Well, here's something I've been putting off doing for a while. This is my trusty Commodore Amiga A600, it's shown up on this channel several times before. As you can see, it is currently playing the Xenon 2 demo disc. If I turn the sound on, you can hear the excellent soundtrack, but if you know it well, you may be able to tell that something is not quite right. Now, if I switch from the Xenon 2 to Kyeref's Amiga test suite, through the magic of video editing I can do this like this, I can demonstrate in rather more detail what's going on. It's currently set to play a sine wave through the four Amiga sound channels. All currently off. If I turn on the left channel, you get an annoying beep. If I turn on the right channel, you also get an annoying beep, but it's a quieter one. If you turn on both at once, you might be able to make out the fact that the left channel is much louder than the right. So what I think is going on is this machine needs recapping. It hasn't been done yet, all Amigas need it eventually, so I'm just going to have to do it. It also doesn't help that Commodore kind of screwed up with the circuitry, the audio circuitry on the A600, and you have the wrong type of capacitor to decouple the output audio. So it chances are that those two caps are failing, and that's why we're seeing this problem with the audio, which is amazingly annoying. I don't like recapping machines. I'm not particularly good at it. I have actually done someone else's A500, and it does seem to work. So I'm going to give it a try on this A600, which will be fun. Okay, here's the A600 motherboard removed from the machine. The capacitors we need to replace are these electrolytics here. They contain on the inside a tightly wound coil of paper and foil, all soaked in disgusting electrolytic fluid, and the fluid evaporates over time, causing the capacitors to dry out, and that changes the electrolytic properties of them. If you're unlucky, a capacitor will actually start leaking fluid onto the PCB, which is really bad, because the stuff is noxious and corrosive and can wreck your PCB. So this is actually a fairly straightforward job. The most difficult bit is going to be these two capacitors here, because they're sandwiched between the audio jacks and the keyboard connector, which is this thing here. Having people on YouTube who've done this, mostly what they seem to do is to desolder this. However, you really need a vacuum desoldering gun to make that work, and I do not have one. So I am going to attempt to do this without desoldering this thing. Now we can get a bit more room by unclipping the top part of it, but it's not a lot. Now, this is the point where I need to explain what I'm going to do, because there's a right way to remove capacitors, and there's a wrong way. The right way is to use a hot air gun or hot tweezers. Now I don't have any hot tweezers, and while I do have a hot air gun, I've tried removing capacitors with them before, and it just doesn't seem to work. I'm just very bad at it. And what tends to happen is that I melt everything on the board around the capacitor, and I blow off all these epically tiny surface mount components, and these are actually quite big ones. So I'm going to take these capacitors off the wrong way, and this is where my comment section will fill up with people screaming that this is bad. This is correct. The way I'm going to remove these capacitors is bad, and you shouldn't do it. However, I have practiced, and it is safer for me to do it this way than it is to do the right way. So I'm going to demonstrate, but not on the Amiga. So that goes over to the side, and we get out a junk board, and let me demonstrate what I'm going to do. So here we have some zoom onto the board, and here is a capacitor that we're going to remove. This is a surface mount capacitor. It's fastened down by these two metal pads onto the surface of the board. Now, it's tempting just to grab the thing in the pliers and pull. This will ruin the board. The copper on the surface of the PCB is glued to the fiberglass backing, and these pads are very small, and as a result, there's not a lot holding the copper pads down. So vertical force is likely to tear the pad off the board, and that's a bad thing. So instead, what I'm going to do is to grab the cap firmly in the pliers and then do this. I am pushing down on the board. What I'm doing is using metal fatigue to break the wires inside the capacitor. There we go. Let me put the upside down cap here so that you can see it. So one leg has actually come off inside the capacitor. The other has come off a bit further down. This has left the soldered on parts of the legs safely still attached to the pads on the board. I think this one, which you can see sticking out, may have actually pulled off the solder, but it's left the pad behind, so that was a little bit risky, but seems to have worked. I can then use the soldering iron to clean up the pads and remove the torn legs of the capacitor. And I've done a ton of practicing on this board, and this seems to work and be reliable. So that is what I am going to do. Okay, moment of truth time. I'm going to start with a nice, easy, big one. And this trick is smaller movements because you're not trying to break anything with brute force. You're trying to use metal fatigue to break the wires. It is coming loose. There we go. Perfect. So I'm now going to make a note of what this is. So that is C303 is a 22 microfarad. Looks like 35 volts. I've got a list somewhere else, but it's best to be sure. And interesting. That doesn't look great. The solder is dull and there's some goop on the board. Yeah, you see the discolored tracks there? I think that capacitor was leaking. Yeah, this machine is definitely overdue a recap. Okay, so I am just going to power through these and you're going to see it all in time-lapse. Because this is really boring.  Some of them have left behind the bottom plastic shell. They'll come off when I clean up the pads. However first we need to take off these electrolytics. These are through-hole capacitors and should be relatively straight forward. Next step is to remove these plastic things. I don't think the best way to do this. I pulled it in my quite expensive and extremely nice soldering tweezers. Heat up the pin and it just lifts off. Okay, and now we go and do all the others. Some of those melted rather than coming off with the pins, but this now takes us to the next stage of the process, which is to add copious amounts of flux and then clean up the pads and removing the capacitors has left fragments of wire behind, so we have to remove those. I'm going to clean the flux off with IPA. Most of them look clean, but now we're going to attempt to use a piece of desoldering ribbon to remove any excess solder from these pads. So now let's try putting one of these new caps on the board. So this stuff is pick and place machine ribbon. It's not really designed to be used by humans. So we remove a capacitor and this came from the bag labelled 220 microfarad and I'm a little perturbed by the fact it says 220 on the can, but I have no way to measure it, so I don't know if it's correct. We'll just assume that our mouse did the right thing. This mouse, digikey, where the digikey did the right thing. So let's bend the legs up just a little. Now I'm going to do 304 first, so let's see if I can actually get this right. Let's solder on the positive side, nice fresh leaded solder. So actually holding the soldering iron in my left hand here, we want to apply just a little bit of heat here, so that end of the cap goes down and gets put into place. Positive is the side that does not have the stripe and now I can see that the other end of the cap needs soldering, yeah that's locked in place, yeah that wasn't great. Normally with surface mount components you put the solder on one end, fasten that down and then go to the other end. I think that with these I need to try putting solder on both pads first and it is in place. Okay, so now we just repeat this process hopefully with focus, focus. So these two are now fairly firmly soldered on. So we repeat this process with all the other caps on the board, except for these two. I'll come to these. A bit of a problem has shown up. This is C321 which is a 10 microfarrow to 25 volt capacitor. These are the ones I bought. These are 10 microfarrowed 250 volt capacitors because I couldn't get 25 volt ones. I didn't realize but these are substantially bigger than the pad is. So these ain't going to go on. Now what am I going to do about this? These are just way too big. I could make them go on by making them stand proud of the board. The legs on the bottom will bend down.  I think there's room. There's a big electrolytic here so yeah there will be room. The other thing is to use through holes. They'll have to go sideways and have the wires soldered on here. I think that is actually worse than using the surface mounts. I'll go and do a bit of poking around. Okay through hole it is. Now the floppy drive goes up over all this so there's not a lot of clearance. So this is going to have to go more or less sideways. So we're going to bend these legs. Okay positive is to the south of the board. So this is going to go on like that. So let's trim the legs down. Okay and a stripe goes to the north. So let's put some solder on the pads and put some solder on the legs. Should it be better off this way around? Certainly easier to put on this way around. It just needs to be at a slight angle. Beautiful more or less. Okay so now we just need to do the same for this one. This one is further back. There is more clearance so it will stand upright I hope. Okay I think this is working. It's a little bit ugly but it should be fine. So let's go over to the other side of the board because now we're done with the the right hand side to these. If you look at the positioning this thing is awkwardly in the way so I can put the component on but then there's no space to solder the top leg. That's awkward. I can attempt to melt this pad and then slide this in before it solidifies but that does not seem like a good idea. If it doesn't work I'll never get it off again. So I think if I bend these legs way down I can then stand the cap up and get in underneath to solder the thing in place. Now this plastic shroud here is where it's going to come off completely. What this is for is to stop the rim of the capacitor touching the PCB. I actually don't think we need it. So I'm actually going to start with the one over here because I need to be able to get in on the right hand side. So positive south stripe north and then it will bend over to go upright because it's slightly projecting off the left side of the case. That's kind of terrible but it does seem to be working. So we can do the same thing with this one. Okay like so. Hmm not very happy also not happy with the focus but it looks like it's working. Okay the next two C235 and 236. These are 100 microfarad jobs and two of these and these should be the right spec ones. Okay so now we need to do C239 the one next to it. This is the chart says that is a 100 microfarad job. If I put these on the wrong place 235 at 236 100 and 100. Right so this one is also a one of these hundreds and that's pretty short on space. So this one is actually too far over to this side. So let's see if we can adjust it. This is one of the advantages of this horrible hack. Oops okay well that wasn't very well soldered on then. It's important to know that this one actually has the the plus sign to the north so this is inverted relative to the others. So I can make this go in but the question is will I still have room to attach the IDE connector because it's going to end up canted over rather. There's one way to figure this out. Okay here is the IDE connector so if we plug this in then how much clearance do we actually have? Enough just now I was originally thinking that one of these would be one of the 10 microfarads but looking at my chart I see that these are 321 and 306 we've done 460 and 214. C214 is this one the label is here and 460 is this one and it's also worth noticing that these are also the opposite way around. So we can easily put our two standing upright ones here and here. So it's this one that's the awkward bit but I think this can be made to work. Okay wow I hope this will work. I don't think I managed to show this on camera. Yes that goes on neatly there. This one is C459 and it is a 22 microparad surface mount and this is one of these little red ones so this one should actually fit which will be nice. Any other end goes down easy. So now we have this one I think that's actually all the surface mounts. Yeah we've got the through holes to do now. Yeah this is as this is through hole stuff it's going to have to be both sides of the board which is we're going to have to hold the thing more or less vertically to work on which means none of it's going to show up on camera so I'm just going to do this bit offline sorry. Okay I've managed to attach the big through hole capacitors with varying degrees of goodness. This one just wouldn't fit so it's standing up which brings me to the last two which are these. These are the audio capacitors. Amiga, sorry Commodore, what's this? That's a metal freak. Amiga cocked up with these. These are decoupling, smoothing, whatever the output audio signals so the voltage range these have to cope with goes positive and negative and you're not supposed to use electrolytics for that. You're supposed to use unpolarized capacitors, ceramics that sort of thing and this is probably why these have failed on my Amiga. I mean they have failed it's not something else. So I am going to attempt to replace these with come on actual surface mount capacitors. I'm not sure this will work but let's give it a try. These things are tiny so the first thing you need to do is to add a solder to just one pad like so then we remove our capacitor from the package just one. I'm not actually sure these are big enough so I want to put it there so it spans across the two pads. I think it'll work. Yeah I think that will actually work so we hold it down and apply some heat. That should have soldered it down on one side it has actually moved so let's see if we can get this back on track. Yeah that is still fastened down so now we apply some solder to this end. Once you actually have the knack of it surface mount is supposed to be much faster and easier to solder than through hole I do not have the knack of it. Okay let's see the other one so that goes here okay now do the other side okay and do actually seem to be soldered joints both ends. Yep I think that's done. Excellent and I actually forgot there are two more I need to do which are these two which are some more of these we're going to stand these upright. Okay I believe it's done so now I just need to check things and then we start reassembling and then see if it works. Okay everything looks all right so moment of truth time let's turn it on and see what happens. Well the computer seems to be working up to a point there we go nothing's exploded nothing's making nasty hissing noises. Okay we should have some stuff hooked up so I turn on and it should boot okay so we go to the audio menu and it suddenly occurs to me that I can't actually hear what's going on when this is hooked up to my capture device so after plugging in my headphones I have discovered that sound is only working on the left hand channel so that suggests that I've cocked up something here the left hand channel is this one that the red connector because for some reason these are reversed which is odd. Okay I'm going to have to do a bit of setup in order to debug this because I can't do it with the the capture card plugged in because you know I need to be able to hear what the result is. Well I did some poking with the oscilloscope and made a few discoveries so here I've got the schematic of the audio system for the Amiga 600 and the audio comes out of the Paula chip here to the right channel and then goes through this series of filters and then it goes to the right jack circuitry with C334 the capacitor that we replaced with the ceramic here. Now this is the Paula and the right pin is I believe is this one and I managed to trace this on the board that is here to these two op amps that make up the filter and all the four audio op amps are in this chip here and I managed to trace the signal so that it was arriving at pin it was coming out of pin eight which is here that is this pin here on the op amp and then it goes through some stuff and it goes through the other op amp to pin seven which is this one and I was observing that the signal was going in to pin eight well rather out of pin eight but not out of pin seven so my immediate thought was that the op amp failed and that's easily replaceable if it was partially failing ahead of time then possibly the stress of replacing these two caps next to it caused something to fail however this didn't seem entirely likely and indeed further tracing showed up something rather interesting so the signal comes out of pin seven and goes to C334 so here is pin C334 and if I do continuity test of course we get nothing through the capacitor because capacitors don't conduct through them however if I touch the metal piece on the top of the capacitor and this pad here we get nothing but if we do it for the one next to it we do get a signal this solder joint is bad it's not hooked up to the capacitor I'm not sure why this makes a difference so if we zoom out back again I can see that there is a contact between pin seven here the output of the op amp and the bottom end of the cap but of course it's not connected at the top end so as far as the op amps concerned this pin is just not connected to anything well there's a bit of other circuitry there but I can't see why we're not getting any signal coming out of this pin the only thing I can think of is something on the on the output side is drawing that line down but I can't find anything like that and I don't know why having this capacitor hooked up would make a difference but this is something which is wrong and therefore it is fixable so let's go and fix it so fixing it should be straightforward we just need to heat this joint up and apply solder I think that will probably do it so let's turn the meter on and try that interesting still nothing so that is metal this is me touching both ends of the the metal thing on the end of the capacitor okay it doesn't help that I'm not actually seeing what's going on very well okay I saw the solder actually flow over that metal end cap so that should now be working just testing the other connections yep okay so that's not a great joint but it should at least work so that's not a great joint but I think that what I need to do now is to hook everything back up again and see if that has made a difference and what do you know it doesn't work it's doing exactly the same things it was before I recapped it this is a good thing in some ways listen so the left channel is working fine the right channel is very quiet so this is suggesting that something else is wrong with this possibly one of the components in the output stage this is all nasty little surface mount stuff so I've identified these four components here and they are all surface mount jobs on the other side of the board trying to debug this is going to be tricky because everything is connected to everything else I mean you notice that the these filters this is a feedback affair so the output of the op amp is actually being routed to the input so trying to decide whether the op amp has failed will depend on whether the components downstream of the op amp have failed I think that given that current cannot flow through a capacitor I'm wondering if it's worth trying to take c337 off the board that will isolate the the right hand stage apart from these cross-connects here which I'm not quite sure what they're for and that should let me rule out any problems with these components here I found some references that occasionally these do die so that's interesting and I should really find out what these are for these are each of the jacks has a switch in it so that it knows when something's plugged in so I think that what this could be doing is trying to mix the two together there is an actual mono output but that doesn't go to the jacks yes I'm going to have to do some reading up on this


You probably have some questions to defend, Elina? So what are the three countries where the IA doesn't work? I'll tell you which the three countries are. One is the Comoros, that's really important, right? That's just a very special case, I mean an extremely small country. But then there are two countries which are important, Ghana and Tanzania. And we have studied those two and we are right almost, we adjusted the brink of coming up with why is it that you cannot with the standard time series model find it. That is because in the Tanzanian case, because President Nierere did not understand macroeconomics. Unfortunately, he was only concerned about nation building, which was a good thing, but he did not understand that when his exchange rate kept going up and up and up and became overvalued, that completely screwed his economy. That's not in itself news. I mean Ben Wendul, who gave the presentation this morning, I mean he was in the 1980s, he was the key advisor or a professor at the University of Dias Alam, who was making exactly this point. But it's the first time that we've been able to show that when you account for that fact in a time series analysis, then you have the explanation. And from around 1987, Tanzania is like the rest. So in other words, the reason why you don't find it yet in the data is that first period. And that had nothing to do with whether aid works or not. That had something to do with good old President Nierere, who had a different agenda. And that really was not because of aid. If you wanted to blame aid anything in that context, it was maybe that it kept him going a little bit longer than he otherwise would have been able to. And then you're saying, oh, but does that mean that aid, to some extent, that's because we gave him the benefit of the doubt. We actually supported his nation-building project, right? The other country, Ghana, that is simply because the 1980s in Ghana are really characterized by pretty big swings. Well, you have all seen the pictures of leaders getting executed on the beach and so on. So I mean, this was just such an incredibly swinging period that that simply does not, I mean, it doesn't give you anything when you put it into the data. It's just, you can't get it, quite frankly. Again, from around 1987 onwards, Ghana is the standard story. So, yeah. Yeah, I don't know who, do I just, please, okay. And maybe you can say something about the definition of aid and the perceived self-interest of the downloaded countries. Sure, sure. First of all, when we use aid in these types of analysis, we typically use DAX figures. And that's essentially because that's the only place where you over many years have collected systematically information on aid that goes from the DAX and also some other countries to developing countries. And it's the only sort of systematic database that's available. That database has a number of deficiencies when you get down to details. One of the reasons why you will not find very many studies of the impact of disaggregated aid. So the impact of budget support, the impact of different types of aid is because then the database becomes quite weak. But we do have numbers on the total sum. So that's why some of us tend just to focus on the total. Because that's a number that we have over the years. There is another database under construction by something called aid data, but they are looking purely at microdata. So they're purely looking at individual projects. And one of the reasons why the DAX database is important and interesting is because it gives this macro story or this gives this macro. Because again, you can do as many studies as you want at micro. And I used to do that in the 1980s and 1990s. And every time I came up with a new story, I was just told, oh, but it doesn't work in aggregate anyway. So you're just wasting your time. Now in terms of the interest of the donors, there are plenty of studies to show a few things. First of all, that relatively more aid does go to relatively more poor countries. So to say that the level of poverty has no impact on aid giving is wrong.  And that's actually one of the, sorry, if I can just make a parenthesis, this is exactly one of the reasons why this attribution problem is so complicated. Because when poor countries get richer, then what happens to the aid? Then the aid goes down. So when you just look at the plot, then it looks as if the richer the country is, the less aid you have, ah, so the less aid you have, the better you are. But that's actually analytically complicated to separate out. Parenthesis finished. When it comes then to other arguments for why donors give aid, oh, there's absolutely no question that these motives, they're not pure. There are in established academic literature. It's shown that there is the so-called Egypt and Israel factor. We analytically tend to try to handle it by what we call a dummy. In other words, you simply put in an effect to try to capture the impact that these two countries are so special. Why?  Now that's where the Afghanistan and so on factor kicks in now. It's also well established that you give more aid to your former colonies. It's also well established that you give more aid to countries where you have more commercial interest. So all of that is absolutely, you know, that's not in doubt. It's not like pure and simple. But at the same time, while I call myself a development economist and I'm probably more development economist, I tend to think of resources, of savings and investment and so on, like things that are important. I mean, I'm not saying it's important in any simple way, but I do know from what I have studied over the years that in order to grow and develop, you need savings and you need investments and these savings can come either from domestically or from internationally.  So, well, so that sort of... But one should not have illusions. And there are also aid administrations that are influencing the aid and those motives are not always nice and clear and simple. But at the end of the day, I mean, if I were to be sort of a bit brutal, if money actually arrives in Mozambique and over 25 years actually keeps that country hanging together, helps build infrastructure, helps put kids in school, helps vaccinate kids, helps build dwells, helps get the government administration to function minimally, do I really care exactly what drives that? Well, if you talk about the effect in the media, if you would call it investment money for, in my case, Dutch companies, sounds very different than when you call it aid. You have totally different discussions about the same thing. Yeah, sure, no. But that may be one of the ways to phrase it. I mean, I don't know. I mean, can we come up with a different... I tend not to speak about aid. I tend to speak about development cooperation. But I mean, I've sort of been forced into this boxing kind of... Yeah. You raised up interesting question because how we should call this? Because over the decades, as far as I remember, there have been different styles of doing the development cooperation or helping the poorest countries. And in Finland, we made the modern process for a while. Now we are supporting different classes from all countries. How do you see these kind of trends and how do they affect that? What seems to be working? Well, all evidence that I have access to is suggesting that in general, it's very hard to separate out a very strong difference between budget support and project aid. Because essentially, it's like when you're in your garden. And then there you have a shovel and you have a spade. You use the spade for certain purposes and you use your shovel for other purposes. I mean, these different tools, they're used for different purposes. And they have different sort of effects, yes, but when you're talking about the overall picture, when do you give budget support? When you give budget support, when you are in countries where you want that country to build up its own auditing institutions, is then you need to sort of get into, you can call it a training process, if you wish, that you have to give a block of money for that institution to learn how to do that, to manage that, to audit it, to follow it. But you can also have project aid in complicated, in Guinea-Bissau. I mean, of course, nobody would ever even dream of giving budget support to Guinea-Bissau because in Guinea-Bissau, the central administration doesn't work. So in Guinea-Bissau, what do you do? And then you try to go in with specific project activities, with specific so-called interventions where you either build a road or you try to disarm some, you know, I mean, where at least you can sort of keep that type of control. So in my view, I mean, I have never really seen any sort of really convincing evidence where you can distinguish clearly between these different types of laws. Yeah, please. So you mentioned Mozambique and that if the aid keeps it hanging in there for 20 years, that's a good thing. But what do you say to criticisms that come from the developing countries where you frequently hear them saying that aid keeps them sort of, say, sort of addicted to aid so they don't do anything themselves to change. So for example, if they get aid for science, they don't bother to invest their own money into research. So what do you say, I mean, do you have any evidence in that? How many cigarettes do you have to smoke a day to become addicted? How many cigarettes? I mean, no, to become really addicted and have a problem, or for that matter, how many rum and coax do you need per day to become addicted? I mean, two, five, ten? Try to think about what I said before about the size of the aid. Do you really genuinely believe that on average, three and a half dollars per person per year, and in when it really goes high, 25 dollars, do you really think that that is sort of leading to that addiction? I have to say that I just can't, I mean, I just can't make the calculus square. I mean, I certainly understand, and I illustrated that with a Tanzania example, that there have been specific examples where this happened, absolutely. But in general, in general, aid pulls out when these things happen. Aid was pulled out in the 1980s, because countries were not quite sort of doing what they were supposed to do. So that sort of addiction thing, I mean, for me to get really addicted, I need a bottle of rum every day for a while, and the money is just not big enough to buy that bottle of rum a day for a long time. Yes, I hope you don't mind if I disagree with you on what you just said. When you say the media doesn't cover aid or aid, it's because in the media we know from experience that what people want to hear is not a long list of statistics, but a story with a human content. They want to know about their fellow human beings. So in fact, my perception of aid has always been that it stacks money from ordinary people, mostly in the West, but also Japan and a few other such places. And it's supposed to have a positive impact, again, on ordinary people, in places like Africa, where people are so much poor. I've never heard a convincing case that it's supposed to have a macroeconomic effect, positive or negative. It's a response to a perception of need, and I wish to address that need. So to that extent, addiction is actually much easier than you'd imagine, because that $25 per person per year is not spread through the millions of people. It's usually focused on specific projects. And if people see a project spring up from nowhere, like say in Northeastern Kenya, which is very dry, norad or cedar or whoever come in and put a series of watching points for the camel herders or the goat herders or the cattle herders, if those wells are dry because they're not being properly looked after, because these are nomadic people. They move all over the place. They don't stay in one place. Of course, they don't say what can we do for ourselves. They say, okay, so that was a negligence. When are the French coming to dig a few wells here? Because the psychology is one of help comes from the outside. So I'm not saying I'm sympathetic to those who criticize aid and say it shouldn't be there, but the fact is that if I receive help from no apparent reason, from people who are not asking me to give them anything back, I begin to have a view of the world which is full of good people who if you only ask them nicely, they'll give you a thing. And that's no different from a woman I saw as I was walking from the earlier conference. This one sitting on the side of the road with a cup in her hand. If she sits there for four days and no one gives her money, she'll go away. If every day two or three kind people give her money, she will continue sitting there. So it's a matter of psychology, not statistics. There are lots of things in what you're saying. Let me try and see whether I can give a comment. The first thing is that I do believe that the macro story is important because it certainly is not brought up when down by tomorrow you're standing here and speaking. People then take it in. When the economist is using the story, it's aid down the rat hole. I mean, so there must be something out there which is also happening at that macro level. I do understand the issue about that you need the human stories, but they are there. If you look behind the statistics, I mean just take for example these various reports that are now being prepared because of the post 2015 development agenda. If you actually dig behind those numbers, they're human beings. And you are seeing actually the poverty numbers have decreased very substantially compared to what it otherwise would have looked.  If you're looking at educational standards, I mean have you actually checked how many boys and girls are actually now actually going to school and that actually girls are almost at the same rate as boys in Africa? I'm not then trying to say everything is good. It's not. There is a lot still to be achieved. But compared to 15 years ago, it is. And there are human, I mean, there are stories there to be told. Now, when you then are talking about when aid sometimes and it does sometimes do that if they go in and they haven't done proper preparatory work. But a lot of aid is not just something that drops down from heaven. It is actually very often associated with a whole range of preparatory processes and you would say conditionalities. And there's nothing in what I have said which has any implications for what I consider the best way of that relationship. I've actually put in writing that I personally find that aid should be considered a contractual relationship in general. Now, then you have a problem. What do you then do when you're having a country where it's very difficult to have a contractual relationship because there's no government? What do you do? I mean, then it's a little bit sort of difficult to do. I believe that they can still do something sensible. Does that mean that that wasn't an Norwegian project up where in some that sort of got somebody to think, well, I think that Africa has a general problem that there is unfortunately still a tendency for people to expect that they are entitled to get a share. And if one of your family members is doing very well like Beno Ndoulou, who is now central bank governor in Tanzania, then he says, well, my cousins, they're still expecting that they can get their share of my salary. But that's not the fault of aid. Excuse me. I mean, that's another set of mechanisms. That's another set of history. That's another set of entitlement expectations that are built up over long historical processes. I hope you see that I am trying to respond, but that it can be sometimes a bit difficult to say yes or no. I'll just add on to the point that my colleague Beno. It's all fine that aid works on several levels, and that's not a question here, I think. But because you had posed the question in the beginning and you were provocative in your approach, I wish to address that particular thing that you said on how journalists don't report on the positive side. But I think the fact that economists use language that's very detached from the audiences that we write for and use so much data and use academic writing to support their points, it's really hard for journalists to actually sit down, filter through all that information and come up with a good story. Now, we're not saying that the stories don't exist. There's good stories about aid and there's really good stories to be told locally about the impacts of aid on the economy and on different areas of the country. But the fact remains, economists are really hard to interview. Economists are hard to access, especially locally. I'm from the Pacific, and in my country, there's only three qualified economists. So when I want to write about aid, if I don't get the data online, I have to find an economist to try and translate this data to terms that my readers would understand. But even talking to an economist is really hard because they still speak in a language that is very different and detached to those that my audience would understand. So there's several layers there. That's the reason why we don't necessarily write positive stories about aid, apart from the fact that it's better to write a story that is more towards the angle that will actually make a difference. Writing negative stories per se on aid actually improves aid in the country. For instance, if aid funding is mismanaged and I've written about it, it means that future aid that comes into the country is better managed and more transparent. So therefore there's a lot to be said for stories that do cover the other aspects of aid. But in defense of journalists, I just want to say that it's data. It's a data issue. I'm sure there's data out there. I'm positive there is. I've seen it. But I don't have the time to sit down for hours, read through your academic papers, go through your numbers, and then localize the story. So if you can present it to me better. So you want the economists to do your work? No, you see, I understand what you're saying. I mean, clearly there is a communication issue and that I recognize. It's absolutely clear and I completely... One of the reasons that we are trying to do this work, one of the reasons that I'm here rather than writing another academic paper is because I like to communicate about it. And I am trying to speak relatively directly and communicate the best I can. And I have not even put one single formula up there today. I've not even put one... So that is, of course, because I share this and I do understand. I mean, I'm one of the people who are flunking students for their exams when they don't speak in clear language, right? So I understand what you're saying, but I obviously was referring more to information-rich contexts. And I can assure you that in the north, in the developed countries, there is a lot of information available which the journalist could pick up, which is not being picked up. And that was the one I was referring more specifically to. I think it's fair to say that there are, of course, also information poorer, more constrained situation, absolutely. But it is, for me, a little bit of a paradox why, for example, Björn Lumböck, who says that the world has absolutely no problem with environmental change, can go on being cited in all of the nice places, whereas all the academic evidence is piling up. I mean, that's another illustration of the same thing. And it's a little bit that which I'm reacting towards. I do recognize that lots of economists, they speak with wool in their mouth and they're very hard to understand. I don't understand them many times. But then I insist that I need to understand. Then maybe you could push them, kick them, say that they won't get in the news if they don't become clear.


Hello everyone, this is financial author Amit Dan of AmitDan.com on this channel You'll find financial travel and more videos just like the one you're watching right now If you like what you see, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing Hello everyone, this is financial author Amit Dan of AmitDan.com Today, I'll have another video on the Equifax data breach and I'm expecting this video about five six minutes long If you have been watching my channel, you know that I posted a video about two days ago Mentioning what to do right away after the Equifax data breach because I'm one of the customers whose information was leaked and Three of my parade cars were hacked and I described or I mentioned about that in the other video and You can watch that other video, which I'll provide a link in the description box below Today I'll go further and describe what to do beyond that The other video I just published Equifax is a company that is full of deception and lies The news broke out that just before the data breach release their executives were busy selling their stocks and making millions of dollars and They're offering some sort of help But the health is full of lies because if you want to get help from them For example credit monitoring, then you're gonna have to sign up for their program and eventually you're gonna have to pay them and then You're gonna have to consent to a clause that makes you not to sue Equifax credit company and After that, they don't even provide any sort of credit fixing or credit repairing program So it's just a credit monitoring program, which you can sign up, but then you have to Give into their terms and conditions and you'll not be able to sue them in the future I've heard news that there are people trying to contact them and Their reps are hanging up on those who are calling them And they're just giving them false news and not telling you the truth Even when you call them, they'll not provide you accurate information They'll not tell you exactly what type of information leaked For your files, they'll just give you a very vague information and it's not gonna help you anyway In my last video, I mentioned that you should check your statements or credit card transactions and call your banks or credit card companies right away and today I'll Describe you what to do beyond that After publishing my last video if you checked your credit card transactions or bank transactions and found out that You didn't have fraudulent charges or anything that doesn't mean that that's the end of the story This type of data breach can take a long time To come into effect. For example, lots of credit card information Will be on the cyber black market for sale for a long time to come So what I believe we should do is that keep an eye on your credit cards and bank statements and transactions And if you see any unusual activities, then stop them right away Something else you can do which is set up credit alert or any kind of alert which is available These are usually free. So for example, if someone is trying to change your address or Submitting a credit application or if there is a transaction or anything to set up alert for that And anytime that happens, you'll be notified via email text or Other means So that way you'll know that someone is trying to Apply for credit cards or changing your address or trying to do fraudulent activities on your cards Another thing you can do you can put a credit monitoring on your credit files. However, I do not recommend taking this Offer from Equifax. There are other credit rating agencies or other companies who offer the same services And you may have to pay a little however, if you are not comfortable with all these data breach Then you can definitely Accept that service to monitor your credit files. So these are the steps you can take to safeguard your information for example, setting up credit card alert or alert setting up monitoring services and keep checking your accounts and statements and If nothing happened to you this time, it doesn't mean that you're totally safe This kind of data breach can take a long time to come into action because The credit card information will be available on the black cyber market for a long time to come now In case you're wondering Whether I'm going to be setting up a credit monitoring alert or anything on my credit files And the answer is no. I'll not be doing this. What I'm doing is that I'm setting up credit alerts on all my credit cards and bank accounts and I'll be checking transactions and statements and then I'll just keep an eye on everything to make sure that nobody is using my address or social insurance number or My credit cards or anything Watching this video if you like what you see, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing I'll have more videos of this nature. So please subscribe and I'll see you shortly. Thank you


let's do it. How do you create the perfect elevator pitch for your idea? Do you have an idea that you want to get out into the world but you don't know how to pitch it? Or someone says, what do you do?  Well, you've got to create the perfect elevator pitch. You've got to make it so simple and so compelling that the recipient of your pitch just gets it and wants to invest or wants to help or gets enthusiastic, gets excited about it. Whether that be an investor or someone who you're hiring or someone that you want to do business with, it must be compelling. So today we're going to talk about creating the perfect elevator pitch for your idea. To help us do that, I've brought in Josh Muchio, who is the host of the pitch podcast, which is going into season two in January of 2017. It was a big breakout podcast in 2016. Josh Muchio, how are you doing? Great to have you here. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it, James. Before we get into some practical steps here on how to create the perfect elevator pitch, just tell our listener of you a little bit about you and the pitch podcast for the person who hasn't listened to it. Yeah, well, it all started, I guess, while I was in school. I didn't realize it at the time, but I pitched for my senior project, a business idea to school, but my business professor put together a panel of investors from the area. So it was a lot like Shark Tank. And I pitched my first business idea there. And I didn't think anything would have come of it, but that ended up becoming my first business. And, you know, as a, after I ended up selling that business three years later, I look back and it's funny. I didn't really mean to, but it's all of a sudden, I've created a business where I facilitate this whole Shark Tank thing for other companies to get their ideas off the ground. And I'm making a long story, very, very short. But yeah, so now that's, that's what I'm doing with the show. We've been doing it for about a year. We've had 40 companies, about 40 companies come on, but in the existing version of the show, there's no investment being made. It's just feedback or thoughts, or if I were to invest. And I mean, personally, I've come to despise our current format. So don't tell the lovely folks who have come on before that. It's just so aggravating because we want to be that Shark Tank feel where investors are actually putting money on the line. And we finally, have worked up to the place where we recorded season two last October. And now here in January, we're coming live with the season two and real investments are happening. So essentially, you have these startups that come with no money, no capital, no, just an idea. And they pitch it in front of investment capital firms to raise money so they can launch their business an idea. Is that the, is that the long and the short of it? Kind of what they do on Shark Tank, the TV show, Mark Cuban and all these other guys who are the sharks, I guess. But you're doing it on the podcast. Is that correct? Exactly.  Now we don't publish the video, we're focused more on the audio, which changes the format significantly. But what you can expect from our show is that it's going to really go a lot deeper on some of the things that they'll tend to just gloss over on Shark Tank. But we don't make it so nerdy that newbie, that we leave newbies behind. We try to keep everybody, bring everybody along. So creating a perfect elevator pitch is obviously vital for people who come on your show if they're going to get capital to be able to launch their idea. It's being able to communicate what your idea is, what it will do, and how it will benefit the investor is crucial. It's the difference between getting money and not getting money, right? It's crucial to launching and not launch. Well, and it's so many things. I mean, it's not just the message of what you're saying, it's really how you're saying it. And I'm sure this is something you can resonate with because it's that way across so much of life, right? Let's say you're literally in an investor opportunity and you're in an elevator and they ask, oh, hey, so what do you do? And that opportunity, if you aren't kind of excited and happy about what you're talking about, happy to be telling about your business, it doesn't matter how good it is, what you're saying is it's not going to go over well. It's not going to be memorable. So that's like, you know, a super basic thing you can do is just be excited about what you're building. Do you recall a time when you were asked what do you do or you were put in a situation where you kind of had a moment or a conversation or 10 seconds to be able to accurately and succinctly describe what it is that you do and you blew it and that you completely messed it up? Do you recall a time like that? You know, I can't recall any specific times, but I mean, it's, it's happened a bunch for sure. I think the, I think the problem is our mind immediately goes to probably the most recent interaction we've had with that thing. And we can tend to get right into like the nitty gritty details. And you almost have to have like, okay, this is my blanket statement that I have memorized. Like for our show, it's like, we're the Shark Tank podcast, we bring on companies, they get funded. And, you know, everybody has a great time on our show and we have some really exciting moments that happen on air. And usually that's intriguing enough, just that line right there where people will then ask, okay, so is it really like Shark Tank, you know, blah, blah, blah, and you can, you can tell more, more after that. But really the goal is to kind of create some intrigue with that first comment. Because really, yeah, you want engagement from whoever he is you're talking to. Well, just before we get into the, you know, how you should craft the perfect pitch, how do we make sure that we don't craft the worst kind of pitch? Like, what's an example of a pitch gone wrong? So a really, I mean, there's so many ways a pitch could go wrong. But I think that the number one way is people get really, they get, they get too excited and too nervous about the pitch that they become their own worst enemy, right? So they know it's a big deal. And I think you just got to go into it and just relax and have a good time with it. But, you know, the number one mistake people go into is they talk details of the product, they talk features, they talk features, features, features, and really, you don't want to talk features, you want to talk kind of overview, like what's exciting about what you're building, what's the broader vision?  And yeah, they would go through the details of the product. But really Steve's job was to like cast the vision for how amazing Apple is and how their 10 year vision is going to be incredible. And you kind of want to do that on a micro scale. So yeah, so Steve Jobs, the best example I can use of him was when you came up with the iPod, it was a thousand songs in your pocket. Yep. That's it. That's it. That's the benefit. That's not a feature. That's not like, oh, we've got a 24 gigabyte product that enables you to put in the songs and it sits into a little device. Yeah, we got this crazy scroll wheel. Like, they're features. The benefit is it's a thousand songs in your pocket. My, to use an example of my own business, my Swanee's blue light blocking glasses on our front, on our homepage, the first words that you see is sleep better. We help people sleep better.  And that is they help you sleep better in turn helps you lose weight, which in turn makes you look better and have less wrinkles and makes you happier. They're all benefits. So where people get in wrong in all kinds of sales is that they bang on and on and on and on about features.  They don't care. What have you done for me lately? What does it do? It's like, when you see these car, car commercials now, I mean, if they throw in a few benefits there, like, like for the real car enthusiasts, they talk about the engine size and like the braking system and they're thrown a few technical terms. But for the most part, what are the cars doing? They're driving around in the mountains and showing freedom. They're going around windy hills and like they're going over rugged terrain. And it's like they're going on these big open rows. It's freedom, baby. It's the feeling of freedom. That's what they're selling. They spend that message so many that like they've skinned that cat 10,000 times. You know, right? It's like bottom line. If they were to, you know, we get you from A to B, but that's so boring. They have to find a way that we get you from A to B better than anybody else. Right. Here's the thing. If I was going to sell a hairdryer, right? If I was going to sell a hairdryer or a hair curler, let's use an example of a hair curler. Okay. To a, to a woman, right? To a 20-something or a 20-something woman. I wouldn't, I would not say, Hey, I've got this amazing hair curler. It's incredible. It's heated, heated at 100 degrees and it goes through your hair and it makes your hair really curly and you look really good and blah, blah, blah, right? I would sell, Hey, you know, there's this, this amazing new device that's come out and all the Hollywood celebrities are using it now. And if you use this device, you are going to turn men's heads.  And when you walk into a bar and I club or you're walking down the street, you're going to notice that people are just looking at you and admiring you. Yeah, you're going to stand out. Yeah. And then you say, it's a hair, it's a hair curler. And then you say, here's the hair curl. So that's an example of going, leading with benefits rather than features. It's not like, here's my hair hair curler by this hair curler. It's, you want to look sexy.  You want to be like the objects of people's desire. You want to feel amazing and look amazing. Here's the hairdryer. Here's the hair curler. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and there are so many similarities between what you will do in marketing and what you do when you pitch your product. I think that the second thing that you really have to understand is you got to know your audience going in, no matter where you're pitching somebody. So we'll pretend we're in the elevator. So loosely, you're kind of one, you know, one sentence statement can be the same for investors, for coworkers, for friends. But then when you say, you know, kind of next is really telling about how well you know who you're actually talking to. You know, most people ask me about how do you pitch investors specifically? And I think you do have to start with the problem and the solution. Start at the most basic premise of what your product is, because that should be clear enough that they'll understand it and then understand the opportunity of what you're building. But then next, you really do have to sell them on kind of the the income opportunity for them. See, as an investor, you're always looking at, okay, I can give this person money, but are they going to be able to give me 10x, 15x, 20x in my return? And if it's not a big, big exit, they won't invest. Most investors specifically in venture. So that's the other big thing. And that's kind of the where you have to really finesse it is really showing the opportunity of what you're building, what it could look like, you know, five, 10 years down the road. Yeah. So bad ways don't get too excited and nervous and don't talk features, talk, talk benefits. Don't talk about the future product, talk about the benefits. Now the good way then we're talking about how to create the perfect elevator pitch for your idea. What you seem to be saying is to start off with you state the problem.  Correct? Yeah. So let's do an example of that then. Maybe we can do an example of one that you've already seen that didn't state the problem and then the solution, or we can just come up with our own one now. Have you got an example we can use? I do have a really good one. So like Airbnb, there's book rooms with locals rather than hotels. And you instantly get like, oh, so it's like a hotel, but I can book with locals. So it's super, super simple. That's kind of like your one sentence pitch. But I think you do have to start with that before you go into the problem. Let's see. I don't have the rest of their pitch up to see kind of what they went into for the problem right after that. If they were investor pitch, I would, I'm just going to imagine, but you know, if I'm Airbnb, you would say, you've got all this unused capacity, people, you know, they have rooms available in their homes, and they would love to rent them out, but they just don't because they don't realize how easy it is. Well, with Airbnb, we make that super, super easy. People can make some extra money on the side. And then if you're traveling, it's really wonderful to, you know, get out of your, these big hotels and find a unique spot to spend some time in the community with the people living there. And like that makes sense. People are going to get that. So let's go over that one more time, because what you did initially was state the problem. So just say the first sentence again, it doesn't have to be identical, but just roughly the first thing that you gave was state the problem. So the problem is, well, okay, so the problem is people have all this unused capacity in their home, but they don't use it. They don't know they have it. They don't know that they could give it away and make money off of it, right? So they're leaving money on the table. Yeah. Okay, great. So there's a problem, right? There's stating the problem. People have got that. Oh, you're right. Well, I have a two bedroom apartment. I'm only in one room. I've got the spare room with just some goods with some like spare stuff in there. I could be renting that out at $100 or not. I could maybe make $1,500 a month extra if I put someone in there. Okay, great. So you started the problem. And then the solution, if you want to finish the sentence, then like provide the solution. Yeah, so Airbnb is a marketplace. There's an app that you can use. You can download, you know, and in 45 minutes, you take some pictures. You can have your room listed and somebody could book the room tonight or this weekend or whatever. And of course, you've kind of got in a marketplace, you've got two sides of it. So it kind of depends on which side you're selling. Yeah, great. So there you go. There's a great example. So state the problem and provide the solution. So I can imagine how people might get that wrong. Let's pretend that we're a really poor Airbnb. Let's just say we're Airbnb. We're just starting out. And we don't know how to pitch because we haven't listened to Josh, Mochio, and James want to talk about how to pitch. You want me to do a bad pitch?  And I want you to do a bad pitch. That's really hard. All right. So, but you know what, I know it's really hard because you know how to do a good pitch. But guess what? It's really easy for people to do a really bad pitch. Yeah, absolutely right. I mean, okay. So if I were, I mean, I could start off right the bad and be like really, really nervous about what I'm talking about. And I wouldn't be able to communicate well, but let's just pretend it's just the messaging side of things because I don't know how to play nervous. We've got this app and like what you can do is you can open it up. You can take pictures of your home and then you can post a room for sale and it lists all of the, so like you can scroll up and down on your phone and see the different listings and then people can pay you from there. And we also have a feature where you can feature your listing higher than everybody else so you get more bookings. Yeah, that's good. So that's good. Yeah, because I'm more, I'm like, I'm kind of getting it, but I'm not really. So that's the problem, right? So in all types of marketing and all types of persuasion in all types of communication, you want to speak in a way that makes it so easy for the person you're talking to to just get it. So the reptilian part of our human brain, okay?  That's what it is. Like think of an alligator or a crocodile, right? It's just rolling around. It's just thinking, right, I want to have sex.  I'm hungry. I'm hungry. There's someone who's, who is, signifies danger. I'm running the hell away from that. Right? That's, we all humans have that, right? We've got that reptilian part of the brain. So when you are marketing or when you're pitching or when you're persuading, you want to hit the reptilian part of the brain so they don't even have to think. You want it to make it want to make it so easy that people don't have to think, which is why when Steve Jobs said a thousand songs in your pocket, people get that. That makes sense, right? Right. And in general, the less you say the better, the less you say the better. But the way that you were doing it then in the, in the poor way, I had to think, right? The person would have to think, oh, hang on. What? Let me, I kind of get it. All right. But now I'm getting out of that reptilian part of the brain. I'm getting into that. I think they call it the prefrontal courts. I'm going to mess it up. Prefrontal cortex sounds like a thing. Yeah. Let me just, brings a bell, three, four, three portal cortex. Here we go. Which is the cerebral cortex, which covers the front part of the frontal lobe. Now that that's developed in humans only in the last like 10,000 years, like our, our ability to rationale and think and do all that kind of stuff. But that's what separates us from the Gators per se. Correct. Exactly. So what we want to do is we want to hit the back part of the human brain where it's just like, we don't have to think I got it. That's why I like in marketing, if you can use one or two syllables in a word, like sleep and better is good. But if you go like, like, if you say it illuminates the room, that's not as good as that. It's saying it lights up the room. You see what I mean? Like lights up illuminate. So illuminate has got four syllables to it, but lights up the room is like, you know, one word, one syllable words, right? Yeah. So it's not just like a one, a first grade reading level. It's also like counting syllables. Yeah, for sure. Like, yeah, I mean, that's, I mean, in general, more syllables is harder to read, but it doesn't sound as good. Think of McDonald's. What's McDonald's slogan? I'm loving it. Yeah, I'm loving it. We want to get to that, right? I understand. What's Coca-Cola? Coca-Cola is the, there's changed. Some of you was recently telling me about what their old one was, and it was classic. It was happiness or something. Something was, something happy. Yeah. People get that open happiness. Yeah. So just simple. Apple is so simple, right? Apple simple. I mean, well, I've tried to do that with my product to sleep better, teaching people how to sleep better. People understand that, right? With my 30 day no alcohol challenges, I teach, I help people reduce or quit alcohol. Is there any confusion there? I don't think there's any confusion. It's, it's simple. So, but with your Airbnb version, it was like, huh? What? Yep. Okay. So that's great. So we've stated the problem. We provided this solution. Now we've got to focus on what it means for the potential investor, right? Like for the person who ultimately is going to decide whether they're going to give you money or, or not. So let's get into that. We're talking to Josh Muccio, who's the host of the pitch podcast. If you haven't listened to it, make sure you go into iTunes and subscribe and listen to it. Season two is coming out 2017. So what do we do? What do we say to try and make the investor see the potential of investing in the, in the, in the idea? So you've set the hook with the problem. And if it's a problem that the investor understands, they're going to get it and they're going to be excited about it. But then you need to sell them on why you're the team to really execute on this. So now we're kind of transitioning from, you know, this maybe doesn't happen in an elevator. Maybe this happens on a stage. Maybe it's a coffee meeting with an investor. This is kind of the more in-depth side of things. And at this point, you have to sell why you're the one to build this team. And, but at the same time, it shouldn't just be a monologue. So you've set the hook. Well, when they come into the meeting, they're going to have questions about the product. They're going to have questions about your vision. They're going to want to know about your team. If you're building something for a big enough market, it's, they're going to know pretty quickly whether it's something they're interested in. And then at that point, it's just due diligence, which is just rigorous. But, you know, you really can't optimize for some of these really deeper things.  And when they're digging into you and really trying to understand things and poking holes in your theories, that's, like, the truth is going to come out at that point. And like, there's really not much we can do to help you there. But, you know, it kind of depends on what we're optimizing for. Are we optimizing for a pitch on a stage?  Yeah. So if we're doing, let's just say, let's just say we're optimizing for on the stage and you're literally talking to investors. So how do we talk in, how do we, how do we pitch them after we've stated the problem and the solution and what your product does? Yeah, absolutely. So right then you're going to go into the team, which a lot of people do team wrong. They start naming the people on their team. You know, so CTO we've got blah, blah, blah. Really you need to start naming accomplishments of you, of members of your team. It doesn't even actually matter their name.  In general, you want to talk about this. So investors are going to love it if you say so. This person on our team has a past exit. This person has shown that they can execute at a CTO role. And this person has absolutely crushed it in sales at these two or three companies. And we've got them on our team because they're excited about what we're building. So I mean, that's kind of the closer that you're going to have. Sometimes, you know, people will talk about the market size if it's not obvious. A lot of times lately, I'm seeing more and more pitches where people don't talk about the market size because they're solving a problem, you know, like Airbnb, for example, if you're building competition for Airbnb, people know there's a market there for, you know, secondary, but what is the market called there secondary living or something like that? Okay. I always find as well, a lot of too many people, when they're pitching you, they try to, like, talk about what they want as opposed to what the investor wants. So I know on my websites for my various businesses, I start off by writing things in there and I'm talking to one person, right?  So when someone reads it, they feel like I'm speaking to that person. Nobody really cares what you want.  They only care what you want as it relates to them, right? Because everybody in this world is selfish. Everyone will not necessarily selfish, but everyone else is always thinking about themselves first. And that's fair enough. That's just human nature. Well, especially in business. Yeah. So an incorrect way to pitch someone would be after you've, you know, after you've successfully done the right thing, which is here's the problem, here's the solution. The next problem would be I want to raise $1 million so we can get this, get this product out to the masses and we can help all of these amazing people. Yeah. Now, now that's what you will ultimately do once you get the million dollars. And that's a great thing that you will help people.  I only care how that's going to affect me. So a better version is here's how your investment of a million dollars will give you a two times or three times return on investment. And in the process, uh, have you inspiring millions of people around the world to sleep better or help making people's lives a lot easier? So we've inserted the word you. So we've changed it from I want to raise a million dollars so we can do this to, um, here's how your investment of a million dollars will make you $3 million and you will be able to inspire and help thousands of people in the process because sorry, go ahead. I was going to say you can tweak it a little bit when you're pitching to investors because, um, a really good investor or a really good founder uses the leverage that they have. And your best leverage is, well, it depends on the situation, but I see there's a leverage that every founder has they don't often use. And that's that leverage of choice in that when you close, you know, something where you say like, we're looking for investors who care about X, Y and Z.  Yes, it does exclude some people, um, but a really successful founder or someone who's smart, um, is going to look for specific investors. And investors in general like that because, uh, if they're the only smart money and everybody else is dumb money, uh, it's not going to be not likely to be a good outcome for them. So that would be maybe one tweak, I would say, of that specific to investors. Have you found, uh, there's any correlation between someone who's like really pushing hard and trying to sell their company as opposed to just saying, Hey, here's my company. And then letting them make up the, the mind, because a lot of sales people in general get this wrong. They try to sell, sell, sell, whereas, whereas good salesmen don't sell at all. They present their idea, they present their product and then the, the recipient of their pitch sells themself. Yes. So I've got some really good examples of this. So, so I've never coached somebody that's been really, really bad, uh, because in general it just doesn't never happen, which was fine. This was great. But I often get pitched by people who want to come on the show and, uh, especially recently on season two, we've, we've had some crazies, man. I'm trying to find one in an email that I think it's okay if I read. I have no idea if you want to hear it or not, but let's do it. All right. So, uh, I don't know if you can edit this stuff out in post, but I got to do an inbox search here. That's all right. You do that and I'll, uh, I'll keep talking. We're talking to Josh Muccio on how to create the perfect elevator pitch for your idea. While you're finding that, I'm going to do a little Snapchat recording here. Make sure you follow me on Snapchat for behind the scenes. I'm going to do it. Say hello, Josh. Hello. This is Josh Muccio from the pitch podcast who I'm interviewing on the James Swannick show podcast right now. There we go. We just did a little podcast interrupt. We're, we're doing a little shout out. Uh, let me know whenever you've got, uh, we've got your thing. There's some great books actually on selling and persuasion, um, out there, which I'll recommend as Josh is finding, uh, his notes there.  Um, there's another one, uh, is it, is it, what's his name? Ironcloth on pitch anything? What's the author's name? I feel bad because I introduced him on stage a couple of years ago. Ironcloth. There you go. I had it right. Ironcloth, um, who's raised about a billion dollars in Silicon Valley and it's a book called pitch anything and it will teach you, um, how to present, how to pitch your idea, how to secure funding. Uh, very, uh, interesting man, very knowledgeable. Um, in persuasion in general, um, anything by Zig Ziggler, um, Grant Cardone, amazing. Yeah. Zig Ziggler has an amazing book. There's a, there's another book, um, uh, Grant Cardone. Uh, Sarah, can you just grab, I'm just yelling out to my assistant here. Could you grab me my, my James's sales book folder right there please? It's just underneath my coffee table. Thank you. So, well, Josh, this is my, this is my own sales book here that I use. I sold about two and a half million dollars with the programs over the phone last year, um, which is in itself a, a kind of a pitch. It's not an, it's not a pitch trying to get raise investment, but it's a pitch inspiring people to take action into various programs. And so I've basically just collected like a whole lot of my, of really, really good notes from books that I've read, like pitch anything from Zig Ziggler for Grant Cardone from Tai Lopez, from having conversations with you just like this, from doing my own experiments in terms of, and so sometimes when I'm on the phone, I'll just pull this out, James's sales book, and I'll, and I'll sort of go through the list just to remind myself to help people. How valuable is that thing to you now? I mean, I guess you could say it's two and a half million dollars worth of value. I would think so. Yeah.  Now let's see how I am at 60. It might be tens of millions of dollars. Who knows? But my dad was the king of that, putting stuff on his mirror every time he woke up in the morning, inspirational stuff. He was cutting and pasting everything, man. Awesome. Do you do something similar? You know, I don't. I'm so, I'm such a digital guy. I just don't have paper out and, but I kind of wish I want to develop a habit. I just haven't. How old are you? If you don't mind me asking. I don't mind. I'm 29 right now. 29. So yeah, I'm 41. Maybe it's a little, maybe in my, my era, because I'm 12 years older than you. Maybe my year is still stuck in the writing things down and sticking things on boards. Did you, uh, did you ever like wait lift or try to be a body bodybuilder? Yeah. Yeah. My dad would paste his head on like Arnold Schwarzenegger and some of these other guys and post. Really? Yeah, that's smart. I've actually just been doing it. I've actually just been doing a vision board where I print out imagery and stick it on a big, big cardboard thing and look at it every day and things like that. But, uh, I digress. All right. Have you got your notes there? You want to? I do. Okay. So this one's really bad and, and, uh, we will not name names. Um, but somebody reached out recently and said, Hey, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm an inventor and I have, I'm seeking an investor that will believe in my product. I have a functional prototype of my product. My product is a multi-billion dollar product. Yes, that's billion with a B to answer your question. I decided to join in because I'm looking for an investor to take my product to the second level and get a percentage of my company. And, uh, then he proceeds to tell me that he's been stalking the shark tank crew for months now. So this was a really, you know, this was a tip right off the bat.  Um, I want the investors to give me a chance. I will surprise them with my product. Anyway, I can't wait. So he understands the opportunity thing, you know, with, I've got a multi-billion dollar product, but boy does he know how to take it too far. And nothing screams, I am desperate and yeah, I don't actually have anything of value than, than that type of email. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I met, I met a guy once about a year ago who came, came to a seminar or a mastermind that I was, I was emceeing. Ty Lopez was, was hosting a business builder meeting and, um, you know, people had paid to come and, and network and do a mastermind. And I was the emcee and I was facilitating all the conversation in the room. And there was a guy there who turned up, he was all excited beforehand. He's like, I can't wait to get there. I can't wait to mingle in the room. I have this billion dollar idea. It's incredible. It's amazing. And he got there and he wouldn't tell anyone what he's billion dollar idea. Oh gosh. Like he would just auto, I don't want to share it. It's too, it's too big. I'm just looking at, I'm like, oh my God, like here's the thing that I learned. I mean, and I learned this from Ty, Ty really banged this into my head. You want to share your idea. You want to share your idea with lots of people. The chances that someone is actually going to steal your idea is so minuscule that you shouldn't even worry about it. You want to get feedback from people. You want people to critique. You want people to criticize. You want people to do all of those things because only then can you get the feedback to go out there and make it. Well, and that's how you get the open doors too. You share an idea that somebody is also excited about and there's an open door. There's an opportunity there for investment, you know, partnership, whatever. If you don't share it, that opportunity never presents itself. And also a lot of times when people launch a business, it ends up being something completely different than what you started out hoping it would be in the first place. I'll give you the best example ever. It's called YouTube. Do you know the story of YouTube? I don't know. It was something else in the beginning. You know what? Maybe I do. It started off with a couple guys as a dating feature on an online dating site. So instead of guys writing their profile, they would do a video profile of themselves and say, hi, I'm James. I'm 25 and blah, blah, blah. But what happened was is that the guys were so undesirable or many of the guys are so undesirable that the women started sharing the videos of these guys making fun of them. And so all of a sudden the guys are like, oh, this is interesting. People are now sharing these videos. Maybe we should just create a site where that enables people to upload a video and just share it really easily. And then there you go, YouTube. Well, that explains all the trolls and haters you get on YouTube comments. It hasn't gone far from its beginnings. I'm just kidding. The point is, I can't tell you how many times people say it like I asked them about their business and say, oh, I can't tell you, mate. You know, hold that secret. And I look at them and I just cringe inside. It happened like a month ago. I was at the crunch gym on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood and I ran into a guy that I've met a few times at various events. And he goes, hey, man, how are you doing? I'm great, man. How are you doing? Great. I said, what are you up to? He goes, oh, yeah, I'm selling products on, on Amazon now and we're crushing it. I go, mate, that's amazing. What are the products?  Well, you know, I just got to keep that, keep that secret. And I was like, I was, I tried not to get, I tried not to get angry, but I actually personally offended. Yeah. I was personally offended because I thought, well, first of all, I felt bad for the guy because he should have shared it because I run an Amazon business and I could have shared what I know and he could have shared what I know and we could have helped one another maybe. And yeah, I could have introduced into people that would have helped his business. So I felt bad for him, but I also felt slighted because he's by virtue of the fact that he's trying to not to, to keep that information from me, he's implying that I would steal his idea that I would actually take his idea and steal it and somehow be a competitor, which is a, and for anyone to think that I would do that kind of pissed me off. And I'm sure if I told my mother in Australia, she'd be equally obsessed. So this person's a friend? No, not a friend. He's just someone I'm friendly with. It's an acquaintance. You know, I've run into him a few times, an acquaintance. That's it.  And I think you should, what did he say? He said, oh, I come from a different school of thought. I was coached by someone who's doing like millions of dollars. And he said, never to share any of the Intel, never to share it with people. And so I'm not sharing it. Who is this guy? Would you share that? I don't know. I don't know who the guy is. But anyway, I mean, listen, listen, just because I say what I think doesn't mean that I'm right in every occasion, right? But here's what I feel. Yes, based on the context of our conversation, Josh, if you're the listener or the viewer, you have an idea, and you think it's a billion dollar idea, wouldn't it make sense to share it with a lot of people? Don't say that. Just a big idea. Don't say billion dollar idea, because that makes people's eyes roll. Right. See that it probably means you don't know. Right.  Because without feedback, you're not going to have a good business. Absolutely. Well, and there's something else that makes me think about my first business, I regrettably built the whole thing in a silo. And I didn't have any co-founders. I chose not to have any investors besides those folks that first invested me in the very beginning. And I paid them off fairly quickly. So anyway, so I just remember there were several times where I felt like I was not satisfied in what I had built. And maybe that was part of the reason why I ended up selling it three years later. But I don't know, I think there's a lesson there. I mean, for me, the second time around building the pitch, I've had a very, I've had a focus from the beginning to bring in as many people as I can from the start, which works out really well for podcasting. And I don't know, it's quite a bit more enjoyable than my last business because of that. But I suppose there's others that maybe do better by themselves. I don't know. Let's summarize what we've gone over here, Josh, how to create the perfect elevator pitch. So the bad way, don't get excited, don't get nervous, don't talk about all the, sorry, the bad way is to get too excited and to get nervous. Yeah, I mean, it's actually okay to be excited about your product and to have energy about it. The problem is when you get so excited that you stumble over your words and like, you know, live in the moment, be happy about what you're building. That's the kind of thing. Don't talk too much about the features of the product, only talk about the benefits. Yeah, definitely. And in general, shorter is better.  People tend to read people's silence as, oh, I need to start to continue talking. It's probably because they're thinking about what you said. And if you shut up, and a lot of them to think some more, they'll ask a question. An answer to a question is much better than you telling them that answer without them asking it. I like that.  I let the polls, let that sink in. I let the silence sink in a little bit. Good way, state the problem and provide the solution. Yep. Usually, that segues so nicely into your product, too. To say, you know, here's the problem, here's what we're facing.  Well, that's what we built, a mobile app that does just that. All of a sudden, you've like, you don't even have to talk about features. People get it. So that's a nice segue is problem right into problem and the solution is the classic pitch. I would add in there always just a reminder to try to hit the reptilian part of the brain, make things really, really simple. Try to don't try to use fancy words. Try to use very simple one, two, syllable words. So people don't have to think they don't have doesn't have to hit that the front part of the brain. It hits the back part of the brain where they just understand it. Focusing on what it means for the investor in a way as well, like using the word you a lot, Y O U, as opposed to I want to can also be beneficial in certain circumstances. There was something else that you said on that, Josh, I think. Yeah, I think so when you focus on, so kind of at your closing pitch, it's really important to focus on it is important to focus on what you are looking for in a person, especially if this is a demo day pitch, describing your ideal investor, because that's your leverage as a founder is who you choose to be on your team. And you want to be selective. Some of the best founders I've seen are like ruthless in how they pick their investors and all of a sudden it gets investors kind of fighting over this person, which is a really good place to be in. Yeah, I like that. Okay. And anything else just to wrap that up? I think we've done a nice review there, but is there anything any closing? Ramon, you know, I don't think so. I think I like I think like keeping some things simple, you know, obviously, everybody's business has something unique. You know, in general, there's there's four different types of pitches. But the most common one that people have is a story pitch. You're pitching the vision of what you're building. You know, that's in general, that's what most investors are looking at. And so they're looking at you your track record. And the team you're putting together is the biggest thing. And the other thing to keep in mind, this goes back to the whole idea, you know, not being afraid to share your idea with people is ideas are worth almost nothing. But teams that can execute on ideas are worth billions. That's something that's worth billions, you know. So building a team that people can trust in, and if you have to do that pivot down the road, people that's, that's what investors are investing in is people not really a specific business because you aren't tied to that business. Yeah, that's so true. Ideas are worth nothing, really. I mean, it's not that worth nothing, but they're worth very little. It's the executing execution of the ideas that that's worth everything. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you very much. Just Muccio, who's the host of the pitch podcast. If you go into iTunes and subscribe to the pitch, you'll be able to listen to that in 2017. The one with the scripted lettering. Cool. And the scripted lettering. All right. And where else can we find info about you, Josh? We're at thepitch.fm and then I'm on Twitter and Facebook at Josh Muccio. See if you can spell that. M-U-C-C-I-O. Hey, there you go. I should be one of those spelling bees. If you enjoyed this episode, please do leave a review and take a screenshot of the review that you leave and email it to me at James at jameswanick.com and post a question that you have for me and I will personally respond to it. I love reviews. Reviews help the show. I love reviews too. Yes, Josh loves reviews as well. You're beating me right now in reviews. Who knows at the time that this airs, but so far you're winning. Well, okay. We're not really in competition. In the end, it's just a race with yourself, Josh. Good on you, mate. Remember to, if you're listening to this on the podcast, you can watch a video version on my YouTube channel, which is James Swanick. If you're watching this on YouTube, subscribe to the James Swanick show podcast and you can listen to this. I'm on Instagram and Snapchat at James Swanick. Josh, it's been a real pleasure talking to you today, mate. Thanks very much. You as well. Thank you so much, James. And to the viewer and the listener, I will catch you on the next one. See y'all.


All right friends so this is a quick video wherein we will be talking about the equivalent focal length right now most of us know how to find the equivalent focal length if multiple thin lenses are placed in contact let us say this is one of the lens this is the second lens and this is third lens right so the equivalent focal length formula for the case where let's say f1 f2 f3 these three focal lengths lenses they are in contact then the equivalent focal length formula we know is 1 by f1 plus 1 by f2 plus 1 by f3 is equal to 1 by f right so there is no confusion here we can substitute the value of focal length these focal length will be positive for converging lenses and will be negative for the negative for the diverging lenses okay now there will be certain situations where the lens and the mirrors are placed in combination okay so again let us take a simple scenario wherein one of the convex lens the other side is silver okay so here what will happen to a ray let's say there is a ray that goes in straight like this converging lens will converge it right then what will happen the mirror on the other end of the lens that will also try to reflect so that it converges backwards right and while it is going through the lens it will further converge right so you can see that the lens is converging two times wherein the mirror is converging the ray only once now I'm all simplifying things here so that you can remember the formula okay so this is the path of the ray that is parallel to the principal axis now wherever it hits the distance of the at from optical center is my equivalent focal length right now if I try to find out this value of the focal length by using proper method so let us try to find out that way first okay so first it will pass to the lens let's say focal length let's say focal length of the lens is f and let us say the focal length of the mirror is f m okay let me take it as f l and f m okay now when the ray is hitting the lens I can use the lens formula 1 by v minus 1 by u equal to 1 by f right so the first image let's say v1 minus u is infinity and it is encountering the lens of focal length f l so this is my first equation okay now what will happen it will hit the mirror right when it hits the mirror I will have to use the mirror formula 1 by v plus 1 by u equal to 1 by f this formula I have to use okay now the image of the lens v1 is the object of the mirror okay so I can write it as 1 by v2 plus u is v1 and f is focal length of the mirror okay this is my second equation now the ray is traveling backwards to the lens okay now when it is traveling backwards to the lens our sign convention reverses right because while it is going towards the right instant ray we were taking this side negative and that side positive but when it is traveling in the reverse direction and I'm taking the lens for the second time this side is positive that side is negative okay so since sign convention is reversed and if I have to use the lens formula for the second time 1 by v1 sorry 1 by v where v is the image which is the final image that would be equal to 1 by f let us say okay and u should be ideally equal to the image of the mirror but since sign convention is reversed I will be writing it as minus u2 okay this is equal to 1 by f l so this is my third equation okay so you can see here that if you subtract the second equation from the first equation okay you will get minus 1 by v2 is equal to 1 by f l minus 1 by f n right then when I add these three and four equations I will get 1 by f is equal to 1 by f l plus 1 by f l minus 1 by f n okay so this will give me 2 by f l minus 1 by f m okay now one thing you need to understand here that this focal length that you have in the third equation this focal length is as per the sign convention which is reversed fine so you are getting this focal length by having a reverse sign convention okay so based on your original sign convention if you have to find the focal length you have to take negative of this okay so I'll write it as 1 by f dash because it is by using the reverse sign convention so 1 by f should be equal to minus or 1 by f dash so 1 by f is equal to minus 2 by f l plus 1 by f m okay so you can see in this case you will have to use that formula wherein 1 by f is equal to minus 2 by f l plus 1 by f m okay now this focal length of mirror you when you substitute the value of course it will be a negative quantity okay and length focal length in this case will be a positive quantity okay so the idea is that if let us say multiple lenses are placed side by side and let's say at the end there is a lens so 1 by focal length of the equivalent combination is equal to minus 2 by focal length of the first lens first lens minus 2 by focal length of the second lens and so on plus 1 by focal length of the mirror okay so you can probably remember the formula something like this wherein you can see the effect of the lens this parallel ray when it hits the lens it converges okay it tries to converge forward but because the mirror the overall convergence happens to be backwards so the effect of the mirror is reversed because of the presence of the lenses so that is why when we are talking about the lens there is a negative sign over there fine so let me summarize it by using one of the examples here this is one of the lens this is the other lens and let us say at the end I have a concave lens and the end of the concave lens is still over so let us say this is the scenario okay first lens let's say has a focal length of f1 second has f2 third lens has let us say f3 and the mirror over here has the focal length of fm okay so 1 by f equivalent of these three combination will be equal to minus 2 by f1 minus 2 by f2 minus 2 by f3 and plus 1 by fm okay so I hope this is very easy to remember all you have to do is in this equivalent focal length formula you have to use a sine dimension to get the correct answer okay all right now many a times we are in a hurry and we generally assume that the focal length of the mirror which is because it is formed on the lens would be equal to focal length of the lens okay that is not at all correct fine if let us say focal length of the lens is given we need to use the lens maker formula here guys mu minus 1 1 by r1 minus 1 by r2 and let us say if it is an equi convex or equi concave lens find out the radii of curvature if let us say 1 by fl sorry find out the radii of curvature from the focal length of the lens and let us say this side radius of curvature is r1 then focal length of the mirror would be equal to r1 by 2 okay so the relation for the focal length of the mirror with the radius of curvature is straightforward but for lens you have to first find out the radius of curvature in order to determine the focal length of the mirror that is made out of the lens okay so I hope all of this is clear to you you can get in touch with me and get your doubts clarified in case there are any