Let's talk about the shadow band. Do you see where do you see it the most? You see, I've seen it on YouTube happen. Yeah. Um, I think it's happening on almost every platform where they shadow band people. Absolutely. So YouTube is notorious for it. They just took down one of the biggest influencers ever a few weeks ago. And there's a lot of people very upset about it. It's called Steve will do it. Steve will do it. It gets a bazillion views. They literally removed his whole profile.  Like he's out there actively doing a lot of things that Ty used to do quite actively when you were in the social meat, when you were focused on the social media game back then, like giving away cars and giving away prizes to make people feel good and help people's lives. That's what Steve will do. I did. They literally removed his whole account. What's the reason? Like, why do they care? What was he doing? Well, anytime someone does content that stands out or that they don't agree with or is woke or some situations happening or right, then they just decide that they're going to remove it.


Hi guys, I just wanted to hop on here really really quick and make a super short video I don't know how many people are gonna watch it, but first of all one I want to announce that my 12 days of nurse miss is going on on my Instagram It starts today, and I've got many different companies. I'm working with and we're giving away Awesome nursing items that I know you guys will love. This is my I think fourth annual year of doing this so Go follow my Instagram enter the giveaways and yeah Second thing I want to say is I apologize I have not put out as many videos on here as I used to no big excuse other than it's just life I've got a daughter. I am still working. I have projects I'm working on outside of the nursing world. We are moving shortly So I'm busy with packing and cleaning and just getting all those things ready and sometimes there's different parts of your life that just kind of have to take a little side-hold and Making videos has been one of them for me in order to keep my sanity. I cannot do everything all at once So I just wanted to say I'm sorry that I have not been as consistent on here I do plan to eventually get back to it. I have big ideas coming your way I am working on a course right now with Katie Kleeber. It is called breakthrough ICU It is an ICU beginners guide course to help prepare new nurses That are in the ICU to be awesome nurses. I have been writing a ton of content. It is going to be Awesome, I'm so excited, but it's been taken up a lot of time away from making videos and so that is one big thing that I am working on as well as a ton of other Big things in my life. So thank you if you have followed along with me Thanks for sticking along and I appreciate all your guys support So thanks for watching and just hang tight. We'll get there. I'll do more videos But if you're bored, I've made hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of nursing videos and Can always go back and watch them if you're bored Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in my next video. Bye


Hey everybody, I'm Molly Amador, and I'm an academic editor and scientific script writer here at Research Square Company. I've been editing here for about three and a half years now, and then a year ago I started script writing for our videos team as well. So now I split my time 75-25 between editing and writing, and I love my job. I also love being a full-time mom and hanging out with my one-and-a-half-year-old son, at home while my husband is at work. So as you can imagine, my typical day is very busy, but it's really fun and really satisfying too. I usually break up my work into chunks. So I'll do one chunk during the day while my son is napping, and then the other bigger chunk I'll do at night after he goes to bed. For me, that does mean a six-day work week, but it really works out for our family. So besides that flexibility, my favorite parts of my job are the actual work that I do and the culture here. I love editing in general.  But I especially love being able to use my science background every single day. So I'm putting all the things I learned in college and grad school to use, and then combining them with my love of words, and I'm helping people at the same time. So that's really cool. And then as far as the culture goes, the company itself is really unique. It's a bunch of super smart, super dedicated, super honest people who genuinely want each other and the company to do well. And I think it's really refreshing and supportive to be with people like that and work with people like that. So anyways, I'm out of time, but it was great talking to you. And I hope I gave you just a little glimpse into my life as a proud employee of Research Square Company.


What a surprise folks, today we're talking about the Nintendo Direct and the Nintendo Switch 2, this time all in the same video because we have some brand new rumors from you coming from a well known Nintendo insider known as Nate The Hate with a tinge from John Lineman from Digital Foundry. And look, today's news, this video is either gonna make you really excited or you're gonna be really disappointed and I don't think there's a lot in between. Now remember, as we're talking about rumors, this is all unverified information. You should definitely kind of just look at this with an era speculation. However, obviously if the one thing comes true, then probably start to expect the second thing. So what are we talking about? Well, Nate The Hate dropped a brand new episode of his podcast and he went ahead and gave some details on things that he expects, sees, wants, desires in the Direct or from Switch 2, including some things about what we didn't know. Let's first dive into what he had to say about next week's rumored Nintendo Direct. So Nate The Hate suggests that the Nintendo Direct won't be a general Direct, but actually is gonna end up being a partner showcase Direct. Now he did just say that this is what he expects, right? So you're like, okay, cool. So he's just speculating. However, over on family boards earlier this week, he literally said, I heard what the format of this Direct is just not an exact date. Well, now after Necro Felipe Lima yesterday dropped a rumor about the Nintendo Direct happening on February 15th, he sort of backed that rumor and said, yes, I also heard the Direct is next week. And with him already indicated he already knows the format and some of the games that are in the Direct, him now coming out and saying it's probably a partner showcase really sets the table. If you actually think about Nate The Hate and while his track record isn't 100%, one thing he's always been fairly, you know, really just accurate with in general, are Directs. In fact, back in June of 22, he was the only person saying that that was going to end up being a partner showcase and he was right. None of the other insiders had it right. Nate The Hate had it right. So when he says a Direct is probably going to be this certain thing, in this case, a partner showcase, he's worth paying attention to. That is why Nate The Hate is actually in our reliable category on our tier list of insiders and leakers and Zippo probably needs to be kicked the hell off because even wishful thinking isn't good enough for the dribble he's putting out there. Anyways, getting back into what Nate The Hate had to say about this, what's interesting about it being a partner showcase is that that kind of sets the table for something else. And that is the Nintendo Switch 2. So this is where I said you might be disappointed it's like not a general Direct next week, not a Nintendo Direct Mini, a partner showcase, but maybe you're actually excited because he has now gone on record again reiterating stuff he said last year, but even more confident today now that more time has passed. Well, you know what? I don't even want to say it. I'm going to let Nate say it himself and let John Linneman chime in as well. I actually want to go on to the reveal timing for the Switch 2 as last summer around Tokyo Game Show and Gamescom, I had reported that there were a lot of whispers about something concerning March of 2024. And the issue was just couldn't figure out exactly what March was referring to at that time. Now, as time has gone on, I am of the belief that March is referring to the reveal timing of the Switch 2. We know GDC is coming up in March, and GDC is likely going to be a significant venue that Nintendo is going to meet with partners talk with partners and show what the Switch 2 is going to be. So right now my expectation is Switch 2 reveal March. Do you think that has merit or you think Nintendo could potentially wait a little later into the year to reveal this? I think that has merit. I don't think that's necessarily set in stone or anything. I mean, it's Nintendo. They can do what they want, but I feel like March would be a pretty... It does kind of align with the other things that I've heard at least from the past and make me think that, yeah, maybe this is the right time to do it. Now, as you can see here, they are indicating that yes, the Nintendo Switch 2 will likely be revealed in March and probably before the Games Developers Conference because Nintendo will want to talk to their partners at that conference more directly about this device, rather than just having to pretend it doesn't exist. So that is really awesome. And look, obviously just a rumor, but having John Lindemann back it up saying that, hey, this kind of lines up with things I've heard in the past, I think that this just strongly indicates with a partner direct next week and this. So if the partner direct is what happens next week, and then we have this, that yes, Nintendo Switch 2 will likely be revealed in March, which is just awesome. It's also very soon. If you're curious on when the Game Developers Conference is, if you want to start to put a more exact timeframe for expectation for Switch 2 based on these rumors, the Game Developers Conference actually begins on March 18th. So you're looking at possibly a reveal of Nintendo Switch 2 in the first two weeks of March, which if you think about that, that's like five weeks, five weeks away, like a month away. So that is utterly insane if what they're saying is true. Now, if you're wondering if they indicate of what this is going to be, is it going to be a big blowout, or is it just going to be a tease of the system with a blowout to come later? They do believe it'll be a tease, but it's not based on any actual information. They're just making guesses, right? They're like, hey, we think they'll probably tease and do a blowout later. However, Nate, the hate does entertain the fact that what if they just do the blowout in March? So basically, yeah, they expect the system to be revealed in March. How it's revealed, does Nintendo go all out with the reveal? Do they just do a tease and then do a big reveal later? That is something that has not been indicated here.  That's what they spend a majority of the show talking about. There's just things that they want. Not things they know, things they want. And also that, yeah, this must be a pretty powerful machine because they don't think the 8-inch LCD was just to have a bigger screen to tout it over the Nintendo Switch OLED, but rather because the SOC, the chip itself, is bigger and beefier and more powerful. And if you have to make the system bigger, why not have the excuse for the 8-inch screen to give them more real estate on the internals? So I don't know. You guys take from that what you will. Again, most of their show is just speculation on what they want, what their desire is, and what they think they should do. But again, partner showcase is something that Nate the Hate firmly believes is happening next week and yes, a reveal next month for Nintendo Switch 2. And I gotta be honest, guys, if a partner showcase is what we got next week, regardless of anything Nate the Hate said, it would already make me feel very confident that Nintendo's unveiling Nintendo Switch 2 really really soon, like imminently, because again, Nintendo doesn't have a super strong lineup this year and if all they're gonna do is keep dropping all the information and all the ads they need for their current lineup on Twitter and other social media platforms, and then they're just gonna have a showcase for indies and third-party games, that kind of indicates, yeah, Nintendo is literally leaving out all the bullets in the barrel, right? They're loading that barrel up to fire it at some point, and at some point would probably be a Switch 2, because look guys, if Switch 2 wasn't coming in 2024, why wouldn't this be a general direct? Let's just ask yourselves this question. If it's a partner showcase next week and Nate the Hate is correct and his rumor is proven true, then what would Nintendo be doing with a partner showcase when they have hardly any games on their slate if Switch 2 wasn't coming this year? Does that even make sense? If they're gonna coast on Switch for another year, they gotta announce games or they don't, because they're not gonna coast on Switch for another year. I don't know guys, I'm pretty excited about this stuff. Let me know what you think about it down in the comments below.  As always, I'm trying my best to keep you as up to date on the latest on the Direct, the latest on Switch 2, and other big Nintendo gaming news, rumors, leaks, etc. I know some of you guys get a little tired at times, it's another Direct, it's another rumor, it's another Switch 2 video, but one thing I will say in my defense, and this is maybe the ultimate defense for what I do, is I firmly believe in keeping you guys as informed on leaks, rumors, and news as I can, and as new information comes to light, as new rumors come to light from reliable places that present themselves forward, like Necro Philippe yesterday, Nate the hate today, it is something that we need to consider and bring to your attention as it adds further context and belief in certain aspects going on at Nintendo, and I just feel like it's important I give it to you guys, because if I don't, then I feel like I'm just omitting information because oh I don't want to talk about this today, but there's real tangible rumors stuff out there that if I just ignore it, then you're not up to date, I'm the only one that's up to date, that's not a good feeling, I want us to be on the same grounds, anyways folks, thank you for tuning in, and I'll catch you in the next video.


So a lot of people actually ask about when do you give up on something and it is such a fine line between being dumb, being arrogant, being those people that we laugh at on charting people like oh my god that's a dumbass idea like everyone's telling you that it's a dumbass idea yet you still have the stubbornness and arrogance to say that I will prove you wrong all of you guys wrong in the next five years I'm going to continue putting another two million dollars in this project that's not gonna go anywhere there's the difference between that and the people who actually leave the product so much to commit and to to see it through until it succeeds now the question is how do we determine when is it a good time to admit that you are arrogant or that you should continue to push through until you see success and a million dollars in the machine so Jason and I have been working on this video series and we're working on this for the last two months focusing on specifically food and beverage it's funny that you know initially Jason was telling me about the fact that you know food and beverage as a space is nobody in the food and beverage space low margins and there's not much of a demand looking for this product or looking for information so for me I believe that I need to see things through I need to be able to see all the slides to prove to me that I'm not giving up prior to seeing success and that I need to be able to see prove it and to have a lot more use in order for me to be able to make the decision to give up on this specific angle to market for our video series all along we've been doing surveys with different foodies influencers to get their take in terms of how much they're willing to spend on resources and are they actually searching for this resource and this knowledge of life we interviewed dozens of food and beverage entrepreneurs at the same time as well to see how much I've been willing to pay for services and resources to educate them on how to you we did this for two months after one incident I remember it was a complete shift in my mentality that it was time to pivot not to give up but to pivot and that incident was when the foodie told us that she's only willing to pay $100 for a service that would guarantee them an $800 revenue so that completely gave me a switch that I had to pay for the whole sector that we needed that I'm not going to be that arrogant person it is because I didn't want to have confirmation bias to think it what is confirmation bias that is basically choosing the belief picking up all the different views in my surroundings that confirms my belief that this dish works that there is development that's confirmation bias and after getting more facts from the surroundings that tell me otherwise and to prove to me the different angles are not possible we're not not possible but it's going to be a huge out no bad that's when I decided that no it was not worth it that it is time to pivot it is time to give up on this specific now for a lot of entrepreneurs out there we think that we have landed on an amazing product idea that this product has never been out in the market and not the way that we're presenting this service or product is is it's going to be over it's going to be a unicorn and the reason why we so truly believe in this is because we suffer from competition bias that we need to take in information that validates this belief of this is not something we do intentionally but something much is we pick up on those cues that confirm our bias it's like whenever you're driving let's say for example Mercedes you see that wow a lot of people are driving Mercedes or when you're driving a Toyota wow a lot of people are driving Toyota it's the same because now that we are exposed to this environment or this bias of ours we find validation within us and in our environment validate that this is the law and that this is more to our surroundings so as entrepreneurs it is so so critical for us to understand and have a support system around us that constantly tells you and your your devil's habit that tells you something otherwise that brings you a different perspective so you're not mind-sighted by all these different competition bias around you that prevents you from making an objective decision to whether to proceed or to give up and not need that person that you know that you are watching there were 15 times that created projects that I given up or that I shifted focus or that I pivot and it made just from a couple weeks to over two years of running these projects until I realized that it was in the doubt I was going down the road and it is all about being self-aware of the confirmation bias so now my question for you is when was the last line you realized that you were suffering from this confirmation bias that you were suffering from this great idea and then now looking into retrospective you're like oh this is actually a very dumb stupid idea leave it in the comment section below I love to see you


At our national convention in Reno last year, DAV's membership elected a true leader to serve as our national commander. Like those who've gone on before him, Dennis Nixon knows the importance of ensuring elected officials honor their responsibility to our nation's sick and disabled veterans. Senator Nixon enlisted in the Marines in 1964 at the age of 17. Excuse me. We needed a break, didn't we? Thank you for that break. He trained to become a combat engineer and was stationed in California. On patrol near the name Vietnam in 1969, while on his second combat tour, he was tripped, he tripped a booby trap. As a result of his injuries to his abdomen and leg, he underwent eight surgeries. After months in the hospital, his leg was amputated. After a medical retirement from the Marine Corps in 1970, Commander Nixon became a DAV national service officer and dedicated 36 years to helping his fellow veterans obtain the benefits they earn. Since retirement from the DAV professional staff, Commander Nixon has continued to serve as a volunteer assisting in the certification training of department and chapter service officers, as well as mentoring NSO trainees in Waco, Texas. Commander Nixon served in various leadership capacities at both the chapter and department levels, including serving as judge advocate for the Department of Texas. He served as a national executive committee and on the DAV charitable service trust boards of directors. Commander Nixon has been active on an active DAV member for nearly 50 years. His decades of experience and expertise has influenced new generations of members and service officers and in turn helped countless veterans and their families. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, let's give a warm applause for our national commander, Dennis Nixon. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for that warm welcome. It's a pleasure to be here with you this morning for our annual State Commanders and Agents Association Midwinter Conference. Before I go too far, I just want to make one thing clear. I did not see that booby trap before I tripped it. That's important to note because I don't want anyone to think I saw it as an opportunity to get home quicker. I'll admit that when I did get home, I caused quite a bit of ruckus with the doctors and nurses at the VA medical centers that were providing my care. Truth is, sometimes I wish I could go back and tell them, sorry, that'll never happen again. I'm talking about the booby trap part, not the ruckus. Because knowing me at some point somewhere, I will cause a ruckus again. In fact, that's why I'm here today, to ask you all to help me to do just that. When I first took the reins as National Commander in Reno last August, I spoke about the VA's mission of service and the importance of using our collective voice of more than one million members to advocate for America's veterans and their families. Well, folks, this week, across the river, in our nation's capital, there is no better time or place. Americans, veterans, their families and survivors deserve nothing less than our absolute best efforts in pushing Congress to do the right thing by those who sacrifice. Luckily for them, DAV is the nation's premier veteran service organization. And that's because of you, the people in this room who have come to advocate on their behalf. This week and throughout the year, we will be addressing some very critical topics. As President Madison mentioned, that includes asking for the full and proper implementation of the VA Mission Act and sufficient VA funding for fiscal year 2020. We also need to stand by and secure benefits for blue water Navy veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange while serving off the shores of Vietnam and our brothers and sisters of all areas who were exposed to toxins from burn pits. We will also continue our efforts fighting for improved services for women veterans and support for caregivers of veterans made ill during their service. But when you visit to congressional offices of your elected representatives later this week, I want you to make one thing clear. And that is that safeguarding and improving the VA is our number one priority as veterans. Our first commander in chief, George Washington said, the willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of earlier wars were treated and appreciated by our nation. That, ladies and gentlemen, illustrates precisely why our nation's veterans must have a system accountable to them for the injuries and illnesses sustained in service to this nation. That is why we must remain active in conversations about veterans' issues and speak up collectively about our experiences. No one else can or will do it for us. Now, I want to take a moment to recognize some important people in the audience today. DAV service officers, nearly 4,000 strong, are the face of our charity to most, often the first impression of veteran has of our organization.  I would like to ask our national transition department and chapter service officers to stand and be recognized. Thank you all for your dedication to our fellow veterans. There are also so many of you out there who are so selflessly volunteering your time and giving back to your fellow veterans. That kind of dedication deserves a little recognition as well. So, all you volunteers, including our transportation network drivers and hospital service coordinators, please stand for a much deserved round of applause. I'm always inspired by the giving nature of volunteers, these men and women are truly standout group. Thank you all. Another group of people I would like to recognize are the professional staff in both Cold Spring and Washington. They're constantly working to improve the programs and services we offer and to empower our local and state leaders with tools and resources so we can ensure our sacred charge to keep our promises to those who served. Mark Burgess, Barry Jesanowski, and Randy Reese, you have assembled a phenomenal team of professionals within the Veterans Advocacy arena, and the work you do is second to none. As veterans and members, we sincerely appreciate all the work these teams do in order to further the DAV mission. Thank you. I want to thank some of the closest friends and some of our closest friends and allies. DAV has no better friend or closer ally than the DAV auxiliary. Under the capable leadership of auxiliary national commander Alan Timmerman and national adjunct Pat Kemper, your support is invaluable and we are blessed to have such a devoted partner. For nearly a century, DAV has stood as the champion of veterans' causes. I can assure you that this year and in the years ahead, we will face many new trials. Your attention to the issues, your support in our advocacy campaigns and your voices lending depth to our message have never been more important than they are now. We need you to be DAV's ambassadors. Take what you learn and experience here this week home with you. Spread the message and invite your fellow veterans to join us. It is through our ranks nationwide that we move closer to achieving our goals. Never forget the men and women we're fighting for. The veterans here in this room, the veterans in the long-term care and nursing facilities, the veterans coming home each and every day, making the difficult transition back to civilian life and the service members currently overseas in harm's way, that these men and women guide your daily efforts. The mission of service is never complete and we owe our fellow injured and ill veterans the best DAV has to offer.  You all have my deepest thanks for your continued service to veterans and families. The people who get that done are in this room. I hope we'll march forward on behalf of DAV together. No one understands the concepts of service and sacrifice like we do. May we continue to succeed in our sacred and noble duty. May God bless DAV and may God continue to bless the United States of America and the men and women who continue to stand to watch to defend her. Thank you. Keep up the good work and go. Calls the Rutgers this week.


And suddenly, 7,000 transactions slam the Ethereum blockchain, and it has the capacity to deal with a fraction of those in any given block. And again, this is a competitive process, right? Where people really, really, really want to get one of these things. With NFTs increasingly in the news, today we'll be discussing the perspective from Inside a Popular Token Launch, a new project from Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher called Stoner Cats. Hey, folks. I'm Anand B. Levine, and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. On today's show, we're talking blockchain collectibles and how the blockchain part is somehow both critical and also a freaking disaster. To do that, as always, I'm joined by the other host this show, Steppi Murphy. Hi there. And Jonathan Mohan. Hey. Hey. Andreas is traveling this week. So I'm not exactly sure how to set up this topic. Like I have not participated in a lot of NFT launches, but I saw this project coming out, a cartoon that involves Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Chris Rock, Seth McFarland, Jane Fonda, and Vitalik as animated cats. Well, Jane Fonda is not an animated cat. She plays a cat lady who are made self-aware by being exposed to marijuana or something along those lines. I don't know. I watched the first four-minute thing after I got one of these Stoner cat collectibles finally, which took a really long time. But again, the project is still very early in its development cycle. There's going to be a season coming out, but it's a really kind of cool way to look at how pop culture is dealing with this on one side as a way to build a community before a show is even out, and then also using it as a fundraising mechanism. So they were selling an NFT of the characters or something? Yeah. So if you think of a project like CryptoKitties or CryptoPunk, something like that, these are what are called generative NFTs or generative art. And the idea here is that you have 10 different kinds of eyes, 10 different kinds of faces, 10 different kinds of mouths, all of these different variable pieces that fit within a particular collection, all the different possible expressions that these cats can have, et cetera. And then when you generate one of these tokens, it picks randomly from this grab bag of different elements. And the one that you get is part of a set, but is unique unto itself. So no one collectible is like any other exactly in every way. These are things that back in the early days of collectible tokens, when we were looking at these unique ERC721 structures, ERC721 is the standard that has now been at this point built into Ethereum for how you actually do these things on the Ethereum blockchain. At first, these were not a big deal, but this year they have exploded. And I believe as I was looking this morning, CryptoPunks are now trading for something like $100,000 as the absolute least expensive one that you can get for something that is literally like a 32 pixel by 32 pixel image of like a face, right? But they've become this status symbol. You know, I was reading an article the other day that was kind of talking about the reason why people go to college partly is to learn, but mostly it's because you want the credential, you want the accolade that comes with going to a school. And these days, it's not even really good enough to go to a college at all. You have to go to one of the Ivy League colleges where there's really only 20,000 spots per year that they can fill. Well, there's 10,000 CryptoPunks, right? And so in a lot of ways for the internet generation, that is increasingly becoming how you demonstrate that you were either early and you got one really cheap because you couldn't afford one now or you got one later and it's like your OG credentials, right? People are increasingly using them as avatars on Twitter and stuff like that. And of course, it's not just CryptoPunks. CryptoPunks is one of the kind of biggest ones so far because it's one of the earlier projects. There's a board apes yacht club and avastars and a number of other projects, a growing array of projects. The point isn't the art. The point is that you are part of a limited cohort of people who have either self-selected or been selected to participate in it and kind of what that says about you. That's the background for this conversation, right? NFTs in that way have started to become kind of important not because of what they are, but because of what they represent about you if you have one of particular sets. Does that make sense? Yeah, that sounds a lot like what MetaCoven was saying when we interviewed him about why he bought this Beeple NFT. It was more about being part of something and sort of owning a piece of digital space that says that you are part of something at the very beginning and you helped bring this into the world. Yeah, I really think that that is increasingly if there's the thing that it is and then there's the thing that it represents. The thing that it is wouldn't be that expensive if it was just an abstract thing, but because they're limited and because they're in demand with crypto punks and with many of these projects that have become popular, they actually didn't as far as I can tell really make any money off the initial sales. It was really just like basically in order to get a crypto punk and kind of the time when they really didn't matter, all you had to do is pay an on-chain transaction fee. And that was at a time when Ethereum was so much cheaper. So the amount of money that you had to spend, you're talking like sub $50 for something that now is selling for routinely hundreds of thousands of dollars in which you really can't buy for less than that amount. That's kind of like where these projects can go sometimes if they really get picked up by the zeitgeist and they build a community that is simply larger than the 10,000 or whatever number that they issue. So what Mila Kunis and her team are doing with Stoner Cats is they're funding the production of a cartoon that is really fully animated, right? Which is typically a very expensive thing. Typically in order for something like this to actually get into production, you would need to go to a studio or you would need to have a publishing partner. They would effectively buy into it, right? And then they would give you the money to go produce it. And then you would, at the point that it's produced, hope to make money off it there. Well, what happened in this case is that they released about 10,000 Stoner Cat NFTs. They cost about $700 a piece. I believe it was three-tenths of an ether that it actually cost. And they raised, I think in total, about $9 million. Now there was a lot of trouble that occurred with this launch. It was not a clean launch. And there were a lot of people who were unhappy with it. But that kind of sets us up for the conversation today. But from their perspective, even with the trouble, it still just was a revolutionary thing because it allowed them to completely bypass the typical infrastructure that would be required and effectively that act as gatekeepers around whether a project gets made. Like I said at kind of the beginning, this feels a lot like ICOs. ICOs really intended to do exactly that. Even thinking back to Ethereum. Ethereum did crowd sale of their token. And the purpose of that was that you weren't really going to get investment from traditional firms that would have put $30 million into a speculative project like that. But there were lots of believers on the internet and lots of believers in the world of Bitcoin who thought that something like that was totally plausible. And so they were able to effectively crowd fund it. These days, ICOs are not so much of a thing effectively because whenever you do sell something like that and it represents some type of interest or some type of utility with that system. Well, at least in the US regulators see that as a security, which has all kinds of troubling legal implications. And it's not to say that every project that used that mechanism was good either. Plenty of them were not. But the point is that it really is kind of like an enabling type of technology that allows people to get outside of the traditional sort of gatekeepers who typically get to the side what does or doesn't happen by nature of providing money or not providing money and instead go directly to the audience who you think is going to be interested, which in this case for them was very successful. This reminds me of a conversation that we had like really, really early on the show Adam, you probably remember this about Kickstarter and about like the amount of projects that crowdfunded a bunch of money and then just never materialized. So was there anything in this whole project that was kind of reassuring you that they would actually do this if they raised the money? Or was that not what it was about? Like, did you even care if they made the cartoon? I do care if they make the cartoon, actually. And I think that most of the people do. Now there's a couple of reasons why people participate in something like this. One of the reasons is that they're legitimately interested in the project. But another big reason is that they think that the project is going to succeed. And by nature of the project succeeding, more people will know about the collectible and then more people will then want to buy that collectible, which then allows them to actually make money by supporting an early creative project when it isn't really well known. And when it does need the money in order to kind of get off the ground and prove to people that, hey, this is actually a thing. So I do personally care about that. And that's the reason why I participated, but I did buy two. And I bought two with the intent of having the option that if I wanted to, then I could effectively, you know, actually make some money off of it. So I haven't participated too much in the NFT thing. We've created some ourselves. I've created some personally and I've bought maybe three or four over the course of the last year. But this was the first project that really got me excited. And again, it's because of the names involved. And it's also because it feels like in this year, we have seen a major shift. And that shift is away from kind of this insular crypto space that we're all a part of and towards this mainstream culture space, right? Where this is just being accepted into that. And I'm, you know, in the work I do for CoinDesk right now, I'm working on a show called NFT All Stars. Again, trying to explore these ideas. I won't get into really what the show is here. But I can tell you, we've been talking to a number of guests who are very, very big and very, very mainstream and are very, very interested. I've probably done 40 or 50 calls with fairly high profile brands or agents. And there isn't a single one who we've talked to who isn't doing something. And most of them also were offering us people from like elsewhere in their catalog, right? Not the person who we went to them for, but somebody else or five or six other people who are working on these NFT projects. So again, I think that that's the part that's most exciting to me about this is it really feels like, although we've had many kind of mainstream moments that felt that way before, this one is so broad and there's so much interest. And all of the incentives line up to push this vision of sort of collectibles on the internet across all of the various types of implications that it has into reality. That's certainly what I'm excited about right now. Yeah, that's really interesting. Can you talk a little bit about some of the problems that happened when you were trying to buy these NFTs? You obviously weren't the only one who was interested in this. And that may have been causing some problems or maybe it was about the Ethereum network. Tell us what happened. Well, so it's everything. I mean, that's really what it comes down to, right? I remember back in 2014, 2015, my company Tokenly ran a series of on-chain vending machines that you could put Bitcoin into and it would send you a collectible token out of it. And we worked with one of the earliest companies in the space who was doing that sort of thing called Spells of Genesis. And a problem that we ran into really quickly was that if you had a hundred people who wanted to buy the cards all at once, well, then you actually had kind of a problem with the blockchain not really being able to deal with that. And it's so important, right? Because the amount of fee that you pay, the order that you get in, like that stuff really winds up mattering when there's, you know, a hundred people going after something where there's only 10 of the collectible that you're trying to get. Blockchains are a lot of really good things, but they're not particularly efficient. And they're a little bit random until they settle, right? There's always kind of the potential to move around. So what I saw with StonerCats was that on all sorts of human growth, hormones, steroids and kind of everything else. Instead of a hundred people pounding down the door for one of these collectible cards in 2014, we were talking about somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 people doing it with this StonerCats launch against only 10,000 potential collectibles that you could create. And then also you could buy up to 20 of those collectibles in a single transaction. So it was always going to be a situation where not everybody got what they wanted. So this is a process that actually took two days. It was scheduled to launch on one particular day. And I'm in the Discord channel, which is incidentally where all this stuff happens in the very early days. I remember the kind of early Ethereum discussions that we had before that thing launched, and that was all in Skype groups, right? Skype groups was the really cool chat app that we were using at the time. Years later, we would switch over to Slack for almost everything. And these days and for the last couple of years, everything is on Discord these days. So this was happening on Discord. And because there was so much demand, the company that was helping them do the launch had actually limited it so you could only send one chat every 10 minutes. And still, even with that restraint in there, it was just a constant scroll of people just asking, where is it? When is it going to happen? And why isn't it happened yet? You know, like, am I doing something wrong? And so the first day when they were slated to launch continued for two hours after they were slated to launch, with them constantly saying, we're almost done. We're almost done. We're almost done. And then later, we would find out that the problem they actually had was they had discovered a very small bug in one of the kind of graphical elements and they had gone to fix it. But because all of this stuff uses distributed storage mechanisms like IPFS, sometimes it's kind of hard to update all those things because you don't have direct control of the servers. You're pushing to a distributed network. Long story short, things broke and it didn't work. And so the first day at the end of two hours, they were finally like, OK, OK, OK, we're going to call it off. We're going to do it again tomorrow. Come back at that point. And keep in mind, this is, again, thousands and thousands of people who are trying to spend at least $700, not including fees on the Ethereum network. So this is, again, like a lot of money that's sitting there and just people who are getting very frustrated. So you come back the next day and they fixed this part of the problem. And so instead, the project launches, the smart contract becomes available. It's a classic NFT launch, so everything happens on chain and suddenly 7000 transactions slam the Ethereum blockchain, right? And it has the capacity to deal with a fraction of those in any given block. And again, this is a competitive process, right, where people really, really, really want to get one of these things. So I placed my first transaction maybe a minute after the thing has gone live. And I'm pretty early in the overall queue. And I look at the estimate for how much I should pay in fee. And it says $15. I was expecting more than that. So I was like, oh, that's great, I'll pay $15. And so I pay the $15 and I'm sitting there and I'm watching, waiting for it to confirm. And it says 45 seconds to confirmation. And then it ticks up and up and up and up and suddenly it's at 59 minutes and 59 seconds.  And so then I'm like, all right, well, MetaMask, which is the wallet that I was using, lets you boost very easily, like a replace by fee in Bitcoin, but lets you boost the amount of fee that you're actually putting to that transaction. And so I'm like, oh, OK, cool, great, I'll do that. I'll increase the amount of transaction fee that I'm paying. And that transaction fee, again, looking at the estimates based on the current number, suddenly now it's $25 for slow, $40 for regular and $55 for fast. And I'm like, OK, cool, $55. Well, I'm spending $700. This is very much like a cost of doing business. Yeah, like it's a cost of doing business. Like clearly I'm not here because this stuff is as cheap as possible. I legitimately want one of these and want to participate in this community. So let's see what happens there. And again, same thing happens, right? It says, all right, 45 seconds. And then it ticks up. Were you thinking at that point that everyone else is doing the same thing? I was, yeah, it was very obvious to me that they were, but I didn't realize to the extent or how much people would pay. I had set kind of like a personal limit for myself of like maybe 50 bucks to $70 in terms of what I thought was reasonable fee, because that's, you know, like 10 percent of the purchase price. So OK, I can justify that to myself at that point was like, all right, I'm going to go to dinner, right? Like if I get it, I get it. If I don't, I don't, then it is what it is, right? And so I come back a couple of hours later and I look through the chat and it's still people constantly talking again, limited to once every 10 minutes, but so many people talking. And now the thing that they're saying is I spent $700 on fees and it ate my fees and I still didn't get a cat.  Oh, stoner cats. I mean, what? Like these numbers are just wild. They're just wild and I don't understand that. So to the blockchain part of things, I think there's a real tendency in the world of cryptocurrency to feel like we need to do all of this stuff on chain because that's how you do it. It's possible to do it. So why wouldn't we do it that way? Anything else is sort of a betrayal. And I think that that's just a fundamentally dumb way to look at this sort of thing. The stoner cats project had actually coordinated with other projects to make sure that there weren't two projects launching at once because this is understood to be a problem, right? People effectively on the Ethereum blockchain wait around for when no other project is launching because whenever anything that's even reasonably popular launches, it has this effect, at least for a short period of time. Now, recently, Ethereum rolled out the London hard fork and the London hard fork contains within it EIP. That's Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559, which among other things does actually add some capacity. It allows under certain circumstances the size of blocks to double for short periods of time. But even if you were to do that, it's not going to change anything, right? Effectively, you've got a limited supply of a thing. You have to bid for space in the blockchain. And so there's a meaningful sort of incentive to bid as much as you are willing to bid as quickly as possible so that you can kind of maximize your outcome for it. But it's just crazy, right? And what actually happened, my understanding is that more than a million dollars worth of ETH was spent in fees that did not wind up generating a cat. And so the project has since come back and said, OK, well, we're actually going to refund you out of our pocket money that they didn't get that went to these miners. We're going to fund you out of our pocket so that you can not feel bad about this. But it took like a million dollars of funding that otherwise would have gone to the project had they not done this fully on chain blockchain purist launch. So I'll stop here for a second. What else can I tell you about this? It's again, fascinating example for me and feels so ICO-ish in ways that I think are mostly positive. But again, these types of like FOMO rushes are I don't think those are just positive. I just think it's phenomenal to hear that without, you know, even the obligation to they're taking a million dollars out of their own pocket to return to people who aren't even their customers. That just sounds like the really classy thing to do. Well, community management, I think, is what it comes down to, right?  They're saying that and then there's losing a million dollars to do it. Yeah, that's fair. That's totally fair. It's real money. And then the other thing I wanted to say, you know, it is really good to finally see Ashton Kutcher doing stuff on Ethereum. Most people don't know this, but Ashton Kutcher was extremely eerily in the Ethereum community. He actually had a call with while I was on it and the staff and it was in April or March of 2014 about building a DAP in Ethereum. Yeah, he basically like read all the marketing release and was like, great, so you can do this now, right? Like let's do it. And in 2014, we were like, I don't think there's really anything here we can do for you because there's really nothing here yet built. But most people don't know this, but he has like this massive nonprofit that deals with child trafficking. He's actually spoken before Congress about it and did a ton about it. And actually now in light of all the Me Too stuff, it makes even more sense. He came to the Ethereum Foundation and he didn't come to it. It was a conference call. But he was talking about if there's a way that we could make a DAP for people to call out sexual abusers anonymously, because he said that there were so many people that everyone knows are the people that need something to be done about, but they can't speak out about it and like no one's doing anything about them. And he was like, could we use Ethereum to like make a DAP to like do something about that? And this is before like even solidity had existed. It was called Serpent and it didn't even work yet. You know, clearly that never got built, but just it had always surprised me how early to tech adoption he was and thinking about these ways of using decentralized technology, even in like very serious contexts. So it's just kind of interesting that now, you know, what is it like six years later or seven years later, he's finally doing his own project and of all things, it's an NFT, which is kind of cute. But it's great because it's just the guys been in the Ethereum space very quietly for a very long time. Thanks for talking about that, Jonathan. I had no idea. That's really interesting. I'm going to look into it. Yeah, if anyone's interested, it's called Thorn and it's this giant network and he does so much for this problem that he speaks before Congress regularly about it. But yeah, so he came to the Ethereum project back when this was three months or four months before the crowdsale. Crowdsale was in August to September. This was in like April, needed a conference call about how to build a DAP. So his mind has definitely been in the space for a very long time. So when did you actually receive what you were trying to buy? And then what did you do with it once you got it? I didn't get a cap during the actual event itself, which, like I said, was a little bit disappointing. And I looked around an open sea, one of the decentralized marketplaces where all of these things sell. And I basically just looked for what's the cheapest one that I can buy. And it wound up being, I think it was like a 20 or 30 percent premium above what I would have paid had I actually minted it, not including fees. And I really wonder if it didn't wind up being cheaper for me just by nature of having not paid any fees in order to compete on that side. Because it's certainly a lot of people paid a lot of fees. But anyways, that's what I did. I just look for one of the cheapest ones with buy now prices. And then I found two that I felt like I liked and wound up buying two because I can't help myself when I like to gamble. I like to gamble twice. But yeah, so that's kind of where it is now. Since I purchased them, they've gone up about another 10 percent, something like that, maybe 20 percent. But again, for me, the value of holding this is actually not about the price appreciation, although that would be a secondary benefit that I wouldn't mind. Mostly it's about wanting to be part of that community and then having an avatar that effectively represents kind of how I feel about that community. So one of the things that I made sure to do with my cheapest possible cats that I could get is I got ones that had smiles on them or that looked like they were laughing. And it's really interesting to me to see again as time goes on, how kind of the price of these things changes as we've seen with things like crypto punks, you know, like the most valuable ones over there and the most desirable ones are, you know, like the ones that have green skin, right, or that have some type of really weird feature that's kind of implicit in that. In the world of stoner cats, those are the Vitalik character, which is a taxidermied cat and then also the Jane Fonda character, of which I think that there's only maybe 10 or 11 of those in total out of the 10,000. So I didn't get any of those. I got the Mila Kunis character and I got the Ashton Kutcher character. But yeah, and then as far as what I've done with it, well, the first thing I did with it was I watched the first episode, which was really just like a six minute kind of origin story type of thing that shows them becoming self aware with sort of some early animation. And now I'm kind of just waiting for the actual series to come out. And then because I have these tokens, I'll be able to watch the episodes as they come out of production, but before they actually go to distribution. And so again, it does have this very Kickstarter like feel to it, where effectively the early consumers of the product, the early consumers of in this case, the show are the ones who fund production, which then allows the people who are doing the production to one, produce it without having really any risk and to already have a lot of validation for when they go to find broad distribution, right? They have a lot of leverage compared to, hey, we have no revenue. We have no money.  And also, can you distribute this on our behalf? Because look at our name recognition. That's kind of the situation that this is replacing. And I'm pretty sure that just given the success that they've had and what I'm hearing from elsewhere in the industry, that this is not a one off. This is a first of type, and then we're going to start seeing projects like this come out increasingly over the next year or two. I remember talking with a movie director who's interested in NFTs, and I kept telling them like one of the things I think is the future is just to take like the MacGuffin of your story and even just make it a one off NFT, just see what it does. Because they always take movie memorabilia after the movie is over and auction it off. And I was like, well, you could also just make like one off NFTs of whatever the plot contrivance is and just see what that does. It's just free money on the table.  Yeah, I actually have a project that I'm working on very quietly in the background. That's actually a radio drama that says that's a go figure that I would do something like that. Oh, that's so cool, Adam. Wow. So anyways, I'm thinking along these lines to building this type of thing into the story, right into the actual narrative itself so that you can kind of have these things not be kind of a tacked on thing at the end, but actually part of the overall experience itself. And again, I'm usually early on this stuff, but the trend seems to be in that direction, although we're probably still several years out from seeing something significant along those lines. So like I said, it's a quick story today. It's a kind of exciting time to be involved with cryptocurrency, because although the technology continues to improve, really what's happening is the culture is coming to us and it's changing cryptocurrency, right? It's changing the community that we're part of, but it's because it's becoming everything and it's not everything yet. I'm not saying it's going to be everything tomorrow, but it's going to be everything. It's going to become one of the most common ways that you interact with many of these things. And that to me, again, is a real fulfillment of a vision that I've had and I've been chasing since basically 2014. So I'm excited about it. I appreciate you guys listening to me act about it. That's a super cool story. OK, the one question I have, you sent a link and you can see some of the different NFTs of the stoner cats and they're really cute. I definitely want to watch it now. But do you have to have one in order to watch it or do you think they're going to release it later so that anyone can watch it even if they don't own one of these NFTs? So the NFT gives you early access. It's not exclusive access. And my understanding is that in a very similar style to Kickstarter, they had like a whole list of different things that depending on how much they sold.  And at the time, they were not at all sure that they were actually going to sell out on these things. And I was like, you guys are 100 percent going to sell it. I'll be shocked if you still have inventory after a day. And I won't be surprised if you sell it immediately. And in practice, that's what happened. They sold out completely immediately. So there's all of this stuff that they're going to be doing as well. You know, there's going to be posters and swag and stuff like that that she'll claim with the NFT. And again, it has a very Kickstarter vibe. But to your question, Stephanie, yeah, it sounds like once they find distribution, these are just going to be broadly available. And, you know, it'll be cool to see what happens. And that's a wrap on another episode of Speaking of Bitcoin. Today's episode featured Stephanie Murphy, Jonathan Mohan and myself, Adam B. Levine. This episode featured music from Jared Rubins with editing by Jonas. If you enjoyed this episode, send me an email at adamatspeakingofbitcoin.show or just leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. Until next time, thanks for listening.


Hey everybody, Dr. O here. We're going to talk about the urethra's in this video, the male and female urethra. You see them both here. Obviously, when you look at them side by side, the key difference is going to be the length. The female urethra's going to be much shorter. The male urethra's going to be a lot longer. As far as histologically, the beginning of the urethra is going to be transitional epithelium. In both males and females, the terminal end will become non-charitonized stratified squamous epithelium, which makes sense. These are generally going to be more protected and stratified squamous epithelium is going to be a lot more protective than transitional epithelium, but just a quick histological review. Before we look at the male and female urethra, I want you to see the beginning of it. At the bottom here, you see the urethra. The urethra is going to be at the base of the bladder, so it's going to be inferior to the bladder. You can see above there, the ureters between the ureters and then the urethra basically form this triangle called the trigone. We'll talk about that when we cover the bladder. I want you to see the muscles involved here. As you transition from the bladder to the urethra, you're going to see an internal urethral sphincter, which is made of smooth muscle, and an external urethral sphincter made of skeletal muscle. These are the two muscles that keep urine out of the urethra, keep them in the bladder. If you want to myctorate or urinate, these muscles have to both relax. We'll cover that more when we talk about the bladder and mycterition, but I just want to make sure that you see that. The proximal urethra is going to be right at the end or right where these muscles are, the smooth muscle of the internal urethral sphincter, skeletal muscle of the external urethral sphincter. Let's go and look at the male first, because the male's got several parts. The male urethra is going to be an average of about eight inches in length. It's going to, so it's got three parts. It's going to pass through the prostate gland, as you can see there. That's going to be the part known as the prostatic urethra. Then we have the membranous urethra is going to be the part that passes through what's called the urogenital diaphragm, so a little tiny piece there. Then the penile or spongy urethra is going to travel the length of the penis, and that's actually going to be, we'll cover penis anatomy later, but that's going to be in what's called the corpus spongiosum. You have the prostatic urethra, it's all one too, but the portion running through the prostate gland is called the prostatic urethra. The membranous urethra is running through that little teeny urogenital diaphragm about a centimeter. Then we have the penile or spongy urethra running through the corpus spongiosum of the penis, so that's the male urethra. Female urethra gets talked about more because of the UTIs, so you see that since the urethra is so short and so close to the body, and you see the urethra there just in the anterior vaginal wall, that it's only about four centimeters long though, so there's a very small barrier between the fecal contents coming out of the anus and contents getting into the urethra, so this is why women are much more likely to get UTIs. Not only that, but it's a shorter, straighter path for organisms to get from the end of the urethra into the body, so the anatomical difference between the male and female urethra is the reason women are so much more likely to get UTIs. Okay, so I think that's all I got to know about the urethra. It's pretty straightforward. We'll talk about it again when we get to the reproductive system in males, but I think that's plenty. Okay, I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.


I'm Hiram Torino. I'm from Tampa, Florida. I work on Jboss Fuse and a whole bunch of open source projects like Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel, and the Fabricade Project. Jboss Fuse is an integration platform that combines a whole bunch of open source projects like Apache CXF, which is used to consume and implement RESTful and web services. There's Apache ActiveMQ, which provides us some reliable messaging. There's Apache Camel, which is used to integrate a bunch of services and components into integration flows. We use Apache Graph as our OSGI runtime. There's also the Fabricade Project, which is used to configure, provision, and monitor clusters of these runtimes onto your on-premise or on the cloud. Jboss Fuse is used to integrate different services or technologies together. A good example might be they need to bring in new leads or opportunities out of the Salesforce system and suck it into a backend database so they could use something like Apache Camel with the Salesforce component and our JDBC component to periodically pull for new leads and do inserts into a database. Fuse comes with over 150 adapters for high-level services like SAP or Salesforce or low-level technologies like JDBC, MongoDB, caching services. Fuse originated from a startup called Logic Blaze, which had a large focus on messaging and ActiveMQ open source messaging. One of the big problems with messaging is you always have to integrate it into systems and we need a tooling around it to simplify how you integrated that messaging into other systems. The Fuse team evolved and integrated through a few different technologies and eventually defined what Carapace and Camel is. We teased it apart a few different projects but put that together and that's what became the foundation of Fuse today. Entry-level developers love Fuse because there's an XML model that has a great editor in JBoss Developer Studio which they can visually design their routes with drag-and-drop operating functionality. There's also Java DSL which Java developers tend to love more because it's more direct and they have more control of these routes but either model that you design for the Java or the XML DSLs they generate the same model under the covers and at runtime they can see what's going on with the routes, check the statistics, trace the routes, even debug the routes. Fuse supports our Fuse distribution of the Apache Craft OSGI container which is a lightweight OSGI container. We also support running on JBoss EAP so all your war deployments can access Camel services just as if they were platform services so you don't have to package them up into your web application. We also support embedded applications mode which means you can use Camel within your web application or microservice. Fuse is supported on OpenShift and it's a big deal because now DevOps can participate in controlling how development bits make it all the way into production. They can create pipelines which you can set up canary deployments or blue-green deployments and OpenShift provides infrastructure to make sure that the right configurations and environments are configured properly for Fuse. Since Fuse is available on OpenShift along with our other JBoss products now you can do combined solutions in a much simpler way.