So a lot of what I'm going to talk about actually resonates a little bit with what Andy has said. And basically what I'm going to talk about today is kind of results from two different projects. One project that's been completed that is work that I did with Fin Tarpe and other colleagues called Learning to Compete project, which has a lot of lessons for jobs and a lot of lessons for job creation in particular in sub-Saharan Africa. And I also want to talk a little bit about new work that again with UNewWider and with National Treasury in South Africa where we're looking at issues of resource allocation and particular resource misallocation and the importance that that has for the creation of jobs too. So as Andy has highlighted and just to motivate what I'm going to talk about, basically the reallocation of labour from low productivity to high productivity activities or kind of structural change is an important source of growth in developing countries. And what this means of course is that there's a lot of job churning. There's a lot of jobs being destroyed and a lot of new jobs being created. So what is important from a developing country perspective is that we have job creation, which is kind of like the extensive margin of this, but we also want to create better jobs and that's at the intensive jobs, intensive margins. But pay better, have better terms and conditions and so on and so forth. So an important question in relation to this then is in order to create more jobs, in order to create better jobs, where should the policy focus be? Where should aid efforts be focused at? And what I kind of argue and we argue in some of our recent work in sub-Saharan Africa in relation to this is that it should not necessarily be with the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. We're focusing more at the larger formal sector enterprises in terms of creating new jobs and creating better jobs. As we know, most of the jobs in developing countries are in the MSME sector, estimated to account for about 90% of all workers and in fact about 75% of workers in sub-Saharan Africa are kind of in a category of vulnerable employed in that they are involved in unpaid work or their own account workers. And if you look at the numbers, some of the research that some of our colleagues in our team have done has shown that the MSMEs don't really create jobs on net. So they're responsible for a lot of job churning. So on net there's not a huge number of jobs created in this sector. They also offer much less secure employment and they also pay much lower wages than large firms do. So I guess what kind of proposing is that it's unlikely that there will be the source of more jobs and will be a good source of better jobs in particular. So what our work points to is the fact that there is a strong case for focusing efforts on larger firms. They, as I've said, create higher paid jobs, more secure jobs and in fact they're more innovative, they're more productive than small firms and engage in much more technological development and technological expansion. And also as we know from the literature on firm dynamics, productivity matters and productivity matters for firm survival and for firm growth. So one of the challenges in many developing countries is that lots of these micro, small and medium-sized enterprises don't graduate to becoming larger enterprises. So they remain small. So what are, I guess, the questions that we ask is, what are the constraints to enterprise growth in developing countries? So what is preventing these small firms from growing and becoming larger firms? And what our work and our research has pointed to is that one of the main factors here is that firms often lack the capabilities to grow and to develop. So I'm going to talk a little bit about our research in that area and what we have found in relation to that. The second area that I want to look at quite briefly because it's just a new work relates to resource misallocation and the misallocation of labour and capital resources and the existence of distortions in the economy that prevent labour and capital from going to the most productive firms. And that's really evidenced by the very wide dispersion in productivity that we see among firms in developing countries, this dispersion that is much wider than in developed countries. Okay, so speaking first about firm capabilities, just to talk briefly about this project that we've been involved in for a number of years. That's a collaborative project with UNewWider, African Development Bank and the Brookings Institution. It involved Finn, myself, and John Rand, Monsuda, Brum, John Page, and the baby shimless. So basically what we did was we had very detailed case studies of industrialisation and the evolution of public policies. We brought together a bunch of quantitative data on firm level data and surveys from a number of different countries. And brought all of this together looking at a number of topics that we felt were of relevance to developing countries. We also did an interesting qualitative survey that I'll talk a little bit about. So it involved nine different African countries and two Asian countries, and the project teamed national local team members with global experts in terms of coming up with our research findings. So I guess one of the motivations behind this project was the question we were asking was, why is there so little industry in Africa? And certainly, you look at the job creation that we've seen in Southeast Asia in particular, that was very much manufacturing sector-led, industry-led. And we've not seen that in Africa. And this is kind of the deindustrialisation that Andy spoke about and the fact that manufacturing only accounts for about 10% of economic activity. So you don't see the job creation happening in that sector. So this is the question that we wanted to answer. And one of the kind of answers we came up with was that in many cases, Africa and African countries lack the capabilities, lack the firm capabilities for the same type of growth and expansion of the industrial sector that we've seen in other parts of the world. We've seen that Africa lacks capable mid-sized firms, and a lot of that has been linked with management and the capabilities of management. But also, a lot of the lack of development of these firm capabilities is linked with two things that I'll talk about. One is the fact that firms learn capabilities from exporting. And second is that firm-to-firm knowledge transfers are a very important source of capabilities. So one thing that we have discovered in our research related to FDI and its importance in terms of FDI spillovers, in terms of learning and domestic firms learning from foreign direct-invested firms. And within that, vertical linkages along the supply chain were found to be a very important source of that learning. And one of the studies that we did was a qualitative survey where we looked at FDI firms and we tried to map in a number of different countries the links between those FDI firms and local firms, local domestic firms along the supply chain. So those that were supplying inputs to the FDI firms and those that were purchasing output from these FDI firms. When we constructed the map for the countries in Southeast Asia, we found a very populated map of interlinkages between domestic firms and FDI firms. When we constructed similar maps for the African countries in our sample, there was virtually no linkages whatsoever. So the story behind FDI is that, you know, it can lead to spillovers, can lead to improvements in firm capabilities, but you have to have an underlying structure there that you're dealing with. You have to have capable firms and these underlying firm capabilities and complexities need to be there in order to be able to benefit from those types of spillovers. A similar story in relation to exporting, which I'll speak a little bit about. So the country studies that this is actually based on, when we did a number of studies on learning by exporting and the extent to which firms learned by exporting, we confirmed a lot of our expectations about this. We found that as expected, more productive firms select into exporting to begin with. Large firms, foreign firms are the ones that are more likely to be the exporters. But we also found a lot of strong evidence to suggest that there is learning effects from exports, so that even controlling for selection and all of these other things, that firms that export become more productive as a result of that process. We found that these learning effects were stronger for the domestically owned firms that are actually engaged in export markets, where you're exporting more sophisticated products. They're stronger where you're exporting to higher income or more complex markets. And they're stronger in the initial years of exporting. So these were not really surprises. These are what we would have hypothesized would be the case. But there were some surprises in these studies. We found that many African exporters are born global and that they don't enter into exporting after experiencing the market at the domestic level. They establish in order to service and export markets. Very few firms learn to export. They may learn by exporting. So you don't have this selection into exporting, as I've said. You have very few partial exporters and you have very few switchers between exporting and not exporting. So in general, our exporting activity is highly persistent. But we also found that there is a real opportunity here for domestic firms because the productivity premium is very high and it's very high where there is not much exporting happening to begin with. And where there are low export participation rates. So exporting from our studies is very important for productivity. It's very important for firm survival and very important for firm growth and expansion. So certainly is potentially a source for more and better jobs in the future. The second kind of main area that we looked at in terms of firm capabilities and the transfer of knowledge and this transfer of firm to firm knowledge is through agglomeration. And this is related to the fact that if you have jobs that are created in well-performing clusters, they can have additional impacts on productivity. So firms, what we found in most of our studies in this area is that firms and workers that are located in close proximity learn from each other. There are productivity spillovers associated with that. Firms located in clusters benefit from a broader pool of skilled labor, which means that you'll have better matching of jobs to workers. And also clusters and especially economic zones have the potential to help link domestic firms to foreign firms. And also help link domestic firms to export markets where further learning can then in turn take place. So I guess what this research brought together was thinking about why countries in sub-Saharan Africa have not, the manufacturing sector has not done well, why these firms have not done well and a lot of our findings could be kind of pinpointed and summarized in this kind of lack of firm capabilities. And the fact that investment there has the potential to lead to job creation in the future. So on foot of this evidence, we come up with a strategy for industrial development and I just kind of point to a few key things here. The first relates to something that Andy pointed to was the need to reform the investment climate agenda. And here is a graph about the ODA for economic infrastructure and how the extent to which it has declined over time. So the infrastructural gap is something that was identified as being a significant issue in many of our country cases. So this is kind of one of the main recommendations we've made is that you need to kind of revisit this and investments of ODA into infrastructure is much needed. Also support for institutional development around foreign direct investment. So if you're not enough to have a policy where you're attracting foreign direct invested firms, it's also important that they are linked in with the local economy. Similarly for special economic zones, we've seen a number of special economic zones in Sub-Saharan Africa fail to be, and they're ineffective in many ways. So kind of a reform of that and thinking much more clearly about how these zones operate is needed. Also obviously from what I've said, mounting an export push is something that's hugely important. There are productivity gains to be had, but there are high private costs of entry. And one of the big constraints that we identified was this knowledge of potential markets, the fact that firms do not know about what markets are out there. And that's something that policy can directly affect. So entering into these global markets, we kind of say we'll need an East Asian style export push. And this will require effective institutions from the top and will require trade-related infrastructure and trade logistics. And providing support for those is also of importance. And then relating more to capabilities and clusters and promoting firm capabilities and building firm capabilities, our studies have pointed to the fact that exporting is an important component of that. FDI and linking with FDI firms or domestic firms is an important component of that. And in particular strengthening the domestic value chain relationship, so linking domestic firms into these global value chains is also a possible source of productivity growth and job creation and the creation of good jobs. Likewise, in relation to the special economic zones and creating clusters, the SEZs in Africa are certainly not up to the world standard. They have not performed as effectively as they have inside these Asian countries. So strengthening these links between firms in the SEZs and the domestic suppliers purchases is another way forward in relation to that. So this is just some of the outputs from that. With a couple of books, a special issue has just been come out on learning by exporting the Journal of African Economies. So you'll find the results of all of these studies in those areas, which I'm doing in time, doing in time in another few minutes. So the second thing I wanted to speak briefly about, this kind of points to some of the, I guess, the trade-offs that Andy was talking about. And this is a new area of research. It's an old issue, but it's really, I would say, a huge gap in relation to our understanding of resource and the extent of resource misallocation in developing countries. So as we've said, it's the reallocation of labour across sectors as an important driver of productivity growth, but there are and there is a lot of evidence for significant resource misallocations within sectors across firms. So this is where you have distortions in the economy that prevent the flow of capital and labour from the less productive to the more productive firms. And this is really evidence by the fact that there are, there's a huge dispersion in the productivity levels of firms in developing countries. The fact that low productivity firms can exist alongside high productivity firms points to the fact that there are these distortions and these misallocations of labour and capital resources are actually happening. One of the similar pieces of work on this in 2009, the Shenkino who look at the potential TFP gains for China and India, if the resources were allocated, reallocated as efficiently as they are in the US, are in the region of 30 to 60%. And our early work from South Africa on this are pointing to similar potential gains in TFP if resources are reallocated to their optimal level. So on the one hand, if you're developing policies to try and favour particular types of firms, developing policies to try and push for exporting and so on, you also have to be very careful in designing policy not to create or introduce distortions that can prevent the reallocation, the efficient reallocation of labour and capital across firms. Some possible channels of misallocation relate to that have been found in the literature so far relate to things like credit constraints, which leads to a misallocation of capital across firms and this has been one of the main sources of misallocation that have been investigated to date. But also you can think about things like rigidities that prevent firms from formalising. If it's costly to formalise, it means that firms will remain informal and this means that more resources may be allocated to informal firms even if they have a lower marginal revenue product of labour. So there you're not getting an optimal allocation of labour resources across firms. Similarly things like gender or race discrimination can affect the allocation of talent and an interesting paper also by Shea and others looked at the removal of gender and race discrimination in the US and found significant productivity gains associated with the efficient allocation of labour. And also labour could be misallocated due to policies that affect the size distribution of firms. So if you have policies where you are supporting large state-owned enterprises for example that can also affect misallocation. So I think that this is just to point to an area of research that where there's a lot more work needed. Particularly in developing country contexts most of the evidence that we have is from developed countries. So here there are strong data constraints of course but I certainly think that there's a lot to be learned from this literature in terms of coming up with policies for promoting an efficient allocation of resources. Okay so I'll conclude. So I guess my conclusion points to the fact that to really address the jobs crisis we need to focus on creating more jobs but also on creating better jobs. And in Africa there is a real opportunity for Africa and Sub-Saharan African countries to break into the global market for industry and goods in particular. And in our work we highlight three reasons for that. One changes in Asia and changes in the cost of manufacturing and in Asia in particular in relation to labor costs. So there's an opportunity there. Also trading tasks and the fact that the supply chain has been broken up into a number of different tasks. It gives firms the opportunities to specialize in one particular task that maybe is not so complex and build economies of scale in that task. So the integration of the global supply chain and global value chains I think represents an opportunity there. And also thinking about industry not so much solely in terms of manufacturing in the traditional sense but industries and sectors that mimic manufacturers are similar to manufacturing such as for example, you know, traded services. They have a lot of the characteristics of manufacturing sectors. We can also think about the agribusiness sectors and so on and so forth sectors that we call industries without smokestacks. And as I've highlighted we feel this requires a new direction for industrial policy that focuses on these three key areas of infrastructure exporting and developing and fostering especially economic zones. But at the same time I think that we do need to be very mindful of the extent of misallocation of resources in developing country contexts and designing policies that remove those distortions can really I believe represents a hope for future productivity growth and employment. But here's where a lot of researchers needed in terms of explaining that very large dispersion of productivity that persists within sectors at the firm level in many Sub-Saharan African countries. So thank you, I'll leave it at that.


Hello and welcome again from me at TU Berlin. We, the TU Berlin, are now next-clouders. Thank you. Sorry for those who saw my talk yesterday. Some slides are repeating, but this is just a smaller one here today. Just a lighting call to who is the one who are interested in the whole story. Just watched the movie from yesterday. To make it short, we started evaluating sync and share systems in March 2012 because we wanted to give an alternative to Dropbox and Co. We just learned the reasons why that is a good idea. And we made the role out of on-cloud 5 for about 40,000 users in May 2013. This is the architecture of our next-cloud infrastructure now. This is a normal big installation with several web front ends, with a Galera proxy and Galera cluster, and we are using GPFS as a cluster file system at the moment, and 5 big IPs, so you can imagine what we had to do for the migration. What we migrated were 22,000 users. 10% of these users are active daily, at least. We have 100 million file cache entries in our database at the moment. We have about 70 terabytes of data, and we have 100,000 file changes a day. We are hosting 17 other universities and institutes in the framework of the DFN cloud. It was not just Theo Berlin who migrated, but the whole hosted instances too. Our migration went from Apache 2.0 to 15.0 to NGNX 1.10.2. We upgraded the PHP versions. We migrated the Shibboleth module from the Apache 1.0 to the next-cloud app, which is really better for us to debug and so on. We migrated from NGNX 9.10.4 to NGNX 11.03. One of the results was a very low load on our database clusters. On NGNX 9, we had the loads on the left side here, and two weeks later, with the same users, the same circumstances on NGNX 11, we have much lower load on these databases here. My lessons for you, the developers, after this migration also have big installations in mind. That means test the scalability of your code. For example, we have 50,000 LDAP entries. I think it's just possible to test software with 50,000 LDAP entries. You can generate some random stuff in an open LDAP. That's not really a problem, but have a look at what happens to your app when you have this amount of entries there. For example, try to make larger file cache entries. We have 100 million at the moment. Maybe it's a little big for testing at home, but try bigger amounts of data and test this. If you make SQL queries, think about making them less and cheaper, because as you saw on my last slide, this is really important for big installations. Another important thing for us who make these big installations is the possibility of disabling functions. That means we need less dependencies in the modules, because first of all, we have to integrate this in our infrastructure. Sometimes it's not possible to duplicate some services, so we have to disable one part of Next Cloud to integrate it in our infrastructure. This is possible because it's open source and we have control of the code, but just make it easier. Sometimes it's not permitted by law to enable one or other feature, so it should be possible to switch it off. Sometimes you want to make combinations between different products, and again it is important to switch on or off the one or other feature. That are the lessons, and I thank you for the great code that is already running here and serving so many users here. Thank you.


Siganella gets visitors from many different places. Alex Cumming, a project manager at Kittafire Trainers, is a visitor training the fire department personnel on new fire simulator operations. I'm here at Siganella to do handover and training on some fire training equipment that Siganella has just acquired from Kittafire Trainers, one of them being a UH-60 helicopter trainer. This training gives the fire team the knowledge to use the equipment and to do the training themselves. It allows them to become familiar with the tactics and techniques they're going to need to have when they do have a response to a car fire on base or a helicopter fire out on the flight line. These tools will help ensure the reliability of NASA's fire and emergency services. Reporting from Naval Air Station Siganella, I'm Petty Officer Sean Hillier.


And what about what's happening with rates? Because I know it's very difficult for the central banks to raise rates at the moment, but at some point with regards to carbon inflation, that is one of the weapons they have. I think rates went up slightly in the UK again recently. Do you think there's a chance that rates will go up significantly or do you just think it's just not palatable? So I think they're going to try to raise rates and still something breaks. So in the 70s, they were able to raise rates because debt as a percentage of GDP was low. You could put rates in the double digits and that interest expense was still relatively small. I mean, it put the economy into a recession, but it didn't put you into a depression. Whereas in the 40s, when you have sovereign debt, it's 100% debt GDP. And it's even worse now because of all this private debt. If mortgage rates are 10-50%, if treasury debt is 10-50%, everybody's insolvent. And so I don't think they're going to be able to get to positive real rates, meaning rates that are higher than inflation levels. They're certainly trying to uptick them, but of course they're doing it rather slowly. As you said, 8% inflation and they're like, okay, 50 base points here, 50 base points here, which is funny because that's actually the fastest they've done it in 20 years. In the US, we haven't had 50 base point hikes for like 20 years. But it's also woefully insufficient. And so I don't think basically I think that regardless of what they do with rates, that's not what solves this. This is bringing more energy abundance and commodity abundance to markets. And in the meantime, I think they're going to try to protect their currencies until you sort of get outright recession or you get credit markets freeze, or you get sovereign bond markets get illiquid and messy. Right? So in the United States, that could mean that, you know, whenever you see the dollar gets too strong, foreign sector doesn't buy a lot of treasuries, banks are already stuffed full of treasuries. Who's the marginal buyer of treasuries? So you get less liquidity in the market gets messier. And then as I said with Europe, I mean, who wants to buy Italian sovereign debt? Not me. Who wants to buy that and hold that for 10 years? And so who wants to buy Japanese government bonds at 0.25% for 10 years when they have 200 some percent at the GDP? I'd rather buy Bitcoin for 10 years. Okay. Amazing. Really, really helpful. What are you optimistic about, Lynn? Energy. Energy investments. Bitcoin. Long term. Good real estate healthcare. Healthcare stocks, things like that. I think that there are... Why? Because you think we're going to get stressed and sick and beaten garbage? But it's just an era that I think is profitable and that is, you know, unfortunately, it's, you know, they have a lot of ways to get a lot of money. But is it something that generally tends to be more profitable during economic difficulty? Because I know, for example, during recessions, it's good to invest in dominos. Well, it's one of the... So healthcare is one of those like mandatory expenditures where people are not going to cut down on their healthcare as much as they're going to cut down on their retail spending when energy price gets high. So I'm rather defensively positioned. When we look at long term, I'm optimistic on just human ingenuity, right? So I think we're going through a quote unquote, fourth turning. So a time period where we're examining our existing institutions. All right.  Okay. So first of all, well, I guess no one could hear me in the very beginning. Sorry about that. Looks like there was a glitch with either me or YouTube, but I think we're okay now. I'll check in the comments and I think we're okay. That's a bummer. Oh, man. Technology is awesome until it's not. So let's do a quick recap, shall we? Let's just do that.  It's going sideways. I was talking about crypto-quant over here. There's two things I really care about. Leverage ratio, we're at an all time high. So people are leveraged like crazy. If you're long or short, I don't care what you do, I'm not your dad. But someone's going to lose. Also, there's this thing called the market value to the realized value for the ratio. Historically, values over 3.7 are the price top and one indicates a bottom. And I talked about this. I said, remember that thing? I don't know if you heard about this. It was called coronavirus. It was a big thing back about a year ago or so. And we bottomed out at 0.85. That was the bottom. And then we're seeing that again almost here. We're at 1.2 somewhere around there. So I can't tell you when the bottom is, but I think, damn, we're pretty close. And that was the thing that I was talking about. Also, I said, hey, look, this is, I think we're correlated. We were correlated yesterday, not so much day because the stock market's closed. If you don't really care about that, go into fractionalized share of art. This is what I own. I have a Banksy and I have a Baskia. It's fractionalized shares. If you don't understand how to buy art, it doesn't matter. Just use MashaWorks. Link in the description. Looks just like this. Bing, bang, boom. There's a video I did which explains exactly what I'm talking about. I have 5% of my portfolio in this. And the reason is, is because it's got a 19.9% price appreciation year over year. I will take that as opposed to the 8.5% craziness inflation and the nonsense that's going on in the markets right now. Anyhow. And then lastly, Guy, thanks for showing up for a Coin Bureau for DCA. And we did that yesterday. Link in the description. Okay. That's how I should do every show. Just go over like that. So there we are. Sorry about that. It looks like the audio was a little bit off in the beginning so I just did a little recap. So that was Lyn Alden, one of the smartest people in the space. And she was on what Bitcoin did. Link in the description. You can watch the whole thing. And it's very pretty fascinating. And just so you know, that was probably the more positive things that she was talking about. If you watch the whole thing again on this show, we try to give you not too much hope and not too much fun. So you make your own decisions. But I got to tell you, it was not good as far as the outlook for the future. So I'll have you listen to it. But there was one more piece I really want to talk about, which was Peter here's seems like a nice guy. He's got a great show. But in this snippet here, these Mark are Peter. Peter and Lyn are pretty big Bitcoin maximalists. Just that's how it is. Some people are. What are you going to do? And there is this one point where they start to realize that, hey, maybe Bitcoin can't do everything. Maybe there's room for other things, which is pretty amazing to me because you don't really hear Bitcoin maximalists say that enough or at all period. I mean, look at Max Kaiser. Everything is like the worst thing of all time. What's this Bitcoin? So there's a snippet right here. He's going to talk about exactly why other chains are actually good. So let's take a listen. Let me share my screen again so you can hear it. This is about two minutes or so. You said Bitcoin and stable coins. This is something Alex talks about a lot. He talks about the fact that an insert in jurisdiction and stable coins are super important. People are struggling with economic difficulty. Bitcoin isn't always the greatest tool for them because the price is volatile. Some of certain jurisdictions, I think he's mentioned Palestine to me specifically. Maybe even Turkey recently, he said there's a lot of popularity with regards to stable coins. For me, it gets into this kind of weird place whereby I'm a Bitcoiner, but I absolutely support and agree with everything Alex says about stable coins. But then I have to square this circle around the protocols which they tend to live on, which tends to be Bitcoin protocols, which we can all be very critical of. You've done some great studies on Ethereum and potential issues with scaling that as a platform. But at the same time, if that is a tool that has become a tool for human rights and freedom, I'm kind of conflicted between criticizing these platforms and saying, when recognizing they are actually helping people. Do you understand the conflict I have? At the end of the day, there are people making use of stable coins. One of the big markets is just crypto trading. That's where a lot of the Ethereum ones are used. The ones that go on Tron are optimizing for lower fees. They're the ones that a lot of people in developing countries are actually using as dollars. They're using them for savings, things like that. As you point out, there's a lot of problems with the underlying foundation that they're on. But the whole point of a stable coin, so Bitcoin is the most decentralized. It's the one that's globally decentralized. Whereas what a stable coin is basically doing is saying, okay, so it's centralized, but the central hub is outside of the country that is confiscating your dollars and is having a currency crisis. If you're, say, Nigerian and you hold tethers or something like that, they perceive that as safer than if they try to store dollars in the local bank. There's a precedent of countries like Lebanon and Argentina and they have a currency crisis. They say, oh, you have dollars in the bank. We're going to go ahead and convert them to local currency at the exchange rate we pick. Any attempts to protect yourself from that inflation just fails. They'd rather have this peer-to-peer version with the central hub outside of the country. Of course, they have to rely on that hub. They have to rely on that protocol. It's not an ideal long-term solution, but it's obviously an important bridging tool for the environment that we're in right now because a lot of people, if you make $400 a month and you have $400 expenses a month, you can't risk volatility for that, right? And especially if you're trying to save for a three-month, six-month, 12-month period, being 100% in Bitcoin is challenging and that's where stablecoins can be useful for them. And so it's serving a purpose. And then there's all sorts of technologies like Taro and things like that that could eventually bring them back to Bitcoin and Lightning. I mean, they originated on Bitcoin. They moved out to where market activity made it cheaper. Maybe they'll come back. Yeah. So I couldn't agree more. And that's the thing. I know, I mean, Bitcoin Maximus will say, there is only one way. There's only one path through and that is through Bitcoin. I just don't believe that to be the case. I think technology and as things move forward, I think there's going to be room for others. So this is a prime example of what they say. And actually, it makes sense, admits it, right? You can't put everything into Bitcoin, especially in your third world country. I mean, it's great if you're like, let's take Turkey, for example. Turkey, they're inflation right now. It stores a 73%. So if you have your money, I think the Turkish lira, you're in pretty bad shape. So if you didn't swap it over to, I mean, at the minimum to a Bitcoin, then you're hurting a lot. And I think the better option probably, and that just depends if you do that like a month ago, you'd still be down what, 10%, 15%. But if you put in a stable coins, you wouldn't be down at all. So again, there is a room for other chains besides Bitcoin. And I have to agree with Peter and Lynn and what they talked about. So again, if you liked part of that conversation, there's a link in the description. You can watch the whole thing. It's fascinating. It's really good. But I will tell you when you want to talk about do your own research, that is a part of it. And you will not like everything you hear. But I think you have to hear both sides of the same story because Hopium can only get you so far. All right. So that's it for that piece. Let me know what you think. And then let's move on to our next piece. Thank you, New York. Thank you, New York. This one's pretty good. I love to peruse the Twitterverse and just see exactly what's going on. And apparently New York came out and said, hey, guess what? We don't want any Bitcoin miners here because the ESG issue, environmental, social and governance. And we don't think that has a place here in New York. So we're going to kick you out. Not really they're going to kick you out. The whole story really comes down to there's a moratorium and you can't start up new ones right now, especially if you don't use any kind of ESG compliance or renewable type of sources. So if you're using traditional electricity, coal and things like that, that's too dirty and you're not going to be able to open up a Bitcoin mining operation, which is fine. And I love this article. I'm not going to read it because that's the whole thing. That's exactly what happened. Now they could veto it. It looks like it's going to go through so far, but it could be wrong. Who knows? So what does that mean? What that means is that it's a big win for other states, just like there was a big win when China kicked all the Bitcoin miners out, even though 20% of the hash rate apparently is still in China because they're doing it on the ground. So it still leaves a vacuum and that means that there's job opportunities. So if you're a Bitcoin miner, it's just a quick message for everybody. If you're a Bitcoin miner and you're in New York or any other country that's just charging too much, there's this state and it's fantastic. We have low taxes. People are just great. We have a good governance system. And if you're looking for a place to set up like a Bitcoin mining operation, there is no better place than Texas. And there's a couple of different places that will help you with infrastructure. Just come on down.  We want you here. So just come out of Texas, all you Bitcoin miners, and we'd be happy to have you. Job creation. So that is that piece. And I would just like to mention one more thing and that is that this ESG nonsense that we keep hearing about, it's a front. It's a fraud. It's fake. And we did a video about this two days ago. And what it came down to was the section of Deutsche Bank that deals with the ESG compliance. They are essentially picking winners and losers. And they just got rated two days ago because they found out that there was some shenanigans going on as to who they were saying was ESG compliant when they actually were not. And no one talks about it. I don't understand why this is a thing. So just watch that video, link in the description. You can understand what I'm talking about. And also lastly, I will just say this. This is from Cambridge, Bitcoin Electricity. I'm not going to go over why I think it's okay to use a bunch of electricity or Bitcoin. I just want to point out one thing. And that is that when you, in August 2019, did you know that China, the average monthly hash rate was 75%? That's a lot. That's a lot in China. And if you just scroll through to the latest, America now is 37%. China still is 21%. Again, underground miners. And then Russia Federation, 4%. And then there's little pockets around here. But I just want to say thank you quickly to China for blowing it. And allowing all those miners to escape over to here so that we can become the dominant force. Anyhow, I just want to say thanks. And that's it. So let me know what you think about that in the comment section. And lastly, we'll finish up with little positive news, maybe. But that's all how you look at it. This was a snippet of information I got from Beta Ray Mondo. And he tagged a couple of us and said, hey, I'm so happy. Reno introduces the biggest little blockchain, the first city run blockchain platform in the US. And I was like, oh, that's good. I just want to take a quick look at that. And this is from the city of Reno. I guess this is their online publication. And I found it fascinating that they put it out like this. But I think there's a little something to be desired. And I'll explain right now. So this was June 2nd. And it says the blockchain application, which is going to be run by the city, built by Block Apps, creates a single ledger documenting consecutive transactions in a designated process. This pilot project, which is free to the city, is unrelated to Bitcoin or other crypto. City departments will be able to access the same records through an online platform providing clarity and transparency. First, let's get something straight. So I don't think that's blockchain per se. When you have one ledger, that's not the whole point. The whole point of it is to be decentralized so it can be immutable. So you just have one ledger and go, whoops.  That's the whole point. So I don't know if that's the newspaper, how they said that, but that's not correct. And then I did take a look at the actual Block Apps, the one who was actually running this for the city. And I do say pretty clearly here, a blockchain ledger is not stored in one central computer or database. So I don't understand what's on this one, but it's a step in the right direction. At least people are talking about it. But again, I believe that there's some more information and education that's needed before we talk about it. But that's my job and your job actually, too. So if you're here right now, you're not a crypto tourist. You're in here in the thick of the bear market and you're the one that we all have to rely on each other to educate people around us. And that's it. So look, sorry about the little audio issue, but hey, that's technology for you. But that is it for today. So if you like today's video, thumbs up, subscribe, all that great stuff you got to take off. It is Saturday. Get out of here. Enjoy the weekend. It's beautiful. Well, it's beautiful here. I don't know where you're at. But now we'll go into the Q&A section and I will answer as many questions to the best of my abilities, and we will go from there. So let's take a look.


So you're going to get a great presentation from Ariel about what she's done, her team has done over the past five years. I can't believe it's been five years since she took the reign of this position, really built out this office. But I wanted to tee it up really quick because I also had a role with the Night Life Office and the Night Life Advisory Board. So as you've probably heard on past panels or conversations, we had advocated in New York City for years and years and years for an Office of Night Life. I remember Paul coming back years ago and talking about Jocelyn in San Francisco and the Entertainment Commission and all these stories and we kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And I guess maybe six years ago, a council member in Brooklyn by the name of Rafael Espinol, we were having a conversation like brought up just casually. We were friendly. I said, this is concept of the Office of Night Life. And he said, okay, I'm going to do a bill. I was like, okay. And we got together, we brought a book menu you heard from and basically drafted this bill or helped draft this bill to create an Office of Night Life. And there was something that was really important to us about not just having the office, but also having some sort of independent advisory board. So the law set off the Office of Night Life, which you'll hear all about from Ariel, but it also set off a separate 14-member advisory board with members appointed by the mayor of the city as well as the speaker of the city council. I was one of those members that was appointed. I was then elected by the board to be the chairperson. And the law required us to do a few different things. One of which was to publish a report and recommendations to the city on what the city could and should be doing to help support the city's nightlife. And this advisory board of 14 members was very diverse. We had people from the industry, you know, people that represented the industry, someone that represented community boards, someone that represented the LGBTQ community, someone that represented a whole list of different stakeholders. When we came to the table at first, you know, certainly there was agreement on some issues, but some other issues, I mean, it was night and day, a lot of disagreement. And we tried to focus on where we could all agree and basically put out a book of recommendations. And I won't get into that whole process right now, but it was very important to do this because it allowed the stakeholders in nightlife to feel like they were being heard. And when we were developing these recommendations, we had public hearings of our own and just like Ariel did, which I'm sure you'll probably hear about as well, to bring in different folks from different sectors of nightlife. So that was the bar, nightclub owners, operators, the workers, residents, you name it. People came, told us what they needed from the city, what was working, what wasn't working, how they could change it and really helped inform our policies that we wanted to see and really how we engaged the industry. And I think it was so important because, you know, a lot of times a law passes or something happens and people just say, that happened, but they don't really feel ownership of it. And I feel like for offices of nightlife to be successful, there needs to be buying from the stakeholders, from the community. And by setting up a separate nightlife advisory board, I think it allows for a lot of that. And the other benefit that it had was getting to work so closely with Ariel and her team and a lot of feedback back and forth. What are you hearing? What are you hearing? What should we be doing? And we were very fortunate because in one sense, yes, we're an advisory board. We're trying to keep the office of nightlife honest. We're going to supervise that. What was so wonderful about it was that she and her team were doing the things that we really wanted to see happen. But on the flip side, if that didn't occur, we also could have kind of pushed back. So I don't want to take too much time, but I just want to say that if you're thinking about having office of nightlife, or you currently do, having an independent advisory board is a really important component. It's a way that you can engage and allow people within the nightlife industry to feel part of the process. They also then have the ability to work with the actual people in the office to help advise them, get feedback, and make sure that you're really going out and achieving your mission. And after five years, as I said over and over again, Ariel is going to be deeply missed. We're really interested to see who the next person is that comes into this role, how they are going to not only take the initiatives that Ariel and her team have created and keep them in motion and keep them going, but also how are they going to imagine the office? What is their vision for the office? So with that said, Ariel, come up on the stage. Hello, brother. So these are the reports that you can get online. A lot of what I'm going to share with you today was all published in this 160-page pamphlet that sort of detailed how the office was created, how we defined our priorities, how we chose the programs that we did, navigated the pandemic, and over 23 recommendations for the future. And then we have this updated report of some of the follow-through on some of those recommendations. And there'll be another report as it's legislatively mandated that we come up with an annual report to share with the world what we're doing. Let's see. It's been a minute since I gave this presentation, but I'm really grateful for the opportunity, again, in my last weekend, of be able to give you a summary in a sense of what this office has done in the time that I had here over five years. And it's, you know, it was only two years in from creating this office from scratch that the pandemic hit, which was, you know, a curve. But we stayed on track. So speaking of staying on track, I will go with my slides. So, yeah, as Andrew was saying, this office was really years and years and years in the making. The first one really that hit the European or the global stage was in Amsterdam. Obviously Jim and R.H.I. has been doing work for 40 years talking about it. But it wasn't until 2017 that through this conversation that Andrew's talking about and a lot of work from a grassroots level and the alliance that this, the New York City decided that, yeah, it's time. The rest of the world has tried this experiment and New York City deserves this office of nightlife. So in 2018, Rafael Espinal wrote the bill and Bill de Blasio, our mayor at the time, signed it and created New York's first ever office of nightlife. So, I'm really proud of our logo, by the way. I thought it was a really huge accomplishment to have this, you know, sort of uptight New York City government, you know, persona, create this really cool disco dance light logo. I think it really helped us to communicate to the industry, right, that they're being seen, that they're going to be heard after what we've learned from the Gation era. So many decades of not being understood and not seen and being seen as a criminal entity. This was the beacon of light that the city respects you, sees you and is dedicating an office specifically for you. And so, this is Rafael Espinal, Bill and Andrew signing before I was even appointed. And then ultimately, after an exhaustive search, a former bar owner, the number one noisiest bar in New York, was able to somehow out of hundreds of applicants or more be chosen to represent this industry and this city. And it was really, I think, not only a relief for me, but for the industry itself and the city, there was a lot of fear, who is this person going to be? Is it going to be somebody who understands us, that have been through it? Is it going to be an enforcer? So again, it was another signal to the industry that this was something that was truly going to be beneficial. So even though I brought, you know, a lifetime of experience, the first thing that we decided was important to do was to do a five borough listening tour, listening and learning tour. But, you know, you might not see it, but I said, you know, what can the office of nightlife do for you? So we invited owners, workers, performers, residents, nimbies, all into one room. I always thought I was insane that we would need something, you know, a bomb sniffing dog to go through the place that it would be war. But we chose really special rooms, synagogues, town hall, beautiful rooms that demanded respect, that demanded decorum. We had playlists to set the tone. And I got up there, not alone. You can see in this little picture there, I brought the New York State Liquor Authority, the Police Department, Fire, Health, all these regulatory enforcement agencies that have historically been adversarial, not to say anything, but to listen.  And at a certain point I was just like, listen, we all know what the complaints are. We've all been complaining about everything for years. This is a now what moment. When an office of nightlife is created, it's a now what moment. And so we just had them tell us what are their top priorities. Improving quality of life, streamlining, everybody's just telling us what their issues were. So the listening tour, people want to be heard, let's hear them. But we already know what the problems are, don't we? The next thing that we did in the office was to create an economic impact study. A lot of people in the industry know what the cultural value is, the social value is. But not everybody cares about that.  And those people care about money. And they want to know, is New York a $35.1 billion industry that with over 25,000 licensed establishments in New York? These are pre-pandemic numbers, but we're still, I think, almost at that place now where we've recovered to it. Almost $700 million in tax revenue, paying for the police, paying for the fire department. And so these were really important numbers to put, supporting almost 300,000 jobs. These are important numbers to put out there for people in government and also naysayers to understand. It's not just about a good time, it's about an economic driver. So after the listening tour and creating the economic impact study, we started to get to work and look to other cities around the world. Looked at what we learned from the listening tour, from my own personal experience. And we took this vast industry with multitudes of problems and somehow boiled it down into four buckets. And so first was listening to the industry. We need to support businesses, help them navigate through bureaucracy. Give them a non-enforced in touch point that is their holding hand to get them through so that they aren't going to problem with the police department. They don't have to call the police department. The other one we heard of course was from the neighbors and around quality of life issues. But it wasn't just a neighbor problem, it was also the venues. The driving force of enforcement is complaints. But it's also not just a venue problem or a neighbor problem. It's also elected officials who get calls from their constituents about the person who's complaining about the venue. And then it's the police department's problem and then it's everybody's problem. So it's really resolving how to manage quality of life issues in a non-enforcement way is a mutually beneficial solution, not just for the neighbor.  You know, nightlife spaces are places where people can look out for each other. I think it was Howie from New Orleans that said, you know, it's the solution, not the problem to a lot of the issues that, oh there it is, how about that? That, you know, these are places where people can learn, learn from each other, where we can teach, where we can raise consciousness and awareness. And so all a multitude of harm reduction techniques and webinars and programs that we've developed to ensure a safer space. What we learned is there's no such thing as a safe place, but safer spaces. And so to keep our eye on that. And so the next slide is, yes, these are improvements that we've developed based on these buckets. Well there was a fourth bucket that is Elevate Nightlife, right, as an economic and cultural asset. I always think it should really actually be the first one because the first thing to do is to reframe a framed industry. To begin to see it as an asset and not a liability because you can't come up with any good solution for any problem. If you don't care about it, if you don't see it as an asset, if it's a problem, you're only going to want to restrict it, enforce it and hold it down. You're not going to want to find the creative, non-enforcement supportive solution. So that's the first thing and the foundational thing that has to continue for every office of nightlife. And especially for this one in New York is to from within re-educate every single city agency about how they look at this industry. And so with that said, those same people, multi-agency city and state that was at the listening tour, we reconvened them and more. Almost 20 different city and state agencies, some enforcement, some not. We met every six weeks for five years with our MASH approach, which stands for multi-agency support for hospitality. And yes, it is a swipe at March, which is the multi-agency response to community hotspots. So this is our answer to March is MASH, a MASH unit. And we sat around pre-pandemic in person and after and during the pandemic without fail online and still. There's up to 30 people in this room every six weeks, not just police, fire, health, state, but cultural affairs. The mayor's office to end gender-based and violence, thank you. And they have turned to be our partners, not just our thought partners, our partners in personal one-on-one case management. So it's about macro solutions, right? How do we change it systemically, but also helping on a micro level, one-on-one case work, or hand-holding, resolving issues so that people aren't waiting in the dark for weeks, months, not knowing where they stand with a ticket or a permit or something like that. Giving them an answer. Sometimes just knowing you have to wait for six months is less painful than waiting for six months not knowing how long it's going to take. But what I learned, especially now at the end of this five years and when I said goodbye to this amazing group, the feedback was you truly helped us change the way we see this industry. And that was all I needed to hear, that this was exactly the right thing. It's about humanizing this industry and expressing what it goes through. So the march. Most of these march operations, which if you were here this morning and heard from our incredible chief, the department, which is we are still in the process of evolving our way out of that.  There was no warning. There was no, it just showed up at your door and you're like, did you know you had 300 complaints? Well, no, sir, I did not. And so we through legislation were able to achieve a 30 day warning letter that notified them, that notified them to contact the office of nightlife to help resolve the issues before to help avoid a march. But also we started, we were, because of this multi-agency relationship, we were given the trust to create a quarterly, annual, bi-annual report, a transparency report. Because it's multi-agency. It's not a central agency really. So there was no central reporting. We didn't know how many were being taken place every month. What neighborhoods, is it really disproportionate against black and brown businesses and communities? And we need to be able to prove that. And this data is what's actually helping us to change the minds of the city and the police department to actually find better and more fair enforcement. Okay, so this is a fun slide. So again, most enforcement is complaint driven.  Right? Nobody called the cops. That was not an option. Right? You go down and you deal with it. And the creation of 3-1-1, where it might be great for many things, for complaints against the hospitality industry, it is not productive. You're literally taking out the neighborly relation of a neighborly problem. And not only that, they created it in an anonymous way, which subconsciously communicates to the complainant that you have something to fear, that you are safer, not showing who you are and your name. And then you can call 300 times, which tells the police and the city and the state that you have somehow 300 complainants when it's one person on speed dial who is anonymous. And so, that's not going to work. So we created, from day one, even at our five borough listening tour, we had outside the center, no, the Peace Institute. In New York State, there is some law that says you have to have free mediation. We brought them in and in every borough and said, think about this as a solution. I wound up personally getting trained as a mediator. I piled in the program with the House of Yes, actually, and many others to see, does this work or am I crazy? And it worked. And so, during the pandemic, we wound up being able to partner with Oath, the Office of Arbitration Trials and Hearings, and realize that they have a center for creative conflict resolution in the government. But it wasn't public facing. It's only for within government issues. I went to the commissioner. She thought this was a great idea. She turned her whole program around. Public facing did not cost us a dime, still doesn't. And we created a program called MEND. It stands for Mediating Establishment Neighborhood Disputes. We have fun bus shelters, and it's interesting because the police department are the ones that are actually our partners. The Office of Department of Environmental Protection, when they get a complaint, they send out a letter to the complaint and said, would you like to MEND? When you call 311 now or go to the 311 app or their website, it says complain, or would you like to mediate? And so, this is really an educational process. We are re-educating people on how to complain. But over 83% of people that choose to MEND, do. And so, the statistics are in our favor. So more quality of life stuff. This is something I learned in Amsterdam when you go into the Red Light District. It says people live here. There are signs. It's a public etiquette campaign. Your night out is someone else's night in. Socialize responsibly. It's okay to use your inside voice outside. Communicating personal responsibility for the actual patrons. Why is all this responsibility always on the owner? And not the people. They're acting like maniacs outside. They also need to have personal responsibility. Another program under our harm reduction umbrella. This was obviously anyone who works in night life in hospitality knows this is an extremely difficult business. You don't even get to bed until the sun is rising. Someone said, lunch is at 1pm. You deserve a good meal but you're probably having pizza. It's a lot of stress being in a dark room. Sometimes fights break out. There's drama. It's stressful. And a lot of people that work at night, sometimes they're even like those people that just don't really do well during the day. The misfits of the world. The beautiful misfits of the world. And so we knew that having a mental health program dedicated to this industry was important and only exacerbated during the pandemic where we saw anxiety, suicidal tendencies, relapse. And so we created Elevate. This is Elevate Nightlife Mental Health Initiative, but we have since expanded it to nightlife mental health and well-being, including physical well-being and spiritual. Again, an entirely free program because we partner with the Department of Health, health in hospitals, music cares. I think it's important to understand that you don't need a multi-million dollar budget because in government there are so many resources that are funded, but as a nightlife office, your job is to see where the resources are and put beer goggles on. And say, I want to partner with you and we're going to reframe this and market this for us, for this industry. All you need is a great, brilliant graphic designer and writer and team like I do in Francesca and José because it was just us three. It looks like a million people in a million dollars and it's just these three people and no money. So perception is everything and resources and access to that and creative thinking and creative problem solving. That's what this is. It's not rocket science. Okay, so as many of you may know, some of you may not know, in New York, many parts of the country, there's a fentanyl. They call it overdose crisis. I call it poisoning. Overdose, I think, is the wrong language. It implies somehow someone took too much of something. But with fentanyl, you don't know you're taking it.  And so I'm personally changing it as a one woman crusade to fentanyl poisoning. However, either way, semantics. We understand that this is happening anywhere and everywhere, but we had to, like everything else, see our nightlife spaces as places where people can look out for each other. But being careful not to restigmatize the industry as the place where drug overdoses and bad things happen, right? You have to be very careful when you are advocating for any harm reduction, whether it be sexual assault and bystander training on the dance floor or drug overdose awareness or drug misuse or depression. We're just here to help educate our workers and our patrons about issues that happen in all walks of life and in all businesses. And yes, in social settings, people do tend to imbibe in drugs and alcohol, and that's okay as long as we help them be safe about it. So we created the NARCAN Behind Every Bar campaign for free in partnership with the Department of Health who is funded to have free training and free NARCAN kits, and well, they're getting codified into law with Council Member Chio-Se.  And so we have a lot of programs and a lot of different initiatives and webinars that we created, but also that our partners in the city and state and even with community-based organizations are creating and with webinars in Zoom, it's endless. So we created another umbrella for all our umbrellas called Night School, and it stands for we love an acronym, if you haven't noticed, Night Life Industry Training and Education, or a acronym, Francesca, is really the brilliant line behind most of these and our graphics. And I think it's worth noting the graphics we use are cool. They're nightlife, they're creative, they, you know, are something you can trust if you're not in gunner. So, bam, here we have three months, and you can see they go from rat mitigation strategies, applying for loans and grants, cannabis, NYC workshops, human trafficking, this is, people who work in Night Life should be aware that there might be somebody, there might be trafficking, how do you, how do you even recognize that? What do you do when you recognize that? Minority and Women Own Business Enterprise Certification, NARCAN, you know, it's endless because your governments have so many incredible programs that you, as the hospitalities are, can harness and just share specifically to your owners, workers, performers and patrons. Yeah, and here's some of the active shooter preparedness training with Homeland Security, and financial management for nightlife workers, party safer, bystander training. So, I guess, you know, you kind of have to then take a pause and talk about COVID, because it happened for a really long time, and, bye, and, you know, everyone's like, wow, so you must have had nothing to do, since there was no nightlife. And, actually, busier than ever, trying to keep the whole industry in city from falling off a cliff, but everyone's like, well, everything must have changed, I mean, how do you adjust? I mean, it did change, but our mandate and our purpose and the reason why this office was created was exactly for this. It wasn't like we have to morph into some, yes, we morphed into crisis management, which, you know, as a former bar owner, we live in on a daily basis, not of epic global proportions, but this is, that's the mentality. And so, we fulfilled our mandate to be a dedicated liaison between the government and the industry to make sure they have the resources and support, but also that they are being heard, and that they have a seat at the table where decisions are being made. And that's true every day, with or without a pandemic, but especially during a pandemic. We did a survey within the first week or two with almost 12,000 participants that showed a 95% drop off everything, overnight. Not that we needed a chart to show us or to prove that, but we did it anyway, just in case anybody was wondering. We held over 40 virtual town halls with federal, state, and city agencies that entertained, I guess is the wrong word, 20,000 participants to get information, sometimes multiple times a week for workers, owners, and patrons, department of health, transportation, all the pivoting. If you lived in New York, you may have seen this brilliant, it's up to you New York in every single window, you know, really taking this incredible opportunity to be in the mayor's office to create city-wide campaigns, you know, it was incredible to see that. We also did a what to expect when you're being inspected in plain language because there were so many different kinds of agencies and nobody even knew what to expect, and it was all this crazy state language. Takeout and hangout, all that stuff. Toolkits with the hospitality alliance and within the mayor's office. We also had a seat at the table and helping to, you know, inform the open restaurant program to make sure that it wasn't, you know, nonsensical. We had the alliance on the outside of government. We were on the inside of government working together, pushing in the same direction on this and so many other things, sort of verifying each other's perspective. And it's going to be permanent. I mean, it's a messy process, but it's going to happen. It's happening. So our recommendations for the future, you know, again, in this report develop a streamlined one-stop shop process, which is now in the process of happening with Mayor Adams. Launch Night School did that. Evaluate the complaint process. Still doing that. I feel like there should be a list of people that abuse the system. If you call 311 a thousand times, you should have a list. You still have to show up for health or for safety, but they should be brought down at night. So for the next person in my role, I would like them to do that. So it's just good to have these. Community board process, we've heard about this. It's a mess. Needs fixing. That's Amsterdam, Red Light District, non-enforcing police, civilians walking around, having these people walking around the Red Light District with walkie-talkies to tell the cops if there's a problem. Just tell them, please don't piss there. Please keep your voice down. A shush patrol. You don't need, you know, if there are cops that should be out there, you know, helping. True crime. This is a very interesting model that they came up with that I feel like to see implemented. House of Yes, you know, these are issues around consent, bringing around, you know, conscious behavior, bringing the idea of higher expectations and communication on personal conduct and consequences in venues. Oh, and then another thing that is undone or that is in the process is changing the dancing restrictions of dancing on the zoning law. It's unfinished business of the cabaret law. It used to be illegal to dance in New York without a license. It's a much longer story, but right before this office was created that was reformed or repealed. There's some unfinished business in the zoning law. So the longer you're in office, you get to dig deeper and go into the text and into the systemic issues. And this is happening. This is in the process. The new commissioner of city planning, the alliance, mayor's office, it's going to happen. I'd like to see 24-hour districts, 24-hour licenses in perhaps Times Square. We're the city that never sleeps. Yeah, we have a bedtime. It doesn't make sense to me. So that's a unfinished business. And there's a lot of unfinished business, but this is as far as I got in five years. How do you take questions? Yes? The red team that you have. The red team, the ambassadors. What is the liability to the city for having them or to volunteer? Because I can imagine, you know, somebody used to walk and talk and say, I'm trying to say, go that often, punch people in the face. How do you manage those? Well, I mean, we haven't fully implemented it. This is something that is an intention. However, we've explored that. There are similar programs, like block by block. Yeah, there's a training process. You don't just take any NIMBY off the street and say, you know, you're the one in charge. There's betting. There's training. There's guidelines. There's accountability. There's a supervisor. And they are also in touch with a point person in the precinct. So really, it's really about being able to say, something's brewing here. We need backup. Or, you know, be able to assess, is this really just about, sometimes it's really just about clocking people. And say, when they're walking within that area, say, hello, welcome to the Lower East Side. Would you like a wristband that says I'd love the Lower East Side? Just a reminder, people live here. They can say F off if they want to. But now they know someone knows who they are, and they've been seen, and they're not anonymous anymore. It's a psychological experience. And then just also having extra eyes, you know, on the street that can... Kind of like a guardian angel. Yeah. Now that's a liability. Except for less life. Exactly. But something like that, but less rogue. Yes? If you could go back in time, in the center of the office, or implementation of any of these programs, would you go back and do anything different? Not that you made a mistake, because it didn't exist. So you created a roadmap. I'm curious if you could go back and either give something a certain priority, or in a setup, or whatever it is. Would you change anything based on those five years or even just in the first year? Is it arrogant to say I'm really happy with the way things turned out?  I wish we had more staff. I wish, you know, things that maybe weren't always in my control. But I feel pretty good. You know, I'm not in a place where I have a very deep regret right now. Maybe in a few months in retrospect, I'll be good. Damn. But honestly, like the best thing I did was hire Jose and Francesca. You know, having a team, especially when you have this much of a heavy lift, to have an intense level of competency and brilliance and creativity. And to have a shared amount of skill where we're never stepping on each other's toes and that each person basically has the job and the ability of 10. You know, that was my best move. Was those two. Anyone? Well, it's legislatively created in his law. I think we feel pretty safe under this mayor. He's the nightlife mayor himself. He goes out more than all of us. I hear people. Oh, I saw your mayor at 4am. And then he's out. He's on time at eight. It is, I think, because of the how loud this office has been and how necessary it's been, especially through the pandemic. The pandemic, as horrible as it was, was really, we couldn't have asked for something better to demonstrate how vital this industry is and how vital this office is. And there are always be organizations like the hospitality alliance and others that help create it that will demand that it stays. And I don't know if the next person will be as sort of relentless or, you know, as loud in the sense as I am. But hopefully my role is the first was to be sort of a little bit more aggressive and they can just do the work without all the necessity for the extra gravitas to demand the respect of the office. But there will always be watchdogs on this. The industry will always expect, I hope, and hold it accountable and the city accountable.