I'm gonna say everybody for us here. I'm ripping a box of 2023 tops sterling baseball for Nester R Thanks Nester for the order and best of luck So big thing about opening cards is literally keeping everything on camera Yeah, if you're never going too high or like to the sides you can go back you can go back and forth That's that's where your sweet spot is. Okay. Now. We have overhead cams and that helps too But the goal is to always keep it on the main camera. Okay, like overhead is cool Like if you have a bunch of boxes from a case way back there, right? Okay I think I'm keeping everything in front You can like tilt the box to show that it's empty or like if you just pull it out a certain way With this it's easy. We are we know what's in here, right? MVP award winners and 2020s all stars luck Nester will start with MVP award winners This stuff you're just ripping hard. It's too hard to actually try to get the box out without doing it You always want to hold it to where like your hands aren't touching corners if you hold a card like this, right? Nice a buster posey. That's two of 25. I'm gonna sleeve. You're not gonna see it first But two of 25 buster posey dual relic auto Be centered for a bit especially I hit like this you just want to keep it centered for a bit Yeah Find a spot where there's not like glare. So if I hold it like this you can't really see like the top of the card It's all white it out.  Yeah, it's always gonna be at an angle in this room So like that's good. That shows most the card.  It's harder with chrome cards easy or something like this, but like prism Optic that's when it gets difficult. Yeah All right next one nester 2020s all stars Come on you Just sound like an old timey person Mike trout three of ten triple relic autograph nester big congrats sick trout trout three of ten triple relic autograph Game used that will do it congrats nester. We'll get that in the mag for you. We appreciate you


You know what I mean? But today's vlog is all about finding your voice on YouTube, even if you have a tough day. Even if you have a tough day, you've got to fight for it. This is where I started two and a half years ago. Welcome to the vlog. Number one, vlog is short for video blog. As you know, may know or may not know, YouTube launched in 2005. And since then, YouTubers and vloggers have shown up all over the place. And really, I see it as an advancement. If you've been watching for any length of time, I think you'll notice a difference. First of all, an attempt at a beard. Don't let me do that again. Don't let me do that again. And trying to find my voice on YouTube. Several things, like confidence, talking to a camera every single day, even in public when you're not sure who's watching. Basically, this is an old, we may have to stop and talk for a second. This is an old alleyway. It's an old alley. Like there used to be dumpsters here and trash and parking and bean bag, flower pots. And like they've transformed it into epicness. There's lights. It's amazing. That is part of the daily vlog experience and it took, it took folks four to six months. I'll tell you this. I remember distinctly after six months of the daily vlog every single day that I remembered it clicked in my brain, oh, it's okay. It's okay to talk to a camera in public. Guess what? Because I'm talking to you in their YouTube. You know, I love talking to strangers, but frankly, when I'm holding the camera up in front of me in public, I'm talking to you guys. And so a tip for finding your voice on YouTube, know thyself. Know thyself so well and you know yourself.  Who are you? What are you here to communicate to so many people on the other side of the screen that frankly you won't know everybody, which is crazy, right? I publish a video, you watch, strangers watch, people that have never been on the channel watch, but you keep talking.  And over time, four to six months, maybe less, maybe more, you will find your voice. I promise. I promise. It will come. But you have to do it. You got to take that first step, take that first step and then the second and the third and over a little bit of time it will click. Finding your voice and finding your audience. Let the audience find you. I have been blown away by all of these people and frankly I don't know where everyone comes from and I will never know until hopefully on the other side, right? But people keep coming to this channel and commenting and chiming in and I just continue to be blown away by the interconnectedness of the digital continent, the worldwide web, the social media, because I publish a lot on YouTube, but I also on Instagram and Snapchat and I'm trying to meet people in different places. And so let the audience come to you and it will happen in mysterious ways and sometimes in very direct concrete ways. For example, I just met a lady in the comments down below in yesterday's vlog or maybe two days ago and she connected to this channel when I, well, when I did this. So I believe she is a runner, an ultra runner probably, and she found that video through an article and ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom-ba-da-bing and boom, there she is commenting below. And now she, now like I know her name, I don't know what she looks like, but that's okay. I know her name and it's awesome. But now we can communicate it to two ways street. However, we're at a bit of a crossroads. We are here on this channel. I found my voice. I believe the audience is beginning to find us. It's amazing. But the content that I'm publishing every day has evolved a little bit, you know, and I love it. But I need to know if you love it, especially the folks who have been watching for not just six months or 12 months, but 18 months and 24 months and commenting not every day, but almost every day. It blows my mind how much and how consistent you are in commenting. So what do we publish here on this channel? Daily Vlogs. What do those daily vlogs focus on most often? Family life, running, but I'll be completely transparent with all of you. I have to be vigilant of my time and the videos that I choose to publish, the themes I choose to focus on, and YouTube, I just got an email from YouTube yesterday saying that the number one category for videos being watched on YouTube every single day remains the how-to category. Did you know that? How-to videos, how-to mow your lawn, how-to change a tire on a car, how-to cut your kid's hair, that remains the number one category watched on YouTube.  The good stuff, I have to be a little vigilant. How do I continue to grow, and that maybe is the question of the day, how do I continue to grow the channel while still being here for you guys through the daily vlog? I actually think I'm walking a pretty good line between the daily vlog and let's say running gear reviews, which those videos are doing well, or the daily vlog and how-to videos, how-to fix the laundry machine door, how-to fix the stove, done that, and so yes, that is definitely the question of the day. How do I walk that balance of publishing a daily vlog for you while still understanding the greatest category for watch time on YouTube remains how-to videos. Now, I do not want this channel to be how-to videos, but I have to be vigilant of what clicks and what doesn't click on YouTube, and so as I continue to find my voice on YouTube and the dovetailing of my voice with an audience, I would love your insight for where you foresee this vlog moving forward and making sure that I'm here to take care of you guys as best I can through the daily video, and I'm not, trust me, the vlog is not going away, but I have to walk that line of daily living and what is continuing to work here on YouTube, YouTube, the second largest search engine in the world behind Google. What crazy.


There's something going on.  I mean, that's, is that partnership? I mean, is that really making love out of nothing at all? All right.  No, that's not love. That's not. I need to practice my machine gun imitations. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. But that's not love. That's not love. So I remember I went to interview Kitten Nativedad thinking early 1997 and I was just a naive 27 year old working on my first book. I'd be innocent lad three years into my stay in Los Angeles. And, and Kitten Nativedad was an experienced wise woman and she had accumulated so much knowledge, so much wisdom, so much love and so much philosophy from her 52 years of life. So I went to interview Kitten. We had a nice dinner. I helped her install AOL on her computer. And when I went to say goodbye, she like gave me a big hug, which was a little bit surprising. And I know you're thinking, Oh 40, I'm going to mock you for, for, for courting a 52 year old woman when you're 27. Like I am going to mock you for showing tenderness to a 52 year old woman.  I am going to despise you for the consideration and the care that you took with this 52 year old woman because it's a good thing to love. It's a good thing to bring people pleasure. It's a great thing to get on the same page with people. The more you have in common with someone, the better. If you agree on the same music, that will bring you closer. If you agree on the same movies, that will bring you closer. If you agree on the same favorite football team, that will bring you closer. If you agree on the same politics, that will bring you closer. If you're a member of the same religion, they have the same theology, the same religious practice. The more you are having common, the closer you're going to be. On the other hand, when the pundit, when the live streamer, when the podcast, it gets out of touch with his audience. So let's say his audience are mainly dissident types and they are convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. But the host does not go along with them. Then that relationship has lost its balance and it is in danger. So you start thinking differently than other people. You start speaking differently than other people. You start practicing differently than other people. You are going to create dislocation and distance from those people.  You need to be on the same page with your audience. And the more dissonance comes between you and the audience, the more things that you disagree on, the weaker that relationship is going to be until people just turn on you. Now, being in harmony with people, like moving together with people, that's a great thing. But there are more important values. I was willing, even though I was completely unexpected, I was willing to be the old-fashioned 19th century Victorian gentleman with kitten natividad. But there were still values that were higher for me than being a courtly 19th century Victorian gentleman when it came to kitten natividad. So when she asked me to do something that was just not in consonance with my values, I said, no, I refused. I was willing to be the courtly 19th century Victorian gentleman. I didn't flee from her embrace.    I'm not like Mr. Holiness. I may not be a walking, talking vessel for God. I may not be the greatest embodiment of ethical monotheism. I may not be the poster child for conversion to Orthodox Judaism. But I am not going to slip a couple of digits into that aperture. I'm not going to do it. I stand for things, man. I'm not going to sell out my integrity, even if she's screaming for me to do that. And she was really disappointed. But I said, no. You might be screaming for me to take the side of voter fraud or to denounce the globalist elites for imposing COVID lockdowns. Or you may want me to go against COVID vaccines. But when COVID hit, I read a book on the 1918-1919 Spanish flu. And I said, oh, wow. There are instances when you've got a severe influenza epidemic where you want to give public health authorities more room. And you do want to take fairly stringent public health measures. I don't know exactly where you should go. Just like I understand that pornography and civilization are at odds. Right. You have to put limits. Otherwise, they used to have animal sex shows on Melrose Boulevard. Right.  So when photographers talk about, oh, we never track in child porn, that's only because you can't get away with it anymore. Right. When they could get away with it, they did get away with it.  I mean, just a vow. No monkeypox for me. All right. So there are things that I still stand for. But Fox News, man, if only they had imbibed the spiritual lessons from when I said no to kitten ativa dad screaming for me to insert digits up a particular aperture. Like Fox News was afraid of losing their audience.  And the Fox hosts, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, the Fox News hierarchy. Like you think they genuinely wanted to insert their digits up that orifice and roll it around and stimulate the prostate with these crazy stories about dominion and voter for. No, they didn't want to do it. But they were even more afraid of losing their audience. So I could have compromised my integrity. Like I could have sold my soul to bring kitten ativa dad, the kind of pleasure that she demanded. But I wasn't going to sell out. Right. So it's a beautiful thing to be in harmony with people. Like the more you have in common with people, the better. So generally speaking, you should say the same things, do the same things as the people you most want to get along with. Now you can just give them different meanings. Right.  Or if everyone around you insists on 2020 voter fraud, then you should say the same platitudes, but you can just understand the 2020 voter fraud as a spiritual voter fraud. Right. So you say the same things. You do the same things as everyone else. Right. But you don't have to sell out, man.  All right. A lot of great stuff in the chat. So let's get to the chat. Love will prevail. Yes. Yes. The Democrats are the real racists. Man. Stormy Daniels must be stopped. No. No. Stormy Daniels is the only thing standing between us and another Holocaust. Yeah. That writing in Chicago, it's just different people expressing their different gifts. It would be terrible if these writing use starved to death. Anything that we need to do to stop that from happening. Yeah. Think of the initiative that these use are exhibiting.  Elliott says Tucker Carlson's correct. Get out of the city. Move to Whitefish, Montana. Luke Croft says conservatives are obsessed with racial snuff films. Yep.  Tucker just bringing the old love and inclusion or hate and division. Love will prevail. Look, I don't care what your skin color is. God made us all equal. Elliott's thinking of opening a 7-Eleven in Compton, not for the money, but for the community. Beautiful. Smash racism. We need first step 2.0. Right. Trump's getting so many criminals out of prison. Oppressed criminals of color in particular. Yeah. What Tucker was saying is absolute nonsense. I feel safe at LA. And if you've got to play, they've got to play. We just need more midnight basketball. Will I vote for Trump so I can do another first step back? Absolutely. We need more community outreach programs. Absolutely. We need more community outreach programs. Maybe Dennis Prager can host some dinners with a difference. Dennis Prager had this program, dinners with a difference where he invited black people and white people inviting each other to their homes for dinner to overcome racial division, racial divide. But the money people behind Dennis Prager advised him that that would be legally risky. I don't know. I don't think it'd be legally risky.  And what could possibly go wrong having some Compton youths come to Beverly Hills, Westwood, Santa Monica, Century City for a nice dinner with some uptight white folks? What could possibly go wrong? I don't see anything that could go wrong. I wish Dennis Prager had the courage to enact dinners with a difference. Think about what a much better country this would be if black people or white people were able to sit down and have dinner together. Yeah, if only these writers learned to immerse themselves in Hayek and Saul and Martin Luther King.  I mean, the U.S. is just fine, bros. Yeah, they're just breakdancing. It's their culture. It just feels honest. It feels homely.  40. You need to practice your machine gun imitation. Yeah, that's what that's what Hitler told the Einsatz Groupon. You need to need to practice your machine gun work. They just needed practice. Bro, you're just reenacting the graduate. How many viewers did 40 lose after he read those books on election fraud? I completely alienated my core audience. Yeah, my average views went down from like 20 live viewers per stream to like 14. And it hurts like I often I stand here and I'm just delivering gold just pure gold. And sometimes it's just a flood of viewers to check out my stream. Maybe I've got this sexy title that compels viewers. And then I stand here. I pour my heart out. All right. And then I watched the viewer count drop from 25 to 20 to 15 to 10. I think I was like 90 minutes into last night's show and I was down to like five live viewers. It's like the normal live stream of the longer he streams, the more viewers he gets. I'm the very opposite. The longer I stream, the fewer viewers I get. They just keep dropping off. Maybe it's because they're so old, maybe they're like dropping dead. Sad. I mean, you may see trees of green skies of blue. And think what a beautiful world. But I'm more spiritual than you are. I see dead people. I see civil war. I see crematoria going up in Beverly Hills. I see another a lot of more in Century City. I asked Luke to set up an interview with the singer of air supply. But he's that guy's got a lot of tats. Yeah, I even said no when the professor and the landlord and just a whole bunch of random blokes wanted to blow me right like free rent meant nothing to me. A man of my high moral character.  Yeah, so I dated a woman after she left the industry Haley Rivers. And what what ultimately drove her from the industry is that she went for a photography shoot. And she was posing naked in a very vulnerable position. You'll be absolutely shocked when you find out what happened. You won't believe what happened next. The photographer, he dropped his trousers. He inserted himself inside of her without a condom, pumped her a few times and ejaculated inside of her. Like that's no way to treat a lady. Right? She went along for for a classy photography suit. And that's the kind of treatment she gets. That's why the photography industry is consistently lost its best and brightest because of this kind of me too abusive, you know, white male objective, objectification of women. It's got to be stopped. Yeah. Bro, I haven't been kicked out of 109 apertures. You're getting the spiritual lesson of what I'm trying to impart you totally wrong. I have refused 109 apertures. Like people used to mock me. Like I'd be there on the red carpet of some photography movie premiere, like conducting interviews with porn starlets. And these various porn starlets would come up and hit on me and like invite me over to their pool and have a party with them. And I would just ignore them because I just kept my focus on my work. I could have sold out. But I believe in things. I stand for things. It was a lot of responsibility. For years, I was the moral leader in the pornography industry. And I could have taken advantage of that status. But did I did I sell out? Did I did I dissipate my essence all over the San Fernando Valley? I said no. Like I'm a serious journalist, guys. Look, hit that last note of chance. I love that song chances. But the chances are all gone. Oh my God, that makes me think of that. The sweet, beautiful, lovely girl that I went to Sierra Community College with just a lovely blonde girl just wholesome, beautiful. I assume she was a virgin. And I once before political science class, I once snuck up behind her and I surprised her. And when I when she turned around, she had tears in her eyes, right? That's that's how painful. And that's how vulnerable she was willing to be with me. She was willing to to cry and show me her tears and she wanted me to go to UC Davis and study economics with her. But no, I wanted to go to Southern California because I heard the girls were really slutty. But the chances are all gone. I could have been with a nice girl. I could have had a normal life. Like we could have grown together. I could have been with a strong independent woman who wouldn't be afraid to call me on my nonsense. It wouldn't, you know, put up with my BS, someone who would have been my equal, someone who would have challenged me, and we would have grown together. Right? We could have been like 30 years into our marriage by now, we'd, we'd have four kids and two grandkids by now. But no, I wanted to go to UCLA because I thought the women were slutty there. I could have gone to UC Davis, got a very respectable degree in economics settled down with a very nice blonde girl. And now the chances are all gone. Man, the viewership just dropping like flies. A coffee animus still a thing in LA. I haven't heard much about them. Have I been to the Channel Islands of California? Nope. Yeah, I feel like I'm all out of love. But am I without you? I know you were right. believing for so long. If I launch into song, right? Then I'll get copyright problems, right? If I actually hit the tune, right, then I'll get copyright issues. What did I want to do with my economics degree? I wanted to get a master's in economics, and then a PhD in economics from Oxford. Luke Ford talks about what air supply means to him. 140,000 views. Throw me down that that link, bro. Throw me down that link. Put put another put another link on the barbie for me, mate. Oh my God, I've got I've got gold for you today. There's gold in them their hills. 40 ones played rocky like a hurricane on the didgeridoo.   I mean, I wish I could do it. I wish I could bring it like like he does. And he has this great line, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen, meaning that the more the government does with people, the more it diminishes them, the more it infantilizes them. Right? The more it limits their opportunities for growth. You know what? How lucrative that approach is, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen, you know how conservatives love that small government conservatives just resonate with that. There are so many speaking opportunities, writing opportunities, radio opportunities, TV opportunities, status in the conservative world, with that kind of thinking. There's just a problem. It doesn't have much validity. Right? The smaller the government, the bigger the citizen. Okay, we have an enormous defense budget. Right? That's what makes the United States so strong and and the dollar so strong. So it's having enormous military and enormous defense budget. Do you feel like that's really diminished you? Because I don't feel like that's diminished me. If I were to go to a public toilet on Venice Beach, and instead of like the really cheap toilet paper, they had some toilet paper was real thickness and even like a pleasant odor, right? That would cost more money. That would be bigger government. But I don't feel like that would diminish me. If I were to wipe, you know, with with a more comfortable, a thicker, more fragrant and just a more classy toilet paper, like if we had more police, right, that's bigger government. So that the streets were safe and you could walk anywhere, anytime in Los Angeles. Right? That's big government. I don't feel like I would be diminished if I didn't have to worry about crime. Let's say we had more luxurious public facilities. And we had cops there to make sure they weren't ruined. Let's say that we made sure that you could ride the subway with perfect safety. You could ride mass transit with perfect safety. You would have twice as many people riding public transport in LA. You'd have a lot less traffic on the road. You'd have less smog. But oh, that's big government can't have that that diminishes the citizen. I don't know if government takes measures spends money to reduce smog, to reduce crime, to jail people engage in anti social behavior. That's big government, right? I would like to double the size of our prison population. That is big government. I am all for it. I don't feel like I am diminished. I don't feel like you're diminished if we have bigger government that in prison seat twice as many people for twice as long as we currently do. If we have clean public restrooms, just imagine you could walk like I want to here's my dream. I have a dream that one day I go for a walk about just me and my not my didgeridoo but my yodel whatever the thing that holds your phone and I just walk all of Sunset Boulevard and just have a nice walk about a nice, you know, six, eight, 10 hour live stream and just imagine that I could do that from sea to shining sea from Pacific Coast palisades, you know, walk to Glendale wherever Sunset Boulevard ends. And and just imagine that we had such big government that they were nice clean safe public restrooms along that route. I don't feel like I would be diminished. Right. If I could safely walk Sunset Boulevard, I don't feel like I would be diminished. I don't feel like I would be smaller.  But when I start walking and talking, and I just get swept away with the power of my insights, the the profundity of my vision, the transcendent nature of my moral perspective, right? Sometimes you need that you need just imagine I could just drop in at a public restroom without walking the entire length of Sunset Boulevard, and I could just safely leave my gimbal with my phone on it just, you know, live streaming. Well, I just pop in to the public restroom and come back and it's still live streaming. No one stolen it because we've got big government that keeps public restrooms nice and safe and clean. I don't feel like I would be diminished. Right. I think that would enhance my life. Plan ahead, dude. Right. So yeah, I could plan ahead. And I could I could make my own arrangements with homeowners along the route. Right. And I could spend money and time and effort to, you know, arrange things along the route. But it would be much more convenient to have big government do that. Just imagine we could have, you know, air conditioning in public schools, we could have nice, safe, clean, elite public schools all over the United States. Right. That's big government. But I don't feel like having air conditioning in public schools diminishes people. I don't know about you. But I retain more when when say the temperature in this room is say less than 80 degrees or less than 70 degrees as opposed to when it's 85 90 100 110 degrees. Right. I like to have air conditioning when it gets hot. Right. It dramatically improves the quality of my life and I would retain more if I was a student if there was air conditioning. So for the money that we spent invading Afghanistan and Iraq, we could have a nice, you know, socialized medicine where everyone could get free medicine. So imagine that we had socialized medicine instead of invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Right. Would that really diminish us if you didn't have to worry about losing your job and then you'd lose your health insurance, you didn't have to worry about living on the edge of bankruptcy or entering bankruptcy or being homeless because of some health emergency. So imagine we just had the same level of socialized medicine as a high functioning country like Australia. So when I go back to Australia, and they have cradle to grave social welfare programs, and they have excellent public health. Right. When they have, you know, an excellent public education program into university. Right. I don't feel like the citizens of Australia are diminished or made smaller by having a government that is high functioning, that is on their side, that's trying to make their life better. So yeah, it is an incredibly appealing sentiment, you know, the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. But is it really true?  Is it is it really true? I know it's appealing. But but what about truth? Don't you want someone to tell you the truth? What about love?  What about profundity? Where's my where's my didgeridoo? I mean, I kind of understand where where prega is coming from. You know, I've got some I've got some sympathy.  When do you think of does he look like me? Do you tell lies for status profit, national syndication, and then say that it's forever? Do you think twice? Or just touch and see? Oh, babe. Oh, yeah.  Are you wild and willing? Is it just for show? Oh, come on. I don't want to touch you too much, baby. Because making love to you might drive me crazy. So now you think that small government is the way you make it. So I don't want to be there when you decide to break it. No. Government bites. Government bleeds. It's bringing me to my knees. Government lives. Government dies. It's no surprise. Government begs. Government pleads. And you think, Oh, it's what I need. When I'm with you. Are you somewhere else? Am I getting through? Why do you please yourself? When you wake up, will you walk out? Can't be love. If you throw it about. Oh, babe. Oh, I don't want to touch you too much, baby. Because big government is driving me crazy. Government bites. Government bleeds. It's bringing me to my knees. Government lives. Government dies. It's no surprise. Government begs. Government pleads. And you think, Oh, it's what I need. But but is it really? Is it really? I mean, the bigger the government the smaller the citizen. I heard that on Dennis Prager. Okay, so what I succeed is a live streaming. You have to you have to have to give the audience what they want. You have to you know, balance things. Say the say the words, right? When she says, I love you, you say, I love you too. I love you more. So you may think, Oh, national parks, local parks, you know, pleasant walkways past the ocean, clean rivers, clean air. You might think that those are good things. But government bites, bro. Government bleeds. Government brings you to your knees. The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen, the cleaner the air, the smaller the citizen, the cleaner the water. The smaller the citizen, the finer the public restroom facilities, the higher quality, the toilet paper public restrooms, the smaller the citizen, the more public restrooms available to you, the smaller the citizen, the less crime, the smaller the citizen, the more the super predators are locked up, the smaller the citizen, the more pleasant public walkways, the smaller the citizen, right? The more national parks, the smaller the citizen, the stronger the national defense, the smaller the citizen.  Then I will show you a real national citizen. I mean, that's where men were men, right? When we didn't have government providing for the national defense, right? When we didn't have government providing roads, but you had to just, you know, cut down your own pathway through life, your own pathway through the forest, right? That's when men were men. That's what we need. Okay, welcome, caller. Blessings. Bro, are you all right? I've been, I've been adjusting my pharmacology. What do you think?  Oh, no. Do you need someone to talk to you, dude? I see dead people. Yeah. Do you try shrooms? I didn't need shrooms, bro. I've been listening to Dennis Prager. We've got, could it happen here? It is happening here, bro. We've got a civil war that's raging around us. Okay, okay. But you have to admit, you know, may not be civil war, but things do seem kind of shaky, don't they? Well, in some ways, but bro, we're just living in a liminal space, right? It's just between now and what comes next. It could be a disaster. Like, tomorrow could bite. Tomorrow could bleed. Tomorrow could bring us to our knees. Or it could be the greatest thing ever. We could reduce racism, inequality. We could have like green energy. But we can't. Because we gotta, we gotta support those Ukrainians, bro. They need us. They need our help. We could have peace in our time, bro. Peace in our time. That's what I stand for. Yeah. Okay, okay. I didn't have much to say. I was little, I was legitimately concerned. Oh, I can handle it, bro. Like other people, they can't handle this kind of caffeine and midaphanel and the cranberry extract and the, the, the Canada dry, no sugar, ginger ale. Other people can't handle that kind of thing, but bro, I can listen to death leopard and I can handle it all. Did you have any nicotine gum? I haven't had any nicotine gum today. Would you, would you recommend? Is this the type of nicotine gun? No, it's absolutely the wrong type of nicotine gun.  Okay. You need a, you need a dark and stormy. Bro, she is the only thing standing between us and fascism. Yeah.  It's great. No, I don't. Oh, it's a, it's a rum, but it has, you don't drink alcohol. It's rum and ginger beer. It's, it's a, it's very nice. Luke Croft says that video last night got me worried, Elliot Blatt. What's he talking about? I don't know. Asking to refresh my memory. I would. Stormy your cattle cars, bro. Stormy your cattle cars. Make your choice, Western man. No, it's not stormy. It's going to be the utter, I'm really getting the urge. I'm really starting to consider leaving the city, given what I've seen. It's, am I being, am I overreacting? Yeah, bro, you're in a liminal space. Don't, don't introduce people's sisters to drugs, right? Don't have adulterous affairs with the sisters of men with extensive criminal convictions, right? Try not to do that and, and you'll be fine. I know, but there's a certain randomness to this violence, which it seems like, I don't know. It's genuine chaos. I don't know who could open a business.  Everything's fine. Yeah. So no, no problems in Pico Robertson. Yeah, we have problems, but problems are just opportunities to grow in love. We're in a liminal space here. We have no, we have no idea.  There was a great article on this. New York Times essay is called, We Don't Know What Will Happen Next. It's so profound. Have you ever thought about that? I'm still quaking. I'm shaking from the profundity of that. I mean, The New York Times, it bites, it bleeds, it brings you to your knees, but The New York Times lives and it loves and it begs and it pleads and that's what I need. So did you read your copy today? Yes, yes, yes. Elliot, everybody hurts. Everybody cries, but don't let yourself go. Everybody hurts sometimes. Are you missing R.E.M.? Hey, you should listen to it. Don't go back to rock though, you're feeling nostalgic. When your day is long and the night, the night is yours alone.  That's true. That's true. I'm really, I'm really, I've had a tough couple of days, Luke. I'm just, I'm not, I'm not functioning at my highest. Tell me, tell me where it hurts, bro. I'm here for you. Ugh, that's the grind, Luke. I'm being ground down, ground down, Luke. Every day is the same.  I have to pull the same load through the fields every day. Sounds like you need power. I do. I do. I need power to pull your load. You need an internal reorganization so that you can optimize and become more effective and efficient and more powerful so you can jump up to that tree branch and just pull yourself up, do a couple of pull-ups. I need to blow this load, Luke. I need this load out of me. I need to blow this load. You need to blow this load, bro. Yeah. The termite's killing you, bro. The satanic pedophiles getting you down. No, I've got my optimal male magniforce from Alex Jones, so I'm so cool. Seriously, what do you do for power? I feel more powerful usually after I meditate, after I do pull-ups, after I get exercise, after I listen to an inspiring 12-step talk, or go on a 12-step meeting, or just a favorite podcast, or inspirational books, or connecting with friends. Where do you get your power, Elliot Blatt? I get it by lying supine on the sun tanning deck at the beach. I just absorb those venison solar rays. I'm a sun worshiper, Luke. Simple. I go old school. I know just how to fake it, and I know just how to scheme, and I know just when to face the truth, and then I know just when to dream, and I know the night is fading, and I know the time's going to fly, and I'm never going to tell you everything I got to tell you, but I know I got to give it a try. I know the roads to riches, and I know the ways to fame. I know all the rules, and I know how to break them, and I always know the name of the game, but I don't know how to leave you, and I'll never let you fall, and I don't know how you do it, bro, making love out of nothing at all. It's powerful, dude. It is powerful, isn't it? Don't you feel empowered?  I feel like Caesar, bro. Crossing the Rubicon. Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to do what's happening to show on Sunday. I'm going to call in. We're going to discuss our entrepreneurial activities. We're going to have a little practical networking session, you know? People who, you know. People who, Jews who need Jews are the luckiest people in the world. That's right. The tribe of Abraham, man. It's nothing like this. It's nothing like this. We need each other, man. We need to lift each other up.  We got to grab the old ladies. Everyone goes, because this is Brother 40's traveling salvation show. Have you, have you kept up with Ethan Rell? No, how is Brother Ethan? He is not doing well, dude. He is so sad. Sorry. He's just bending into this just gremlin state, this sort of semi-human state. He just kind of mumbles and slurs. But the drug use seems to just go off the charts. I really don't think he's going to live long. Do you know why God gave us two good hands so that we can reach out with one hand to our brother Ethan when he is troubled? Like just reach out one hand for him, because that's what it's there for. Like when Ethan is troubled, you got to reach out your hand. Reach it out to the man up there, Ethan, because that's what he's there for. So take my hand in yours. Walk with me this day. In my heart I know I will never stray. What do we do with the other hand? We put it on our heart and we listen to our heart. We got to pack up the babies, grab the old ladies and everyone goes. I'm a stickler for details. Well, yeah, I don't think he'd be receptive to what I have to say.  I think he needs an intervention, Luke, and you're the man to bring it. Well, it's important to start soft and slow, like a small earthquake. And then, then when I let go half the San Fernando Valley shakes. Well played, dude. Well played. All right, man. That's all I got. That's all I got. I gotta go to bed. That's all you've got. It was so much. I mean, for Elliot, he just like, he sells himself short. Like after those polls of wisdom, he says, that's all I've got. I mean, he gives us so much. I go out on top. I go out on top. I don't, I don't, I don't wait for the hook, you know, I go out on top. Elliot gives and gives and gives. And then he says, oh, that's all I've got. It's like he's climbed the 20,000 foot mountain. He's taken us to the highest peaks, right? He's helped us forward every valley, cross every stream. Look, to quote Mick Jagger, I don't got that much jam. Bro.


Let's unbox a Diplomat Arrow fountain pen today. We actually already have a Diplomat Arrow unboxing for you on our channel and on our website, but this new color came out and we decided it was just so stunning. It deserved an entirely new unboxing video. So if you're familiar with Diplomat, you recognize their packaging which is unique and different with the sliding metal cover over the top of their box and then your arrow. This German-made pen has all the smooth lines and a streamlined body. You've got the Diplomat branding across the front of the cap and then the Germany on the back because this is a German-made pen. You do have your dark section and it's also metal and then you have your stainless steel nib and the nibs Diplomat uses are really really really well-liked. The Diplomat Arrow is a cartridge converter fountain pen and it comes with a branded converter already installed in the pen for you. And with the Diplomat Arrow fountain pen you get an exciting pen that brings the legacy of the Zeppelin right there in its own design. It's made from full aluminum casting anodized with matte fittings. The body does have those groove-like depressions that follow through onto the cap and they're actually, in case you're worried about, very comfortable in the hand. And the other noticeable thing about this design that people love is the sliding click cap design. And some color variations are available with a 14 karat gold nib. You might also want to check out the ballpoint pen and the roller ball pen options. They come in almost all of the different color variations. You can get any of the three. Subscribe to our channel for more fountain pen review and shopdiplomats at penchelay.com


What's up everybody, Jason here for jaspyscaseprac.com. Five hip parade spots being given away in that mixer with this 2023 legacy football one box break right on team number one. So this is actually a new release guys, just came out yesterday. So legacy football one of the new early releases of 2023. Now some of these cards of course might be and still their collegiate product, but of course it's gonna go to the teams obviously that they're currently on because I believe unless there is a logo, sometimes there is a logo with the teams on it, pretty sure actually. There are times when that does happen, but sometimes they'll be in their college uniforms but of course it seems they're currently on if that's the case, but I don't see a checklist I'll just see yet. But like I said, obviously for the most part most people haven't really bounced around rookie wise yet. So just starting training camp. So let's do the break first and we'll randomize the names, teams, distribute the hits out there at the end, we'll re-randomize the names separately and then of course top five get into that mixer. So let's roll and let's do the break first four to two, six times. One, two, three, four, five, six. Got Eric down to AA run. And six, six, one, two, three, four, five, six. Chiefs down to the Colts. All right, so actually just the way it came out like that and then let's alphabetize it. Give you guys a quick minute to look at that. A little taste of it. Not sure if we'll have any group breaks of this stuff. It doesn't seem like we got a lot. We've only got like two cases words and obviously splitting them up by case like for personals and then a case, you know, potentially in the store with some personal or some group breaks here but maybe we can carve out a little four box maybe six box break or something but I think for the time being right now nothing's planned. You get two autographs per box as well. Got a Clayton tune, little mink. Ice prospects, Marvel's mims. A couple of rookies here as well. Just to kind of show you them right there. There's a little Bryce young. Just looks like a little corner, a little thing there but very, very thin cardstock so it might be more common in this product. Jackson Smith and the jigba. There's a little Rogers. Look at first Jets Rogers, right? Jets, gonna Michael Tang. That's a to 100 it looks like. 33 out of 100. Jalen Carter, Tanner McGee. It's a little price prospects, Bryce young. Then we got another rookie, Jackson Smith and jigba. Again, a little small corner ding here on the right corner. Looks like a lot of these cards have that. It's a 2.99 and then like I said that one just doesn't have the logos just yet. It's just more college product but gonna go out to the team that are currently on. C.J. Strout. Got a little Paris Johnson Jr. B. John Robinson. And then Rashid Rice to 2.49, a little patch autograph. This looks like this rookie does have the Kensington II logo. I think the RPAs might have them. It's just not the base stuff. We got a little numbered mini of Secombe Barclay 22 out of 50 and it looks like the second one's gonna be points. So, what we'll do guys is obviously top five we'll get a team, a spot in the mixer. Number six has a little consolation. We'll give you that 400 points for just missing out. Out of 149, Will Anderson Jr. Actually you got a little bonus. This is supposed to be two autos only. Nice. Houston Texans. So that one does have the logos. Houston Texans. Kensington Chiefs was Eric Klicks. Last but not least, Houston Texans landed. We got a Clayton Tune. Number to 100. Prations. Got a numbered Jalen Hertz to 199 for my Eagles. Going to A-A-Ron. And there you go. All right, sweet. Well, that was a fun little box right there. Looks like we got an extra hit though. Anyway, some top-loaders for that. Like I said, we'll give away this 400 points to where we come to number six, just missing out. Sweet. That was a fun little box. Now let's switch scenes. And again, top five. Get in. Click roll. And it's just Nate guys, two times. Two times. One. And two. So just missing out is Eric last spot mojo. So Eric, you're going to get that 400 points. And good luck, buddy. You could still be in the top five, I believe potentially. I know you had multiple spots. Chat promo, you're in. Roy, Ryan Pressnell, A-A-Ron, and Michael Tang. There you go. So top five are in. Let's paste your guys' names in here. And like I said, guys, another filler on the website. We're officially only just potentially five straight-up spots and two fillers. But again, like I mentioned before, if we sell those five straight-up spots very quickly, we can always cancel a filler and just be in other five spots with one filler. So appreciate you guys, get the next one going, jaspyscasebricks.com.


Thanks for showing up. I'm excited. This is my first, like, AM talk where people aren't, like, hungover. And so I'm super stoked that all of you are awake, presumably awake. I'm told there's a lot of jet lag if you're coming all the way from Seattle. But hopefully that'll work. My name is Joe Masty, and let's talk a little bit about hiring developers. So I am a consultant. I work in a lot of things with companies, but I tend to work with them on their onboarding, their hiring processes, working with apprenticeships and stuff. And one of the things that I've noticed, both with companies that work with me and some that maybe should, is that we have a problem with hiring. And this is a big issue, right? How many of you have at your job a job posting that you cannot fill for a developer? Right? There's a lot of us. It was a big deal. And these are not, in a lot of cases, this is not just, like, oh, hey, we can use an extra person on the team. This is, like, an exigent threat to your business. This is a big deal. And interviewing is hard. Another show of hands. I like show of hands stuff. How many of you have received a terrible interview? Has anyone ever attended?  Does anyone want to cop to ever having given a terrible interview? Okay, I have. Good. I was hoping that somebody would actually, you know, cop to that. And I think that this is funny because, you know, even big companies, you think about, like, the Googles and the Facebooks and all these companies that have, you know, 10,000 developers, they're not actually doing better. Their interviews are just as terrible as the rest of us. And that, to me, points to the fact that interviewing is, in fact, difficult. It's expensive. Anybody that you have on your interview team also has a full-time job, right? So these engineers who you expect to take hours and hours out of their day also have a complete set of tasks to deliver. So on the candidate side, so anybody who is applying for your job, they may also have another day job. They probably have other things going on in their life, right? And if you think that that's not your concern, remember that the candidates that you really want to hire are the ones that probably already have a job in other places where they're applying. So if you give somebody, you know, 100-hour homework, they're just going to move on. Right? And I think that we're making it ultimately worse on ourselves. We're not really doing any favors. My informal sense of how we tend to get an interview is how did I get hired, right? So I've been interviewed in a bunch of different ways. That would seem kind of cool. Maybe we'll do that one, or maybe we'll try something else. So it doesn't do us any favors whatsoever. And I'll tell you now, there is no perfect interview. So we're going to talk through a lot of things and make interviews better or worse, but there is no correct, per se, answer. I will say that there are a lot of bad answers. And the bad answers are the ones that, in large part, we're doing right now. And the result of that, clicker doesn't work, yes, is that this happens. So this is one of the main contentions I'm going to make to you. I wanted to put it in early because I want you to think about this. The reason that our interviews are bad is typically that we are not measuring what we think we are. When you have a bad interview, when you have puzzles, when you have abrasive interviewers, you're not measuring the candidate. You're measuring the interviewer. And the entire point of the interview, obviously, is to see whether that candidate is good. And so this is ultimately why you end up turning down good candidates. This is ultimately why you end up accepting bad candidates. This is why you have 200 interviews and never offer anybody a job, is because you're not measuring. And I don't think that this is on purpose, right? It's always bad on purpose. What's happening is that we don't have a tool set. We don't have a mental schema for how to evaluate if our interviews are any good. We tend to be engineering types. We're not coming from an HR background. And so usually it's that made it up. So good news, even if we have not invented correct ways to do interviewing, there are other fields that have, specifically ones that have been around a lot longer than we have, psychology. And what I want to talk about today is industrial and organizational psychology. So this is one of the major branches of psychology. It started in the 1800s, late 1800s. It really came to prominence in the 1920s, which is during the First World War, what happened was psychologists in the army needed to figure out where to place a million recruits, literally one million recruits. And so they needed to come up with a way to handle that process. And so they started to codify what they call selection. So I'm going to include, at the end of this, there's all the references. And there's a lot that you can look up. If you do find yourself wanting to look at primary material, selection is the name of the concept that you want to Google. Cool? And so it's going to be a little bit tough for me to cover 100 plus years of psychology. Unfortunately, they have written a lot over the course of five generations as it turns out. But so what I want to do instead is I'm going to give you a tool in three parts, a way to think about the interviews that you're doing. And then we're going to cover a couple of the common kind of tropes, the things that we tend to see in interviews, and look at them through that lens. Cool?  So number one is validity. So if we have something we want to measure, if we have a construct, is what we call this in psychology, validity tells us whether our measurement measures that thing. So these bullets do not very closely line to each other, but they are all centered approximately on the bull's eye. That's validity. It's OK that they're spread out. It's OK that, in fact, most of them are wrong because they are measuring the correct concept. And there's a couple of different factors to validity, things that I want to consider while we're here. One of them, one type of validity, is the question of whether the thing, the question that you ask corresponds to the concept you want to test. And so if, let's say, I wanted to test whether you know arithmetic, if I ask you to list off the digits of pi, is that a test of your arithmetic abilities? No, right? If I ask you to do 5 plus 5, may not be a very question, but it is, in fact, arithmetic, right? And the second type of validity that I want to talk about is a sort of wider one. Given that I can test your arithmetic, does that correspond to a skill that I need you to have? I can test your arithmetic, but if the job that I'm trying to hire you for is carpenter, is that actually a valid skill for the job? Someone's called external validity, is the name of that one. And you'll notice that all the concepts of validity talk about a construct that you want to test. You have to know what the bull's eye is. And so this is actually our first wrinkle when we come to hiring a developer. Because as it turns out, we probably do not agree on what makes a good developer. There is a lot of complication to our field. And so as it turns out, it's very difficult for us to say what success even is in this sense. So think about what a great developer would be in your terms, right? Hopefully it doesn't look like this. Maybe, maybe not.   And you kind of generalize and say, OK, that's a good developer. But that is not a real concept of good developer. What that is is kind of a bag of characteristics. Some of them may actually relate really well to whether somebody's a good developer. Some of them may not at all. And so one of the things that happens is when we start to measure people based on what we've seen from success, we end up measuring all these things that we didn't intend to. And we get that. And we get more of that. And that's what our entire team becomes. Reliability is concept number two. So if validity is whether we're centered on the bullseye, reliability is how close our measurements are to each other. So in this case, we don't even care if it's centered as long as the measurement comes out the same. And so just like validity, there are a couple different concepts in here. One of the big ones that's really important in technical interviewing is that if I give you an interview and if somebody else gives you that same interview, you should get the same score. If you don't get the same score, you're not measuring the candidate, you're measuring the interviewer.  These things should not impact our measurements, but they do. That's called inter-rater reliability. A second one is if I take an interview once and if I take that interview a second time, I should get the same score. This is called test-retest reliability. And what that means is that if there's an element of chance, if there's an element of did I happen to follow the one path or the other path and it totally changes my score, again, I have not measured me, I've measured the instrument or I've measured the random chance that I took A instead of B, and we're hiring on a dice roll, right? And then the third type of reliability, we're not going to see a ton of this, but if I were to have multiple questions, those questions need to yield the same result. So if we go back to our arithmetic example, if I ask you, what's five times five? Thank you, some of you know arithmetic. What's eight times eight? Thank you. What's 265 times 12? Nobody. Clearly you don't know arithmetic, right? It's the same form of question, but what happens is we have these questions where there's some other confounding variable. In this case, we've all memorized a very particular set of multiplications and we're not actually doing them in our head, we're just doing them by rope. This happens all the time in interviews. We measure a construct that some people have memorized and other people have not. And all those concepts of reliability, I think that's an interesting one, point towards approximately the same thing. They point towards consistency. So we're not gonna belabor this in the rest of the talk, but I wanna say that if you give the same interview, if you give it the same way, if people have a scoring rubric so that it doesn't matter who's there, what matters is how you do, right? If that scoring feedback is objective, you will tend to be reliable. So reliability, consistency, I'll say consistency breeds reliability. So number three, usability. Held up two fingers for three. We could probably come up with a valid, reliable interview for developers and what it would look like is having you do one of everything, right? If I were to do this in my arithmetic, I would just ask you one of every single question. But of course this doesn't work, right? And it's tempting sometimes in our interviews to be able to just smash enough things in that we get that accurate measurement, but of course that doesn't work. It's exhausting, people don't wanna go through it, and ultimately what we have is a really limited opportunity to take measurements from people. So we need to be really careful about how our usability works and this differs between company to company. So one of the things that's really tragic about stealing the Google interview, if you take Google's interview and use it for yourself, they can abuse their candidates because people still wanna go work for Google, right? It's true, it's kind of a shitty process, but it works for them, because people don't drop out. That probably doesn't work for you. And this is different between candidates as well. So imagine we give homework, let's say it's a 20-hour homework, right? Somebody that takes a bunch of time. Some candidates, if you don't have a job, let's say you just graduated a boot camp, let's say that you just left your job, fantastic, no problem. If you're somebody who has a real job or got help you, if you're somebody who has a family, if you have other commitments, if you've ever had a medical issue, this is now what you're measuring. You didn't mean to measure that. You didn't mean to just exclude anybody who had ever had a family, but that's what's happening. So we need to keep usability in mind. And so to throw a couple other confounding factors, your target probably does not look like this, or in reality, nobody's target looks like this, but your target looks like something else. And that is because your requirements, the things that you do, the constructs you need to measure are different for you than they are for everybody else, right? And so you cannot just take somebody else's interview. And when you're thinking about these interviews, you can't simply say, okay, we'll just maximize one dimension, right? I can tell you approximately how valid different types of interviews are, but you have to balance that against the other factors. You need to say, should I trade off validity for reliability? Because the correct answer is often yes. And then in reality, bringing back to the usability, we get this kind of thing. Three concepts, pick two-ish, probably really pick like one and a half. So there is no perfect interview. You're not gonna get something that is off to the top right here. You're gonna get something that's messy and dirty. And what that means is that the only way for you to tell if that interview works is to test your interview. You must test your interviews. And what that looks like, if you have an existing team, this is actually nice, you can give your interview to your existing team, assuming you like them. If you don't like them, just invert the results. But assuming you like them, you can give the interview to your own team, but that's also not good enough.  We are accurate and valid and all those things. But again, we've managed to measure something that we don't intend to. So you need to go out and you need to test your interview against people who are not part of your existing team and who are not part of the kind of experience and demographics of your existing team. Cool? All right, let's figure out how to use these tools. I don't know if that's an ax or a hammer, but it's probably an ax. So we have the tools, we have reliability, we have validity and we have usability. Let's talk through the interviews. So I'm gonna cheat, this is not part of the interview, but it's my talk and you can't all leave fast enough. So huh. The interview process really does start back at the job posting, this is good and this is bad. The reason I wanted to bring this in here is because if you, again, if you have, if you accidentally exclude a bunch of people, if your job posting causes nobody with left-handedness to apply, then nothing you do in the rest of the interview will ever fix that, right? They're not even in your queue. So let's talk about what you need. This is the opportunity. So we talked about constructs and we talked about how you can't just steal them from somebody else. The job posting is an opportunity to think about the things that make somebody successful for your organization. You need to think about what things you actually wanna measure. And a good rule of thumb here is that if you're putting it as a real requirement, you should probably actually measure it during the interview. If you have something you're not gonna bother to measure it, you probably don't need it. You need to prioritize these things because everybody is different and everybody is flawed. And so in reality, if you have a list of six things that you really need, pardon me, you probably really only need like four or five of them and if somebody comes in, you may wanna hire them anyway. And then again, going to need versus want, I want somebody who's great at testing, I want, somebody who's great at refactoring, I want, somebody who can scale my services and who can scale everything and scale buildings, but I don't need that. And so remember that many people have been socialized not to apply for jobs that they don't qualify for. So the more you put on the need, the more you exclude people. I happen not to agree with applying for jobs that don't qualify for, but that is the reality of what it is. What are you asking for? The actual text of your posting is really relevant. Have any of you ever declined to apply for a job or discontinued applying for a job? Because you saw a posting that wanted like some variation of the Ninja, Unicorn, Jedi, right? Is anybody, so I have neglected to apply for places just not interested, right? Do you think that they meant to exclude me? I'm a Ninja, yeah. But the reality is that that happens and so the words that you use, what you actually ask for matters. In the resources, I'm gonna point to two different things, two resources that I like to use for this. One of them is called Textio. What they do is you put your posting in there and it kind of tells you these are things, like these are corporatey words that people tend not to do very well, right? And that can help you. And the other one is called JobLint. And so that's one where again, if you've got these kind of Ninja rock star, we're gonna go crush some code. It can point out a lot of those things to you that you may not have considered in the past. So we need to be careful about what we are asking for. And then we need to think about where we are asking. If the only place that you post your job is Carnegie Mellon, where by the way you are like the 50th most interesting startup, right? Your team is gonna reflect precisely one background. It's gonna be CMU. That's not good. We need to have a variety of depth. The same thing goes for your network. If your network is relatively homogenous, if you all tend to come from the same place and do the same things, that is not gonna create a sufficient candidate pool for you. So think about where you are posting jobs and you need to reach outside of that comfort zone to find more people. And ultimately, this is a good thing for your team. It's the initial screen. We get some resumes. Let's talk about the different types of screeners that people tend to get. These are like trivia, I think would be the category you would call this. If you wanted like a litmus test, if you can Google something in 30 seconds or it'll take you like 10 seconds in IRB, it's probably a trivia question. So let's think about validity here. In theory, well, maybe not this question so much, but there are questions that are trivia that you could ask that might be valid. The problem is that there's not very much signal. Usually if I ask one thing like, what's the name of this method or what's the order of arguments of this method, it's very little data. And what it ends up rewarding, what it ends up measuring instead is recency. Have you dealt with it lately? So a lot of times the way this interview works is that the director or the CTO reads something on Reddit and then they go have a phone interview and they're like, oh, hey, do you know this thing? What is the memory footprint of this string thing? Is that valid to the job? No. A minute ago you didn't know it and you were fine. So this is not real valid criteria. Could it be reliable? If you ask the same question, I think it could be reliable. Do people ask the same trivia question? No. We mostly get it from whatever they were thinking about last. So in practice, this is rarely reliable. Is it usable? Well, one trivia question is very easy. I'll say, I think that you could get a more valid version of this by asking like 50 of these. I think that with enough trivia, you might be able to get something that resembles a valid question, but then that's not usable. This is not a very good one. Do we know that it's part of? Very common font screen. It's Fizzbuzz. I think Fizzbuzz is interesting. So jumping it valid, is it valid? Maybe. There is an aspect to it that says can you write some amount of code? It does suffer from the problem where people tend to study for Fizzbuzz. Like if you are a boot camper, you absolutely are learning to write Fizzbuzz cold. But it does track some kind of concept. Is it reliable? Yeah, it's probably reliable. I can administer it. I can think about the different types of things if people get right, get wrong, I can score it. Is it usable? Yeah, it's actually pretty usable. I think ultimately that's why people use it is because it's very easy to administer. If we wanted to make this better, we would probably want to change it from one that's really well known. Like I said, everyone knows Fizzbuzz. If you're looking for a job, learn Fizzbuzz cold. You've now passed 30% of phone screens. Good work. But I think if we change that, we would have something that's a little more valid. Homework. Who issues homework as part of their hiring process? By which I mean, go write some code on your own time and submit it. Fair number of people. I think, again, homework is an interesting one. Homework is super valid. Homework is a work sample test. So in the terminology of IoCyc, probably the most valid way to, or the most predictive way to look at somebody's work is to have them do the work. That is a work sample test. Homework works for this. But it has significant problems. The reliability is an issue here. Because what you have is candidates, some of whom can spend 20 hours and some of whom can spend five hours. And if you're grading criteria, don't take this into account. You end up with a really, really different set of scores for people. And you did not intend to measure again whether I have commitments at night, but you did. And so the way we can fix that is maybe to put some parameters around it. Hopefully you give them an assignment that's related to your work, goes to validity. Hopefully you give them an assignment where you say, spent about five hours. Could somebody cheat? They could. But it gets you closer to having an accurate baseline comparison. And hopefully you don't give any homework that is like, please re-implement our whole app or please work on this NP-complete problem or this thing that our software architects can't even solve, but show us a working demo. Like sometimes we have this tendency to just like, that's a thing I was thinking about. Doesn't work. And then I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this one, but something I've seen a lot of recently is these sort of sites where they promise to give you a score, and so you go there. And I think it's super, super usable because it doesn't take any engineer time. And it may even be reliable because you tend to ask like the one question, right? Or a handful of questions are the same question. But the question of validity comes up here. And I think that this is ultimately where these become problematic is that the questions in their question bank because they need to be auto-gradable and because they need to generate this big volume of them tend to have very little to do with the actual business of building software. Is that fixable probably? Have I seen it yet? No. So interview day. A year ago, Carrie Miller gave a talk at RailsConf about hiring. Problem solved. It's actually a really good talk. You should go watch it. And there are a lot of things about the interview day that she covers. The big ones I wanna cover right now is really minimizing variance. So anything that differs between candidates ultimately is going to give you extra noise that you're not measuring. What that means is that you should have a schedule and it should be a consistent schedule. You should know who your interviewers are. And your candidate should know that as well. Your interviewers need to be trained. They need to understand what it is that they're doing. They need to have a scoring rubric. And I'm gonna contend here that your candidate should probably know what you're measuring.  So if you can do those things, tell them what to expect. You're gonna put them more at ease.  First thing they go into, code writing. Has anyone implemented a, we'll say a red-black tree at work in the last year? No, no hands? Okay, good. Don't do algorithms. They look like code. They look like code we use, but in reality that's not how we build software. Nobody ever implements red-black trees from memory at work, right? So there's a problem. They feel valid, but they're really not because the correspondence is very low. Are they reliable? No, not really. They have some of the same recency bias.  And so great, now you have an inverse selection. You select for inexperience because those people remember algorithms. Good work. Usability, yeah, it's probably pretty usable, right? I think a better version of this would be if you were to take an algorithm, like don't pick something with somebody famous's name, Dijkstra's anything or any of that. Pick an algorithm that you make up and have them implement that from a sheet of paper. Say, here's the algorithm, here's your laptop, do that. This defeats the recency bias. This is an actual test of what we do for software, just translating requirements into working code. Don't give algorithms. The even worse version, whiteboard coding. And everyone's expecting me to hit on whiteboard coding and I will, because it's dumb. If at your job you're required to whiteboard code, not if you have the option, not if people tend to, but if you're required to whiteboard code, please by all means go ahead. If not, what you are measuring is a skill that people don't use unless they are practicing interviews.  It's really not that hard. And then the live bug code. Does anyone do this? Wait, don't raise your hands. It's technically illegal. If you're not paying your candidates, you can't have them work on production code. In most states. Check your local list. States. But, so the cool thing about this, validity-wise, this is like 100% valid, right? Because this is the work. Like you could not get more valid than this. And that's cool. But the problem becomes the reliability. If you're working on a real code, you generally can't repeat the same problem. Or if you do, you have serious problems and shouldn't be hiring. So usually what that means is that we have this trade-off. Either I spent a ton of time in my backlog finding things that are similar-ish, in which case it's not usable. Or I just kind of pluck something out, in which case it's not reliable. Remember that parallel form is reliability. But also it's illegal, so probably you shouldn't do it. So now that they're exhausted, they've written some code, let's do some problem-solving. Does anyone know what interview question this is? I actually got hired on this once. It's dudes, they're buried up to their necks and they've got hats on and like, you have to tell who's wearing what colored hat and if they do that and they don't get killed or something. This is just dumb. Let's talk about validity. No. Let's talk about reliability. No. Let's talk about usability. Yeah, great usability. Awesome. But you've measured nothing. Not only that, but your candidates are probably looking this up. Again, if you're a boot camper, if you're looking for a job, just go look up the six or seven of these that everybody uses. Learn cold, you'll find, pretend that you're having a hard time with it and then come up with a trick. Ta-da. A little bit better, case studies. Given a hypothetical, how would you deal with it? This can be valid. You can use your existing work. This can be reliable. You can give the same case study based on historical precedent. You need to modulate a little bit. If you have a senior developer and you are giving them, say, some architectural problem that you can't solve, it's an issue. If you have a junior developer and you're giving them effectively any architectural problem, that's not something that's in their skill set. That's probably not what you mean to measure. But even better, this is my favorite kind of interviewing. Behavioral interviewing? Has anyone ever seen this? So this, it takes the same form every single time. It's tell me about a time 1x. And the reason this works is that despite what they have to say in the financial sector, past performance absolutely predicts future performance. Absolutely does. And so, this is a great interview insofar as you can test somebody's real experience. It's valid. Yeah, I know. Great work. It's reliable. You can test the same thing over and over again. And then usability. There's a little bit of a challenge. It turns out that to get good answers out of people, you have to train them on this kind of interviewing. But that's okay. You can overcome this. And then culture fit.  So you've had this before. You're measuring for people like me. There's no criteria. There's nothing. There's a gut feel. And the way the gut feel works is that it takes into account every one of our preconceived notions. So it is, again, almost zero validity. My answer to you should be just don't do these. But you're gonna do them anyway. So if you're not gonna listen to me, at least think about the things in your culture that do cause people to be successful. We ship first all the time. We ship the highest quality all the time, right? We teach everybody. Or we're independently capable. These kind of things that actually could measure success and at least measure those. But better off just don't use them. So you send the person home. Now that they're gone, no more problems, right? So the way the debrief ends up working all the time is of course we get into a circle and then everybody does. It's kind of like when you do Rock, Paper, Scissors as a kid, you're like Rock, Paper, Scissors. People read each other, right? They read each other socially. This is what happens. Or you end up talking to the person on my left. I think this person's like an eight out of 10. They're like, yeah, no, that was the worst. They go, yeah, it's six.  So the way that we fix this, we write it down first of all. Have your interviewers write down specific objective feedback. Not, she was cool, but she missed the test coverage issue in this question. She solved the problem with 10 minutes to spare. And then share all that feedback at once that nobody can cheat. Make sense? Cool. So recap. If you want to hire well, welcome. Time for recap. If you want to hire well, you need to pick a set of constructs and you need to design and test interviews that are valid, reliable and usable. Cool? So there's one more thing I want to talk about before we actually go. And the reason is the point at which I submitted this talk. I was having an issue with a couple clients where they had teams that we'll say were more than a little bit homogenous. And so I talked to them about their interview process. And what they always said is the feedback I get all the time is we only want to hire people, we only hire the best, we don't want to lower the bar. And I hate this, right? But I couldn't tell you precisely why. Like I couldn't give you the reasoning. I know it's wrong, but I couldn't give you the reason. And I understand the reasoning now as part of this talk. And the reality is that for a lot of us, what they believe, they're not bad people, but they believe they have this bar and you're over it or you're under it. And in that sense, of course you don't want to lower it. But the reality is the bar doesn't look like this.  Because of all these extra things that you're measuring that have nothing to do with job success. And so I'm gonna say we should probably actually raise the bar. Most people with interviews are not nearly as tough as they think they are. But to do that first we need to make sure that the bar is straight. Cool? Thank you.