Konnichiwa and hello everyone. Welcome to the basic Japanese class for beginners. I hope by now you are a little familiar with the Japanese alphabet, with Japanese words, with kanji, with hiragana and I am sure we learn a lot more things during our 40 lectures here. You will get to know a lot about Japanese culture, about Japanese people also. But today, first of all, we will do the assignments that I had given you in the previous class. So, let us do our assignments. I hope you have done them. Ohayou gozaimasu. Soredewa hajimemashou. Do you understand this? Ohayou gozaimasu, of course you know I am sure. Ohayou gozaimasu means good morning. Soredewa hajimemashou. Let us begin now. I had given you in your first assignment to count things here from 1 to 10. So now, one thing I want to tell you is that there are pictures here. But in Japanese, when you count things, you count in a lot of different ways. For example, if you are counting long objects, you are counting flat objects, you are counting small animals, you are counting big animals, you will count them, you count people, you count them all in different ways. So over here, I have just listed, I have just put randomly some pictures for you, so that you can just practice your numbers from 1 to 10. It is not any method of counting, it is just a practice of numbers. So, please keep that in mind. That is the main reason we are not naming the objects over here. We are just counting from 1 to 10. Ichi, as you saw was already there. Ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyuu, juu. So, we are not naming the objects listed here, shown here. We are just counting from 1 to 10. Your next assignment is this picture where you were to name the objects shown in the picture. So, while the objects are here for you, hoki, hoki, wine grass, wine grass, chess boudo, chess boudo, okashi, okashi is snacks, hana, hana. And in the end, we have spoon, foku, foku. Then in B we have how many things are there in the picture. So, you are supposed to tell how many things are actually there, the things that you have named. So, while there are 6 things in the picture, we will go on to the next assignment. Again, it was just to name the objects. Basically, what we are doing here is we are practicing vocabulary, which will help you make sentences later on when you are doing conversation. So, while the first one is kame, as you can see, ashi. You can repeat after me, ashi, jinja, take, take, take is bamboo, kabocha, kabocha, sushi. Sushi you can see is very interesting. It is a delicacy and it is made out of rice balls and raw fish or we could say raw seafood.  It is a delicacy and it is liked a lot by foreigners as well. Terebi, terebi, ichigo, I am sure all of you like ichigo, kuchi, kushi and senpuki. Well, now I had given you some pictures and from the pictures you were to tell where the person is from and what is the name of the person's country. So, well, you can see from the picture that this person is not Indian or Oriental and looks from either Europe or the US. So, over here it is written doitsu, which is Germany and doitsu-jin, German. So, doitsu-kara desu, doitsu-jin desu. In a similar manner, we have these three pictures here. Kara desu, America-jin desu, Chuu-goku-kara desu, Chuu-goku-jin desu. You can make out from the kimono that the lady is wearing, that she is from Japan. Nihon-kara desu, Nihon-jin desu and of course, India. Indo-kara desu, Indo-jin desu. So, these were your exercises for last week. I hope you did them properly. Now, just for pronunciation practice, so that you get used to the sounds, your tongue gets used to the sounds. You understand hiragana. We will just practice these randomly put hiragana. You can repeat after me, please. A-i-u-e, papi-papu, o-i-u-e, he-hi-fu-ho, kaki-ku-ke, tachi-tsu-te, ke-ki-ku-ko, te-chi-tsu-to, sashi-suse, neninu-no, sushi-sase, naninanu, tachi-tsu-to, mami-mume, tochi-tatsu, me-mi-mu-mo, tachi-tsu-to, mami-mume, babi-babu, gagi-gu-ge, babi-bubo, ge-gi-gu-go, papi-pu-po, zaji-zu-zo. So, I hope now all of you are feeling a little more comfortable with these sounds, which are initially a little strange, but then you just get used to them and they sound very normal. Now, we have done about 46 syllables so far. We have done the first set of hiragana. Now, today we will do the second set of hiragana, which is actually not very difficult because it is made with the help of the first set. I will write it down for you once and then we will do the vocabulary over here. You remember doing the kei sound. I am sure you remember doing the kei sound ka, ki, ku, kei and ko. Then we did sa, shi, su, se and so. Then the third set we did was ta, ta, su, te and to. So, well, now we will do with the help of this, we will do another set today, which is the ga set, the g sound, which is a slightly nasal sound. So, just by adding two symbols over here, from ka, you can make it into ga, ga, gi, gu, ge and go. So, you could repeat after me please, ga, gi, gu, ge and go. The vocabulary for ga is ga-ki. Ga-ki is a musical instrument, ga-ki and ga-jin. You remember the word ga-jin? We did ga-jin in lesson 2. So, well, ga-jin is a foreigner. Then we have gi, ginko. Ginko is a bank and gishi, gishi is an engineer. Gu, gun-jin, gun-jin is a soldier. Gurabu, gurabu for gloves. You will notice that this is written in katakana because it is a foreign word. Ge, genkan, genkan is the main entrance of the house. The main door of the house, geta. Geta is wooden sandals, which the Japanese wear go. Go is goma, sesumi and gomi. Gomi is garbage. Now, again, we did in the first set sa, shi, su, se and so. Just by adding this symbol over here, we get the z sound that is za, ji, zu, ze and zo. Just by adding these two over here in the sa set, we get the za sound. You will notice that ji is a little different. This is an exception. Please remember. Now, to the vocabulary part, za zangyo. Zangyo is overtime, as you can see. Zashi, zashi is magazine. Jinja, jinja. You can see the meanings over here in English. Jinko, jinko, population. Zubon, zurui, zurui is cunning. Zembu, zembu, zeikin and in the end we have zo, zo, elephant and zori. Zori are flat sandals, which the Japanese wear. Now interestingly, as I told you earlier, for a long sound, you can write o-o as in zo, which is elephant, as you saw just now. You can also write z-o with a bar on top, which again means it is a long sound. And you can also write zo, which again also means it is a shows that it is a long sound. So, all these will be listed for you, so that you are familiar with it. You can choose whichever you want and you can use it when you are writing. Now, we did the ta series, the t series earlier. Now, by just putting this sign again, it becomes the d series da, ji, zu, de and do. Da, ji, zu, de and now you will see that this is actually it has come over here. So, this set is not used that much. This again is being used over here. So, this set is not used. So, these two symbols which you see are actually not used in hiragana when you are writing. So, we have da, ji, zu, de and do. Please remember that we will come to the vocabulary. Daikon, danchi, the meanings are given right here. Jibiki, jibiki, jisho, zu. We have nothing with zu over here. De, denwa, denchi, dorobo. You remember doing the h sound or ha, hi, hu, he and ho. I hope you remember this. Now, it is a little different from here. Ha changes to the B sound which is ba, ba, bi, bu, be and bo. Ba, bi, bu, be and bo. We will do the vocabulary. Bara, baikin, bideo, bijin, bunsho, bengoshi, bento. We have bo in the end. Boku, boku is informal for watashi which you have already done. But boku is only to be used by men, by males, not by girls. Bochi, bochi is a graveyard as you can see. Ba, bi, bu, be, bo. Then in the end, the same ha sound which we made into ba, we will put another symbol over here and make it into pa, the P sound. Pa, pi, pu, po. So, we will do this vocabulary very quickly over here for pa as well. Pisa, I am sure you like pisa all of you. Pink, and the girls will be liking this colour pink. Purashikku, puru. So, you can see the long sound is denoted by this dash over here in katakana as well as in roman. And all these words are in katakana again because they are foreign words. Penki, penchi and po, po is posto, your male and potto. Potto could be anything, it could be a tea pot, it could be a kettle, it could be a simple pot. Any pot is a potto in Japanese. Well, we are through with our hiragana set and now you can see that we did 46 symbols in the first set, 46 sounds in the first set. And today, we have done 25 in the second set and in all we have 71 symbols or sounds in hiragana. So, please remember all your sounds because you will be making a lot of words with them and we will be requiring them to make new words every day. Now, today we will do something new. You have done some construction, some sentences we have made, some grammar we have done today.  So, now, you would also like to tell your friends what your specialization is, what you have majored in, what you are studying. So, well, what is your specialization? Or your major or your subject is senmon which you are studying. So, senmon wa nandesuka, that is what we are going to do today. Well, before I actually give you the conversation, I would like you to listen to this audio. I know you will not be able to understand most of it, but I am also sure that you will at least be able to recognize a few words from the audio. So, please listen carefully to the audio and then we will go to the actual conversation. So, this is what you actually heard. Well, I will read it now for you. This is a conversation between Tanaka san and Rao san, two people. They are just talking somewhere and have already met probably, because the usual first time meeting conversation is not there which is hajimemashite dozo yoroshiku. So, well, they are just talking. I will read it out to you now. I will not read the names, please. Shitsurei desu ga onamae wa nandesuka Rao desu. Rao san wa daigakusei desu ka? Hai, sou desu. Senmon wa butsurigaku desu. Watashi no senmon mo butsurigaku desu. Tanaka san wa nan nensei desu ka? San nensei desu. Rao san wa watashi wa ninensei desu. So well, this is a simple conversation. You have already done shitsurei desu ga. Shitsurei desu ga, as you know, means I am sorry, but I am going to ask you something very directly and you put up a question. So, shitsurei desu ga onamae wa nandesuka. You have done onamae, which means name. Wa of course, is a particle which you have done, which is a subject particle. Nan is a question word, which means what. This of course, is the verb part and ka is the question, which makes a simple sentence into a question or an interrogative statement. So well, shitsurei desu ga onamae wa nandesuka? Rao desu. The answer is Rao desu. Rao san wa daigakusei desu ka? Rao san wa daigakusei desu ka? Daigakusei is a university student or a graduate student. Dai means big, a big place of learning. Are you a student of that place? Daigakusei desu ka? Hai, sou desu. Sou desu means yes, that you are right. Now this new word, senmon. Senmon means specialization. Senmon wa butsurigaku desu. Senmon again because you are talking about your specialization. So, senmon wa butsurigaku desu. Butsurigaku is physics. Watashi no senmon mo butsurigaku desu. Now a new particle for you, no and mo. So first we will do no. Particle no shows possession, shows belonging to a certain person. It is of a certain person. Something belongs to someone. Noun 1 wa noun 2 no desu. Noun 1 wa noun 2 no desu. Noun 1 can be anything, pen. Enpitsu, tokei, kaban, kuruma wa again noun 2 could be any person. Tanaka san watashi imouto sensei oka san no desu. So, pen wa tanaka san no desu. Pen belongs to Tanaka san. Enpitsu wa imouto no desu. Enpitsu wa imouto no desu. Enpitsu belongs to imouto. Tokei wa watashi no desu. Tokei wa watashi no desu. The tokei is mine. Is that okay? So, it basically means mine, yours and ours. Particle no always shows possession belonging to ownership of something. As you can see, it is written over here. Something is the possession of someone and it always follows a noun or a pronoun. Kaban wa watashi no desu. Isu wa gakkou no desu. The isu belongs to the school. Hon wa rao san no desu. As is written over here, hon wa rao san no desu. Megane, now this Megane belongs to me, does not it? So well, Megane wa watashi no desu. Does it belong to you? No, it does not belong to you. It belongs to me. So, it is mine, watashi no Megane desu. Megane wa watashi no desu. Then we go back over here. Now, in the first line shitsure desu ga onamae wa nan desu ga. Now, we did this question word nan. So, you will see that nan and nani are two question words, two interrogative words and they mean exactly the same. They are similar words you can read over here and are equivalent to wat in English. The only difference with these words is that nan and nani are used at different places. Nan is to be used with the numbers one. Second, it is to be used before words starting with either d, n or t. All other places you will notice. Later on, as we have just done only one over here, only one sentence with nan. Later on you will see that nani is to be used in all other cases. Also, you must have noticed in the conversation that o is given. We have done this onrific o last time also. This is to show politeness, to show respect to the other person and generally is used with namae and kuni. Kuni is country, namae is name. So, when you are asking someone's name, please say o namae wa nan desu ka? And if you want to know someone's country, well you will say okuni wa dochira desu ka as we did last time. But please remember this also that for your own name, you will never use o namae. You will always use namae and for your own country, you will never say okuni, but you will say kuni. So, please remember that watashi no kuni wa indo desu. Anata no o kuni wa dochira desu ka? Please remember that, well this is your conversation in English. It is a translation. Senmon wa nan desu ka? So, well you just go over it and I am sure you will understand it is not such a difficult conversation. We have done everything in the conversation, in class here. Well, this is your conversation in the script. So, now we go back to know, you can practice with a lot of words here I have given for practice. For example, you could put watashi no pen desu. Watashi no enpitsu desu. You can repeat after me please. Watashi no kaban desu. Watashi no shousetsu desu. Watashi no kyoukashou desu. Shousetsu is a novel. Kyoukashou is a textbook. Watashi no kyoukashou desu. Watashi no kagi. Kagi is as you have seen, kagi wa kizu. So, watashi no kagi desu. Watashi no kasa desu. Kasa is an umbrella. Watashi no kasa desu. Watashi no megane desu. So, now what you can do is with no. We just now did watashi no pen desu. Watashi no kasa desu. Watashi no kasa desu. This just pen as I told you once again we can practice as we did over here. Instead of watashi you can put any name you want as we did over there and you can just use it with pen or you can put list a number of nouns over here. Number of things and say watashi no pen desu. Tomodachi no pen desu. Tomodachi no kaban desu. Tanaka san no kuruma desu. Any of this and you can practice at home. You will see it is listed over here. Watashi no pen desu. So, now you can also use two-nose. For example, as is given over here. Watashi no tomodachi. Watashi no tomodachi. My friend no pen desu. Watashi no tomodachi no pen desu. Tanaka san no okusan. Okusan is wife. Tanaka san no okusan. Okusan no pen desu. I will write it down for you over here. Watashi no tomodachi. Tanaka san no okusan. Sensei no okasan no pen desu. So, you have two-nose over here. This no okusan. So, you have relationship very clearly stated Watashi no tomodachi no pen. My friend's pen. Tomodachi no okasan no pen desu. Oto san no tomodachi no pen desu. Sensei no pen desu. A simple relationship over here. Sensei no pen desu. Watashi no sensei no pen desu.  Now, there is a small dialogue over here. Tanaka san wa gakusei desu ka? Hai, sou desu. Kim san mo gakusei desu ka? Hai, watashi wa doboku kogaku no gakusei desu. Tanaka san no senmon wa nan desu ka? Watashi no senmon wa kagaku desu. So well, this is a dialogue between Kim san and Tanaka san and you can very clearly understand what they are saying. Tanaka san wa gakusei desu ka? Are you a student? Hi, I am a student. Kim san is also a student? Hai, watashi wa doboku kogaku no gakusei desu. I am a civil engineering student. Tanaka san no senmon wa nan desu ka? Watashi no senmon wa kagaku desu, which is chemistry. So, this is how you can ask someone's senmon. This is the translation of the kaiva in English and you also have it written here in the script and the important part in this conversation is senmon which we are going to practice now. Now, for practice we have it right here for you. Watashi no senmon wa kagaku desu or watashi no senmon wa kagaku de wa arimasen. We did de wa arimasen in lesson 3, so please remember you can say this and you can also say de wa arimasen. Watashi no senmon wa wutsurigaku desu or wutsurigaku de wa arimasen. Watashi no senmon wa su-gaku desu or su-gaku de wa arimasen. Watashi no senmon wa bun-gaku desu or watashi no senmon wa bun-gaku de wa arimasen. So, please you can do the same thing for all the others, hou-gaku, i-gaku, ken-chiku, ke-zai-gaku or ke-zai also is used, johou-kou-gaku. So, any of these you can use as the pattern does not change. Watashi no senmon wa my specialization is whatever. You can also ask what is your senmon by just adding ka in the end. So, tanaka-san no senmon wa nan desu ka and instead of tanaka you can put any of these nouns over here. Instead of tanaka you can say anata, you can use oka-san, you can use imoto, you can use tomodachi and you can also use ototo or any other noun that you want to. Tanaka may be replaced with words given below. Tanaka-san no oku-san no senmon wa kagaku desu. And you can also put a ka over here and you can ask tanaka-san no oku-san no senmon wa kagaku desu ka. If it is kagaku, hai kagaku desu. If it is not kagaku, i-e, kagaku dewa arimasen. So, you can have a small conversation over there. In a similar manner, tanaka-san no tomodachi no onamae wa nan desu ka? You can ask a simple question. Now, if you remember in the dialogue, tanaka says watashi no senmon mo butsuri-gaku desu. Now, this particle mo, this is new particle mo, this is a new particle, it means also or to even. So, if I say watashi wa indo-jin desu, watashi wa indo-jin desu. I am Indian. If you are also Indian, you can say watashi mo indo-jin desu. So, watashi wa indo-jin desu. Simple statement that we have done. Now, this has been said once, watashi wa indo-jin desu. Now, if you are also Indian, then you can say watashi mo indo-jin desu. I am also Indian. So, now you will notice that if you have to use particle mo, which means also or to, then a statement has to be given first. A statement has to be there. Something has to be said, which you are repeating. Watashi wa indo-jin desu. Watashi mo indo-jin desu. I am also an Indian. Watashi wa gakse desu. In place of indo, you can put gakse, you can use bengoshi, all the vocabulary that you have done for profession, for what you are doing, for your senmon, for where you belong to, what country you come from. You can put any of these and say watashi mo. It could be gakse, it could be Indian, indo, it could be bengoshi, anything. It can be used. But you have to remember only one thing, that wa has to be, a statement has to be made first with wa and then only mo can be said. It is used in affirmative, interrogative and negative sentences. Over here you can see watashi no senmon wa kagaku desu. Imoto no senmon mo kagaku desu. So you can please read all of this. As you can see Tanaka san wa indo-jin desu. Watashi mo indo-jin desu. Tanaka san wa ninensei desu. Neha san mo ninensei desu. Ninensei is ni is too as you have done. Nen is here and sei is a student. So, I am a second year student. Tanaka san is a second year student. Neha san is also a second year student. Tomodachi wa gakse desu. Watashi no tomodachi mo gakse desu. My friend is also a student. Imoto san no senmon wa nan desu ka? Imoto no senmon wa kezai desu. A simple conversation. Well, there was a small phrase over there. So this, you have done it once. So this means that is right. What you are saying is correct. And Arigato, I am sure as you already know is thank you very much. Now, we did numbers last time from 30 to 31 to 50. Today we will do numbers from 50 to 60 and 60 to 70. So, very very quickly for you goju ichi. You can repeat after me. Goju ichi, goju ni, goju san, goju shi or goju yon, goju go, goju roku, goju nana, goju hachi, goju kyuu, roku juu. I hope you will remember all of this. Lot of new vocabulary I can see. But well, we need to do all that because we want to make some good sentences, some good conversation we want to do. So well, this is from 61, roku juu ichi, roku juu ni, roku juu san, roku juu yon, roku juu go, roku juu roku, roku juu nana, roku juu hachi, roku juu kyuu, nana juu. So, all of it is listed over here in Roman, in Hiragana and in Kanji characters. Especially, Hiragana is listed for you so that you can memorize the Hiragana characters, memorize the Kanji characters and then you are able to write very nicely later on. Next, we did Kanji, I believe, till 6 roku. Now, we will do from roku onwards till 10. So, first of all, we will do nana. Nana is just two strokes. I will just make it for you nana. So, one and two nana, then comes hachi. Hachi is very simple, four fingers like this and four fingers like this makes it eight. So, eight is very very simple like this hachi. Then we have kyuu, kyuu or kuu. Kyuu is the strongest of the single digits. So, it comes from this part like this kyuu. So, it is made like this kyuu and then very simple juu. These are your numbers. Please remember nana, hachi, kyuu and juu. Is it okay? Once again nana, you can repeat after me hachi, kyuu and juu. All are two stroke Kanji over here you will see. You have done four strokes and five strokes earlier, but all these, this set is all two strokes. Now, this is simple vocabulary. The meanings are given on the right side. Hiragana in the center and in blue is all the new vocabulary for you. Please learn it at home. Akka-chan, kodomo, onnanu-ko, otoko-no-ko and you can see, it means a boy, okasan. It is a long sound, oto-san, imo-to, oto-to, onesan and over here younger sister and elder sister. The Kanji characters, the pictograms are different. Onesan, elder brother and again you have ototo and onesan and the Kanji characters, the pictograms are again different. Obasan, oji-san, oksan and please oku-san. So, the ku is silent over here. So please, this is all new vocabulary which you can use when you are using the particle no. It will come very handy. So, please learn this vocabulary. Now, in the end, we have your assignments. It is your homework now. Practice by changing the underlined words with options given below. It is a very simple assignment. Suzuki-san wa America kara desu ka? Iie, sou de wa arimasen. Watashi wa Nihon kara desu. And then you have a, b, c, d, anata, otou-san, tomodachi, sensei and furan-su, kankoku which is korea, spain and thai which is thailand. So, please practice by changing the underlined words with options given below. You have the names and the name of places. You need to replace those with the options. Then, practice with your partner by replacing country and senmon with words given below. So, you have America, doitsu, thai, indo, itaria, furan-su, eigo, nihongo, computer, kikai kou-gaku, kagaku, kei-zai. You can replace them properly. Read the conversation. I am sure you will understand all of it. It is not very difficult. All of it we have covered in the lesson. So, you can replace these place names with place names here in the conversation and your specialization, your subject names with words here underlined where subject is required. And now, we have had a long class. So well, I will finish here. Soredewa minasan arigatou kore de owarimasu. So well, thank you everyone. Let us finish here today and we will join again. Meet again tomorrow for our next class. So, minasan mata ashita aimashou. Arigatou gozaimasu. Thank you.


Okay, a very good morning to you. Hope you had a great weekend. Obviously really sunny outside But I hope you managed to stick to the rules and remain somewhat self-isolated But other than that, I hope everyone made the most of it of what they could So it's Monday the 6th of April gonna do the usual look ahead for the for the week But before I begin as per usual if I could kindly ask if you do not already subscribe to YouTube channel Please hit that subscribe button. If you turn on the bell icon, you'll get notifications when I release these briefings every morning Here is the Amplified Trading.com website So if anyone not familiar with us, please do check it out If you scroll down on the homepage, basically you're presented with a few different options so if you're a Trader or interested in developing your trading then just click on that learn more in the professional trader program section We've just updated this web page actually, so do check it out There's a few things there that might be of interest to you and then on the student side If you are a university student or a recent graduate, then this is our kind of flagship internship training program Which is where we use our quite sophisticated Simulation technology that gets used by all the banks and all the business schools around the world So check that out as well, but let's get stuck into it let's talk about markets and let's talk about the week ahead and This is what the charts look like this morning and just to give you a refresher I've got Euro dollar cable on the top followed by gold in the top right But the German Dax the Dow the E-mini S&P and I've got WCI crude in the bottom center And then on the right WCI or excuse me T-notes futures. So here then what you can see is Relative risk on actually the Dow futures already up over 800 S&P's up just shy of a hundred backs up three hundred and seventy-five You got T-notes down 11 ticks It's a pretty decent reversal from where we were when we finished a week last week gold However, marginally up up about three dollars. So not quite plain to the tune of the general risk environment but broadly flat but overall higher equities lower fixed income and then oil prices which saw quite a Dramatic gap down of about 10% at the reopening a trade overnight who have basically clawed back those losses And we're now down just 38 cents. So having reversed course of a good Two two and a half dollars from the overnight move, but we'll discuss that more in a second the main thing of course people are looking at and how to Kind of rationalize why this morning is quite a stop positive type of environment Well, the coronavirus of course remains absolutely Center to investors attention and traders alike So the total confirmed number of cases now just short of 1.3 million with a death toll just under 70,000 now one of the main things though that people are commenting and looking at this morning is this This graphic here is the kind of rolling update from the FT If you actually go on the FT website and go to the coronavirus hyphen latest Web link so usually there's a paywall on the FT website, but they've actually because of this being a Humanitarian issue they've basically unlocked that part website So you can actually use this in real time from the FT for free at the moment So here Italy and Spain's death tolls are plateauing. You can see that here Italy right in the center and Spain actually dipping ever so slightly But the UK and the US every day is bringing more deaths than the last At the moment But a couple of different things to update you on here Italy had the fewest deaths in more than two weeks over the weekend France reported the lowest number in five days Spain's tally fell for three days in a row The US has warned that the hardest week Is still ahead for the coronavirus and on that note? This is what? United States looks like at the moment. So of course very much situated in the New York state and in the northeast part of the country You can see here as well The color is defining whether or not blue being there is a statewide stay-at-home order so definitely much in playing on the the western east coast and then the Kind of stripes lines so Kentucky for example would be an advisory to stay at home These other areas much lower case numbers Iowa, Nebraska North South Dakota and so on where there is no warning in effect if you like So this isn't particularly new I guess we know the delay of the land here and where the more kind of hot spots of this are now at the weekend The US advisory team were warning that we are in for the hardest week of the coronavirus in terms of America So we are expecting this number of currently in America of 337,000 to go much further north unfortunately for the time being However, an interesting development was New York reported its first decline in daily coronavirus deaths on Sunday New Jersey, which is the second highest number of US cases in North America They also saw a slowdown in the death rate So there's a couple of glimmers here some some potential positive signs developing on What we had been watching of course in the likes of China, which is this inevitable kind of peak and then decline of the amount of Confirmed cases and subsequently deaths as well Now this does then lend its hand to two real things on this Subject that I'm watching and let's not get away from the fact that despite economic data and speakers and things happening The coronavirus Updates and how severe or not it becomes is definitely the most the most key macro driving theme for this week once again So the two things I'm really looking for is one with the US in the UK How fast are we accelerating? Obviously as you can see on these lines here, it's still a fairly steep trajectory for the moment So do we continue on that path just going at the same rate? Or do we start to the curve to become more shallow to a certain degree? So that needs monitoring and tracking and then the second thing I'm looking at is areas like Spain Italy and France which you can see have seen very slight dips over the weekend as I've just run through is That sustained or is this just a momentary dip before then we see another phase higher So these are the things I'll be looking at to determine whether or not This truly is something to get much more positive about because the virus trajectory will will decide the economic reality That we have going further forward in the future so That's the kind of wrap up on the the coronavirus side Well, the final one is this this is Boris Johnson, of course has been admitted to hospital I'm not sure if you saw that yesterday now personally. I think the Newspapers and the financial media are trying to make a bit of a mountain out of a molehill here I think it's just such a Sensational headline right the prime minister taking to hospital I was looking on Twitter last night for went to bed and there were loads of rumors about he's being put on a Respiratory system and all this sort of stuff and to be honest It's all just nonsense because it's just people trying to scare scaremonger people just trying to you know Fit some sort of rumor to moves We did dip a little bit and the reopening of trade you can see that that was this Candlestick here, but the moves already been taken back and we're moving higher for the moment. So yeah, I wouldn't I don't really see him being Incapacitated as a massive thing because to be honest He is just a front figure of a whole team of people and particularly when you you think you've got Dominic Rab who's already there chairing most of the meetings anyway Is he's kind of de facto number two and then although Dominic Cummings is also suffering from coronavirus? We know that he really pulls a lot of the strings as well and as far as we're aware He's still in operation for the moment. So yeah, he's in hospital Apparently, it's because he's had persistent virus symptoms. Not that it's got any worse And he's not at this point incapable of doing his job either So even if that headline did come out and he wasn't able to lead I'm not so sure that would be a massive market mover to be honest Or although obviously the national media would make a massive splash about that if that was to be the case With the UK so I've said even though it does look a little bit more promising in New York and New Jersey at the moment According to the data number of deaths at the weekend on Sunday Actually the US have warned the hardest weeks to come for coronavirus But the UK as well according to government advisors and scientists have said that the kind of peak of the outbreak is likely to hit in the next 7 to 10 days So that being said probably going to be quite a tough spot as well politically for the UK politicians this week Just before we move on there was one thing I did want to mention because quickly on my Twitter account I know some of you have really seen this already But I do release the macro menu on a Sunday, which is my kind of view On the week ahead So rather than waiting for markets to reopen and this briefing on a Monday If you didn't want to get ahead of the game and you know You're kind of marking up technically your charts, but you need a bit of a fundamental view of what's going on This is the report that I release And obviously includes a lot of my my thoughts particularly on coronavirus and oil for this week So remember to check that out. It does also have the calendar of highlights of events Which can be quite useful as well for planning your week accordingly in terms of where the potential pivot points could come And on that point the kind of main thing then that we're looking at is oil prices Now I'm just going to bring up the let's just have a Well, this is the oil I'm just going to make sure I've transitioned my screens correctly here. So this was that on Twitter This is my account here if you just search for my name You can click on the macro menu And the macro menu is here with all the the kind of debrief that I give or the preview I should say for the week ahead Now oil prices is the one that a lot of people are looking at and this is because we had such a monumental rally Last week. It was quite incredible. You remember on thursday trump came out with a tweet and he was saying Basically, he's going to get involved. He's going to get saudi and russia to sort this mess out He was speaking to big industry companies on friday And he was starting putting numbers on the table of a global coordinated cuts to the magnitude of 10 million Then he followed up with another tweet of 15 million That really fired up oil prices, but over the weekend Basically, what's happened is It's all come crumbling down a little bit because russia and saudi still are not seeing eye to eye at this point in time And the meeting that was tentatively scheduled today has now been pushed back to thursday And so when markets did reopen Last night, let's just have a quick look at the oil chart What we did have was quite a significant gap down in prices. You can see here now That doesn't look that big, but that's actually about a 10 percent move Now a couple of things here to be aware of Some progress was said to have been made Over sunday, according to diplomats, but a lack of participation from the united states The world's largest producer could prove to be a stumbling block because despite originally calling for the deal President obama gave a speech on saturday not saw if you Not sure if you saw that speech But he described opec as a cartel And he threatened tariffs on foreign oil And he's basically saying well that we're pumping. We're not going to change anything. You need to change stuff And you know, this is the the problem that I saw Kind of last week with the the aggressiveness of the rally that we had is that you know markets if you think about it The the the price that we trade is the price That we think about our forward-looking expectations and trump really has set out a very high bar now that needs to be hit You know the idea of us cutting drastically about 10 percent of global crude oil production I'm just not sure whether or not that's going to happen In terms of if the us aren't taking part and obviously Sounding russia need to take the bulk of that that load and on that point Here's a look at quite an interesting graphic to give you a bit of perspective If you never really looked at these things I'll just transition my screen. This is looking at the the january 2020 oil production for opec and opec plus And what the different colors Signify the blue and the gray the blue is their cutback has reached target So with the way that this deal works is that every Every country or oil producer has an allotted quota or target So you can ascertain whether or not they're being compliant or even in some cases overly compliant like saudi arabia So you can see here saudi q8 angola algeria congo and so on are all Have cut back their production to reach their pre-agreed target Whereas you can see for russia that's not the case And if anything in terms of a compliance level russia has only ever really been more recently at around the 70 percent margin Where a saudi arabia have been going well over and above doing what's necessary in order to really carry in shoulder the burden So it has a you know an actual implication for the move In crude oil, which is you would say fairly unsustainable for them now one of the other things is That you know when we talk about oil prices right now We're not just talking about supply all of the news that the weekend was about supply How much are we going to cut when are we going to cut is an emergency meeting? When is it going to happen? What's the size all these types of things? But if you think about it, it's not just a supply Situation here. There's also a demand one and if anything the demand one is even more worrying I would say than what supply can be done In kind of in terms of manufacturing or maneuvering in a way to try and prop prices up because if you think about it the international energy agency the iea said on friday, they're basically even if OPEC plus were to cut by 10 million that still wouldn't be enough To offset the huge loss of demand on the back of the quarantining and locking down of basically the whole entire globe On this pandemic of coronavirus To give you a bit of context the numbers gob and sack said that the actual hit I think there's either 24 or 26 million brows per day is going to be the demand impact That we're going to see off the back of coronavirus So if you've got a demand impact of say 24 million, but you've got a supply cut of 10 It's still not an equilibrium. So prices are not ultimately are still going to come Further south you would think by logic in that definition. So Although prices are up at the moment. Yeah longer term How sustainable is this rally? Are we going to go to 30 35 40 50? I'm not so sure I guess in the end much like when we're looking at the other things the overall Virus trajectory will determine and decide the outcome in a sense on that demand side because that will be A factor of how the economy is performing overall Interestingly another point I'm watching this week. I saw this morning. Saudi Aramco is delaying the release of some of their pricing Monthly oil pricing list Now if you remember they said when oil prices tanked about two and a half three weeks ago They said that they were going to undercut the market for new customers by 20% And that's what caused that big route in prices right after that An ability to find an agreement at the OPEC meeting So it's quite interesting that I think it could be quite a trigger point because let's say well one You know, this meeting has been tentatively scheduled for thursday now. Could it be delayed? Absolutely it could the more it gets delayed the more negative that is for price because people will assume Then no deal will ever come forward To if Saudi Aramco do come out and is closely watched monthly oil pricing list if it comes out early And they are massively discounting prices Well, then all the more reason why they're not going to have an agreement with russia And then again the rally's off. We start coming back down again coronavirus updates again dependent on that trajectory Whether or not um, france spain italy starts to pick up again Whether the us and uk start to accelerate even further again. This is going to be very important as well for oil prices But the latest that we've had is this this morning This was mosca and riyadh are very very close to an oil deal according to russia's sovereign wealth fund chief And that's what explains that little bit of a bump up in price that we've just had here Since uh, I kind of got to the desk this morning around six o'clock through 27 Up to around 28 bucks where we trade at the moment. Um, just to have a look at a few things. I'm just going to Make this a bit bigger and I'm going to remove my video feed in a second so you can see everything but So let me just see if I can move my camera Like that So here I'm looking at uh, wci crude So this was that big gap down when Saudi started that price brawl on that fallout from the OPEC scheduled meeting But now we've got some real key levels To keep an eye on both on the up and down side here. I've marked up with the ellipsis on the right hand side So that was the gap down the rally that we've had To where we are at the moment So if we continue to move higher then obviously you've got the friday closing high print that was up just above 29 29 13 type level any move above there then we'll be keeping an eye on the 17th of march That would come in at 29 17 and then the probably the uh, a big level here You can see I've got these rectangles where the there's been some key areas really here around 28 49 And then also 30 50 where it's acted as decent support and resistance on both those occasions through Most of march So really where we are at the moment is quite a key area and then if we continue to move up then 30 50 I think would be quite important if we did get a bullish kind of outcome and all signs look good They're going to get a deal then I'll be looking up for a further push then over the coming Days and by the end of the week could we be up through 34 20? possibly I do think though the risks lie to the downside particularly given the fact that now These kind of big numbers like 10 million bar up a day cut have been put on the table. I think a The likelihood of delivering that I think is relatively low at those levels and b even if they did I'm not sure that really offsets the demand impact from coronavirus. So Yeah, I don't know. I think the market's got a little a little bit ahead of itself In that regard While we're on the charts, I'm not going to go over anything other than just oil and the s&p I'll leave sam to tweet a couple of things that he's looking at From a technical side and some of the setups he's got for the week ahead But this Puts into context a little bit. I guess about the the ramp up we've had in the overnight session No chinese trade. It was the Holiday there and obviously this is a holiday shortened week. Don't forget. You got good friday Coming up. So it's only four trading days So he's managed to come back up to the levels we were training right at the end of march Anything north of here. You got a 2600 level which was the march study first kind of High that we saw at that point in time in the the late asian or the late wall street session That I'll also be keeping an eye on intraday Any further pull backs and back to the consolidation that we saw in the early asia part of the session So first of all, we've got the r2 and then those levels down at 29 25 kind of 50 mark All right to finish things off. I quit look at the the calendar for the for the week ahead Today is relatively quiet You've had the german factory orders come out or industrial orders. I should say come out this morning They've printed at minus 1.4 percent Just a little bit better actually than expected expected was for a minus 2.4 percent reading But today pretty quiet overall. So I would say very much a focus on the virus updates I'm sure that's how the us will be looking at things and then the oil price As well needs to be observed quite closely And then on Tuesday, you've got the rba interest rate decision. Obviously, they've already slashed rates now to the effective lower bound. So It's all about commentary and what else are they going to be doing with their unconventional monosuit policy tools to support the economy going forward You've also got a euro group meeting. It can be quite interesting just given the current state of play overall economically in the eurozone Then going further forward into the week on wednesday You've got the fmc meeting minutes Thursday quite a busy day because if you think about it everything starts to get Squashed into thursday given the lack of trade on friday for good friday So the main highlights they've got some uk data industrial manufacturing production the monthly gdp trade balance construction output all coming up for the uk Weekly jobless claims Continues to be a massive thing, of course You know if you did read my macro menu, you know that what we had last week, of course was this monumental Rise in jobless claims 10 million now the last two weeks So would be anticipating a number again that multiple mid kind of millions this time around Which means that it's pretty much all but inevitable that The severity of the q2 gdp4 is going to be significant and unemployment in america Although it's just around the low four and four percent numbers at the moment It's most likely as we can see here 4.4 percent that number is going to go well into the mid teens in my opinion Over the coming weeks and months as we'll see in the further payroll reports to come in april and may That would far and exceed the 10 percent peak that we saw in around 2009 in the depths of the financial crisis So economically this is going to be way worse than the global financial crisis ever was Really i'd say it's a lot of a byproduct of the immediacy Given it's a health issue and it's required an immediate lockdown and stopping of many most businesses Is why it's been so magnified in terms of such an immediate and large-scale impact on the economy, but you know payroll numbers are going to be into the multiple millions I think come the next report we'll see in about four weeks time All right, that is it from me. So any questions? Just let me know leave a leave them in the the video Comment section i'll get back to you throughout the day, and then I will wish you a good week ahead. Thanks very much guys


In 2013, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service entered into a cooperative agreement with the South Dakota No-Till Association and IGRO, SDSU Extension, for delivering the latest soil health and productivity technology to South Dakota farmers and ranchers. This event was held in Mitchell. All right. Well, thanks, Jason, and thanks, Ruth. I'm sorry I can't be there. In person today, I've had a few things that demanded my attention that just prevented travel for the next couple of days and everything. But I do want to spend a little bit of time talking about soil health and its foundation for efficient crop reduction and climate resilience. And basically, the bottom line is that without soil health, you're not going to be able to cope with some of the things that are going to happen. Here's my contact information. And as has been said, I do direct two things. I direct the National Lab for Agriculture and the Environment. And then I direct the Midwest climate hub, which basically covers everything from Ohio through Iowa and from Minnesota down to Missouri. So those eight Midwestern states that are synonymous with the corn belt and everything. Basically, what that means is I work two jobs for the same amount of pay. So I do have a, I've taken a cut and paid with two directorships. But I do want to spend this time going through a number of different pieces on why soil health is important. How do we talk about soil degradation? How do we talk about soil enhancement and then finally building climate resilience and we'll leave time for some questions and all of this. We start out with why soil health is important. And we can get a lot of different things. The economic value of this is one piece of that puzzle. And we've seen anything from $75 to $100 per acre as the value of improved soil health. I was on the phone with a producer this morning that said that basically he thinks is probably in that economic range and all of this in terms of the different things. And I'll weave some of that together as we go through this. And just to start it off, we'll start with this piece of it. And it's a study that we did back in 2013 and 14 in which we looked at county yields. Each one of those points on that graph is the average of three years of data. Corn, this is soybean data. Excuse me, soybean data in this. You can imagine that there's a large amount of variation in this. Those county yields are plotted against the National Crop Commodity Productivity Index, which NRCS has in their database. So it's readily available for all the states. It's part of their whole structure. But the piece of this that becomes very important is that as we improve the soils, we improve the average county yield for soybeans in this. And you get down in those dark circles that the Kentucky yields, we have a lot of poor soils for water holding capacity. There's also, in a lot of those, if you look at average county yields, there are sometimes those yields go to zero. And so there's a large amount of variation. But interestingly enough, as we improve the soils, we improve the mean county yield. You can ask what's wrong with Nebraska. All of those data points lay above that. They have higher average county yields. And that's because in this study we went through when we only selected the irrigated counties out of Nebraska. Bottom line is if you can supply the water when that crop needs it through the growing season, soils really don't have a major impact. So basically a consistent yield across the whole range of different soils. The other piece of this is we... Start your slides show. So the slides are bigger? Yeah, they're on full screen. On our screen we're seeing the left-hand side with your slides. And then the center screen is the slide. I just wanted to increase that. That's fine. Let's see if that... Because I'm showing them full size here. Let me see what I can do just a second. I'll trim it down just a second. Now with that I can take it up just a little bit more. One of the things we find when we start working with producers is that they manage their crop as if they had higher quality soils than what they actually do. And so one of the things in this whole climate resilience piece is really to start getting producers to understand what their soil resource looks like. And if you look at this, this just happens to be corn yields or maize yields. We see the same thing in terms of the crop commodity productivity index, the better the soils, the higher the average county yield. And we see that with individual producers as well. And so we got very curious about what this looks like across the Midwest. You see that those darker areas in there, the high quality soils, parts of Indiana, Illinois extending into Iowa into Minnesota. And then as we get the light colored soils as we go around that. One of the things that we see as we move across counties in the Midwest is that we're changing the average county yield as a result of what soils are there and how resilient they are to the different extremes of weather that we have within each growing season of mass standpoint. Also as we extend into Corn Belt into North Dakota and South Dakota, we're moving it into areas that have soils that will have limited productive capacity unless the growing season is absolutely perfect. And so a lot of things that we've been looking at and just to put it in a pictorial piece for you. This is a soybean production field that's just west of Ames here. The left hand side is that field with a aircraft image taken in early August. And you can see there's a few light spots on that, but for the most part it's pretty green. It's supposed to saturate that index that we use. That same field is on the right hand side. Three weeks later in late August, you can see a lot of different areas in that. And basically what is denoting is in those light colored areas that's leaf drop, really early senescence on that. I did put on there that dark colored area in the center. It ran about 65 bushels in the acre. Those lighter areas are the yellow areas about 25 bushels in the acre. We lost 40 bushels in the acre because it didn't rain in a three-week period. And so what we're seeing in a lot of this is that soils really do have a major impact late in the growing season because of the amount of water that they're holding, amount of water that they can make available to that crop. And if that water is not available, then we find out that that's really causing a problem in terms of being able to achieve these high yields. And we see the same thing. This is just a yield map that's been smoothed and everything with geostatistical techniques. Those green areas are the low-yielding areas, purple areas, the high-yielding areas. We've looked at this field over the whole period of time, and we see that those green areas, the low-yielding areas are pretty consistent in that field, mainly because they're water-limited. If the soils have limited water-holding capacity, and when we get into that grain-filling period, they basically become water-stressed. It may not show up in terms of leaf rolling or leaf tipping in terms of soybeans, but physiologically they're having an impact in terms of the overall process. What this has led us to is a whole concept where we really begin to look at why are crops behaving the way that they do relative to the conditions that are out there. This just happens to be corn or maize from Story County. That upper line across that straight line is what we call attainable yield. That's the yields in which weather really wasn't limiting factor during that period from 1950 through 2012. That's the straight line, the jagged line below that is the actual county yields. Then that dashed line at the bottom is the yield gap, the difference between that straight line and the actual yields. You see in those big drops of 1978, 88, 2012, 93, you've got flooding, you've got drought, all of those other things that cause yield gaps, but what's been more important is the graph that's on the lower right-hand side. That is when we take a look at the fraction of attainable yield, and that's what that x-axis is relative to the frequency of that yield gap, is what we're finding is that we're losing 20% of our yield, 80% of time, because of the interactions between what the weather is within that season and the soil. One of the things that becomes very important in all of this is that that 20% yield loss is well within our capabilities to think about how do we improve our soils. If you would think about smoothing out 20% of your yield loss over time, it becomes a different value looking at the economics of what soil health is really worth. If you look at this, this is for Story County. This is Christian County, Illinois. We've actually computed these yield gaps in these relationships for all 677 counties across the Midwest, so we have a pretty good idea of how these are responding. You can see that they change patterns and quite look the same as the Story County yield. This is soybeans from Story County, again looking at different crops. You see where those drops occurred in all of this, and then here's Christian County, Illinois, soybeans as well. These are quite instructive to us. When we look at a county level basis, we've been doing this at field scale as well, where we can get a sufficient length of record to start looking at things and just really why is yield disappearing within fields, and we begin to see those dynamics as part of this. If you look at another piece of this puzzle which shows you the value of soil, and this is crop insurance claims, and we've been looking at crop insurance across the Midwest. This is all of the aggregate. We find that the top insurance claim is excessive moisture and precipitation, means that it's wet in the spring. We're either drowning out spots or we have so much wetness that it's reducing growth that limits yield. The next one is drought. Those two claims, excessive moisture and excessive precipitation or drought, account for 55% of the insurance claims across the Midwest. The third one is actually frost, and you can see how low that is relative to the rest of them. The third piece, if we look at drought and excessive moisture in terms of crop insurance claims, becomes another facet of how do we look at the conditions of the soil in this, and we can begin to relate it back to the National Crop Commodity Productivity Index from that perspective, and we get it for soybeans as well. We see the same types of things, excessive moisture or drought, are the top insurance claims for soybeans from that standpoint. It really puts a different framework on how we're looking at soils, how do we look at the variation of weather within a growing season, and what does that mean? So all of this really has gotten down to a point of which a little bit, and what I started with is this whole aspect that I call the soil degradation spiral. And if you look at this, and really in a factor of how do soils degrade, how do we move from really high quality soils to more quality soils, and what does that mean for us? You start out with something that's what you might call poor land management. You can put your own definition to that. One of the first things that we see when we begin to institute something as poor land management is aggregation begins to degrade. The very surface of that soil in terms of the aggregate stability begins to change. We end up with compaction of crusting because those aggregates that sand silt and clay is no longer held apart. And so we begin to see that soil begins to puddle very quickly. Then we end up with water wind erosion in there. It makes it extremely susceptible to the extremes that are out there. Extreme events in precipitation, which are becoming more common. We see a lot more erosion coming off of fields. Then as we have water wind erosion, we reduce plant growth because we no longer have the soils available to it. If we don't have the plant growth, then we begin to reduce the soil biology or how we're feeding that biology. We ultimately end up in reducing yield and then we end up with reduced soil productivity. And that latter part, we get negative responses to weather variation. The more variable the weather, the higher the yield variation is among years or within fields because it's no longer that perfect growing season that we need to make that all happen and everything. So if you think about it just from that perspective, we begin to see all of this. You see erosion occurring on these fields. These are typical scenes across the island, 2013. When we had lots of rainfall during the spring, we see the same thing in 2014. We've seen the same thing in 2015. A lot of wheels, bellies, a lot of svelting on the edge of the field, a lower right-hand corner. We basically have eroded everything down to the planar track in that. So you can see that there's a lot of corn that got washed down with that as well. So I mean erosion tends to be one of our bigger problems in terms of protecting the soil surface as well. And if you think about this because there's always this discussion, well, there isn't that much erosion. We only talk about four tons per year, which is 25,000th of an inch on that. On a yearly basis, that's a pretty small pile. But if you look at 40 years and you get 160 tons or one inch of soil loss, that becomes a fairly large pile of soil loss at one acre. And you think about this is that in 2015, because of some of the intense storms that we had, we had estimated soil erosion losses that were anywhere from 50 to 100 tons per acre. And so we're losing way more than what is even tolerable from a standpoint of really what does it take to replace that soil and everything else. So we have to be honest with ourselves in terms of really that as we move soils around, we're having real problems in terms of this. And the other piece of this that you all know in South Dakota and North Dakota more than we think because we're not supposed to have wind erosion, but this is a scene that is actually just south of Ames. This was in the spring of 2014. That stump that's on the edge of the field there, it's covered with about two inches of topsoil. And so we've blown a lot of high-quality topsoil nutrients off of that. We estimate just back-calculating from the size of that soil, the size and the depth of that soil that's over there, probably anywhere from three to four tons per acre lost by wind erosion. And this is from a stage in which wind erosion isn't a big factor for the water erosion. So all of this, and so we have to think about this aspect of soil and soil resilience as a removing soil, whether causing a problem in terms of the dynamics that are going on. So when we think about this degradation process, we think about it from a standpoint that how do we begin to change all of this. And so you look at the fragile nature of our soils, the aspect of what it takes to degrade a soil is that slippery slope, the slippery side that heads down there. We can go down that fairly quickly. But the other one is what I call the soil degradation climb in this because everybody keeps asking how you build soils back up. And if we think about building soils back up as a stair step in there and I just use a simple diagram of a stair master because it is going to take work and it's going to take some energy to make that happen. But the first one on that improving soils is biological activity. Is that we build soils through biological activity, not by chemical or physical manipulation. It's not something that we add to the soil.  It's really how do we create a home for that biological activity to work. And you think about this. One of the things that biological activity does is increase the rate of organic matter turnover. It increases organic matter turnover and improves nutrient cycling. And all of this is what I term the invariable and dynamic processes that are going on because they're below the soil surface. We often don't think about them but the reality they're working. And then what they do is we move up that ladder as we begin to improve the soil structure. We improve water availability. Those are the visible outcomes and all of this. And all of a sudden you end up with improved efficiency, water use or nutrient use. You improve the yield and ultimately you improve the profit. The individual I was talking to this morning in terms of understanding this process he's producing well over 200 bushels of corn per year with less than 140 pounds of nitrogen applied. In fact he thinks he can even reduce that more because of this improved nutrient cycling in all of this. And so it's really about understanding these dynamics and what goes on. And so in this whole puzzle, this biological activity is really something that we need to think about how do we manage ourselves to create a favorable system for our biology to work in all of this. And so you think about this in terms of benefits of clock residue and I'll just explain what I mean by that because if you think about this simple clock residue on the surface the first thing that it does is basically stabilize that microclimate because what does biology want? So biology wants the same things that you and I want. They want a nice shelter. They want food. They want water. They want oxygen. And you think about what your desires and life are. Food, water, shelter, oxygen and all of this. And so that residue layer on top of that soil surface is really modifying that microclimate. So it's not going through extremes. A bare soil surface in June and Central Iowa here will reach 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. At the one inch depth it will reach over 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Protein begins to denature 104. So a lot of times we just really cook the biology out of our soil. And without that biology we don't have the mechanism to make those stable aggregates and to keep them in a stable form over time because that poor land management, that first step down there we see aggregation, aggregates to grade within a one year period as we begin to abuse the soil and everything else. So this thing is very, very quick in terms of changing. So a stabilization of that microclimate, that residue layer also protects that soil surface from the forces of rainfall so it infiltrates the water a lot quicker. It suppresses evaporation so that it maintains a healthier water environment. It protects those aggregates so that there's gas exchange between the soil and the atmosphere as well. And when you think about this, when you put it into perspective the left hand side is a passive protected blanket that would just be the residue on that surface and then there's an active protected blanket that has a cover crop on it. And from the physical aspects that cover crop and the crop residue basically behave the same. The difference between them is that an active protected blanket with its root system that's going into that soil profile is continuing to feed or supply sugars and exudates into that biological system longer than the root residue and the other parts of the corn residue system or the passive residue system effect. So cover crops have an advantage in all of this. If you go back and you begin to think about how quickly soils respond when we begin to change or go to a cover crop cocktail that's where you see the most rapid increase of soil organic matter. And my hypothesis in that is that the reason we see that with the cover crop cocktails is that we are promoting a more diverse soil biological system. And so it's not only diversity above the surface, it's diversity below the surface that's causing a response as well. So you have to think about this soil as a living organism that it's not really a passive system and it's not driven just by the bacteria that are there but you've got everything from mammals to earthworms to insects. You've got micro fauna, micro flores, and a mighty bacteria, algae, fungi, all of that.  They move the water soil back and forth. They're a living soil team. A lot of this, they're all working together in terms of this total soil factory that we have out there. And so if you think about a really, really healthy soil, lots of biological activity, you have the equivalent of two African elephants per acre out there. So you've got 10,000 pounds of biological material that's underneath of that surface that's doing all sorts of different things as well. And so that becomes a very interesting piece of this program in terms of how do we look at managing that to maintain its biological component from that standpoint. So residue and cover crops. The first piece of this is really about stabilizing that microclimate. So it provides the shelter aspects of what the biological needs are. Everything it does is provide the food source to the microbes. It supplies that food need as well. It also provides the source of nutrients to be recycled in the sand. And this aspect really becomes an important part of this overall dynamic of what we look at. And just to give you an example, this is a comparison that we've been doing looking at it. The dash line is super-use. That's the stabilized urea that is an enhanced efficiency fertilizer. Perfect blend is a composted chicken manure. It has three different strains of bacillus in it. So it's a biological fertilizer that we put with this. This is just we've measured leaf chlorophyll throughout the whole growing season. One of the things that we begin to see when we start changing the biological system is that we improve the greenness of that crop during the grain filling period because the grain filling is about just about one day, one ninety-five in this graph here. So the plants are greener and longer during the grain filling period. What we found is that that translates into improved yield because the better we can make that biological activity late in the growing season is that we can improve the yields and all of this. So we've actually built a little index. We just integrate under the curve of leaf chlorophyll readings just during the grain filling period. And so it gives us a way of looking at just really how effective that biological system is in maintaining greenness and then translating that into yield. The yield component on corn happens to be the weight per hundred grain. So we're actually making each kernel bigger because we just have more and more carbohydrates to put into that leaf. But when we really think about soil health, we just can't think about the nitrogen dynamics or anything else. It's a carbon cycle because we're cycling organic material. It's a water cycle and how we influence that. It's a nitrogen cycle because of how we decompose and how we mineralize all this. Realize it in a crop production system. We're driving it by solar radiation out there. But too often we try to separate these out. But in reality, when we look at farming systems, we're talking about the combination of these three things all together. And just look at this from a standpoint of a study that Sal reported on about ten years ago on what happens in continuous no-till systems and the phases that the soil goes through. And I just want to call attention to a couple of different pieces of this. On that initial phase, what we're really doing is reestablishing the microbial biomass because we're maintaining that stable microclimate. And as we increase the stability of that soil microclimate for the biology to work, is that we begin to rebuild the aggregates. Then you start increasing residue. You change all of this. And then finally you get over to that 20-year period. You've got extremely high nutrient cycling and all of this.  So when you look at the economics, as you go across this from a five-year to a 20-year time frame, pieces that we begin to see affected. And particularly during that 10 to 20-year period out there is improved water availability. So we have greater resilience of that soil to variations of weather. That 20% year loss that we see, we can begin to overcome by how we increase the organic matter content of that soil. We get an economic advantage because of this improved nutrient cycling is that we can get the same yields or higher yields with less nutrient input because we're cycling them a lot quicker. We get better crop performance, so we have higher yield potentials in this whole system as well. So all of these things are working for us throughout this whole dynamic and all of this. The unfortunate part is that in its initial phase is when a lot of people get to that point and then they give up on it as well. Why this is becoming important is a couple of different reasons and why climate resilience becomes part of this. We've been looking at the changes in climate across the upper Midwest that just an example for Iowa. This is the annual precipitation on a statewide average. In 1895, we were just a little above 30 inches. We were just shy of 35 inches, so over that 120 year period we increased the annual rainfall by about 5 inches. But more importantly, why this becomes important and this is what we see across the upper United States in the upper Midwest and extending into North Dakota and South Dakota is that this lower part and that is that we're having more and more of our precipitation comes as spring precipitation. Summer is sometimes trending down, sometimes remaining even in all of this. But also you see the variation is beginning to increase as well. So if we think about more spring precipitation and our soil is not set up to handle high intensity events, we end up with a lot of runoff, we end up with a lot of erosion, a number of different things that have bad consequences as we go on. Everything we see in all of this is that we're just looking at a simple change. May-June precipitation, which we pass by as spring versus July-August precipitation, which would be in summer at the left hand quadrant would be dry springs, wet summers. Lower left hand would be dry springs, dry summers. This is all the data, again from just from Illinois, 1895 through 2013. The point I want to make is that all of these data are pretty well clustered. But the recent years, and this is what we see across the Midwest, is that our 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14 have been planted on here are all out on the fringes of what we've seen in the past. Our weather is becoming more variable. It is becoming more unique combinations of weather events in terms of what the precipitation regime looks like, in addition to intensity of precipitation, the decreasing frequency of some of our precipitation events, and more variable center of precipitation really needs us to ask ourselves how do we manage in this condition, which is there. This happens to be Minnesota. They're 12 and 13 at the bottom, 2009 was on the other side, 2010 was on the fringe, and this is 2011. It actually had to be in the center of that. 2014 was on the fringe as well. So what we see across the Midwest is that we're becoming more variable. Here's really what concerns a lot of us in this, and this is the longer term projections in terms of precipitation. Winter precipitation is going to increase all of us relative, and if you think about this, it will have our precipitation in the winter, so even a 10% increase isn't a whole lot. But the bigger factor is the more we're seeing in the upper Midwest, more spring precipitation. The southern part of the United States are expected to decrease, but the one that should concern us is this lower left-hand one in terms of the sum of quadrants, is that all the models are agreeing and we're seeing the trend already in the data is that our summer precipitation is decreasing and becoming more variable. You think about the implications of that just for a minute, and that is that we built our agricultural systems on reliable summer rainfall, and we're going to be moving into a pattern in which we have less reliable summer rainfall. And so it really gives us the point that we need to really think about how do we manage our soils to be much more efficient water reservoirs, much more efficient water capture systems in all of this from agriculture's perspective. The whole change in climate and climate variability is really about water management, which says that soil management becomes part of this overall puzzle. And in the fall, the Great Plains States and the United States were rejecting a fall decline and fall precipitation as well. So you think about all of this in terms of the dynamics, it really gives us the point of just how do we think about soils as part of this aspect. And if you think about this from a different viewpoint, one of the things that we see with this changing temperature regime, changing precipitation regime is really what's going to happen with the soil of biodiversity out there is that we're going to have to put our soils into position to be able to protect and maintain that shelter aspect of soil biology to create conditions in which that biological system can be maintained. And again, it's back to food, water, shelter, oxygen, all of those things that we need to survive are going to be disrupted by just the signals that we're already seeing in the changing weather and climate that we have out there as well. So if you think about the science of soil health, we often assume we can change soil health without considering that we need to use soil biology as a first step. A lot of people would say, well, you know, I can add this to the soil, I can do this to the soil. But in reality, first we need to stabilize that soil biology to allow us to do the thing and then recognize that biology is linked to all the attributes that we consider soil health. It's the biology that builds those stable aggregates and it's the biology that maintains those aggregates as well. We see erosion events occurring in soils that have as little as one inch of rain over a 24-hour period because our soils are not in capacity to take those rain events, even small rain events, without causing ponding and runoff. So if you think about this last part of the system out there in terms of climate resilience, there's all this emphasis right now on climate smart agriculture. How do we build agricultural systems that are resilient to the climate? And the first piece of that is really about building organic matter. It's about how do we take minimum tillage, conservation tillage, build that in terms of reducing the tillage piece of it or increasing the residue aspects in terms of diversifying crop rotations or changing that. But that's only part of this overall puzzle. We have to integrate it with nutrient management practices that allow that crop to respond to what it does. If we look at this, how do we begin to think about improving water and nutrient use efficiency as an output of this? How do we get the most crop for a unit of water? How do we get the most crop for either the nitrogen out there? And I do believe that we've got to integrate livestock management practices. But the key of all of this is climate smart agriculture is going to be a result of putting improved soil and water management practices into practice. And not just talking about them but actually putting them into practice because that will become the attributes of climate smart agriculture. If you look at this, the water soils, the results from Hudson over 20 years ago showed that organic matter content and available water content in the soil were linearly related. The higher we can make organic matter content, the more water we have available. Also, if you think about this standpoint, as we reduce our organic matter, we reduce the capacity of that soil to infiltrate water. And we see more and more of these events as we see in this upper left-hand graph with water running off the fields and causing reels and gullies. And again, it's back to this field right here, is that as we've looked on field scale basis is that our yield variability comes from the soil's inability to supply water during grain filling. That fooling bristles was the fact that our soils did not have the capacity to supply the water when that crop needed it. So you end up with a lot of only leafshed diminished efficiency of that crop from that standpoint. So climate resilience is really derived from a soil's ability to supply water nutrients to that crop throughout the growing season. So health is the ability of that soil to supply those fundamental needs of a plant. A staple home, a root anchor, food, air, and water. One of the things in this that we see, and I'll go back now to this excessive moisture claim. The excessive moisture in where we see a lot of the yield decreases early in the season are really the soil's inability to exchange, not carbon dioxide but oxygen. And you see plants that are in waterlogged or near waterlogged or higher than field capacity soils. What we see is that those soils or those crops, you know, they're yellow. Everybody says that that's due to the lack of nitrogen or the nitrogen leaks too. No, it's not really. It's due to the lack of oxygen. We get a very stable soil aggregate surface in there. Same soils. So the types of everything, you see that those same amount of rainfall are not causing near that visible damage that are out there. So oxygen becomes a major part of this overall puzzle. Water obviously becomes part of it. Degraded soils are not climate resilient. They are climate dependent. The productivity out of a degraded soil is only going to be a function of how good that weather is during that growing season. The more variable that weather, the more variable that productivity will be in the year. And so you think about that 20% yield loss that we have. We start looking at yield gaps is that we can begin to close that by how we improve the soils and all of this. So our challenge, and when you think about the upper Midwest and you move into the South Dakota and the more rainfall limited area, is really to enhance the soil resource through soil health to increase the water availability of that crop. Think about what an extra inch of water during the growing season would be worth in terms of economic productivity. That's what we often derive at $75 to $80 an acre. The individual from Indiana has been in improving soil health, putting in context of $90 to $100 an acre increased profit across that. And he farmed 6,000 acres. So you can quickly do the math and see what that's worth to you. What we have to do and all of this is how do we begin to increase the biological activity to increase the organic matter cycling and nutrient cycling through a stable microclimate at the soil surface. Is that we can't expect this to work if we continue to disrupt the soil surface, disrupt the biology. We have to protect the soil against extremes and climate extremes of precipitation that we see occurring in this. Because in addition to this shifting signal in terms of seasonality, we see that this is already beginning to become evident. Is it more and more rainfall events are coming as heavy rainfall events? We get very intense storms in all of this. So we've got to protect the soil against this otherwise we end up with more erosion in all of this. Producers often ask me, what's the best measure of soil health out there? And I've really come to realize that it may come down to simply this. What's the surface of your soil look like after a two inch heavy rain? Go on your field and look after heavy rainstorm. And if it's all puddle, you see water running off, you really have real aggregate stability at the surface. But if you don't see ponding, you've water infiltrating, then you're never set up in terms of well aggregated soil from that standpoint. So with that, I'll entertain questions in all of this. There's just two things to think about and I left out a few minutes for questions and everything. So Jason? Okay, CRP for 20 years. I've got almost no residue on the field. I've got some heavy rain and of course the surface, you know, I consider that almost to be like a recently tilled field because of the rain. So how far of a step back did we take? You know, we had 40 years in and now it's like I said, the surface doesn't look good. How long will it take us to build back to where we probably were? What are you going to do going forward? I mean, if you go back to, you can try to put that back into a corn soybean rotation system or is it going to be in a more diverse rotation? It's cover crops and options. If you can get that then back into a corn bean wheat rotation and protect that surface because it keeps that residue on the surface just to begin to diminish the impact of the rainfall. The two years in soybeans is probably what hurt you the most. If you can put it back into that corn wheat soybean rotation, you probably see healing within the first, actually I've seen changes under a wheat system within the first year right at the sole surface. And because the small grain wheat system really does seem to remove a lot of biological activity. It stabilizes that. You can go to very reduced tillage and maintain that residue. And even on the wheat stubble is really allowing that stubble to stand so that it captures snow.  But that whole aspect of having that standing residue modifies that microclimate near the sole surface. It changes the whole temperature regime. Those standing stems absorb rain drop energy, do different things. Corn stocks as well absorb that energy. So, things will come back fairly quickly on that. So, you know, just be patient with it. But, you know, you go out there after that first year and I think as you look at that upper core range, you'll see the changes already beginning to occur. Okay, hearing none. Thank you Dr. Hatfield for joining us today. It was really good presentation. Give him a hand.


Second piece of news, Spider-Man has a new home. Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime has some good superhero stuff. That's like their thing. They got the boys. The boys is a good show. Which I know you didn't like the last season, but the boys, yeah, you're done. But the boy, a lot of people are still on board. I'm iffy on it. And then you have Invincible, which is fantastic. That's what was good. But they've only had one season, so they have plenty of time to screw that up as well. I still think like Amazon, like when I think like Amazon movies, it's just, I don't know, man.  Well, here we have Spider-Man spinoff series, Silk. Lands order at MGM Plus and Amazon with Angela Kong, Angela Kang, as showrunner. Forms part of suite of Marvel series from Sony TV. Sony doesn't have a good history. Sony is a Sony vehicle. I was about to say Sony does not have a good history, so. Well, they do get, they have Into the Spider-Verse, which is phenomenal. That's, but that's like one in a million. I know, I know. That's like one in a million. It's not their strong suit. So here we have a slew of Marvel characters. I like the word slew. I use it when I can. All the D characters. Are heading to the small screen after the MGM Plus, the linear network formerly known as Epic's and Amazon Prime Video ordered a suite of live-action series from Sony Pictures. The Spider-Man spinoff series, Silk, Spider Society, which has been in the works for some time, will be the first show to emerge from the pack with the walking dead's Angela Kang, set as showrunner. The deals in culmination of a complex web of rights that meant the series will have to debut first on a linear network, in this case, MGM Plus, which is set to be relaunched with its new name in January. Oh my God. So MGM Plus, is that the HBO Max right now? I'm guessing so. So anyway, so Amazon's gonna merge with MGM Plus to put out these movies now? So what I think is MGM Plus, they have to be featured on other things and then they'll go to Amazon Prime. Gotcha. MGM Plus will have the first window in the US and the series will then air on Amazon Prime Video streaming services in the States.   I'm just not a fan of Sony. So that with MGM Plus and all this other streaming, it lost me. But knowing how I am, being a movie buff and a TV show buff, I'm definitely gonna watch it. We could do whatever we want. Yeah, I don't, I just don't care. I really don't. I really don't care. Too much superhero stuff. It's all boring. I wanna see the X-Men. Yeah. Yeah, X-Men, I guess. You talking about the new animated show?  Yeah, the new animated show going to Disney Plus. It's gonna be pretty good though. Disney Plus is hot trash for shows. Yeah, but I think they're gonna- They got the original show runners and some of the- And I think they got the original voices too. Not sure. Yeah, maybe. I hope they do. It's just Tara Strong doing the voices of everyone. She does like all the voices.


At Audiology Associates of Prestonsburg, you can live your life the way you want and find the freedom of better hearing. You'll experience patient care that is specific to you with exceptional follow-up care that ensures your hearing and balance needs are being met. Audiology Associates at 1428 Northlake Drive in Prestonsburg. As floodwaters begin to recede, residents of Floyd and Knot counties have been left with destroyed homes, wrecked businesses and waterlogged vehicles. Many residents are also trapped in their homes due to collapsed roadways and bridges. I've been up for two days watching these storms come in from Missouri. The far chief lives straight across from me, but he had a stroke and he's trying to recover. And I knew that how the water comes up and this time here the water come up faster. I've been here for 40 years. I was born here, but I left to come back. I've been here 40-some years. I have never ever saw water come up this fast in my life. I went in my building just to check to see if it was getting in it and it was already six inches in the building. By the time I made it in the house, I didn't even make it to the house.  As far as I was in the water to get electrocuted, I went in the house and when the good people out there sees this and hears it, you better listen to your emergency alerts from the news people because when they tell you something, it's going to come. Jenny Wiley, Pine Mountain and Buckhorn Lake have opened to those who have lost their homes and shelters are also open at the Brethwick County Courthouse and the First Presbyterian Church in Hazard. He grew up here. I grew up here. I'm 69. I've never seen anything like this in Pine Mountain. I've never saw any devastation from a flood like this. These are just terrible times. They happen in life. Like I said, I'm 69. I've never seen it like this in Pine Mountain. I'm sure there's people that are really suffering a lot and more than we are here. We'll board it up and see what happens. It's terrible though. If anyone is looking for a family member, contact the Kentucky State Police at<PHONE_NUMBER>. If you would like to donate to help the victims of the flooding, go to tmekyfloodreleasefund.ky.gov. For Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.


Good evening. Back in April I created my first ever ARG coverage video, talking about the channel Gunslinger Pro 2009. It was my first upload to achieve a notable view count, and while I've tried to branch out into the other types of videos I enjoy creating, spooky Gmod content has proven to be a great way of keeping my primary subscriber base satiated. I've been promising and promising that a follow-up video on Gunslinger was on the way for months, setting the holdover as me waiting until there's more content since I don't think a full analysis video would be appropriate for an update consisting of only one upload. I mean, after all, four out of my 36 videos have been ARG related, so it's probably time to stop milking the genre. However, with all the time that's passed, I'm starting to doubt that a new upload from Gunslinger is coming anytime soon. As I said, he's only posted once since my first analysis, and that was half a year ago at this point. This gives me two options. One is to keep holding out for an upload that might not be coming and risk being unable to fulfill my promise, and the other is to give people what they want, even if it's a little lacking. I'm sure you can tell what I've opted to do. But today I'm going to cover this one new video, get everyone on the same page regarding some details I missed in my original analysis, and then close by speculating on what happened to Gunslinger, because I'm actually a little bit worried about the project. Without further ado, here is this sole new upload from the channel titled Gary's Mod Ultimate Sled Tutorial. Have a look. Here we see Gunslinger in the classic Sled Build game mode, a relic of the Gmod 12 era. I remember spending hours on this map when I was younger, so this video hit me right in the nostalgia glands. Gunslinger shows us how to make a speedy sled, explaining that lighter props like signs and cardboard are the key since they go down slopes quicker. We see him put together a sled, deck it out with some Team Fortress 2 memorabilia including a red heavy rag doll, and then slide down the path to the bottom. Once he's crossed the finish line, Gunslinger gets off his sled and begins hearing a voice. He turns to see the heavy, now standing up from the sled and gesturing at him. In what seems to be a fit of anger, Gunslinger grabs the heavy with the Fizz gun and flings him into the air. As the video comes to a close, we hear what sounds like the heavy choking. So let's address the obvious. This heavy is alive, shocker, and it looks like his attempt to make peace with the player didn't end quite how he was hoping. This scene is the most blatant depiction of Gunslinger pro's brutality yet. All speculation that he's unaware of their sentient condition is shattered, as he is shown cruelly attacking someone who is simply trying to socialize with him. One interesting revelation from this video is that the ragdolls can talk, and not just in preset voice lines it seems. The line heavy starts before being attacked is a you are good friend, which is spliced from two separate voice commands. This could imply that the ragdolls have the ability to speak freely, which humanizes them in a way that makes Gunslinger's treatment of them even more cruel. The last thing I have to note about this video is that the heaviest line, engineer is credit to team, along with the screenshot flashed at the beginning, confirm my first video's theory that the player represents himself as the red engineer with the Gunslinger equipped. We now know that if this character pops up again, it is a direct self-portrayal of Gunslinger. Overall, while this video doesn't introduce many new elements to the ARG, it does give us the most upfront display of Gunslinger's sadism, and continues to show off the creator's fine grasp of the era he's imitating. Now, let's talk about some things I missed in my last video. User Combine on Trial Mod was the first commenter I could trace this now well-known trivia back to. At the beginning of the ragdoll walker video, the red soldier appears to be sending an encoded message to the viewer. This implies that the lines are diegetic and not edited in post by Gunslinger, and hints at the now confirmed fact that the ragdolls can speak and communicate. While it holds no bearing to the story itself, I've also seen a lot of speculation that the method used to create this smooth movement from the Spy as Sandwich video involves the Kinect, since Garry's Mod has support for it. I really believe this effect could have been achieved in nearly any animating software, but I suppose it's a possibility. And the last notable thing that's come to light since my video is that at least two of Gunslinger's videos are replicas of actual old era Garry's Mod machinimas. Spy as Sandwich, for one, is a shot-for-shot recreation of the 2009 video, Sandwich as Spy, and plays out identically up until the moment the Spy appears and starts banging on the screen. The other example of this is Sniper as Century, which, though not filmed on the same map, sports the same premise as a video of the same name from Loll Bean's productions. So with all these updates out of the way, I want to get to the real point of this video, which is to ask what happened to Gunslinger Pro 2009? Well, one rumor that's been absolutely inextinguishable since I released my first video on Badwater is that Badwater is Gunslinger and that the creator moved on to it as a new project. But having talked to the creator of Badwater myself, I can tell you firsthand that this is not true. There is no connection between these two ARGs beyond inspiration and they are not directly affiliated in any way. In fact, I can confirm that this line in the Badwater Q&A video was actually meant to direct people away from this theory. But if that's not the case, then what happened? Well, since I never got in contact with Gunslinger's creator, I can only offer my guesswork. Perhaps they didn't want the attention or didn't enjoy the pressure now that so many eyes were judging the project. They did make the sled video after the channel blew up, but that might have been meant as a send-off. There's also the possibility that the ARG is still active behind the scenes planning something huge, but I doubt it. What I find more likely is that the channel's stagnation has something to do with its aforementioned fan-made successor, Badwater Videos 2009. Badwater popped up during the peak of Gunslinger's popularity, then proceeded to put out videos that were no offense, but less subtle and a good degree easier to follow. And they put them out much more frequently as well. I've heard Gunslinger described as a collection of cryptic, unnerving videos while Badwater is more like a structured series with a story arc, and I'm inclined to agree. Badwater's heightened activity during Gunslinger's stagnant period, as well as its recognizable mascots like Melon Man and the Tee the Near, played a big role in helping the channel eclipse Gunslinger's views and subscribers. And I could see how it would be demoralizing to the creator of Gunslinger to see someone create a project more popular than your own off the back of an idea or genre you pioneered. And I sympathize with that, which brings me to the main reason I made this video. This ARG has had a profound effect that I think has gone largely unappreciated. It played a major part in building the source horror community and set the blueprint for hundreds of other inspired projects. Seeing its growth stagnate and its uploads come to a halt has been upsetting to many, including myself. I don't think the creator understands how much of an impact they've had. To get personal for a moment, my video on Gunslinger was what jumpstarted my channel's popularity. It earned my channel monetization and garnered me my initial audience. I am extremely grateful for the opportunities it and the greater source horror sphere have provided me. I've made some great friends and connections and even built my own community off the back of these ARGs. Not to mention how much of a blast I've had covering all the series themselves. Overall, I'd say I'm a lot more emotionally invested in these ARGs, especially Gunslinger, than I think most people are. So here's my plea. If the creator of Gunslinger is watching this video, I implore you to contact me so I can affirm to my viewers that you're alive and well. Or if nothing else, so I can personally thank you for how much your channel has helped me. As for everyone else, thank you for watching. Have a good day.