upstairs. I had come prepared to deal with this valet, for I had a special reason for wishing that he should not be interrogated by the police. On a playing card I had written a number he bore in Dartmoor, and had added the words, I know you, get out of here quick. As he turned to lead the way upstairs I flung the envelope containing the card on the table in the hall. In an inside pocket as near to my body as I could put them I had the two candles. How I should use them both I had already decided. The valet ushered me into Cara's room, and once more I stood in the presence of the man who had killed my girl, and blotted out all that was beautiful in life for me. There was a breathless silence when he paused. T.  The chief commissioner, with a heavy frown and purse and lips, sat stroking his moustache and looking under his shaggy eyebrows at the speaker. The French police officer, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his head on one side, was taking in every word eagerly. The solo-faced Russian, impassive of face, might have been a carved ivory mask. O graded the American, the stump of a dead cigar between his teeth shifted impatiently with every pause, as though he would hurry forward the denouement. Presently John Lexman went on. He slipped from the bed and came across to meet me as I closed the door behind me. Ah, Mr. Galakor, he said, in that silky tone of his, and held out his hand. I did not speak, I just looked at him with a sort of fierce joy in my heart, the like of which I have never before experienced. And then he saw in my eyes the truth and half reached for the telephone. But at that moment I was on him. He was a child in my hands. All the bitter anguish he had brought upon me, all the hardships of starved days and freezing nights, had strengthened and hardened me. I had come back to London disguised with a false arm, and this I shook free. It was merely a gauntlet of thin wood which I had made for me in Paris. I flung him back on the bed and half knelt, half laid on him.  He tried to speak, his soft hands gesticulated wildly, but I was half lying on one arm and held the other. I whispered in his ear, nobody will know who killed you Cara, think of that. I shall go scot-free, and you will be the centre of a fine mystery. All your letters will be read, all your life will be examined, and the world would know you for what you are. I released his arm for just as long as it took to draw my knife and strike. I think he died instantly, John Lechman said simply. I left him where he was and went to the door. I had not much time to spare. I took the candles from my pocket. They were already ductile from the heat of my body. I lifted up the steel latch of the door and propped up the latch with the smaller of the two candles, one end of which was on the middle socket and the other beneath the latch. The heat of the room I knew would still further soften the candle and let the latch down in a short time. I was prepared for the telephone by his bedside, though I did not know to whether it led. The presence of the paper knife decided me. I balanced it across the silver cigarette-box so that one end came under the telephone receiver. Under the other end I put the second candle, which I cut to fit. On top of the paper knife at the candle end I balanced the only two books I could find in the room. Unfortunately they were heavy. I had no means of knowing how long it would take to melt the candle to a state of flexion which would allow the full weight of the books to bear upon the candle end of the paper knife and fling off the receiver. I was hoping that Fisher had taken my warning and had gone. Then I opened the door softly. I heard his footsteps in the hall below. There was nothing to do but to finish the play. I turned and addressed an imaginary conversation to Carla. It was horrible, but there was something about it which aroused in me a curious sense of humour, and I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh. I heard the man coming up the stairs and closed the door gingerly. What lengths of time would it take for the candle to bend? To completely establish the alibi I determined to hold Fisher in conversation, and this was all the easier since apparently he had not seen the envelope I had left on the table downstairs. I had not long to wait for suddenly with a crash I heard the steel latch fall in its place. Under the effect of the heat the candle had bent sooner than I had expected. I asked Fisher what was the meaning of the sound and he explained. I passed down the stairs talking all the time. I found a cabin slone square and drove to my lodging. Underneath my overcoat I was partly dressed in evening kit. Ten minutes after I had entered the door of my flat I came out a beardless man about town, not to be distinguished from the thousand others who would be found that night walking the promenade of any of the great music halls. It was no more than a coincidence that whilst I should have been speaking with you all the second candle should have bent and the alarm be given in the very office in which I was sitting. I assure you all in all earnestness that I did not suspect the cause of that ringing until Mr. Manson spoke. There, gentlemen, is my story. He threw out his arms. You may do with me as you will. Kara was a murderer, died a hundred times in innocent blood. I have done all that I said myself to do, that and no more, that and no less. I thought to go away to America, but the nearer the day of my departure approached the more vivid became the memory of the plans which she and I had formed, my girl, my poor martyred girl. He sat at the little table, his hands clasped before him, his face lined and white. And that is the end, he said suddenly, with a rye smile. Not quite, TX won round with a gasp. It was Belinda Mary who spoke. I can carry it on, she said. She was wonderfully self-possessed, thought TX, but then TX never thought anything of her but that she was wonderfully something or other. Most of your story is true, Mr. Lexman said this astonished girl oblivious of the amazed eyes that were staring at her. But Kara deceived you in one respect. What do you mean? asked John Lexman, rising unsteadily to his feet. For answers she rose and walked back to the door with the chintz curtains and flung it open. There was a wait which seemed an eternity, and then through the doorway came a girl, slim and grave and beautiful. My God! whispered TX. Grace Lexman. End of Chapter 22. Recording by Peter Tomlinson. Chapter 23. Of the Clear the Twisted Candle by Edgar Wallace. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Peter Tomlinson. Chapter 23. They went out and left them alone, two people who found in this moment a heaven which is not beyond the reach of humanity, but which is seldom attained to. Belinda Mary had an eager audience all to her very self. Of course she didn't die, she said scornfully. Kara was playing on his fears all the time. He never even harmed her in the way Mr. Lexman feared.  What happened was that he brought her back to England. Who? asked TX incredulously. Grace Lexman said the girl with a smile. You wouldn't think it possible, but when you realised that he had a yacht of his own, and that he could trouble up from whatever landing place he chose to his house in Cadogan Square by motor-car, and that he could take her straight away into his cellar without disturbing his household, you'd understand that the only difficulty he had was in landing her. It was in the lower cellar that I found her. You found her in the cellar, demanded the Chief Commissioner. The girl nodded. I found her and the dog.  It was very beastly, she admitted, and she's been living with you all this time, and you've said nothing? asked TX incredulously. Belinda Mary nodded. And that is why you didn't want me to know where you were living. She nodded again. You see, she was very ill, she said, and I had to nurse her up, and of course I knew that it was Lexman who had killed Kara, and I couldn't tell you about Grace Lexman without betraying him. So when Mr. Lexman decides to tell his story, I thought I'd better supply the grand enumor. The men looked at one another. What are you going to do about Lexman? asked the Chief Commissioner. And by the way, TX, how does all this fit your theories? Fairly well, replied TX Cooley. Obviously the man who committed the murder was the man introduced into the room as Gather Cole, and as obviously it was not Gather Cole, although to all appearance, he had lost his left arm. Why obvious? asked the Chief Commissioner. Because, answered TX Meredith, the real Gather Cole had lost his right arm. That was the one error Lexman made. Hmm, the Chief pooled at his moustache and looked inquirily round the room. We have to make up our minds very quickly about Lexman, he said. What do you think, Cardinal? The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. For my part, I should not only impotune your home secretary to pardon him, but I should recommend him for a pension, he said flippantly. What do you think, Savorsky? The Russians smiled a little. It is a very impressive story, he said dispassionately. It occurs to me that if you intend bringing your Mr. Lexman to judgment, you are likely to expose some very pretty scandals. Incidentally, he said, stroking his trim little moustache, I might remark that any exposure which drew attention to the lawless conditions of Albania would not be regarded by my government with favour. The Chief Commissioner's eyes twinkled and he nodded. That is also my view, said the Chief of the Italian Bureau. Naturally, we are greatly interested in all that happens on the Adriatic Littoral. It seems to me that Cara has come to a very merciful end, and I am not inclined to regard a prosecution of Mr. Lexman with equanimity. Well, I guess the political aspect of the case doesn't affect us very much, said O'Grady, but as one who was once mighty near affixiated by stirring up the wrong kinds of mud, I should leave the matter where it is. The Chief Commissioner was deep in thought and Belinda Mary eyed him anxiously. Tell them to come in, he said bluntly. The girl went and brought John Lexman and his wife, and they came in hand in hand, supremely and serenely happy, whatever the future might hold for them. The Chief Commissioner clearly stroked. Lexman, we're all very much obliged to you, he said, for a very interesting story and a most interesting theory. What you have done, as I understand the matter, he proceeded deliberately, is to put yourself in the murderer's place and advance the theory, not only as to how the murder was actually committed, but as to the motive for that murder. It is, I might say, a remarkable piece of reconstruction. He spoke very deliberately and crept away John Lexman's astonished interaction with a stern hand. Please wait and do not speak until I am out of hearing, he growled. You have got into the skin of the actual assassin and have spoken most convincingly. One might almost think that the man who killed Roamington Cara was actually standing before us. For that piece of impersonation we are all very grateful. He glared round over his spectacles at his understanding colleagues and they murmured approvingly. He looked at his watch. Now I am afraid I must be off. He crossed the room and put out his hand to John Lexman. I wish you good luck, he said, and took both Grace Lexman's hands in his. One of these days, he said paternally, I shall come down to Beston Tracy and your husband shall tell me another and a happier story. He paused at the door which was going out and looking back caught the grateful eyes of Lexman. By the way, Mr. Lexman, he said hesitatingly, I don't think I should ever write a story called The Clue of the Twisted Candle if I were you. John Lexman shook his head. It would never be written, he said, by me. End of Chapter 23. Recording by Peter Tomlinson. End of The Clue of the Twisted Candle by Ed Gawalis.


Heinemann Settlement School is encouraging locals to shake off those winter blues with their intro to Appalachian Flatfooting Dance Class Saturday, February 24th. The class is free and open to all skill levels and abilities and will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. at the school. We're hosting a free workshop on Appalachian Flatfooting and it's taught by Tiffany Owen, a dance instructor from Pye County. Appalachian Flatfooting is a percussive style of traditional dance. It's related to lots of Irish step dancing and English step dancing as well as Indigenous style dancing and it all combines together to create the Appalachian tradition of Flatfooting and clogging. Do you worry about having enough money to last throughout retirement? Give Reed Potter at Raymond James a call. Reed has 26 years experience helping folks enjoy their best life in their retirement years. Pre-registration is required and water and snacks will be available. If you're nervous about trying percussive style dancing like this, the good news is that it's very low impact. So a characteristic of Appalachian Flatfooting is that your feet stay pretty low to the ground and you're not flailing your arms about. You're not running all over the place. It's pretty low impact and there's no set tempo necessarily. You can dance as slowly or as quickly as you feel comfortable with. For more information and to register, go to Heineman.org backslash events. Reporting for Mountaintop News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


Nick Russell called me and I told him, he said that he wanted to offer his substitute but you talked to him about this tabling, that he thought that I was making a terrific mistake by agreeing to that because he thought that there would be doubt left as to my authority and it would be an open sore and be coming up the full rights and the doves all the way through. I told him I didn't think so that I would favor letting Morris make his case and try to rescind it and then without hurting anybody or getting personal, get up and make a statement that the questions whether you want to rescind it or whether you don't and there's direct vote on it can be had by tabling but I sure don't want the motion at table to imply that any dilution of that resolution because if it does, I'm in the hell of a shape as the Commander-in-Chief and with other nations too. I don't think that it would in any way. Well it will unless you make a case for it when you make the motion at table or get somebody to do it either make Russell or somebody say, here's what the authority of this resolution is. Now Morris wants to take that away and our position is that we're not going to take it away because if we leave me in doubt there whether I have authority or not, hell, I'd rather turn the authority over to Fulbright. I've got to know what authority I have and I believe I have unquestioned authority as Commander-in-Chief 162 cases according to the Attorney General in there. Without the resolution? Without the resolution. With the resolution I've got them in there with me but is this motion at table in any way in the light of what they said diluting it? Now if it does, I'm against it. I think it ought to be, case ought to be made that Morris wants to rescind it and we're not going to rescind it and thereby by not rescinding it it stays just as it is. That's right. And that we want the ever-dictated in the world to know. We don't want P. King. The case is made Mr. President without even saying a word. I don't agree with it without saying a word. I think it ought to be in that record for that roll call and that's the case he makes. I'm far tabling it and I don't want to rub anybody's nose in it like he does with Melson and the rest of it but I do think it ought to say Morris wants to repeal this. Now we're not going to repeal it. I'm going to move the table. If you want to repeal it, you vote with Morris. But if you want to leave it just as it is with all the authority that it contains, why you vote the table? If you don't, why you go on and vote with Morris? Because? I just want some would-be fellow that's waiting to see what to do depending on the Senate to misinterpret this because I know what happened to us in a couple of hours by misjudging our intentions. I'm controlling this thing just as carefully as a human can. I'm watching it just as much, but I cannot have them in doubt about my ability as Commander-in-Chief. No, but you had that ability, you had that responsibility, keyed without a resolution. I agree with it, but to all the play, Mike, all the editorial, what's going to be done this Senate? What's this group of 20, 30, 40 senators? Are they going to take away authority? Are they going to hold it back? And they may interpret this and the propaganda and all the morning papers is that they've kind of agreed and they, so I think when we make a motion to table, please see that someone points up the fact that this leaves the President without a bit of this authority changed or diluted. Okay, Mr. President. Thank you, Mike.


We are in the midst of a health crisis. But it's not just the one you think. We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. Within the last year, there have been more suicides in Japan than COVID deaths. Globally, close to 800,000 suicides take place. That's one suicide every 40 seconds. Due to the tremendous lockdowns that are happening due to the coronavirus, many are experiencing the most difficult and dark times in their lives. Maybe that's you. Isolation has been tough on all of us. Our routines have been disrupted. Our friendships have been disrupted. The connections and things that we get used to and drive meaning from in just everyday activities, they've all been stripped away. And in a lot of ways for a lot of us, our peace has been stripped away too. And as we think about mental health, I mean, it can be easy sometimes, especially in isolation to get caught up in negative self-talk. I don't matter. I'm useless.  I'm a failure. These are lies. Straight up. And I want you to hear that. If you've convinced yourself that these are somehow true or have some weight to them, they do not. They're lies. You were created in the image of God, number one. But also God did not make a mistake when he made you. Your life has purposed. Your life has meaning.  That's a tremendous act of love that should tell you who you are. You're his child. You are loved. The problem is, is that negative self-talk, those things that we're telling ourselves, maybe things that have been spouted off by friends or family in the past, words and wounds that have led to some sort of hurt. Man, those things tend to be amplified in the midst of isolation. We were not designed to be in isolation. God designed us to be in community. A community that can build us up, encourage us, love us, motivate us and pull the very best that we have to offer the kingdom of God. In a lot of cases, COVID hasn't created our problems but it has merely amplified them. Let me give you an example. I'm a homebody. I like to be at home. I find a lot of peace in being alone, doing things by myself, writing, shooting videos, graphic design, a lot of these things just take place by myself and I enjoy it. But I also enjoy putting effort into other relationships that I have and going places with people and hanging out with them and pouring into their lives. But I also need time to be by myself to recharge. I don't think that's wrong. I think that's just the way I'm wired. Maybe you're wired in a similar way. However, for people like me who have this tendency, we can often feel ourselves leaning into this isolation. This is just dangerous. We can dig ourselves into mental holes which we can't seem to get out of. That negative self-talk, thoughts of worthlessness, those lies that are reverberated in our head, we need help to escape. In times where I felt the absolute worst, one conversation with a loving friend could very well be the turning point. For those of you who are experiencing this struggle, I want you to do this for me.  Now I know this may seem cheesy, it's like of course he's gonna say this, this is like a Christian YouTube channel, but seriously, I want you to be totally honest with God and what you're going through. See, what I often happens, at least in my own life, is sometimes I'll pray to God, but I will hold things back to kind of preserve this sense that I'm okay, like I'm a good Christian, like I am, that I'm put together.  Just think about that, like God knows you perfectly, he loves you fully, but you're trying to keep things away from God that he already knows. My encouragement to you is to just let that stuff go, all that burden on you, give it to God, be as honest as you can. Now the second thing is reach out to family, friends, your pastor. I know this can seem cliche, but the only reason it's cliche is because it's said so many times, because it's true, because it's important. But even for me, I'm thinking about it and I don't do this as much as I should. When I'm going through something, my tendency, like I was saying earlier, is to lean into isolation as opposed to open up. It's the exact opposite of my nature. But I think that's something that, look, we gotta grow in guys, because when we're going through some of the darkest times in our lives, we need people the most in those moments. We don't need just more of ourself, more of our own thoughts, more of our own, you know, things going on, because that'll get us in a hole. We need to listen to other people. I can just remember so many times where I felt like totally hopeless about life, literally, like just like, especially in regard to, you know, the ministry and stuff like that and just being totally discouraged and stuff. And then having one conversation with a friend or my dad or my mom and just like my perspective being flipped. Like God uses those moments to open our eyes to see, look, we're telling ourselves lies, we're deceiving ourselves, we're in this kind of disoriented state.  And I'm hoping that I can help be a voice to tell you, look, those are not true. Like these are distortions and you need to get yourself out of this. But a lot of what God uses to get us out of those things is our community, is our, you know, the people within our church, the people within our friend group, our family. So I want you to reach out to them because they might not know what you're going through. For those of you thinking about how to care for your friends, which should be all of us, we're thinking about how can we make an impact on our friends' lives. I always remember this, be the person you needed in your darkest hour.  This idea first came up for me when I was reflecting on a past kind of mentoring friendship that I had with a younger guy. And I was, you know, supposed to be an example for him. I was a teenager and this was somebody that I was, you know, trying to be an example for. But I ended up kind of pulling away because it was too much for me to deal with. I couldn't figure out how to be that influence. I couldn't figure out how to be that mentor at that stage. So I just gave up and looking back, I look back on that with a lot of regret. And I just know that I'm not gonna let that happen again. I'm not gonna let those opportunities pass by again. Because look, man, you could change somebody's life by just being the person you needed in your darkest hour. What did you need to hear from that person? What did you need somebody to tell you that made the difference, right? And if you could share that with somebody else, man, that could change their life.  I'll see you next week, God bless. Thank you so much to my patrons on Patreon that make this content possible.


Hey friends tonight. I'm hanging out at Disney Springs a couple of weeks ago I made a video showcasing all the happy hour Locations and how to actually drink on a budget down here at Disney Springs But tonight I want to showcase a high roller menu and show some of the more expensive drinks But before that I just want to kind of enjoy the atmosphere because it's a beautiful day. So let's go do this If you guys want to see that video of all the happy hour locations I'll put it in the description below so that you can check it out But today like I said is just a beautiful day blue skies birds are chirping music I'm really happy to be here And like I said before we're gonna be looking at some more higher-end cocktails and focusing on like the actual Craft of making a cocktail compared to just finding the cheapest way to actually drink like in the previous video So we're gonna be trying things that are very fancy and I'm excited for it I know the Edison has a select menu with some amazing drinks And then a couple of other spots that I actually have personal favorites at and we're gonna be able to show them to you I Think my first stop is gonna be here at Morimoto Asia And it's actually got a signature cocktail in here that is a chef inspired drink And I'm very excited to try because it's very unique and that's what I'm looking for is unique high-end drinks And I think this fits the category very well This restaurant is so cool and it's got one of the most amazing bars if you take a look at this This is actually the Disney Springs bottling company and you can see this is like the whole entire idea behind the springs And where they would bottle up the springs water and these were all bottles and it looks like it's a factory I never knew that about this restaurant itself But it is absolutely amazing and this is all fishing that's right here very cool spot And like I said before it has a really unique drink here and that's the whole concept and idea behind this And I just thought hey why not when you're here you're here This is the actual peaking duck old-fashioned the drink I was talking about it's a chef inspired cocktail using Makers mark private select and it's actually has duck syrup inside of it This is gonna be a very unique experience and it's $18 so we're starting down a little low It's pretty pricey, but you know you're paying for the experience of this especially drinking it at more emotos I Recently started drinking a lot more different like cocktails and special liquors and basically just trying new things So this is definitely up there as a unique new thing and I'm excited And here it is and you can see it's a specialty cocktail because it has the more emoto stamped ice cube I always think that's very fancy and then the leaking salt right here This is a fancy touch, but what I'm excited for is the duck syrup inside there.  This is really interesting Honestly, this is a very delicious drink I was a little shocked like I said because I was expecting kind of like a little bit of a bite or a bitter But the duck sauce actually just kind of like calms it down a lot So very good here very very shocked more emoto very shocked With that being said though, I would have to say if you don't normally drink old-fashioned This isn't gonna be something you would enjoy But it's something like it if it peaks your interest then you should try the peaking duck Makes sense if it peaks your interest try the peaking duck Yeah Regardless though, I wish there was a way you can keep the ice cubes You know that's kind of crazy I want to get like a custom ice tube maker like one that says like PMM That'd be fancy Now I think it's time. We move along. I really enjoyed the drink in there Please let me know in the comments what your favorite drink of the night's gonna be because I'm looking for uniqueness and things that I Wouldn't normally try the purpose of this video is to experience more of the higher-end things and also things that I Normally wouldn't drink so let me know what's your favorite? And I'm just loving the atmosphere today. It is so beautiful out. This is one of the nicer days I've seen here in Florida in a while And I know the rest of the United States is actually kind of a little bit cold at the moment But Florida showing its through heat The next place I want to take you guys to is such a personal favorite of mine I love it here and the theming is phenomenal Enzo's hideaway tunnel bar which is basically a Prohibition speakeasy and you know that just fits perfectly to have some very special drinks So I'm excited to actually go down there and of course it's kind of like tucked away like a speakeasy bar would be I Always enjoy just walking through Enzo's hideaway It's just such a fun experience and normally we don't stop and actually get a drink So this time I'm gonna show you one of their amazing cocktails here They even have like that slide like lookout slot right there So you have to knock on the door and then you get to go in and it's like a tunnel bar. That's exactly what it is Very cool Whoa fancy Oh This place has some very very rare liquors and it's so excited to see what they can put together Because of like the theming of the whole entire speakeasy and the kind of like Smuggling and stashing different types of alcohol and that's why I like it so much down here and I like the music as well As you can see Enzo smuggled and stashed collection They've scourged the globe on a mission to find unique hard-to-find spirits Meeting with brewers and distillers that create rare small batch booze So I think that's really interesting you can get some very special stuff here So we're gonna try one of these like very rare to find spirits as you can see we have some very aged realm 12 years both of these are and Once from Guatemala, and what is the other one from? Oh, this is from Guatemala, this was from Nicaragua 15 years I think I'm gonna do 15 years then sounds fancy Boy fancy I Normally I don't drink like these very expensive liquors or anything like that But like I said I'm doing this for the sole purpose to actually do an experience new things So that's why I'm trying to live it up do the best that I can and just take it all in you know what I'm saying So the bartender actually looked it up, and it's not 15 years. It's 25 years or each drum that is Absolutely mind-blowing. It's not every day. You're sipping on 25 year old aged rum I'm very excited for this though. I don't know what to think Why is there no kickback? That is mind-blowing Oh my lord, that is very delicious Wow That is definitely the smoothest rum I have ever had I am seriously impressed with this I also love how this connects right to our next stop, which is the Edison and it's actually we're gonna take like the back room Entrance like we're gonna walk through the back doors all of the endoside away and go right into the Edison That's my favorite thing about this Jackie actually ended up getting the lemon cello, but you know what's funny. What you're next to a big jar of lemon Yeah, that is very fancy, isn't it? Honestly, I can say I see a difference in between like cheap like Admiral Nelson like rum and then this rum Of course, you have to pay for that, but this is like so smooth and it's actually kind of refreshing and I I'm starting to appreciate that a little bit more now. So cheers. Salute It's also really nice to switch up from whiskey to rum and This is a great spot for those vintage rums like I said and the most expensive one I think is thirty three dollars So I mean that's not too bad as you can tell you go down to the cognac So you have a Tennessee for fifty five and then a little bit more down the rise actually get a little bit more expensive The whistle pig Boss Hog is ninety five dollars for a pour This was absolutely delicious, but now for the main event the high roller Menu at the Edison look at Jackie's excited Yep, so we're gonna actually oh, yeah, you gotta roll the dice daddy needs a new pair of shoes So we're actually gonna actually exit through the back of Enzo's hideaway to get into the Edison All we have to do is take a left past the cheese and meat cooler and then Go into the wine cellar here, and we'll notice we got just a little tiny like hallway back here see doesn't look like we're supposed to be going this way, but It takes us right into a corridor and then Right on in to the Edison. How cool is that? The Edison is by far my favorite place to come hang out steam punk with live music and amazing cocktails And the food is amazing here as well so cool, and I'm happy that we're gonna kind of Basically hang out here for a little bit because there's a lot to take in Between Like I said before they have a high roller Menu and it's gonna have some of the most amazing cocktails I'm so honored to be able to try this the bartender PJ who actually created this menu was actually gonna be taken care of Us tonight, and he's gonna show us all the ways Here is PJ he is gonna be taken care of us tonight He's the author of the high roller menu, and he actually has an Instagram. What's your Instagram? I am the alcohol alchemist. Oh very fancy, and you were basically in competition, right? You've submitted you're in the top 50 of Oh, yeah, I do competitive craft clock-tailing It's pretty intense. I just was involved in the United States bartenders guild world-class sponsored by Diazio I'm a top 50 in the United States So we're currently in the national semi-final round there competition's very tough Looking forward to getting some positive results in the coming weeks. Fancy PJ's got a station all set up and he's gonna prepare all the high roller cocktails for us And I'm excited because this is some very amazing stuff now You can see they have the maker's mark signature the private select right there And then this is Michael Jordan's alcohol his liquor itself. So this is gonna be this is gonna be an experience These are the actual high roller cocktails PJ's that gonna put together for us And you can see some of them are very pricey But and you're gonna actually witness the artwork that goes into actually making these and I think he's doing the Gilgamesh First so this is gonna be such an experience I Feel like it needed that like Skull smoke cloud when I pop that in there This is an ancho pepper Very neat So a lot of people are worried that this drink is either a gonna be too sweet From the top of orange. No Or B is it gonna be too spicy?  Drink with Boston Next PJ is gonna make the tea time and this is your this is the drink you submit it right this is your competition Fancy this is gonna be good it needs to be concentrated because obviously when I stir it I don't want it to over dilute It stands for very juniper over proof, so it's actually a navy proof gin 57.7% ABB Tea time tea time And last but not least the silk and lace This one right here is made with the actual makers mark private select just for the Edison This one's thirty four dollars and these are very phenomenal cocktails. I love everything that they put into this I got my secret ingredient my house infused through before tools What that night Here Here is a look at all three of the Hyrolo cocktails We have the tea time with prudence, which is the tall one in the back the Gilgamesh is actually this one right here Which is really awesome. I love the way that they're actually making that like I love the glass that they use and then of course The silk and lace right here. Oh, these are gonna be so amazing. I can't wait to try them though. I Think I'm gonna start off just in the order that he actually prepared them So I'm gonna do the Gilgamesh first and this drink has such a fancy like Presentation I think it's amazing and I'm excited to try it so I'm gonna go in Wow That is so smooth and amazing no kickback at all Wow Seriously, that is that's a good drink The thing with this drink is I was expecting to like taste a little spice because of the habanero and anchov but it is balanced perfectly with a little sweetness and it's definitely something you want to sip on and Casually drink at a nice slow pace. So now I'm gonna jump right on into tea time Tea time with prudence and I think this is like one of the more fancier glasses. Look at this. I feel like I'm from the Great Gatsby This is gonna be more of a gin based drink and like I said, I always like holding glasses like this itself So I'm gonna just do Wow, there was a lot of things happening there You can really taste all the different flavors and you can tell it Like this is a signature cocktail like more than anything actually Definitely a very big earthly taste to it and I enjoy it. I mean, I mean, I'm not the biggest gin fan but This actually has a unique blend of different flavors and I can vary I can't really tell there's a gin drink to it actually Now it's time for my favorite. Well, I don't know if it's my favorite yet because I haven't tried it But I have a feeling it's gonna be my favorite the silk and lace because I like Makers March select and I've had it here before and plus the just the vanilla inside of it with the redberries I can smell it. I'm excited to try this. This is gonna be this is definitely gonna be my favorite. I know That's that's not right It is not right like for something to taste that's delicious and to be like a Cocktail it shouldn't be allowed like most people can't drink the makers mark and then not have a kickback or anything like that But that's something you can like drink like jungle juice almost This is this is phenomenal. This is it number one for me, but don't forget Let me know which one you think you like the most because I mean, I don't think I can do better Also, I should point out that the ice cube is stamped with makers mark So just like the old-fashioned that we had at Morimoto. This one is also very classy and fancy It's so cool to be drinking the drinks and enjoying the music These drinks are very very amazing and the one thing that I like about them the most is they Created them right here inside the Edison like PJ made this right here And he actually used all the ingredients from all the different vendors from Disney Springs So he actually got tea from the tea company inside Disney Springs And they also got the honey from the honey store right here in Disney Springs So that's really it's really fascinating and the fact that one of them is a competition drink That's perfect But some fancy food Calamari Calamari a lecture fries and The thing the bacon We need the bacon look at that oh, I'm so happy Yes Jackie I still have my clothespan. I wanted to keep mine and I didn't I kept my clothespin. It's it's at my house Yep, I did Love the bacon here Edison I dropped a little bit of the bacon jam But it's so cool to actually eat it off of the clothesline like pens. So it's kind of like chopsticks But this is the best to go with the bacon. We also got lecture fries and calamari.  I'm excited. Which one should I go with this one? Yeah, this sauce isn't spicy.  I think I'm gonna actually close pin the calamari Look at that fancy The calamari was actually very delicious and I would even say that the sauce was good too Overall, I really love the Edison when it comes to cocktails and when it comes to appetizers like just alone I can come here and literally drink drinks and eat appetizers all night long. I love it Obviously you guys can tell how much I love the Edison and all of their amazing drinks So make sure if you guys come check out PJ. He is an Absolute amazing bartender and he's so skillful in his trade itself and the high roller menu has such an amazing Amazing like cocktails and ingredients. I absolutely loved it. I hope you guys enjoyed it too and We'll see you next time