I am Laura Born-Friend here, some important information, right? The deputy director of the Early Education Initiative here at New America. And just to echo Lisa's comments at the beginning of the event, we're so pleased to be hosting this event today to discuss these really important findings. And that's what this panel is going to help us do. So immediately to my right is Miriam Calderon. She is a senior partner at the School Readiness Consulting. To her right is Megan Gunner, the director of the Institute of Child Development and Regents Professor at Distinguished McKnight University. To her right is Peter Magione, co-director of the Center for Child and Family Studies at WestEd. And immediately to his right is Angie Robertson. She is the project coordinator of the Education Quality Improvement and Professional Development for Early Care and Education. And you can learn much more about each of our panelists in your program for today. We have such short time to really get into the meat of the discussion, so I'll direct you to read much more about their credentials and all about them there. And we are really thrilled to have such an expert and esteemed panel joining us today.  And so I'm curious, you know, after listening to the presentation and after, you know, reading through the report, what really sticks out for each of you? We can just, you know, whoever wants to jump in first. We can go in order. Sounds good. Well, first I just want to start by, you know, thanking New America and the authors for including me in this discussion. It's really awesome to be here and I see so many faces in the room and folks that have dedicated their careers to working on this issue, so I kind of wish we could all sit in a circle on the rug and, you know, really talk about this, because I know there's so many important perspectives in the room. And again, congratulations. I think first the report for me brought out how important the transparency is around these findings and the real hope that this creates a lot more dialogue outside of this room about what we learned. So two points and then a sort of that immediately jumped out at me. One is, you know, we know that a significant share of the early childhood workforce is comprised of women of color, immigrant women, and this is often something very important that we talk about in our field as an asset and the strength and this diversity as something that is certainly critical for ensuring that we have, you know, a high quality workforce to be able to instruct a growing, an increasingly diverse child population. That said, I'm very saddened to learn that black and Latina child care workers are most likely to be enrolled in public benefits programs. And I think that, you know, the recognition for me that Americans really work on the backs of women of color and immigrant women and that for these women work doesn't pay off is something that, aside from, you know, the efforts that we need to do to address all of these issues, I think I just want to raise sort of the equity lens for me as well around what the implications of continuing to allow strategies that disproportionately affect women of color that are working and trying to provide for their families is problematic. The other sort of point that jumped out at me was the, something that I think the study of 25 years ago sort of warned about which was putting increasing expectations for the workforce on a shaky foundation. And so when I think about where we are in this field and some of the things that I've observed we're increasingly adopting, I think structures that are most common in the K-12 system about evaluating teachers, about defining what, unpacking what quality instruction looks like and what quality teaching strategies look like, developing workforce competencies, building professional development systems. And, you know, and we're doing that similar to K-12 without the foundation that we know we have in K-12 around, you know, entry minimal qualifications for entry level benefits and compensation. And so I think, again, the expectation, I mean the caution around these kind of expectations without a strong foundation. I'm also very honored to be invited to be here today. I am operating a bit out of my comfort zone and I think I was supposed to. Thank you, Deborah, my dear friend. Because most of my work is at the intersection of developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience. I'm not the neuroscientist, but I work at that intersection. So you will hear most of my comments linked back to what we are discovering about the importance of experience for brain development in the early years of life. So with that, a little bit as a context, the thing that struck me, and I think you've done beautifully in this report and you did 25 years ago, though I didn't read it 25 years ago, is to tie the quality of experiences that children have in daycare to how we are paying the people who are serving as their teachers. And to me, in the context of what we have now learned about brain development, how much the achievement gap in the size of children's brains emerges over that first three to five years of life. How closely tied that is to the experiences children have. By transitive inference, we know that is related to the quality of experience they're having, which we now know is related to what we're paying. So remove that. We've got the quality of children's brain development is associated with what we pay to people who are working with those children. Most of our kids spend most of their waking hours in childcare. So childcare is the context of the developing brain. If we are unwilling to pay them more, lots more, than what we pay for people who work in doggy daycare, then by extension, it means that we value the development of our puppy's brains as much or more so than we value the development of the brains of the children who will be the people to compete and keep our country sustainable. This is insane. So that's what struck me. It means our country is going to the dogs, right? Peter? I also am honored to be here and want to thank New America Foundation and the authors, and it's really such an important piece of work. So many things struck me. One is, I firmly believe in a birth to five, even a birth to eight framework for understanding early development. And my work has been concentrated on infants and toddlers' birth to three professional development. And you know that there's a difference between what pre-K teachers are being paid and kindergarten teachers and infant-toddler childcare workers, or I would say infant-toddler teachers or care teachers, and to see the difference in this report is startling. And to know work like Megan's, which shows the effects of stress, and we know the effect of stress on the people who are doing that work, and to know what they need to be able to provide. They need to be sensitive, responsive, focused, attentive, alert, really willing to give of themselves to the children, but to be preoccupied, to be distracted by the kinds of stresses in life that they're facing. It just isn't fair to our children. It isn't fair to the families. And most of all, it's not fair to those teachers. And so that's striking. I think the other thing that's striking is as a profession, and I've worked with various states and with the federal government around competencies, what should teachers know, early childhood teachers know and be able to do, we have a very tall order. And when we bring together the stakeholders from around this country, we recognize it's about health and safety, it's about managing groups, it's about being responsive to each child, being able to individualize for each child and document what's happening, understanding atypical development well enough so that you can partner with early interventionists and provide the kind of services that those children need, all dual language learners, all of that has to happen. And yet we're expecting people whom we're not willing to even pay a living wage to be able to take on that education and do it well with passion and care. And I just don't think it's a realistic expectation. And we've been trying to live on this basis for too long, and we can't go like this. It doesn't work. When we do professional development and come back six months later to evaluate it in a center, half the teachers are gone. So what's the effect of your professional development? Thank you. Thanks. Angie. I think what I would add to it is being a teacher, I remember going to college, I wasn't teaching 25 years ago, but I started school 20 years ago. But even then deciding to be a teacher and start out in elementary education and quickly moved to early childhood education because that's where my heart was. And I'm thankful that I have a mom that let me choose to be in education. But that being said, what's striking to me about this report is myself as a toddler teacher, I chose to be a toddler teacher. I had the same education as someone who could teach in public school pre-K and head start, but made the choice to be an infant toddler teacher and made substantially less than my counterparts. And so I think what's striking to me about this report is that we as a field have increased our education, but the salaries have not increased. I think the other thing that is striking to me every day as I go into child care programs is we are teaching the future engineers, the future politicians, the future doctors and lawyers, all those skills they need, the negotiating skills, how to work together, the order of things, organizations, those kinds of things. We're teaching all those things. And that's very important and very critical for us to do for those children, but we aren't receiving what we need for ourselves. So those are the things that stood out for me. Thank you. Megan, we know that the research tells us that stress and especially toxic stress is so damaging on children, but also the teachers, can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure. How long do I have? Quickly. Preschool teachers, people who work with young children, have to be fantastic at executive functions, right? They are constantly, it's a very analytic situation. If you're going to do this really well, and I want to argue that we can no longer tolerate good enough brain development. If we are going to compete with all the countries around the world that are providing excellent early experiences for the kids in this global marketplace, we have to have better than excellent brain development, which requires better than excellent teachers. So it requires this capacity to analyze what's happening in the moment, figure out what concept the child could be learning. Which physics concept should I be teaching here? Which numerical concept is this appropriate for? What language arts can I do in the moment dynamically? That really takes analytic skills, executive functions, ordering and sequences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and knowing a lot of information. That's your prefrontal cortex on steroids, guys. Not on steroids actually, that would hurt it. But you really have to have a highly developed and well functioning set of executive function circuits in the prefrontal cortex. Stress targets the prefrontal cortex. As any of us know who have been under feeling anxious, worried and stressed, we cannot what? Think straight. That is our executive functions have been taken offline so we can act immediately and impulsively and probably inappropriately to those children in our care or whatever. So the reason stress is so bad in these contexts is it unhooks the very capacities that we need for teachers to have to be the most effective and develop the most powerful brains that our country is going to need. Thank you. And so I want to go back. We know that the original childcare staffing study really first shined the light on poverty wages for early childhood teachers. We've heard about the minimal progress. Improving those wages, we've heard even more about the effects of toxic stress. We know that young children really need the nurturing adult child attachments and interactions to really get the best start in life. So let's talk about what's really at stake. Why can't we wait another 25 years for that next title that we want for that next report? What's really at stake? Why do we need to get this done sooner? Well, I think what's at stake is the development and learning of the next generation of children. And also what's at stake is the quality of life of the people who are providing the education and care to those children. And I think we have a dual responsibility there. We can't leave out one without the other. I mean, we can't get one without the other. And I think this report makes that very clear. I think the report 25 years ago made it very clear. And I really have dedicated myself to the professional development side, but always I have this nagging feeling unless somehow we work out the pay side of this professional development. We can be very aspirational about it, but that's all we're going to be is aspirational. And so I think what we're talking about is are we equipping our children to do well in life, to be successful. And if we're talking about school readiness, we have to have people who can give full attention to supporting that process. Maryam? So we are a majority minority nation. So I would argue that all of our futures are at stake. I mean, we have a persistent achievement gap in this country as we all know. And I would argue that the reform strategy has yet to figure out really what to do about it or yet to address. And I think that we all in the room know that early childhood development is the strategy around the achievement gap even if some of our K-12 colleagues haven't really wrapped their heads around that yet. And so I really believe that that's why we can't wait. And I think the more that we see attention to this in the coming years particularly as we have next generation assessments and we continue to raise the bar in terms of our expectations and our aspirations around achievement, you know, that gap is going to continue to create a sense of urgency around this issue. Thanks. So to continue to beat the dead horse. I think what is at risk here or what's at stake here is whether 25 years from now we will be the leading country in the world or will be a has-been country. We are seeing rising numbers of children. Well, we have been on a slippery slope at all levels of thinking of education as a private good, not a public necessity which translated means that brain development is a private good, not a public necessity which means that over the course of the next 25 years if we keep on this slope we are going to have only a limited number of really powerful brains in this country to keep us at the forefront, to be able to keep peat in the kind of global markets that we're facing. Income inequality will get worse and worse and worse and as we're hearing this will threaten the stability of this nation. I think our nation is at stake with this. Thanks, Angie. I think what I would add is for children what's at stake is the turnover issue. Having teachers leave their classroom to go work at another child care program to make a nickel more or a dime more, that breaks a relationship and for young children they need those strong relationships so they can be comfortable to develop all those things that are really important for them to continue on in life. So I think the turnover is a huge issue and that's what's at stake. The other thing I think is the debt that the child care workforce takes on in having these low wages as child care teachers, we pay for rent with credit cards and car payments with credit cards and so the debt that we have is just unsurmountable. So I think those two things are really important and are really what's at stake for us. So Peter, I know you mentioned that the first report had similar findings and made a strong case that change needed to happen then and here we are 25 years later with looking much the same so why do you and others on the panel feel free to jump in? Why don't you think we've seen any progress? Why don't we have a premium on education? I think it's a combination of factors. I think one is the younger the child, the more we have in mind that we can just let children play and they'll be fine and the more we have in mind that it's just babysitting and it's not real work and so you shouldn't have to pay a lot for it but it isn't just babysitting and I think that's the point that we have to help people understand in our society. You don't have a babysitter come for 40 or 50 hours a week during the prime time that your child's brain, your baby's brain is developing to take care of that child. A babysitter is just an occasional person who fills in. You're going to do the main job of supporting that child's development. Also we're talking about group care, children and groups and children and groups creates a whole different dynamic for early development and care. We have to organize our environments. We have to create environments that will invite different children who are at different stages of development to engage in challenging learning. We have to be knowledgeable about development so we can adjust to each child on the fly. We need to be able to help those children learn to cooperate together and function as a group and manage the care of each individual within the context of the group. All of that, as already has been said, is really a fine-grained kind of work that takes this very sophisticated executive functioning and what we haven't, I think, succeeded in doing as a field, we've been able to define what's needed professionally but we haven't been able to help our society to see that and I think that's the work we have to do because if you could see it, if everyone could see it, I think then we would start to get that change. Other thoughts? Yeah, keep talking. I think it's the siloed funding in our field. When I think about looking at the report, when I think about the different programs and the way the salaries and the wages, the wage picture played out, it was pre-K, likely more resourced than Head Start, in terms of highly resourced or sort of interchangeable, interchangeable, and then childcare. I think the recommendations speak to this in terms of required salary guidelines and I want to underscore that. I'll give a DC District of Columbia anecdote from work I've done there. In this wonderful city, all three and four-year-olds have robust access to very well resourced pre-K. In the public school system, where I worked, where Head Start and pre-K in the vast majority of classrooms are one and the same, I always used to like to think about the fact that we had some of the highest paid Head Start teachers in the nation. That structure was about, we brought in Head Start funding and we had pre-K funding, but that was because we were operating in a system, which I think the policy section speaks about with required salary structures tied to different levels of qualifications, compensation, you know, education qualifications and licensures. Literally some of, you know, the highest Head Start paid teachers in the country, comparable to all other grade levels. More recently, we have started to work on a strategy around infinite toddler care, right? Because what we all know happens when the vast majority of three and four-year-olds go into public pre-K and the private schools is we destabilize the business model and the cost model for community-based child care, right? And literally here in the district, we're seeing mostly infants and toddlers, you know, in community-based child care and very few three and four-year-olds in community-based child care. We started with a 15% reimbursement rate increase for infinite toddler quality. No idea if it had any impact on wages. No ability to really track that. No way to kind of require that. So we put it out there. 15% reimbursement rate increase for infinite toddler child care providers and subsidy. And we don't know if it moved the needle. Then when the early Head Start child care partnership opportunity came along, we said, okay, well, we've got some funding here, quality improvement. We're going to build in salary bonuses. This is critical, particularly if we want to keep to Angie's point, talented people working with our infants and toddlers in a city where you can go make a lot more money, you know, working with three and four-year-olds and you're still working in the field of early childhood. So we started to collect some data from our child care partners. And, you know, in terms of wages, and we had, you know, benchmarked, I'm looking at Rachel as my partner in crime in this.  And we get, the data that we get back is it's all over the place, right? Some programs similarly resourced are doing fairly well and right by their teachers, and some are not. So what do we do? We're still struggling with that, but then it becomes very easy to default into this, well, let's take more big picture. Maybe we can put some more money into workforce development strategies. We can put it into scholarships. We can, I mean, I think the point is it's just hard to figure out. Even when you have the opportunity and you have some resources, so I feel like this real lack of progress is really part and parcel to this lack of a bigger birth to five financing strategy. One that gets outside of all of the existing programs and says, who's going to pay for what? What's the federal government going to pay for? What are states going to pay for? What are parents going to pay for? It's the same, and that's where we build in these kinds of salary structures and compensation and requirements around the skills of our workforce. I was going to chime in now because I agree with both of what you all said. I think that our workforce, the places in which we work is so varied. You have Head Start. You have for-profit healthcare. You have not-for-profit healthcare. You have family child care homes. You have all these ways in which care happens, and so when we section that off and we do great stuff for early Head Start and Head Start, then that leaves out for-profit and not for-profit, and so I think we've got to figure out a way to make that go across the board. The other thing I would say to Peter's point is years ago in the Worthy Ways campaign, we had where we had folks would come do job shadowing, and what that meant is people who typically work with young children would come and spend two hours working with us, and then we would give them a paycheck for what they would earn in childcare, and there was nothing like seeing, you know, men with ties on trying to have group time or change diapers or things like that, and then we give them $11 for their work, and then that made it really real for them to really understand what we're doing and how important and complex it is and the low wages that we receive. Until we make progress in making it more known how hard this work really is, and until we get to a point of not sectioning it off, I think we're not going to make much progress. Megan? Yeah. Jack Schoenckopf and Deborah Phillips got me to work on neurons to neighborhoods a long time ago and followed that up Jack did with the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child. What Jack realized was that we weren't getting there much very far on converting what we know into what we do for children, and this is what we're talking 25 years of converting it into what we pay folks because we weren't taking on board the science of communication and realizing that we really needed to figure out the gap between what we know about what it takes to be a fabulous preschool teacher to what the public thinks and find the metaphors the language that will bridge that gap because we're going to have to change the public's mind. It is not about just loving babies. I think if you went on the stream they need to love babies well that doesn't take much education that doesn't help. We need to get them understanding that it is really takes a mind that if they weren't doing child care could probably be a physicist because of the degree of analytics that they require to do it really well. I think we need to bring the communications experts way on board and work on helping them people to understand smart play or what it takes to do guided play because otherwise the context just looks like you're playing with babies and we're never going to get there. And so still the word that pops into people's heads is babysitters one as you all have just described it's so much more. So I'd like to turn to a more positive question. What gives you all hope? Can you think of any promising programs or policies that you've seen that really are good examples positive examples? There are a lot of them. The room goes silent. I don't know of policies per se but what I do know is a couple weeks ago we had a meeting with child care folks because we were looking at compensation in our county and so we wanted to really ask them what are the parts that are important in looking at that and so one of the things I talked about was the education level making sure that there is recognition for their education levels and that they are seeking education. Looking at the turnover rate making sure that child care teachers are staying in the same classrooms and working with the same children because we know that's important for that consistency and also to have somewhat of a salary schedule so that you know if I have a four-year degree regardless of where I choose to go work this is what I'm going to make. No different than what they have in the public schools where the parts and pieces that were really important to the teachers that we talked with the other thing that was really important was that the teachers, the folks who are working with the young children be involved in what gets decided. That was very clear. To do that though of course it means there's got to be some education on both ends but it was very clear that folks want to be involved. I think the other thing that gives me hope is I work at a university and so every year we have graduates that choose to still work in early childhood and so that gives me hope that there are folks that want to continue to do this and for those folks I tell them just like my mentors told me know that this is going to be your salary and know that it is not enough and know that you have to work hard to get more and make sure that folks know that that's important. So those are the pieces. That's what gives me hope. That's what makes me go to work every day. Thank you. Anybody else? What gives me hope well a lot of things but two in particular one is that I've been honored to work with many many early childhood teachers both infant toddler teachers and preschool teachers throughout my career they are extraordinary people they passionately care about what they're doing they're intellectually and emotionally engaged with what they're doing they want the best for children and they're willing to make sacrifices great sacrifices to pursue their passion and if we can reward that if we can recognize it for the value that it truly has for our society I think we have the potential of unleashing just amazing work in our field but just taking it a whole level higher the other thing I want to say that gives me hope is we have built great knowledge and we know we know how to have a positive effect on the development learning and well-being of young children and to create a society in which we have more effective people and are more competitive as well as more caring we know what needs to happen so if we can leverage that knowledge I think I think we have great potential I would say this the shift towards more of a learning and development frame in terms of what we're doing so I think echoing what Peter said sort of our efforts to unpack what quality is, what effectiveness is our efforts in QRIS to help parents sort of really understand that you know I have hope that one day we're we're not going to sort of be stuck in this place of well we're going to help parents work and then what we have left over will support learning and development we don't finance K-12 that way even though when public school is closed I can't go to work or somebody in my family doesn't get to go to work that day but we don't finance K-12 in that same way and say this is about Miriam being able to understand what's left over is there to support learning and development so I think that shift is positive it gives me hope and it gives me hope that we really do understand more about what it should look like and our goals for children as well as our goals for effective teaching Megan? Yeah, I am hopeful that the more that the story about experience and brain development begins to penetrate that we can help use that story and link it to how we've experienced the training of the people and the fact that they are developing brains and not just helping people to go to work will finally get through so I'm hopeful we can use it right Great Thank you and now before we turn to our next panel we have a little bit of time for some audience questions so if anyone has a question we should have one or two people wandering with a microphone any questions from the audience? I think we're going to have a microphone but here it comes Hi, Helene Stevens with the Alliance for Early Success one of the things that struck me about the report was the statistic about the cost of care doubling in the last 25 years and the wages are only going up 1% or 15% and so I guess I would question whether or not there actually is a heightened awareness on the part of the consumer that this does cost more but what the heck is happening with the wages we know that that's the largest cost in that and I know Marcy said they have no idea what's going on there but I'd be curious if anybody has any good guesses about what's happening with that funding if in fact the cost is going up I do know that this is a question that's going to be explored in the second panel but if anyone wants to jump in with just a thought I feel free to do that but also we can feel free to leave it to a panel too so to come and over on this side I'm sorry Good morning, my name is Kevin Briscoe I'm with the Council for Professional Recognition and I just wanted to kind of piggyback on something Megan said you spoke you alluded to a public awareness campaign we can ask ourselves why is STEM so prevalent across the educational spectrum because they've been able to find a message and they've been able to pound that message across a variety of different stakeholders and I'm asking where is the political will where is the personal will where is the public will to kind of address this situation and how can we as well one as a communications professional in this field kind of advance that cost Any thoughts? Language and metaphors is a good metaphor people we can tie it actually to birth to three too because the public understands that boy we better be good at science, technology and math if we're going to compete so what we need to help them understand is that babies start learning about these things at birth and that we're setting them up with what is being done in birth to three, birth to five is setting up all those constructs in their heads I think people would be stunned I mean they know they learned to count but that is like the minor part of what they're learning so if we could, we need to connect the dots for the public and policy makers and do it better and with the language and the metaphors that we can develop that will get past that gap and understanding that's what I think oh sorry, go ahead I wanted to just respond did you want to respond? I agree and I think the public awareness in terms of building political will I think that's huge I also think I'm part of building political will going back to what I was saying is I think we need the policy too around how we're going to finance birth to five systems and I don't think we're really there yet we know what quality is we know what quality costs we know that we need very talented well compensated professionals but I don't think we've really figured out that piece that's the part that gives me pause around how we're really going to get there because we know we will need significant new resources to be able to make any of this a reality otherwise we're just going to keep doing a little bit better for a few more kids with a little bit more money that we're able to get if we keep working in the existing structures that we have I was going to comment that I've heard a number of policy discussions well parents have young children for such a short time and they're engaged when they have the young children but then their children are older and they're engaged around what to do with older children and I remember bear with me for just a moment and a plane one time behind me was someone who knew personally the person who came up with the American girl concept and what that person said was the marketing idea was grandparents that grandparents would have money and if you could create this nostalgia with money then you'd have all this investment in the grandchildren buying this expensive stuff this really cute expensive stuff I think we have to get the grandparents involved because they're interested in their individual grandchildren but what they don't quite make they don't connect the dot that the future of their grandchildren depends on everyone else's grandchildren and how that whole society is going to work together and if we could help them connect those dots and see that the life that's the legacy they're going to leave for their children is dependent on this I think that'll help because we need the people with power and it's the older people who have the power and the corporations that's definitely how my daughter got her American girl so did you have it? I think no we have time for one more question my question has to do with the fact that many of the young children especially infants and toddlers are not in center based care they're in family child care homes and much of the statistics and the data that we were able to look at in this report are based in center based programs do we have any information about the wage structure and the wages of those family child care providers and how that relates to even those of center based providers which we know are very low? do you want to use? yeah this side yes we do I'm not sure Marcy Caroline and I have it in us to do the family the home based version of this report it would be similarly we draw on the new national survey and related to the profiles that work needs to be done I'm sure it will be done you can go into the Bureau of Labor's statistics data and look at child care workers who are in home setting so again you're going to be pulling from a lot of different sources and you can do it again you're going to have this absolutely patchwork quilt of people and places and funding streams and so on but it can be done it'll probably be an even more depressing if it's possible picture I just wanted to say something about the issue of getting people to understand your question about parents I think parents experience early childhood is expensive and then they look and they think oh this person is taking in all this money there's five kids here and they're all paying what I am oh they must be making a lot of money and I think parents there's sort of two issues with parents they don't understand sort of the economics and how the budget works in early childhood and I think the other thing and I just was with some friends actually who just have two kids and they sort of thought well okay it's a few years we'll do this and then we get to go to public education and so they're sort of like I mean the way the short term works is they think well maybe I can do it for a little while and then I'm going to be relieved of that burden and I think we need to really help parents to speak up around these issues too so that we're not making an early childhood worker versus parent thing but it's not working you know it's a lose right now for kids for parents and for the people doing the work we have to sort of get people to think about well it could be a win-win-win if we had a different way of structuring the finances win-win-win I would just add for family child care I think that family child care providers if they receive a wage at all a lot of times family child care providers opt to not pay themselves and so I think the numbers are even lower for family child care providers what I would worry about for family child care providers is because they do have infants and toddlers in their care and that can be really loud and really busy and all the things that Megan said but the other thing I would add to is their mental health is what I would also worry about being the only person in there all day long with the children rarely having breaks rarely having time to plan talk with families go back to school all those kinds of things even harder for family child care providers yep anyone else have anything to add? well thank you so much for joining us here today and please join me in thanking our panelists


Spotify announced Tuesday that it will now offer audio books to Spotify premium subscribers at no additional charge. Starting in Australia and the UK with other markets including the US getting it later this year. Around 150,000 books, that's about half of what they have in the catalog, you can only listen to 15 hours of those books per month, after which you have to wait until next month or purchase extra 10 hours in blocks of 10 hours, which most of the books I read are more than 15 hours, so I'm not sure how this is going to go down.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with late in sports cards, ripping 22, Panini National Treasures football. First off the line, a photo and hobby, two box makes you number 13, random team style. Here's a look again at your random results. As always, you can find these on the website under the results tab as well as the link in chat. Again, you got Jeff N with the bucks down to Paul P with the browns. Have to scroll down once. Thanks again everybody. Let's do it. Good luck. Thank you all again for filling this up. I really, really do appreciate it. That was awesome. Let's do it. Here we go. Hobby first. We'll go into photo. Hey, John Elway to 99. The Broncos got a Kirk Cousins to 25. There is a little bit of like gunk on that. I'm gonna send an empty box and wrapper with Minnesota. Sorry about that. Vikings. 18 to 49, two three color patch. Amari Cooper. What is it? What's the next word? Nice one there, Browns. Switch to number two. Seven of 49. It's gonna be Devin White for the Buccaneers. Player Warren on Devin White. Absolute stud. We've got a triple that is gonna be a Matt Stafford, Cooper Cup, Vaughn Miller, and Aaron Donald. Nice one there for the Rams. Grads Rams. Got upside down Brissol. 25 of 49, one color and three color. That's on that Jets. Cool one there. Congrats Jets. Got Jersey Auto is for the Niners Debo Samuel. Nice one there. Congrats San Fran. Not mistaken. I think this is from last year. 39 to 49. That is gonna be for the Cowboys. Yes, from 21NT. Zeke Elliott. The new Patriot. Yeah, Zeke Elliott. Grads on that. I almost said New England. Grads on that Dallas. Oh, this is nasty. For the Raiders. Five of 10. That is gonna be a Bo Jackson. Patch Auto. Player Warren on the bow. Bo knows. Congrats Vegas. Very cool. Take that for sure. Bradley R. Congrats, buddy. Zeke might be love it. And really nice one here. Horizontal RPA. Jersey number parallel to 97. Aiden Hutchinson. Going to Lee P. Congrats Lee. That's a gross patch too. That's awesome. We'll get that into a mag for you. Congrats on that one, Lee. Here you go, my friend. And empty. All right, photo time, photo time. I like photos. I like photos. I like photos. First off the line sticker. Looking for our stars and stripes. RPAs. Come on. Let's see somebody big, buddy. See something big, man. Got a Nick Chubb. Five of 13. That is a really physical tandem. That is gonna be a George Kittle. Eight of 10 on the green for the Niners. Got a Aaron Jones. AJ Dillon. 34 of 99 for Packers. This one there, Green Bay. Got game gear. Jordan Poyer. That's game used. 40 of 99 for the Bills. Game worn slash used material. That's Buffalo. That is gonna be a Tim Brown. 9 of 25. Player worn for the Raiders. Treasures of the Hall. 16 of 49. Justin Jefferson. Going to the Vikings. Nice one there. Minnesota. We've got a Parion Winfrey. 29 of 99 for the Browns. Rookie Otter. Got another one. Going to the Cowboys. That is gonna be a Zeke Elliott. 1 of 49. Congrats on that one there. Again, Cowboys. Jersey. Going to the Jets. That is gonna be 66 of 99. Elijah Moore. How do we do that? Go into the Niners. That is gonna be 20 of 25. Danny Gray. Stars and Stripes RPA. Nice one there. Congrats on that, San Fran. Danny Gray. Going to Davenby. Congrats, buddy. Nice. Danny Gray. It's an empty box. Do a quick recap. You can make it, Danny Gray. We've got Jerseys. Elijah Moore. Sunday Treasures. Justin Jefferson. A Tim Brown. That's Jordan Poyer. AJ Dillon. Aaron Jones. Bree Saul. Quad for the Rams. Devin White. Anna-Marie Cooper. Autos. We had Zeke Elliott. Parion Winfrey. Bo Jackson. Zeke Elliott again. And Debo. One there. Then we've got our two Magg Cards. Aiden Hutchinson for the Lions. 56 of 97. Trying to get the gray. Nice one there for the Lions. Solid. Very solid. Stall, Sam. Stall. Just staring at you. Everybody's watching you. Ah, so much pressure. Then we had Stars and Stripes RPA. Danny Gray. Going to the Niners. That will do it for the break, guys. Thanks again for the film. Appreciate it very much.


In this video I will be explaining level negative 7 of the back rooms, also known as the Dinner Party, which is what I think to be the scariest negative level that I've ever gone over so far. This is a disturbing place in a really morbid and guttural physical way, and viewer discretion is advised because this is about to get nasty. Without any more talking from my end, let's get into the video, shall we? Backroom's level negative 7 has been given classification of a class 5 difficulty, and is heavily unsafe. The level itself is stable, and there's really one single entity that calls this place home. His name is Johnny, and we'll get into him later, I promise. The level is highly dangerous and should be avoided at all costs, but if you or another wanderer finds yourself stuck in it, you're gonna have to watch this video to figure out how to escape. It takes the appearance of an extensive and winding set of hallways and rooms that appear to be from a house complex. The house itself is non-linear, which means the layout and the design makes no sense, and the hallways of physical spaces do not follow any physics from real life. The hallways seem to wrap around a central location inside the level, which is known as the dining room. The dining room is a horrifying place with deeply disturbing descriptions given, and if you find yourself walking around the hallways and you end up in this dining room place, you're gonna want to run away as fast as you can. The dining room looks just like an empty room with a table in the middle of it. The room is barely lit up with a dull overhead light, and just be warned what I'm about to describe is grotesque. On the table in the dining room, you will see disembodied heads on the plates. The plates themselves are set a few inches apart from each other, and the heads on them are all different, and they're all on different levels of decay.  But the heads are thought to belong to the unfortunate wanderers who made it to the dining room and didn't leave in time before he got to them. Again, I'll explain him later, him being Johnny, but just know never to stay in this dining area for a prolonged time, and never make any loud noises to attract Johnny, unless you want your head on a platter. The main characteristic of these hallways and rooms are that they're shrouded in a dark mist. Now it's not that the level itself is actually dark, it's that the darkness seems to be real here, you can kind of feel when you cross over into it. It feels like mist, or a fog in the morning. Anyways, this darkness and this physical lack of light floats around the basement and covers different parts at different times of the level. There are occasionally light switches on the walls here, but it is imperative that you never turn on the lights. Ever. Never do it, because turning on the light switch would reveal your location to Johnny, which is, of course, the worst thing you could do to yourself. It is possibly the worst fate in the back rooms, actually. It is important to note that this level is not infinite, nor is it very large. It's a finite place, with only a select few floors and hallways and rooms to explore. The level's ambience is not absolute silence. There's actually a strange collection of sounds constantly echoing to the carpeted hallways. You cannot really refer to it as music, because it's not really like musical. It's more like random notes and sounds playing in an unnatural and liminal way. Anyways, the sound is constantly beeping overhead, and it's really the only thing that you can hide under from making noise to not attract Johnny. I mentioned just now that the level is multiple stories, and that's true. And there are different sets of staircases that you can take up or down to get to the two other floors. All three different floors have unique styles and design decorations, but they all follow the same house hallway and room style that the entire level does. When you walk up or down one of these staircases to get to the other two floors, the way you came from will shut and go away behind you, essentially forcing you to walk through this new floor until you find the exit back where you came from. In total, there are three zones per the first two floors, and the final third floor has one single zone. This is referred to as the end zone. Now, the end zone is not actually a real zone you're going to explore. It's more of just a big room with a door on the other end. The door is locked until you find the key to unlock it, and the key itself is randomly placed inside the rest of the level. The rooms in this level are empty and they're plain. Usually at most there might be a desk or a bed or a chair, or some of the random piece of furniture, but all of it seems to be from real life. Keep these furniture pieces in your mind because you might have to hide under them to evade Johnny. The hallways on these floors seem to shift when you're not looking, which adds to that non-linear nature that I mentioned earlier. This makes it really hard to map out where you're headed or where you're going to be, so just think of these hallways as a Rubik's Cube that can shift. This is very important because you might find yourself running away or trying to hide from Johnny, and the hallway switch could be to your advantage, or be to your detriment, it could bring Johnny closer. This Johnny figure that I keep mentioning is horrifying, and I'm about to explain it right now. The entity is only referred to as Johnny because there are strange invitations scattered around different levels of the back rooms, inviting people to Johnny's dinner party, and this level is the dinner party. He's the reason for those disembodied heads on the table, and is also the reason you should never turn the lights on in the halls, unless you just don't want to be alive. Physically, Johnny seems to be a shadowy, dark entity of an unknown physical size. Most people that see him really don't survive the encounter to give accurate details, but from the few that have, or the few that have pictured him, he seems to be a grotesque, dark shape with large white eyes. He smells of rot and decay, and he behaves very sadistically and malevolently. Johnny can sense when lights turn on in this level, and the second one does, he will sprint at an unnaturally quick pace to that location, that's how he hunts. He seems to mainly hang out in that dining room area where those heads are at at the center of the level, so if you wander that room, or if you accidentally get there on purpose, it'll be the last thing you do most likely. Johnny's attacks are vicious and aggressive, and he will slash and bite and do anything in order to despond you or his victims. After this, he will then take their head back to the table for display. He seems to feed off of fear, it is unknown if Johnny is some kind of mutated entity, like a wretch or a hound, or a redkin, or what his true form is, but since the level is covered in this misty darkness, and Johnny's full body has never been seen, we can just guess that he looks gross because he smells gross.  If you want to survive this level and Johnny specifically, you need to do the following. If you hear footsteps outside of a room that you're in, you need to hide quickly and quietly. If the music on this level stops playing while you're exploring, you also need to hide. This means that the entity Johnny is nearby. This creature as a whole strikes fear into thousands of wanderers inside the back rooms. He's very taboo, very scary, and many people won't even go near this level, because of how dangerous Johnny is. The only good news is that Johnny's eyesight seems to be bad because he's used to the darkness, so he relies so much on hearing and smell to hunt you down. This is where hiding under that furniture might save your life, because he might not be able to see you under there. To enter the level, you have to touch a piece of paper on any other level that reads, You've been invited. Inviting the reader to Johnny's special dinner event. If you find this invite, you can noclip through it to come here, but if you also find it, you should shred it and never touch it again, because it would be the worst thing you could do to yourself. To exit the level, you need to search the different rooms of this level to find these magnetic key fragments that all come together to make a full key to use to unlock the door in the end zone. Now the end zone is at the top floor of the level is the third and final one. You have to unlock the door on the other side of the room in the end zone to escape. The only problem is some of these key fragments might be in very dark places, so you might have to use a light to find them. And what did I tell you about lights? They attract Johnny. So you have to do it for a split second, maybe one or two seconds at max. If you want to survive, that way Johnny doesn't have time to react. This level is truly horrifying, and it really seems to be a morbid reminder of how dangerous the back room is and how little we understand it. It's one of those levels that sends a cold chill down your spine after you read it, and it makes you physically sick reading through the descriptions, specifically about Johnny's victims. But I think this is a great example of the back room's horror, and even though it's really scary, I think it's downright an amazing level, and I hope you enjoyed it.


I was doing a bit of experimenting today, playing around with API choices and stuff like that. And let me show this off and then I'll get into what this actually is and what the motivations were. What did I forget? Oh. I think that's it. Yeah, there we go. Okay, let's get a trace running. So, the IPv4, destination, and I'm sending it to, okay, sending it to my gateway. So, let's apply that and there will be, because I forgot something important. Well, there we go. HTTP payload, you can see that it is HTML. We can go a little bit further. Let's smack this in a div, be another payload and you see it's now within a div. And let's just do some really simple tests that's going to fail. So, I guess just if false. Does this compile or not? I don't remember if that will actually work or not. It compiles. Does it do what I want, though? It does. This is rather exciting to me. Now, very important thing, I want to get out of the way. This is overwhelmingly prototype stuff. I have no idea if I'm going to finish this. I have no idea if I want to or even if this approach will work when scaled way out. But the thing I was thinking is that it would be pretty easy to create a domain specific language for this where it translates a few things over from the DSL into this code. So, if we were to translate that, let's indent a few things first. Well, other way. Yeah, this will work for now. This will work. It'll get the point across. So, if we were to modify this into a rough sketch of DSL, probably we wouldn't even need that net, to be honest. I think you can see how this could be pretty easily translated into what we just had. Now, the idea of using pre-compiled webpages is not actually that unusual. I know a lot of people know web development stuff from PHP and Ruby on Rails. I think it's Django for Python. I'm not super big on web development. But pre-compiled webpages are actually a thing with an Asp.net make quite a bit of use of them. They existed pretty well before that, too. What's the thing called? CGI and FastCGI were essentially using that well before any kind of language-specific web server came about. You will also notice, though, that the sockets that I had defined there, which was basically just this. I don't know if you've ever used NATsock. There's a lot more writing than just this. In fact, I think I still have the thing I was doing with NATsock. Yes, I do. This is opening up that same socket in NATsock and then writing just a string. It was kind of bitching on Twitter earlier, so that's what this was from. I'll show what's in these, but there's not a whole lot right now. But the socket is essentially a wrapper around this so that this entire thing could be condensed down to this part and this part, which is a lot less writing, a lot easier to make use of. This is a lot. And mind you, this part is obsolescent nowadays anyways, so you can generally remove this, but the rest of it still needs to be written, and that's a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff. So delving into what I was dinking around with, the sockets package is literally just a wrapper around NATsockets right now. It takes advantage of the controlled types to do some special stuff in the initialization and finalization. Where is it? Yeah, so in initialization it actually creates the socket and assigns the channel and a finalization that closes the socket and nulls out the channel. Other than that, basically everything is just wrappers along with some interface to the actual stream because the socket type is wrapping up the stream as well. And the way this works is a little wordy. There's a heck of a lot going on here. It looks a lot more overwhelming than it really is. The only thing that you'd actually be making use of is the put for the content tag, which of course isn't a real thing, but I needed to have it called something. But then just like the div and end-div and paragraph and end-paragraph and the same for any of the other ones. What these actually do behind the scenes is tack on to this list. Now I'm using the doubly linked list and the add as containers. I'd probably write out my own because there's actually a validation thing that should be doing in what would be called a loopback link list or something. Lists can get really complicated, but it's essentially a list with loops between specific nodes. And you'd use that to validate that all the tags are actually ended appropriately rather than sending it off to the browser for them to find that out because you don't want the person browsing your website to find that out the hard way. This is just a proof-of-concept right now. Yeah, this is pretty delightful compared to what AWS does. Actually, I'm doing mod stuff too. AWS, yeah. There's demos. They got a lot of demos. I think we can go into... Yeah, they got templates in split. So let's do... Yeah, how fun reading that. Still, like I said, I don't know if I want to go the whole route with this. I don't know if I'm actually going to make this a thing or not. It was just something I was playing around with, but I did want to show it off.