The world is always relying on young people, and luckily we have so many internet population. And also, the world has close to 1.5 billion people who were born in the late 1980s. Look, this is the generation born in the internet time. How can we make full use of the internet to help those young people, and helping young people, helping our future? If the economy is keeping healthier, growing in a green economy, I think we will be having a lot of great and excellent entrepreneurs come up.


So after playing Outroders, while the demo for over 100 hours I have tried and tested every single farm in this demo. Today I bring you what is my opinion by far the best legendary farm in the game. How's it going guys, my name is DPJ and if you enjoyed the video leaving a like really helps out and if you like what you see and want to see more Outroders, be sure to subscribe. So within every stream I have done, basically every night since the demo has been out, I do constantly get asked where or what is the best farm for Outroders in terms of earning those 10 legendary weapons available in the demo. Now like I said, I've pulled over 100 hours into the demo so far. I have spent days at these farms and today I bring you what is in my opinion the best farm and why is the best farm. So in reality we have four things or places we can farm. We have Gors and his chest which can take a few minutes per run. We have side quests with payback being the fastest side quest you can do. This also take in over two minutes. We have the vanguard captain who can farm fast and easily and we also have the og captain, the terra infirma captain. So let me state, the captains it seems are the way forward. Gors and his chest as well as the side missions although they do drop legendaries it seems as though you will be spending way more time doing these to get said legendaries. The problem we have here people is not knowing the drop rates and with us having captains who we can kill literally every 30 to 40 seconds why would we farm Gors and his chest or side quests which literally take four or five times longer and it takes so much lung to get what seems to be an even less percentage of getting legendaries. Wine which we get from those captains and what they offer in terms of drop rates. But even if the drop rates between Gors and his chest as well as side missions are that at the same of captains it still makes way more sense to farm captains as they're just way way more efficient. So if I were you if you are chasing those legendaries I'd avoid Gors and those side quests.  Now I detest the other day and you can more or less run these captains both of these the og and the vanguard more or less exactly within the same time. Og captain is literally a second quicker due to how many adds are here that just kill you way faster but without really knowing they're more or less the same. But guys I will tell you one of these captains is miles better and way more efficient to farm over and over and that captain is the og captain the terra infirma captain. This og captain basically is three times better in terms of that drop rate for legendaries and the reason for this being is the fact that this farm and with the og captain there are at least two marksmen here who by my experience have just a good chance to drop those legendaries as the actual captains. Also with the og captain there are like three or four breaches maybe more these can also drop that loot. To be honest with you know all enemies in the game can drop loot it just seems there's an increased rate with captains and the marksmen and while in reality you can kill the captain here and two marksmen at the same time and still die within the same time you can kill the vanguard captain and then die and repeat the farm so without doubt people the og captain is by far the best and for me over the past few days I have had literally six drops in not that much of time. I had two legendaries drop within the space of a minute at the og captain I had another two drop last night in literally 10 minutes I started my stream yesterday and got one here within five minutes it is in my opinion a much better and more efficient farm and those who don't know how to get to this terra infirma mission this is what you need to do. Obviously after you have completed the demo and can't go any further and are at that world tier five back out to the main lobby menu then here you want to select that fifth story point load in and once you are in follow where I go on screen now you will eventually end up at the og captain but first you have to take out a single group of ads but when you're done with these ads you then come to the og captain and this is how you farm it literally run forward kill the captain take out the two marksmen as you'll see me doing on screen in a split second stand there and let the other ads kill you. You can take out the breaches if you want but to me it's way more efficient in just taking out the captains and the marksmen as the breaches are way more tanky and take way more time in killing and seem to be a lot stinger in my opinion.  For me farming solo makes way more sense as it's quicker and more efficient and within my testing you're just as likely to get that legendary drop but it is just my opinion guys but for sure people right now within the outriders demo the og captain is by far the best farm and I've made this video for all the people out there who still ain't sure a lot of people are still farming side quests a lot of people are thinking about doing gores a lot of people go to the vanguard captain because it seems as though you can kill him quicker which is indeed the case the problem is there is it takes way longer for the ads to kill you plus there are no marksmen there whereas the og captain it takes a little longer to get to him you can kill him just as fast as the vanguard captain but you can also take out the marksmen which are literally right next to him too and you die way way faster so both farms in my experience about the same time to run but with the og captain you have three times the chance of getting that beautiful legendary loot even more if you can't reach us but yes I hopefully still help you out if you're still unsure I mean the og captain is the farm most people are using anyway but like I said I'm still getting people within my stream confused about the best but yes for sure the terrain firma og captain is the best farm in the demo right now in my opinion for those beautiful legendary weapons and on that note the end of the video has arrived if you enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out feel new around here want to see more outriders on a daily basis videos and streams make sure you subscribe and if you never want to miss a video of mine or a stream turn notifications on by hitting that bell bottom guys thanks as always for stopping by I hope you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one


So, thank you all for attending the talk. I'm going to be presenting work unfortunately virtually and not in person, but this is joint work on refugee return and conflict with Austin Wright. And so as we just heard, there are more people forcibly displaced across borders now than at any point since record keeping began. And of course, one of the most prominent instances we just saw this past summer, when more than a million people attempted to flee Afghanistan as a result of the Taliban's rapid spread across the country. And at the same time that we're seeing increased forced displacement around the world, we've also seen a collapse of the so-called durable solutions for refugees, one repatriation from host countries to origin countries, which is the historically dominant solution accessible to refugees, two, naturalization in developing host countries, and three, resettlement in the West, which is hampered, of course, by discriminatory migrant backlash. Today I'm going to focus on refugee repatriation because it is the historically dominant solution for refugees. And understanding the dynamics of repatriation poses some major inferential challenges, namely because conflicts dynamics are directly endogenous to conflict trends in origin countries. So here we can look at a time series of refugee outflows from Afghanistan to Pakistan and then returns likewise of Afghans from Pakistan to Afghanistan. And what we see is that outflows, of course, spike when episodes of conflict begin or intensify, and then likewise repatriation spikes in brief moments of stability, for instance, around the collapse of the Taliban. And this pattern is not unique to Afghanistan. We see a kind of similar wave shape of refugee returns around these key moments of conflict stability in places like Iraq, Serbia, Myanmar, and Mozambique. So this is a regular phenomenon and it poses a real threat to inference, again, because repatriation and conflict are directly endogenous. We're going to get leverage on this question by studying a large cash grant program in Afghanistan that was rolled out in 2016 and saw the repatriation cash assistance offered by UNHCR to Afghan refugees interested in repatriating from Pakistan double. In response to this cash grant program, there was an unexpected and large-scale wave of Afghan returning from Pakistan, and they accounted for 66 percent of global documented refugee returns in 2016, so a huge number of people, upwards of half a million. The cash assistance that we study was economically meaningful in the Afghan context, amounting to about $400 per returnee, that's not per family, that's per individual. And it was rolled out at the start of the 2016 fighting season, so if you can imagine a situation where we would expect refugee returnees to exacerbate conflict, it's going to be at a period in time when the insurgent movement, the Taliban, is recruiting a large pool of kind of itinerant temporary fighters for summer offensives. And so this creates a ripe condition for finding the opposite of what I'll show you that we ultimately find. And we're going to leverage historical returnee settlement patterns in a Bartik style difference and differences design using some previously unreleased NATO and Afghan government combat records, which I obtained as part of dissertation research and provide a kind of follow-on to the earlier CIGACS dataset that has been released for the period from 2006 to 2014. And this data that I have covers 2015 to 2022, or 2020, rather. So the core findings here, we show that the encashment program and refugee returns under it reduce insurgent violence. And we provide evidence that this operates through an opportunity cost channel. The program raises reservation wages in destination communities and constrains insurgent recruitment. An unintended consequence of rising reservation wages is that it also constrains counterinsurgent tip buying. And so there is a negative effect on the efficacy of counterinsurgent bomb clearances. On the other hand, encash returns increase communal violence. And we show that this effect can be offset by social capital and strong local institutions. Okay, so there are three real perspectives on how refugee return at forced displacement more broadly might intersect with conflict. On the one hand, we can think about forced displacement worsening conflict, for instance, by providing a ripe source of recruits for insurgent groups, or by exacerbating institutional fragility. We might also think about how it could worsen social conflict, for instance, by exacerbating competition between non-migrant neighbors and migrants over jobs and other resources. And then a third perspective in the literature emphasizes how refugees might actually be associated with improving security because they come with aid and they've acquired human capital and skills abroad that might ultimately bolster livelihoods in destination communities. And we're going to adjudicate these perspectives in the context of the program I mentioned. So the context here, we're studying Afghan returns from Pakistan. Pakistan is a historically large host state of refugees virtually entirely from Afghanistan. In 2016, at the time that we study, there were more than one and a half million Afghans living in Pakistan. We're going to study returns induced by a cash assistance program, which in the graph at the bottom here, you can see induces a large spike in the time series of returns. So the program was precipitated by a terrorist attack against the school in Pakistan by the Pakistani Taliban in December 2014. No Afghan refugees were associated with the attack, but it kicks off a wave of anti-Afghan xenophobia in Pakistan owing to the perceived link between the Pakistani Taliban and the conflict in Afghanistan. And the government kind of stokes this link as well. In response to growing at anti-Afghan xenophobia in 2015 and 16, the Pakistani government threatens the expiration of refugee cards for registered refugees in Afghanistan in private meetings and negotiations with the UNHCR. And in response, UNHCR as a way of mitigating the hosting burden borne by Pakistan offers to double repatriation cash assistance payments with the hope of getting more people to return home. And so the payment doubles from $200 to $400 in the period in gray, you can see. This assistance is economically meaningful in the Afghan context, the median family under the program receives $3,600, which is equivalent to an entire fighting season's worth of income if the men in the group were to mobilize on behalf of the Taliban. It's also equivalent to at least several months of listed wages. And we have some survey-based validation throughout that I'm happy to talk about in Q&A. I'm going to gloss briefly over the encashment procedure, but essentially once you registered for return in Pakistan from a camp, you had a week or so to get to the red stars denoted in Afghanistan, which are encashment centers where the grant was paid out to you and from which you could return to any district of your choice. So we draw on these novel records of insurgent violence gathered by NATO in the Afghan government. We are also using a U.S. government-sponsored conflict tracker from Afghanistan to chart communal violence. Happy to talk more about this in Q&A. And to show you the kind of distribution of violence here, it comports with a lot of what we know already about conflict dynamics in Afghanistan, particularly severe levels of conflict along the border with Pakistan. All right. We're drawing on repatriation data on documented refugee returns from the UNHCR Afghanistan office. In the map here, you can see the distribution of returns under the program that we study. And again, we have survey-based validation using a survey of attorneys fielded by the Asia Foundation. The empirical strategy is a Bartik-style differences and differences design where we have this time series shock coming from the program and then we're leveraging cross-sectional variation coming from earlier historical return settlement patterns, specifically in 2013, the first year that we have return data. And we're going to focus on this reduced-form least squares equation, but I can also show you instrumental variables results, for instance. And to build some initial confidence in the design here, you can see that historical return patterns strongly predict contemporary destinations.  Of course, the key assumption here is parallel pre-trends. And again, I'm happy to go more into this in Q&A, but we think we have a pretty good case here for parallel trends in the pre-treatment period. All right. So briefly, the core results, the first and main effect here is that we see the encashment program associated with a large and substantively meaningful decline in insurgent violence during the program period in destination communities. And yet this is counterveiled by an equivalently large and substantively meaningful increase in incidences of communal violence, so for instance, feuds over land. Now I'm going to go into some results where we try and probe the mechanisms. So first, we might expect that rising reservation wages owing to the encashment program constrain insurgent recruitment. And if this is the case, we should see insurgents substituting from more labor-intensive tactics to more capital-intensive tactics. And so the most labor-intensive tactic is going to be direct fires, something like a gunfight with government forces. Capital-intensive attacks are going to be things like explosive violence and IEDs. And what we see is that the negative effect of the program on overall insurgent violence masks heterogeneity to this effect, declines in direct and indirect fires and an increase in explosive violence. We can also push this a bit further by looking at the lethality of these different attacks. And again, we see declining lethality of labor-intensive violence and increasing lethality of capital-intensive attacks, which suggests to us in a pretty clear way that the opportunity cost channel is what's at work here. And we're also responding to declining levels of recruitment by shifting out of labor-intensive attacks. We might also expect rising reservation wages to increase the price of tips that counter-insurgents are trying to buy from the civilian populace. We don't have data on tips for the period covering 2015 to 2020, but we can exploit the rate at which IEDs that were in place were found and cleared versus successfully detonated by the insurgents. This measure is strongly sensitive to civilian informing. And we provide evidence that the rate of IED clearances by the government is declining in the program, again, suggesting that rising reservation wages have this negative unintended consequence of constraining counter-insurgent informing. You are running out of time. If you could please accelerate a little bit. Thank you. Yes. Almost done here. Okay. So communal violence can be offset by social capital as proxied by the share of refugees returning to an origin province or district. And then finally, we show that strong local institutions, things like village-level sheriffs and access to elders also help offset the increase in communal violence. All right. So in conclusion, we provide the first causal evidence here on refugee return and conflict. We show that return affects different types of violence in different ways and think that this is a ripe avenue for future work. We find that the cash transfer induces repatriation and spills over to non-migrant neighbors still illuminating some of the dynamics of refugee aid. Again, provide some evidence on mechanisms. The program specifically constrains insurgent recruitment, but also counter-insurgent tip-buying. And then finally, we find that building social capital and local institutions, especially informal institutions, is likely to be a key antecedent for safe refugee return because these help blunt any positive effect on communal violence. Thank you.


The Employment Standards Act of British Columbia sets minimum standards for non-union workplaces across our province. It protects workers and it protects employers. This video explains the 10 most important things you should know as a BC employer. 1. Who's Protected? The Employment Standards Act applies to non-union employees working in BC, including those who are not citizens. If your employees fall under one of these categories, failure to comply with the Act could result in penalties. 2. Keeping Records? Records must be kept for every employee and retained for two years after employment ends. These must include wage rate, all hours worked regardless of how the employee is paid, benefits paid, gross and net wages, deductions, and any stat holidays and vacations taken. 3. Hours of Work and Overtime? The Act sets requirements for employee meal breaks, time off between shifts, hours free from work each week, daily pay and overtime. Anyone scheduling staff must understand these minimums. 4. Minimum Wage? In BC, the minimum wage for liquor servers is slightly different than for most other workers. Whether an employee is paid by the hour, salary, peace rate, or commission, their total pay must meet the minimum wage for all hours worked. 5. Pay Days? Employees must be paid at least twice a month. All earnings must be paid within 8 days of a pay period's end. No single pay period can exceed 16 days. 6. Vacations and Vacation Pay? After one year, BC employees are entitled to 2 weeks annual vacation. After 5 years, this increases to 3. After 5 calendar days of work, employees are entitled to vacation pay of 4% of all wages earned. And after 5 years, this increases to 6%. 7. Stat Holidays? An employee who has been employed for at least 30 days and worked 15 of the 30 days before a stat holiday is entitled to stat holiday pay. Eligible employees who work a stat holiday must be paid time and a half. 8. Unpaid Leave? BC employees are entitled to certain unpaid leave from work. You cannot terminate someone or change a condition of employment due to a leave. The employee must be returned to the same or similar position when the leave ends. 9. Deductions? BC employers are responsible for deducting wages as required by law for things like income tax and employment insurance. Only if the employee has given written consent can you deduct advances or accidental overpayments from an employee's wages. No employee can be made to pay any part of your business costs such as cash shortages or damage. 10. Termination? As an employer, you have the right to terminate a worker with written notice or compensation. An employee of less than 3 months can be terminated without either. Final wages must be paid within 48 hours of termination. If the employee quits, final wages must be paid within 6 days. Help keep British Columbia a fair and prosperous province for all of us. Know your responsibilities under the Act and do your part. Get more information about BC Employment Standards. Visit the Employment Standards Branch website or call 1-800-663-3316.


ॐ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ  ौ ौ ौ ौ  esto is a fight happening right of personal life. ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ. ऎई जॉ ० ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौ ौौ ौ the water is surrounded by strange bacteria.


Hi, I'm Sarah Mauro, Realtor with Cell State Peak Realty. Welcome to episode two of Property Time. Today we're discussing your home's value, a hot topic that sellers, buyers, and curious, looky-loos seem to want answers about. Today we're mostly touching on trends and shifts that we experts are seeing here in Longmont, Colorado, and I am thrilled to introduce my expert of the expert's friend and mentor, Kyle Snyder, of First American Title. Kyle has a relentless attitude of gratitude. He's been in the industry for over 20 years. He is the king of stats, a passionate debunker of myths and assumptions, and he really knows his stuff. A home can't seem to go under contract in northern Colorado without Kyle knowing about it, and he seems to know everybody, and he's a ton of fun to do deals with. Thank you so much, Sarah. That is very sweet. You're welcome. Thanks for being here. I wouldn't have missed the opportunity. Awesome. So we've been hearing words like cooling down a lot, and we hear this every fall, and we don't just mean the temperatures. So which indicators are you seeing that things actually are slowing in the market? Which indicators are you seeing? No signs of slowing, speaking particularly about competition and sales. Okay. We're going to take a couple laps around the block on this one, okay? Back in August of 2018, we finally broke $500,000 for our average price in Longmont. In October of last year, we broke that record for the fourth time. So that was a very hot time in the market. Well, the last four consecutive months, we've broken the record. Four months. Four straight months, we've set a new record to last month. The all-time high, excuse me, of my glasses, I'm getting a little old, she thinks it's funny, is $634,000. That's a pretty quick change. That's a pretty big, pretty steep incline in prices. Yeah. And so competition, it's still there. Right. Additionally, we have nearly the same number of sales from the first half of last year to the first half of this year. Okay. And last year, it was the second highest ever. So we're busy. There's a lot of sales happening. There's still a lot of activity. Yep. So the monthly sales prices, they're limited in their impact because it's just a month. Right. So you can have wild swings. Sure. So we look at the average price for the entire first half of the year. Okay. Well, it's the highest ever. And it keeps climbing. Again. Yes. Up 16%. So these are things that I look at that are long-term trends. That's a good way to look at it because monthly ups and downs don't really tell the full story. Got it. Got it. Thank you for that. Now, here's where it, there's where I try to make the argument that it's maybe not so much hot, that is. You mean that it is cooling down? That it may be cooling down. So in June, our days on market were down 52%. So we went from 53 last year to 25 this year. Okay. That's quite a bit down. That's almost half. Yes. It's 52.8% down. In July, we were 36% down. In August, we're 45% down. So things are sitting a little longer than they were. Starting to sit just a little bit longer. But what's a little bit? If we look at sold price to list price, that's kind of a hot topic because we've seen that go up. Yep. So here's our numbers since April. 105%. Okay. May 108%. May was hot. Hot, hot. June, 106. Yep. July 105. August 103. So we're not pegging the meter anymore, but it's like going from Mach 2 to maybe Mach 1. I love it. Thank you so much, Kyle, for those indicators. What would you tell a Northern Colorado seller who's been considering selling their house all year but just hasn't pulled the trigger? Why now? It sounds like the best time would have been May, right? May and June were ridiculous. I didn't even enjoy my job in May or June, to be honest. But should they sell now because it's going to start getting to 103? Should they wait? A lot of them want to wait.  What would you tell them? Get off the fence and do something. You know, first thing, I think for the first time, you really got to plan a little bit harder on an exit strategy. Last month, I put out some suggestions of where people can go. 25 most affordable beach towns, best places to retire abroad, things like this. Now, in the last 18 months, we've learned that we can go anywhere. We don't need to retire to go to Florida. We can go there just to work for our job. So plan where do you want to be? If you want to be across town, call Sarah. She's got the MLS access. But if you want to be in North Carolina... Make it happen. Make it happen. You'll find them a realtor there, right? Sure. And waiting, you're saying, is really not going to bode well. You know, last year, people wanted to wait. Year before that, people wanted to wait. Year before that, people wanted to wait. Not only is the price of the house going up that they're going to sell, the house that they're buying... It's going up, too. The prices are going up, too. Yep. They're not going down anywhere. Not anywhere soon, either. No. People know that. But it is, you know, there's a little bit of analysis paralysis I'm noticing. There's a lot of big decisions to make. There's COVID variant coming. I can understand it, but I appreciate you driving the same train as me that says, now's the time. One of the other things I would say is don't overprice your house. You know, a lot of that 108% was driven by listed here, sold here. If you now list here and think you're going to sell here, you're kidding yourself. Yeah. You still got a list competitively. Yep. Yeah. Recalibrate those expectations a little bit. And you know, you don't fight the market as much, either, because you have appraisals and inspections and, you know, issues that come up in our normal. Right. When buyers are skipping over those because they had to to fulfill those obligations. It doesn't end well. Yeah. They were doing unethical things like saying, oh, I have all the cash in the bank to buy this house and then changing to financing somewhere down the line. Flipping the script. Yeah, I saw that. Okay. You mentioned a little bit about year over year, late summer trends. Can you speak again to, I get a lot of questions about, you know, this cool down, but particularly the late August, early September time that we're in. Can you talk about that transition? School has started, temperatures outside are cooling off. Like what is happening and is it different from what happened in 18, 19, 20? This is one of my favorite discussions right now. What we've seen in the last couple of years have taken us away from reality. The demand and the pricing has been so high, there has not been the typical dip in the fall. It happens every year. There's a pattern. And I've got a great graphic here that you're going to put on this after editing. And it's going to show you how normally these sales cycles happen. In a normal market. In a normal market. And then we're going to see the last couple of years how that's not normal. But this year, we're filling back into the normal, falling back into the normal cycle. You mean kind of what happened in 15, 16, 17? Yeah. In some of the hottest markets ever. But we're falling back into a regular trend and it feels like the sky's falling. It's not. Because we're not used to it. We're not used to it. We've taken out of it. We've been taken out of the normal cycle. Sure. Sure. Well, thank you for that. That makes sense. And I look forward to looking at those graphs myself. I do get them in my email. You, on a personal level, recently, I think just this summer around that hot time, you personally sold your primary residence.  And you had a lot of fixing and rehabbing to do. Why don't you tell us a little bit about why you did it, when you did it, how it turned sort of the numbers a little bit? Well, my wife and I have been real estate investors for some time now. I've bought and sold almost every type of property there is, residentially, from a 12 plex to condos, single-family homes. We flipped a few of them over in Boulder and in Longmont. Let's say that bull market is a tough one to work in. Especially now. Yes. So this was that opportunity. The house across the street from my father, became available. The older people moved away and we got, we were able to acquire the property at a reasonable price. It needed a lot of work. Congratulations. Yes. This was, this was one of the neighborhoods here in Longmont, yeah? Yes, Longmont Estates. Of course. Lovely area. Yep. So we were able to acquire the house and it needed a lot of work. So after about a month of work, demo, on a walk, we came to the decision that we wanted this house. It's a unique custom 1968 ranch with a wonderful view. Nice. And it's a Longmont story. It's a coming home. We live immediately across the street from my father who's married to my wife's second grade teacher. We can see. What? Yes. We can, we can see a house that I lived in as a child. Michelle had a paper route. Wow. Around that area. Our friends, parents lived down the street. So we didn't, we didn't want to just flip this house. We didn't want to put, you know, lipstick on it. This house needed. Love. Yes. And you were ready to give it. And we were. And our kids are in college. We're empty nesters. Hey, let's sell this house. We didn't want to leave our neighbors. Denise Jacobs, she's near and dear to her heart and her whole family, but we left and moved across town and are in this house and we'll be there for some time and we love it. It's a gem. Awesome. But you know, we're participants in the market and we sold last November. Okay. Same model house of ours sold six months later for 50 grand more.  No, because then we wouldn't have had the house that we live in now. Right. So you have to, you know, I appreciate that sentiment. Everything happens for a reason they say. It does. And you came full circle. I love that story. Living across the street from my father is, is awesome. It's a blessing. Yes. I haven't lived that close to him since I was in high school. You and he and Michelle deserve it. Congratulations. Yeah. Judy and Michelle get along. Nice. Nice. So we've been hearing a lot of buzz about Longmont's demand really spiking, particularly right now. Like you, you mentioned competition. We've been hearing that we're the next NYWA. We're the next gun barrel. What are you seeing that supports this? And how does that compare to Frederick Firestone, birthed, eerie, superior? Well, what's so great about Longmont right now? Well, Longmont's the best that always have been, right? Other than that. I mean, that's a given. Right. So, um, it's my, my reaction to when people say that is it's about time. It makes sense. It's our time. It's, it's, it's finally that time and it should have happened, I feel, years ago. But when you have, Boulder's been over a million dollars in average price for probably a couple years. Several years, it seems. And before that, what? They were in the 900s. They were in 800s. That was very expensive territory. And so people didn't want to spend that money there. So they would move to Lafayette, Louisville, Superior area, better access to the Denver Metro area. Kind of proximity that they wanted. Yep. Better proximity to sports, concerts, bars, eating, whatever it is. Well, after a time, those places get very expensive. There's seven, $800,000 average prices. Right. Where do you go next? You go to the most affordable town in all of Boulder County where we have been for forever. We have been. And so then people start moving here, uh, bidding up the prices. Yep. There is still a shortage of homes in the United States. So this demand is not going, 5.5 million homes are needed now. I heard, well, I heard 5, I heard 4.5. Now it's up to 5.5. Yeah, it keeps growing every day. Not builders. And so there's no demand going away. We have all these millennials moving out of the basement. They're tired of living in mom's basement. They're getting married, buying houses. You know, general population growth itself. It's ridiculous. These things are happening within a housing shortage.  So we will get more expensive here. And when people get tired of paying these prices, they're going to go to Firestone. They're going to go to Birthing. They're going to go to Loveland. And we're already seeing some of that. We are. We have been. But in terms of Longmont, would you say, you know, how do you feel about this? How does it, what does it look like for us? How quickly are we going to get to the 900 range? Do you think? It's going to be a while. It's going to be, I mean, that's still a couple years out. Yeah, that's still 40% increase. So that's going to be some time. And I think there's, you know, boulders up in the 1.2, 1.4 range. So we're not going to creep up that quickly. Right. I think with some infrastructure and services and such like that in Longmont, you'll start to see that. But right now we're better. We're becoming a better community for Boulder. And we've been that way for a long time. Yeah. We're still within an hour, hour commute even less. Yeah. You can still make the mile high same in less than an hour. Right. What is the average price right now for a single family home in Longmont? I know it changes on the monthly, but. So for the year, it's through the first half of the year. That's right. That's I have and it's 584,000. 584. Yeah. Okay. That's significant. That is. That is. It's significantly more than when I moved here. And I'm grateful for that. Kyle, you've been wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. That's the property.


In today's video, we're attempting to achieve one of humanity's most substantial and crucial accomplishments. Taking a rock, found in nature, turning it into a raw metal, and forging it into a useful tool. We'll see if we can go from rock to iron knife. Everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery, but could an average person figure it all out themselves? And work their way from the Stone Age to today? That's the question we're exploring. Each week I try to take the next step forward in human history. My name is Andy, and this is how to make everything. Be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey. Today's video is sponsored by Bespoke Post, they're a monthly subscription, every month you get some cool products and other things, so check out what we got today. Alright, so this month we got kombucha making kit. Eventually, we'll get to some kombucha, so this will be a really cool practice, get us kind of familiar with the process before we try and do it all the way from scratch. Inside here, there's a little box, there's a really nice knife, a really sweet Damascus style texture to it, comes with a lifetime warranty, and that cuts pretty good, you never have too many knives. Round off our corners, it's very curated for working on right now, so making a knife today, take a short quiz about what you like and don't, and they take a box based on your preferences. If you don't like what's in your box, you can return it for a different one at no extra cost. There are dozens of box options that change every month, shipping is free and each box costs a link, $45, it's free to join and you can skip a month anytime, so check it out. So this is just one month of activities, click on the link below to get 20% off your first order of a spoke post. Use promo code everything20. Several weeks ago, we started our first attempt at bringing us from the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age with the creation of metallic iron, by building a bloomery and bellows and attempting to reach a temperature hot enough to convert natural iron ore into metal. While succeeding in creating iron, when it came to actually working it into something usable, the result was less than ideal. So just having to find myself in their neck of the woods, I plan to meet up in person with Joseph and Joseph from the YouTube channel Good and Basic. They similarly have a deep interest in primitive technology and they've been working on figuring out the iron smelting process through numerous past attempts. So since my bloomery didn't survive more than two firings, I enlisted the help of their furnace and their expertise. But first, they tip me off to a good location to find some additional iron ore to smelt. Down in southern Utah, there is an old ghost town called Old Iron Town, formed in 1868 as Iron City was attempt by Mormon pioneers to become more self-sufficient in the iron supply through ore mined from the nearby Iron Mountain. Mostly abandoned in 1876, it is still occasionally mined when prices make it profitable. All right. So I'm in southern Utah right now near an old ghost town called Old Iron Town. And also they still occasionally mine at still, but it's mostly dormant right now. And a lot of iron ore tailings are now scattered on the ground here that are just dumped when they do the large scale mining. And all of this is pretty good candidates for smelting. Hello, magnet here, and I can test them out and see that they are, in fact, magnetic, which means they're magnetite and should smell pretty good. So thanks to Good and Basic, they gave me the the suggestion of this area. So I'm going to collect some and you can see if this can be smelted into iron, see if we can make a knife. Now, with the source of the iron ore, I met up with the Josephs. Ready for the Fuego? I'm ready almost for the Fuego. I'm here with the guys from Good and Basic and I did my iron smelt and it wasn't the most successful. I did make iron, but it wasn't very workable. So having to be out here and you guys have your massive one, you built that you've done it at least four or five times now and survived. So far so good, right? I didn't have to tell the tale. So with a smelt like this, what we typically would do is wire it with layers of orange charcoal, just like you did. Two to both of these on, right? Yeah, two to one charcoal or by weight. It doesn't matter which one goes first. I did charcoal first. First major difference is that the furnace is bigger. One advantage the height might give us is it gives it more time for the carbon monoxide to seep into the ore and to strip off the oxygen. The other major thing that we're going to do is poke it with a stick.  There's a couple of things that can typically go wrong that we've discovered. One of the key ones is getting enough air to come into the furnace in the first place. Basically, you get the slag that drips down the furnace and it tends to cake around the air inlet and they'll actually physically block that entryway.  You can't do anymore. There's no more air coming into the furnace. So the solution for that is to jam a stick through the air inlet hole every so often and also you run into another problem, which you can also solve with a stick, which is where the charcoal forms kind of a roof and then there's a void underneath it. And so to fix that, you poke the roof with a stick to make sure that all the ore falls down to where the fire is actually happening. So one other thing that we've done to prep for this smelt is we've done what's called roasting the ore.  It burns off a lot of the impurities in the ore, like sulfur. Another thing it does is it weakens the ore. It puts tons of micro fractures and stress on it so that it's easier to grind up in little pieces for the smelt. And then that also means that there's more surface area for the carbon monoxide to bond onto, rip off oxygen atoms and leave you with elemental iron. When you're smelting it, you're taking the carbon monoxide that's produced by the fire. It combines with the oxygen, strips it off the rock. So basically, the more you can get sulfur and other impurities out of the way before you start smelting it, the better off it's going to be. So crushing the ore after roasting it, those two steps are also a really important ingredient. We found a really important component of our smelting process. Makes your day so much better. We've done it both ways. We are hoping that the taller furnace will increase the amount of time that that iron ore is being exposed to carbon monoxide so that it can turn from iron ore into elemental iron. We've smelted in all we think 10 plus times and using this furnace, we've probably done four. I think we've done five or six. When we first built it, it was only about four feet tall and it was a little narrower. We wanted to go for a natural draft furnace. We wanted to have a slightly larger capacity and so we just kept on building it up over time. And this has lasted through, you know, winters. It's remarkably durable building material. I think we could run it through another dozen smelts easily. At first, kind of we thought it was just us that like smelting, you know, it should just work. Multiple failures meant that you were doing it wrong. One of the tough things about smelting is what a finicky business it is. So there can actually be multiple good ways to do it and you can kind of like accidentally trip and fall into the right way when even slight variations on that would not have worked. You know, you can run your furnace too hot. You can run it too cold. I mean, there's the variable of the ore type. The weird thing to me about this process is that none of it is intuitive.  And then I'm going to spend my entire day not gathering food or making clothing but pumping bellows, which I had to make myself in order to force air into this thing. And at the end I'm left with a black sponge, a black sponge of coral. And I say, great, I did it.  Very much figuring it out. The trouble is that you're dealing with natural ingredients, so this is a rock and this rock has iron in it. It has oxygen in it, it has, you know, the mineral but it also has unknown quantities of other stuff. And what that means is that even if the method would work perfectly if we were using something more consistent like mug or this stuff, we haven't dialed it in yet. So today will be an interesting experiment. So yeah, I think we'd both consider ourselves more expert than we were before. Let's still learn. I'd say we're sophomores in the process. Eventually we'll graduate. But in the meantime, I'll use that name. Be sure to check out their previous attempts of iron smelts on their channel as well as a bunch of other great videos on primitive technology. We ran the furnace for a little over five hours until the supply of ore and charcoal started to run low. Then we extracted the bloom, a spongy mass of melted impurities called slag and hopefully a large supply of iron metal. While still hot, the bloom is compressed, consolidating all the metal together. In my previous attempt at the iron smelt, this is where mine failed. When compressed, the bloom only shattered due to its low iron content. We've missed the mother load. Yeah, I know it's still in there. That's typically where it forms too, is right under the air inlet. How the heck do we get that out? Very carefully. Okay, be careful. This furnace represents scores of hours of effort and I would really rather not focus on shaking, that's what we're looking for. Yeah. Okay, it's, it's split in two. We can get it. Oh my word. Okay, I'll start gently capping it. So the issue here is that we've pulled something out of the furnace. Yes. Very bloom-like. Very bloom-like. And so now the only question is quality, right? How much of that is slag? How much of that is charcoal? How much of that is elemental iron? This is actually one of the things I find most interesting about this process. That thing does not have a visual way to tell if it's success or failure.  Even if you did it right. Yeah. There's no part of this where you see shiny metal coming up the bottom. Right there, I am very confident is iron. If we hit that with a grinder, it's gonna be shiny. That looks really promising. Next, they set up a primitive forge and we tried working the hunks of metal into an ingot. Because of quantities of impurities and slag intermixed with the metal, it needs to be worked and consolidated heavily, slowly working up the slag. We have a nice little pancake. Oh boy, I'm gonna try to layer a bunch of these pancakes together to make the actual thing. So now let's eat a first one. Awesome. That looks beautiful. I wanna cry. So beautiful. At some point, that could be a problem. At some point. I think we have a great model here. Quality is just gonna cause difficulty in the forging process, but it's not gonna mean that you can't make tools. Or absolutely not. Oh my God. Okay, there you go. Beautiful thing right there. I'm dying. Look, you're hitting it. You're hitting it so relatively hard and it's, ah! Ah! I'm sorry. I'm freaking out. I can die happy. I've had this moment. Lollipin. Yep, little nickel sized pieces of iron. These two pieces layered on top of each other in the forge. We're now gonna layer charcoal gently on top. And ideally, we will find those same two pieces, forge well done together. If we can do that, then we can do this entire process with some time and patience using the primitive method. Is that it right there? It is. They're fused! I get welded! Ha ha ha! This is two pieces of blue. This is the beginnings of hooded steel. We just did a successful forge weld. Got a small ingot. We have a small ingot. We just forge welded effectively in a primitive forge with iron that we made from scratch and we did it without any metal tools. These are wooden tongs made from a split branch and this is literally a rock that I used to forge it into place. And the anvil is also a rock. We've done it. We've made iron from scratch. In Africa, there are some regions that had iron first and just let that sink in for a second. They took this process, they took it far enough to have iron-bladed weapons like spears first.  It's not even close to it. When he enjoyed on time and daylight, I took these very promising ingots home to finish processing into an actual tool. All right, so Utah ended up going pretty late into the night with the good basic guys. So we weren't quite able to fully forge these into something, but we did manage to make some actual pancake metal. We were able to flatten it out, which is where I'd filled with my previous melt where it would just shatter. There we were able to layer and then forge weld together, which proves it is steel, steel and iron, it's a combination of both. I'm back home now in Minnesota where it is quite noticeably a lot colder. But I got the forge going, and we're going to try and finish forging these off and see if I can make something usable like a knife. But the big bloom, we didn't have a chance to fully work on in there right now, heating up, and then we're going to start adding it in the layering, and hopefully make something useful out of it. This is the other one. On pieces of iron, challenge with the charcoal is they look very similar and they're hot. So here it is, the end results. Wait, no, this is the bespoke knife they gave us. Here it is, the knife I made from a rock of iron to an actual iron tool. Admittedly, it's pretty small. We started with a pretty large chunk of bloom, but as I worked it down, all the little pieces came off, got pretty small in the end. After polishing it off and grinding off some of the surface oxidization, it is definitely iron, as you can see the silverness behind it. So there is no doubt that iron has been made and that this is now a tool that has a bit of a cutting edge, although it's very small, probably not the strongest. It is a iron tool. Admittedly, this is probably the worst way to learn how to blacksmith using a very poor iron that has been definitely a challenge. Over two days of blacksmithing, of trying to kind of flatten and pancake and then stack them and layer them, forge weld them together to try and kind of consolidate the iron and compact it together. It's definitely been a lot of work and the result has been very frustrating.  It really couldn't even forge and shape it too much to what I really wanted. I ended up mostly grinding it to a desired shape. So it's been a big challenge. It's been very frustrating and the end result right now is not that great. Like a more experienced blacksmith could probably produce something better but someone who doesn't really know what they're doing, I don't know how they would have figured out how to actually make high quality steel. This is iron, it cuts, it dices, it is a tool, maybe more of a letter opener but I think we can very confidently say we are now in the iron age. Probably one of the more disappointing things is just how much kind of scraps kind of broke off from the bloom as I worked it. So this isn't waste. In their video with a good and basic which I highly recommend checking out, they build an Aristotle kiln and experiment with kind of salvaging a lot of scrap metals leftovers from blooms and also nails and other scraps like that. So it's kind of a way to reprocess other forms of metal. So my intention is to kind of replicate that myself. All of this scrap, somewhat successful bloom from my first smelt, combine all together, do a bit of an Aristotle furnace, re-consolidate it and hopefully we can get some larger pieces of metal to make some more substantial metal tools. So definitely check that out. And they are also doing an extended video of their primitive 14 using just stone tools. So also check that out. So a huge thank you to them, really great meeting up with them and being able to get their help. Thank you to all of our supporters on Patreon. If you want to see us continuing this journey of rebuilding civilization, be sure to support us on Patreon. And if nothing else, thank you for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed these series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.


Wydwch chi'n mynd i'r cwmhysgau. Rwy'n cais i'n meddwl Tessa i'r holl ffawr o'r pryd yn gweld y pethau ac rydyn ni'n ddiddordeb ar hyn o'r cyfeisio ar gyfer cyfweld. Rydyn ni'n rhaid i'r ddweud yma yn ymddangos ymweld i'w ddiddordeb ar hyn o'r cyfweld. Rydyn ni'n ddiddordeb ar hyn o'r cyfweld. Rydyn ni'n ddiddordeb ar y cyfweld. Rydyn ni'n ddiddordeb ar hyn o'r cyfweld. Mae'r cwysig o'r cyffredin ni'n gwybod i'r cwysig o'r cwysig o'r ffordd. Mae'n gweithio'r llyfr, o'r llyfr o Aberystwyth, yn ymwyaf, yn y Cwysig, yn y Ffwrdd, y llyfr, yn y llyfr. Mae'n gweithio'r llyfr, ac mae'n gweithio'r llyfr, ac mae'n gweithio'r cwysig o'r llyfr yma, mae'n gweithio'r llyfr, mae'n gweithio'r llyfr, ac mae'n gwneud dy'n gweithio'n ddefnyddio i'r grifith ciydd eich wlad, arbod wedi gael Punkt 5 ym youtube? Rydym yn rotate? Mae'n ymweld fyddeol, mae roi i, Ie wedi bwysig creu cymaint gwrs... жyw hun i pop Fuus, mewn fóleio a phob angen ar y cyddog angen y maen leading Ac mae'n ddechrau'n ei chwanhau ein ffg o'r ysgol. Mae'r gwneud hynny. Yn gwneud hynny. Mae'n ddiddordeb yn 30 yma. Chwethech chi i'n gwneud yn gyflawn i'n meddygau ac mae'n gweithio'n meddyl. Mae'r cwmwysigol yn ddi-ddiwedd. Mae'n gweithio'n cymunedol. Mae'r sefydlu, mae'n gweithio'n gwneud i'r programau sydd gennym iawn cyflawn a'r cyflawn i'r cyflawn i Wales. ac mae wedi cael mwynfodol iawn a'r dwylo'r dismysgol yma, i bobl i'r pobr, i bobl i'r pobr i'r dweud. A mae, a pobl yn iawn, yna'n gydag i'r cyf Everywhere. Felly, rhaid i ddweud i ceisio fod y cyfeiriau, ond yw ymarferio �ztod o'r bwysig, ac o edrych gyda'n gwneud y prosiectau i ddechreu. Rwy'n fwy risio i ddechrau'r prosiectau i ddechreu. Mae'n ddiwedd fel healurau. through policy and theories that I've used in the program, and then I'm gonna talk about the program and give you some of the quotes, particularly just a few quotes from some of the countries in that course. So, all of us have a context and I think it's really important as a researcher and a mindfulness practitioner and trainer to know your context and to state your context. Rydw I gael mwy'n amser hynny cos mai yw y nesaf â'r ffordd. That's where we come from in the forms of what we do. Maybe speaking to what Joe was saying as well. Rydw I live in Wales. I like road biking, as you can see. When I was young, I lived in Croyden. I lived in quite a working class area. I defined my place of origin, like a working class family, and I cycled round Croyden. It's quite a thing for me now that I moved from the streets of Croyden I speak Welsh as well, which is apparently unusual for people from Croydon, I don't know. I have a practice so obviously the practice that I have done informs my work and I started off with a Gwenchor course. I started off doing yoga and then I actually trained as a yoga teacher. I trained, I taught yoga for 15 years alongside my main job in Wales and as a passionate course and then the standard 10-day retreats for a few years I've also done the mindfulness training course as well. I've got a practice that has a Buddhist context as well as the secular mindfulness context a'r context fighor ffrindwydd i'r gweithio. Rym ni'n rhaid i gweithio ysgol ffwrdd yw ysgol. Rhywbeth ychydig. Fe wneud hynny, mae'r gweithio i'r rhywbeth, ac mae'n gweithio i'r hynny, mae'r gweithio i'r hyn yn ôl. Ar y ffrindwydd, mae'n gweithio i'r hyn ar hyn ar hyn oedd y cofau sydd ar y cyfarfod yng nghymru. Rwy'n gweithio i gweithio i'r hyn, ac mae'n gweithio i'r hyn y gweithio i'r hyn. mae'n gweithio y tu fantau neu amdd zamanaeth. Mae'n gweithio o fewn ffordd y model wych. Mae'r gwaith a'mdd cymdeithas. Mae'r blaen lle o fynd yn gweithio. Felly mae'r iawn yn y mod i'w maen nhw. Felly mae'n gweld yn cynnig. Dyma'r sylwyddon yn ymgyrch yn yr unig ond dyma. Fy fydd eu rhan fod yn y ryw i yn gwasanaeth hefyd. I've worked for shelter and I've worked as a VSO and the picture here is with Ronda McGee who currently is really doing excellent work around colour insight and mindfulness so I'm kind of positioning myself there as somebody who works on these issues, has an interest in these issues. I ran a social enterprise in Wales working on environmental issues, my last job but now I'm a researcher which is kind of strange for me, well no it's wonderful, it's a wonderful opportunity and here I am at the Amsterdam conference which happened earlier this year which is one of the big mindfulness research conferences and we had a little with some people actually that are here today and some wonderful people here, Christina and David Forbes and Nick all kind of working on different aspects of mindfulness and how it can make a difference in the world so that's wonderful so all of that informs everything you're going to see and I'm going to add another thing which is a bit vulnerable for me I have to say I could even feel it now so I'll just name that is another key thing that informs that I need to tell you informs the work and my approach is that I have a high adverse childhood experience score and some of you might know about the ACE score if you don't you might want to go and have a look because it's a list of questions that you fill in and it looks at things like whether you experience divorce, whether you experience emotional or physical abuse and if you've got a score on this over four then it means that the statistics are kind of against you in terms of what might happen next in your life so I mean these are a few graphs if you've got a high ACE score then you're more likely to have early teen sexual experiences you're more likely to have underlying chronic depression more likely to be raped as you grow up it's yeah it's not very cheery I have to say more likely to have a suicide attempt and kind of fits with everything else really more likely to be prescribed with antidepressants now probably the reason I'm standing in front of you now is because I've got a high level of resilience which I got from my family who were very resilient but there's also a lot of trauma there as well and if you're going to look at this you need to look at the two together you know resilience and ACE scores go together so why am I bringing why is it important to me to bring this up because when we're thinking about mindfulness or and what we're using this for sometimes we think quite rightly well how can we help the individual you know how can we do something that is going to give deal with the suffering deal with the individual quite and a lot of the work has been around that a lot of the work has been around that and and that's brilliant and I myself have benefited my practice certainly helped me work with trauma and then it's kind of moved forward again one step forward well okay that's good but how do we actually look more widely about how how people are impacted you know why well let me say there's two things here one is like why people end up having adverse childhood experiences and can we do anything about that number one and number two can we look at the wider issues of adverse childhood experiences and then what that leads to because you know most people in prison most people in prison are some great work by a guy called Gabor Mate I was listening to this week I'd recommend him to anybody interest I see a few nods you know who really is very interested as like well if you look at most people in prison you know a lot of them have had adverse childhood experiences they've got high levels of adverse childhood experiences so we've really got to look at that wider social implications of adverse childhood experience which is not just about giving the mindfulness or giving the mindfulness in the context in that wider context so I hear some of you see some of you nodding and I'm yeah you hear that that's great and the other thing that we need to do is um is consider new ways of working and this is a quote from John Kabat-Zinn as you can see in a conversation with Angela Davis in East Bay Meditation Centre and she was saying well yeah she's actually been in prison she's an activist some of you might know her she's been in prison and she said it's great I'm kind of loosely remembering what she said she said you know it's great doing mindfulness in prisons John but does it really address the wider kind of social issues you know and how can we actually do that how can we address those issues and he said well we need to develop new models we need to incubate these new models you know are there strategic and tactical ways we can find to develop different orthogonal orthogonal he uses that word a lot John Kabat-Zinn orthogonal models that work better so that's kind of the invitation to us while we're looking at this wider debate is we need to be we need to be developing being creative making mistakes testing models so the work which I've been doing has been trying to address this trying to kind of find new ways of working look at problems differently looking at new ways of working okay and that's mainly through Abriswith University so we're a bit out on the edge as well so this work maybe a little bit out on the edge and and also the University of Birmingham I'm now actually writing up a PhD which will incorporate most of the work that you're hearing now some of this work is slightly older looks a bit dull as well I have to say I'm looking for something that might look a bit more yeah funky in the next stage okay so when I started the research and even today when when we start to ask this question and some of this has come up already how can mindfulness address these wider issues we all care and we want this to do a little bit more maybe when it's doing so I'm just going to quickly this just quickly show you that this this area is huge because as some people I said I think Jamie said it already we could just we need to make it more accessible you know that's that's really important that we make this work as it is more accessible and I'm using nbsr nbct is a a kind of shortcut for secular mindfulness we need to make sure that trainers actually represent a wider demographic not just delivering it to a wider demographic but actually representing which the two are obviously linked a wider demographic we I've worked in sustainability education for a long time we need to really consider the frames that we use in any training are they the best frames you know are they using examples that would support our environmental change I mean people might think this is a small point but actually the frames you hear all the time really tell you you know really informing you about your world so I've got my nbsr training book and I think there is one about taking the rubbish out in my book anyway I don't know if it's changed but yeah we need to change that that needs to say taking sourcing my recycling we need to reinforce these positive frames all the time do we just look at mindfulness do we there's lots of papers which just attempt to prove that mindfulness does make people pro-social that that's how it is um and yeah I'm not sure that the evidence is is is as strong as we would like in the way that we would like it do we need to revitalize it in terms of its you know Buddhist ethics as it lost its ethical roots that's another way people look at it do we need to emphasize the compassion now the compassion is a topic I hear about a lot there was someone over here talking to me about it just now um I mean great intention um yeah and I think we need to really look at that is that what we need to do maybe we need to deliver an advanced or second tier mindfulness after someone's done nbsr maybe they can do another course on top of that that looks at wider issues well that's great too isn't it because it kind of expands the thinking maybe we should develop nbsr for people who are creating change activists or just people working in organizations trying to develop corporate corporate social responsibility anybody who's out there and trying to make a difference maybe we could do do things to help them with mindfulness maybe we could develop nbsr for people responsible for policy and change and we've already heard Dan and Jamie discuss one way that we might do that and this is this is just a few I have three slides with things we could be doing that like around this in this area and some of it look quite small some of it look quite big some of it conflicts with each other you know some people think so we should be doing something but there's lots that can be done in this area and there's a huge amount of research that can be done in this area meanwhile and this is the thing that kind of blows my mind a little bit as well a lot of the the research you know on mind on emotion on things that inform our programs well there's huge amounts of interesting things happening in those areas as well so actually we know we don't actually agree on what we're not we don't actually not agree but there are many different definitions of mindfulness there is no agreement on what mindfulness is there actually is no particular agreement on what mind is or perception or cognition which actually came as a bit of a surprise to me as well as to how much debate there are in this in in these areas as for emotion I got a book out the other day with all about 100 papers on you know what is emotion and really and I've done lots of reading before that because I included it in my course but there's not really much agreement on what emotion is in fact there's a lot of disagreement on what emotion is emotion regulation similarly the function of the default mode network that a lot of us kind of take for granted in our training actually there's people can test that what what what is actually there for and whether it's more social or self-referential the amygdala there's people don't all agree on what the amygdala does and the big thing really is well you know you have these pictures in neuro imaging and like who's actually putting the theories onto these pictures they're pictures you know and there's a lot of kind of very interesting discussion about that out there about you know who's making who's doing what relative to these images who's saying what okay so that's the context okay so with all that in mind my particular context has been has moved from could just looking into where the mindfulness creates more pro social or pro environmental behaviors to like okay well actually what could what could we do here and I work in Wales um Wales is a great country and it's quite a small country and it's also one of the few countries that's actually put legislation in which requires the public sector to be more sustainable it has a something called the future generations and well-being act and so and that includes changing ways of working them changing ways of working so they've really appreciated that they need to change ways of working in order to get a paradigm shift in in sustainability and well-being so my context has been there and um the thing is what you quickly realise and I did work in the public sector for many years so I kind of had a sense of this is the world has changed since the civil service since policy makers kind of policy making was designed you know policy making was designed to regulate and count things you know just tell people what to do and to count numbers but the world has become really complicated you know we've got five as already been mentioned you know we've got these wicked problems you do something over here and something goes wrong over here there's multiple stakeholders it's really complicated out there meanwhile um the job has become much more relational still quite hierarchical system as we know but um it's become much more a job of relating um 90 you know 70 to 90% of their jobs are talking to each other this is funny oh let's see if this works shall we um did this weird okay kind of flips it's weird right so just just have a little look this is a little um this is a little snippet from a meeting in keridigion where I live um a health board having a meeting so just consider this for a second oh it's nice okay so they're having a meeting this is a board meeting it's really important now just let's see if we can pause it there bronglies hospital they've had to close down they they're wondering about beds they haven't got enough beds and it is an emergency um an A&E department I think just closed down and they're having a conversation um now it does this look to you like a good way to have a conversation you know to have a conversation about something that's really important where you need the people to be like really relaxed and to really be able to talk properly to each other and maybe come up with some creative solutions and you could maybe see you know they're hunched behind their computers there's this strange row of seats opposite them that are empty um you look at that just look at them they're slightly stressed we know that this is not a um a good way to operate so why why do we still do it is so we might say what actually happens is because these situations are so stressful you know people end up on the other end of them kind of having small breakdowns and then maybe we give them nbsr to kind of wipe them up and put them back in that's probably a little bit but you know I do feel quite strongly about it because really what I want to do is stop having meetings like this then make people stressed would seem a much much better thing to do and meanwhile very relevant to this is yeah I'll just a couple of points um I mean I I there's a whole bit of theory that I kind of is the basis for the program that I'm doing um you know theory on emotion and cognition is changing very fast and um it's gone beyond emotional intelligence this idea that emotion and cognition interact so strongly that demarcation between them um turns out to be a fruitless exercise in the end we must talk of an emotion cognition amalgam and so it's not about heart and head it's about heart head and I know there's you know that that will come into the mind from us too but mood and thinking are completely interrelated and so that is really important for the people who are making our policy to understand really important um here's a picture of Angela Merkel with with yeah Putin and it's quite a famous picture because he allowed his dog to come in knowing that she um had a very bad experience with dogs when she was younger so he knew that it would stress her out and you can see she looks slightly nervous and for me this is you know a lot of um our politicians a lot of people um who were making policy they they've got emotions and these are really in effect how they are interacting and how they are doing the work we need them to do so it's really important that they understand all this that they really understand emotion and cognition and we use the best science that we can to help them meanwhile there's a whole load of work around bias and we understand what we understand the mind to be that we understand the mind to actually be more predictive than reactive there was some discussion about um us being less reactive and of course mindfulness you know puts that pause in and that's great but actually there's some science out there that actually probably fits better in terms of for me anyway and and I've heard others say so too in terms of how the mind operates it's much more predictive and that it will actually create bias and this um this is problematic for um basic decisions that we make that will tend to look for information that confirms what we already know rather than seeing new information and it also has an effect on unconscious bias because um you know we will um prejudice will come from that relative to you know all sectors gender race sexuality and and so that's all in there so that's a really important shift in how science in is starting to look at the mind which could really inform how we deliver mindfulness okay I'm a bit am I all right with time okay so on the basis of all that for the last seven years actually I've been working in Welsh government um in some relation to this um to this act um and now ending up uh with a phd piece of work I didn't ever feel on it and I've worked as a research associate on it um but finally doing a phd um which was with the scs the senior civil service this is Catae's probably hardly any of you have heard this is where this is in Wales the world's civil service a lot of them are um we have people who work opposite to this building as well um part of the university is just around it so this we call it mindfulness based behavioural insights and decision making uh because they were able to kind of take that you know it's not mindfulness for stress management so they were eight if I called it mindfulness for stress management then a lot of people wouldn't have come on it the managers wouldn't come on it that I was working with and also it's not so much what they were interested in we had senior civil servants on it um the head of treasury as she was a champion for the program I did for the phd um deputy director of the NHS people working on tackling poverty in um really poor areas in Wales childcare you can see the education so really working on a wide areas eight sessions over three months possibly unusually for um a mindfulness course actually starting with the day's session very interactive so that's another way we can talk about mindfulness being more social is actually by making it more social in the learning um and I used some of these novel theories I was using behavioural economics theories of bias predicted mind constructed emotion and I was supported by caliper academy chrystam gd great guy who really has supported this work in the public sector um and with their app so they had a mindfulness app that they they did the practice that supported the practice um and I used novel research methods this is sense maker um and it through this they collected narratives over the three months period so almost like journaling and they had to signify themselves what these narratives were and I think the key takeaway I mean I could talk about this in itself was that we expected on the I'm going to put my glasses on we expected on this that I've got here maintaining relationships at the top in this first um triad reason thinking and taking action at the bottom and we were kind of expecting I was expecting that they were going to say most of their work was about reason thinking or taking action because that's what civil servants do but actually it's all about maintaining relationships that is what their job is and that's what they continuously said and what the data said and and then in interviews I said to them um so it looks like actually your whole job is about maintaining relationships and they said yes and I said it is now you say it and I said well that's kind of facilitating people isn't it embodied extended minds social and they were going yeah well it is yeah so what training do you get about cognition perception emotion because that's kind of what you're doing isn't it and they were like none none just kind of crazy isn't it when that's your job so I'm just going to give you a few quotes that came out of it that kind of really fits with that with what I've just said really so the first one so this is one of the senior directors in charge of the health service so this is before the course before the course I know I had a reputation as a fairly clear straight talking person who says it as it is not in a demeaning sense but with a clarity in fact I was described by a previous boss as their Rottweiler which I think I wore as a mark of pride for quite a number of years I was sent in to sort things out when they were not going particularly well but I think what I realised was how frustrated I got when despite the right answer being obvious and the next steps being obvious people didn't couldn't or wouldn't take them and what I didn't have was a wide enough range of responses to cope with continuing difficulty so I would find I would be repeating myself in subsequent meetings I would say well you haven't done that so try harder it's not actually a very satisfying message to deliver and I'm not sure it's a particularly helpful one to have but that's what my team would have seen of me it's fairly hard edged clear demanding not I hope unreasonably demanding approach but that's what would I I would have done and he cared he cared wasn't he didn't care since the course I've been putting myself in the other person's shoes and trying to see the world through their eyes and understand why they find these things difficult and why they or their organisations find these things difficult then trying to be much more empathetic rather than judgmental I didn't mention empathy once to them I we talked about how minds work about how bias works and perspective taking really kind of understanding the other person's perspective I actually find more about what's going on than you do in a more adverse serial relationship where people hide things or just share with you what they want you to see not the bit they are worried you might have a go at them about so we go on courses to how to have difficult conversations and you get a checklist but that is not the same as having a culture in which difficult clear conversations are expected and expected by the individual or the other half of that clear conversation so I think we shy away from making from it making the problems worse because you create a conversation when no one expects to have clear conversation so the programme included dialogue and it included mindful dialogue together with bias people looking at their bias as they had mindful dialogue so they and then they go out into the world and they would kind of practice then watching bias using the capacity of mindfulness whilst in conversation and strangely enough it makes them compassionate when they actually hear they actually realise what they've got to do someone's enabled them to kind of investigate that and they do something different so here's another one so I think my normal approach is to before the interaction decide what I want the outcome to be and then I'm going to channel everything towards that and if I don't get that then that will be a bad outcome or I will have to come back to it again or whatever so I've changed my approach I now start by asking the team what they think crazy in a meeting yesterday I listened to theirs used first and surprisingly decided that their approach was better than mine isn't that wonderful isn't that wonderful um so I didn't need to intervene this saves energy for me and them because they don't have to push back against the position I reached which is key isn't it if all your work is like this pushing to and pro it makes you stressed but if we actually create working relationships that are you know positive informed engaged then all's well so I'll finish I gotta cut just this this one maybe a couple more or not a couple more maybe one more so this is a classic one an email somebody sent to me I really dislike this person so really understanding that and I know I dislike this person I was about to reply with a really really nasty email back and I stopped myself and I reread the email in fact I reread it about two or three times and realized that I completely misread it and I'd instinctively replied if I'd just incorrectly instinctively replied I would have caused myself and others no end of grief that's me this is really interesting how you found a strong felt sense stopped you seeing information yes so I found particularly with this email I was kind of in an agitated state because this person had sent me something and I was reading it so fast I was looking for things to find fault with because we looked at confirmation bias how that interacts with mood and therefore how this just is inevitable and then they done the practice so they've been able to see that themselves I wanted to find things wrong in it and it was only in the second third reading where I kind of bought my agitation levels down so we've got that sense of regulation but then I could actually read it properly so that was a bit of an eye opener in terms of how we deceive ourselves I'm thinking how often have I done that how often have I not read something and then drawn a conclusion that's completely wrong and these small like micro interactions are what make up our policy making and what make up our political process and so this person working on poverty said I have a narrative that enables me to understand what's going on and not suppress my emotions but notice them and decide whether I want to behave in line with them or choose some other form of behavior I think I went with emotional suppression before but it's about noticing and understanding what it is and deciding whether you want to go with it or do something different I actually think this is all much more important than values I think it's actually in relation to some of my colleagues who I have a lot of respect for but I actually think because we need to you know we all share I did work on values before we all share the same values is how those values then get kind of enacted I think we do need to connect with ourselves and what we care about but then we need to be able to have difficult conversations and kind of work with how we're going to do that just just quickly despite the fact that I didn't really talk it wasn't a classic mindfulness course I wasn't talking about stress or about presence in the same way it still actually did incredibly well on all the mindfulness scores because Calypher Academy did it before and after survey and relative to all their other courses which were a little bit more traditional in the way they work this program actually did exceptionally well so I'm going to finish now this is a Australian jewel beetle and Australian jewel beetles this is a male Australian jewel beetle finish on a lighter but but point point the female is brown and bubbly and so the male is kind of designed because we're all just designed to see patterns to go for a brown and bubbly thing and the brown bubbly things across the Australian impact it out back these days are beer bottles so unfortunately the Australian jewel beetle is attempting to mate with jewel with beer bottles instead of the female and I put this in because it just sums up that the that the we're not really designed to see reality that's not actually what serves us in evolutionary wise mostly what serves us as being able to see patterns and that's what this program was about and that's what the works about and in a way that's for me what ultimately Buddhism is about you know how do we see how do we construct reality and how can we use that aspect to kind of really develop programs and ways of working that will make the change that we want to see thank you thank you Rachel I think this might be more of a confused comment now rather than a question I'm thinking about the examples that you gave you know in in the workplace and before I ever heard of mindfulness teaching people how to have difficult conversations and introducing motivational interviewing and all that sort of thing and good quality leadership and management training would have been designed around these principles so part of my question is is this just putting the mindfulness tag onto something that we've already got because we've mindfulness is the involved thing so that's one sort of question in my mind and then the other one is um we've talked about people in governance we're talked about policymakers we're talking about people in the workplace we're talking about mindfulness for stress is is it a different form of mindfulness depending on the context or I'd sort of come here with the sort of maybe naive understanding that mindfulness is something that we could easily explain and I think the first presentation um echoed my view of what I understood of mindfulness but as the afternoon's gone on I'm beginning to wonder if there are other strands to it that I haven't been aware of so I suppose the number the question is are we using the term mindfulness because it's the in thing to cover things that we've already had thank you thank you thank you for that question yeah both great well actually I I kind of see them a bit together really in the sense that yes um you know a lot of this work in terms of listening difficult conversations has gone on possibly not always in the public sector you know little bits in the public sector so my context sometimes with all due respect you know they're different to other organisations so there's a specific context there but also my experience of the kind of work um that you're discussing is it doesn't necessarily include developing capacities in metacognition so a first person inquiry whenever into um what's happening in my own mind as I'm having these difficult conversations usually the work so it they actually work really well together you know actually exploring the felt sense you know there's there's very I haven't come across very much work that actually builds capacities for exploring the felt sense alongside those management type listening type work that you've done and then putting that in the context of bias which has a maybe a social context and I I completely agree with you what what we actually need are trainers who can work in a particular context understand that context understand the wide net of mindfulness and then design something that's going to work in that context so I think the whole thing is a lot more complicated than maybe some of my colleagues if we really want to make change thank you very much for the um excellent presentation I just want to go back to one of the slides when you said there was a lack of consensus and certainty over many of the definitions of psychological components and cognitive components I'd like to add that the default mode network DMN which is the the part of our brain that's active when we're not actually doing anything there has been research over the last two or three years that's taken that thinking forward both with traditional forms of meditation um and with secular mindfulness so I think that's that's a field and it's actually revealing some new things about meditation and mindfulness generally but the the idea that there are these areas which are which and I'd agree completely there's a lack of consensus over the definition of mindfulness we don't have we don't have measures for compassion within the cognitive community that everyone agrees with it it draws out the question how can we then understand the effectiveness of meditation and mindfulness if we don't have the instruments to measure the effect of mindfulness yeah and um yeah thank you for that um exactly yes how do we having that is the question isn't it and can we I'd love personally uh you know to have research bigger research centres maybe with a wider kind of remit more kind of um more of these areas I don't see a lot of um research that actually widens widens it out um a little bit in terms of yeah we've got this issue about the actual definitions and then about the scales and how does this all fit together and how can we take it out of the well-being right it's always in the well-being on the mental health kind of frame um so I just think it needs um funding in different areas and in different ways to kind of look at look at this really and then how do we train our mindfulness teachers as well so that they actually can they actually be trained in in more of this and then be more kind of contact be able to deliver relative to a context and then how can we design research that will actually then tell us something about that and obviously qual quant research and widen up more social sciences coming in perhaps to actually um look at different ways of getting data out of out of this whole system yeah yes indeed well I'm putting it out there hi yeah um having uh had personal experience of quite a few meetings that looked like that nightmare that you described or put on the slide what would be your idea of how those sorts of meetings in the public sector should be taking place given that you're often talking about large numbers of people with very intense stakes in particular issues sitting in the room together vying for the control of a mic um yeah and really what I want to bring into the field is that those systems are based on a particular view of what the mind is you know that's based on a historical kind of view of rationality and hierarchy and that that's how we best come up with a decision um what I'd like to put in system is and then kind of what we did with the senior civil service is like well if the mind if it's more like this and when I say mind I mean extended social I don't want to be too neurocentric here um is like this yeah how do we design systems that are going to better facilitate that and really the piece that we can bring in is helping people to understand that and then design systems that work better according to that because what what's missing is that piece from my perspective that I could bring in is that they they're kind of not seeing their blind spot um that that this isn't the best way to work with the mind and it's that that's the bit that's the kind of the elephant in the room because we could start to look at people like google or whatever that we you know we hear all you know that they're constantly working in more innovative creative ways there's lots of examples out there of how that's done um but the civil service needs to find their own way really um and it's how we what we can bring in I think as mindfulness trainers to help to facilitate that and not to just maintain it by just kind of dealing with the stress aspect hello I'm Hilda and I come from Belgium and we work also in the public sector and I want you to ask to show the slide with the different issues that we have to um that you should interrogate your directors it's three slides ago I think okay thank you this one no no this one you want to see this one thank you thank you thank you