According to Alvin Adams, public relations are a key component of any operation in this day of instant communications and rightly inquisitive citizens. They need to know you and watch your offering, but do you have what it takes to package and present your image in the right way? Well, Mere Gitarimutanu is not just a communications expert, but a talent with a soul to help, serve, and empower businesses and individuals for a successful community. We met Mere three or four years ago when we just came into Sunbox together as young PR experts. I was a digital expert and we wanted to start collaborating because we were very close with the agenda in marketing and helping businesses. And I've known her through 30 years working together and growing together our businesses, growing other businesses as we're collaborating. Mere is a very good visionary, somebody who has a very good passion to see other people come up with businesses and even the founders themselves and their teams. So we've been working with Mere ever since and there's no one there whether we're having an amazing day or a fight or a day where we're fighting that we've had a challenge working with her. She's been fantastic to help us. Also in our business, visualise, grow, collaborate and help our clients get even further impact. We've done a few projects together and always Mere is the one thinking outside the box. Very tiny thing that nobody has thought of and that brings a bold moment she brings a bold moment in the room every time. Mere will think of something like I had to deal with sort of everything but you've added some spice into it that we've seen. We couldn't seem to find but it seemed like if she didn't have that thing she wouldn't have been asked to. It's like the whole project. I've been to maybe 4 to 5 years ago she's my boss, she's our lead director at Brandt Papier and I've worked with her since several projects, several clients, personally and work with professional. So I keep telling people, this is a funny thing, I keep telling people that Mere is the kindest person that I've ever met and we're just like, no, it's not possible. Then I got to my laboratory and Mere gave me a job when I really needed one. I didn't study peer, I'm not even from a communication background but she took me up and trained me and showed me the ropes and basically what I do every day.  Yeah, so Mere literally is the kindest person. My name is Mere Mutanu. I'm a communication practitioner. I specifically work in the PR sector which is Public Relations and I run a business called Brandt Papier. We're now operating maybe over the last 10 years so I currently call myself the founder, CEO and all those other titles that are associated with running your own business. Mere narrates to me how she discovered her passion in public relations and communications guided by her core values in community service. Brandt Papier is a communications agency that helps SMEs and other businesses to be seen, to be known and to be hired. We believe that it's very important for businesses and especially businesses in Africa to tell their story so that people can get to understand what they do. And a lot of times I've found that many people don't want to tell their story. Either they're afraid that they'll tell it wrong or that they will make a mistake somehow by bringing themselves that visibility. But the truth is for any business to run people must know you exist and the only way that people can know you exist is if you tell them about yourself, what you do, why you do it, how you do it and I've been doing that now for like I said the last almost now 20, going to 2 decades. They say a long journey will always begin with one step and this step leads to another all the way to a point of no return and that is what makes a hero. I've been employed previously I have begun my career as an intern then I progressed and went on to different organizations within the communications PR field until I was encouraged to start my own business. I grew up in Nairobi but my parents originate from Bukambami both of them from Kittui and I think I had an interesting upbringing I can say the first few years of my life I lived with my extended family they all made a big impact on my life I even lived with my grandmother for the first couple of years of my life as well and so now there I went to Kambami I learnt all my kikamba properly and I had it, my goods I saw, sent to the market and I loved it, it was really really nice and then I came back to Nairobi to continue with my education and lived in Langata started off there went to currency primary school and stayed there until I finished my KCPE went on to Statehouse Girls High School was very involved in sporting activities actually a hockey player I did a little bit of music I wasn't in the common club I wasn't in drama club or music singing so I was more into sports actually which I really enjoyed growing up in Langata as it was called LA was interesting I think I formed a lot of friendships there we moved on to South B and then to Atriba so I did a lot of moving I would say but not after every year or anything like that there was a little bit of stability a lot of that of my formative years were really spent growing my friendships and understanding what it means because my siblings came much later so I have large age gaps the beauty of this jewel is not only physical but deep within her lies a golden heart that goes out of her way to reach out to the needy one of the things that Brandspark PR does is we take up Rabono project every year and one of the ones that we start with is called Kilele Health and Kilele Health is a Kilele Health association was started by a lady called Benda Kitaka and she's coming from years of working with cancer survivors and patients and she was a client at one point where she was the marketing manager at Toyota but due to a personal issue she then decided to be an advocate and a voice for this cancer especially cervical cancer patients and survivors and caregivers actually so we've now been working with Benda for the last 2-3 years and what that has done for us is to keep us perspective on how much some of these individuals like Benda need support of organizations like us who have communication skills to be able to tell the stories of what they're doing to help them in their pokasi journey and also to create forums where they can bring people together to continue sensitizing them from things such as they call them non-communicable diseases something called cancer and specifically this year Benda and a few of the other survivors decided to go to Climb Mount Kenya and that was so amazing because before that a lot of the survivors didn't know how to tell their stories they didn't know how to even tell their family members some of the needs that they have and so we helped them through a program where they learned how to share their stories on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter and give them that perspective of this is what I'm doing join me and help me to tell the stories now this particular year they have a target of raising support for women to access especially needy women to access free some we call cancer medication which is a vaccine and we are looking to raise almost $500,000 so that at least $252,000 of these women can access this vaccine for free we are then working with some of the brand ambassadors like Limo, Kipke Moe who is going to climb up Mount Kenya ten times not just once but ten times to create awareness about this need and we've been so privileged to be part of this solution and to help them then team think through what are some of the options that we have how do we package this information so that we can reach more people so beyond that we work with the band association of Kenya again same thing so much need happening in formal settlements people, young children getting banned because there's no awareness whatsoever on the impact of having 80 degree bans on your body and we did a campaign with one of our clients team Fay through Bio Oil to just create that decision in the informal settlements and we work together with stakeholders like the band society of Kenya like the say John's and Red Cross and the county government to help share that to package and share that information so you find like the doctors they know exactly what to say but they need it to be visualized like how does this poster look how does they do a walk every year how do we make sure that everybody gets to understand why they are doing it and helping them also with media coverage because that's not something very many people actually know how to do they don't know how to package their story so that the media are interested so working with this project on pro bono helps us to have an impact in community but also gives us the opportunity to see once somebody knows how their lives change we love to see how we can plug into the different corporates we work with and ask them what is your CSR how can we help you to embed it in the community and she reveals to me the secrets behind her successful smile my motivation is to to tell stories that have impact I've always been the person who people feel like I understand what they are saying and I'm able to articulate it better so think of an interpreter so I feel like I'm that person for businesses and for individuals a lot of times somebody will just a good example somebody asked me for their business name what should it be called they gave me their tagline and told me what they are doing and in a really short time I was able to put the words together and give it meaning I'm convinced actually that 80% of anything think of a business now at this level think of a business 80% of any business will rely on proper communication to make that one sale if people by just looking at the logo looking at the tagline looking at your quick introduction are not able to see what it is that you're doing they will not buy from you I saw that companies in the west brands in the west they kind of understand that in Europe and in America they understand that for you to be able to sell they have this machinery where you immediately come up with your name there's a logo there's business cards there's merchandise there's a website they have they know the power of visualisation whereas here in our market because it's again like they say first second generation businesses a lot of people will be trading for a long time without having registered their company without having a name for it without having an identity without all these things because they think it's too much and then we also our culture tells us kizuri charge user which means if something is good people will buy if it's not nobody is going to buy so they find that telling the story of being visible is a waste of time a rather focus of the sell not knowing the way the mind works is that I first have to see something then I like it and then I think whether I'm going to buy it so we are in this space of helping brands to tell their stories in a way that is simple and also helps them to be seen like I said for you to be bought somebody has to have seen you somewhere then they know about you by knowledge it means do they really understand what you do and then be heard they look now with the internet then say let me see whether this company called Brandspark PR exists so whatever then is there or if I ask someone to see have you ever heard of this company no it begins to impact your trust so all this visibility plus trust is what builds your pipeline for sales so I've seen this for many companies in the last almost two decades as I've said the companies that are focused on telling their stories the companies that are focused on even just being visible they are the ones who customers have come to the ones that have remained invisible it's harder for them to make that one sale so I want to make it easy for people to sell their products as I've seen and that's what motivates me I want to encourage that young woman who's who's currently feeling hopeless she needs to finish her university and she's not getting an internship what can she do I think one way to look at it is position yourself to volunteer and not to be discouraged be optimistic and also look at all this virtual work that's available right now there's a lot of people who are saying you don't have to come into my space but I could give you some projects to handle and then when you're given those opportunities you do them well I'd like to encourage that person to pass you knowledge and collaboration as much as possible don't try to do things in isolation and feel like I must crack this you and give yourself grace if something doesn't work out just join a community Sandbox has a lot of learning opportunities every month there's always a networking forum that's been asking people to come in and join us and learn at only a thousand women that's for snacks really you come in and you can sharpen your skills on different things so there are numerous programs going on how can you as a young business plug in to some of these and even begin to grow your business how is the thought of mentorship how do you get a mentor who can help you move from point A to point B by keeping you accountable so that's something that also really worked for me and then for the couples running businesses I really recommend doing this class because of Doa so just for marriage it's for like I said how to have shared vocabulary so that when I say fighting fair you understand what fighting fair means both of us understand so the more common values you have the easier it is to work towards success so many associations at least the key associations that support families in business so that's another place to plug in maybe some buildings in career and looking to start their own business even if it's at a late juncture maybe you've pursued your career and now you feel I don't know I need to start preparing for retirement we only have like a couple of years before all the wind is spent on the current employees that we have it's to encourage you to come there's a program at Turnbox called Kisima for professionals who are hoping to start businesses after having been employed for quite a bit of time so there is a solution within the Sandbox if you go to sandbox.ke www.sndbx.ke you're able to gain access to all these programs that are running and there is one for each and every kind of person who wants to start a business talk to someone after you make the decision consult somebody before beyond your family circle who's actually been running business and who can give you that kind of support that you need it doesn't come easy but there are several challenges that come with the calling a lot of times women CEOs are seen as though they are running their businesses as a hobby because and especially if they are married they have a perception still I know it's going down but a lot of times we might walk into the same room offering the same product I mean the same solution a man's invoice will be one million chillings mine will be one million chillings his check will be signed I'll be told this one million to be negotiated because you're just going to buy shoes and your handbag so it's looked as if the man's income is going to do a lot and he could be single living with his mother but people don't have a problem for women there is always that you already have a cover I don't need to really go deep into my pocket to pay for this service the same amount that I would pay a gentleman when there is a negotiation we just feel like how do I know he will deliver I can't trust the testimony of one woman I need another man to come in and give his input I've been really grateful that there are so many women associations there are so many women who are working together now to break down those inequalities and at the sandbox we do have a platform that brings the women of sandbox together to address some of those unfair business practices but I think people always underestimate how old I am my experience, they underestimate my ability to deliver because they perceive that I don't fit in the normal category it's very important to bring out what your positive skills are what is it that you are good at as opposed to focusing on the negative I focus on my positive the skills that I shared earlier the values that I have the ability to make friends with anybody and just being committed to do whatever you say that I do has helped me to gain credibility over the years and I'm grateful for those people who have given me a chance my business a chance and I want to encourage everybody if you focus on the positive you can overcome the challenges and every limitation has an opportunity for you to overcome so always think how can I overcome I think friendship is very important and also respect I also believe that the kind of person that you go into business with must also be a great supporter I really value that my husband allows me to take the title, CEO, founder if he doesn't feel certain by that and that has been a great canvas for me to progress and I mean I did go into the business first then he joined so he's not very interested in the titles he's interested in what I'm doing he's very focused on how do we make whatever we're doing work and progress so I find that that attitude he has the right attitude and that has allowed me to be able to still progress and to grow Wisemen said that you are defined by the community you belong to the public relations expert has chosen not to just be defined but also to create one and empower it to become one beautiful community ready to impact the world I'd like to tell you very now that finally I've been asked I think her gifts are limitless and it's so fantastic she's very talented and I think her impact can go on if I'm not an entrepreneur sometimes I don't know if you know what you're doing it's power I don't know if I should give up I don't watch Netflix it's sometimes so tired but it felt very her gifts would be missed in any room that she was going to be in so many people she's had to impact and even in our lives I feel like if I don't see a Mary here then I'd be so confused so confused with myself whether to be also continue if Mary has given up I should give up so I know she's gonna she has many things to do and bright future ahead and she keeps motivating inspiring us so may you continue I'd like to thank my parents for encouraging me definitely to be the person that I am today I'd like to also thank my husband who has been instrumental in the growth of our business it's impossible to grow if you don't have the right support systems at their home and obviously my children is Jeremy, Kristia and Jordan Pan obviously the sandbox community my church community that has given me everything my customers doesn't have so many things to say about all those communities obviously all that has been made possible through God and giving me this opportunity so I'm really grateful that I feel I can confidently say I've been living out my papa's and I'm grateful that I have an opportunity to see how much God loves me and how many doors he's open for me to become the person that I am today


If you're watching this video, you're probably a PA student, new grad PA, or somebody that's interested in becoming a physician assistant. So you probably know that PA's work in every medical specialty, but with that freedom comes the paradox of choice. And also, FOMO. You might be asking, what's the best specialty for me? What if I choose the wrong specialty? And what if I can't find a job in the specialty and in the city that I want to live in? Also, what if a specialty I don't like as much pays much better, should I still give it a shot, work in that specialty? These are all very valid concerns, and so how do you choose a specialty as a physician assistant? Let me see if I can help you with that. The first thing to consider is where are you in life and what's important to you? Are you single? Married? Do you have kids? Do you really want to work in a certain town or city to be near family and friends? Is that important to you? Or can you move anywhere in the country? How important is money to you right now? Would it make a huge difference to you to make 10, 20, $30,000 more? Or are you currently prioritizing learning and becoming the most well-rounded best provider that you can be? You may have heard that when choosing a first job as a physician assistant, you get to pick two out of the three. Location, salary, and specialty. And that's pretty accurate. So if you have to stay in a certain specialty or you're in debt up to your eyeballs and you really need that higher salary right now, so specialty might not even be something that you should consider right now. So the first thing you should do is take some time to objectively look at your life, what's important to you right now, and use that as a guide to choose a specialty as a physician assistant. The second thing to consider is your health, your own physical body. As medical providers, we spend so much time and energy helping other people be healthy that we often neglect our own bodies. And unfortunately, we only get one body per lifetime, so we need to take care of ourselves. The reason I'm asking you to consider your health is this. Your body may dictate what you can and can't do for long periods of time and therefore where you can and can't work. What kind of environments you can and cannot work in for a long period of time. So if you're like me and you have a service-connected low back injury that makes it impossible to stand for long periods of time without pain, then maybe a surgical position is just not a good idea. So personally, I already knew this going into PA school, but it definitely got confirmed when I did my surgery rotation and my back started to hurt and get stiff after like one hour in the OR. And then when I had to take part in longer procedures, up to six hours, I think one was like seven hours, my back started to hurt tremendously, and I just knew that that wasn't for me. So I knew for a fact that I could not take a job where I'd have to be in the OR. I could probably take muscle relaxers, painkillers and deal with it, but why would I want to torture myself? I simply knew that surgery was not for me. The good thing about this, and I guess kind of the bad thing about this, is eliminating surgical positions actually eliminated at least half of the physician assistant jobs out there for me. It made it much easier to choose a position. So take stock of your health, the things that you can and cannot do physically, and use this to help you decide what certain jobs are for you and which ones are not. So now that we figured out what's important to you and what your body is capable of, let's consider one more thing, and that is what you actually enjoy doing.  Do you thrive on instant gratification and you need answers today? Or do you like to play the long game and see things happen over time? Do you like forming long-term deeper type of relationships with multiple people? Or are you kind of more of a social butterfly and you prefer that most of your relationships be surface level and you like to get to know lots and lots of people, but on more of like a surface level kind of a relationship, not super deep and digging into like what makes them tick and why they do the things that they do, but more just like, hey, how you doing? Oh, this hurts, okay, let's fix it, boom, move on. Nothing is wrong with either one of those. None of these characteristics are good or bad, and there is room for all of them in the medical field. So it might be obvious to you that someone who prefers a fast-paced environment would do well in the ER or urgent care or even like a busy family practice or specialty clinic. Someone who prefers to take things slow might prefer a smaller family run type of clinic or maybe something ultra specialized like oncology that requires more time with each patient. These jobs are out there. You just need to know what it is that you want and look for that. And last but not least is what you're actually interested in. Yeah, I know it might be weird to make this the last thing you consider. You would think that this would be the first thing you consider what you're interested in, but it really is the last thing that you should consider and here's why. I have met countless medical and PA students, pre-med and pre-PA students, all of whom were very certain that they wanted to work in a specific specialty, and then years later they're doing something completely different. What you're intellectually curious about and what that specialty practically entails are two completely different things. For example, I think psychiatric disorders are tremendously interesting and I enjoy the little bit of psych I'm able to do as a primary care provider, but what I want to work full time in psych, absolutely not. No way. At least not the way that psychiatric care is delivered currently in our current system. If it changes sometime down the line, I might be interested, but right now, absolutely not. No way. You might be interested in cardiology, but then after working in cardiology for a while, you see that it's actually rather depressing, and although you are very interested in how the heart works and everything intellectually, the practical aspect of working in cardiology is boring and frustrating and you'd rather do something else. Not saying anything bad about cardiology, some people love it, but just as an example, you know, just because you're interested in something intellectually does not mean that you will like the practical aspects of working in that field. So you should definitely consider what you're interested in, the topics you found most fascinating in medical school or PA school, but take that with a grain of salt and make sure that you get a rotation in that specialty or at least go shadow in that specialty, preferably multiple offices working in that specialty so you could see the nitty gritty, the day-to-day grind of what working in that specialty actually entails. So there you have it, guys. That's four things to consider when choosing a specialty as a physician assistant. I'll see you in the next video.


I am forsaken, abandoned at the end of all the paths to peace that were supposed to lead to me. You seek other lovers, and the dreams of those dreamers tell lies. There is no peace. Now you call out to me, where shall we go? While Jeremiah and Rachel stand weeping, there is no peace. I accuse you. I eliminate peace from the vernacular of your lives. I leave you the pottery shards, the abandoned fields, the sour grapes, disaster. There is no peace. Even redemption comes at a cost.


with our friends Tyler and Jess and Jesse and also Woody thank you for coming along with us a YouTube channel called 407 eats so you should check them out but for now we are gonna go ride towards sorry Midway Mania and it is 70 minute wait but we got fast passes for this actually thank you I know they say that it's a 70 minute wait but it doesn't look like that I mean this area is pretty pretty open and the line doesn't start until this room so I wonder if it's an actual 70 minute wait but the air in here is very nice so we're gonna switch things up today to give me boys first girls the entire verse Veronica and Jess I got $20 on the fellas $20 on the fellas yeah isn't that allowed not gonna be filming this because we take this serious right hard over there yep but boys first girls will let you know who wins best in cart here we go about I would say 450,000 look at that how'd you guys do oh I think it's I think it's fair that the fellas won so look we're gonna be serious about this look at this the cat Veronica Rita I barred has escaped from jail look at them he kind of looks like you've been our last goodwill challenge with their broken sunglasses it is fun to take a spin with your friends Veronica pretty much insistent that we ride early in swirling saucers because she loves it I like this spot to watch sleepy doc is a couple flying out look at him go oh boy which one are we gonna get which one are we gonna get we gotta go this one this one oh my lord we gotta go we gotta go all right this is our guy any second now so we just got off alien swirling saucer decided to check up on slinky dog dash it's only a 65 minute wait but we don't have time for that today but that is the lowest I've seen it actually I love Toy Storyland but one of the big downfalls I think is there's not anywhere you really can get away from the heat and it's hot over there like they don't have somewhere where you can just go sit and relax and AC unless you sit in the bathroom oh no oh if you sit in the yeah so we're gonna we're gonna leave Holly not Hollywood series Toy Storyland gonna go maybe ride something else and just catch some AC for a little bit because it is very hot out today in the hundreds so apparently the greatest show is Kylo Ren and I just realized you've been sticking stickers on my back this whole time I bet you I just figured it out wait a second well when I said the tune in lounge was too crowded and we needed to find somewhere else to go sit down and cool down I immediately thought of the perfect spot the dance party Nate says that he could balance a chair on his chin I guess Tyler can too well I mean you can say whatever you want oh my god what the heck me wow oh yeah I think you should give up don't do it what other cool chair dance moves do you have was that it oh look at your your chair dance move sitting they have elevator and pizza Rizzo yes look at the pizza Rizzo employee of the month and big mean coral was the first ever employee of the month oh no that's a pizza eating contest okay we left pizza Rizzo we went up there to cool off but ended up dancing so I don't know well I think it's time we head to the Tower of Terror that's right we're gonna go ride the Tower of Terror because it is probably our third favorite thing to do now in Hollywood Studios ever since Toy Story Land opened up there it is favorite hotel on property I missed the Christmas lights here actually though I missed the Christmas trees lit up it was such a nice beautiful site and look at that it's only a 20 minute wait for standby look it up there someone's handprints going down the dusty window ghost all right I'm glad everyone's here they're good guess we're done with today very long day very fun I am roasting and sweating profusely yes yes yes yes so love the life you live like you love and if it's your first time watching subscribe to our channel you might like it and check out 407 eats because they're awesome too yes you like food or dining then you'll probably like us I made new friends


Thanks, everybody, and welcome back after our afternoon break. I just want to introduce our fireside chat panelists for our fireside chat panel mix-ups, whatever we want to call this. So joining us today to talk about what is public interest technology and how it relates to MLab, because you've all even asked me. And I said, good thing that's the first prompt question. You'll get to know all about it. But to discuss it, we have our lovely panelists. So we have Afua Bruce, who is the director of engineering for New America's public interest technology program. Afua joined New America after spending several years working in federal government at the White House and at the FBI. From 2015 to 2017, Afua served as the executive director of the Office of Science and Technology Policies National Science and Technology Council at the White House. In this role, she oversaw 100 different federal inter-agency working groups tackling challenges on environment and sustainability, homeland and national security, science, technology, and STEM education. Prior to joining the federal government, Afua was a software engineer at IBM. Sasha Meinrath is the Polymer chair and telecommunications at Penn State and director of XLAB, an innovative think tank focusing on the intersection of Vanguard technologies and public policy. Prior to founding XLAB, Sasha was vice president here at New America Foundation, where he founded the Open Technology Institute in 2008 and co-founded Measurement Lab. Sasha's research focuses on distributed communications, digital feudalism, digital craftsmanship, telecommunications, and spectrum policy, cybersecurity and privacy, and disruptive technology, and is a testament to his lifelong commitment to promoting social and economic justice. Larry Peterson, the other end, is the CTO of the Open Networking Foundation and the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Princeton University. He's the co-author of the best-selling networking textbook, Computer Networks, A Systems Approach, and has been the technical lead on several internet-scale distributed systems, including the widely used Planet Lab and Measurement Lab platforms. And the Koblet CDN, now commercially licensed by Akamai. He is currently working on the Cord Access Edge Cloud and leads Cord's tech steering team. So our first prompt, and I will help drive us through these prompts, is how would you define public interest technology and what are some examples? OK. OK, well, so I would start from my unbelievably biased position of saying that OTI is the epitome of public interest technology. And it points to me, in many ways, to how the conversations changed. Because I can remember sitting on a stage, not unlike this one, at our old New America haunts with Vint Cerf, talking about why we were going to launch this crazy contraption called Measurement Lab. And we talked about broadband transparency and the need to get data into the hands of key decision makers. When we would sit down, whether with NTA or FCC, they'd say, well, we don't have the data. And so we were going to solve that problem with a experiment, which is how this all began. Today, I would say the battle has shifted. So public interest technologies then had to prove that technologists in the room were important. Data, science, statistics, scientific methodology, those were important. Today, the battle is much more about getting people to actually act. We've seen this for decades in other spheres, the climate debate, for example, where America is just lunacy. Today's public technology, public interest technology, has to be about focusing not just on the data collection and making that available and accessible and all that. But in many ways, and I'll stop after this, looking at how do we force reluctant leaders to actually abide by the implications of our data and research methodologies and outcome? How do we get people to actually act when the evidence, in many cases, is overwhelming? And yet our leadership of both parties is for a variety of reasons, either reluctant to move forward or adamantly opposed to moving forward. That seems to be the two buckets. I think, to me, public interest technology, it's very simplest, is using technology to advance the public good, whether that is using data and putting it in the hands of decision makers, whether it's making sure that as people create policies that are going to affect large swaths of the population, that they include technologists at the table, or whether it's technologists thinking through, how can I develop solutions, develop applications that can reduce homelessness, that can positively impact my community, that can take a lot of the nonprofits that I see around me, or the state and local governments, especially, to increase their capacity and help them operate more efficiently and better serve their end users and their target populations. I think those are different ways that we see public interest technology. With New America's public interest technology program, we have a variety of projects. Some of them include working, for example, in LA County to help LA County stand up a new office to give police officers a new option, an option other than incarceration when they first encounter minors, working in Rhode Island to help them redesign their foster care placement system to drastically decrease the amount of time it takes families to go from saying, I would like to have a foster child someday to actually being able to get through that system, also looking at mapping the opioid epidemic and putting into the hands of people ways to share stories about loved ones, but also to find resources and to drop off excess prescriptions that they have. So just the wide variety of different ways that you can use technology to advance the public good. So you're starting off by pointing at how hard it is to get any action out of all the great technology we're producing sets nicely opposed to the way I was going to approach this, which is the technology, like water, runs downhill and it's going to do what it's going to do, and we know where it's going and it's going to get there just a matter of time. So I'm thinking that the way you get people to act is you just continue to do the technology. So let me give you a little example. It's kind of come out here a little bit that there's sort of the policy into things and there's the technology and how do we bridge that gap. So I've been hearing about, we definitely have questions we want to ask and we want answers to and we want to convince people and that's based on the data. The data, we have the data because of the methodologies and collecting the data. We collect the data because we have platforms that we can run the collection on. And if you kind of go back to the history, that's where Planet Lab's involvement was. It was just the plumbing underneath. It was the platform. And so I was here on that same thing and as I come in this morning, the carriers were all in the room and they were really skeptical of what we were going to do with MLab. Well, it turns out that my other job, I resigned at Princeton, but I'm now with the Open Networking Foundation and what we're doing on the behalf of and in working hand in hand with the carriers is taking that very same technology that we had underlying MLab that's now generating the data that has the potential to influence policy and that's the technology that the carriers are now wanting desperately to put into their appointments. And the key was that that technology is open and it allows for innovation, it allows them to be more agile in the same way it allows us to be more agile and creative. And so I guess to try to tie this up a little bit more cleanly, the public interest, the way that I approach this and everyone approaches it differently, certainly, is make the technology available and keep it as open as you can and enable innovators. And it's through that innovation that you just eventually will do the end run around a lot of the policy and then they will be catching up, of course. What are some of the components, I think Larry started his pieces, oops, sorry, Mike just came on. What are some of the components that make a successful public interest tech initiative or that make a public interest tech initiative successful? What do you do as the roles of government, academics, civil society, companies and people in everyday life? I think you've all talked to some of that a little bit, but if you wanna dig in on those. Sure. And I can talk a little bit about what happened before MLAB because I was working with Casey Claffey over at CADA back when it was the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis on the Commons Initiative, the Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Network Systems. Can you tell we're academics? And that was, in essence, an attempt to do broadband measurement at national scale that failed miserably. And what we learned, in essence, failing was the answer to this. So what works? Well, it turns out having good corporate partners with deep pockets, when you're talking about something at this scale, that's essential. So it's great to be able to actually work with Google on a project while simultaneously beating against Google on the privacy side of the equation and realizing the non-monolithic entities that these corporations are. That, I think, was essential. And I think what was also really important was we had a policy problem that we were directly addressing. In this case, what's the broadband speed in the United States? Nobody knew, right? In 2009, a lot of people wanted to know the answer to that, but no systematic effort had actually been done and the information we're getting, which is like everything's light speed from the providers, we were like, I am skeptical. But the data sets, the open publicly available data sets, didn't exist. And so we had to solve that problem. Turns out it was very difficult to solve and people are still solving it and doing things that we thought were science fiction 10 years ago. Like, I mean, looking at how far MLab has come in just one decade is awesome. It's really inspiring. And I also feel like the dedication of so many people over such a long period of time. No one in their right mind would come and work for MLab and yet here we all are, spending our time and energy on something that should never have worked. It should have been failure 2.0, but instead, it's the largest open data set on the planet regarding broadband measurement information. That's amazing. And so I think those components are at least some of the key facets. I won't say it's all of them by any means, but this policy need, the dedication of people that were willing to spend time and energy, provide their expertise. It was sort of like a technical stone soup to make MLab work. I think it's still kind of a stone soup and maybe a stone soup with many courses or something to extend the metaphor. But I do believe that this endeavor should be one of many as opposed to one of the few operating at this scale and impact, which is a question for what's the next decade of public interest technology look like? Well, I think we're still struggling to figure out, particularly with a current administration that is hostile to such things as data, reality, et cetera. Great to follow that. I think successful public interest technology projects really come down to partnerships and having diverse teams. So as you mentioned, it's incredibly important to have a partner, whether it's a big corporate partner who can fund the work, but also partners that truly believe in the value of the technology and in the mission that you are trying to accomplish. Without strong partners, the technology is going to go nowhere. But also having diverse teams is incredibly important. I mean, by diverse teams, not just having engineers or technologists on the team, but also having strong policy people who understand the issues and having strong design people who can make sure that what you're designing is actually going to meet a need. I think oftentimes we can fall into the trap of building something because it's cool and we think that we know what the problem is and what the need is, but by having strong partners and having teams with a lot of diversity of thought, you can actually build something that will be used, not just build it and we hope they will come, but build it and have something that can make an impact and be sustainable. That's a great answer. So having the funding is necessary, but not sufficient. I've seen too many projects where people come along because there's money there and they didn't work, but I've seen other projects where there was no money, but the individuals had the right incentives to jump in and they'd figure out how to get it funded as they went and they would get it funded because it was good work. And so I think one of the keys is that you have to enable people to go where their interests take them. Some of them it's in the policy direction, some of it's in the technology direction. So NDT is one of the key tools within MLAB and I know it wasn't built to measure home connectivity. So the story is it was to answer a particular question in a local area network, an engineering problem that you had to solve. So that was like very clear incentives, but we've got flashing by all the other MLAB experiments is because some researcher had the incentive to go do something. You put, I'm an extremely strong believer in the attractive force of some artifact in projects like this. So you can easily draw a parallel to open source. You're not just randomly talking about doing stuff, you're actually doing stuff. And so if there's a code base that you can check out and you can add your improvements to or if there's a platform that you can go deploy your experiment on, that's absolutely critical as opposed to just talking about doing stuff. And that creates the center of gravity and when they work it's because you get this critical mass of people that wanted to contribute to the same thing, but that's because for a moment their incentives were aligned. And that's the critical thing and MLAB was in the right place at the right time because there was some platform, there were a few tools to get started and there were interesting questions to be asked. What does success look like to you and what are common obstacles that you see for public interest tech projects? Well, I'll engage in a couple of quick anecdotes depending on what success is defined as. I think one of my all time favorite successes, I'd been at the FCC for I guess about 18 months battling it out with and it was basically like myself and Thomas Gideon who was the old technical director for OTI sitting in a room not much smaller than this one talking to the FCC about how they should do broadband measurement, the methodologies that should be used and et cetera. Around the entire rest of the table and the outside chairs were ISP lobbyists and we were just getting hammered. We were getting hammered on like everything. And it boiled down eventually to them saying like you just don't understand how the internet works, you don't understand TCPIP, blah, blah, blah, blah. Continued over email. We knew the next meeting was coming up and we were just gonna get absolutely annihilated. So here we are at the FCC, 40 or 50 industry representatives, two public interest technologists knowing that we're gonna just get reamed because we don't understand the technology and luckily we had a couple cards to play. So in walks, then surf. And you look around the room, some people recognize them, right? And their faces immediately fall. And true to form, Vincent walks in, he's like, hello, are we talking about TCPIP and broadband measurement? He's like, my name is Vincent. As if no one would know, like what was about to happen? To me, that's what success looks like is that no matter how much in that, that's a room where every hour they're burning through, I don't know, 40, $50,000 in retainer fees on one side of the battle. But where you have not just expertise, but like the expert, TCPIP, on your side of the battle. And at moments like that, you can radically shift the conversation. That's exactly what happened. It went from people saying like, we're going to make MLab non-existent in the FCC's thinking around broadband measurement to being unassailable as a utility that should be used, should be in the mix in how we define, how we measure broadband speeds. I think another big success is still to be determined. I feel like in doing this kind of work for 10 years, we've laid the foundation for really remarkable, much needed shifts in what a 21st century society looks like. But what the success has to be is getting people to act on that. And that's an open challenge to us all because I feel that this is my third administration that I've worked in DC with. I'm looking forward to the fourth. But in the interim, like what I have seen, especially over the last eight years, are multi-stakeholder processes that engaged many people, but didn't get to the actual meaningful change that needs to happen. And so the success in many ways is still to be determined. But then again, we wouldn't be here if we'd already won all these battles, right? It's what we do over the next few years, I think that's gonna matter a lot to that success. Success to me in the public interest technology space is when policy makers or corporations or non-profits look around the room and ask where's our public interest technology person? The policy makers are the ones who are initiating and saying, here's a need for us. We need in order to make sure that we have developed good policies, we need to make sure that we have good technical solutions and we have access to the data to get this done, that we can't do it by ourselves with just the policies that we've done in traditional ways, but we need to be acting on the data. We need to make sure people are capturing the data, sharing the data, making it available and consumable. I think to me, that's what success looks like in the public interest technology space. As far as challenges to get there, there are quite a few. As I'm sure many of you in this room know, but building that demand, figuring out common languages to use both ways, both from the technologist side, how do we communicate in a language that the policy makers or the nonprofit organizations will understand and see as valuable and see as desired and required? But how do we do that? How do we also provide opportunities and make this field and this work attractive to people coming out of school and people in different careers? How do we build that interest from the actual people who are going to be doing the work to actually do the work and to make a difference in this way? So let me give a different kind of answer. I'll go back to the technology side of public interest technology. To me, success in this MLAB space is that we get the technology to the point that we've totally democratized the access network, that you don't have to be a global carrier to offer access technology to end users. And that means it's lowering the bar to deploying that technology. The internet lowered that bar the first time beyond all telecommunications was through the telcos. And that was really good for a while. And anyone in theory could stand up an IP router and you would have connected to the internet. That doesn't quite get to the access technology but we're at the edge. And things like MLAB have been instrumental in taking us to the point that we can lower the bar to entry to be in your own ISP. And that's when you get the competition that actually changes the equation. So for me, success in the space of MLAB is that we have completely democratized the access network. And I think the technology can take us there. Now we have to keep the policy from preventing that but there's an opportunity to leapfrog ahead. Most surprising learning from the projects that you've been involved in that you think we get to share. The most surprising? Or the most surprising thing. What was the moment for you that you were surprised in the projects you've been involved in? Like, I don't know, every time you talked about the... Like it's fake, it's 10 years before you are. Yeah, that's okay. Well see, now I think that's fast, right? Like if we go, it's only 10 years to build this crazy idea into this global platform. That seems like, we should capture that lightning in a bottle again. I've got one. This is a tough question. I've got one. And then maybe they've got some questions. So here's the most amazing thing about MLab. It has been running continuously for 10 years. There are servers out there that have been running continuously answering queries without going as a service going down for 10 years. And actually, he hasn't gotten any credit so I wanted to point to Mike over here who has been back at Princeton keeping the machines that's the control plane, the management for MLab running and delivering the software stack that gets run. And it's one part-time person doing that and that's absolutely amazing. And it's, for me, the most surprising. I shouldn't say that's enough. Of course it was going to work. Yeah, I think one of the most surprising elements of all of this has been just the resiliency of the status quo did not do anything. It's, I really, when we created MLab and I founded OTI, we were having a totally different conversation 10, 12 years ago, which was to say if only we had the technical expertise, if only we had the data, if only the transparency were there, these were all battles that had to be won and I don't want to pretend like we've won them but we're winning those battles. And what's surprising to me is even when you have gotten that far along, we're still facing this reluctance. I mean, it's like denial about technological reality that's everywhere. And every time I go up onto the hill and talk with folks there and I'm like, okay, so here's how whatever it is actually works. So there's denial about denial. It's like meta-denial, yeah, I don't know. I mean, but it is shocking to me that we can go straight from if only we had data to, you have too much data, which is actually how the FCC initially responded to MLab. And yet here we are 10 years later, we still don't have a functional broadband map for end users, right? And that's crazy to me. And we still have all of these places where we've kind of mortgaged the decisions as if we didn't actually have to pay the opportunity costs. And technology is one of these places where it's here, it's creating increasing dramatic stresses on rule of law on the legal foundations for a civil society. And I would say you'd be hard-pressed to show meaningful transformations of our rule of law to address these technical realities. The gap between technical reality and legal realities has never been greater than it is right now. Okay. I'm not sure. Yeah, I was like, I'm not sure, no. Larry's trying to think of a positive learning that all of mine were also negative. Also, as has been said, especially the amount of time that it often takes to go from here's an idea that we think will matter to actually convincing people that it is an idea that will matter to then convincing them to act. It surprises me every time. We have 10 or 15 projects now with the New America's Public Interest Technology Program and every time that our timelines shift, I'm like, man, someone should have predicted this every single time. So that's probably for me one of the biggest challenges and frustrations. Okay, I think we do have another prompt up here, but we can also open it to questions. I'm open to making that shift if people want to start asking questions. Okay, I see some hands, so let's do that. Rich, do you want to come? Okay, our Allison's right behind you with a mic. Cool. Yeah, hi, thank you for the presentations so far. And I was really interested in the very broad definition of public interest technology that you gave early on and part of me is very excited to be a part of Measurement Lab and I think the kinds of things that we've achieved and hope to achieve are very much in the public interest. My question is around the broader definition of that and what role the public needs to play in assuring that the success sort of definition for either the technology group or the policy group is in fact in their interest. There's what role does the public get to play in that partnership and I'm wondering if you have any experiences you can talk about related to that. Well, so at some level the public ultimately needs to be able to vote with their feet and their checkbooks and I mean the whole idea behind making broadband usage transparent was then that you could make informed consumer decisions based upon that data. If it's totally transparent you still only have one option then it wasn't really doing you much good. So that's where for me the end game has to be that we have the means or the technology to lower the barrier to being an ISP and giving the option and my option is no throttling no all the good stuff at low cost. So I mean that's, we can change policy to try to steer in that direction or make it harder to steer in that direction but ultimately I guess that would be where you would wanna be. I think in there are different cases where the public can actually take an active role in providing data and helping to develop solutions. We had one fellow with public interest technology program who worked on financial mapping and for that project she trained students at a local community college on how to do data collection and they went to their local neighborhoods to collect different financial information and then map that for the area to create some really interesting lessons learned on what the true wealth was in those communities and that over time how it impacted people's individual wealth and so by finding ways to engage and to provide information or go seek out information I think that's another way that the public can take an active role in making public interest technology a bigger thing. And I think we also must be students of history. Right, I always used to joke but I think it's kind of true. If universities, if I was an academic if I did my job think tanks wouldn't need to exist. Right, why have kind of another institution that's informing policy makers about research analysis that's happening in real time but we've cloistered ourselves. We were in my academic head, cloistered ourselves away in many ways from policy relevance and that's a great disservice and we should learn from that. It's also the case that when we shifted from an agrarian to an industrial society, it created profound shifts in what society looked like and led directly and explicitly to some of the worst, most egregious, painful, detrimental outcomes for society at large. Led to the Great Depression. It led to having to construct a new social contract of which the social security, various safety laws, wage laws, et cetera all came out of that. One catalyzing period in our country's history. And the same attention needs to be paid when we're transitioning right now from an industrial to a digital economy. And if you learn from history, you know like the trajectory is already set and we as people who are able to see at least some strands of where these trajectories lead have to be more proactive if we wanna avoid the kinds of detrimental impacts. Job displacement writ large. You think the opioid epidemic is bad now? Like when you displace truckers, long haul truckers, the number one job for men in America, 3.5 million. What do you think happens to those communities in rural America where it's the last job? Now, unfortunately, a public interest technologist is kinda like Cassandra, right? We see these futures but are never believed in real time. And that is our curse. But I think by, I hope, I'm an optimist in belaying what I'm saying, but I believe that by learning from these histories, that we can avoid those pitfalls and put in place far more proactive policies. This is why I say we have to transition from getting into the room to holding key decision makers to account. We have to be more relevant than our institutions, whether the universities or what have you in order to affect changes to prevent those, what I see is dystopian outcomes that are all but guaranteed without our active intervention. It's been again. I'm just thinking about success. And my guess is that one measure of success of this whole program would be if it became the norm to design and build these systems so that the measurements are made normally and the transparency of their performance and data is also the norm as opposed to something we have to extract by kicking and screaming and fighting and so on. Just making this standard practice would be an extraordinary success in my opinion. Getting lots of nods, okay. Other questions for our panel? And it also points to just build off this, it points to me to sort of the ludicruciity of DC, which is like when we're talking about scientific methodology being the radical position at this point in time. Right? And we aspire to having that be the norm. It shows you where we currently are in history and why our intervention, our work is so critically important. So, okay, we have another question in the back. It's like, otherwise we'll end on one of my prompts as a last question, but. That is, I'm paraphrasing, but that was kind of the premise of the question. So if I'm a technologist, why would I ever come to the table with a policy person? Because the career directory perhaps is not as lucrative. So, with that being said, let's table that on the side for a second and let's say, let's take the M lab thing and let's say, okay, all right, somebody, what is your advice for resiliency is kind of the question, right? For someone that's looking for a career in public and international technology. If I'm a talented technologist and the private industry has a lot more to offer, why would someone aspiring university student come into the public technology space knowing that there's gonna be a 10-year battle and perhaps not much action is gonna happen? Well, when you phrase it like that. I mean, I think at some point, right, as we make the argument for people to enter public interest technology versus going into the private sector, I think we have to acknowledge some of the differences between public interest technology and private sector. And I think one of the biggest differences is your satisfaction and the impact that you can have on the world is going to be very different when you're working on problems for the public interest than it likely will be if you are working in the private sector. There are a host of benefits that we all know that you can get from the private sector. But I think some of the challenges and the impact that you can have in public interest technology is what makes it worth fighting for. I think, especially as conversations in the broader public sphere happen around, it's important for people to be part of a community and for people to not just like something on a social media site or complain about something, but to actually become engaged in process. This provides a very real, concrete way that you can take engagement and take fashion and channel it into a way that will have a real tangible impact. So technologists want to have impact and impacting public policy is one of the valued impacts today. And this organization's probably had as much to do with that as any out there. And so there are absolutely researchers who are thinking if I can do this experiment then I can influence the discussion on this public policy point. The second thing I'd say is it's not quite such an either or situation. There are plenty of entrepreneurs out there who are taking the technology and running with it that are not the incumbents and they're trying to leapfrog. There's a startup in San Francisco that is franchising bringing up an ISP. So it's ISP in a day. They're going one apartment building at a time. And that's the kind of, that is another outlet in there that will change the equation. I can also think of nothing that I've done in my life except for kids. It has been more fulfilling. At the end of the day, not only do I sleep well doing this work but I know that the challenges that I'm facing are because I'm trying to leave the world a better place. Before my time and it is over. Maybe it's like kids helps drive that but I really do believe like the world that we live in and the world that future generations will inhabit that trajectory is being set right now. So that the work we're doing is so critically important it's an inoculant on a global scale with the potential to shift the entire future of civil society. Like how powerful, how wonderful, what an incredible opportunity that is. And then when I'm old and gray, I can tell my kids that thing that you take for granted today, there's a crazy group of people meeting in Washington DC in August of 2018 that was the genesis point for that. How great is that? Last question, so Greg, go for it. I'm a little just working here. I'm a little reluctant to wade into this. For one thing, it makes me think like the MLab is not the important thing that I ought to be working on but your comment about putting five million truckers out of work seems to me. It's only 3.5 million. 3.5 million, okay. It seems to really make very, very clear a huge problem that is coming toward us pretty rapidly. And it seems to me that there's a big separation between people who kind of either intuitively or idealistically understand that there are certain social problems that we need to address in order for the world to keep working well. I was at IBM years ago when they were ramping up big emphasis on diversity and they basically made a very strong business case for it. And I think that they actually helped sell that business case in the rest of the world, in the rest of the country at least. And it seems as if on the one hand there are some problems you can kind of make some progress on by collecting really good data and then beating on people. But I wonder whether how many, I wonder how many of the problems we could solve more effectively if we could actually convince wealthy people and corporations that it's in their best interest to solve this problem. As opposed to, hey, here's some new technology, how can we ring a few billion dollars out of it and move money from poor people to rich people and make this problem even worse. So I wonder what role public interest technology ought to be playing in figuring out why we ought to solve these social problems and what the impact of solving these social problems would be. Well, comrade, I feel like you've put your finger on some serious tensions within modern neoliberal capitalism. But I would caution against maybe dismissing the import of what MLab is doing. It seems divergent, but let's game this out for a moment. 3.5 million truckers, that's a big number and that's a big impact on a national, in fact, a global scale. The only hope we have of being able to address this problem, I, autonomous vehicles are coming, especially for that use case. And in fact, society will benefit from that writ large. I'd just like to avoid the decimating externalities of that. On the other hand, the only chance we have to address this looming problem is to find a way to bring broadband connectivity because it's the future, right? A service economy for these communities is the only hope you have when all the manufacturing jobs are gone and when the last job is gone. We can't even get there until we acknowledge the extent of the problem and we can't do that with the creptacular data set that's the official broadband map of the United States. So to get the funding, the multi-billion, the multi-tens are hundreds of billions of dollars that need to be spent to upgrade our 21st century national infrastructure in order to help truckers whose lives are going to be detrimentally impacted within the next five to 10 years. We need the data to show key decision makers. No, your map that shows mission accomplished, there's connectivity here, isn't even close to done. And when we finish that task, then we as public infrastructure technologists can talk about the training programs and all these other massive investments that we must make as a society. This is not an option. It's a requirement. And MLab I think plays a crucial pivoting role in that of making it impossible for a decision maker to ignore the problem that's coming, not in the distant future, but like in the next administration. More hands, but also we're a little over time and I don't wanna cut our breakout short. All right, Ken wants the last one, okay, sorry. All right, one last question, and then it'll come on. As you start talking, it'll come on, yeah. One of the things we've done in California is actually done a very good map of mobile broadband. And one of the things we've discovered is exactly the places where those 3.5 million truckers today have three-fifths of the broadband that an urban user has. And they've had it for three years. And it's a constant trend in every measurement that we've been able to take. They are the neglected class in the United States. And as we move to 5G, as for those of us who know the physics of 5G, it works like great over 100 meters, which means that the challenge for rural users is about to explode. If current technology is only three-fifths, can imagine what's gonna happen when urban areas be seen and ramp up to 100 megabits and beyond, but it only can work in urban areas. The problem is immediate. So on that note, let's, thank you for that good, let's give a round of applause to our fireside chat panel. Thank you.


Hi, my name is Colleen Coppinger and I'm the owner of Painting with a Twist in Grapevine. The twist about painting with a twist is that you can bring in whatever beverage you want to drink while you're painting. Most people choose to bring a bottle of wine, and these two were donated by the two local wineries that are my favorites, Homestead and Sloan and Williams. We provide everything you need for your wine, including a corkscrew. But I find a lot of people don't know how to use one of these, so I decided to make a short video to show you how easy it is. This particular corkscrew is called a double pull because it has two levers. It also has a little knife for cutting the boil and the actual corkscrew itself. The first step is to remove the boil capsule, which I just recently discovered. That's what it was called. Some of them you can just pull it right off, but others require you to use, actually use the little knife that's on the corkscrew. Most wine bottles have a little lip here. You can either cut above the lip or below the lip. Personally, I like to cut above. I find it's helpful to hold the corkscrew like a potato peeler. Like you're going to be peeling a potato. And then you're just going to rest the blade next to the bottle against the little ledge. And I like to turn the bottle and just kind of hold my hand steady. And it really does just feel a lot like peeling a potato or an apple. And I like to go a little bit past where I started, just to be sure I get it cut all the way off. And then you can just lift that right off. Step two is actually removing the cork. You'll want to open the corkscrew all the way up like this, then you're going to take the little point, come in at a 45 degree angle, slightly off center. Then I like to just start turning the bottle and pressing in.  We're going to push it all the way in until the very last rung is right above the cork. You don't want to go too far because you might get some cork in your wine. So step three is actually removing the cork by using the levers on the corkscrew. There's two of these on this one. So you're going to rest the first one right there on the lip of the bottle. I like to grab ahold of it and kind of support it. And then we're just going to pull up on the actual corkscrew. Pull up as far as it will go. And you're going to bend that back down and that will allow you to put the second little lever on the lip of the bottle. I still like to hold onto it and go ahead and pull the cork all the way up. So now just take your cork off the corkscrew and enjoy the best part, have a glass of wine. If you'd like to come and paint and drink some time, you don't need any artistic experience at all. Just go to our calendar at paintingwiththetwist.com slash grapevine. Find a painting you like and sign up. We hope to see you soon.


Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA the Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. I'm gonna talk to you guys about some team of knockout stage stuff that has been going on so far in this promo. I'm sure a lot of you guys have seen the prices of these cars and it is honestly pretty astonishing. We've had two days of packs of lightning rounds and of content from this team of knockout stage promo. I wanna take a look at the cards that are in packs right now, maybe a few of their prices. Will they be investable out of packs and are they gonna hit their lowest point early on right now while the most of the packs are going to be opened. So let's actually go take a look right now at the squad. I wanna apologize as well for not uploading the past couple of days, having some internet issues with just being able to get the videos actually uploaded to YouTube. So that's the situation that's going on with that. But let's take a look at this team. I mean, you see Ronaldo at 3.8 million coins. Like that Ronaldo and 98 Ronaldo at 3.98 million coins is I think a lot of people and it's not just about Ronaldo when I clicked on the wrong one. It's not just about Ronaldo, but so many of these cards are just very, very low and it makes me really think that a lot of people actually opened up saved. Saved up packs 3880 for Ronaldo right there, but left wing, it makes me think that a lot of people opened saved up packs and that's, people are just kind of either scared because team this season is coming and they know that's coming or they're just kind of afraid to buy right now. This card right here, I thought this card would still carry the hype. I lost some coins in this card because I was trying to flip overnight from Friday into Saturday. I bought them at like 7.30 and actually ended up selling them before like 7.20. So I broke even on transfer profit just about and I lost tax on four van dykes that I bought last night because I thought this card was gonna rise up to 800.  Maybe if they'd run NA lighting rounds later in the evening, you know like midnight UK, they kind of hit a low point and then they start to get more rare on the market as people try them out the next day and the week in league but so many of these cards and I made a tweet about this. I made a tweet about this today actually that a lot of these cards, actually almost all of these cards have special items already. It's not really, none of these items are really new cards that people just wanna go out and try, maybe a Willion, maybe the Abombing, the Todich, the Neres, the Colossanek.  Van Dyke has had so many special cards. Pique, Sterling, Messi, Sun, Firmino has a few, Mane has like three, he's in the past couple of weeks with the Champions League Man of the Match, the Player of the Month and now this Team the Knockout stage card and you know, Sane as well has got a ton of different special cards and so does Abombing, he's got a couple as well. So it's just like people didn't really feel the need to try some of these cards because they're not new. I mean, they're just new upgraded versions and people must be thinking with Team of the Season in mind. Now, I wanna look at this Van Dyke card again because this is something that interests me and we're gonna have to kind of keep watch on. 729 right now on Xbox. He was as low as 700K flat today. If we look at his graph, 667 at one point during the Lightning Rounds, he's now up to 729. So if you were able to buy in this like 680 kind of price range, I was at ease and buy for you on the Xbox but I wanna take a look at how this 93 compares to the 92 Road to the Final card. Since the 93 has come out, this Road to the Final card has tanked. Look at this, he was 845,000 coins after their game after they won versus Porto during the week and look where he's at now, 640K. Yes, this item is still alive. Yes, this item could get upgraded to a 93 but I think a lot of people sold this card because he has a very high possibility to win Young Player of the Year, excuse me, not Young Player of the Year, Player of the Year from the Premier League. So we could see his Team of the Season card come out early in that respect. I'll talk about the Player of the Year stuff here in just a little bit. But there's a lot of panic on this card and I wanted to show you guys this especially because I haven't heard a ton of people talk about this but this 92 Van Dyke was kind of like the best version that wasn't the Team of the Year. So obviously it was 800K so the Team of the Year version is up here at 1.3 million coins. So this was the more affordable version and it was the best until now we have this, the 93 rated card. But looking through the rest of this team, I know Sun seems pretty cheap to me because his headliner card is like a million coins. So this card being at 600K is pretty, I think on the low side, I think it should be 700 on Xbox, maybe 750 closer to 800 on PS but it's just like nobody wants to buy cards right now and that's kind of just the whole mantra to the market. Like nobody wants to buy these new cards. Other cards are doing well. Other past Team of the Weeks, they have gone up. You look at some of the carnival cards, they were panic sold a bunch leading up to the 6 PM promo. I had a couple tweets out, wow, this is a serious situation right here. Thomas Muller, 64K. Wow. He must be taking a hit because of the Max Cruz player of the month. Interesting. That's a card that I'm gonna have to look at. If I see low 60s, I'm gonna have to go take a look and possibly buy that but a lot of these cards rebounded very well from where they were at. Now this is your Reese's down a lot because of him getting the new Team of the Knockout stage card but a lot of the cards were panic sold and then rebounded very well through the Weekend League and I had a few flips. I posted those on Twitter as well on Friday of some cards that I was able to flip. Now I wanna talk about some content that we still have here in the store. Today we got a SBC, which was the Team of the Tournament SBC and it gave out UCL supply. I actually have this pack and a Flashback Player Pack to open, kind of, and it's like a reward for no videos the past two days for you guys. I'm gonna have those packs open at the end but we got this UCL supply today so if we go and flip in, I wanna take a look at this as well. This is our usual UCL Rare Card supply. This is how it looks every time. We see that the market just completely drop off when this three player pack or whatever tradable UCLs they drop on the market. Today was, when I looked at the market a lot and what I saw today, today was just a good day to club stock. You could club stock. Again, they probably released these cards back onto the game because they were getting so rare after being used up in those UCL Premium upgrades. People were grinding to those. There were a lot of people who were doing those UCL Premium upgrades even though those packs were just awful for most people. But today is a good time and probably still is to catch some on bid because this SBC is still out in the store to get some of those UCL Rare cards on bid. Now, I don't have very many in my club but I will go check a few of them right now, some of the SBC type cards. We'll have to take a look and see where some of these cards are at, man, Jukic down here at 12,000 coins. That is pretty cheap. Considering these cards supply is still pretty low because they've only had a couple rounds of supply. Is this one bought? No, it's not bought. Somebody bid 12,5. I'll throw it in the club and 85 rated UCL Rare card for 12,000 coins. Not too shabby in my opinion. You can do that with a lot of this stuff right now. Maybe look for some 84s. One of my favorite 84s to trade with earlier in the year was Juan Matas, UCL Rare card. The version of him looks like he's a bit inflated for an 84 rated right now. 15K looks a bit high to me. But a lot of these cards are pretty cheap and you can find open bids and you can get on the open bids and they're still pretty rare. So I don't imagine an SBC coming out with that would maybe require these cards again until the next round of Champions League play which is actually in about 10 days. It's on the 30th of April, is the next Champions League game that is Spurs IAC semi-final game. So that's something that we have to kind of look forward to as well. But I remember I sold a Dorasi that I had in my club for max price, 30, 35,000 coins when that UCL Premium SBC comes out. And if Team of the Season has not started by the time those next Champions League games come back around, I bet they could drop that UCL Premium SBC again and we could see those UCL Rare cards sky back up into the hype. So that's a pretty low risk investment. Basically the best way to go and find cards to stock your club with for the SBC fodder UCL Rare cards is you can go to the cheapest players by rating tab on foot bin right here. You can click on the UCL Rare and then you can apply filter and then you're gonna see all the UCL Rare cards by the rating. You can see 84s, you see down here Adan is at 5k, Pizzi is at 6k, Subasic, Felipe, Savic, some 83 ratings as well. And then if you wanna find the 85s and above, just go to FIFA 19 players, select the version UCL Rare and then choose your rating over here. Just make it 85, search by custom filter and then search by order by Xbox price, you have to click it twice and then boom, you're down here the cheapest 85 rated Manjukic, Zeech, Lopez, Neto, Bernardo Silva, 16.5, now that is interesting. I'm gonna actually go check, take a look at that. That is Premier League, that is Good Links. So we're gonna go take a look at that here just for a second but this is a pretty good safe method to just club stock if you do think that they could require some of these SBC, some of these cards again, which I think is very plausible the next time that they run Champions League promo, Champions League, any type of Champions League content I'm gonna add this one to my transfer targets, see if we can get that one out of bid. But also today was a pretty decent day to club stock golds as well. The second day of lightning rounds is usually when you see stuff go the lowest. Thomas Muller right now, 19,000 coins, 18,750, that's pretty cheap for an 86 nowadays in the game, you have to think about that used to not be very cheap for the 86s but if we go back over here to cheapest players by rating and we clear filters and just go back to normal and look at the 86 rated players, they're back at 20K and I mean, if you look how it's been in the past couple of weeks, everything has been down to 19K at its lowest point and then boom up to 28, settling down to 23 to 26. So a lot of these higher rated cards, the SBC fodder cards have a higher price range now, they are worth more because of all the icon SBCs that are on the game. So that's gonna continually keep their price a lot higher and I actually saw a lot of people this weekend, you could tell, they opened some packs, they got some coins from whatever was going on this weekend and they were able to go out and finish some prime icon moments SBCs. Now, whenever I flip through the icon section like this, my FIFA freezes, as you can tell right now, it is frozen, it's gonna reset me, there it goes. But that's kind of a pain, we'll hop right back into foot as soon as I can. But all those icons that are out and the people doing them, I saw on Twitter today, so many screenshots of people that were completing icon SBCs, it just goes to show me that people are using those new coins that they got, putting them into icon SBCs. So looking at, again, maybe if we have lightning rounds today on Sunday, it could be a last chance opportunity or another opportunity, not a last chance to pick up some of these gold cards because we should get more SBCs. We probably will get another SBC today on Sunday with the another team in the knockout stage, player SBC. And that could arise some demand for cards depending on what kind of card we get, obviously the requirements. But that's a shout to stock your club with some of these high rated golds as well. As I would imagine that they would climb out of this promo ever so slightly until we do hit team this season where there will be tons of packs opened and everything pack oriented will kind of come back during team this season. And then you'll want to have your club kind of clear those high ratings because they will go down for that. But we'll take a look at that when that comes. But again, today it was just kind of like a club stock or a club fill kind of day. The UCL Rare cards, the gold cards as well, sniping and lightning rounds, bidding on lightning rounds, you're gonna have one last opportunity to do that today. And honestly, you could do it during squad battle rewards as well. I mean, you think about this week and the weekly objectives. Actually it shows here on the screen as I'm loading in the Zao Felix. 84 rated striker from Benfica, that card that he in real life is getting very pumped up right now. There's a lot of hype around his card. So there's a lot of people that played squad battles this week, myself included. You see that earlier today I went through some games and I was just scoring my Portugal goals to get that card. I am now in gold two. You're gonna see a lot of people that get the rewards this week. What is a gold two reward? Prime mixed players pack and a premium gold players pack. So I will probably maintain my rank here in gold two and get a couple packs this week. So there's gonna be a lot of people that do that. So you might see some extra supply of the team in the knockout stage cards. You might see some extra supply on those just because there's gonna be packs opened on Sunday night with those rewards and as well with the gold cards. And that's a lesser busy time on FIFA but there's still a lot of packs open. So that's a really, really good time to get on bids for the high rated golds if you do have a chance to do that when squad battle rewards come out. So this video is going long already. So I will quickly mention Player of the Year. Go over here to Twitter and take a look at the PFA Player of the Year. They actually shouted out today the nominees for the Player of the Year. We should see these SBCs coming up in the next couple of weeks. I will maybe look into this a little bit more deeply in the next couple of days. We have Van Dyke, Hazard, Mane, Bernardo Silva, Sterling and Aguero with Aguero, Sterling and Van Dyke kind of being the front runners for the Player of the Year. And we also have the Young Player of the Year which that is right here. Where is the Young Player of the Year? I just had it. Young Player of the Year, boom. Nominees for the Young Player of the Year are Trent Alexander Arnold, who's this guy. Brooks, David Brooks from Bournemouth. Marcus Rashford, Declan Rice, Bernardo Silva and Raheem Sterling. It's going to be Raheem Sterling. If he does not win the Player of the Year Award he will win the Young Player of the Year Award. In my opinion, and I think a lot of people would be in agreement with this, Van Dyke will win the Player of the Year and Sterling will win the Young Player of the Year. Now investments for this stuff, last year we'll take a look at some of these, the SBCs that they released last year for like the Neymar, for the Mbappe. I think maybe I'm thinking a FIFA 17 but there was a Kante and a Dele Alli. I think that was FIFA 17. I kind of forget who it was last year to be honest. But we'll take a look at those SBCs later this week. Maybe gear up for those, maybe find some investments but right now it looks like a lot of the Sterling Informs are up. A lot of the Van Dyke Informs are up and invested in. I mean, if you go look at Van Dyke's Champions League card, his cheapest special version. I mean, this card was well under 300K when the supply came out for UCL cards and he's now up to 300K. So that's something that you kind of want to watch with this. A lot of this stuff is already invested in. I will not be investing personally in some of these SBCs. There are going to be some people that might make a lot of money because these SBCs will be expensive because these cards that they will come out for the Player of the Year cards will basically be team of the season quality. They will get team of the season boost and the Player of the Year cards will match the rating of that team of the season card they will get in a couple of weeks when that promotion does come out. But back to focus, focusing on the things at hand. Let's open up our two packs. We have the UCL three player pack and the flashback player pack. We'll open these really quick to finish out the video. We do not get a walk out in a UCL pack. Germany, center back. Hoffenheim, who is this? Vokes, 81 rated. All right, we'll take that. We got a couple of these players in the club at least. For something, we'll send those to the club. And then the flashback player. I did this SBC for around 100,000 coins just because it was a lot cheaper because of the packs and everything. If this SBC is still available when you're watching this video, which I think it's going away, it's a lot cheaper now than it was before just because of the high rated golds going down. Obviously as a walk out, we are getting a flashback player in a pack who's going to be Spanish right back, Juan Fron. Not the best, definitely not the best. But you know what? I'll throw him in the squad. He will probably get thrown into an SBC at some point this year. I know a lot of people use this card early on and he actually links pretty well to some of the players that I do have in the back of my team. I have a Ramos. I have a Godin untradable. I have some Obloc, UCL Obloc. So we'll throw that Juan Fron in the club. Not the best, but it's okay. Again, if you're looking to buy some stuff this weekend, I would just say be careful. Look for the quick flips again. You see that I am very liquid. I still have a few investments on my transfer list. I have some Man of the Manchuris that I'm just kind of holding. I'm just kind of waiting to see if this card will get rare and recover in the next coming weeks. And I also have some Man of the Manchuriporte as well still that I got at 130K. I'm really hoping that they up his price range and I would like to see what happens with that card. But again, look for one last opportunity to club stock today with the golds or get on some bids for UCL rare cards and be tuned in for squad battle rewards if you can to maybe pick up some deals. Then if you enjoyed the video, smash a thumbs up on it. Comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe to the channel if you're new. It's been Nate, The Foot Accountant. Catch you guys later. Peace out.