folks I'm Mike and I'm 28 of Fix My Mix a show where we listen to some songs from the community and endeavor to impart some wisdom to help people get through to the stage where they're going to release that music and when they do release that music I sincerely hope they follow the link which is up here and it's down in the description as well and release that music through DistroKid notice the nice the nice hoodie I've got on today release the music through DistroKid and it'll go out to all the places they want it to go to like Spotify and Restream and all that sort of stuff and yeah okay I'm getting a message here from oh I'm getting a message here from my guest I'll just bring on the show right let me do that let me just pull him up Pete Johns here hey hello have I got some weird sound going on I reckon you're on the webcam like welcome to the troubleshooting I'm glad you were here because I wouldn't have known for about 10 minutes otherwise we would have kept talking about our delightful hoodies and no one would have you could hear me though hopefully you just have a down like a down a tunnel like a troll oh yes yes that's webcam mics wonderful wonderful things oh don't know why they even have them they should just disable them they need to make a webcam that has no mic so you'd never have that problem absolutely nice to see you here with your hoodie on could you give me a little favor could you tuck your little things inside just so we match a bit more yeah that's it it's the way the cool kids do it look at it we look like giant knobs we love your district it is we're gonna get a snapshot this one and put it right on there Instagram yeah this is two middle aged old blokes in Australia like district kids they'll never sell another subscription again it's terrible really because and I must say this because you many of you are sponsored for a show and you you're sponsored for all your shows you know it can appear that you're just doing it for the sponsorship I mean I genuinely do use district hidden they're brilliant I mean they are they're they're a lot more professional than we are and they will grab your music and they'll put it out on all the platforms and yeah like I used to circuit for two years before I started and yeah they have very cool people and they have lots of cool services and I they're adding a heap more all the time so I know we sound like we're just like corporate shill but you and I both release music and we both use district kids so we we practice what we preach that was the word I was looking for corporate shill corporate shill is that word ever used in any other context is there any other kind of shill not only when a New Zealander goes to the beach and they collect some shill that's the only other place you're already starting to get a little bit I told you I was a little bit sleep deprived today mate it was gonna be a fun we all need to meet a hey before we go any further we should we say hello to everyone who's here should and most of them you've already said hello to in the last hour or so on your show it's very hello to the folks who came over from my show I'm gonna say hi to the Lily Pillies always what's the name of the person from the Lily Pillies manny that's right yes I'm manny I should know that hello I've clicked on the wrong one random I'm this is hide hide yeah Doug and Jade yeah that could be a duo couldn't it we've got me yellow me you know we also have we have some we have Craig nice to see you here we have house Malone I've offended Craig cuz I made my New Zealand joke oh we do you go yes yes I just love to mess around with the vowels over there don't they just what vowel should we pick for this word we just we just forget that the letter R exists I'm gonna go in the car I'm gonna go down the skill in the car and get to the spa later each short sax is here always nice to see you and I believe we also I can't can't see him here but I know Kevin was here Kevin parents yeah there is Kevin parents here nice to see you all here this is gonna be recently please you know I've been doing some hands-on sort of mixing things on the show but this week we're doing fix my mixed light which is which it doesn't involve any of that hands and stuff we're just gonna be listening to three songs from the community and trying to help guide people to where they ought to go and much like our banter the the song intensity is it gonna increase throughout the show we're gonna start off with something very light it's it's like soft porn at the beginning and just hard called triple X the last track is really full-on it's quite enjoyable actually to be honest with you I was just watching your show you had Dom on there I did Dom Tara Grosso inspired me I've got I've got an idea for you okay I know that he was of the idea that that you shouldn't have two names he felt that you should just go with the one name but I don't I've got an idea for you Pete let me pitch this to you second channel right second channel I know you've already got a second channel so third channel it's called John Pete's this is an alter ego channel John Pete's where you advise people they should buy the best gear possible when it's gonna make their music much much better and there are very definite rules that you should follow in making music how about that that would be good like the bizarro world like that's a bizarro Star Trek in the Seinfeld people where it's exact opposite I actually like the idea of that I can say gear sluts is the best forum ever you'll never find any hate there should always buy external preamps because they'll make a massive difference and here is the five rules of songwriting you must always follow otherwise you suck let's see that's your channel in a nutshell I love it I like I'd watch it something you know what it might be more successful I would have to do it as a peace take though I would have to do it target shake I would have to um okay hi my name is Pete now hope you will I'll start like that yes I'm doing marvelously well I'll just do everyone's catchphrase and just throw up all in there just don't why go with hope I hope you will why not just go with I hope you're alive do the Glenn frickin thing and just go you're a back of a asshole yeah suck you can't create music yeah yeah do that yeah anyway that's the John Pete's channel coming to your YouTube soon folks let's go to the first song this is from I said it'd be very light it is very light and it's also quite long as well I always say if a song's long that's a part of the song because can it hold your attention for that period of time is you know if you see me suddenly going and scrolling Instagram you'll know that's right so this is from a brand Alexandra let's pop his name up there he deserves it absolutely we can do I think the song's called moonwave he says second song finished since I started writing again I never intended to release any of these songs I wrote wherever came to me and directed it to serve the song itself rather than a target audience I struggled to write short songs especially ones that with a slower tempo and this is definitely no exception to that had a lot of trouble with this one as far as mixing and getting the feel right still not entirely happy but with it but a bit fatigued appreciate any feedback you get like that towards the end of a song doesn't he can get a little bit fatigued yeah does now just a quick equipment list you know I like this is blue got there I was saying to remember Brent sent one in before and he's got a little equipment list that makes quite nice quality music a blue bluebird se Mike a focused right scarlet 2i2 an alvarez acoustic and a fender telecaster nothing to over the top there beautiful so listen to this song I recommend that people in the chat do make a contribution and help Brent Alexander out with this and also let us know if the song holds your attention for the full five minutes and 67 seconds how can it be 67 seconds it can't be can't five minutes and whatever it was I like that my microwave lets you put 80 seconds in there and I do it all the time if I want to do something one minute 20 and just go 80 seconds or I'll go one minute 80 and it's like oh you know me any see you really know me I said oh it's gone the shallow water come from the moon she would burn the dark the shadows in your sinking home just like you you won't trade muddy water the seals swallow you you won't trade there's so much in you people swallow you there we go we hear Pete Johns is not on his phone no so he's ready to get it ready to give me some feedback I am and look I was I was listening and I was also watching watching the chat and see what other people had to say as well which I thought was very interesting stuff too first up I love the song it did engage me for the whole time I live in the sucker for dynamics and that one had dynamics out the wazoo probably not even the volume the volume was pretty consistent but the stereo field use was really good in that one the slowing down like the speeding up and slowing down the tempo something I know you're a fan of like and something we don't see enough in modern music because it's so easy to be on the grid that it's hard to slow down and speed up and have multiple tempos yeah there was a lot of comments about the vocals and I'm actually interested in your view on this Mike because we're old blokes and the vocals to me had had more of a 70s and 80s style vocal treatment and what I mean by that is the vocals were were nestled in there and they were floating in there with the guitars and the other tracks they weren't sitting on top and upfront and present which is more of your modern 90s 2000 style of mixing vocals a little louder and a little more compressed and upfront I actually thought it worked well for the style of the music so I was personally a fan but I can see what folks were saying that maybe it didn't what what did you think of that one to me I'm a bit old-fashioned with this it sort of depends if it's a lyrics song or not you know and I didn't feel this was a lyrics song I thought this was a more like a mood song yeah you know so I wasn't bothered by the fact that once in a while yeah the vocals weren't on top although well you're just making me do all the feedback now aren't you this is your trick isn't it is my I got other things to say but I'm gonna I'm gonna say something which I thought was a little to steal a word that you used often on your show I thought this may sound a bit wanky when I wrote the notes the people in other parts of the world wanky means doesn't mean people I just pretentious yes nobby so I put in my notes you know a little muddy in the low mids I hate it when YouTube is like us say that sort of thing but I was glad to see that someone in the comments center and then I felt sort of you know yeah so I definitely feel that there was a lot of things competing with the vocals yeah a little bit of acoustic guitar some of the keys some lovely pad sounds in there and things going on and the vocals were occupying some of the same space yeah you know and and that's we're all got a little muddy for me you know so yeah I don't think Brent's here live but if he's watching on the replay it's it's sort of simple but some of you need to practice a little bit is just use your EQ mostly you can use dynamic EQ as well Brent if you want to get fancy with it but use some EQ and another little tip I talked about it last week with Dan is to automate that EQ so in the sections where there's no vocals or what have you you can give away some of that frequency range back to some of those instruments but then when the vocal comes in this is where dynamic EQ is good as well or automated either way doesn't matter but you can then scoop out some of that area in those instruments and and probably for the vocals that may help to give it a little bit more space but also for the guitar and the keys were really fighting for that space as well yeah there was a lot and again I'll be wanky to you there was a lot of competition in the mids and originally I said because I really liked the bass guitar on that I thought it was a really subtle bass guitar tone and I think I mentioned this last time I was on the show but a lot of folks are hesitant to have a bass line that is up a little higher up on the on the top couple of strings and I think this one worked really well at the start but maybe for some variety like you say maybe start like that but then when you really need those vocals to pop through then you can maybe take the bass down an octave and that does a couple of things it frees up that mid-range and it also adds some low ends a lot of folks said kind of lacking in the low end and I probably agree with that it was missing lots of pads but all the pads were in that mid mid range and even if there was just like a bit of a wobble kind of or a bit of a low string pad that was just doing some cello work or something like that down below I think that could really work for a song like this so that's just another idea I had but Mimo actually said something she said the strings are on the right and that was that that was sort of annoying his probably ears where he's like oh I want everything to be balanced and I was after he said that I was listening to the balance of the mix and I actually liked the fact I don't know I'm a bit old school I like the old four track recordings where the drums were on the left and the right that they did make it the 16 because I just find it funny but I don't I don't know I don't think a mix has to be a hundred percent balanced down the guts all the time and you can have some things coming in on the sides if they're not instrument that they're the whole time that's distracting but interesting isn't it because yeah I mean sometimes we can fall into the trap of trying to reproduce everything we've ever heard in commercial music and then start thinking oh there's a right way of doing things I think if we can get again a bit wonky but if we get a bit arty-farty it depends how it makes you feel doesn't it like if there's an in balance and something's because we've had some tracks here in there where something's right over to one side yeah if that kind of creates some tension because it feels a bit uncomfortable artistically that would be a great thing wouldn't it potentially yeah you know yeah and that's why I don't mind I don't mind that with the stereo because I was listening to that and the guitars actually did a great job it was a really good guitar tones because there was a couple of guitars there they had they had slightly different tones which is always a good idea and they were separated so I would hear and it was all it created a lot more of that swimming sort of feel and you talk about sort of the art of of creativity and making you how you feel I felt like I would love to sit back with my eyes closed and put some decent headphones on and just let that swim around my head because it felt like it was almost it was definitely in the stereo field and almost felt like a 3d space because of the delays that were on those guitars it was coming back and forth and it was swimming around and again it reminded me a lot of I was kind of think who does this sound like and at first I thought it was more sort of 70s and 80s style but it's actually a lot like a lot of the 90s and 2000s Australian artists like gotcha and Leo and Pete Murray and Josh Pike and these sort of guys that you know they got an acoustic background but they add in a lot of these nice sort of elements such as your pads and your league guitar bits that kind of just make a song interesting so it's still laid back and chill still telling a story but it's yeah it's just got these interesting so I actually really liked I thought I liked it too. I thought it was a really nice chilled track Danny Gables suggesting Alan Parsons. I'm saying Danny Gables who is Danny Gables real? Did you catch that? We learned that Danny is maybe not a not a not a true identity. Maybe he is Alan Parsons and he's now here trying to promote Alan Parsons music to young people like us. So a scammer in a Facebook group the other day that said that so it must be true. Let's go to a break. Thankfully folks you'll be glad to hear that me and Pete are not supposed to sing. I was going to say I'm really tired mate so I'll be from freestyle rapping in a district in Aden's can we just play them? I will say that the last song in terms of the length was fine for me if and and Brent mentioned that he wasn't aiming this at me he just created the music for himself in a way which is just good. If you were creating the music for yourself and you were trying to be very very commercial you might rethink the song length I guess and could be done with that song I think as well. That's if you're trying to be popular and one of the things you can do to be popular is get on playlists can't you? One of the ways to actually get your music heard on Spotify is to get onto a playlist. Now DistroKid offers a really fun way to get onto one of their playlists with their Wheel of Playlist feature. Simply head over to your DistroKid account go to the top right where it says goodies then go down to Wheel of Playlist and then you start off simply by selecting a song something you've already released and then click on connect with Spotify. Now obviously the further up a playlist you get the more likely people are to actually hear your music and enjoy it. So what DistroKid do here with this feature is they give you three chances to spin a wheel a kind of a Wheel of Fortune type of thing going on here. Now the best result of those three spins determines your number in the playlist and as I say the higher up you are the better. So on this occasion I achieved 1088. You can try every day if you like so maybe that's something you'd like to do to actually get your music in a playlist on Spotify. You know when I made that little thing like many many months ago I accidentally had the reverb switched on and my mic and if you listen you can hear it. I was wondering that I'm like do I have to have my audio moving here or something or is that mic's fine. I'm like probably I've listened to that 25 times since I made it and I think I don't care. Why shouldn't voiceovers have echo on them. Next time I want you to do the inner world that's the voiceover. If you want to make your music shine get on the DistroKid. Yeah maybe not. Nice to see some people arriving in here. Let's say hi to a couple more people. Hi. We've got Jeremiah in there nice to see you. He was a bullfrog once I heard. Jeremiah was a bullfrog that's what I heard. I don't know what he's talking about but he was a good friend of mine. Joy to the world. Nice to see and I hope I'm saying that correctly and nice to see that he gave a light before we started. And yeah thank you to say hello to one more person who did we already say that was what I was looking for. Princess LDG's kingdom. Hello princess from over from over on the studio live today. Community a very nice member of our community over there. Princess LDG's kingdom sounds and I don't want to be rude here but it sounds like one of those emails I get for a game company that want to advertise. They all want to be on creative source for some reason. Yes dear creator from manager. That's right dear manager. Dear manager please consider our game. We'll give you 100 free gold. I noticed last week or one of your shows I was watching during the week because I do. I do. I'm having a cup of tea. In fact you put a social media post you were reacting to the porn chats that were there. I had a lot last week as well I think I had the same ones as you actually but I was looking at your show and I was noticing that you get those and it's because of your filthy mouth isn't it. That's what it is. Yeah and that's why I've started getting them on my show as well. Yeah so just they hear me say wanky or Jeremiah they're just like this guy won't say anything. Crazy we better get over there. People are definitely going to click on these triple X cam links. The weird thing is that the fact that they exist means someone's click on someone's watching your show and thinking actually I would listen to this next song but actually rather go and have my identity stolen. Yeah I'm looking at me Mo. Yeah I'm looking. Don't kid it was I can't look at it. I notice they left quickly after your show. Anyway let's move on to the next song that we have. I did say increase in intensity so we're into the middle to the middle rank now. This song is from Jay Pilkinis. It's called Still Raining and you see I thought I'd send you a song whose mix represents a conflict between three elements each one struggling to dominate. This is a quasi blues number called Raining. So the conflict in the mixing is between the vocals which have to carry the song the guitars which give it structure and horns which hopefully give it a unique sound. I'd like to try and get my words out. I'll get my birds waddled here Pete. It's like trying to choose between your three children. Sorry easy choice. They don't watch my show anyway. You can be really honest about which one you... can you be really honest about which one you love best. Anyway I tried the best to balance the three and got those results. Is he still talking about children or the song? We'd love to hear some different opinions and approach in this song. Let's have a listen to this song and Still Raining from Jay Pilkinis. Can I just say here with that intro just that beginning I'll forgive Pete if he needs to go off to take a bathroom. Ending again. There was a couple of middle-aged men but anyway. That was a production. That was epic. That was a word that I would say for that because just starting with the thunder clap and then just kicking in and it moved through. It was almost like I hear the whole three children thing and which one would you go with and I like it's a hard one to go with. I know a lot of people make a lot of comments and I'll talk about that in a moment but first up it's got wow factor. There's passion in there. There is just so much going on that it really just takes you on a journey. At no point was I like when's this going to be over. I'm like what's coming next? Where's it going to go? How's it going to be? I absolutely love the horns in there, that horn arrangement. Bubba who knows his arranging as well. He's here in the chat mentioned that he said that someone knows their horn arrangement. That just sounded so good and it worked really well. The way the lead guitar and the melody of those horns was just sort of working together. That word really, really well. The drums to me were the thing that stuck out in a not pleasant way and I think Jade Star mentioned the same thing in the chat there as well and I don't quite know what it was they were. They weren't the right type of drums and I don't know if you've got views on this. The right type of drum for that track and I think you almost needed some splashier almost not brushes but just a subtler hit on those where it had a really big thump kick and a big crack snare which would be great if it was a big stadium rock song but I think it didn't quite fit the bluesy kind of vibe that I had in that song. Yeah you wanted something powerful but there was so much else providing that power that I thought it was just a little bit overcooked in that but I love the horns. The lyrics unlike the last song I think it's exactly what you mentioned in your feedback about the last one but the flip side of that that you did want to hear this story so the lyrics being more upfront was relevant and worked well. I think when everything else came in same sort of issue as we had in the last song there was so much in that mid-range the lyrics kind of got buried so you might need to either do some automation to bring that up or like you said some dynamic EQ to just chill everything else especially in that pre-chorus it was a brilliant build but I couldn't hear the words of the build and I was really following the story so I wanted to hear all of that so as much as I like to hear a big crescendo the vocals almost had to automate up with that crescendo and the other thing I'd say is overall I think in terms of because it's fixed my mix I know not fixed my master but almost seemed a little bit overcooked in the mastering it was a little bit too intense and it was almost like a frequency overload I don't know whether it was limiting on the master bus or something that was just bringing everything up but I'd just love to hear because there was so much dynamics and so many changes in there love to just hear a little bit pulled back and not quite that full-on sound so but yeah again epic took me on a journey and yeah really enjoyed it cool interesting just another show idea fix my master hey there you go could get a completely different type of porn link in the chat if we did that but overall talking about the master a little bit here I did feel that there was I just felt overall there was a lot which which was a little bit harsh at time in in the mid to the high mids okay I use a little tool called it's from Isotope called tonal balance which I sometimes just chuck on my master bus because you do lose a sort of context with with with this you know during the course of mixing and mastering you can get over and what's the word when you're over familiar with your own track and you just lose a sense of perspective with it so I find that tool quite handy folks if you just look that I don't know how much it is or whatever and I'm not promoting it there's no affiliates but I just do use it all the time and so yeah now I just want to address the horns I didn't like the horns I just didn't like them I like the horn arrangement okay but I did not like the horns I have a funny relationship with horns whenever I'd look at horn libraries if you're using virtual horns I always try the whatever you listen to them out of context they sound amazing you bring up the line being I'll just play a few like oh my god it sounds exactly like a trumpet or a sax or whatever he's doing and then for somehow for me whenever they're in a mix they sound like a synthesizer playing a horn sound and just never sounds good to me and that just was I was just sorry I'm a bit sensitive to it and but there is one just to promote another product there is one that I found that seems to work better just for in case Jay Pilkin has wanted to try this it's by big fish audio school to vintage horns like but I think they've got two of them and what they are what it is about them is it's not very perfect they've got lots and lots of things that are not very perfect about them when you listen to them you think oh it sounds like a really old dented trumpet or what have you but I found with those when I have used horns occasion in my mixes that they sit in a mix better and they sound like a real brass so just a little tip there because I was still not convinced and it was such a shame because obviously they were real guitars in this and the guitars when they came in and they did their thing I thought were great really sounding nice I was hearing this clash between something that sounded very realistic and cool and something to me which sounds a bit synthesized I'm being a bit harsh on people there you go my truth I agree and so I've just got this mental image of the horn library and like Mike creepily like putting a book under his jacket as he walks out of the horn library yes I think I think it is and again I find that that with a lot of those virtual instruments like you say they sound good they're almost designed to sound good as a solo which no one uses any of these instruments as a solo instrument a lot of it is that they're often quite harsh especially in some of that mid into the high sort of trebly ranges so yeah even it just rolling off some of that top-end from that horn so you don't get quite that harsh blast I think there's a lot of that in this so that's why I think of everything sounded a bit overpowered because yeah there was lots again lots of mid lots of a muddy mid to high build up there that was just making it sound a little bit too harsh and just softening some of that will I think we just add some sheen to it you could just rub your horn so the final thing is is that horns can be hard but just roll off the top end and you'll be fine so moving on what's it about Jewish sorry yeah I'm not sure that district kid are going to sponsor this show anymore or they're going to double your salary you know either way I don't know I like district kid they're cool people that might go this is exactly what we want or or either way folks look overall they quite a nice brave song great entertaining song actually and kept me interested after this little break we're going to be going to my final song which as I promised is a bit of a crescendo intensity intensity if you do follow the link in the description down below it's going to take you to a special page on district kid with this yellow banner at the top that banner is letting you know that you're going to get a further seven percent discount off your first year if you sign up here and let's face it it's already very cheap if we scroll down we can see that years membership is $19.99 per year for an unlimited number of albums and songs and so long as it's your own music there are no extra charges and you get to keep all of the royalties from the various platforms platforms like Spotify Apple Music Tiktok Pandora Amazon Instagram title iHut Radio Deezer and more Kevin was just saying in the chat there and he may well be right I haven't thought about this occasionally real life horns sound like samples too you know what most of us probably don't mix horns all that much so I wonder if it's something never have I'm doing wrong in in the mixing of sample horns I don't know could be because it's not really a speciality of mine but no no I'm all about cowbell that's what I specialise in mixing cowbell by the way I tried the wheel of playlist after your first promo and I'm at position number 1620 so if everyone could go over and listen to 1619 other songs you'll get to hear one of mine if you do that and I'm sure you'll have better either worse like somebody the other day in one in my group did say I think they got in the top 10 or something these days so it happens sometimes yeah I think I think you got to keep doing it every week basically I don't yeah no I don't either but it's an option that's a cool thing district are always thinking they've got their little meme videos and they've got their the promo cards I was using those this week and a lot of people use those and they work really well so and I'm terrible at promoting music if people ask me questions about how do you promote music I don't care uh yeah Damien Keyes he's a British bloke and he has a great channel all about Damien Keyes so if you if you're into the whole wanting the 21 day single release plan and how to Spotify and how to submit to playlists and all that sort of stuff I just handball people straight over to Damien yeah yeah cool all right so the last song is uh from take this in your best DJ voice if you could please Pete I'll just pop it up on the screen here hey welcome back here to fix my mix with Mike and Pete this is a track by scapegoat they're brand new one it's called let them fight perfectly he's a professional folks I do admire him so much there's like there's Letterman there there's Letterman and and then there's Michael Parkinson I used to like him yeah and then we've got Graham Norton then we've got Jade Star and just below that is Pete Johns he's very near the top don't forget Michael be out there in the parking lot with the ice cold big and chocolate milks next to big air boring he's a creepy district kid hoodie so the final song from a band called scapegoat we can say I can't remember who sent it in but one of the band members if you're able to include this song and fix one of the mix I'd appreciate I would appreciate it says in brackets I appreciate you already for all the knowledge you've provided oh this is an original from my band um it's called let them fight and this and the song title is scapegoat I recorded mixed and mastered it myself um the best I could I won't tell you how many instruments recorded unless you ask I don't want to influence your perception beforehand how mysterious I know I like it you're mysterious okay let's go and have a listen to this song then wake ourselves up a little bit let's do it choices that you make can't just stand up one day yeah and expect no resistance where sea is your true no time for end the dark starts with a spark the flames getting high there we go first I'm going first I'm going first I'm going first okay during this week uh Susie who still works from home um because her company I don't know still think we have something going on you know why am I going on she works from home and um and uh she spent her week accounting as she does but also watching a whole bunch of Metallica concerts for some reason she was sort of rocking out I don't it just looked like a weirdo to me yeah just had her earbuds on doing her accounting well that's accounting not just counting can you count my subscribers again honey hundred and how many thousands out anyway she was rocking out and she was saying to me do you know what babe she said they're great musicians they're really good musicians and I was like it's a bit patronizing isn't it what did you think I'm going out of the limba tell her actually reasonably talented she's like all metal heads are just dumbo's you can't play the instruments is that what you assumed me anyway and everyone's everyone's gonna hate on to but no I was struck I was struck and I always am because I'm I don't listen to this kind of music but um the musicianship was really good like really really good if you very tight in places you know really really good I'm just impressed and also the um the composition really to be honest with you in this was it's not that different to classical music to be honest with you it's really not direct connection there are two closest genres going around classical and metal it's yeah yeah just the the dynamics of it and the the changes in the arrangement and the changes in intensity in this track just I loved that I thought it was so good it was so good I guess the the um that you listen to certain genres of music because they are in some way matching where you are mentally spiritually psychologically as a person and I don't dislike this sort of music because of the music it's just I don't often find I'm personally in that space where I want the music to reflect my mood in that way so does that make sense so yeah so I actually really respect the music very very much yeah but um yeah that's not where I find myself wanting to reflect you although I could some mornings with the kids sometimes yeah sometimes as I'm as you frantically getting breakfasts and lunches and getting kids to school and things like that yeah but my soundtrack is frantic frenetic metal I can tell you that yeah cool so with all that said I was glad to see that Jade Star was in the chat because she's much more expert than me on this and was agreeing with the first thing I had to say is feedback with all that preamble the vocals seemed very very dry to me um and a little exposed and I didn't I wasn't sure because you know there's certain norms if you like in certain genres of music and I thought is this just me not understanding the genre but I just felt that they I didn't think they needed to have a big whole bunch of reverb on them but just a little bit more than than what was there I felt it would have just sat in there and maybe with that changing throughout the song I think someone mentioned that maybe that possibly an automated reverb where it was a little more in some places than the others but apart from that I actually felt that overall there was a bit of low missing in this song as well whether that's just as simple as the bass guitar should be a bit bigger in the mix or or what have you I'm not quite sure but I just felt through these headphones which I use every single day of the week that um that it was just lacking a little bit not a lot but just a little and apart from that's all I have to say I really kind of really enjoyed these strings to be honest with you I'm really well played by the musicians involved as well absolutely yeah well for me my favorite or probably in top five bands of all time is a band called tool and that was very tool-like perfect circles another band that's that comes to mind I yeah I really dug I find it hard I found it distracting to try and critique it because I just wanted to rock out to it because it is it is my jam these days as I get older I get more folksy and more acoustic-y but this was me 20 years ago this was all I was listening to um yeah I agree with the the vocals with a little over overloaded at the start and then it got a bit buried and it was definitely on the dry side like you don't have to it doesn't have to be doesn't have to be 80s hair metal reverb like with all the big long reverbs and delay tails but a little bit more and weirdly for a song like that I think the the vocals could have even had a little bit more of a rougher sort of edge to them and even a little bit of distortion or something on those vocals just to I know the guitars were so heavy that I think the vocals kind of did get a bit buried by that I'm going to go out in a limb and say that the person doing the mixing in this band is probably the guitarist because those guitar and I say that with love because I was guitarist we tend to mix our guitars as we think the guitars should be front and center and the highlight of it and this is actually a very good guitarist because I you I think you you're on you're in the anti shredding group like me whereas people that shred you better shred really well and the shredding solo that you had sort of towards the end there I was all ready to hate on it and say don't do it don't put a cliche shredding solo in there because sloppy shredding there you can isolate that audio for later but sloppy shredding there's nothing worse than sloppy shredding where it's not in the groove it's not on the beat it just sounds like a hot mess this sounded really good and I'm a time signature nerd too and I was trying to count in some of those sections uh we had bits of five eight some six eight and even some like eight eight sections in there like through that chorus or pre-chorus section it changed up almost every second bar and I love that because I love the idea of you know people just trying to mosh to it and then wait hang on where's where's the first beat I can't do it um and again tool use that a lot so um yeah I could imagine that scapegoat have probably listened to a lot of tool in their time as well but no epic I loved it I thought it was cool and yeah I think a little bit of tidying up there with the the vocals and maybe a little bit more beefy in the low end and um yeah nothing you're home you're gold cool thanks so much to scapegoat for sending that in and it's just another reminder I might say that um any genres of music will be accepted on the show if you submit them um regardless of the biases of the host or the guests of the show um we're prepared to listen to anything even sometimes I have I must admit folks I've for people who have emailed me some songs which um I've had two or three which are seven eight or nine minutes long and I've I have hesitated to play them on on the show I don't probably and I don't like to play half a song either because I feel like that's like showing half of a picture to someone yeah I do that I was just thinking just to end the show if I move over this way a bit can we do one of those half and half well we you you're gonna go yeah do we say goodbye to folks gonna get my good friend folks thanks for being on the show yeah uh it's been a great fun uh hello I hope oh no I'm looking a bit too tanned I need to I need to fix my white balance it looks like yeah looks like you're the sun half the sun uh yeah thanks for being on fix my mix I hope you've enjoyed it other half of mic we'll see you next week bye have a mouth wide open mouth wide for a youtuber shot


This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here, one bingo, we're here, we're back, it's Wednesday morning, I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech, and this is, let me do this carefully, this is Mina, Marco and me, San Mina, she's not here. But Marco is here, in the flesh, in the studio, we love that, welcome to your show, Marco. Well, the sign says there, thanks for having me on the show, so that's something I can agree, and my eyesight is not poor enough, I mean, this is really a treat to be able to have you two times in a week. Fabulous. I can only hope we'll find something to talk about. Why do I feel we will, we can, we will. So let's see, what do we talk about, let's talk about energy, Marco. The first thing is, let's talk about solar power that you brought back from Tibet. Solar energy, of course, keeps the planet going, causes things to be green. Without it, we would be one sorry species, right? So I thought, in honor of your continuing fight, fighting the good fight, on behalf of us in Hawaii, and all sentient beings, that I would present you with this little token, formally initiating you into the practicing prayer wheeled club of Hawaii. And this is a solar powered prayer wheel, it is from Lhasa, Tibet, and this is a solar cell right here, so as it's pointing out towards the sun, it does not need direct sun, in other words, defuse sun will do it, you can put it on your car dash, this little wheel actually does spin, as it's doing now. And there are actually teeny tiny prayers inside, and as the Buddhists in Tibet and places like Bhutan and other places believe that as it spins round and around, it sends its prayers to the heavens for the benefit of all sentient beings. So congratulations, you're the first initiate here in downtown Honolulu, so you are going to hopefully start a trend. Yeah, well I know that they're all going to be envious, they're going to be stopping me on the street congratulating me, and being envious at the same time. I will find a treasured place for this, Marco. Well, you are most welcome. Great statement of energy, a perfect gift, perfect. But let's go further than that, leave it there. Let's go further than that, let's talk about solar in general, so much is happening. You sent me an article from the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, it really left a tattoo kind of impression on my thinking about where solar is going, you want to summarize that? Sure, in fact I've been engaged in a bit of a dialogue with that reporter just in the past, a handful of hours, Russell Gold, he writes out of Texas and he's one of the energy writers for the journal. That specific piece was looking at utility scale storage, battery storage, and specifically how it is offsetting the need to run what are known as peaker plants or peak demand plants. So if you can provide peak demand, if you can satisfy the peak electricity demand in the service territory with batteries rather than running fossil fuel, cost effectively, now cost effective of course is critical because as I've said for a number of years it's not, renewables at all costs is cost effective renewables. So if the batteries can be charged by renewable energy rather than say fossil fuels, then that reduces the demand for peaker plants which are typically more expensive, less efficient to be able to meet some utility demands. And that's only- We have one here, we have a peaker plant in Kapolei. I've seen it, I've walked it. We had an OC16 show about that plant. Oh, I'm electric. It's beautiful, high tech, brand new, well it's brand new. A few years old, relatively speaking, it's brand new. And it does exactly what you said, it ups the game at the critical hours of the day when it's necessary and then it's not necessary after that sort of comes down again. So we're beginning to see a number of kind of path-breaking utilities in our state and also in the mainland that are moving forward with these larger scale storage plans and integrating them into their network. So it is certainly a work in progress. We're not, we haven't hit any type of critical mass by any means in terms of mass deployment of storage. And it's a real challenge on the part of the utilities to try to determine what ideally is the best mix. And again, we're going where no utilities have gone before in this state in terms of trying to figure out what the best mix of utility scale renewables is along with rooftop solar along with utility scale storage at substations, let's say power plants and also much smaller scale storage at people's homes. And how is it all going to mesh together, work properly, to create an interactive, interdependent, resilient grid that we all aspire to see? And as we've talked about, I think earlier this week with Mina, one of the examples that has kind of blown away a lot of us is Puerto Rico and the fact that that's an island that's suffered beyond serious devastation. Puerto Rico is the ghost of Christmas future. The ghost of Christmas future, yeah. And on the fact that now five plus months after Hurricane Maria, there's still 30, 40% of the population that don't have a reliable access to power or five months later. So are we in a precarious, as precarious situation? I mean, Hawaiian Electric will say, no, no, no, Ron Cox is one of the VPs. They are senior VPs at Hawaiian Electric, did a piece on the advertiser in the past couple of months saying, we're watching this very carefully and we're not as much at risk. Well, he is watching it. As Puerto Rico. He spoke in the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center meeting in Waikiki two weeks ago. We saw him. We have footage of him speaking and he cares a lot about that. I think he's like the designated person at Hawaiian Electric to care about that. And he's got some good ideas. The question really is unknowable until something happens. And something is likely to happen pretty soon because we have climate change and we have El Nino coming this summer. And we have, call it the, you know, it's kind of a random analysis of, we have not had a path of a major hurricane come through Honolulu yet. So that means the chances of one coming through Honolulu now, right? The chances are greater. Anyway, so if that happens to Honolulu, we're going to find out, you know, how well prepared we really are. Right. So this is on the Hawaiian Electric road map and another one of their VPs, Bob Eisler, is kind of heading up there as I understand it, heading up their efforts in terms of looking at battery storage and where it's going to be deployed first, how it's going to be deployed, how much is going to be deployed. So it's really a fascinating time from those of us in the trenches as solar contractors, homeowners who have yet to go solar who are looking at batteries, that are looking to deploy it as it makes sense. I mean, KIUC being the leader in the state so far in terms of deploying. And David Bissell spoke yesterday. My friend, David Bissell, you know, has really been the captain, you know, great captain of the KIUC ship. They have one PV plant that will be going in with storage in addition to the existing one with solar. So Tesla exists. That's already up there. AES is going in. Right, right. He's also building pumped hydropia. Right. Right. And he's way ahead on this whole notion of storage, however you frame it, with photovoltaic. And he's not doing wind. They had a bird environmental problem. And I guess they have people in Kauai who don't want to do that. So there's no wind on Kauai. There won't be any wind on Kauai. And, you know, you talked about the evolution of the mix, so to speak. Well, the evolution on Kauai is real simple. It's photovoltaic and storage. Although they have a certain amount of begas going on, you know, they have They're still burning begas? Yeah, they have. I'm not sure that's the right word for this. This is agricultural product.  Right. It's not begas as far as I know, because I don't think there's any commercial cane on that island left. Okay. It wouldn't be begas, but it would be agricultural material. It's biomass. Biomass. Thank you, biomass. And they have a big factory there. We saw it. We filmed it. Made an OC-16 show out of that, too. And that's really going great guns. They burn it from the heat. They have a turbine that creates power and they send the power to K... Yeah, you see, as a contractor has this, it's quite a big facility. Right. And I can't give you the numbers on how much percentage of the total, but it's part of their mix, for sure. Well, I suggest to you, though, as in Kauai, this whole thing is going to evolve into photovoltaic and storage. And we're seeing that with the recent announcement last week, with Hawaiian Electric Miko and Half Moon Ventures in Chicago, we talked about UNI and MENA on Monday, that this plant on Molokai, which needs regulatory approval, permit approval, all the logistics have to fall into place in a relatively short order, even though we're only in February 2018, excuse me, they have to get it up and operational more or less by the end of next year. So this would be... To get the tax credit. To get the tax credits, right? They're also tapping into the so-called new market tax credits with Pono Shim that's a big part of the equation. So from what I can tell, they're leveraging the tax credits to the Hilt in order to pull this off. But if they're able to do it, bring it online, it's a very big leap for Hawaiian Electric to do this. So Molokai is a small service territory, about 3,000 customers there. And it's got one power plant and one power plant only. Fossil fuel. Fossil fuel. So if you can turn that island to close to 100% renewable or certainly 90-ish percent with one solar plant and one battery, that's really a big deal. So I'm very pleased that Hawaiian Electric and Half Moon were able to come to terms on this. And since it's a power purchase agreement, it means that the risk from Hawaiian Electric's perspective, I think, is less than if they were to own the assets themselves. That's the harder slog. And Hawaiian Electric has shown over the years to be somewhat averse to actually owning utility-scale PV generation. That's exactly what David Bissell said yesterday at the Harvard Club. It's better to have the contractor own it because the contractor is expert in this sort of thing. And he's the one who installed it, so let him manage it. And you pay for his management, but it's OK because you're going to get a better product that way. Yeah. Well, and Hawaiian Electric, I believe, they have received approval or are about to get approval to issue out requests for proposals across their service territories for multi-mega-watts of renewable energy, which most likely will be third-party-owned with them, the third-parties proposing contracts of multi-year duration at a favorable rate for all the rate pairs. It'd be great if we could collectively get enough of these PPAs nailed down where the price of electricity would plateau. And ideally, ideally, without being an economist, I don't know how real this is to be able to start a downward trend. I mean, that would be truly remarkable. I don't know how likely that is. But the article talked about that. It talked about the peaking plan for a kilowatt hour. And this would be higher than the average of what they are charging people, but it was like 87 cents for a kilowatt hour during peaking by virtue of the peaking plan. And it was way less, I forget exactly what, it was in the thirties or something for the storage and battery affair. You've got to get less than that. And the question I want to put to you is we have two factors going on. One is it's the termination of these tax credits. Both of the federal tax credits are going to expire sometime. And query whether in this administration they're going to be renewed or not. The administration is not so interested in renewables and environmental issues as earlier administrations. And the second thing is we get the tariff. This administration puts a tariff on affordable tax. Those two factors work against this dream result of having PV and storage all over the country. I'm reluctant to go too far down the road in terms of forecasting. What you said is absolutely correct that when you have the hint of a trade war perhaps brewing and an increased cost of affordable take modules coming into the country, that's surely not a good thing. But at the same time the numbers that I've seen so far show the increase in affordable take modules to be rather nominal when it comes to the entire cost of the installed system. I mean it's not going to go down certainly but it's going to be more an incremental increase. The Solar Energy Industries Association or CIA for short based in Washington was forecasting a job loss of I think 24,000 if these were to be approved. This was prior to the White House decision. How hyperbolic that is, I really don't know. Clearly if you're trying to fight against something you want to play up the boogeyman nature of it but it's certainly not a positive thing. And 2017 saw in the biggest market in the country which is for solar which is California saw the number of new installs go down for the first time in years and years. Now part of that is weather related because California was socked first part of 2017 with torrential rains and go figure now that it's kind of on the flip side of that. It's not drought conditions but a lot less rain. So there's just so much to play. Well one thing is clear is that this is becoming a national issue. These questions are being raised nationally in many states, many cities. And when we come back from this break Marco I'd like to talk to you about where companies like Nexterafit where there'll be another merger or acquisition in our future somehow because of these national trends. And I'd also like to talk to you about one thing you raised earlier and that is the need to have a mix between utility scale solar and single family or single building solar and how that fits with the need to vary the power lines underground in the case of disaster. Oh wow we'll never finish. Big bucks, big bucks. We'll be right back after this break. This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. We're back with Marco Mangelsdorf here on Mina, Marco and me, son Mina. We're back with Marco Mangelsdorf here on Mina, Marco and me, son Mina. We. We. Little French never heard anybody. And we're talking about energy, of course, it's so interesting to, you know, and thank you again for being in the studio with us, Marco. My great pleasure, Jay. So some of these leftover questions, there's about a million of them. But you know, we have, we have national trends going on. I mean, you know, go back a few years ago, Hawaii was like the only one on the screen. We were, you know, a leader, and we were an icon, everybody wanted to see what we were doing. Now, a lot of places. And the article that you sent me, Wall Street Journal article, talked about next era. And next era was doing big time, big developments in solar and battery. You know, we worried about that during the approval process, people didn't think they would do that. Well, they are doing it. And they're doing it outside the state of Florida. They're doing it in other states and other cities, and they've gone national. And that seems to be, you know, it seems to be consistent with the national trend here. We're doing bigger. We're doing national with national actors. And I wonder how that affects Hawaii and whether next era or somebody else will be back. Next era still has a lingering interest here and maybe a future interest. What's going to happen? Well, as far as I'm being back, I don't have any inside information on that. I mean, both Hawaiian Electric Industries and next year I gave it the old college try and then some in an effort to have Hawaiian Electric be purchased by next era. And that failed due to a regulatory decision. And there's no doubt that the Hawaiian Electric Board gave very careful, careful, careful, one more careful, careful consideration about moving in that direction with next era energy out of Florida. And it was a, this is, it was all part of the discovery process on that docket. Yeah. And like, You followed that. You were in the docket. The Hawaii Island Energy Cooperative was a intervener on the docket, so I was reading quite a bit of that intel. And they came to the conclusion that was going to be a good move for the company, good move for the shareholders, good move for the state of Hawaii. And it was the rolling of the dice, which they believed was standing a pretty high odds of being able to, to, to win the big prize, right? And it didn't happen. And that was a tremendous amount of effort on Hawaiian Electric's part, next year's part. So the appetite that Hawaiian Electric may or may not have to roll that dice again. It was a very heavy two, but it, it took a lot for them to get to the point to roll the dice with next era, which was a bold, innovative, It was indeed. I agree. As far as utilities go, company on the mainland. Is it a vant guard move? And as you mentioned, part of that Wall Street Journal piece is that next year is doing a project in Tucson with storage that is going to be a path breaking project. So next year is living up to their, their reputation of being a more progressive utility company or, or, or utility group. As far as them getting back in the action here, I can't comment on that. As I think we've talked about kind of in passing, it was interesting to see that for the Koleen Hanabusa, for governor campaign, the two of her contributors, because it's all public knowledge, of course, Eric Gleason, who led the charge here for next era and who I got a chance to know and have a lot of respect in law for. And his boss, Jim Robbo, who's the CEO, they both contributed the maximum amount to the Koleen Hanabusa for governor campaign of 6,000 a pop. And is that some indication they're interested in getting back here? Or is it just a way of giving their friendly salute to a governor, Governor David Ike, who was demonstrably opposed to, yeah, you recall that. Yes, I do as well. So I think it's going to be my, my channeling the Hawaiian Electric Industries Board, which my, my insight into that is extremely, extremely limited. It would be rather extraordinary if they were to find another suitor, I think, who would come up with a juicier package that would stand a better chance of being able to get regulatory approval, especially in light of the approximate year and a half of that got to be being open. Oh, that was such a hassle for the next era, yeah. And they would treat it, you know, with a lot of disrespect may I add. But anyway, but there is, you would agree with me though, I mean, and this is the implication of the article, these are national trends. These companies are doing projects way outside their, you know, original geographical areas, and we're going to see consolidation may not be the right word, but we're going to see national events, national developments taking place, no? No, undoubtedly. I mean, the storage is, when energy storage is being hyped and fond over two, three years ago, I thought, oh, here's just yet another hot topic that people can get all excited about that has a lot more smoke than actual fire. Well, the smoke has been going on long enough that there is actual fire there now a couple of three years later in terms of who's in the market. Tesla based in the US with Elon Musk and then the superstar that he is. And, you know, it's great that Falcon Heavy launched and then he said prior to the launch, he said it's either going to be one heck of a launch or it's going to be heck of a firework show as in blowing up on the launch pad. So Space Man made it up and it's on its way. Actually, I heard the trajectory is that they were a little bit off and they're not going to get to Mars, but they're going to shoot past Mars into the so-called asteroid belt. So the point being is that you have major players, whether it's Tesla, LG Chem out of South Korea, Samsung out of South Korea, Sonan out of Germany, Mercedes-Benz out of Germany. And if you look at the largest battery making facilities of this type of battery in the world, according to Bloomberg, number one is the Gigafactory outside of Reno. But then there are eight or nine Gigafactory-like scale plants that are going in China and in South Korea. So where is all this product going to go? It's got to go somewhere. These people who are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop these production facilities aren't doing it because they think it's going to sit on a shelf. And further, you know, it's likely with the new technology it's likely to be cheaper or at least cheap enough to be competitive against fossil fuel. So this could be the best time we ever had. Well, let me ask you this question. You referred to it earlier. It's the mixed question between utility-scale solar, which seems so efficient, and rooftop solar for smaller residences and buildings. We're still, the jury's out on which way is best. The mix is not yet established. Hawaii will learn more about this going forward. One of the elements is, suppose we have a storm. Because the storm is not going to knock off the battery. The storm is going to knock down the poles.  And I don't know how that plays, but I wonder what your thought is about it. Well, full disclosure, my company is a Tesla energy dealer. So we have been installing, in fact, I installed one of their power walls on my very own home. And I've had a net-mitted system now for the past several years. Is it working OK for you? It's working fantastic. And I've tested it in a simulated grid outage. And it provides, I don't use a whole lot of power, but it provides power for my entire home. So it's back up for the entire home, which I think is a substantial retrofit market for companies like mine to be able to offer the 80-some-odd thousand net-energy-muted customers across the state back up battery retrofit in order to provide that resiliency and redundancy. You can't make a ROI return on investment argument because it doesn't produce power. It stores power. But you look at it from the perspective of, we're the most insured we've ever been as a species. We pay for car insurance and health insurance and life insurance and liability and pet insurance, insurance, insurance, insurance. So are we at a point now where they're going to be more and more homeowners are we thinking, does it make sense to pay an insurance policy to have the security and peace of mind of battery storage in case the grid goes down? Now, if you had asked the people in Puerto Rico last July, that they would have, no, I'm not worried about hurricanes wiping out the island for four months. So people here, they would say the same thing, right? Right, so there's nothing like an adverse weather event to get things top of mind awareness. And I brought back to the image that you've probably seen of Hurricane Aniki 26 years ago. It went in a lateral line south of the Big Island, almost straight line south of South Point, and then made, much to everybody's surprise, a sharp 90 degree right hand turn straight up and blasted the garden aisle. So when is the next one going to hit? You don't know, I don't know, we don't know. But we're in a more sensitive part of the world in terms of those type of events. So having more storage deployed strategically with a mix of utility scale solar, rooftop solar, will do nothing but increase the interdependence as well of the individuals who are companies that put storage on. And also I think over time lead to a greater resiliency and redundancy of the grid to be able to stay on during adverse events. But we're truly, Jay, we're truly going where no utilities have gone before on this kind of scale. So you gotta take our hats off to folks like David Bissell and Kei UC and the folks at Hawaiian Electric that have a bunch of smart people who are really dedicated. And we all want the same thing, more renewables, get to 100% in a cost effective way sooner rather than later, have us be less dependent on these long supply lines of oil and other fossil fuels coming from great resources. And more security. More security, right, right. So to have security, it seems to me that the underscore here is to have security you really need to have both. You know, your house for example, just take it as an example. It will go indefinitely off the grid. Indefinitely, yes. And most houses don't have that. You gotta have both the PV and the battery. And I think, you know, people don't understand that if you took a survey right now, my people say I'm fine the way it is, I'm not gonna change anything, including the people who are on the grid but have PV on their roof without a battery. And after El Nino, after whatever happens this summer or the summer after that, maybe that's gonna change. In the end, I suggest to you that we will have both. Why? It could have cost more, but we will have both because of security. Right. And the price of batteries will go down. There's no doubt about that. I think it's gonna be more gradual rather than off the cliff, decrease in prices. And, you know, typical adoption curve is you get the first adopters who are willing to be the first ones out there and then they talk to their neighbors and they talk to their family and they're pleased with being able to have that. Plus, I gotta say that the app that Tesla came up with, which I'm not big on apps, not at all. The cell phone app. It's on your cell phone, you can see as long as you have internet access, wherever you happen to be on the world, you can see how your system is operating. And for a wonk techie guy like me to be able to see what my solar produced yesterday, what my battery do, how much did it offset my utility usage? I mean, it's really way cool. So, I think there's that part of us that are the consumer, which some don't give a darn about that kind of stuff. But a lot of people, the ones that I've come across so far think it's really cool. So, and that's, you know, got a hand at Elon Musk that he has, of course, no shortage of detractors, but he's onto something. He's onto some really cool things, some really big things. And as I shared with my students when I taught UC Santa Cruz last year, companies like Tesla, they're not selling near term, short term profitability. He is selling hope for the future. Vision. And that's kinda short in supply sometimes. And that points out one bottom line point that I think we have to always keep in our minds, that technology is getting more disruptive. There'll be bigger, better technology. People can copy that app, or at least the functionality of it. There'll be another app, there'll be another idea who knows with artificial intelligence. So this is all gonna get better, more efficient, and hopefully cheaper. Thank you so much, Marco. We're rocking in the free world. You know, you're great on the phone, you're even better in person. Thank you. Thank you. I thank you for that. I'll be spinning, spinning, sending all powerful positive messages for all sentient beings. I feel it. On your dash. I feel it. Whoa!


And we are here with Yvonne Schindler who has created this amazing Connect 4 piece. Oh my goodness. There's buttons you press on the bottom that makes the Connect 4 work and we've also got different animations. Start again.  That's fun. And does it automatically do something when you win? Yes. That's great. What's good? Let's make one win. Excellent. That's really well made. And so tell me about the construction. You made this yourself? Yes. How did you do it? Well, I made it all myself.  All the little mandalas I draw on an iPad and then just put in the blow forge. Then each, there are seven panels, eight foot high, made out of wood. Yeah, I cut little windows in it. And so the good thing is I can take them apart, so it's easy to transport, I only need like a cargo van, nothing, nothing's too crazy. Also I used the big arcade buttons that are in a hood, buttons, and it's also got all new pixels in here, edge lip, nine pixels on each panel, and they're all connected per panel. Yeah, what else? There's an Arduino Mega in the middle that is just running all the code. Well, it's really wonderful. Took about four months to make. Where can we find out more? Do you have a website? Yes, I have a website, evanschintla.com. All right, nice to meet you on Instagram. I'm also an Instagram fan. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. This is just beautiful. Thank you. Very inspiring. Thank you. Bye. Bye.


I think it's good for us to actually go through the Criss Hughes Up Ad, because I think it brings up so many fascinating issues about how people think about this. And I'm probably not going to hit on all of them. I'm sure if I spend another few hours with the essay, it could come up with another 15 angles to talk about because it is rich in the conventional way, both Democrats and Republicans, both the left and the right, look at the world. And Criss Hughes clearly comes at it from the left. But, you know, not clearly, but there's some clear hints that he comes at it from the left. But it's a way of thinking that unites all those who think about economics, think about capitalism, things about markets, think about government from a collectivistic framework. And that, of course, is something that is common, both on left and on the right, and probably the biggest challenge we face today. Alright, so as I said, Criss Hughes is the co-founder of Facebook. He's known Mark Zuckerberg from the Harvard days. I guess they were roommates. They shared a house in Silicon Valley when they first moved to Silicon Valley and started the company. He was there when all the major decisions in the early part of Facebook were made. And one of the points Criss wants to make early on is that he likes Mark Zuckerberg. This isn't personal. He doesn't say that, but he implies that. But he makes a deeper point. He's trying to make a deeper point, and he's trying to make the point of, you know, Mark is human. And here he sounds like a conservative, I have to say. Mark is human. And humans we know are flawed. Humans we know are flawed. And we should be very careful. We should be very careful of giving immense, what he said it calls, unchecked power to flawed human beings. It's interesting though, and this is true both on the left and on the right because both, but particularly on the left. On the left they talk about humans are flawed and therefore we need massive government in order to check the power of these flawed individuals. And they never consider the idea that the people in power, government power are flawed as well, that they're also human by this logic. Of course, conservatives usually use the humans are flawed argument to defend capitalism. What they say is, yes, humans are flawed. We agree with you humans are flawed. And therefore what we don't want to give politicians too much power. We want to disperse power.  And, you know, Iron Man was brutal in her critique of this argument for capitalism and argument for from depravity. You know, Hayek makes this argument and almost all conservatives make this argument. It's our inability to reason now inability to be rational lack of information or lack of knowledge that makes capitalism necessary, which is which is the opposite of Iron Man's view, which is it's the fact that we can reason it's a fact that we're rational. It's the fact that we can be good. It's the fact that we are able that we are competent that makes capitalism necessary. So, you know, right from the beginning that comes out of this. So, you know, Mark's Mark Zuckerberg, he's human. And therefore he is he is flawed. And therefore we don't want to give him unchecked power.  It fuels all the articles on the Facebook issue. No matter where people come down in this, it ultimately is is kind of in the background. And it's it's it's a crucial important issue that you have to think about. And that is that they equivocate all the articles equivocate between two kinds of power. They see no difference. And this is this the left is always done and the right is doing this constantly. The two types of power, political power and economic power. The idea is they're both unchecked power. They're both power. They're the same. And indeed, the way to cure one is to use the other the way to cure excess economic powers to use political power. Now, there is. However, a fundamental and this is to a large extent. To a large extent. To a large extent. Well, this is one of the fundamental problems in all these arguments, one of the fundamental argument problems in all the arguments, not the, but one of them is that they can differentiate between economic power and political power. And they don't see the difference. They don't see the fundamental difference between what constitutes political power and what constitutes economic power. And that is the difference between economic power and political power. Well, the fundamental is that political power is not does not rely on voluntary association. It relies on coercion and force. Government is force. Government power is the force to curse. It is the power to curse. It is the power of the gun. It is the power to force you to do things you don't want to do. It's not about voluntary exchange. It's not about voluntary association. It's not about trade. There is nothing voluntary about government actions. Government actions are coercive by their essential characteristic is coercion. You pass a law and people don't follow it. They're in violation of the law, which means they have to go to jail, pay a fine. Force is inflicted on them. The essence of government is force. The essence of economic power is voluntary trade, voluntary association. You do not have to work for any particular company. You do not have to buy any particular products. And you do not, and I know this is a shock, many of you, particularly those of you watching this on Facebook. You do not have to be on Facebook. You don't. Really. You can get off if you choose to. And it's not like you have to have an alternative. No.  And some would argue even preferable. Without Facebook in your life. Facebook is not a requirement of human survival. But even those things that require human survival require your energy and effort and require your voluntary association, your voluntary trade with other people, potentially. But Facebook is something you voluntarily engage in. So economic power is based on voluntary association of voluntary trade, voluntary participation. Either party can walk away. And I mean either party because that also means, because it's voluntary, that Facebook can decide that they don't want to associate with you.  So Facebook has the right to discriminate in terms of who it associates with, who can use its platform and who can't. And you have the ability, right, to not be on Facebook. And that's the essence of economic power is even if you grow very powerful from the economic perspective, have a lot of money, have a lot of market share. You still cannot force people to use you. You still cannot force people to interact with you. You still cannot force people to be employed by you or to provide you with services. The whole basis of a capitalist economy, a free economy, is the idea of voluntary exchange. And even in a semi-free world in which we live, the essential is voluntary exchange. Now, the government restrains that and limits that unfortunately through the use of coercion, through the use of political power, through the use of force. For example, Facebook can't discriminate in certain cases. It can discriminate ideologically. It can discriminate, for example, based on color of skin or sex or orientation or whatever, right, which it should have a right to do. But still the scope of voluntary choice and voluntary interaction is still quite substantial. We still live in a society that is far from fully, and I don't know what percentage is. But still is powered by voluntary association. The marketplace is still powered within the constraints of bad laws, within the constraints of the curse of power of government. Within those constraints, we still voluntary associate. And none of these people differentiate between that. To them, they are the same. And of course, this goes back to the Sherman Act. It goes back to anti-trust laws. It goes back to all of the legal precedent, the coercion of government, that it cannot differentiate. It does not differentiate between those two forms of power, and it assumes they are the same. It assumes that because you have 80% of a market or 90% of a market, even 99% of the market, you are somehow forcing people to use your product. Forcing in the sense of cursing. And that's just not true. It's just not true. Now, there is an argument to be made that in a crony economy, there is a mingling of economic and political power. And indeed, we're going to get to that. Facebook's call on regulators to regulate it is exactly that, is giving Facebook through government political power. Because that regulation is probably going to restrict competition. It's probably going to entrench Facebook into the position that it has. And when that happens, one must fight against it. So one must always fight against regulation, against government expansion, against government control, against more and more and more power in the hands of those who wield a gun, in the hands of government. Wielding a gun should only be tolerated, approved of, if it's done in self-defense. Not if it's done in order to protect some companies against competition. All right, let's see. So let's go back to Chris Hughes' argument. And he's making an argument that Mark is all-powerful. I mean, part of the article is very much to put it all in Mark Zuckerberg's lap, if you will. This is not a company that is even run by the board of directors, he argues, because Mark Zuckerberg controls 60% of the voting shares. So the board actually doesn't really oversee the company because the shareholders can't vote against Mark. Mark also doesn't just own Facebook, doesn't just own Facebook. He owns Instagram and WhatsApp, which involves billions of people every single day using now. And only Mark gets to decide how to configure Facebook's algorithms, although of course he doesn't, to determine what people see in their news feeds, what the private setting they can use and which messages actually get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violence and incendiary speech from the merrily offensive. And he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking, or copying it. So it's interesting, we've gone here from demonizing just the corporation as all-powerful, having control of all these things. To now focusing on the CEO, on the owner, and driving it, Mark Zuckerberg is too powerful. It's Mark that we need to control. Now interestingly, he describes kind of Mark's character a little bit, which is fascinating, because again he has this, I don't know, almost love-hate relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, because you can tell he greatly admires Mark, and yet he thinks he doesn't say this, but he implies it that Mark has become some kind of innocent monster of his own making. He says, Mark is single-mindedly focused on growing the company, on becoming the best, on becoming, in a sense, competing away, beating the competition. Beating the competition no matter what it takes. No, but within the law, without violating anybody's rights. So he talks about, you know, that Mark's focus on growth has led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. You know, not thinking about things like, again, Chris Hughes, right, how it would change the culture, influence election, or empower nationalist leaders. That's where you get a sense of ways coming from politically. Suddenly there's an empowering nationalist leaders. What about socialist leaders? Maybe he could empower socialist leaders. I mean, now that he would never, I guess, object to. So, you know, and he talks about Mark's, you know, single-minded focus on being the best and winning the competition and, you know, being, you know, dominating the field, right, dominating the field. And then, of course, he goes into this whole analysis of, this is not what America's about. He writes, America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person because we're all fallible. This is the conservative, at some extent, founder's argument. But the founders had a deep understanding of individual rights. So the idea of lack of concentration of power had more to do with rights and checks and balances. And the idea of what it meant to protect then it just meant in terms of fallibility. But, you know, he and many conservatives turned this idea of fallibility into the central argument. There's no issue of protection of rights or anything like that. So he talks about, you know, we've created a system of checks and balances in order to exactly protect this. And again, notice, no differentiation between political power and economic power. Political power and economic power are the same. So if we've done this in the realm of politics, if we've created checks and balances in the realm of politics, then we must create checks and balances in the realm of economic power. It is just unacceptable to give corporate actors private individuals the kind of economic power that we've supposedly, you know, not allowed our politicians to have. Although it's kind of, it's really interesting because of course in the end he's got solutions for what should be done about Facebook. And his solutions give a lot of power to politicians, a lot of power to the politicians. He quotes John Sherman, author of the Sherman Act. And so just to show you that these attitudes are not new. They didn't come about yesterday. They didn't come about because of Facebook.  John Sherman was a Republican congressman, Ohio Republican. I think it was a, it wasn't a congressman. He was a senator. So here's the quote from Sherman. If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we will not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. No difference, no difference between political power and economic power. No difference, but what is cursed, what is forced and between what is voluntarily exchanged, what is voluntarily engaged in, what is a product of voluntary association and trade. And of course he gives the example of, you know, and we did this. We, you know, we broke up monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T, never mentioning all the protections AT&T got before they were broken up. And of course, not that I supported the breakup of AT&T. I'm just saying AT&T would have never existed if not for the support as a kind of monopoly without government support beforehand. And of course never mentioning that by the time the Justice Department actually broke up Standard Oil, it had less than 30% of the oil of funding capacity in the U.S. And, you know, antitrust was irrelevant to that. Except impediments. But if we allow the oil companies to have the power, which you say has come to them, because we need the oil, it's a question of supply and demand. So if we approach this laissez-faire, as I think you would like us to, free of government intervention, free of all the force and the regulation and the controls which you abhor. Now we've got Mr. Gigantic Oil Baron saying $2.50 a gallon. Now here's what happens. The blue-collar guy who's trying to make a living and feed his kids can't buy gas for his truck, can't possibly survive in the free marketplace, and suddenly he's on welfare and he's got to go for a handout, another feature of government that you abhor. You can't have it both ways. But all this is economic fallacies. To begin with, nobody in a free society, now we're talking about the free market in which the government doesn't interfere, nobody can become a monopolist. All monopolies are created by a special privilege for government. It's only by an act of government that you can keep competitors out of your field. Therefore you couldn't become that kind of monopoly. The power you hold as an industrialist is not the power to use force. It's the power of producing something of value. That people want. And it's the people who literally control you because every purchase is a vote in the favor of some businessman and in a way against others. It's the public who decides what they want to buy and what they pass up. If, using your examples, you became this powerful tycoon economically, but you cannot force anybody to deal with you, and you cannot force competitors out of your field, then every smaller man would be in that field because you would have established a price way above the market. You might last months, if that. So in other words, if I tried to be Mr. Big and charge outrageously high prices for gasoline, I would go broke in your view because in your, leave them alone and let competition handle an approach to civilization. Somebody with a smarter, with a better mousetrap, pardon my mixed metaphor. No, that's a very good one. All right. Would come along and undercut me. That's right. Sell at a cheaper price. But it isn't just my view. You know what I'll do? I'll buy him up the minute I see this bird. I'll buy him. I'll own him on Tuesday. And where will you get your money when you're not allowed? I'm already holding them up for $2.50 a gallon. But they're not paying you. You say they're all going out of business. They've got to get to work. We're married to a petroleum civilization. This has been done, you know. It isn't incidentally just my view. That is history. There are people who have tried to corner the market repeatedly, and the result was that they went broke.


The prevailing security challenges of the country may have fed the forthcoming general elections in 2023 negatively So says the former chairman of INAIC that professor at Tahiro Jega Professor Jega who served as INAIC chairman during the 2011 and 2015 general elections Was speaking in Ibadan on the U.S. State Capitol where he delivered Electro at the fourth senator at Bilaji Mobile Roundtable. Take a listen What is most important is to very carefully define the role that each Security agency can play and to also ensure that they play it impartially Because the tendency that some of them had in the past Was to think that their role is to protect a regime or a government rather than to ensure protection of national security So if we can get security leaders of security agencies to know that their job is to ensure Peaceful conduct of election Hello, hope you enjoyed the news Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button So you get notified about fresh news updates


So one thing that I've really had to do is I've had to remember, somebody explained it to me very, very well once, that whenever I ask for help, it's giving me the opportunity to grow in that particular realm, but it's also giving other people the opportunity to grow their skill set. And so I had somebody tell me once quit taking away people's opportunity to learn. And obviously we want to be kind, right? Like I don't want to just put everything on my team and say, okay, you guys do it and delegate literally everything. So it's being really intentional. And so one other thing that's helped me is obviously, we all work in nonprofits, we're very mission driven. And that mission is something that really helps me figure out, okay, if I want to do X, Y and Z, if X, Y and Z needs to be done, is it for the betterment of our organization? Or am I just being a little too proud or I don't want to share something or just frustrated? I'll just do it myself, you know, and that kind of thing. So those are the two things that have really helped me. And honestly, there are times when I sit at my desk and I literally tell myself, don't take away their opportunity to learn. Is this helping the organization and


What we've got up into this point is what is phenomenal.  You've worked hard. We are all extremely proud of you, okay? And you will look back on this as a pivotal moment in your life where you accomplish something. Our reputation bodes well right now. The battalion commander was like, I'm pumped about Grizzly and about what you guys are gonna do, okay? So when I tell you that this photo will mean something to you, I promise you it will. Maybe today it won't, but five, 10, 15 years from now, it'll be the best day of photo hanging on your wall. Now we're not done yet. We gotta finish strong. We gotta finish stronger than we started. We've done good. We've done great. But now we're gonna take it to the next level.


So let's actually have a look at an output. So here is the IR spectra for butane to own or to butanone You can see firstly the broad tongue that we would expect Occuring so here is the again the output from the datasheet and When you look at the output from the datasheet the OH groups are up in the 3 to 0 0 mark But so are the carbon hydrogen bonds and this is the problem is when you see a value around here Are you looking at carbon hydrogen bonds or are you looking at the hydroxyl group bonds? And that's why we need to remember that if it's a hydroxyl group The the output is much broader not the spike. So the fact that we have no tongue Means we do not have the OH groups So that's definitely out and that's kind of good because Butan to own would not have it what butan to own does have is a double bonded oxygen to a carbon So if we were to draw that but means for So I'll put my four carbons in to is where the functional group is and the unknown bit means It's a double bonded oxygen There's no other parts to this name so I can just assume that everything else will be Hydrogen so now that we've drawn this molecule. Let's see if our Infrared display actually helps us to identify all of these things So we've already said that this region around the 3000 mark is our carbon hydrogen bond and we certainly have plenty of those we've got this really Nice peak down at around 1718 and what you can notice is that that peak around 17 1718 falls beautifully into the range for our carbon double bonded oxygen We definitely have one of those so we have one of those we've identified one of these We've got this whole mess in this little region here. I have to say sometimes this can be a little bit tricky for you to Interpret for example, we've got a a carbon-carbon bonds We know that there are definitely carbon-carbon bonds and they occur between 750 and 1100 and there's a few of those in there Also in this region we would sometimes find carbon-carbon double bonds That's really sitting in the 16 20 to 16 80 region. So that's really more up Here and you can see there's really not much going on up here, but what about the carbon oxygen bonds between a thousand and 1300 sort of hard to detect what's going on here So again as we've talked about previously there can be some Ambiguities that you're looking at when you start to analyze these different types of spectra Sometimes because the region's overlap you need more than one type of spectra in order to pull all of these together So I think what we probably need to do is to have one final Video in this series, which looks at all of this spectra together and how we interpret them In order to build a picture of exactly what molecule we have IR are a bit of fun and usually they have a nice output that gives us some nice clear regions and obviously what you want to do is look at a range of different compounds in order to try and get a sense of How each of the spectra differs for different sets of compounds and that's something that we will have to do A little bit more of during class time, but thanks for watching