Good afternoon. You are with the Vermont House Government Operations Committee. We are gathered this afternoon with Orange County Sheriff Bill Bonyak, and with Commissioner Mike Schirling from Department of Public Safety. We appreciate you being with us today. The committee is getting up to speed with some new members of the legislature and some folks who are newly transferred to government operations from other committees. So what we would like to understand, and I'm going to ask you first to do just a high-level introduction to the Law Enforcement Advisory Board. Then I would love for us to be able to dive in a little bit on the body-worn camera policy process that you are embarking on at the moment. Bill, I assume you're going to speak to us first and Commissioner Schirling's on back up if we pepper you with too many questions. Absolutely. So, Madam Chair and representatives, thank you for inviting me. I'm Bill Bonyak, Orange County Sheriff, Chair of the LEAB and LEAB, the Law Enforcement Advisory Board, just give you the higher level. Back in 2004, the Vermont General Assembly created the Law Enforcement Advisory Board. The purpose of the board was to advise the Commissioner of Public Safety, the governor and the general assembly of issues that affect all law enforcement in Vermont, i.e., the body-worn cameras, use of force, fair and impartial policing. Every year, there may be requests from the governing bodies to look at some of the items and that's what we do. We have a collaborative approach. The LEAB is made up of currently 17 members who are put together by our legislators, and it's everybody from the commissioner to the sheriffs, the chiefs of police, constable, members of the whole list. So, I'll just give you an idea from the Attorney General's office, fishing game, Vermont Leeds and City Towns, Defender General's office. So, we've got a wide variety of people with all different levels of experience with law enforcement. So, and then what we do is we'll look at something like what we're looking at today, the body-worn cameras. And back in the fall, we were requested by DPS to update the body-worn cameras. And so, on December 21st, we got the first draft at a regular meeting. And then what we did is we formed a subcommittee of three members. They took that and worked with Jen Morrison. She's a special assistant to the commissioner's office, to the commissioner. And they reviewed it. They looked at many different policies out there. They also worked with the ACLU and, I believe, a total of over 140 different, let's say, recommendations that came in. So, a lot of people have got eyes on this and it's very transparent. So, we just met this past Monday and we reviewed it and we had a couple more minor changes that we'd like to see. So, we're sending it back to the subcommittee for their review to make some minor changes. And then it'll come back to our February meeting. We'll review it. So, either our February meeting or the latest, there'll be March that hopefully the LEAB will approve it and then move it forward to the Vermont Criminal Justice Council. And then I just want to bring it so you know that once the LEAB approves this policy, this model policy, that will become the standard until the Vermont Criminal Justice Training, or the training out of it, the council, they'll take it, review it, make any changes. And they have until January 1st, 2022, to bring it back before the legislators. So, that's where we're at right now. And myself and the commissioner, we're both here to answer any questions. So, I appreciate the overview of the process. And I guess what I'd like to do is drill down a little bit into some of the considerations, some of the actual policy considerations themselves, just so that members of the committee can get a sense of what are you going for? What are you aiming at? What are the problem areas that are sticking points for you? What can you tell us about what you expect will be ultimately contained there? All right. Some of the, I'd say, if you want to, the biggest areas of some controversial areas, it's going to be, can an officer review the recordings prior to giving statements on a potential criminal investigation? So, that's one of them. Retention guidelines, timelines, most particularly with lethal force incidents. But in general, everything, the prohibitions of the use of body-worn cameras in schools or hospitals to work through to allow for recordings if the officer responds to an incident or use of force is likely or during a criminal investigation on site. The other thing that's going to be difficult and very expensive is the redaction. When you're talking about on a statewide level, I'm sure the commissioner will talk about this because we were taking around ideas. Currently, there's many police departments and sheriff's departments who do have body-worn cameras. And we're currently, some people are using the cloud for storage. Some are doing, like, I'll give you an example, for a sheriff's department. We're keeping, we have a separate computer and a separate hard drive, like a three- or four-terabyte hard drive that we store all the data on for one year. And then we just buy a new hard drive and store it all over again every year. The bigger picture, if we go statewide, if the state is going to, I don't want to take too much away from the commissioner, but we're looking at a new records management system that's going to go statewide, will everything be stored on there for all of the videos? It's, there's a lot of questions. Any, when we stop there and ask any questions or commissioner? I'm a. Public layer has a question. Yes, Samantha. Rob, unmute yourself. Sorry, you couldn't understand when my lips were moving. Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't know if this is a question for the sheriff or the commissioner, but when we're talking about body camera policy here, we already have a fairly extensive and robust one for VSP, don't we? We do. And we have a, that's a good question. And we have a robust statewide model that was previously developed. However, as we learn more as the community standards change and as a number of other things intersect body worn cameras, evolution of use of force in response to resistance and a host of other topics, this is a timely point to make modifications and to take additional stakeholder feedback. As you'll see in the memorandum that we drafted, there's been extensive stakeholder feedback. And the areas that the sheriff has outlined, when to turn the camera on and off, retention schedules, what types of things need to be redacted, and review of footage by officers, and when that should occur, are the key areas where we've sought feedback. We've engaged professionals that can help us understand things like memory and how review of body worn camera footage can impact memory. And we're weaving all of those things together to create an update from that solid foundation that existed previously. But we do believe this will be a substantial set of enhancements. And I'm happy to go into more detail around those policy considerations that the sheriff was outlining, if you'd like. Well, thank you, Commissioner. And if we can wait for another day if it's appropriate, that's fine. I'm just curious. I recognize that this is one of those things that has to change as society changes to a certain degree. But for lack of a better expression, there's a part of it that sometimes it feels like we're just trying to reinvent the wheel. It would seem like several of those examples that you've pointed out, I would have thought we would have already, in some cases, have addressed them. Some of them were addressed, but the thinking evolves over time. And we are constantly looking for ways to improve policy and operations, not withstanding legislative action or interest. This happens with dozens of policies on an annual basis. We're working on a couple right now in the wake of a couple of events that we're learning, had to better handle certain kinds of things. And we're making policy alterations today over the next week or so on a couple of other areas of operation. So it's a normal course of business. Very good. Thank you, sir. One of the things that you're adding some definitions to the policy. And the ACLU has made many recommendations. And we have incorporated those into the policy. So we're making sure we're being fair to all parties concerned, everyone. And even with we're addressing the prohibition of the use of facial recognition. So the only time that can be used, you're going to need to search more. So there's a lot to this. It's not, we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We're just, as the commissioner said, we're adding to it. And we're making it more of today's recent standards that have been going on on a nationwide level. I think we're getting ahead of the curve here in Vermont. So it may make sense to elaborate just a little bit on a couple of those areas where the policy considerations have been most robustly discussed and additional language added. Among them, when the camera should be on or off. Now, when you look at this from the outside, the initial reaction is, well, why would you ever shut it off? Well, if we're in a public restroom and we're not dealing with a violent event or something that needs to be captured, people have a privacy interest there. When we're in a school or a hospital, there are privacy interests that override the need to capture encounters with officers. And of course, if things go poorly, we turn them on at that point. Relative to retention, you're balancing the technology and how much storage the sheer volume with the need to retain footage. And it's important to note, when you talk about retention, there are two different kinds of retention. First is the initial retention period, where all video is stored for a period of time while you can assess whether it needs to be archived and that's that second level. Anything that involves an arrest involves a use of force or an unusual event or it's capturing evidence or something of that nature, it's gonna be archived and basically held forever. But for all the other encounters, the day-to-day things that are happening or it's capturing interactions, those are typically gonna be held for 90 days well. You can make assessments as to whether there's something that needs to be archived for a longer period of time. And then redaction is the whole area where the technology and processing things and altering video is a little bit dicey, but it's something that we're working through and I don't wanna bring us down that rabbit hole too far in this initial overview. The last piece is when an officer should review footage. Nine times out of 10, an officer's actions don't result in any kind of serious outcome. Someone's not injured, it's not a use of force where lethal force is used to superstition knock on wood. If I say that something bad could happen. Most of the footage is just of routine things and it's used to refresh an officer's memory as a report is written or something of that nature. And there are no restrictions in the draft policy relative to reviewing footage on sort of the day-to-day things that just happen. There are restrictions or parameters in the draft that are informed by memory science and the need to conduct an independent parallel investigation in incidents where there's death or serious bodily injury where a lethal force has been used, where the officer for a period of time becomes a subject of a parallel ongoing criminal investigation. And the best science we've been able to unearth and the best guidance that we've been able to draft so far and this is still in development creates a balance where an officer will write their report or give an interview without the benefit of their memory being aided by the video. Understanding that memory is fallible and that certain periods of time have to elapse before a memory actually sets in. There's a chemistry behind that. And then following that, the officer can review the footage and then make alterations or clearly document what facts were enhanced without modifying their original statement. So that's the balance that appears to be the best policy construct based on the current thinking around the use of video and those kinds of serious incidents. Thanks, commissioner. I've got Sam Lefebvre with a question. Thank you, madam chair. Thank you, chair and commissioners. So my questions kind of hit a couple of different spots. So the cameras that are already in use, how would those be used more if let's say like DMV does get them because what their work is is completely different in a sense like they're creeping under tractor trailers. Would those hold up or would be looking at different systems? And a couple, I'm grateful to have many friends that are in law enforcement and they consistently remind me that a camera is only good for proof if it or for proof for either person, the officer or the civilian if it's there.  And I don't think the state's in a situation to pay for the automatic upload of the recording. Have we thought about that also? I'm not sure I'm following the second question but let me do the first one first. The camera systems are hardened systems. They're designed for use in all kinds of conditions, rain, sleet, snow, extreme temperatures of all types. Underneath trucks, you wouldn't necessarily have to have the camera on by policy because it's designed to record or the policy is designed to direct the recording of interactions between an officer and the public. That's not to say it couldn't be used to document defective equipment or something that was found underneath a tractor trailer but that's not the primary use. And I'm sorry, if the sheriff followed the second question, I'll have him answer but if not, I may have to ask you to rephrase it for me. If Sam, can you just rephrase that please? So if you have an officer who's having a public interaction and the interaction goes south and the officer is injured and the camera is taken off of the officer, is there any way for you guys to track the camera or pull that information off if you don't have the camera? No, that's a great question. If the hardware is lost, the video is lost as well until that video is either, until the camera, the hardware itself is either docked for upload or in some instances, we have the ability to wirelessly upload from a barracks or a police station or a wireless access point. Because I know... We're not at the point yet where there may come a future time when it's streaming from the scene to another location but that technology is not available yet. And I don't believe the funds are either from just other department's perspective. The amount of funds it would take to automatically upload to a cloud is something the state of Vermont would not be that happy looking at the price tag for. So those are just points I'd like to just look at. And the couple of DMV officers I've talked to, they mentioned the same thing that when they were on their creeper, they wouldn't be necessarily recording but if they popped up and the trucker was unhappy with them and that moment of them setting up, they were caught in a scenario. It might be good to have that on camera but then it goes into when to turn it off, when to turn it on and distraction. So thank you guys for your questions, your answers and your time. Thank you. Yes, if I may just add a camera is a tool. It is not a perfect tool. It does require that you push buttons. You don't always know when you're gonna need to push those buttons. The buttons don't always work and candidly in under stressful situations, your fingers don't always work. So it's not perfect. There are going to be instances when a camera should have been on when it's not. It's going to happen. And the goal is for those things to happen as infrequently as possible and to strive for perfection as much as we can but we'll not hit that mark every time. The other thing too, most of these cameras they're set up, they're either recording all the time but when you hit that button record, it goes back either 30 seconds or a minute. It depends on what the camera is set up for. So like you said, if DMV inspectors underneath the truck and the guy starts kicking them, he slides out and that is recorded. And then when he hits record button, it goes back to that 30 seconds or 60 seconds. So like commissioner said, these are tools, they're not perfect but there's several different cameras, styles out there, everything from eyeglasses to worry on your shoulder, worry directly on your chest. And the technology is ever changing. We had some of our digital cameras in our cars but as soon as we pulled into the sheriff's office and you're in reach of the Wi-Fi, it automatically downloaded. You didn't have to manually download the camera footage. It would automatically do it as soon as you come in contact with the Wi-Fi. So the technology is out there and it's ever changing. All right, John Gannon. John, you need to unmute. I think you were unmuted before you just remuted yourself.  Thank you very much for testifying today, sheriff and commissioner. I have a comment and then a question. I just wanna remind you about Act 106's prohibition on the use of facial recognition except by drones. So you just wanna take that into consideration in your policy because even warranted facial recognition would be prohibited by Act 106. So my question deals with what recommendations of the ACL used you did not incorporate? I believe, I'm talking from wrong commissioner, but I believe we incorporated all of them. I think it's pretty close. I think there's a couple of fragments that may be different. I think on retention, we may be different by an incremental factor. I don't recall exactly what it is. I don't have that spreadsheet of all of the feedback in what's been incorporated, what's been partially incorporated and what hasn't been incorporated in front of me right now. Can we have that, please? Sure, we'll get it to you. Thank you. I think that was attached to a document that was sent to you, but I have to verify that. It may be the use of force one that's complete and that one's been submitted. We have an unbelievable amount of work that's in progress. So a spreadsheet was sent yesterday. It might be the use of force version. No worries, we'll be patient. I just want to reassure the committee here that this has been thoughtfully looked at and transparency, working with all groups, everyone listening, like I said from the beginning, I think over, there was like, I believe like over 140 inputs on this, people adding stuff or making recommendations. So, we're being mindful to everyone, everyone involved and we just want to make sure we are doing the right thing and we get this policy done correctly and that all of our monitors feel low on force or run the right track, we're doing the right thing here. And to answer your question on the spreadsheet, it was use of force that was submitted and the body worn camera version of that is not complete yet, but it will be available once it is complete. But if you want to know what it will look like, you can take a look at the use of force version of that. How custom. Thank you, Madam Chair. Good to see you again, Commissioner and nice to meet you, Sheriff. Could you speak to your process for soliciting feedback and input from Vermonters with lived experiences with body worn cameras, whether it was good, bad or ugly, what was your process to get those voices? Well, candidly, we don't have a way to identify folks that have lived experience with a body worn camera. So, there isn't a way to directly access that cross-section of people, but the overall engagement process included sending out press releases and inviting stakeholder feedback across social media platforms statewide and directly soliciting feedback from 145 known stakeholders and stakeholder groups. So, it was a wide net versus a, well, partially surgical net because the known stakeholders and stakeholder groups received it directly. But we don't actually have a mechanism for reaching folks that have lived experience with body worn cameras. I've actually never heard that population identified that way before. I've heard other populations with lived experience identified, but not relative to folks that have experience with body worn cameras. I guess I was wondering if there were community-based organizations out there who would be closer to the ground and in touch with people who may have had positive or negative experiences. So, that's what I was curious to know. You know, we went through a similar process with our effort to gather and put around social equity issues and we really made an effort to find those organizations that are on the ground that would be able to identify people who have had experiences, whether they were positive or negative. So, that's what I was curious for. Yeah, so good question. I'm not aware of any organization that's organized around folks with that particular kind of experience, but I guess I would start by referring you to that same report I just mentioned, the one that's already been submitted on the use of force policy that has a lengthy list of the stakeholders who provided feedback and those who were engaged. And it's roughly the same list because there's only a finite number of stakeholders in social justice and law enforcement matters in Vermont. So, I would expect that once this report's completed, it'll have a similar list attached to it. Okay, thank you. Any other questions from committee members? Right. Commissioner or sheriff, anything else you would like to share with us? That we'll continue to work on this and hopefully, like I said, either a February meeting or by March, we should be, hopefully, the LEB will be approving it and sending it on to the Vermont Criminal Justice Council. Great. And then we'll work on the next one. Well, I appreciate your good work and your diligent efforts on this. It's all, you know, these are tasks that we have been called on by our constituents to give to someone. So I appreciate that you're focused on that and putting your good efforts into it. Oh, you're quite welcome. And I just want to give kudos out to our special assistant to the commissioner, Jennifer Morrison, many of you know her from Burlington. And she put a lot of time and effort and research into this. So she deserves a lot of credit. It's not as simple as someone might seem looking at it from the outside. So I can appreciate that you have benefited from her research and hard work. Any other questions from committee members before we let the commissioner and the sheriff go? All right. Gentlemen, thank you for being with us today. You're quite welcome. Nice to meet everyone. Thank you. All right, committee. Thank you so much for popping right over here after the floor. The budget adjustment debate went a little faster than I thought it might. So it looks like we're getting into committee and getting done in good time. I don't know about you, but the break we had earlier did not give me enough time to get through all of the messages that I needed to respond to and all the phone calls I needed to make. So yes, tomorrow we are, let's see, what do we have? We have committee tomorrow after the floor. Carrie Brown will be with us tomorrow morning after the floor to jump back to the boards and commissions bill. And she is gonna come in and talk with us about the Vermont commission on women. And then through the first couple of days of next week, we will hear from other boards or folks who are aware of the workings of boards that the bill proposes to change and we'll try to get that bill out in short order next week. So tomorrow afternoon, we have a joint hearing with the Commerce and Economic Development Committee. This came as a result of requests by you that we look into the operations of our UI system and try to understand some of the challenges that it faced in the unprecedented wave of unemployed Vermonters when we shut down after the governor stay home, stay safe order last March. And so I would expect it will be a good, robust discussion and we will benefit from the experience and the wisdom of the Commerce Committee folks who we are doing this hearing with. And so I guess I would just say that we, this will be the first opportunity that we've had to have a larger, really large group meeting. And so please feel free to raise your hand and ask a question as you would. It's a larger group. So it might mean that we're moving a little more slowly but this is important information that we all need to be able to get on behalf of our constituents. And so I just wanna say right there that I want you to feel free to get your question in and if we run out of time we'll come back to it on another day. And that's all I have. Any questions, committee discussion? Everybody wanna go finish sorting through all of the endless communications that they haven't been able to keep up with.


Great. Welcome everybody. We're, I sent you a meeting request to open up the screen if you want here. Okay. Just, we did a lot of work, evidently since the last time it looks like we're re enabling where we are with saw tooth. There's a bunch of discussion couple people have asked questions and. Thanks Sean for guiding a few of them through there and Kevin, and I believe. Bill have all guided people through there so that's good, and we need to start reaching out and having more people enabled on this. So the, I just threw the agenda up here in terms of what's up on. Google Drive. So basically, you know we're to keep the one dot current X line current we've got a bunch of ideas on here. We need to walk through. We made a lot of progress let's keep that up. And I think the first question we had on there was should the project take what's in Maine and take one dot three or one dash three and make it the main so that would be the branch structure. And I believe that was Sean.  So kind of the current state of Maine, why this is this is interesting is. There's a ton of good stuff in in Maine that isn't in one three. That kind of puts one three to shame, actually. However, the decisions that we made quite a while ago is switch over to transact before it could run transaction processors. largely because some of us are completely uninterested in any other language than stuff that would run in wasm, which included all of the maintainers. So we put that effort into into that and didn't implement transaction processor support. Which leaves it in the current state of, you know, the rest of the community here not not migrating to it. So as we as we move forward, like, I guess like a principle I'd like to move forward with is that we move forward as a as a single community, and not kind of fork the project. And so with kind of renewed interest in in one three. It really makes sense to go back there's a larger, I think community here around one three. Then I anticipated surely that we go back and we just start back porting the good stuff off of the other branch 23. But then to make it clear that like, you know, we have one, certainly development branch that we name that that branch main. And I think it's probably an easier. It's an, it would be an easier path to start with one three. Kind of not break it as a as it were, then to fill in any gaps between main and what the community expects right now out of one three feature set. Do people have comments on that Kevin bill anybody else. I totally ask is if there are there any infrastructure you got just I don't really have an opinion on whether or not to do it. It's just, are there any. Well, will there be a breakage. If we do that from infrastructure and things like that. Build stuff.  The forks here. Right, the forks and like, you know, personal checkouts based on main and stuff like that. You know, in an ideal world, this is something you would never do. Right. But it is where we are. And I think it does make sense to kind of rally around, you know, single code base. More than just kind of continue to diverge. Because we can, there's plenty of examples of communities diverging and essentially creating two completely different things. I think that that can work if there's a big enough community. I don't think we have a big enough community for kind of multiple projects here. I'm in full agreement with that that we need to have it merge back I don't think you're going to have much pushback I'm not sure who's using it. I'm not aligning I think we'll find out once we break their forks or break whatever they've got on their server. And they'll come to us at that point so we have to be ready to answer those questions but I've been involved in multiple open source projects and sometimes it comes to a point where you've got to do this so I think the people that would care are using the splinter, because it is, you know, like 100 times better. So, basically in every way, then then sawtooth except for consensus and transaction processor support, but like from like a stability perspective. So, that being the case like there's not a lot of sawtooth notes that are first, like first order sawtooth notes. Okay. Um, what do you what do you mean by that running actively, you're saying. What do you mean by that that statement there's not that many nodes, not that many splinter I think it means not that many splinter. Not that many, like, uses of this code base in Maine in like, POC is your production and stuff like that, because in the wild, I see. Right. So I don't think we're going to be breaking, you know, people's environments. I don't think that's a real concern. So you don't think there's very many people using sawtooth itself. And they've many of them migrated over how many people are using splinter, do you think so I don't, I don't want to comment on that, because of all the days, and all of that stuff is this NDA so But suffice it to say that like, you know, the team that was working on on the stuff, you know, a lot of like the vision the overall vision was to bring all of the really good stuff that is in splinter, essentially new networking layer. And that's what the main branch essentially does in part. It's not like we're going to kill the branch though right we're just going to move it off to another would just move it, but I'd rather like for me personally like where I'd like to invest my time forward it's like okay. We can take some of those features, we can we can merge the stuff into into main and then kind of move forward as a community. That way, as opposed to filling in the gaps in that current branch. It's like we can look at what's in Maine and we can like, you know, there's, there's some patches that were just, you know, that we can just pull right directly. And the one problematic one is that transition to transact, where we wouldn't want to pull that exactly. We will want more finesse and to not break the current transaction processor support. And it's down to the practicalities right so it's the life of the splinter community, we just born in advance and advertise that this is what they need to do to switch to the branch. So just switch to what is currently made but will be, you know, branch X. What would you want to call this branch we want to throw a new number in there so everybody's aware of what's happening or we can call it a one three call it a one four and start merging into that. We called it like 199 informally, but I think just giving it a name that's not a virgin number, because we could see like the current one three growing up to be 2.0 so I don't want to like, take away from that for us to kind of get to the same point by different direction by like claiming version numbers. We like the main branches never been released never been declared ready for like production or anything like that. So, so we have we were very careful never to just kind of developer discussions, not kind of claim that it was ready so. So I don't think there's a big concern. Just picking a different different branch name. I have to think that I haven't come up with one yet. Who should we have on that should it be yourself, Kevin bill. Anybody else. I mean, I think everybody else is working for one of the companies. Probably only maintainer that has permission enough to do that stuff. Okay. It's very easy. It's not like a time consuming thing it's just like a more of a big decision type of thing. So I think we should go ahead with this unless there's objections from buddy, anybody on the call. I think you just pick the branch name and then read me somewhere. Just to warn people what's happened. Okay. Just a note. So that's a good idea. Right. Let's figure out what happened. Yeah, so let's make sure we post that up on discord several places and possibly under announce that way. It kind of gets permanently hung there as well as the active to active channels that are there. Let's get it posted all three once it happens. So people understand what's going on. Any more discussion on that one. So I have a question. Embarrassingly, I've pretty much ignored main because I almost all of our work has been in the one one that Francis so I've pretty much tuned out of it for a while. What are the, you know, what's the elevator picture what are the main changes that have gone into main that are in the regular one series is you said network layer stuff is there anything else. So it's hard for me to talk about the vision then like focus on like what's currently in in Maine, in terms of like our intent and direction, because some pieces aren't there but it's hard to talk about, you know, being compelling without kind of the whole. The way that we started splinter was just a recognition by us, you know, like the authors of soft tooth, right, that wrote all the code that that the networking layer is bad. Right, it's. It's got some pretty extreme problems with it. Even more problems with the journal and stuff like that the abstractions aren't good. It's extremely difficult to make changes there without breaking something. And it's always to some extent always been broken because of how it's written. You know that's that that's an artifact of the intense effort over quite a long period of time to construct it and get it to the future set it is right so not taking away from that but just saying it has issues. So we're looking at moving that trust say like okay. Like, we actually don't want what's there not has issues. You know what do we want. So we started kind of thinking about that and thinking okay how should this work cleanly. And that turned into splinter. How I saw splinter initially was essentially just a lower level. Networking layer that we would use under sawtooth. So most most of the thinking in the early days splinter was kind of at that layer, like, if you think about dividing things up cleanly what would you want at that layer versus you know mixed with the other layers and stuff like that. So we put a lot of effort into into that layer into three connections things that like in one three. You know our, are rather broken those problems don't exist in splinters network layer. But as splinter kind of grew up took a life of its own. And, you know we kind of started to use it to kind of prototype things that eventually, you know, you know, from a vision perspective we see like okay this would make sense for sawtooth but we can't do it in the subject code base. So we have to splinter and then we can talk about how to get it back over to sawtooth so things like reconsidering transaction execution. You know, implementing transact, for example, and the reason that transact was in splinter first is it's easier. It's not so easy to to deal with that mix of Rust and Python code that we currently have three. And so, all the transaction support which is, you know, leagues, leagues better than, than what's in one three. Right we took everything we knew. We created something far more elegant.  All the other capabilities are essentially there, including like really good that's what we cared about. I still do care about. So, so as, as we're kind of exploring this okay so we have like transaction support it's like, you know, I would say half of sawtooth, right. In a cleaner model, more flexible doesn't have the issues. We started to look at, okay, the worst part of sawtooth is the journal. Why is that right. And so we started to work on abstractions around. Okay, what should it be. Right. You know why does it feel like spaghetti code currently, right the boundaries must be wrong, which they are, and that is why it feels that way. We stay around with that. Okay, what, you know, what does it look like if we if we clean that up and we think critically about the, the function of consensus and in the journal and stuff like that. And a lot of that is currently in splinter now splinter only because of where our focus has been is all to face commit because the use cases were ones that just lent themselves to using to face commit. So it's a capability sawtooth doesn't have to go down to two or three nodes. But there are some interesting use cases where you don't really care about the trust issues, but all these other features are compelling. And that's kind of the space that we were playing in for a long time with what's splinter and grid. So it's really like every. So the way that we came back to sawtooth to the vision was okay let's take the work that we've done in splinter and put the interesting pieces of that. That make it into a blockchain in the sawtooth. And so a lot of that work has been focused on live sawtooth and saying, I don't know exactly what we're going to do in the future. I don't know exactly what we're going to do in the future. I don't know exactly what we're going to do in the future, but we essentially finished transact for for what we needed at the time. There's a long list of stuff that, you know, I'd like to see going to that code but even if you don't want was and but you're using rust. It's really good. But the things that splinter doesn't do that, you know, I couldn't see it really doing was, you know, becoming a blockchain, you know, that's, that's what that's what sawtooth is about so all the all of these other things, you know, like the consensus model and journal in splinter are not block based. It's a simplified version so that we could work on, you know, various pieces. And so sawtooth to really about, okay, let's take the good pieces that we have in splinter. Use those. But in sawtooth and really live sawtooth rewrite the journal. And, and all of the things that make make it a blockchain that aren't like the lower level things and reconstruct that up. So, you know, main is part of the way there. But not so far that it that we can't like, rebase that effort on the one three. I think the, you know, the, the direction that we were going with that branch was really to think of, think about redefining sawtooth, right, from here's a validator to here's here's a project that has a really nice rust library for building distributed ledgers, whether that's block based, like sawtooth, or whether that's non block based, like scabbard, which is the splinter transaction processor essentially. You know, but really see the project as, hey, we're going to build this awesome capability to build custom distributed ledgers. Right. And the validator is going to be a reference implementation. And the things that we've seen over time right with like forking in within our own community and, and especially people on the call here not contributing back all the time. Right. Under that model is great. Right.  And that's the model. Right. You can customize it, customize the add value replace components. You know, that that that and the validator just being like reference implementation. And so, you know, the reference implementation like most reference implementations, you know, can get users pretty far but from like a development standpoint, seeing that as like, okay, what we're really doing here is we're going to build a model kit to create these things.  So, yeah, so. Okay, thank you. Thank you very much for the for the summary just it's good to know, you know what the state what the state of the artist right and then, again, I admit to having not paid attention to the to the main development effort for a while.  Yes, but it's not something that even I have done recently because it's not. It's not an incredibly useful thing to do. Well, that depends. It wasn't it wasn't incredibly useful to me is what I should say. Because we weren't using use cases that were like PBFT based. But you can stand it up. And we did this with like our grid testing and stuff because all of the, the grid testing. And the grid grid runs on both because everything in splitter is 100% compatible with what sawtooth and so you can kind of, you know, pick your distributed ledger that you want to run a grid on. Now, we're going to end of life grid, eventually. But. But that being the case, you know, they're very, very similar. I feel like the difficult thing in Maine, which is extremely true. In one three as well is like the difficulty of standing up and not work. It's pretty extreme. With all the Docker assumptions that we've made there and stuff that kind of just makes it more difficult than it needs to be. But it's functional. But it can only run wasn't smart contracts. So maybe not functional for this crowd. Why don't we go on to some of the specific changes. Just to keep us on track so we can get this in under an hour. Any other questions to Sean on the first thing. And he's given us a wide ranging view. So if you want to say that was that was that was a good, good presentation. Thank you very much for going over it. Just think it helps to, to give a basic understanding of where everything is. Thank you. The thing that we need to do post switching branch out is, is basically come up with a game plan to identify the bits and the things that need to move forward right there are definitely good bits in the main there. And the goal of frankly, we're one of the original goals of eliminating the Python. It's a great call. There's a lot of the boundary violations happen inside the Python stuff right. The, so what we should do basically put on the board as the next thing to do after we do the merge is to go through and try to identify those things that need to be pulled across because they're or they skip us down, down the way, and then put them up on a board. I know we don't have. I don't think we haven't, we haven't even brought up jury and I'm not suggesting we talk about jury now but that's the next one. Whatever right it's, but it's, it's a some sort of tracker right to go for it as it goes through but the my point is, next thing after we do the branches to come up with the plan to see see what's what the first first goers are. We're already talking about some right which looks like the database abstractions and stuff like that. And those are, those are similar. Do we need to have a board. Do we start putting actions on, or is there one that you're using Sean. I think it would make sense to just use GitHub issues on the on the repos that are that are affected. You know we always use like internal boards for everything in Jira or, or whatever but like, I think we've used probably four or five different things but from a project perspective because we're not, you know, we're not going to run sprints together. It makes sense just to enter them as issues and you know assign and stuff because I imagine people are going to commit to timelines and stuff. Okay, so we'll start using GitHub issues to start putting notes in there. Okay. Zmcube message I can't remember who sent that. Do we want to start just talking through that one. Yes, yeah that was, that was me and so we've been using sort of as a transaction process. And we've done a couple of integrations in rust and currently working on unifying abstractions between a couple of different transaction press implementations. And there's a few mainly ergonomic issues with the current rust sort of SDK when it comes to using it from modern rest, mostly around using it from asynchronous rest. It was designed at a point when that wasn't particularly stable, I think it was around around around the time features were introduced into rust and it was still a little bit up in the air, I think, but the two main issues from the perspective of using it as a client to communicate with a validator, the Zmcube message sender is both blocking and concrete, so you end up having to put your own traits on top of that and putting asynchronous implementation on top of that as well if you need a sync. And the other side of that is in the transaction process itself is the the apply method supplies a mutable reference which is quite a difficult type to deal with even in synchronous rust, but in asynchronous rust it's very tricky you need to build a internal mechanism and effects systems on top of it to be able to use the transaction context in a, in anything that's asynchronous that you're supplying into the into the apply method. So, Sean, is this part of what you've already got done in your other projects and we can move on. I mean, yes, we've completely rewritten that code. That's actually in the software now because we move transact there. And that's all part of transact. I think a couple things. Yeah, all that code is synchronous. So, so all the async use case here is, is new. There's, you know, not those pain points at all without that. I think, well there's a couple things one. I've seen the sawtooth SDK trade has kind of deprecated for a long time. So, I don't think it's necessary.  Because those of us using transact have really just seen that like as completely, you know, replaced essentially by what we have in transact, which doesn't include the transaction processor pieces. Right. So it's not 100%, but it's like 90%. It's like smart contract APIs and stuff coming from transact. And we have a lot of smart contract smart contracts that probably have conditional so that we can select between them. Because that was interesting for for a period of time. So I think like at a high level. You know, I'm on board with with iterating on that stuff. I think that we should do that in probably in the sawtooth. In the sawtooth, we should we should make sure we have a clear delineation between what's in lib sawtooth and what's in sawtooth SDK. And that becomes hard because there's a lot of potential like code sharing. So, you know, do we want more than one crate? It's essentially like the question there, or do we just want to pray where you turn on the features that you're using? Is it shared because of the dependency on the protobuf primarily in the existing sawtooth SDK because it does have both the transaction processor side and the client side and all they all they really need all they really depend on mutually is the is the protobuf generation. As far as I can see. Does the MQ code can all be shared or is shared, right? Use the same same MQ socket code for clients and for TPs. Yeah, so I think that's something we can explore we don't you know need to make technical decisions here. It's kind of isn't the form for, you know, in-depth technical discussion that we haven't, you know, kind of already hashed out and thought deeply like on the channel. So I'm not sure what the answer should be, but that's, you know, that's kind of where I'm starting from this. Oh, this was deprecated maybe not now. Maybe we need to rethink this. Some of the stuff we have in the sawtooth should go over to the SDK and we update that. And do our development there. Or maybe we move it all to the sawtooth. So any more thought, I don't want to even recommend one way or the other, like, I know I would lean towards the sawtooth because that's where the transact stuff is, but there's a lot of things that we've talked around. So we should take this over to Discord and discuss it there and see what we can come up with. I think that's the best place. I think really we need to. So it's interesting considering using like async stuff within apply. It's interesting that like that I've really thought about because it's completely uninteresting if what you're doing is writing smart contracts. Right, because smart contracts should be like that. Right. It shouldn't be that it should be logic, right. It should be stuff that can run within wasm. And so you wouldn't do anything asynchronous because it's it's doesn't make any sense. So, but if you go to transaction processor level, then that's different. So I think it's, it's important to differentiate like okay what are we where are we kind of changing the interface and like who's the who's the target. Interestingly, our use case for the asynchronous bits in the transaction processor is purely for serialization for various reasons we've ended up with a some asynchronous stuff in us in our civilization. But the the actual core bit that would map to smart contract would be that still that's purely that is purely synchronous code but there is.  That's over to discord. I'm trying to just get us running the next 14 minutes here. The apply signature processor. Do we want to have that discussion on discord also, or do we want to talk about it here. It's probably quite detailed so I'm quite I'm happy to move that to discord if that's okay. Let's do that sounds good and my concerns are going to be like how do we how do we get to like one code base so you know we could take, you know, and diverge significantly. And you know my goal is going to be. Okay, I want to make sure that like where we're, we're unifying more than separating. So, you know the viewpoint I'm going to bring is like, okay how do I use this within splinter how do you use it. How does it impact all of the smart contracts that we currently have stuff like that. Yeah, we can take it to discord. Okay. The next thing on the list was existing test infrastructure should be rebuilt, built, and especially considering we're changing quite a bit of infrastructure here are the codes. Do we want to rebuild that who would do that. So last time I think I threw up my hand I said I would help out with that I have some time to deal with that this month. And you said you had some terraform stuff for running up the past infrastructure. Yeah, and this was like ad hoc stuff not stuff we would like the system, but like, yeah, we could connect on that and try to get one of those systems up. So I did, I didn't maintain that stuff. And the person that's that's maintained it. I'm so interested in answering questions about it. So, like, maybe. But, um, Yeah, sure. We can work through it. It's a place to start and we can throw up some things. Got some ideas. My goal would be to get it so that it could run in a CI infrastructure. And then a short test, and then a long one. We'll see. But that's that's that's a stable so I'll think it was gather up materials and see what we can do. That sounds good. So I'll put on there Sean and Kevin take this up on a fly anybody else. What their name on that. Okay. I think the new smart contract interface. That is on there. I think that goes back into your first original discussion unless there's something different that I missed on that. Yeah, I think so I think that like, we just need to differentiate between like, because we use the same interface for maybe multiple things right now. But like, okay, we really shouldn't be doing that. So smart contracts should be using a smart contract interface. And then we have the transaction processor stuff that is more flexible and to make sure that like, when we trans change the transaction processor stuff we're not rewriting any of our smart contracts. Unless it's to like a better smart contract API. Of course, but like, that those are kind of two, two different things. They're maybe too tightly coupled. So I think that's the thing to think about there. Okay. The last thing on there is update any of the demo somebody's asked for that on discord a couple times. Don't know if we want to do that, considering the changes we're talking about. And that would be down the road maybe some firm has an intern who could do that once these changes are made, because interns usually start in May. That's what I was thinking on there. You get the demos and GitHub, because right now somebody tries to run them. They're a mess. Like what's demo specifically. Like this. Yeah, there's a slight. I was a problem with the XO demo right there I was broken to I think the XO right so just like documentation and probably primarily Docker issues. Yeah, most likely it's probably just you know there's a disconnect between something changed in the documentation was never updated or you know somebody forgot to build the Docker container or something I think it's mostly stuff like that. Well, the nice, the nice thing to report here is we have all of the website stuff is actually all hooked up and like commits emerges that repo will update the live site and stuff, which is one of the more recent things that we that we did is converted over to charcoal and stuff and made it accessible. Before it was very hard to deal with, but you can actually just go into the doc repo and just run. You have to install just first and then you can do just run and then you can run the site locally and work on it. It's very easy. Okay. So I'll table that one for now and hopefully this starts getting itself out over time. High priority bugs or issues anything that we needed to talk through on that. The needs to be handled fairly quickly. Anybody have any of those. I don't think so right now. Keep that as an agenda item always. Yeah, and anything on an open discussion that we want to talk about that we haven't talked through is monthly a good. Go ahead, Sean is throw this out there. So our current life maintainer policy. I think could use a revision. I think primarily in in two ways. I think the first is defining some inactivity period by which we might retire maintainers, if we cannot easily contact them to ask them if they want to be maintainers. Or just a period by which like, you know, we've kind of defined the period so that, you know, no one is offended. If we change their standards and rules around that the current the current policy is ask which is is I think the best policy for folks that are that have a lot of knowledge that like we would rather be we would rather keep on the project than eject from the project because if they do come back they come back with knowledge that that maybe the rest of the group doesn't have. And so to be very careful about removing people that fall into that category. But at the same time, feels like we have a lot of inactivity on folks that are unlikely and probably don't have that level of knowledge. So that's first thing. The second thing is making it clear about kind of the criteria by which we add new maintainers. The current current process is all of the maintainers vote. And that leaves a lot of ambiguity because, you know, in our heads we have the criteria the criteria is something like you have to have been committing in the project for a long time you have to you have to be following all of the community rules all of the pull request rules all of that, you know, before, before we would add someone as a maintainer. And so my thought is, you know, instead of leaving it ambiguous. We should probably document what the expectations are, make it more concrete so that it's achievable. So I am probably going to draft up. And I'm thinking that this is like something that we just added the website terms of like here's what our rules are that would replace the current process. But also make it like very kind of explicit. Kind of on both on both ends. And so, mention it here because it would be great if people have thoughts about what that should be the duration of time of involvement before before like adding maintainers, the duration of time before retiring maintainers. I think that is as important as I, as I write this up. Okay. Any other thoughts. Good. Just to throw out the note is that apparently, according to hyper ledger anyway you're supposed to put the rules inside of the maintainers MD in the repository, which makes sense. Yeah, we can link it there for sure. And lastly, a month from now, a good time to reschedule the next, or schedule the next meeting. Yeah. Okay. So we'll put the next right. Can you help me schedule that for the next meeting. Yeah, I think it's already set to be recurring but I will check. Perfect. So, I'm just kind of the kind of stick the stuff together so we get going. If people have thoughts, let me know. Other than that, I think we're done for today, trying to keep it at one hour. Any last thoughts or that's it. Okay, thank you everybody.


So the other day I covered a DLC4 legendary file which in my opinion at the time was the fastest way to earn new legendos. Today I bring you yet another file which in my opinion is actually faster due to the consistency of how many legendos drop here. How's it going guys my name's DPJ and if you enjoy your stay here and would like to show you supporting that like button truly helps out and if you like what you see and want to see more be sure to subscribe. Also before we go any further for all your gaming needs no matter the platform you play on amazing prices and incredible weekly deals check out G2A linked within that video description. So this file I found by mistake covering an easter egg which I haven't yet to cover on my channel but yeah the actual file itself is super efficient. Now the previous DLC4 legendary file I covered was Evil Brook and Mordecai. Still a great file if your build is powerful enough. The thing about these pairs of fact though they can be a little stingy with their drops. Today's file I was consistently getting 4 plus per run and it's a much easier enemy to kill at the same time plus there are many other enemies in this area which also doing the drop legendos too. Okay so the enemy is the ward watcher alpha and his location can be found right here as you can see on screen now upon the benediction of pain. Now a little earlier on in the mission there is another one of these ward watcher alphas but for me him and his enemies around him seem a little more stingy. So this one is definitely the better of the two to farm for those new legendos.  And yeah this is another great legendary farm for those new DLC4 legendos and I hope this helps you farmers out. Just a quick video guys but I do hope you enjoyed it. On that note we have come to the end if you did enjoy leaving a like really helps out and if you're new around here and want to see more BR3 be sure to subscribe. Well thanks as always for stopping by, hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one.


Welcome back to my YouTube channel, guys. Today is part two of the differences between New Zealand and the US. So if you haven't seen part one, make sure that you watch that one as well. They don't need to be watched in order, but there is a part one that has some really good content in it as well. And if you haven't been following me on TikTok over this last year, check me out at KiwiAmericans where I talk a lot about the differences living in New Zealand compared to the US. So today's going to be good. In fact, I think I'm going to have enough content to come up with a part three. So you want to subscribe below and hit the bell because there's going to be another part to this, but you're going to love this. Here we go. In New Zealand, they eat often. Like I said in my first video, they have morning tea, which includes food, afternoon tea, which includes food. Then they have dinner and then they have sometimes pudding later on at night where they have like another dessert before they go to bed. So in New Zealand, you feel like you're eating all the time or you're taking a break whether you're in school or at work. It's just very normal for people to say, let's take a break for afternoon tea or morning tea or let's go get something to eat. You feel like you're eating often, but in the US, you don't eat as often, but you eat huge portion sizes compared to what you get in New Zealand. So there's a big difference in portion size in the US compared to New Zealand, but in New Zealand, you're just eating many smaller meals throughout the day. And like even when you're eating like dinner in New Zealand, it's not as like there's not at many choices like you'll just have a wrap. Whereas in the US, you would always have like a meat and a potato and a vegetable, whereas here it's just one item because you know what, you've been eating all day. It's okay.  In New Zealand, you have a product called golden syrup. This is not a product that I've ever seen in the US. It's similar to molasses, but not the same. They have golden syrup. It's like the brown sugar of syrups. It's made from sugarcane. It's not as sweet as like our corn syrup in the US, but it is used in a lot of recipes and it's just a very common product to use in baking in New Zealand that you just don't see in the US. But in the US, we all know what we got. We got corn syrup. We got high fructose corn syrup that's in all of our snack processed foods. It is not allowed in New Zealand, in Europe, in Australia, in a lot of countries because it's not good for you. But in all the US snacks, we have high fructose corn syrup. So make sure you check the labels when you're in the States if you don't want to eat that because it's in a lot of food in the US. In New Zealand, it is very common for people to walk barefoot. Yes, you will see people walking into stores, barefoot, fish and chips shops, just walking to school and in school, in churches, barefoot. It's okay and normal. People just walk around with no shoes on. In the US, that doesn't exist. It's very common to see signs in the stores windows that say no shirt, no shoes, no service. So make sure that you have shoes if you're in New Zealand or visiting the US because you must wear shoes.  Now they can do that here because there are no pests. There are no like, there's not really deadly insects and spiders and stuff walking around to get your feet. So you can. Don't do that in Australia. That's a different country. That's a different situation. Don't do that in Australia. But in New Zealand, it is, there's a lot. There's not a lot of pests. It is pest free mostly and you could walk barefoot wherever you go. In New Zealand, when they say, would you like a biscuit? They are referring to a cookie type item. Okay. The biscuits in New Zealand are cookies. But if they say, do you want a cookie in New Zealand, they're actually meaning chocolate chip cookies. So they're the only cookie that's called cookie, the chocolate chip ones. But if you're in the US and someone offers you a biscuit, you are not getting a sweet cookie. You are getting a savory, flaky, moist, delicious, ready item. And it's so good. The biscuits and it's savory. It's not sweet in the US. So the biscuits are so good. And they are, okay guys, similar to scones, but they are not scones and they are flakier and they're kind of crispy on the outside, moist on the inside, and they have a different taste than scones. I get this question a lot and a lot of argument saying it's the same thing. If you want to check out, I have a video on my YouTube, I'll link it here that shows you how to make biscuits and gravy, which is a common food in the US. And you can see the difference and how they're made a little bit different than scones. In the US, they play American football. In New Zealand, they play rugby. These are the two most popular sports in each country. Now, when you play rugby in New Zealand, it's different because they pass the ball backwards. And when they score, it's called a try. And they don't wear all of the padding. They just ram into each other without pads on. And it's amazing. It is a amazingly athletic sport. Now, they do have rugby in the US. It is not as big as it is here in New Zealand. It is growing in the US. And it is an amazing sport and it's super great to watch. So never watch the rugby game. If you're American, check it out. Now, in the US, we have American football. And that is played in high schools at the college level, at the professional level, and they wear pads, and it's different. They pass the ball forward. And when they score, it's called a touchdown. So a little bit of different lingo. It is two different games, obviously, but it's similar. They're similar games. But yeah, so rugby is the most popular in New Zealand. American football is the most popular in the US. So check them out if you've never tried. In New Zealand, refills on soft drinks are not allowed. They don't have free refills in New Zealand. They do in the American fast food restaurant. So in some Burger King, some McDonald's, that sort of thing, you can get the free refills. But there is, I don't know of any New Zealand restaurant that offers free refill. So you do not get free refills on your soft drinks here. And they're much more expensive. So if you're gonna like buy a soft drink, it can be like $3 or $4 for soft drink. Whereas in the US, it's much cheaper. It's half that probably. And then in the US, they have refills everywhere. So like, not just in fast food. In bars, there's a sometimes when there's a bar that it isn't refills. But if you're going to a restaurant, you sit down almost everything is free refills when we're talking about soft drinks or busy drinks, as they say in New Zealand. Yes, they call soda busy drinks here in New Zealand. And I was here for two years before I realized that that's what they're talking about. They're talking about fizzy drink. I just thought it was like a completely different drink. But it's actually just soda. And another little tip for you is Sprite in New Zealand is called lemonade. Yeah. So if you have gin and lemonade, it's actually gin and Sprite. Just another handy tip for you. So yeah, there are refills everywhere in the US, but they also give you huge cups to like, first of all, how do you even drink all that and then need a refill? But yeah, so free refills in the US and not free refills in New Zealand.  I remember the first time someone said this to me. I was like, do you want me to shout you? You want me to yell? It was so confusing.  And New Zealand coffee is amazing. The cafes are amazing and all of their coffee is so good. And they make some of the coffee different. Their most common drink is the flat white, but the way that they make their mocha, so good. I should talk about this. Okay. So this is how they make their mocha. They actually put the chocolate powder or the chocolate syrup in the milk when they're steaming the milk and it just melts into this beautiful dream that then goes into the coffee and so much better. Why don't they do that in America? They just put the syrup right into the coffee after it's made. I don't know why they do it that way, but the mocha in us here are so good. And speaking of coffee, like, what are they even drinking in the US? Once you come to New Zealand and you taste really good coffee. Oh my gosh. And you realize that Starbucks burns their beans and their coffee isn't actually good. That's why you always buy it with so much sugar in it. That it's so, I don't know what they're drinking in the US. They drink this drip coffee and you have to drink a lot of it.  Like you get as much caffeine in this amount as you're getting in these multiple, multiple cups of whatever the drippy tar coffee you're drinking in the US. It's not good. Now there's plenty of cafes. If you're in the bigger cities that have espresso, please note that in New Zealand, you get two shots of espresso with any coffee in New Zealand. Whereas in the US, you get one shot and you have to pay 50 cents for another shot. So it's quite a bit of a less caffeine if you're looking for that caffeine kick.  It's just drip coffee. It's just, you know, coffee through the filter and it's not even French press or the plunger type pushing it through makes it stronger. They don't even do that. It's not very strong. So they have to drink lots of coffee. So in summary, I always talk too much when I talk about coffee. The coffee in New Zealand is so good. Every coffee that you order is two shots of espresso. They're in small cups because they're strong enough. You don't need more than that. And they're flat white is the most common and they're mochi nose so good. In the US, they have drip coffee. They don't have really a lot of cafes other than Starbucks, commonly around the whole country. And yeah, it's not that good.  So everybody puts coffee creamer in their coffee in the US and they don't have that here. They don't have coffee creamer because they don't need to. Their coffee is so good. The coffee creamer though in the US is really nice. But it just adds a lot of delicious flavor to your coffee. French vanilla, hazelnuts, cinnamon, whatever you kind of feel like. So coffee creamer is very popular because coffee honestly isn't that good in the US. So you almost come to New Zealand and check out how good the coffee is. In New Zealand, they have ice cream at movie theaters. What a brilliant idea. They have like this, they make up the cone, they put like two scoops of ice cream on it and they like frost freeze it.  This does not happen in the US.  In the US though, you can buy nachos to go into the movies.  These buckets are like this big.  And if you buy the biggest soda, you get the free refills because you're going to need more after eating that. So sometimes when we do that, we would buy the big bucket and the big soda and it feeds the whole family for dinner.  And there you go. The US always giving you free refills on things when you buy the big stuff. So yeah. So ice cream in movie theaters in New Zealand, but nachos and big ol popcorn when you're in the US. Well, I hope you enjoyed the video this week. This is part two of the differences between New Zealand and the US. So make sure that you check out part one. I will have it on the next screen. And stay tuned for part three. So subscribe below, hit the bell, and we will see you next week.


Hello everyone and welcome back. Hope you had a good lunch. Max Ivy is known worldwide as a blind blogger. He is a totally blind man from Houston, Texas who has transformed itself from a morbidly obese failed carnival owner to a respected a music equipment broker in the best health of his life. He had to learn so much including hand-cooting his first website in HTML, recruiting clients, setting fees, recording videos, using social media networks, building an email list, etc. People told him how inspiring his story was and encouraged him to share more about what it's like to be an entrepreneur who happens to be blind. That led to a second website, three self-help books, and a podcast called what's your excuse show. This grew out of the fact that many people have said that if Max can do it then what's my excuse. Max loves to help others achieve their own goals and dreams. And if you have any questions for him, no matter how delicate, just ask. He'll answer with the honesty, humor, and grace he is known for. Please welcome Max Ivy. I feel like the elephant in the room sometimes. I'm just gonna stand here. Is that okay with y'all? All right, good. My name is Max Ivy and I am known around the world as the blind blogger. And I want you to ask yourself why would I be known as the blind blogger? Because whether you know it or not, there are lots of visually impaired people out there with blogs, podcasts, online businesses, and authors.  Even though I knew that my work wasn't the best, that I'm not the most talented blind author, I'm not the most prolific, I'm not even the most consistent. But I am the one that when it came time to start a second website to share these stories, people online said, Max, we've been calling you the blind blogger for two years. It's about time you accepted it and went on about it. So that's and the reason I share that is because I believe that there are people out of here in the room or who watch this later who have said they want to start a website or a blog, but they haven't even filed for the domain. Or they have the domain, but the website is still in that part where you edit it, but it doesn't go live.  But a content. And those of you who have content, you're not as consistent as you would like to be. For most people, the reason for that is because they are afraid that their stuff isn't good enough. The people don't want to hear what they have to say. Their website isn't pretty enough, functional enough, that people are going to be disappointed if they come to their website and see what they're up to. And most people, instead of just going ahead and accepting that pretty good today is better than perfect tomorrow, next week, next month for that mythical day of someday. Most people, that's what they do. They wait, they stall. They think if I just learn one more thing, or if I just meet one more person, or if I buy that next theme or something, I'll be good enough, it'll be time to publish. And so my goal here today is hopefully to encourage anybody that's in one of those stages to just press send to finally decide that I'm gonna put my work out there. I'm gonna share my story in my own voice and let the rest of it take care of it, take care of itself. And for those of y'all who don't know, I just finally got over my cold this morning. So I'm doing my best up here y'all. Last night, I couldn't even talk to the taxi driver. But to emphasize my point, I want to share a story about my first website. It was called the Midway Marketplace. Well, it's still Midway Marketplace. It's not my primary focus anymore. Because now I'm more into blogging and podcast. But in 2007, I decided I was no owner going to halfway it. I was gonna see if I couldn't turn selling other people's use the movement equipment into a full time profession. Man was that a mistake. I had no idea how much I didn't know. I really was a babe in the woods. I had no idea what HTML PHP or Java were. And I only had a very loose idea of what a website was or how I would start one. This was before Facebook, before Wi Fi. And really before people even knew what WordPress was. And at that time, I knew I knew the website because everybody said I had to have one. But I didn't know how to build one. So first, I did what you would do. I asked people I know if one of them knew how to build a website. And nobody did. But I have a brother Michael in Florida. He's one of these people he has an extra gene so he can figure out technical stuff and make it make sense. He's blessed that way. I'm not. He figured out how to build a simple website with three pages, a homepage and an about me page and a page for equipment listings. And he found the form plug-in. I don't think they called plug-ins then I think they were called strips from source for that would allow me to add new listings to the website without knowing anything about how it all works. But then Michael got a good paying job. He didn't have time for me no more. I didn't have the money to hire a webmaster. And I wouldn't have had the courage or the faith to turn the keys to my car over somebody to somebody I didn't even know. So even if I'd had the money, I wouldn't have done it. I had to figure out a way to maintain and even build my site because I wasn't happy with the way it was. I wanted it to grow. I'm funny that way. I'm always looking at the future and the possibilities and what we can do to improve things. So Michael told me go online and start visiting some of the forums and I did that.  And after you go through the tutorials, then you can come back and ask those questions and then you'll know a little something. So I went over there and I did the basics, the homepage, links, embedding photos, putting email link. And felt like I was doing pretty good until it got to picking my colors. Because when you pick colors, and I'm sure most of y'all know this, but I don't know if people watching know this, you have two choices. You can go with the Hexode, Dexamist, whatever that word is, numbers, or you can go with the names. And since I had no way to know what number, what color, and I remember 24 colors in my coloring box back when I could see them, I decided I go with names. So I picked yellow for the background because when I could still see the stuffed animals on the background, they were also better on yellow than they did on white. I picked blue for the text, red for the links, and orange for the previously clicked links. Well, imagine my surprise when I found out from some of my website visitors that the yellow was an ice creaming yellow, the red was brick, the blue was navy, and the orange was something fluorescent like out of a neon sign from a bar. This site was very bright. It was so bright that Ray Charles and Steve you wonder could have had an argument over it. It was bad. It was bad. And my new friend Carrie went on archive.org and she found it. She found a slide. Yeah, let me let me set this up for him. Yeah, let me, hey, she found a slide. Now she's going to put it up there because we talked about this before and I believe in doing stuff that this fortuitous. But look, don't look directly into the image. Okay. You might want to put your sunglasses on because this is bad. Go for it, Carrie. All right. Yeah, while she's putting it up here, I want to tell you as bad as the website was, I was still able to sell amusement equipment because what I did was I got to the point where this is the best I can do right now. Let's focus on stuff I can change. And that meant recruiting new listing. Tell me people about the listings I had, sending people to the website pages where they could see the rides and buy the rides. And in the first year, I sold a simulator to a guy in Australia that sold for $50,000. In the second year, I sold a carousel for a mall in Georgia that was $125,000. The website work because I didn't let the fact that I knew it was bad. This isn't a case where Yeah, go for it. Put it up there. Put it up there. This is good. This is what happens when you turn a blind guy with a color palette. And I really don't have a better story than this to show you what what I'm talking about here with you. Just because you don't think you're good enough yet doesn't mean you should hide your story. And those people who have yet to press send yet to publish their first post, I wanted to look at that picture and think that website as bad as that was, that's $1,000 of amusement equipment. And trust me, when I tell you this, selling used carnival rides is probably the hardest job in this world on whether it's online or in person. It's not easy. In addition, I was a blind guy doing it. And I was the new guy in the business. And my business model was different than everybody else's because I was new. I was working on a commission sales basis. Everybody else had advertisers and their websites were completely free. Just try telling people they have to pay you for something they're getting for free. You do that. That's, that's never easy. But I did it because, like I said, I focused on what could I do? And eventually, what would happen is people would go, I've had my way I've had my ride on so into the site for a year, haven't had the first bite haven't sold it. We say we'll let you give it a try. And when I would sell stuff, especially old hard to play stuff, my reputation started to grow as somebody who could, you know, find a home for the misfit rides is my brother like to call him. Yeah, in the day in the in the early days, most of the stuff I got was only because they had tried other places and failed. And don't you know, I was very happy when I would succeed and they did. One of my favorite memories of all was when I sold a carousel, the one I mentioned in Georgia, it had been on the list for a company in Italy that had offices in Milan, Nashville and Sydney. They had been trying to sell it for a year. And they're still mad at me for selling that ride. So that was, that was, that was what 2008 we found out, which would have been the year after I got started. Later on, I would meet a great guy from Switzerland named Ashley Fox, who would go max, I'm going to introduce you to word crowds. I'm going to help you move your website over and we're going to make it much more traditional. It's going to be easier to use, but you're still going to be able to maintain it. Which was one of the conditions I have had with every webmaster I've ever worked with is, whatever we do on my site, it has to be something that you can teach me how to do, give them my limited skills and the fact I'm going to be doing it with streaming. And so far that has worked. There are some things that took a little more, a little more work than others to figure out how to explain them to me. But we did eventually get it. And of course, one of the worst parts was I had created so many pages, like something like a couple of hundred pages under different categories that just migrating all that stuff from HTML to WordPress was, was a big chore. I wouldn't recommend it as bad as it is to go from blogger to WordPress. I would never want to go from HTML to WordPress. It was especially not a big, I don't know if I can quite call my site e-commerce site, but I guess that would be where it would fall. But yeah, that's, that's proof there. If you work on what you can do something about, you focus on, on spreading the word, getting your name out there, you can be successful. Now I'm not saying you should put out a crappy website. I was saying that you, you know, but there comes a time when if you don't know it, somebody in your community should say, Hey, you've been talking about this long enough. It's pretty good. Yeah, it can be better, but you'll learn as you go. And for the most part, people out there online, they like to watch people's progress. They like to be able to relate to you. And one of the ways they can relate to you is they see you in the beginning. They see you when things aren't, aren't great. They watch you get better. They watch you learn various things and they become fans and followers of you. I mean, in my case, when I built the email list by giving people free text links that managed to grow an email list of over 3,000 people worldwide, people that was like a big deal to them. To me, it was not a big deal. To me, it was just another day of showing up and working my butt off to try to build a business. And quite often, that's the way I think of things. I don't really think of them as being as difficult as they are because to me, it's just the next problem in front of me. Now, I do have a couple of other examples of when this has worked for me as far as not being perfect and maybe thinking it wasn't ready, but having to be a good outcome. When I decided to become the blind blogger, which I fought for two years because people told me I was inspirational and I told them, no, you're talking about somebody else.  They don't have a reason why they're not doing something, but they're still sweet walking through the day. They are still not challenging themselves and they don't have an excuse. You have a perfect excuse to stay home, watch TV and eat Cheetos if that's what you wanted to do, but you don't. And that's what makes your story important and you have to share it.  Now, I run two websites, one of them sells amusement equipment, one of them is motivational, coaching, writing books. Somehow, I got a picture of a really pretty part train engine confused with my profile photo. So my very first post says I think I'm ready to be an inspiration. And what comes up at the top of the post with a picture of this huge part train engine. Thankfully, it was a gorgeous part train and not on a hunk of junk apart train. But because you know, if I'm going to mess it up, I could have messed it up a lot worse. The funny thing was just to show how people will relate to you if you give them a chance by putting your stuff out there. Half the people who saw that post said, Max, did you know there was a train picture? The other half though said, Max, what an inspired idea. Most of us remember the little engine that could work. What a great idea to put that picture of a train up there in a post title. I think I'm ready to be an inspiration. This happened because most people out there online, if you give them a chance, they want to like they want to be educated or inspired or motivated by. They want you to say something that helps them in some way or say it in a way nobody else has said it before. And in my case, people thought that train was on purpose. I had to admit that it was on accident, but I didn't take the picture down. If you go to the blind blogger.net, you look for that post, you'll still see that picture up there. Because I think it's important to remind people that our mistakes, especially happy accidents like that, they're just as much a part of who we are is when we get it right. 99% they really are. Another time this happened to me was when I decided to record my first video for the website. Now I record in my room in an older house in Conroe, Texas. And I have light perception, but I have a very narrow field of vision, which means I can't see the light on or off unless I'm looking at the light picture. I sat down to record the video and didn't think to look to see if the lights were on or off. So I recorded this video in the dark. Yes, I did. Yes, I did. And once again, half the people who saw it said, Max, did you know you were sitting in the dark? The title of the video was leading you out of the darkness. The other half of the people, the other half of the people said, Max, what a brilliant metaphor to which I said, thank you. But that was all a happy accident. I didn't do it on purpose. It just happened to work out that way. But there again, what if I had decided to keep those posts back? What if somebody had told me, Mike, you messed it up and I took it down and fixed it? That would have wronged people with the message. And at least for me, my message is that it's better to go ahead and take action, no matter how small, no matter how successful or unsuccessful, because that's how we get from here to there. And I do my best to make an example of that, even when I mess up, even when I end up in what we used to call in the carnival business of jackpot, which is a bad but funny situation that you later retell for the entertainment of others, just in case you all needed an explanation of what the word jackpot meant. And so sometimes I get myself into situations, but I usually will find a lesson out of them. Since I imagine most of you all haven't read my posts last week, I was speaking another event and Amtrak lost my suitcase. But instead of being disappointed by that, in fact, it had my brand new suit in it and all my grooming products and my laptop and pretty much everything else that I own was in that suitcase. I went to the conference, I went to all the events, I met everybody I shook hands, I had conversations, I participated in the contest, I won a free microphone. I gave my talk in five day old blue jeans and a conference T-shirt and I was standing up there and something from George Dio Amani, which I just recently learned who the heck that is. But because I decided that I was going to show up, I was going to do my best, I was going to give these people a lesson, a message by the way I behaved in a bad situation, I managed to continue to embrace this whole thing about not making excuses or it might contradict them what is my excuse. And those are the kind of things that I share with people a few years ago, I was promoting the web marketplace and I was thinking, I live in a suburb with no good transportation, I would really like to go meet people face to face but that didn't happen. So what can I do about it? Next thing I know a guy named Brian the Hammer Jackson is looking for people to come on his show on what he calls Small Business Friday, he's looking for business owners that want to come on and talk about what they do. And so I put my application in and they picked me. I'm waiting there Friday morning with my old flip phone from Sprint, standing out in my garage where it's cold because I don't want to get interrupted by somebody else while I'm talking to him. And yeah, it does get cold and used to in January, okay? And it comes time for me to go on. My phone dropped a call while he's trying to call me back. I'm trying to call him back. We both got voicemail. He finally gets on the phone with me again. He goes, Oh, what are you blind or something? And I said, well, yes, I am. At which point we had about a minute and a half of silence, which for any of y'all who do podcasts is death. And then eventually I laughed about it. And then eventually he laughed about it. We had about another five or so minute conversation after that. He was so impressed by the way I handled it. He asked me to come back the next week. And I ended up coming on his show every week for about six months before I started doing other people's podcasts and radio shows to the point now where people think of me as an expert in using podcasts and radio shows to promote their brand. And some people have even started hiring me to do that. That all started because I didn't want to be, I was stuck in my house and needed a way to get to people. And it was proof that even a bad show, even a bad talk and the people who have spoke here before me this weekend, some of y'all know that. You walked off the stage and you're like, why was I here? You know, I hardly ever had that feeling, but I've heard about it. And people in the audience though, a lot of them are looking for you to say something they can use. They want you to do well for the most part. That's one of the great things about the blogosphere in my opinion. Because there are so many helpful, supportive and encouraging people online, whether it be blogs, podcasts, videos. There's generally a community that we have where once you learn something, you're open to teaching it to people who haven't learned it yet. You know, so that's one of the things I really love about the blogosphere. And I've been, I've been very blessed to meet many people who have become part of my story because being open to meeting them online. But, you know, that was six years ago now, my first radio show. And two years ago, I talked to a woman into doing a radio show and she is now going from being a woman who was afraid to share her writing in her home country to somebody who is now doing interviews. So I really enjoy helping other people that said in my bio. This week, I got here to work out. I had the worst cold I've had in years. I wasn't sure I didn't be able to get up here and talk to you also. I'm very glad that that worked out. But if I had to come up here and squeak at you, I was going to do it. I really was. Now, I was, I was going to, I was going to put my book up here, but now I set it down. I'm not sure which way would be up. And I'm afraid that if I walk over there and get it, I'm going to end up in somebody's lap. But the book is called the blind bloggers New York City adventures and how you can make your dreams come true. And it's another case where if I had went off of what I felt about myself at the time, I wouldn't have done because when I went to their website, it's a what is the competition where they pick 24 people a year out of thousands of people to based on their writing to go on an Amtrak trip somewhere in the US and hopefully spark their writing dishes so they can create a book, a play, collection of poems, short stories, whatever. When I've found out about it, I went to the website and I looked at their website and I read some of the bios of the previous winners and I started seeing plays nominated for awards, best selling books. People with publishing deals with traditional publishing companies instead of self published. Before long, I was starting to think, you know, Max, this is like that old Sesame Street song which one of these is not like the other and I'm the fourth guy in that square. And I almost talked myself out of it until I got to the point where I read a woman's blog, a woman's comment and she said that if I thought, no, if you were taking people who weren't already successful and established, I would apply and that made me feel really sad for her and it made me think, I don't want to be that person. I don't want anybody to be that person that they'd be afraid to submit their work and take their chances, even if they feel like they're not worth it. So I filled out the application. I submitted it along with part of my first book and they selected me out of thousands of people without even thinking we're going to send a blind guy to New York City by himself. I think if they had known that in advance, they might have thought different before it was over with, we'll never know. But I've had a great time every time I've been here in New York City. The point there though is if you wait until you feel like you're worthy, you're never going to do it. The website's never going to go live. Your first post is never going to be out there. You know, I have made a living on taking chances on putting myself out there. Maybe when I wasn't ready, many times I wasn't. But a lot of times I thought to myself, how will I know? A lot of times I, my, my daddy used to tell me all the time he would say, Max, if you don't ask, they can't say yes. And I'll try to live that. In some cases, I would have been better if after they said yes, I said no. But, you know, we don't always make the best decisions in the moment. But I tell you, the worst decision is to not put your work out there online. It may not be great. It probably isn't. As a matter of fact, I've never met a webmaster who was happy with their website. I've never met one yet who didn't, who, if you asked him and seriously, they wouldn't tell you that I need a new theme. This one doesn't do ex-forming or my content is horrible or nobody really wants to read what I have to share. I wouldn't be a bit surprised because I've never met a webmaster. Webmaster was happy. I've never met an author that was happy. Every time an author sends a book off to be published or submits it to an online site like Amazon or Smashwords or Barnes and Noble, they all have that moment where they're scared to death. Nobody's going to like their book that nobody's going to want to read it and the people will even say what business do you have writing a book and those peers never go away.  A year, about three years ago, I started my podcast, What's Your Excuses. I was encouraged to do it by a guy named Frederick By, who's a real good friend of mine. He said, Max, come on the show. I'll be your co-host. You won't have to worry about any of the tech. We'll be fine. So I did that. And for a year later, he calls me up and goes, Max, I can't be there today. I want you to do the show by yourself. So at the last minute, I'm like, how do I do the show? How do I record the show? And so in the space of about four hours, I signed up for Zoom, tested Zoom, used Zoom to record an interview with a guy named Michael Schwartz, who's a filmmaker from California that's losing his vision. Put out a great podcast, even though neither one of us was sure it was in focus. Got a lot of great comments on it because of the content, because of the interviews.