And have fun and have fun. Okay. So we're live on howl round. Hold your, hold that thought. Holding it and we're recording now. So welcome everyone. My name is Brenda and I am the conference coordinator. I am happy to welcome you all to the playwrights under the radar session hosted by Brian Moore. This presentation will be in mostly in English, but some will be in Spanish. So remember to just download the oral simultaneous interpretation at web switcher pro and the volunteers will add that token, the access token to that on the chat box. Hello everyone. My name is Brenda Muñoz, coordinator of the LMDA Congress. I am happy to welcome you all to the playwrights under the radar session. This panel will be in mostly in English, but some will be in Spanish. So remember to just download simultaneous interpretation at web switcher pro and the volunteers will add that on the chat box. Muchas gracias a todos los presentadores por estar aquí. Thank you very much to all the speakers. I will leave it to you, Brian. Great. Thank you, Brenda. Thank you, Brenda, for the introduction and for all your work over this weekend and last couple years, I guess, yeah. Thank you very much for being here on behalf of the executive committee. Welcome to the 2021 LMDA virtual conference, whether this is your first session or your third of the day. And welcome to this year's playwright under the radar session. LMDA would like to thank HowlRound for live streaming this session and also thank the online playwriting resource page by page for sponsoring this session. We appreciate their support. I'm Brian Moore. I'm the president of LMDA. I am based in the ancestral land of the Pawnee in the Sioux currently known as Seward, Nebraska, but I am attending this week's conference on the current and ancestral homeland of the Ojibwe and the Dakota also known as Bemidji, Minnesota. I'm excited to share this presentation and these presenters with you as they share some of their favorite playwrights with you through this playwrights under the radar session. If you're familiar with our hot topics format, which we've been doing for quite a while, we use a similar format where each presenter will get a maximum of 5 minutes to share their playwright or playwrights with us. One of our volunteers will be keeping time so they'll have an idea of when they are running out of time and when they need to stop. So we will hope they respectfully do so. And we will plan to share contact information about the playwrights on the conference hub for future reference. They may mention some info during the presentation, but it'll be there at a later time and date as well. At the end of our presentations, we will have time to take any questions from the audience or from each other. If they have questions about each other's work and writers. And we'll also welcome the audience to share any additional names of playwrights and info that they want to share with us. Feel free free to post those either in the Q&A or in any chat functions that you have available. Finally, we will conclude the session with a special announcement from LMDA. So, I will leave it at that and so please stay tuned for that. As Brenda mentioned, we will have presentations in both English and Spanish. So, I'll be able to listen to the translations of each through the web switcher app. There's and there will be, there's more information on the conference hub. Alright. If there is nothing else, let us go ahead and begin with our 1st presenter. Who is the consulting dramaturg at Colleval Essence Theater project and Marie. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Brian. I am coming to you from the unceded territory of the. Kikapu and Ottawa people, which is a colonially known as Bloomington, Illinois. And I am here today to talk to you about Amy Tofty. So I am going to share that with you. Is that sharing? Can you let me know if that's sharing? It is not. It is not. Let me try that again. Now is it sharing? Yes, just loading. Yes. Alright. Yes. Alright, Amy Tofty is a playwright and screenwriter. Her play righteous among us was a finalist for the 2020 Woodward and Newman playwriting award. And won the 2020 Todd McNerney playwriting award. Her play cardboard cardboard castles hung on walls was a semi finalist for the 2021 Bay Area playwrights festival. Her most recent live production was her sci-fi thriller. Women of 4G, which was premiered by Chicago babes and with blades in 2019. And her work has been presented and developed throughout the United States. Australia and New Zealand. She's a member of the dramatist guild and holds a BA from the University of Iowa and an MFA from Cal Arts. In her artist statement, she says, I write plays that center on female characters and experiences. I reclaim male dominated genres and stories and spaces for women. I'm currently exploring female villains. And I'm also trying not to kill so many characters. One of the things I like most about Amy is her extraordinary sense of humor, both in person and in her writing. I first became familiar with Amy's playwriting during the fall of 2019. When I was asked to serve as the on the selection committee for coal essence theater projects new play festival. Which took place in early February of 2020. Coal essence theater project is a small non equity theater in Bloomington, Illinois. Which focuses on producing new works for underrepresented voices parts and pieces is a new work. Which centers on to a strange siblings Parker and Melissa. Who meet face to face in the presence of a mediator to negotiate the settlement of their inheritance. Set in a small town Parker. Who is transitioning to gender neutral wants to use their proceeds from the estate for transformative top surgery. And their sibling Mal is reluctant to comply. But what initially appears to be a simple case of petty bigotry is revealed to have deeper and more painful roots. As the siblings unpacked decades of misunderstandings and resentments. They begin to build a new relationship. Something sometimes comically revolving around perceptions of body image and the presence or absence in one form or another of breasts. Amy is a passionate artist and generous collaborator, which earned her a place. On the playwrights advisory board for coalescence theater. A new initiative for that organization. I have links to the other playwrights for. And their NPX profiles on the final side for this presentation. And I recommend that you take a look at those as well. I think you'll find them also. As interesting as Amy. During the 2020 season for coalescence theater, Amy's play righteous among us was chosen for a full production for coalescence. But due to the pandemic. It was, it had to be presented as a zoom production. I see I served as the dramaturg for that show. Righteous among us is an emotionally charged play. That asks the question is a comforting lie more important than an uncomfortable truth. In righteous among us are researcher at a civil rights museum is researching. Workers who saved Jews during the Holocaust, as well as families of survivors. But when she discovers that one of the. One of the resistance family stories is a lie. She must not only break the news to all involved and shattered the myth. But also come to terms with her own need to find heroes with good intentions among regular people. Unfolding like a suspenseful mystery. Each character must make difficult moral decisions, which impact their standing in the community. And the way history is recorded, which leads to another question that the play raises. Can we really truly know history? Amy's characters are complex individuals exploring difficult situations and facing them with humor, tenacity and humility. Revealing a compassion and grace that most of us hope that we have when we face conflict. One of the things I appreciate most about Amy is her unique voice and perspective. Her intelligence and vivid imagination and come to encompasses a wide range of subjects and viewpoints. Just as her language and characters explore a variety of tones and experiences and genres. Replacing characters are intricate and nuanced. And that is what makes them rewarding to both watch and produce. Her social conscious is both compassionate and comes from genuine beliefs and personal experiences. And I look forward to working with her again in the near future. And you can too have the pleasure of working with her. Amy tofties plays are available on the new flight exchange as our other writers that work with coalescence theater project. Thank you very much. I look forward to looking up Amy's work. Appreciate it. All right. Let us move on to our next presenter who is as good as Guzman Gonzalez. Hi, Brian. Hi everyone. Thank you very much. I am very glad to be here. And since I panic when I try to improvise, I'm going to be reading everything. I'm going to let you know when my actual presentation starts. I'm just going to introduce myself. Now I'm starting my presentation. Now I'm starting my presentation. I'm going to introduce myself. El llama a esto desde limitar la dramaturgia. Como dramaturgista me parece que este espectro infinito es fascinante, pues su imaginación se manifiesta en maneras más amplias y flexibles que las que la escritura hace posible comúnmente durante la concepción de un universo. La materialización específica de todas estas infinitas posibilidades se vuelve exponencial. In 2007, Javier Fundol Editorial Antropófagos junto con sus entonces compañeros de escuela, Laura García, Mónica Perea e Iván Aris-Mendi, que en paz descansó. Todos estudiantes de dramaturgia del Colegio de Literatura Dramática y Teatro de la UNAM, que querían empezar ya a publicar sus textos para dar a conocer la dramaturgia joven mexicana. Se volvieron un colectivo que concibe la dramaturgia como el diseño de experiencias. Comparten esta concepción con otros dramaturgos, como por ejemplo su actual colega, Laura Muñoz, y otros colaboradores de la época más reciente de la editorial que tienen el objetivo de difundir dramaturgia contemporánea alternativa. Su concepción actual de la dramaturgia implica una expansión a otras disciplinas y a otros medios, por lo que invitaron a más artistas con quienes han ido reflexionando y poniendo en crisis el que hacer de la dramaturgia. Y han aprovechado la plataforma digital para darle a cada texto el espacio necesario para su pensamiento debido y en constante expansión. Pienso que el trabajo de Javier se distingue por un punto de vista desacomodado a propósito, por una postura disidente, una inconformidad no disimulada. Retomo las figuras de celebridades de personajes a cuyas reputaciones ya estamos predispuestos. De seres mitológicos cuyas historias marcaron a la humanidad y los lleva al escenario desde otro ángulo. En 2015 tuve la suerte de ver su pieza Jim Morrison, o mejor dicho, de asistir al concierto que él con la colaboración de Laura Muñoz, es significó al encarnar al rockstar que le da título a la obra. Desdibujando el escenario, mezclando apelaciones directas al público y largos monólogos en los que parecía sumido en un transe, consiguié que los espectadores fuéramos al mismo tiempo sus fanáticos, sus compañeros en un bar, invitados a la misma fiesta que él, testigos a su decadencia y acompañantes en su transformación en el famoso Ray Lagarto o Lizard King. Esta es una de mis obras favoritas creadas por él porque fue la primera en la que sentí que los espectadores dejábamos de serlo al estar inmersos en la misma situación que el personaje al verdaderamente acompañarlo en su travesía. En marzo pude ver virtualmente la lectura de Vampir, que engloba una pecumpecolar interés por los vampiros que yo también comparto, además de una exploración del uso del lenguaje, práctica común en su trabajo mediante la que busca explorar los juegos que se pueden hacer con la percepción. La obra Vampir recorre la historia de los vampiros de todo el mundo, incluye folklore, leyendas viejas y manifiesta también como se han representado con los iconos musicales más famosos del siglo pasado. Sus presentaciones se alejan de lo tradicional, son eventos inmersivos, pretenden involucrar al público de diferentes maneras. Los invito a sumarse a la página editorial antropófagos.com, donde está publicada la mayor parte del trabajo de Javier y la de muchos otros dramaturgos. Todos los materiales son de descarga gratuita y antropófagos dicen que quieren diálogo y quieren conversación. Creo que lo que destaca el trabajo de Javier es que en su poética equilibra contenidos que mezclan gustos totalmente personales y una perspectiva crítica sobre nuestro contexto con la permanente búsqueda de formatos y técnicas transdisciplinarios que complementen y permitan abordar dichos contenidos. Muchas gracias. Muchas gracias, Lores. All right, let us move on to our next presenter, who is Brad Rothbard. Brad. Yes, I'm here. Hi everybody. I'm Brad Rothbard. I'm a freelance dramaturg and a maker of hopefully good trouble. My pronouns are they them and I need to acknowledge that I'm working on the unceded land of the Lanapo Kink, currently known as Philadelphia PA by its conquerors. I have thin brown hair, brown eyes and brown oval glasses. My face is oval as well and I have a white soul patch. I'm wearing a pink shirt with white squares.   I'm about to start the presentation. Amazon said a five minute shop timer onward. Shop timer, five minutes, starting now. Today I'd like to discuss the work of two playwrights who deserve our attention. Hagen Bryce Walker, Kim, Amazon Stop, who deserve our attention, Hagen Bryce Walker, he, him and A.A. Brenner, they them. One, Hagen Bryce Walker, H-A-Y-G-E-N hyphen, B-R-I-C-E space, W-A-L-K-E-R. I'll let him speak for himself in defining his plays. Hagen Bryce's work is like if street car name desire, mean girls, Texas chainsaw massacre and beloved got shitfaced at a Buffalo Wild Wings happy hour and then stumbled into the neighborhood bath house while belching the soundtrack of In the Heights.  An honorable mention for the relentless award in 2018, Wolf Crush is a fully mature work. Walker takes what seems to be a fairly slim set of premises falling in love with for the first time in high school, livestock mysteriously being slaughtered, a coke-addled school principal, werewolves and turned into an epic about identity, discovery and ostracism. Reading it, there were multiple times I felt he had written himself into a corner only to discover that what looked like a wall was actually a door to an entirely new level of work. It's a truly remarkable achievement and one of the 10 best plays I've read in the last five years. And I've read a lot of plays in the last five years. Equally important for those of you who produce work is the fact that Walker knows who his audience is, writes for them, and gets them to show up. Ask me at the conference bar how I know this is a fascinating story. If you wonder how to get the next generation into the theater, here's your answer. Hagen Bryce serves as his own agent and can be reached at HagenBryceWalker at Gmail.com. All one word, all lowercase, no hyphen. Two, AA Brenner. A period, A period, B-R-E-N-N-E-R. This one is personal. From much of my life, I've identified variously as Jewish, non-binary and disabled as I have cerebral palsy. AA identifies variously as Jewish, queer, non-binary and disabled as they have cerebral palsy. AA Brenner writes the plays I needed in the world when I was in my 20s. I'd like to let them speak about the work for a moment. I don't just write plays about disability or queerness. I write plays that are inherently ontologically disabled and queer. This results in plays with disabled characters played by disabled actors where disability is never mentioned. Because disabled writers are still writing disability into existence, every piece that touched upon the subject either positions it as the subject of the work, this is me, not AA, a recurring theme in the work or the center of the disabled character's existence. Brenner's approach to the gigantic step forward. On to the work itself. AA is a still-development playwright whose work is becoming fuller and more nuanced with each new script. This work, Blanche and Stella, a sequela, is a modernized queer, is a quote, modernized queer disabled adaptation of a streetcar named Desire with no cis white men. End quote. It's a radical revision of Williams' work with the central premise being that two women were not actual sisters, but rather extremely close friends. Their last three works have been this radical adaptation of light comedy and a neo-absurdist short play and each work shows a full understanding of that particular form. Unlike Walker, who while centralizing the text makes the play part of a larger event, for Brenner, the script is the thing. The writing is crisp and with each word exactly where it needs to be. AA has been shortlisted and announced as a finalist for numerous awards, including the Larga-Pothete Fellowship and they have not yet graduated from their MFA program at Columbia University. They are so far ahead of any curve that it is ridiculous. If you want to produce a play by a disabled playwright and you should, AA Brenner is the one. AA is represented by Chris Tillard-Verve, email CTILL at VERVETLA.com phone number<PHONE_NUMBER> However, they are... Your show timer is done. Amazon Stop. However, they are still extremely interested in enlarging the non-binary and disabled theater communities. Therefore, if and only if you identify as non-binary and or disabled, you may contact me privately for their personal email. See. Thank you, Brett. Thank you. All right. Our next presenter is Jackie Goldfinger. Jackie. No sound, G-Hi. Hey, G-Hi. There's no sound. Yeah. Hello, this is Jacqueline Goldfinger bringing you some great new playwrights to check out. I was lucky to meet Zandra when she was finishing her MA in theater from Villanova University right outside Philadelphia. I really enjoyed her as a person. I thought she'd be a wonderful collaborator. I made a note to work with her one day. And then when I read her plays, they floored me. They're sophisticated and vibrant. They were powerful and thoughtful. She has a background in history and in cultural critique. And so all of her plays were layered with historical and cultural intersectionality that bloomed and that also banged into one another and made the characters come into some really deep, complex, interesting conflict.  She calls herself an optimistic and curious polymath. She thought she would grow up to be a human rights lawyer and she is now a human rights artist. Her work was adaptation with revolution, with history, pain with power, laughter with rage. I encourage you to check out her work on the New Play Exchange. Rachel is the unexpected laugh that you get at a dinner party when someone has accidentally said something very truthful. Her writing is complex. Her characters are likable and hateable and everywhere in between on the spectrum, often within the same play. And she is fearless in going to the heart of an issue and making you really look at what is happening with the characters behind the mask. Rachel writes that she writes plays about complicated, complex women of color. These women are neither saints nor villains. They are eternally both. The women are intelligent, listed, and most importantly, real. As these women navigate through the American landscape with a series of different issues, they also struggle with the complicated idea of what it means to be a woman today and layered complexity adds to their various dilemmas. She uses her play. She writes to invite the audience into her world using humor and creating a recognizable world. We sit together, we drink together, and we live in these spaces together. My work challenges what these spaces can accept and what absolutely must change so that the room where it happens can be increasingly more inclusive. Jared is the most emerging of our emerging writers for this under-the-radar session. His voice is warm and wonderful and understands pop culture but also understands the layer of history and time and culture that led to this pop culture moment. Keep your eye on him. He's gonna do great things for the American theater. Jared says that his work will always be about black queer people in order to normalize the idea of our stories through life being captivating and relatable. And his goals are to write for stage, television, and comic books. Keep an eye out.  I've been participating in playwrights under the radar for 10 years now, so I thought we'd look back and check in with some of our writers from the past. Thank you very much, Jackie. It was great to see some new people and some recaps of some older, some previous playwrights from the radar, if you will. So I appreciate your assistance and you shared a lot there in those five minutes. I appreciate it. All right. Our next presenter is David Geary. David. Kia ora, koutarana ki tukuiwi, and nari pakeha. I am from the Indigenous nation of the Māori of New Zealand and I am also European. I'm hoping that this is sharing now and I'm going to start from the beginning. Can someone tell me if that's working? Yes. Awesome. Okay, so this is going to be a bit of a whirlwind. Tim Sinclair-Harvey is Silic's and Chacolton, and she has written a play called Kamlupa, which is called an Indigenous matriarch story. So I wanted to showcase her and this play Kamlupa, but I'm going to show you way too much information for five minutes. So you can get this PowerPoint off me if you want it. What Kamlupa is is about three women who go to a powwow. I would encourage you all to go to a powwow. And this is the Kamlupa powwow. It's very big and kids are invited. And you can learn how to throw horns properly. And one of the great things about powwow now is they're getting a lot of two-spirit people involved in them as well. Not so much under the radar anymore because she won the Governor General's Award. And in her speech, she said she wanted to write Woman Who Are Full and Funny and Sexy. And the judges also agreed that it was subversive and irreverent and brilliant. One of the things that happened while she won was that 215 graves unmarked were found of Indigenous children at Kamlups. So Canada as a whole is going, oh my goodness, what is going on here? Not everyone in the Indigenous community, everyone knew about these things. But I wanted to say this became a huge thing for Kim because people started asking if he is an example of an American graveyard at schools. But Kim was asked, like, is this a time to be celebrating? And she said, you know what? Personally, I will not let the failures of white people any more Indigenous joy. And Kim is all about joy. Her plays are very joyful. And here are some of the things. One of the matriarchs in her own family is big to her is her mother who said that she won't watch the plays unless they are capital F funny. Kim's background is she did a lot of work as an actor and ended up with what she calls cry, die, trauma drama. And she decided that there needed to be more stories and more joy. And this play is very joyful. It has a great designer. She's also a fire creator, which means that she also takes responsibility for the well-being of all the people in their cast. And she actually creates moments on stage where people can get together and have connection during the plays. So a lot of what I found when I discussed these women was that they had big political manifestos and ethics as well. Here she is. Kim actually is getting theaters to write a treaty with her now. And so I'm not going to get you to read all that, but she has a treaty with Citadel Theater. This is her new show, Break Horizons. And she also is using a great Indigenous designer who I'd ask you to follow called Scarlet Delirium. One of the things I want to do is like Yolanda Bernal is one of the women who's in the show, but she's also a great writer herself. And she is interesting. She only wants Indigenous reviewers to review her work. She welcomes you at the door and she talks a lot about carrying emotional weight with her audiences. Quilemia Sparrow is a person who's worked as a director. This is one of her shows. And she created the Pipeline Project, which I would ask you to check out, which also had speakers in the second half, like from the community speaking. Lindsay Lachance, I'd encourage you all to get in touch with, she did her PhD on Indigenous dramaturgy. Lisa Ravensberg, as well, started the Anti-Racist Canadian Theatre Exchange. Margot Kane, we were talking at lunchtime about what is a matriarch, runs the talking stick in full circle. And some of you may know Monique Mojica and her work. I wanted to do a shout out for Fallon Johnson. Does CBC podcast. I'm getting my one minute warning. Thank you. This is Nyla Capontier who does Power Bootcamps, which are really fun and is doing an excellent play called Debt Section of a Mixed Heritage Woman coming up. And then Tara Bagan, who you will have seen at other LMDA conferences. I would ask you to check out. Abette Nolan, Renelta Alouk, working at the Bant Centre. Santy Smith, doing these great dance shows and Raven John representing the Two-Spirit Tricks the World. And also, I know you did computer games yesterday, Dr. Elizabeth Leponse. So you can follow me and you can follow Kim. I would just say follow Kim. And you can actually get my Indigenous dramaturgy guide, too, if you write to me. I'll put my, I put my email in the chat. Stay curious, as Michael I said, about Canada. There's a lot of amazing women and matriarchs, matriarchs in the making really doing great things. Thank you to all the grandmothers, mothers, aunties and sisters out there. And Kiora and Heitschke, everyone. Thank you, David. Appreciate all the playwrights you shared and all the artists that you shared. Wonderful information there. Thank you. That's all right. Please do get in touch if you want any of that information. I will personally be getting in touch with you. But yeah, we will try to share some of that information on our conference hub as well. So, what we can to make that happen as well. Thank you, David, for contributing and your willingness to share more. So. All right. Our next presenter is. Susanna bazillion. Thanks, Brian. I'll bring this up as soon as I can. Can you see that? Yes. Yes. I just prerecorded this. So I'm going to let it run. The best ideas come to you when you're involved in something else, like taking a shower.  And all of a sudden, it's conscious. It's free to make connections that wouldn't have made if you were actively working on them. It's like the parable of stories of Newton getting hit on the head with an apple. And suddenly, everything clicks. And he firmly wants gravity or, or arpanies getting into the bathtub. And when seeing the water rise around him, puts it together, the water he displaced must be the same as the volume of this submerged body. Here we go. It was suddenly living, watching in every process, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, it all comes together. Click. Inspiration. The shower principle. The words of Ariel Mitchell. Ariel Mitchell. This was an excerpt from her latest work, a parenting podcast play called The Shower Principle. It's a two-person series featuring a young couple engaging in life's greatest experiment, Parenthood. They navigate their new, unsteady world while finding what they can really hang on to. Ariel has written several other plays, including Give Me Moonlight. It's a play inspired by Scotty's Castle in Death. Another play is A Second Earth. A story about an Afghan girl who was raised as a boy but must then marry a man from which Ariel was awarded the KCACC, F. Harold and Mimi Steinberg 2013 National Student Playwriting Award. Ariel was also named a new musical in 2017 New Voices Project finalist and has been featured in several developmental opportunities such as the 2018 Colson Ornages Arts Theater Accelerator, the Dramatist Guild 2017 Baltimore Footlights Reading Series, 2016 Artists Bight Midrash Group, Prospect Theater Companies Fall 2015 Musical Theater Lab, and the Cash Walk Residency Program. Ariel's ability to translate her keen observations into dramatic text began in her sophomore year of high school. She then earned her BA in play writing with a minor in music in 2013 from Brigham-Biam University. While there she earned third place for the 2013 David Mark Cohen Award and the 2011 Vera Hinkley Mayhew Award. She then obtained an MFA in Musical Theater Writing from the Tish School at New York University. She has been published with Samuel French and had a production with T. H. M. L. Theater Company in 2019. A visit to Ariel's website reveals an array of full length and 10-minute plays, plus musicals she has written and seen produced. One thing you will not find there, however, is the latest regarding Ariel's project, a musical. She has engaged in preliminary work with female magician of the decade, Arion Black, whose research has uncovered the stories of more than 200 female magicians. They will be featured in Ms. Black's upcoming book whose pages are filled with their amazing historical stories and images. Ariel is excited about the richness and diversity of the characters selected for the show. She especially identifies with the heart of the central story, which is inspired by Ms. Black's own life. It's rooted in the love of two sisters who have been divided by life, but to become reconciled and reunited to illness, death, and humanity. And so the ghostly ladies of magic says of Ariel, she gets it. It's easy to give notes to, knowing she can trust her to come back with story and characters that meet the standard she is looking for. The show is filled with music, magic, and heart. Keep an eye out for this one, folks. It's going to be absolutely amazing. To keep up on Ariel's work or commission her services, please see her website at www.ArielMitchellWriter.com Thanks for listening. Great. Thank you, Suzanne. Appreciate it. It's like we got some new work happening there as well. All right. Let us go to our next and final presenter for today, which is Adrian Centeno. Adrian. Hello. My name is Adrian Centeno. I'm speaking from the ancestral lands of the Chumash, the Gavrilina Tongvo, the Fernandino, and the Quiche peoples. Today I'm talking about Amanda L. Andre. She is an award-winning Filipino-Romanian-American playwright healing from Virginia and currently residing in Los Angeles. Amanda's work considers the body as a site of struggle. In her stories, bodies are marked by iron, by skin color, by perceived and actualized notions of gender, race, sexuality, by history, ghosts, creatures, and by actions intentional and otherwise. This attention to the body is embedded in her artistic process, which she describes as quote, digging around and finding where it hurts, end quote. Her playmaking is used to diagnose and ultimately provide a sense of where the body is on stage. And if we're so moved, the work offers us a potential model for our own healing journeys. I first met Amanda through my dramaturgical work at the University of Southern California where she was at that time a first-year MFA student in dramatic writing. A year later, I was invited to serve as workshop dramaturg on her second play, Black Sky. We were already friends at that point, but we were crucial to this moment in the American theater. Here, I'll briefly highlight three of her works. In Black Sky, a dystopian near future where teens are conscripted into a nightmarish version of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and sent to manage climate catastrophe. Amanda invites us to consider what it means to come at of age in what feels like the beginning of the end. Fierce leader Kayhawk leads her team mission to repair a regional electrical grid in the Appalachian mountains when suddenly disaster strikes. Was it a solar storm? Maybe a test scenario meant to assess the team's readiness for greater challenges? Or perhaps there's a saboteur in their midst. This may sound grim, but it's a credit to Amanda's outstanding work that the piece is as beautiful, funny, and tender as it is existentially haunting. It's also the winner of the 2020 U.S. Prize and is currently under auction in New York City. In Lena Passes By, an epic fairy tale fantasy, Filipino-Romanian-American Lena Bala travels to her alien father's homeland of Romania to search for a magical cure that might save him. In one mesmerizing scene shortly after arriving Auntie Ursa informs Lena that to go on this journey, she'll need to strip herself of the source of her strength, her tattoos. She'll connect Lena to her ancestors, who she draws on for guidance in times of trial, and she fears she won't succeed without them. Auntie Ursa asks what she drew strength from in the time before she had the tattoos, to which Lena replies, quote, I've always had them in my skin, the needle and ink just revealed them for everyone else, end quote. One by one, painfully, she strips the tattoos away. She stops short one, she can't bear that one. She offers a compromise which is accepted and she ventures into the Romanian forest to seek the heart of a wolf. Finally, mama I wish I were silver. Mama I wish I were silver commissioned just last year by the vagrancy in Los Angeles, tells the story of three soon to be four generations of women in the Remedios family. In the very recent past we meet Sophia, anxiously entering her third trimester of pregnancy. The only thing causing her more anxiety is the imminent arrival of her estranged half-sister, Ariel who is adventurous, independent and Sophia's senior by 22 years. The two were never close as their mother Dia gave Ariel up for around birth for reasons unknown to the two. In the not so recent past, young Dia and her mother debate whether or not they should flee Manila before time runs out. Grandmother insists that Dia must flee for the sake of unborn Ariel but Dia's commitment to the revolutionary struggle roots her to the Philippine soil like a Nara tree. Before grandmother leaves she offers Dia maternal wisdom that in the moments between birth and contractions Dia will slip away to the spirit world to look for her child.  There's an urgency in this work to tell the stories of ancestors that they didn't get to share or that were shared but have since been forgotten. To close, I'll quote the playwright who said it better than I could. Quote, it's not enough for this to be in a book. These stories have to exist in people's bodies. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. There's some great playwrights in these presentations and I appreciate all of you for presenting and sharing your love of these playwrights and I look forward to kind of checking out many of these if not all of these myself. So we had 10 new playwrights shared with you all today including many, many more from the presentations from David as well as Jackie. We definitely encourage you and hope that you all find their information and check them out. We plan to share some contact information for I hope all of these playwrights on our conference hub and feel free to reach out to them if you want to see their PowerPoint presentations or get more information about many of the others that they've mentioned overall. So thank you for your time today. At this point, I want to take a moment and see if there are any additional playwrights that people would like to share at this time. Maybe there are some that you have been working with over the past year or so especially as we are watching theaters open up slowly over these next few months or so. Maybe there are some playwrights that you've been working with during this downtime. Also, maybe looking into as we begin to figure out what playwrights should be next. We're seeing a lot of work from we're seeing a lot of productions that are obviously bigger productions, more popular productions but we definitely want to make sure that we're continuing to support the new playwrights as well as we are getting back into the theater and figuring out what kind of shows we want to do. So if you've got any playwrights that you would love to share at this time that might be under the radar or just getting some buzz. As you heard, a few of our playwrights here have been winning some awards recently over the last year or so including, it sounds like Kim got one last month. So please feel free to share that at this time. I'll give you a moment if you want to share that through the chat or Q&A see if we get any response that way. If our volunteers or anybody have years of any, feel free to share. Or if there are others that any of our presenters have in mind that would like to share. I do actually Brian. If that's okay. Last year I presented George Nelson and I was saying how his show was opening but it was delayed obviously because of COVID but it is launching this summer. If you go back to last year and look at his one sheet that was provided, you'll be able to see a video clip and get the updates on that show that's opening. Great. Thank you. Looks like Jackie shared info about her playwrights in the chat. Do you want to share more Jackie? Yes. A wonderful Philadelphia playwright named Alex Rosenfeld just got accepted into the American Jewish theater conferences mentorship program and so if you're looking especially for Jewish theater I'm going to put her information in the chat box as well and she actually worked to develop her new Jewish plays but she doesn't have to pull to stage them or anything like that so I'm sure she'll be looking for producers and other opportunities. Again that will be in the chat. That sounds great. Thank you Jackie. We'll look out for that information. I'm going to share a couple of things I'm seeing in the chat here. Adrienne shared Amanda's MPX info Amanda sharing her love of the work of Emilio Rodriguez some info there. It's the co-founder of Black and Brown theater company in the Detroit area so there's a couple links there to check out there and looks like Jihei mentioned I think it's Lyra Yang a mixture of mythical nature with storytelling and there's a web address LyraNelon L-Y-R-A-N-A-L-A-N .com Great, thank you. There's Alex's info and Suzanne I shared a link from what she talked about as well. Great, thank you everybody. I'd like to say something for a sec. Yeah, go ahead. One other playwright I'd like to mention is a woman named Caitlin Turnage. Caitlin now teaches at Texas State but she is an ex-charismatic Christian and writes from that perspective. She writes a lot about faith and aging. Faith in being in high school, faith in being in college faith and lesbianism and I don't know anyone who approaches faith A, so straightforwardly and B, from such a complex position because of her own positioning in her life and the work is Southern Gothic in addition to you know the subject matter she's handling it's I met her when I was drama turned at KCACTF where she won one of the 10-minute prize the 10-minute play which our play was a 19-minute 10-minute play but yeah, I don't know anyone who's doing what she does and she does what she does quite wonderfully so she's on a new play exchange look her up Caitlin Turnage, T-U-R-N-A-G Okay, great. Great, thank you Bray. Are you able to put the name in the chat? Great, thank you. All right, I'm going to share these last couple because we want to give some time for our announcement here at the end Jihei mentions representation of, I think it's Hei Young Guang that she presented a couple years ago and there's a new play exchange information for that playwright and then Amrita is shouting out Jasmine Sharma a playwright who recently graduated from Northwestern University she has a play, Radio Gradient a political drama that examines the power of complicity through three women's journeys uncovering the historical roots of a campus hate crime it had a profound impact on Amrita and she immediately connected with Jasmine to get to know her and her work more deeply she continues to find her plays authentic nuance and filled with memorable three-dimensional characters she has a website jasminesharma.org thank you, thank you for all of that Amrita, I appreciate it let's see Jackie is mentioning Infilii in the 2021-22 season Stephanie Kim Soon-Walters has a new play Esther Choi and the Fish that Drowned and that'll be produced looks like next season so if you're in town, let Jackie know and she'll get you a comp and she shares information there okay with that being said let us move on and I want to give a little bit of time to share an announcement and give some time for our final presenter to talk about a little bit more about it so I think Jihei is starting the video so I'm going to let Jihei do that thank you Jihei I hope that the sound came through for some of you but just to reiterate the LMDA 2022 conference will be in Philadelphia we are incredibly excited to host all of you here on the traditional lands of the LaNay-Lanape we have already begun putting together resources and program ideas and we're thrilled to have you join us a little bit of information about the conference coming up and this information will also be sent out on the listserv today so if you want to review it it'll be there for you the next LMDA conference will be July 21st through 24th 2022 in Philadelphia the traditional lands of the LaNay-Lanape and the theme will be theater in the wild performance outside the proscenium so we are talking burlesque, we're talking cabaret we are talking a lot of educational theater we're talking site specific work we're talking digital theater all of those wonderful types of performance and more will be covered I'm going to be the conference chair I'm Jacqueline Goldfinger most of you know me as Jackie G from Philly and I'm so excited to welcome you to our community I'm having English, Spanish and ASL interpretation available next year's conference having all that kind of interpretation does cost money we're going to have a packet we send out this fall about conference sponsorships if you or someone you know or organization you know you think might want to throw us a little bit of money and be a conference sponsor and get all kinds of special things and benefits I hope you'll let us know the sponsorship packet comes out for those of you you know have may be asking why this area why on these lands and it's a great vacation location you can come and do almost anything there's the historic district there is traditional performance there is the Lancaster beautiful Amish country there is we have a wine valley now believe it or not so we will be sending out information about Philly in the surrounding area if you want to build a vacation around your conference everything in the old city area as it's now called is accessible and updated to national park service standards it's one of the great things about having a conference in Philly is that because so much of our event spaces are run by the national park service especially in the old city district you're going to have all kinds of accessibility physical accessibility there's translation headsets all kinds of things which are going to be great and it's easy to maneuver there are hotels amenities and it's easy to access from out of town they're actually expanding our airport right now it's already an international airport but they've added two terminals and we will be coming a delta airline hub as well so by the time you guys are ready to come in you're going to be able to fly in from anywhere many many times a day of course we're also connected to the national highway system the national rail system and the buses and if you're coming from New York especially you can get a $3 bus ticket as long as you plan in advance we'll send out those links this fall with our planning packet what if I can't make it in person Philly sounds awesome but I don't know that I can actually physically make it there will there still be online content yes yes yes I love the accessibility that online content provides you'll be able to provide you'll be able to buy a virtual pass to access online resources and a limited number of presentations we are looking at getting an app specially made for us so instead of having to deal with 9 million links you would literally open the app and everything would be there for you when you need it super excited I know the interpreters need a break I apologize what I'm going to do is I am going to send out everything today on the listserv it'll be just a very 5 page with pictures and some information about what we already have planned for the 2022 conference and a timeline for when you can expect information from us about the conference so thank you so much thank you for letting me have this time thank you to the interpreters you're doing an amazing job and I will hand it back to you Brian thank you very much Jackie thank you for the presentation and for the information and look forward to the additional info that you'll share on the listserv and in the future as we work on coordinating and organizing the conference for next year so alright with that we are going to wrap things up but I wanted to take another minute or two to again thank our presenters during this session I want to thank you all for sharing your additional playwrights that you all are thinking about at this time I want to thank our volunteers and our translators as well as HowlRound for the live streaming today as I mentioned much of this information is going to be on the conference hub if you are not yet registered for the conference there is still time to get registered and I'm kind of putting on my president hat here but all the information from this session but as well as all the other sessions that are happening over these next two days we have a few more today and we have many more tomorrow will be available for those who register for the conference so please go to lmda.org and register for the conference there is additionally asynchronous information asynchronous content which has been available throughout this entire month and will continue to be for the rest of this month and maybe a little bit longer for you to check that out as well we also do have our conference in Mexico City at the end of the month and if you are not able to join us in Mexico City you can still get access to the content that will the presentations that will be happening in Mexico City as well we will make that available digitally as well so feel free to register for that as well with that all said thank you again for your time over this past hour or so thank you again presenters and all those who have assisted us during this session and will continue to do so throughout this week throughout this week and these next couple of days and we look forward to seeing you at future sessions and maybe even able to talk to you at the various conference happy hours at the end of today and tomorrow so with that take care everybody and be well and we will talk to you soon bye


The great search where lady to try to find that codec thing. Oh, no the great search brought to you by digi key native fruit where we look at Ways for you to find the thing that you're looking for on digikey.com Thanks, did you key lady? No, what is of this week's great search? Okay, so What I wanted to show was I've been hacking this bear and it was kind of cool To see that inside. Oh, sorry. Yes. Yeah, the bear And inside there's this sonic's chip and separately a bluetooth Chips using the nr 51 822 which is a chipset I know and love because We've used it many times To do bluetooth connectivity It's not a very powerful chip. It's like I think 16 or 32 k of flash It's it's very minimal or ram. It's very minimal It's good for bluetooth and but it's like well, why not just have everything run on this chip Well, this was designed in 2017 and this chip is actually a pretty powerful dsp. They can do a lot. It's got native usb. It's got SD card interfacing. It's got built-in audio. It's great for toys Which is what it is. It's a toy chipset or apparently also used for ip cameras So they wanted to add bluetooth. They added it with a bluetooth or energy module now these days the nr 51 is like I mean it's not discontinued. You can still get it, but it's like Very long in the tooth You'll probably want to go with an nr 52 or nr 53 Series that nr 53 is a little newer and the nr 52 is definitely the workhorse Of the nordic family So I thought I'd show that you can get ready-to-go modules at digikey for doing your Either adding bluetooth through an existing design Like it could be that you really cannot run your entire code on the nr 52 Although you should try because it's a cortex m4 chip And so it's quite powerful. You know you'd be so or I think the 52 yeah the 52 840 is a cortex m4 the 832 might be a cortex m3 But they're very powerful processors lots of flash lots of ramps. So you might be able to do a lot of your design completely on that chip In which case you could use a module, you know, you plug it in. Um, it's got the antenna. It's got the Crystals got the passives. It's got everything ready to go. Maybe even certifications Or you can use it like this with You know some other chip that you are forced to use maybe you need a dsp You need uh risk 5 what have you and you can add it as an assistant chip. So Let's go to digikey. I'll just close all these Things about hacking this codec. Um, don't forget digikey no longer has a dash That's big new thing and it's a brighter red color uh So let's go to bluetooth modules And uh, there's a whole area Um for modules and modems There's also separately transceiver ic's but I want in particular. I want to show you guys Um modules that are ready to go. They'll speed up your development greatly They usually come with a variety of different antenna options. They're tend They're certified for fccc etelic You know, whatever which can really speed up your certification process. You'll still need to do it for your your finished product Um, but it's nice if the uh intentional emitter is already done So you don't have to worry about like, uh, is that going to cause me any issues? Let's go with active and uh Let's go with normally stocking What a coincidence 840 that's the nr 52 840 is my favorite and um, so look at what is available down here. Let me just bear out of the way Lots of options. Um, so again the modules they come in various sizes But most of them are very small This one is kind of cool because it's like it's it's just micro miniature. It's got um And so you can look over here. It says which ship this is the nr 52 832 doesn't have native usb Uh, but it's otherwise a very powerful chip with a lot of peripherals. The only thing it doesn't have is usb Uh, the 833 did add usb. I guess I haven't used that particular one But this is very very cute. I like that. It's like it's it's, you know, it's extremely compact It's a little bit more expensive than the non-compact version ubox makes a lot of great modules Uh, I definitely use them. This one is is also tiny You can see the little antenna on there So tiny you need like a macro macro lens to get it The Nordic chipset though u blocks makes modules for it, but they're not the only one Panasonic also makes them as well But in particular, let's look for You can actually search for what chip is inside Uh, which is kind of nice utilized ic part So let's look for the nr f 52 And then uh, we'll just select them all Again, the 52 comes in a couple different configurations the 811 I think is either fewer pins or less ram like there's there's versions of this chip that are um Less ram or less flash less pins, you know, and you'll pay a little bit less for them So depends on uh, whether you Um want the chip to run your entire program. You might need more flash more ram You know, if you're making something like uh, you know those air tags or tiles where it's just wedding a little bit of program or makes a bluetooth beacon Um, you can get away with very minimal flash chips flash pins and Memory so you can see here the different memory configurations up to 1 mega flash and 256 k of ram. That's the nr 52 840 Okay, so looking at pricing Um, there's a few options. So you can get uh, nordic, uh, sorry nordic chips through the mdbt Uh series from ray tack. I've used ray tack. They're great. Um, these modules are fairly easy to place. They come with PCB antennas or chip antennas Usually chip antennas will get you a little bit more range But they're a little more expensive because they have that antenna on there Nothing's cheaper than just a trace on a pcb. So that's uh, Going to be inexpensive. Um, this 84 Sorry nr 52 810 Is also fairly inexpensive. It's about five dollars um this one 192 k of flash 24 k of ram. So It's the it's a little sister to the 840 basically which has uh megabyte of flash and uh 256 k of ram um 52 820 832 let's look at, um, let's now look at marketplace products. We'll just look at what's stocked immediately. I'm the juki So, um, if you're actually looking for like the absolute cheapest Of all time The fan snail modules are going to be very inexpensive. They're they're bare bones, but they work very well They will come with, uh PCB antennas because again, they're very cost effective However, they do all have sec certification Um, if you open up the datasheet, uh, they have telec Australia se I said And they also have a qd id um By the way, you will want that because if you don't have a qd id uh, the bluetooth group will email you and say you have to pay us for a qd id, which I found out After the fact it's not well documented explained. You do need to have it have a qd id So that's quite handy. Um, but almost everything that comes from the Nordic family has it except for the nrf 8001 Which is very discontinued. So you're not going to probably be using that chip But this one's great. I mean, this is um, cortex n4 64 megahertz again. It's uh, The little sister to the 840 Um, just doesn't have a ton of flash and ram only 192k, but that's still a lot Don't forget you're going to have to share that with the soft device that needs to be loaded Don't remember how big the soft device is, but I think it's like about half of that And if you want to do you may not have enough space to do over the air updates because the soft device is taking up space and then Depending on whether you have a bootloader or whether you have how much Over the air slots you want to've got if you don't do over the air, maybe this is okay And only 24k of ram again, you're gonna have to share that with the soft device, but for very simple bluetooth devices You know, this could definitely do the job for you um The 832 is also inexpensive a little under four bucks here, uh, this has um, also 192 Uh k a flash and 24k of ram Um, this one definitely doesn't have uh usb. I don't know if the 805 does sounds like it doesn't but um, the 832 is a slightly older uh family, but Looks like it's still available and we have a core for this chip as well. So Uh, even though we don't support it if you want to get started quickly you can use the 8 of fruit 832 core Um to bootstrap swap your project looks like they have it available also with uh a ufl connector Which is kind of handy if you want to have a nicer antenna So these are uh some options. I say like Kind of hard to beat 250. Um, this is my pick for the great search Very inexpensive bluetooth friend and that's a great church


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First of all, welcome everybody to the Institute, it's an unusual time for a meeting and this may well be reflected in the numbers but I think as we will find there's a quality quantity issue that should show itself. First of all, I'm Tony Brown, I'm a founder member of the Institute, currently called Senior Fellow and I've been asked to chair this because for a period at the end of the last century, as I say, I was a director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in which capacity I represented Ireland and Macedonia. I spent most of my time defending these, the word Macedonia without the words former Yugoslav Republic of and when I came back from that, and I had been involved in the Institute before, we established a working group on the Balkans which was required of the most active groups in the Institute in which the people of, like Misha Glany and others addressed us on a regular basis, but of course eventually the enlargement processes a hold and the western Balkans aspect of it died down as a priority issue and so the Balkans group ceased to be as active as it was, but on this afternoon's event is evidence of this, the issue is coming back on the agenda and we have been from the point of view of the Institute, that is objectively significant but also ties in with the work that we are doing in the group here that deals with the future of the Europe of Trity Seven and we are currently discussing the whole issue on the basis of work done by our colleague John O'Brennan from Manuthus with us today. Back on the agenda I think it is going to be particularly now in the light of what we are going to be discussing this afternoon which is the very important communication from the Commission on the EU enlargement policy which was published only just a matter of a week or so ago, which is a very important contribution to the political debate in the institutions and hopefully in the member states and we also have the prospect next month of the EU western Balkans summit in Sofia under the Bulgarian presidency of the Council which would be seen as an occasion on which further impetus can be given to the debate on further enlargement. So that provides the background to this afternoon's event. Before I do any more I have forgotten to do what everybody who sits in this chair has told us to advise you to do the usual good deed with your mobiles and also to reflect on the fact that we are there in an emergency. The emergency exits are the entrances to which you came and not as some people suggest the windows which probably would lead to even more emergencies but certainly the mobile phone either off or silent if you please. So to discuss the preparation of the work that is going on to prepare for the eventual EU enlargement and Balkans we are very privileged to have Archer Popovsky who is the director, deputy director general of DG neighborhood policy and enlargement negotiations or DG near in the commission who is coming back to the institute after an overview is the record of the last institute pre-presidency conference which was in 2012 so that you spoke there on the external action service and that you were I think also the deputy secretary general of that institution in the period from 2011 to 2015. Mr. Popovsky has been in his present role since April 2016 and is responsible for the southern neighborhood relations of the union and also has responsibility for migration issues and security issues in that part of Europe which is a pretty heavy and serious responsibility. Of course I have a background in the Polish foreign service and we worked in the former Poland in the institute in the early years of the decade, of the previous decade. So we are very interested to hear the own interpretation of the position that is emerging as enlargement comes back on the agenda. We of course remember that when he took office, the commission president made it clear that there would be an agreement on his watch but that is moving towards the end and recent statements both from himself and other leading figures show that enlargement at least is coming back on to the agenda of policy consideration and the situation of western Balkans is particularly interesting in terms of countries that are already candidates, countries that may be candidates from countries that are problematic in various ways in terms of their status. So we will follow the usual pattern, your remarks which we look forward to, 20-25 minutes or so on the record and then the discussion of the record of what we call Europe House Rules but really Chatham House Rules adapted to Dublin and that does not mean that they are not observed but we like the time for our own to start on these things. So without welcoming you again perhaps you would tell us what we are to expect under the rubric of this extensive work from your institution. Thank you very much. It's good to be back. It's good to see again some friends, Mary Cross with whom I have the pleasure of serving on the Political and Security Committee and everyone who took me for a trip to Somalia and this is something you never forget.  Now it's close at the home, this is the Balkans and now the last couple of weeks I basically feel like a travelling salesman because I'm going from capital to capital and talking about the strategy for the Balkans. Both in the region and in the member states and both work trends are important. But it all started with the big bank announcement of President Junker in September of last year when he gave this clear perspective and that was really like this famous sport from Samuel Goldwyn that it starts with an earthquake and then things were out to the climax and that was this earthquake moment for us because indeed President Junker decided to set the tone of discussion and in a way make this European perspective irreversible. That was part of the State of the Union address and elevated enlargement to the priority policy areas of the Commission where it belongs. For a number of reasons we see it as a completion of a certain process that started in the 90s with the preparation for the 2004-2007 enlargements. It simply confirms that the place of Western Balkans is in Europe. I mean they are surrounded by the European Union, they share the same values, they aspire to become members, they just need a little bit of push and they need to do a lot of hope. But there are also challenges that we share, whether we want it or not. You mentioned some of them, the migration crisis. In a way that was the most defining moment in 2015 that has put back Western Balkans on the European political agenda. Up to 2015 people thought of the region as they think of the past. I mean there was still some legacy issues, there was Kosovo, etc. But it was not much trouble. Then it came back with the vengeance and then also organized crime emanating from the region. There is terrorist threat, I mean again there are linkages. We know of the foreign terrorist fighters originating from the Balkans. It's not as many as we think, it was 900 from the six countries, which is double the amount of Belgian foreign fighters in Belgium, it's not that big. But it is a fact, so we can only deal with this in the European framework. So we don't want to leave a security vacuum at our doorstep and that's why we want to re-engage. So as a next step the commission put forward a strategy, a framework paper that was issued in February that reaffirms this window of opportunity that sets a date. I mean the date was mentioned by President Juncker, but then it was re-confirmed in the paper. And dates are always tricky because they raise expectations. And if the expectations are not met people get frustrated, that's life. When I was on the receiving end, so negotiating Poland's accession you were also fighting for a date. And there were European leaders who came to Warsaw and said that Poland should become a member of the European Union in 2000. Never materialized, so a lot of people got frustrated. So the date that we put forward 2025 is indicative and is to be seen as an incentive. So if everything goes well and the best prepared countries do their homework, they could possibly exceed. But they can also go back and they can, I mean others can catch up or they can even overtake the front runners. For timing we have two, Serbia and Montenegro, it's factual because they started negotiations a few years back, they've made progress, they closed a few chapters and they are more advanced in terms of the early forms. But we really wanted to open up this perspective for everyone. I mean for all the six countries some people call it the regatta principle. So they all move forward and then we see who comes in first. But of course they still need to sustain their reform efforts and fulfill a number of conditions. On the conditions the commission has always been very clear. We call it fundamentals first. I mean they have to take the commitment to the European values and the fundamental principles like the rule of law, functioning judiciary, fight against organized crime and state capture, they have to take it very seriously. We also expect the countries to settle in a binding way we say in the communication order by lateral disputes. Because we have so many examples from the past where by lateral disputes were imported into the European Union. We would like to avoid it in the future. I mean the main, the one that is on everybody's mind is Kosovo, clearly. And the strategy is very straightforward in saying that we expect a normalization of a relationship between Serbia and Kosovo. And this has to be done in a legally binding way ahead of any accession. We are not prescribing a solution. That's for them to sort out and the European Union is there to help. And that's the so-called Belgrade-Pristina dialogue that has been ongoing for some years. But we are not going to dictate the terms of the normalization to the country's concern. The economic reforms need to continue. I mean, when you look at the candidate countries, none of them except Turkey is a real functioning market economy. I mean, the structure of the economy is heavily affected by the communist past, the question of ownership, but also competitiveness, level of investment, connectivity between them. I mean, it's a relatively small region of 18 million people, but not really connected with each other. I started traveling to the Balkans when I joined the engineer, so that was two years ago. And then I discovered that the best way of getting from, say, Skopje to Belgrade is to go to Vienna. So that's the old pattern. So we want to help them improve the links, road network, energy infrastructure between them. An aspect that is really important is youth. This is a relatively young region, but faced with a very serious problem of brain brain. People are leaving because they have no job opportunities at home, are relatively well educated, are European, and living very close to Europe. So it's difficult to stop. I mean, it's part of the trend. People go wherever they want to leave, but if we offer them something meaningful to do at home, they will be motivated to stay and to prepare the countries concerned on membership. We decided to launch a number of, we call them flagship initiatives. Six flagship initiatives. I'm going to come back to them in a moment and also back them up with considerable funding. To give you only one figure, until 2020, we want to top up the pre-accession assistance for the West and Balkan Six by 500 million euros. And then we need to prepare ourselves, the European Union, we need to think of financial implications. It won't be that huge because it's not a, I mean, economically it's not a very, I mean, it's not a, it won't have a huge economic impact on the European Union, but there will be financial and also institutional implications, et cetera. Now, what's on many people's minds in Europe, in particular the countries, I mean the neighboring countries, so some member states like France and Germany is the, let's say the negative phenomena like organized crime, state capture for in meddling, pure state of judiciary. So there we have to be very firm and we have those famous list of chapters, negotiating chapters. There are two, number 24 and 25, dealing with the rule of law, with the judiciary, fundamental rights. And these will be, these will stay on the table until the very end and we really want them to take these matters seriously, to deliver on judicial reforms, to fight against corruption, organize crime, to pursue a meaningful public administration reform and to enhance the functioning of democratic institutions, including the parliaments. When you go around the region, you see that very often the opposition is marginalized. Sometimes it's their own request, I mean they simply boycott the parliament, but even if they don't, they don't have much to take. That's the role of the opposition to be pushed by the government, that's normal, but they need to play that role because otherwise there is no checks and balances. So the flagship projects that I mentioned, I will not go into all the details because that would be too boring and time consuming, but it's six of them first strengthening the rule of law. And that's not just something declaratory, we want to engage operationally on the grounds of, for instance, we will deploy a number of liars and officers of Europe, the European Police Agency in the region. I mean for the time being it will be one of the countries, starting with three countries, with Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Albania, but then we will expand it, we want to have a good footprint of operational people, to be our eyes and ears on the ground, but also provide advice in the field of police requirements. We will do something similar, not a network of liars and officers, but we will engage with Eurojust, the prosecutors network, we will support the ADL having joint investigation teams in these countries. The second flagship is reinforcement engagement on security and migration. Migration I mentioned already, you may know that the European Border Management Agency Frontex has deployed their teams on the borders in Serbia and in former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the guest officers we call them. We want to continue that and help them manage the flows, even though the situation is much less dramatic than it was in 2015. There are still some people in transit and some people trying to cross the borders on the way to European Union, be it Hungary or Croatia or Slovenia. The third flagship is enhanced support for social economic development, so that's the investment in business climate and economy. The fourth is transport and energy connectivity that I described already. Then a digital agenda for the Western Balkans, that's interesting because then we are looking ahead. Normally, because this is a relatively new dimension of our daily life, we don't want them to have to catch up when they join. There are certain things we can already prepare. So, for instance, remember there was this European legislation lowering and then eliminating roaming fees in the European Union, which is something of a direct benefit to every citizen. Well, I'm not saying it's going to happen in the Balkans tomorrow, but it should be happening at some point in time. We have to prepare that, we have to explain to the operators how to do that and if needed, back it up financially so that when the day comes they can do the same. And this is sort of a healthy dose of populism in the sense that you do really something for the people because everybody has a mobile phone and everybody is traveling. And the last but not least, it's support for reconciliation and good neighbor relations. It's not only those legacy issues that I mentioned by lack of disputes, but there is a huge need for reconciliation. I don't think I need to explain it to anybody in Ireland. We want to support the building on the best practices in our own countries, whether it's the reconciliation between Germany in France or Germany in Poland or the peace process in Northern Ireland. People out there who can help, people out there who can share their experience, we want to facilitate that. Because the potential for conflict is there. I mean, it's not acute, it's not going to explode into our face tomorrow, but there is something may happen. I was in Sarajevo on Monday and I had a series of meetings also focusing on security, internal security, organized crime, radicalization. And I was reassured by our own colleagues there, but also by NATO, still presence, the situation is fine. I mean, there is no reason to raise the alarm level, so to speak, but it's not guaranteed. It's reversible. And the way of addressing the root causes of potential conflict is to deal with all those open wounds from the past. And it's only 20, 25 years ago that it happened, so we need to invest in that heavily. So I think our roadmap is pretty clear. We have our marching orders. We are assessing all these countries regularly. You mentioned the report that was adopted by the Commission last week. That's the so-called enlargement package. So the six country reports on the Western Balkans and Turkey, very detailed. So going with the income through all the criteria, the Copenhagen criteria for membership and assessing. I think it's rather fair and we don't do it ourselves. We really reach out to everyone, to our own delegations, but also to international organizations like I don't know, Council of Europe, OECD, OECD and others to help us with these assessments. They are really well balanced, giving a fair picture of the state of preparedness and that's an annual exercise. The novelty was a clear recommendation to start accession talks with Albania and for the OECD. Because they've made sufficient progress in particular judicial reforms and governance reforms, so there are still issues out there. There are ongoing negotiations on the name of the country with Greece and that we keep our distance because it's a real bilateral issue and the UN is involved. But we hope if they manage to find a solution which seems perfectly feasible, then it would open the door for accession negotiations. By the way, it also would open the door for NATO because we would also like to join the alliance. Albania has made considerable progress in the judiciary and the government is doing a good job. So we hope in June when the members of the state are going to adopt conclusions on enlargement, we hope that they will follow our recommendation. But we are still looking at a few bumpy weeks ahead of us in Brussels. And then indeed our leaders will meet in Sofia with the counterparts from the six countries. That's the confirmation of the European perspective. We really want to keep it on the agenda. And then there's still a lot of, I mean I would say blood sweat and tears. I mean it's enough blood that has been spilled in the region but certainly sweat and tears for us and for them. But the direction of travel is clear. What we still need to do is to communicate. It is a historical opportunity and we need to close the circle. We need to complete a certain process but it's not obvious anymore. And then I'm a by-product of the 2004 investment. I joined the commission in 2008 only. But back in the 90s it was pretty obvious that the EU has to be enlarged. Now this realization is no longer there. That's why the communication is so clear on that. And we have to reach out to EU audiences in the capitals, to the parliaments and GOs. Why the audiences? That's why I appreciate opportunities like this one. I mean to explain. In some cases it's difficult because you are faced with criticism. But it's absolutely key because otherwise we risk losing a good outcome whenever it comes. So this will certainly, we spend all effort reaching out and explaining the rationale and how we want to go about it. But once again I would like to reassure everyone that we take it seriously. And we are very firm on the fundamental parameters and the fundamental values of the European Union that we expect the countries concerned to respect. I think I'll stop here and then we have enough time for a discussion. Thank you.


Interesting times today, everybody. As we move along our little endeavor to take a look at our portfolios and things that are going on the crypto and digital asset market, we tend to focus a lot on the price action, what the price is doing, is it going up, is it going down, how can I do a cost-based analysis and see where I'm going, and how, of course, do I make any type of revenue or funds as we move forward in the market.  I think we're missing the big picture as to what is going on as far as utility. So I'm going to give you three different indicators to take a look at as far as utility and where things are going. Also, we're going to talk about grayscale. It looks like they're in trouble, which means that the spot Bitcoin ETF is in trouble. Also, we'll take a look at Polygon. Looks like they're doing some major big things as far as tokenization of assets here in the Southeast Asia region and a couple of other things at the very end. So the first thing I'd like to talk to everybody about is I'm here in Korean Blockchain Week, and that is why I've been streaming at a very different location at a very different time. And one of the things that I've learned around here is that price action is great. But when I look around and I see what's happening, I have to tell you, I must be honest, I hear the same things that I heard in 2018. This is going to be the next big thing. This is going to change the world. And really what it comes down to is what are you really doing? What is actually happening and how do you actually have real utility? So it starts off with this. There was an article that I had highlighted, wanted to tell everybody about. And we actually, this is about Coinbase L2, which is base, suffers a block production stall. Team says the fix is deployed. We actually met the base team as we're moving forward with our project, which is a Web 2 to Web 3 game. I'll talk about that much, much, much more later. But we actually met them and we want to see if they were a good fit and potentially they may be, but you know, who knows. But one thing I will say about base is that they've done surprisingly well in a very short amount of time. But here's what's happening as far as utility moving forward. So base dates we have deployed a fix and are starting to see the recovery of block production and gossip. Others may have issues submitting transactions. We are actively investigating and we'll provide updates as we have them as again from the base team. And I found this interesting, which is that this was from a follower, a base itself, and they said, wait, it's based down. There's no block in eight minutes. This is the type of world we live in now. Everything has to be perfect. Everything has to be now and everything, if anything breaks down, then of course it's the worst thing of all time. But you know, people, some people say, well, it should never go down. Absolutely. There's different ways to look at that. You can say, well, it went down because there's so many usages or it's so new or whatnot. But you know, we're in such a new state. I think this is bound to happen now. Did I, how much got affected? Well, we'll see. But this was the crux of it. The Layer 2 network built in Optimism's OP stack went live in August. Right now we're in September. On launch day, the total bridge value exceeded $150 million. League's following announcement base announced over 140 integrations. Base is then unusually successful in attracting value from both cross-chain transactions and DeFi activity. So you have to ask yourself, well, first of all, you can't buy base. Base is a Layer 2 solution and it's built on Optimism. Coinbase right now has no plans for a token. If you would like to get into that on a secondary basis, that would probably be with Optimism. But base itself is not a token you can actually buy. But this is built on Optimism. That may be a play for you to consider. I'm not a financial advisor. You do whatever you want to do. But when I took a look at this, I said, man, it's pretty fast for just under a month. Of course, you know, having a backing of Coinbase is a pretty big deal. So when I thought about it, I go, well, this went down. What happened to the price? Because this is what we always think about, right? Price, price, price, price, price. What's my portfolio doing? How am I doing? Am I up? Am I down? Now, if we scroll down, I think it's 42, not a big deal. Optimism itself, you know, 0.6%. That was in a 24-hour time period. 0.8% in one hour. So it's up, actually. So it looks like it's not a big deal. And it got me to think, I'm like, well, with these metrics, is this all that really is? Is it just all about the amount of money that we make and how things are going? Is that really what it comes down to? Well, let me tell you. People that I've met here in Korean Blockchain Week, a lot of VCs and people in crypto since 2013. Price action itself is there's a lot of people that do a lot of things to move the price, we'll just say. And from the stories that I was told, especially about the older days and a lot of different projects, it's a lot easier than you think to move price around.  Really, what we want to take a look at instead of price is how things are moving as far as utility. So there's three different websites I want you to take a look at. I'll link them in the description. One is L2 Beat. This is all layer two solutions. And the one is DeFi Lama, as far as total value locked for all chains. And the next one is DAP Radar. So let's just start with L2 Beat, first of all. So L2 Beat is an interesting website. And it takes a look at the actual total value as far as like locked up for layer two solutions. And you can see that there's one project that I'm very bullish on, it's Arbitrum. We met the team down here in Korea, very great people, nice people, they know what they're doing, they're growing and it's a very new chain. And you can see as far as it's number one, 5.17 billion. Now, OP Mainnet, Optimism, they're doing pretty good and they're right on their heels. Half of it, 2.48 billion. And of course, this is the total value locked in escrow contracts on Ethereum. And then you've got base down here. And remember, 150 million under a month and now it's already doubled that. So we can see that some of these projects that are new are crushing the products that are old. Remember loop ring? It's supposed to be the next big thing. Yeah, not so much. And then polygon down here is ZKEVM. I don't know any of these, honestly. Fuel F1, Canvas Connects. But we're talking about L2s. This would be a website to take a look at who actually has it locked up. Now, if you want to take a look at all the chains, we can go to DefiLama. DefiLama.com forward slash chains, again, link in the description. We can see that, you know, as far as locked up, Ethereum is, and I know people talk about, well, this is going to be Ethereum killer, that's going to be Ethereum killer. The only thing they can kill Ethereum right now is Ethereum. If they can, you know, work together with the L2s and who knows, maybe an L3 coming about, it's going to be hard to really overtake Ethereum. And you've got other layer ones, Binance Smart Chain and Tron over here doing pretty darn good. Now, from what I understand, my big question was this all the time, as far as like Tron, which was why does Tron do so well? And I got a pretty good answer over here. They, a lot of people here, because this is my first time in Asia, in Asian countries, especially in Korea's first time. And so, you understand, Rob, Tron has a pretty good lock hold on their stablecoin. So if you want to use the stablecoin itself that's built on Tron, you need Tron. And they do a lot of transactions and they go, it's not just, you know, Justin Sun being a fantastic marketer, there actually is really utility for the stablecoin. That's why you see someone like Tron do so well. And then of course, Binance Smart Chain over here, but look at this, as far as all chains, Arbitrum. Almost 5%, total value locked. Avalanche, which had a major, a massive jump on it. 2.7, Polygon, 1.9, old Tron, 1.7, all right. Optimism, Solana, all the way down here at, jeez, 1.34. And then base, not even a percentage point. And then all others is 8%. But you can see that, you know, this is why like, when I take a look at who has utility, who's actually using it, I mean, that's why I have Arbitrum. That's why I have Avalanche. And really, I should really start thinking about Tron, quite honestly, but I just can't do it. Solana, sure, Gapes can't do it, but all others. So that's just second to three. And then if you want to take a look at this, of course, DAP Radar, who's you actually using the DAPs? This is great as far as like DeFi, everything's locked up. And we can see it over time. We can't just take a look at like, you know, TA and take a look at the price action, but you take a look at DAP Radar and you can break it down. There's different timeframes. You can highlight this 24, seven day and 30 day. And you can see that if people are using it, there's actually utility. Look at this. Kai Cheng, you ever heard of that? Neither have I. What it's built on? Neer. Neer is a pretty good platform. Not too many people use it. It's just going to be one of those things where we'll neer break out and we'll see. Farmers world on wax. How many people talk about wax these days? Not too many. Are people actually using this DAP? Pancake swap, I think we know about. Elean Worlds, and again on wax and Binance chain. Web three game and then Sweat economy, when I've been talking about forever since over a year ago. And of course, they're going to launch in America, September 12th. So we got to what? Couple of days to go and uniswap and so on and so forth. But so I take a look at this. I think myself, okay, these are the things that I look at to see who has real utility. L2B, DeFi Lama, DAP Radar, and you can break it down by games NFTs and so on and so forth. But what I thought to myself was, what the heck is Kaicheng? So I just tickled real quick. Kaicheng is built on Cosmos, not the Cosmos you're thinking of. COS MOSC, which is an AI project. And they just reached a 500 million evaluation after near this partnership. It looks like they're actually investing into them. So here's what this is. Cosmos is Kaikai. Kaikai app will utilize Neer's blockchain to make online payments cheaper. Kaikai has its native stablecoin Kaicheng, the one you just talked about, equivalent, we just talked about, equivalent to a penny. You just kind of unwrap fiat and then convert it to Kaicheng to use it for payment purposes. Why is this important? Me as it, for online transactions for my businesses, I can understand why this is going to be big. Here's why. Myronik nailed it. Founder of Cosmos believes that Kaikai can reduce the cost of transactions by approximately 50 times compared to present payment leaders such as Stripe or PayPal. So now the next question that you're probably having is, Rob, why isn't my crypto being used for that? Why isn't XRP being used for that? Why isn't Bitcoin, the lighting network being used for all this? Why do they pick that? That doesn't make any sense. My answer to you is, I don't know. Talk to your project leads or whoever it is that actually deals with these projects and go, you know, there's a lot of different opportunities out there. Why isn't this, you know, growing like it's supposed to be? And of course, people will always point me to, you know, there's this use case and there's that use case and then just take a look at the metrics that are out there. So I can't tell you exactly why this was chosen over something else and why your crypto is fantastic. And maybe it is the same. This is actually what we have. And then actually further break this down. This is on TechCrunch. It's the same thing. And it was put together pretty well by the founder of Cosmos. And he said, look, it's like this. And I understand because actually I should take payments. He gave the example of buying a $5 cup of coffee. We always like this analogy, right? Especially when we're talking about Bitcoin and Lightning Network and so on. And he says, look, stripe and PayPal charge effectively over 10% for small transactions. The seller ends up increasing the price, forcing the buyer to pay 6 to 10% more. In a year, the coffee drinker could easily be spending an extra $200 just because the transactions are handled by intermediaries like Stripe. What they're talking about here is this. If you use Stripe or PayPal, it's going to go 2.99% plus 30 cents per transaction. Maybe it's 1.99% or lower. But the base is 30 cents per transaction. If you're buying these small type of items, maybe a cup of coffee at $2, that 30 cents really gobbles up a lot of the room there. So you're essentially paying, like I said, 10% roughly, depending on how much it is, $3 and so on and so forth. So if you use something like this and you can reduce the amount, the cost to the user, then what you can do is you don't have to keep raising your prices. And what's even great, and Steven from Puerto Rico will appreciate this. You can lower the prices on your products because you don't have to pay so much for the transaction fees because you're using those cryptos and you can reward the people that are actually going to use it because some people say, well, why the hell would they do that? Why would they go through the whole process of getting a wallet, using the crypto, going through that, and then paying for when they use their Visa card and have it for the merchant? And the reason is very simple. The merchant can say, if you pay with this, I will cut your cost of your bill by X. And of course, they will look at that and say, well, that's a pretty good deal for me. And then I can come back to this because it's a little bit cheaper as opposed to everybody else who has to raise their prices because of the transaction costs that they have with Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, and Stripe, and so on and so forth. So when I look at this, I get it. And that's real utility moving forward. Not so much about like this could be it, and this is the price. So when you're taking a look at what these products are, take a look at the actual utility and what's happening. So that's it for that section. Now, if you have something to add on, please put that in the comment section or in the chats right now, we'll go over it because there's everybody who's got, you know, this is my project, this is why it's going to be big. Let me know. So there is that part. Also, as far as utility goes, polygon. Now, before we go on, you have to understand. If you're new to the channel, welcome. I don't think you are though. I think you've been here for quite some time. If you're new to the channel just understand that I'm very biased and the things that I talk about and things that I own. So I usually direct my attention to these types of projects and I talk about those. So when I talk about polygon, I have to understand that Rob talks about that because he owns a boatload of it. So here's what we have. Korean finance giant links up with polygon labs and tokenized securities. This has been a big thing. Larry Fink came out from BlackRock, 10 trillion asset center management and talked about the next big thing is tokenization of assets. And here comes polygon down the pipe and saying, you know what, we can do that. And here's what they got. So they just ain't to deal with Meret asset securities as far as tokenized assets. Polygon labs is set to be a technical consultant in the Meret asset security token working group. And so we will focus on building the infrastructure for tokenized securities platform securities. The thing that Gary likes to talk about all the time and don't worry about security. Security is just stocks, pieces of the company. It's not like it's some magical mythical thing. They make it out to be some awful thing. It's just I deal in securities all day long. You know, if I open up my Robinhood account and trade stocks and just so you know, the Meret asset financial group is not just some small group here in Korea. It looks like they have half a trillion or 565 billion asset center management as of June. That's a pretty big thing. So the things that we just talked about, tokenization of assets, total value lock, the things that are going on. Well, what does that mean for our market right now? How does that look as far as where we can potentially go? It's a great question. And there is this chart I love to whip out. Every so often when I'm talking about these things and this is two years old, three years old, excuse me. All the world's money and markets that want visualization.  This represents a hundred billion dollars. And this is crypto back in 2020. It was only worth 244 billion. And now we're over a trillion. Actually at one point we're over 3 trillion, but hey, welcome to the bear market. And you can see that military spending. It's quite a bit. America leads the way, a third. Coins and bank notes, the Fed's balance sheet. Here's the billionaires, Zuckerberg, Bezos Gates. Here's gold, almost 11 trillion dollars. So if we can tokenize that, that's pretty good. How about Fortune 500 companies? You're looking at trillions and trillions as well. And if we could tokenize some of these assets for people that can't get it, just like Larry Fink talked about, I think it's pretty big. Here's the stock market. Here's the money supply. Here's global debt, $233 trillion. What if we could tokenize that? Here's the real estate market, which I believe personally is the next big thing as far as tokenization of real estate. I know some people will say, well, what about an REIT, a real estate investment trust? Yes, you can do that. But wouldn't it be a little bit easier to put everything in a blockchain and make things a little bit more observable and not so much hidden away? But look at this global real estate, $280 trillion. Here's global wealth, $360 trillion. Here's derivatives. Derivatives. I always think this is a mistake when I'm scrolling because I think it just repeats. But no, this is derivatives. It's one quadrillion. So we take a look at what polygon is doing. Total value locked up in DeFi and loans and things like that as we just took a look at it here at DAP radar and the all chains and all that stuff. Where could we go? Go pretty far. The problem is when we're going to get there and it's always about the time. So let me just think about that. And that is the great news for the day. Now let's get to some not so great news. Well, I guess this is actually pretty good news. Alex Machinsky, been on the show three or four times, talked about Celsius. Light right to my face. Right right to your face. We all lost, right? Six figures on the tube for me. And thankfully, Alex Machinsky just had all of his assets frozen at the Department of Justice in August. So hopefully we get the claw back and we get some of the back. We'll see how it goes. Now I'm not going to read this. It's a big repeat. I'm just happy that this is actually happening. This guy was a scammer and he's running a Ponzi scheme in my personal opinion. And data kind of supports that. But I'd like you to follow somebody and that's Aaron Bennett. I can't keep up with the Celsius news and what's going on. But Aaron and Tiffany Fong and Cam and Simon Dixon do a fantastic job. Aaron just had a great video. If you're a Celsius user, watch this video. Step by step voting guide, how to vote on the Celsius and Fahrenheit plan. And there's a new one that he just had out. Let me see here. Make it a live stream. Nope. How was it? Sorry. Three days ago. How to vote on the Celsius plan. And of course nothing on the Bitcoin mining company. So watch those two videos. There's a link in the description. Check it out. And to get to the next big story is grayscale. So grayscale had a fantastic win against the SEC. And we were all very happy with that. Grayscale came out and they said, look, if you're going to approve these futures ETFs, why can't you approve a spot Bitcoin ETF? And the SEC was like, no, that's just what we're going to do. So they won the case and the judge didn't say that they have to approve it. But they said the SEC must relook at the application process for grayscale and their spot ETF. And the big reason why SEC is shooting these spot ETFs down is because of market manipulation and fraud. Here's the problem. When you have grayscale and they're doing some potentially shady things, I'm not saying that they are doing it. I'm just saying this in the news reports that we have. This is not looking good to get approved for spot ETF and it could allow the SEC to go look. If this is one of the leaders out there, maybe of course, you know, Fidelity and BlackRock also being leaders. But you're going to see right here, there's fraud going on and it's rampant, just like I said, as far as Gary would say. And this is what we have. So Winklevoss twins from Gemini are filling an investigation of the DCG crypto empire. And really, it just kind of comes back down and say, it's like, look, well, actually, this is what it, the best way to do it. This is from David Bailey. You can follow him on Twitter. And what's happening is here is that very cyber and the grayscale Bitcoin fund, GBTC, was that they're borrowing cash from Genesis trading platform to prop up the grayscale Bitcoin market, 500 million, 300 million of it happened on May 10th, 9th or 10th. He then borrows 18,000 Bitcoin June 18th at unbelievable terms, no collateral, uncollateralized loan. If you watch the show anytime, you know that I'm not a big fan of uncollateralized loans. That's what led to the collapse of Voyager as they took in, oh, I don't remember, 334 and $20 million from three hours capital, which led to their collapse. So if these are the things that are going, you're borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, we've got big problems and this will come out and the wash will see how it goes. But again, that's something that I would say is a positive for that spot ETF that everybody wants to get approved. And that's it for today. So look, we are flying back today, so probably no video tomorrow and then we'll probably pick some things up on Saturday and go from there, but that's it for the news for today. So if you like today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing, let me talk about it. It's time-sensitive. Now, if you wanna do, just hang around, we'll do a little quick Q and A and we'll talk about anything that you want to and answer all your questions and we'll go from there. But if not, take off. Thanks so much for stopping by. I appreciate it and I'll see you. On the next one.