Okay, hello, welcome to another episode of the podcast. It's me plus you is us. My name is Elaine. And my name is Kwame. And today, we're going to be having a conversation. Doing some marriage counseling. That's if we had marriage counseling. So for context, we didn't go through the traditional method of counseling and they're just not traditional. I wouldn't say traditional, like, you know, the religious route, if I should put it that way. But maybe for context, explain what is how this religious route looks like in Ghana. As I'm saying, so the religious route often involves some counseling if you're going to get married. So I'm not going to have my camera. If you're going to get married, you do some counseling, couples counseling before you get married, because of course you've not been married before. So they need to take you through or advice you on what to expect, what to note, certain things that may pop up. What would you do if it does pop up? So that's what often happens.  We didn't go through that. We didn't do that. No. But through a friend of our channel and a friend of work, he is leading some counseling in his church. And he shared the scenarios with us. So he said that we should try it out. So here we are trying it out. And before we go on, I'm just letting Elaine know that her camera is there. Oh, but I was looking here. OK. Her camera is there if she wants to look at people and talk to them. Because she keeps turning here like, OK, I want to look here, but I don't want to look here. So her camera is there. I know. She's looking really pretty over there as well. So I will introduce the scenario. So the theme for the day is building stronger marital bonds. So we'll have a scenario and then an uncomfortable question. And then we discuss. So the first scenario, imagine a married couple where the husband tends to bottle up his stress and pressure from work, never expressing his emotions or seeking support from his spouse. Over time, this lack of healthy coping mechanism leads to increased tension and distance in their marriage. Question one, uncomfortable question one. How do you handle stress and pressure in your life? Are there any ways in which your coping mechanisms have negatively impacted your marriage? Boom! How do you handle stress in your life? Are there any ways your unspoken coping mechanisms have? In which your coping mechanisms, well, difficult word, have negatively impacted your marriage? Spill the juice. OK, so how do I handle stress in my life? Often, I like to distract myself. That is very right. That's how I handle stress. And distracting how? By distracting myself, I mean I'm on my phone a lot. There's a difficulty in the lines being blurred and everything because I'm on my phone a lot because I'm also working. And then I'm on my phone a lot when I feel stressed also to distract myself. So because I work a lot online, I post my stuff out there, people contact me and I'm a freelancer. So I get inspiration, I get contacts, I meet new people and everything online. I'm always on my phone, technically. And when I'm also stressed out as well, then you find me watching a lot of funny videos and just distracting myself. It's basically not speaking up. And when we also have arguments and I don't feel like talking as well, I retreat and then I stay on my phone basically. So it's more like I go into my shell and by my shell it's on my screen. And then I'm quiet, I'm by myself, I'm just enjoying. So where it becomes a problem is where you have to say or I have to say. I don't know if you want to share a shirt. Yeah, I mean, where it becomes a problem is Elaine is, I mean you are the kind of person who likes to open up things you like to like, if this is a map and it's crumpled, your technique is to open up the map and then let's just straighten it out and see where the issue is and see where we're going. I like to talk through things. And it's not always... This is where the difference comes in. It's not always welcome. It's not always wanted. It's not always, I don't always feel like it. Like I sometimes want to talk or be in my bubble or be in my whole for a bit. Can I comment? Yeah, yeah. Can I comment? So I think there are multiple levels to it. So first, crime is coping mechanism is distracting. So whenever it's on his phone, it's unclear when he is coping with something or that he's working or that he's like chilling. So that on itself, sometimes I have to ask like, are you working? Like I want to say something or I want to discuss something, are you working? Or I say like, I don't know if now is the right time. So we have been able to check in on that. But it's also difficult because sometimes it looks, it seems, I'm not saying it is. Like he's not interested in the topic because he's on his phone afterwards or he's not like, it doesn't look like he's actively doing something with the conversation we've had before. So do you get me? Yeah, yeah.  So then I had to learn that it might not be what it looks like. It might not be that he's not interested. It might be that he's interested, but he has to take a break from it in order to process it. Am I seeing that right? Yeah. Yeah. And then. No, but there's also another level to after that. I mean. I wasn't done with the level. No, go, come in. No, you finish yours. I don't know if I, I think you took me. Okay. So I, yeah. But what I was going to say is that the reason why you also often come in to make sure that we do is based on our experiences from the past, I sometimes will revisit it. Yes. So that's another tricky thing. Grammar can move on without it being really nitty, gritty talked about. I cannot. I want to discuss every single angle. And that's also tiring for him because. Yeah, so we're trying to find that balance. But for me, it gives me a lot of clarity to also hear your perspective on it. Yeah. And it also confirms, I mean, it affirms me and also where I stand and whether I'm not jumping to conclusions that are maybe too rigid or far fetched. Far fetched or like, because I feel something I'm running to that conclusion. Yeah. So that you don't assume wrongly. Yes. So I'm cautious with that. So it helps me to talk through things. And then, yeah. So my coping mechanism, if you've all didn't figure it out yet, I need to sit in it. I mean, I can distract myself off the soapboard, but I also know I have to face certain things. So that is kind of a challenge. That it comes with emotion. So I can be angry or I can be sad. It's mostly sad or disappointed or frustrated with myself. I think those are the things I feel and then I just have to sit in it. So how it has impacted you negatively. I think for you, it can be frustrating that we have to talk through everything. And yeah, that can be tiring. I assume. Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes it's tiring. But on the other hand, I think because Krabbe is like distraction and not necessarily want to revisit stuff. And I am like all about the nitty-gritty and talking through things. I think we kind of find the balance. We are finding it. It took a while to find the balance, but we are finding the balance because now I'm also more open to listening and having a conversation. I don't enjoy it as much. But I'm more open. In the beginning, I was very, I was blocking it. I was very defensive about, it's really not necessary. I can't do it. It's now I don't want to do it or it's not necessary for us to even go that deep into it. Let's just, it's more like conflict aversion in a way. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, but over time, I think we are learning to find a balance. And I'm also very much, much, much different from when we started.  It's a long time. Eight? Yeah. Yeah. I think you've really grown in that sense. Like you want to try for us to talk things through and I think you've also experienced the benefit of talking things through because then there's nothing hanging over us and there's no tension in the room. There's no, you know, because Elaine can't like function after things have not been done. I find it really hard to trust that things are fine when we are not fine. And that's a, that's a major difference between us. And I've also talked already about this with my friends. So I could share it like confidently. Like, okay. Grammy has this foundation of, we're good. Like no matter what, like it's like this foundation underneath anything. Like no matter what happens, we are good. I know, I know, I love you. I know I want to be with you. Like it's this rock solid foundation. I'm not saying I don't feel the same way. I feel the same way about this guy. Don't worry. But for me, I want to actively affirm and do things together and like have quality time and build on it and learn from it. And like it's more an active way and more of a verb for me. While loving for you, it just is. Like you have decided that it's something has clicked and that will be there forever. And I trust that that's true. But for me, it's not like I don't believe in us or like, but it's for me, it's an activity to always keep on growing, to always work on it. And that's also give a different dynamic because when we have conflict or we have a confrontation, afterwards I find it really hard to trust that we're good. Like I want to confirm. You need assurance. You need assurance. It's more like you need assurance than anything.  Yeah, I have to take care of your affirmation before. Yeah, so that is negatively impacted because it is my insecurity that you have to deal with in order for, so that's. Again, it's been a long time and we've been managing. Yeah, so now I don't know if you want to share this with us, I think. So at some point, because I needed to be reaffirmed, otherwise I couldn't even sleep. I don't know if this is good to put out on YouTube, but sometimes you have an argument like it's heated and then Kwame would just turn around and sleep. I'm sure many ladies can, I don't want to generalize, but you have certain people in the relationship that can just turn around and sleep. Yeah, people who cannot. Look, I can turn around and sleep, not like, I don't cast the arguments. I just let you know that, look, it's 11 p.m. We are both tired. Let's just sleep and talk about this tomorrow morning. Because that works for you, but it doesn't work for me. So I would be very heated like in a bed, like I can't sleep. And now I'm all alone with these big feelings. So then we, because that happened... He hates that so much. What? Well, we have to like finish the big feelings before sleep. I... No, not big feelings, big feelings. Big feelings, I'm saying.  Oh, I'm in trouble. No, but I know you don't like that. So we came up with the following solution. Is that after an argument and it's getting late and Carmen feels like tapping out because this is not constructive. And often he's right, I'm not saying he's wrong. Often it's not constructive anymore, but I still have those feelings. So what do you want me to do? Then we would say like, okay, this may be a good time to pause. So we would say not stop, but pause so that it will be addressed tomorrow. So I need that assurance. And then we would hug for 30 seconds. That is okay. That is okay, we are good. So I need to feel that we're good. So how do we do that? Like, of course we're not counting down like 30, 29, no. We just hold for a little bit. And then Carmen would turn around and sleep. And I would also be able to try to sleep. I've just got to hug will be fine. But we don't need that as much anymore lately. I mean, we are barely sleeping anyway. So maybe that's the reason, but we needed that at some point. Yeah. And I think when you are distracted, you're also not looking for that physical connection. Well, when I feel vulnerable after confrontation or an argument or some new insight we gained and it still needs to settle, I really long for that physical like, oh, we're good and just feeling you close, like we're still close. You don't really need that. Like you're so independent in a way. Yeah, but also the practicality of it. I just want to sleep, you know. Yeah, but that's, I don't, if you keep doing that, your hair is going to look funky. It's okay. It actually is okay, it's fine. Okay, let's go to the second scenario. Yeah. So we have planned on doing three scenarios, but where the time is even from this one I can see from our recorder, even for one scenario, I think we're just going to do scenario two. Okay. We'll do part two of this conversation. We're like, we're just happy. We're marriage counseling for us, because as you can see, we need a lot of work. No, we're working on ourselves. We're working on ourselves for sure. Okay, another scenario. Consider a couple who have been married for several years, like us, three and counting and are facing, is it three here? Are facing a difficult financial situation. The husband prioritized finding solutions and providing for the family, but unintentionally overlooks his wife emotional well-being. Reflect on, oh no. Yes, reflect on whether you prioritize your spouse emotional well-being during challenging times and think about how you actively support them and work on building emotional intimacy drawing from the experience of this couple. So the question is, do you prioritize your spouse emotional well-being? How do you support them during difficult times and do you actively work on building emotional intimacy? Yeah, I think this one comes from where we just came from. No, no. It does. It relates it, but this is now about the financial. I think it's a really good topic because financials bring out certain things in people that you didn't even know you were aware of. Like it has to do a lot with the feeling of security and that's why it gets so heated often. But the scenario is the guy is facing some financial challenges. And also the scenario puts the guy in a very traditional role. Yes, so he feels, but maybe that's also can also be coping mechanism that when you're faced with challenges you... Retreats into work. Into, and retreats into what you have known maybe from your own growing up.  Yeah. So it's possible. This is such a thin-iced type of thing to navigate because on the one hand maybe most men, most men feel like if I'm financially okay, I can think. And if I can think, I can manage my emotions. But I can't even breathe if I feel that I can't provide for my family. And that in itself makes the person retreat or go into solution, solution, solution. While the wife also thinks that, you know what? I love you for you. I love what we have. We're okay. I need you to be here with us. I said, now that you have a child or something or with me here and now. And that's where the clash is.  And because of that, he's not available to... Emotionally available. Emotionally available to the impact it has on the spouse because she might not even be looking for solutions. That's another one. Yeah, she might not be looking for solutions, but the solution, that's what I'm saying, that the hard wiring of the average man is when money's in my pockets, everything else is calm. Yeah, especially in, I mean... I can see my wife because I'm not thinking of tomorrow's fuel, the school fees, the food, I'm not, I can see my wife, I can see my kids. None of those things are an issue in the back of my mind. Then, hey, what's up, what's going on with you? That's basically it. Because of the hard-wiring and how this relationship and everything's all right. But there's a lot of gender role there as well. It is. The provider, that the man has to be the provider. So that puts a lot of pressure on men. But that's mostly what happens in religious or traditional settings. Yeah. Yeah, and I don't know the point. I think, yes, I know the point. The point I wanted to make is with that role of being the provider and fixing things, men are also often only thinking of solutions, solutions, solutions. While in this case, the woman might just want to be listened to, or the partner just want to be listened to. We don't need solutions, and we have that too. Out of finance, even, right? Out of you and the finance. Aside from finance. We're putting the finance on the side. Just listening and solution based that we're talking about now. Yes, because that is also, but it is linked to this scenario because he feels in the pressure to provide the ones to fix things. While she just maybe wants to Be listened to. Listened to and reflect on, hey, how did we get here? What can we, how do we feel about it? What does it mean for us, like as two people being in a union? But we have that as well, that I come with something and grandma immediately jumps to, okay, but you can do this, you can do that. And I'm just like, great. But I just wanted to, I know that I will move to solutions in a bit. But I just wanted to share what this meant on my mind and how I feel about it. And yeah, I just wanted you to listen to it.   That on itself can already be a solution. Hearing like always, well, you've got this. I know you can do this. And I think we had to learn the hard way that's to check in like, what do you need? And I think we're still doing it. Yeah, we're slowly bringing it in. So when he grab his coping mechanism aside from distracting is also like being very practical, like functional, like, okay, let's do this. One, two, three, da, da, da, da, da. And then we do like this. That's what works. Because he doesn't like to, he doesn't like to, to see me suffer. And that's where it comes from. So he sees me in pain or in worry. And then he's like, I have to fix this. Yeah, let's just stick it away. Yeah. But again, my coping mechanism is sometimes feeling it and that will fuel me into taking it on and navigating it. So that's also how it connects. Yeah. So, what was the question again? How do you? Yeah, you can check. I lost the question. Oh, do you prioritize your spouse? Oh, I had a question. Do you prioritize your spouse's emotional well-being? Yeah. Yeah, we do. In the beginning, it was, of course, obviously blocked a lot by our own judgment and prejudices. Yeah. But now it's... I think I try, like, I try to check in with you. We all try to check in. Especially, I mean now... But you do way better with checking in. Yeah. You do way better with checking in. I think I've affirmed. Well, it's something I really know. Come on, it's not affirming, it's just the truth. It's something I really admire about you, like you really do check in. So... Thank you. You're making me shy on tape. Yes, I like to check in with you. How was your day? How has it been? And I also noticed when things, okay, I'm not saying I can see in the future, but I know crime very well. And with some things like a certain situation, I know it will get too demanding or I foresee some things just because I know him, how he works. So then I check in a little bit more because I feel like you'll get to a point where you need more support, maybe. Yeah. And so if I can give an example of what we're currently now in. So I'm working a nine to five in an office and Kwame is a freelancer. So most of the times he's a lot with Eli and he's doing amazing. Let me tell you that. So it's not about that I'm worried about him or that they're at home or anything. He's doing amazing. It's just that I think it's not healthy to only be a parent. And because Kwame is also creative, that was fuels him, that will move him. And I foresee, but keep an eye on this channel, that we need to get more help. So Kwame can also feel or nourish his creative side. And that point is gonna come. And I- I don't know when yet, but- So now we finally, I was finally able to talk to him a few days ago. To consider maybe a bit more help. So his mom is helping us out, which is great, but she doesn't live in Accra. So we're trying to also see how to go about that. So that's something I foresee. So in that way, I think ahead of, hmm, this is great being a new dad, but can he only be a dad? I'm not sure if that is the way to go. And then I try to prioritize it and check in with you. Even before you get to the point- Which is fair, but I have also a short hair that, I mean, I had a lot of things planned this year until Eli came. And then you still think that you're gonna be able to do things a certain way. And then when you're in it, you realize that, oh, okay. Maybe you need to re-strategize. So in re-strategizing, I have settled with myself. Like I've made peace with myself with the fact that in his first year, which is very formative or very important, I'm gonna be more present as in home with him because I'm a freelancer. Work is coming, but how work is coming in for me is like I can deliver in the night or like I can- No, I know, I know. You're more flexible. I know. Yeah, I'm very, very, very flexible and that's what the situation is now. But sometimes with creativity or creative projects, you need to kind of- Be doing more- Yes, immerse in it. And if you have a five month old, it's difficult to immerse in things. Even for me when I'm in the office, it's always there. And I'm not even physically present. So that's what I just foresee. But I have to give you credit because one of the, I think one of your coping mechanisms outside of distracting is also adapting. You adapt very well to new situations. Quickly. Yes. That also leads on the functional side of you. Like, okay, this is what it is. Let's go. I mean, the emotions won't solve anything at the moment. Can we just do this? Can we eat? Can we, you know? Yeah, you're very practical. My emotions are all over the place. Yeah. Sorry, I lost the second question. No, these are the two scenarios. No, no, no. There's a second question on this particular scenario. Yeah, so I think we, how do you support them during difficult times? I think we've discussed that. And then do you actively work on building emotional intimacy? I think we do. Yeah, we do. Often when we have something, one of us is dealing with something and we talk about it. That afterwards, and we gain new insights from it. You can just snuggle up and like... And now, because we don't have a lot of time or free time on our hands, we do things that we can both be in the same room and have Eli in the same room, which is technically we that eat in the same room with him, or we eat while watching an episode of something. Yeah, I think that's... Or we just chill in one place together.  Or we watch something at the end of the day. I think it's a nice ritual as well, even though I fall asleep a lot. It's okay. We'll be watching TV and in lane inside. Yeah, it's just... And then she's also the one with the remote. She's holding the remote and... Gone. So I think we're building intimacy through that. And yeah, I would need to think about more moments where we build emotional intimacy, but I think showing up for one another is the most important one. We do show up. I think, yeah, we do show up. And I think we also keep each other emotionally in check, like I get me very rigid with tasks I have to do. So I feel at ease, like in the house, like I have to, for example... Walk the dog. Walk the dog at the end of the day. So he really tries to check in with me, like are you doing this now because you want to? Are you doing it because you feel obliged? Because I often feel obliged to do stuff.  So I'm checking that box. But I have to say it also... I don't get to be outside a lot because I work in an office. So often, like 80% of the time I do it because I also want to get some fresh air in our craft. Fresh air and just clear my head a little. There's more than the computer screen. There's more than all these meetings. There's more than all these writing that has to be done. So it has two functions. But I like that he reminds me that it's okay. It's okay if you leave the dishes or not... Check this box. Oh, that box. Yes, I like to do lists. So in a way, we have a bit of a similar coping mechanism with the functionality. Because I'm like, if this is in place, then I'll feel good. And while mine is a bit on the opposite side, not if this is in place, then I'll feel good. But it's more like you're feeling bad now but you need to eat. Yeah. So I don't care. You're pulling back to the things you really need. Not if this is in place, I'll feel good to... You do it to fix the emotion. I put the emotion down to fix the situation. Like the emotion can wait. Yeah. No, I think, yeah. I think like small tasks in the house where you don't really need to use your head, they help me process through things. So I'm also like, if I do these dishes, then I can think about this. Well, I'm just like, the dishes need to be done. Forget about this for now. But you're also good at saying, and I like that, that helps me, saying, why are you doing this now? Like just sit down, woman. Rest. I got it. Or like, we're not gonna do this today. Tomorrow morning, we'll do the dishes. And I'm like, no, not the dishes. Yeah. So I think those are the two scenarios. I really like this conversation. Yes. I'm so grateful for this counseling. I really like how we're... Maybe we should have done counseling. I'm kidding. How we're doing online counseling. I'm very curious to hear if people recognize stuff from our conversation or that they're like, wow, this is very different than how I moved through these issues. I'm just curious. Yeah, we're just curious because we didn't get an opportunity to have this. But in talking about this, we realized that we're already living it or doing it. Kind of, yeah. I think, I mean, I do see like the added value of counseling, like having a third person look at how you interact and pointing things out. A neutral person just overseeing that. Because things get heated. I mean, in every marriage, I'm sure. It also keeps things spicy. Spicy. Yeah, so that's it for this edition of the podcast. Thank you so much. I'm looking this camera, I'm looking this camera. And we're gonna, you know, maybe do other scenarios. Oh, we'll do the other three. I'm really excited. Like, we'd even want to continue, but let's cut it here otherwise, yeah. Oh, there's no otherwise. Just let's leave some for the other times. We've tickled your taste buds, but we'll come back. Yeah. Okay, thank you so much. Where are we? This one? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you so much. I still have to get you to sell the camera. Thank you so much for watching. Curious to hear what you think in the C section. We do have more videos. Probably we'll put them up here. And catch you later. Bye. Bye. In the C section. See you in the C section. Ah.


So if you notice that the people who are promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election results are the same people who are promoting conspiracy theories regarding COVID vaccines. So the best analogy in my mind between COVID vaccines and what was an analogy to COVID vaccines. I saw a cartoon today, you've got a building on fire and the flames are just leaping up everywhere and then you've got this crank saying well what about the long-term consequences of fire extinguishers. So that's my attitude towards those who are all skeptical about COVID vaccines, meaning those COVID vaccines that have been approved for use in the United States after undergoing extensive research, it's the equivalent of standing in a burning building and when you're offered a fire extinguisher you're saying oh but what about the long-term consequences to fire extinguishers? So why do people believe such ludicrous things such as that COVID vaccines are really dangerous or that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, why do people believe such ludicrous things without any evidence? So I think part of it is people just love to feel smarter than everyone else that they've got the real truth and everyone else are just sheep, everyone else just following conventional authorities but the conspiracy theorists they really know the truth. So there's this bloke Julian Sanchez and he is an analyst at the Kato Institute and he's got a good Twitter thread here on cranks about the election and cranks about COVID vaccine. So he says, because I like exterminating any residual shreds of faith in humanity. I looked through the overwhelmingly hostile comments on a YouTube video by a doctor debunking some COVID misinformation tonight. So by the way, for people who are hospitalized and dying of COVID, between 94 to 99 percent of them are unvaccinated except fire extinguishers have been proven to be useful and so have COVID vaccines. If you're being hospitalized or dying of COVID, the odds are about 95 out of 100 that you have not been vaccinated. So those states with high levels of vaccination, they're very low rates of people getting hospitalized for COVID. So the evidence is just overwhelming, overwhelming how effective COVID vaccines are. You have to be a person who just wants to put your hand in the sand and ignore all the evidence. If you think there's something particularly heinous or dangerous about those vaccines for COVID that have been approved for use in the United States. So there are a lot of parallels between those who believe in election theft and those who think that COVID vaccines are dangerous. So what you've got, you've got vaccines have risk. Yeah, the risks of getting COVID are about 100,000 times worse than the purported risks of taking the vaccine. So everything is a balancing act. So on the one side, COVID, 100,000 times more dangerous than any possible repercussions from the vaccine. So we've got cranks on both election theft and COVID vaccines. And they often like the trappings of real science. So I've had all these people send me Bret Weinstein's videos on COVID-19 vaccines. Do fire extinguishers have risks? Yes, they have risks. All right. Everything has risks. So I will post relevant links in the video description. So what you've got with cranks on both COVID vaccines and purported election theft is you've got people who want to use all the superficial trappings of real science. So you'll have links to, you know, Bret Weinstein, biologist, right? I don't think there's a burning building. No, we've just got four million plus dead people from COVID. But hey, what do you care? Like when has the unnecessary deaths of four million people bothered you? All right. So you've got links to like journal articles. And then you've got all these impressively hackery looking hex dumps and spreadsheets full of IP dresses. And it's like, see, I'm giving you the evidence. Here's a link to Bret Weinstein, right, Bret Weinstein biologist. He made a video where he talked about this. So there's an article in the Washington Post about the long con of Mike Pillow CEO Mike Lindell is just kind of winding down. So he's just putting on a summit trying to claim that China stole the 2020 presidential election. And he had a breakout session where Lindell's team claimed to have provided evidence. And it's just a collection of files. We don't have four million dead in the world. There aren't four million dead from COVID, yes, there are over 600,000 in the United States. Why do you care? Look. I care that people are dying unnecessarily. I care that regular Americans, taxpayers have to spend upwards of a million dollars taking care of those who are too irresponsible to get the vaccine.  Who do you think puts the bill?  Do you think they have up-to-date health insurance? Do you think they have comprehensive health insurance? No.   Well, they pay the price if they get badly sick. But the rest of us pay the price because we have to pay for the treatment that they get because usually they're too irresponsible to carry sufficient health insurance, right? So 10 days in the ER, that's going to run well over a million dollars, right? So who puts the bill for fat people and people with other preexisting conditions? We do. So that's why I have so much contempt for people who don't take care of themselves and allow themselves to degenerate through obesity, lack of exercise, not looking after basic health issues. So Mike Lindell's kind of released all this digital gibberish, a list of computer internet protocol addresses and rich text format files trying to prove that China hacked the election. And apparently hundreds of thousands of people have watched his videos on election fraud. That's an ethical solution, assuming that what you're saying is true. I don't know. I don't know.  And like when you've got all these people, particularly on kind of my side of the political spectrum or pushing bogus theories about vaccines and bogus theories about election fraud, in particular because this is on my side of the political spectrum, I just want to point it out. So that's why I find it particularly interesting because they generally tend to be people from the distant right. Now what you get is the trappings of real science, trying to make these cranky cases event against COVID vaccine or for electoral fraud. But the evidence is completely bogus, right? So we had what Joseph Cotto presented as evidence for massive 2020 election fraud, a New York Post article with zero supporting evidence and nobody following up to provide anything additional on the New York Post article. You just had a New York Post article that essentially repeated all the claims of Donald Trump about mail-in voting, but without any evidence. But for Joseph Cotto, this is like compelling. Then his other piece of compelling evidence was this poster Patrick Basham, who doesn't understand the basics of politics and political analysis and polling analysis, just wrote a completely pathetic piece, which I've discussed many times. So people, they want to believe in voter fraud or they want to believe that the vaccines are dangerous, evidence is irrelevant, but they want to make their case with what sounds like evidence. So that's kind of amusing. They like the superficial trappings of real science like, here, listen to this Brett Weinstein video. Now the evidence is always absolutely useless, absolutely pointless, because the people making these cases, they don't have the training, they don't have the context, they don't have the ability to evaluate the quality or the relevance of the links or the technical articles that they're claiming. They don't even understand what they're promoting in most cases and same on the election fraud side. So the people who want to believe this, they have no idea what real evidence would look like in these cases. They don't know whether it makes any sense that someone would have that kind of information claimed in the spreadsheet full of numbers, but they are flattered by the invitation to assess the evidence for themselves. It's like, oh, do your own research, make up your mind. I'm just asking questions. When you have someone is using the approach, I'm just asking questions. Actually that's a real tip-off that they're offering a bogus line of inquiry, because if you have a point to make, make the point. Don't just try to make your point by saying, oh, I'm just asking questions. That's like the lowest level way of trying to make a point by claiming, oh, I'm just asking questions, bro. What do responses from actual experts look like? Well, they're almost always completely dismissive of these cranks, understandably so because experts can tell the evidence is nonsense and they're not interested in spending hours going into granular detail about why, throwing around citations to technical matters they know full well, a lay audience isn't equipped or even has the ability to understand. The people who are equipped to understand this technical material don't need a popular debunking.  Then to the audience, once they believe in these cranks, this comes across as arrogant. The crank, he is flattering me with a display of technical jargon and a mountain of citations to provide evidence. I'm not equipped to evaluate that evidence, but I can not along and say, oh, yes, I see. I feel like I've been treated as a peer. People with real expertise understand that this would be performative and pointless. So past this fairly superficial point, they go with some version of 99% of us who spent years studying this are on the same page and you have to trust us, which does feel patronizing. What the crank is doing is more condescending. The crank is the equivalent of a child giving a child a fake cell phone so they can make calls just like mom and dad. They're pretending not to ultimately rely on trust and so they get trust. The actual expert is honest. I can't take you through medical school. I can't give you a computer science degree in a YouTube video.  So to the insecure, that feels bad. At the bottom of these conspiracy theorists is just insecurity. When the expert says, look, you need to do years of study to be after understand this, or you need to at least do a couple hundred hours of study to understand this. That's going to feel off-putting to the insecure. So all this is a byproduct of a culture that valorizes the ideal of being an independent thinker who questions to receive wisdom, doesn't just accept things on authority. Now, there are healthy aspects of that, but almost everything we know about the world and about history is because we've accepted it from authority. Aside from very limited number of things that we have deduced from our own life experience, especially everything that we think we know comes to us because we've accepted it from some authority. So the vast majority of human knowledge is beyond any individual's ability to personally verify. So we have to take most things on authority. And folks who are trusting a crank, of course, are also taking things on authority. So what the crank does is give people the illusion of not trusting authority. Unlike those sheep who just trust the authorities, it's like the media elites win large followings by telling you not to trust media elites. So the expert is treating you like an adult is the one who at some point is saying, I'm sorry, you don't have the math skills. You're not willing to do the work to understand what's going on here rather than pretending that common sense conquers every domain of knowledge. So let's have a look at the chat. What is my fundamental point here? My fundamental point is about the similarities between cranks on COVID vaccines and cranks on election fraud and how they it's amusing how they love the trappings of science without any understanding of what they're actually dealing with. And it's also a point about how almost everything we have to that we think we know about reality because we have accepted it from authority. So in strictly logical terms, argument from authority is a logical fallacy, but it is the way the world works. Obviously everything we know is because we accept authority. Why are the numbers of deaths in San Francisco being at zero weeks on end? Because by and large, people who live in San Francisco are way above average in intelligence and I would assume there are fairly high rates of vaccinations in San Francisco. So you find an area where you have more than 50 percent of the population that's vaccinated. They have relatively low death and hospitalization rates from COVID. You find an area where less than 50 percent of the population is fully vaccinated and you start getting much higher rates of hospitalization and death from COVID. So those who are getting hospitalized by COVID now or dying from COVID now, between 95 percent, 99 percent of them are not vaccinated. You imagine that if 100 percent of America gets the vaccine, that this will go away. It's not a matter of this will go away. It's a matter of can you reduce the death rate and the hospitalization rate because putting people in ERs is very expensive and the people are so moronic that they're not vaccinated, they're unlikely to have adequate health insurance to pay for their $500,000, $2 million worth of ER bills.  So it's not a matter of, oh, 100 percent vaccination, then all our problems go away. We're going to need booster shots for years, right? We're going to need approximately annual booster shots to deal with COVID for years from here. Are people in non-high risk groups dying of COVID?  Right, so most people who die from COVID are not otherwise at death's door.  Who cares? To me, 16 years of life is a very big deal. So we have 610,000 or so COVID deaths in the United States, average death costing 16 years of life. Yeah, to me, that's a big deal. Let's go through the chat. So, yeah, I assume that we're going to need booster shots approximately annually from here on out. And so the longer that you've gone since your COVID vaccine and apparently the less effective the vaccines are at preventing you from getting COVID, but they still retain great effectiveness at preventing you from getting hospitalized or dying. So Israel is already providing booster shots. I'm sure we'll be getting booster shots in the United States in the next few months. Vaccines have risk. It's so tiny for COVID vaccines like AstraZeneca. Like one in a million person has like some blood clot problem. And it's not even clear that that blood clot is coming from the AstraZeneca. That's there's been so much shoddy discussion of media reporting about AstraZeneca and blood clots. They talk about blood clots linked to AstraZeneca where you can link everything. Linking is a really inexact term, all right? You can link watching the Luke Ford show to, you know, 100 horrible outcomes, right? You can link drinking water to 100 horrible outcomes. Like you can link this and this, noting that there's some kind of correlation between A and B is not causation. So all this media talk about AstraZeneca linked to blood clots, it's just such, you know, fuzzy talk, right? We don't have evidence that AstraZeneca has been killing people. We do have evidence that people have taken AstraZeneca have also died because everyone who's died, they've also died because they've also had water. They've also had food. They've also breathed air. They've also gone for a walk, right? So just because they took AstraZeneca and then three weeks later they died doesn't mean that AstraZeneca killed them. And so this argument that AstraZeneca is linked to blood clots is just very inexact talk because we don't have any clear causation between AstraZeneca and blood clots. Thomas Bergman says Britain reports 35% of hospitalizations involve people who are fully vaccinated. I don't believe you. I don't believe you because in the United States of the people who are hospitalized or dying from COVID, 94 to 99% of them are not fully vaccinated. So why do you care, Luke? If it works, then you're safe up there on your high horse. Like, why do I care about anything? I could do a show about some things that happened in the Middle East 3,000 years ago. So I could try to give you an explanation for why I care, but I may not even be cognizant of it. I may not be fully aware of it. You don't fully know your motives. I don't fully know my motives. I just know some things click and it's like, oh, yeah, I want to talk about this. So we don't even know our own motives. I've seen how they count the numbers. They count anyone who pops a PCR test, says Thomas Bergman. All right, Thomas Bergman, what have you read about how death certificates are filled out? I suspect you haven't done that much work. So industrialized nations take death certificates very seriously. Now, does that mean there's never a mistake in a death certificate? Of course not. Everything that is human contains mistakes. But industrialized nations want to get a clear picture of how their population is dying. So if you look at the serious way that death certificates are taken industrialized nations, and yes, there are going to be errors, there are going to be mistakes. But overall, there's not some massive overcounting of COVID cases, right? So from the available evidence, it appears that COVID cases are undercounted by a factor of three. So we've got numerous academic studies arguing that COVID cases are undercounted by a factor of three. That means there are three times as many COVID deaths as what have been reported. So that's the consensus of the academic studies that I've seen until now. They could be wrong. Science is constantly changing. Skinny, healthy people aren't a problem. I suspect that skinny, healthy people in general are much less susceptible to a whole range of things, including respiratory illnesses. There's more number of people who are allergic to peanut butter, but most people aren't. Can the government mandate people eat peanuts because studies show that peanuts are safe? Well, from what I've read, if people are introduced to peanuts earlier in life, it's highly unlikely that they will develop these peanut allergies later in life. So there's no analogy between peanut allergies and bad reactions to COVID vaccines. So there are far more peanut allergies proportionately than there are bad reactions, severe reactions, disturbing reactions to COVID vaccine. But I believe that the government should operate on the basis of greatest good for the greatest number. Yeah, 160 million people get vaccinated with AstraZeneca and the anti-vax people think that like 160 blood clot cases are statistically significant. Right, so COVID will never go away. We're going to need booster shots annually. The third world will not be jabbed. Well, we've had great success of vaccinating the third world with all sorts of different diseases. So the globalist health authorities who you despise, they've effectively doubled our lifespan at last 120 years.  Right, so we have people who are protesting chlorine and swimming pools. We have people protesting the equivalent of fluoride in water. We have people protesting all sorts of different vaccines. All the major significant public health changes have come with their critics. And guess what? Overwhelmingly, the public health authorities, the global minded public health authorities have most of the time been right and the critics have been wrong because the global health authorities with the things they've done such as vaccination putting fluoride in water, putting chlorine in swimming pools, getting everyone vaccinated. All the measures that public health authorities have taken, the major measures have doubled our lifespan in the 120 years. Yeah, non-vaxxers are made an identitarian. So the much of the Trump crowd has climbed on this crazy election fraud, you know, vaccine dangerous bandwagon as a part of their identity. I remember Biden getting a jump of 150,000 votes on CNN. Yes, because votes come in and there are areas where 90% of the vote is going to go for the Republicans and other areas votes are going to come in where 90% of the vote is going to come in for the Democrats. And also guess what? In the tabulation of vote counting, sometimes people make an error. So they take 130,000 from this candidate. They rectify the error, send it over to that candidate. So the electoral system in the United States is overwhelmingly staffed by volunteers. So they do make mistakes. That's very different from voter fraud when defined as a crime, which people get prosecuted and convicted for. Mike Lindell went on CNN, said he's going to drop the bombshell info on faxes, going to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Yeah, he's holding a three day symposium in South Dakota. Not very impressive what he's coming up with. Yeah, Mike Lindell is going to release the Kraken. So there's another article here about something that I've been banging on about for approximately a year now. So there's this Chinese real estate company. It's got like 300 billion dollars in debt. So you think the United States has bad debt? You think the United States has bad corporate debt, bad private sector debt? Where is this? Where's this story I just saw now on this Chinese business? If there's no voter fraud, why is there opposition and hostility toward voter ID law? So number one, of course, there's always going to be some fraud. My argument is that it's not significant. Now, the hostility to voter ID fraud. So I think much of it is just arousing the base. Right. So voter ID would make very little difference. Right. Having voter ID will not reduce voter turnout significantly. It would have a very small effect, but it fires up your base. Right. So I think that's that's why people get so fired up about it. Where is this story that I just read in the New York Times? Oh, Evergrande. Evergrande went from China's biggest developer to one of its worst debtors. So Evergrande has 300 billion in debt. It has far more in debt than it has in assets. And Evergrande is a Chinese real estate company. It epitomizes the vulnerability of the world's number two economy, which is China. So it does more money than it can pay off. So China has all sorts of problems like this. There's even a special term for these Chinese problem companies. They are great rhinos. They are so large. They are so entangled in their country's financial system. The Chinese government must ensure their survival. So failure on the scale of just one of these great rhinos would just ripple across the country, spell ruin for millions of Chinese. So China is very much a paper tiger. As I've been going on about for more than more than a year. Yeah, in America, we call it too big to fail. So yeah, if there's no better for ways, there's so much opposition, hostility and passion about voter ID laws. So a lot of passion. A lot of opposition, not a lot of hostility. It's not really about the thing that they're saying.  Just like the opposition to Donald Trump that said the 2016 election was not legitimate because Russia interfered with our election. That wasn't really about concern that Russia rigged the 2016 election. It was a way of putting a damper on the Trump administration's ability to execute its agenda and it was a way to fire up its base. Just like voter fraud for Republicans these days isn't primarily about voter fraud. It's a form of identity and it's a way to cope with disappointing news. And it's a way to fire up your base. So Roberta Kaplan, who's suing all those alt-right people on Charlottesville. She has been implicated in the downfall of Governor Andrew Cuomo. She's resigned from a fundraising organization. She founded it. So apparently Roberta Kaplan had been going after what Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch and company. She had been attacking Andrew Cuomo's accusers. Yeah, Evergrande will need a bailout from the Chinese Communist Party. But there's a whole host of companies in China, just like Evergrande. Oh, did you see a big boom in productivity for the pandemic productivity boom last? So we've got fewer workers now and they're making more stuff. So we've had this enormous productivity boom and is this significant? And I think it is because the the COVID crisis has forced a lot of individuals and companies to learn new technology and more efficient ways of doing things. So I don't know about you. I'm 55 years of age. I don't generally like change. I only like learn new things and make significant changes when I have to. And now because of COVID, our economy is being forced to make all these significant changes. More and more people are working from home and working from home. It's far more efficient. So you the average person will save an hour or two a day from commuting. And we've probably got more automation and companies have invested in new software, new technology, all sorts of businesses are found that they can do with fewer workers. So the workers they do have maybe working more efficiently, maybe working harder. So the theory of efficiency wages suggests that employers get what they pay for. Paying more means a higher performing workforce.  So now that people are getting higher wages, people I think may be working harder in general. Then the work from home effect. So employers are embracing working from home is a long term solution. They're investing in appropriate technology. More and more offices are paper free and not keeping paper files. If your office is all in the cloud, then people can work from anywhere. So businesses going forward, they're going to have fewer offices, smaller offices, fewer desks. We're going to have higher total factor productivity. So not just the efforts of workers, but the capital investments that they use to do their job. So we're going to have less office space going forward, fewer desks, fewer cubicles. So working from home has generated apparently a 5% boost to productivity. And most of that gain comes from save commuting. Now, official labor productivity statistics do not include commute time and hours worked, but people now have an extra hour or two in their life if they're working from home. And this pandemic has forced all sorts of innovation for individuals like learning Zoom, learning the cloud, learning technology and forced innovation that would would not have happened as rapidly. So we've got got an adoption of technology that has accelerated new firms to being created at a historic pace. We've got a shift to remote work, which is going to outlast the crisis. So these four forces are going to lead to sustained productivity. Joe Biden received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. You receive more African-American votes. I don't get a popular vibe anyway, because it doesn't matter. People didn't vote for Joe Biden because they liked Joe Biden. Most of the people who voted for Joe Biden voted for Joe Biden because they hated Donald Trump. Joe Biden does not have to be liked. He does not have to be respected. He does not have to be adored. There doesn't have to be any passion for Joe Biden because it's a binary choice in American presidential elections. So in the suburbs, there was a 2 percent shift against Donald Trump and the Republicans. So that's where the election was decided. So people didn't vote for Joe Biden and overwhelming numbers because of the intrinsic qualities of Joe Biden. They voted for Joe Biden because they thought he was a better choice than Donald Trump. Halsey and Turd flinging monkeys says the American economy is going to collapse, going into a hyperinflationary mode. A la Venezuela is in Barbway. Why am I a republic going forward after Joe Biden's trillion dollar infrastructure plan? Count me skeptical. I think we're going to be fine. I think America is going to dominate the 21st century just as much as it dominated the 20th century. Yeah, we may have more inflation than we expected. We may have, oh my God, we may even have five percent annual inflation this year. We may have inflation going forward, say two percentage points higher than what we expected. So instead of two percent annual inflation for the next five years, it may be something like four percent annual inflation. How are we ever going to survive four percent annual inflation? Oh my God, it's just like the Why Am I a Republic? Joe Biden couldn't fill an arena or a stadium. Like Trump or Obama couldn't hold an event attracting more than a thousand people. That's true, but you don't have to be charismatic. You don't have to attract large crowds to get people to vote for you. What you have to do is be the better two options in people's mind. The people that didn't like Trump didn't trust Trump voted for Biden, no matter how they felt about Biden. As long as they thought he was the least worse of the two options, they voted for Biden. And so there's just no correlation between crowd size and voter turnout on election day. That's just a complete delusion.  Therefore he's got a lot of uncounted support. There's just no evidence for that. I remember Gough Whitlam was running against Malcolm Fraser in Australia in 1975.  So look at any political science analysis. What's the connection between rally turnout and election day results? There's none. There's none. People aren't voting for the most charismatic candidate or the most entertaining candidate. They're voting for who they fear less of the two major choices. Bye-bye.


Hello, WordCamp Europe. Bonjour, Paris. It's an incredible honor to be here today, and thank you all very much for sticking it out to the final session. Last thing standing between you and the after-party. I hope that we can have a good time together. Before I start, I want to just note, I learned to code from the WordPress community. I started making websites when I got out of college and learned more and more from many of the people in this room. And it's events like WordCamps that make that community so strong. So before I go any further, I'd just like to ask for a round of applause for the organizers and the volunteers and the translators and everyone else. These things do not happen without them, and I am very grateful to be a part of this one. This one's been incredible. It's been so good that this is, I figured I'd start off with a data visualization, and because whether or not you know it, pie charts are kind of like the comic sands of data visualization. People love to use them, but designers think it's awful. I want to make data that is approachable, though, and comic sands and papyrus are often noted as being approachable fonts. So I thought, perhaps, it would be a good chart to start with. And this chart shows the talks in blue at WordCamp Europe that I have wanted to attend and the talks in red that I would have liked to skip. And the only talk that I would have liked to skip is my own, because I would love to be across the way in Michaels. But thank you all for coming to mind again. And it's going to be an interesting session, because data is not necessarily something that we talk about a lot. I mean, we talk about it often, but we don't think about really what it means. We think of WordPress in terms of the things that it lets us do. We think of it in terms of publishing and posting and commenting. We think in terms of content, because it is a content management system. And we are not used to thinking of content in terms of data, but of course it is. All of that content comes from a database, so what else could we call it? In order to do data visualization, you have to have some sort of information and a desired picture you would like to draw with it. And in WordPress, in order to have a website, you have some sort of information and a desired presentation you would like to give it. Those are the sites that we create. And the way that we traditionally take data out of WordPress and put it in front of our users is through PHP and through the loop. The loop is just PHP code that takes information retrieved from the SQL database and converts it into a format that we can map into HTML. So each individual post gets rendered out in a specific part on the page, usually one-to-one, maybe again in the sidebar. But as you're reading through, if you go to the URL for a page, you get the data for that page. The page is driven by the data in the database. In this way, every web page we make that is driven by a database can be thought of as a data-driven document. This is a phrase we'll return to. Everything we do is giving visual representation or audio or semantic representation to information that is abstract and stored somewhere that we cannot see in a form that we cannot imagine. So the goal of data visualization is to take that complex information and represent it visually to let you learn things about it that you might not be able to see or might not have known about. DataViz is all around us. DataViz being the hip way to refer to data visualization. Charts and graphs and interactive graphics are all around us on metro signs and buses and cell phones and apps and dashboards and boardrooms. We're so immersed in pictures of data that it's very easy to take them for granted. But every chart that we see was created by a person for a reason. In a way, it's a storytelling mechanism. And the more complex the story, the more complex the graphic. If you have a lot of different pieces of information, what we would call dimensions, different aspects of a picture, putting them together in one image that represents in one graphic things like geographical position, size of an army, temperature, that's a lot of work. And if you do it well, you can communicate a lot of information very concisely. It's an honor to have made this conference in Paris, because some of the best data visualization examples that we have from the beginning of the field are by Frenchmen, including Minard, who created this graphic. And the upshot of this is that we have a number of over 100 years, 150 years right now of good data visualization practices that we've accumulated. And they're taught in schools. We learn to make charts and graphs and plot things and learn how to use Excel, which is the most widespread data visualization tool in the world. We measure site traffic and sales with one eye on analytics dashboards like those provided by Google and Jetpack. And as we're reading news stories, data maps and visualizations jump out at us to help tell stories and help fill in the information around the words that we're reading. They don't tell, they show. But of course this isn't just limited to articles, many data visualizations can actually become a story in and of itself. They let us take things that are very complicated, things that are very abstract like budgets and national agendas, and they give us the ability to explore them and to draw our own conclusions from them. They highlight nuances that might be missed. And they can also humanize numbers or just give us a sense of the scale of a problem. When we read a number like 11,419, which is what the ticker on the left will eventually reach, 11,419 is not a picture that we can hold in our head. But if we can think of each individual point as a person, it begins to seem like a whole lot of people. A good visualization can show us the individuals that make up statistics and it can highlight things about the information around us that we really should be thinking about and make us aware of the scale of some problems. It can also help us solve some of those problems. In the sciences where researchers in different groups can produce astronomical amounts of unconnected data, we have a lot more ability to gather information than we do to understand and analyze it. And data visualization, like this portal built with Boku and Harvard Medical School, can be used to build collaborative tools that let scientists explore that data and find connections in it that might lead to breakthroughs and things like cancer research. The scale of data being vast, what we call big data, is not something limited to the sciences either. You can't reason about something that you can't see. So if we're gathering tremendous amounts of information about things like economic performance of different companies or the performance of different providers of internet traffic, you can't really reason about that information. There's no point for you having collected it until you get it in front of somebody who can actually understand it in a visual way, or an analytical way, I should say. And so that's all nice. But why am I talking about these things at a Word camp? Something that really drives me is finding ways to bring in things from the rest of our fields to make WordPress and the community around it stronger, and also to make us more aware of what's going on in the broader world and even under our noses within WordPress. So today I wanted to propose this talk to marry two major interests of mine, data visualization and WordPress on the open web, and give you a sense of how these tools might be relevant to us in our plugins and themes and other projects. I had the immense honor of working at Boku, a data visualization consultancy in Boston for a number of years. I actually have moved on this month to new things, but what they taught me was that this is an immensely powerful skill, and it is a tool that we should all be aware of and be able to leverage in our work. Because content is data, and data can be visualized, so we shouldn't just be looking at the words, we should be thinking about what else is there and what we can understand about it to better meet our own goals. To see how we can do this ourselves, let's think about what sort of data is in a post. It's got a title, some amount of content, an author, categories and taxonomies, and of course a date. And of those, the date is the only numeric field, and because it's a numeric field, we can do things like Jetpack does in their analytics module or like GitHub does on their contribution graph, and we can take that date and plot it in the calendar format that we're familiar with to give us a sense of how regularly we are posting. Regular posting is important for maintaining a blog or a site because it's the way that you generally maintain engagements and get the word out and keep yourself going if you take a break, as I did on my personal blog. I ran this on my own blog and it was basically empty for the past year because I've been working on other things. I think having it in front of you is a good reminder and I really like what GitHub does, but I think that we can actually, for our first example, make me simplify this down even more and say rather than looking at days in a year, what individual dimensions of data might be relevant for understanding posting rhythm over the course of a year on the month-by-month basis. So this is what's called binning as in putting things in a bin and it's taking a number of individual data records, in this case posts, and grouping them together into bars that we can compare. The reason that pie charts are sort of denigrated is that they're often used instead of a bar chart for comparing different values and it's much easier for us to compare values in terms of vertical change than area. Humans are very bad at estimating area, so that's just an aside, but what we're doing here is we're saying let's get all of the posts on our site and understand what months they were published in. Looks like there's some peaks in March and June and maybe again in the end of the summer and some dips towards the holidays. This is actually something that we can render in PHP. We could do a WP query and get back the data and map it into some sort of object that we could then use to draw divs that we style with CSS to create a graphic like this. But in this case, we're actually going to be using scalable vector graphics and JavaScript because if we do that, then we can start to animate it and we can start to say, what is the change over time? Company founded, smaller team, more interesting projects, even more interesting projects, more velocity, more interesting things to share, open source kicking off and you can get a sense of the history of a site and you could use this as a way to sort of understand and think about where there might be gaps. For example, there's a gap here in January 2017 where we didn't schedule any posts before everyone went away on holiday, so when we came back in the new year, there wasn't anything that was quite ready to go out yet. This is an interesting editorial tool and this is something that could be built into a plugin to maybe help maintain a little bit more of that rhythm over the year and be more aware of those gaps when we should be thinking a little bit farther ahead. So how do we actually go about drawing this image? There's a lot of power in getting our data into the browser but JavaScript is complicated, SVG is complicated and getting data in general is generally complicated but it's gotten a lot easier because with the WordPress REST API in core, of course, we can just ask for the data and it comes back to us as data in JSON. So we can step through all our posts, get the first page, collect it, pull the dates and post times out of it and then step on to the next page and keep going until we have got all of them. You can make these requests by downloading them manually using a tool like Curl, jQuery, NEAJaxLibrary and then you'll realize that that's probably not the best way to go about doing this because you're making a number of individual requests and you're throwing away almost all of the content. So it's been mentioned a number of times at this event but I can't believe we can stress it too much. We should be very, very mindful about the data that we're sending over the wire and this JSON on here, which is less than a single post-worth of data, it adds up. For a WordPress plugin, we shouldn't be assuming anything about the internet of our user. It should be totally not known to us whether they're going to be on a low-band width metered connection or an absolute top-tier free unlimited high-fiber system even in a major U.S. city, I've been feeling that phone data plans get more and more less and less, I'm sorry, unlimited every year and it's slow. You don't want to have to make people wait or they're going to go and they're going to find something else. To make a graph like the one I showed, this is all we actually need, although technically we I think need even less, we only need the year and the month and the count. So if we send anything extra, we're wasting bandwidth, money and time and if you saw the lightning talks in this room earlier, also harming the environment because all of that time is server energy. So we use custom endpoints. The first sort of takeaway that people should get is that if you want to go down this route and start exploring with drawing graphics in the browser, use a custom endpoint to get the data to the client because it's that way you're going to be able to make things as concise as possible and if the data isn't going to change very often, you'll also be able to use transients to store that data so that it can be sent very quickly. Some of the graphics that I've worked on can take quite a while to compute and even though we're not working with astronomical amounts of data in WordPress, if you want an overview, that's a lot of queries. You don't want to repeat those on every request. If the data, yeah, using the default endpoints is great for prototyping, but be efficient when you're shipping production code. So now that we have that data, we need to draw the graphic and for this, as I mentioned, we can use HTML and CSS for many things. They're particularly good at barcrafts and area charts, sort of tree maps, which is a rectangular nested area chart. Anything that can render HTML can be used to create a visualization and you can use any tool you're comfortable with to render that markup, whether it's on the client or the server. But again, once you start wanting to get into more interesting shapes and lines and different sorts of layout, you're probably going to want to move towards scalable vector graphics or SVG. There's a lot of drawing tools out there that help you with SVG and this is not going to be an especially code heavy talk. It's more going to be sharing tools and resources. One data visualization tool for SVG stands out above the rest and that is a tool called D3 or data-driven documents. This is a tool created by a developer named Mike Bostock and an open source community and it is a really excellent way to declaratively specify the mappings between the data and the way you want the represented and then to define a procedure for actually making that image and handling updates and things like when you get new streaming data in and you get those fancy movie style dashboards that are constantly changing and animating. But you don't have to do all the rendering yourself so before we dive into more charts I just want to highlight a couple other tools that are available for doing data visualization, one of which is of course Excel but also Tableau and other tools. I don't want you to think that the only way to make a visual is to do it on the web but if you do want to draw it in JavaScript you don't want to handle things like put a circle here put a bar there, make it this big size at this way. There's a lot of interesting tools in the middle that give us the ability to say more what kind of chart we want and then they'll do the rest for us. One that I have some personal experience with is a tool called Vega, which is by the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab in the States.  And his group has been working on Vega to produce basically the same way that we, with the REST API, give a JSON syntax for our posts. They've created a JSON syntax for data visualization. So this is something where your tool can simply get the data and give it to Vega and then they'll handle the drawing. Or if you're using React or Viewer or something there's a lot of libraries out there that let you handle the drawing of a visualization using these tools. So there's a lot of other information about our posts that we can visualize besides the date. The date is arguably the least interesting because it's numeric and we kind of have good tools for reasoning about numbers already. But an interesting piece of posts are the categories and the tags that they have and the way that those interrelate. I know that something that many of the WordPress projects I've worked on struggle with is how best to use categories and tags. So now that we know a little bit about some of these tools available, there are some techniques that we can use to visualize those relationships in an interesting way. And graphing a relationship means effectively graphing a network. Relationships define connections between individual entities in space and if you think of those as a network you can start to position them and group them and understand what the relations between them are. So D3 provides what's called a force directed graph. It is a tool to basically do a lightweight physics simulation to take a bunch of points and say, all right, how can we lay these out? How can we give them forces that represent whether they should be connected or not and run that simulation until you get to a point of stability at which point you can start to explore and see that, oh, in this case, which is another Mike Bostock example, these are the characters of Les Miserables. Les Miserables, sorry. And the central characters, like Jean Valjean and Javert, end up in the center, whereas the characters whose names you don't remember are those stray individual points leading out on the edges. Everything recently seems to be about graphs and networks and so knowing how to do this seems like a useful thing. Maybe we can use a network graph to lay out the posts that we want to share and understand maybe visually what types of content we write about can focus our use of tags a little bit better. Or maybe not. This was an idea that I had when I pitched this talk, was to do a really nice network diagram of tags and categories, but because most blogs I feel tend to be fairly focused, you get what ends up being called a hairball, where everything connects to everything else and it all clumps together in the center. There's still things we can learn from this. You can see, as you explore, that open source projects are related to... Tags that represent open source projects are related to a category that represents open source contribution and web development and the outliers along the edge are actually turned out to be tags that are not used. And so this is a useful thing if only to know what tags you could probably delete. But there's probably better ways to represent this information. Not every chart is totally appropriate to every form of data and different representations are going to highlight different things. This is the same data about the tag usage visualized instead of a network as a co-occurrence matrix. And what this means is that if two tags occur on the same post, they are connected and we fill in that square. And if we sort it so that the most used tags and categories are in the upper left corner, then we can finally start making some useful things... useful statements about the content on this website. We can say, ah, we write about tutorials. We make a lot of tutorials, but they cut across a number of different topics or, you know, maybe the most focused topics that we've talked about are performance, things that are constant problems, and so they require constant investigation and writing. You can also see which terms are less common and begin to understand whether those represent areas where you might want to expand the articles that you provide or else maybe focus more on the places where you have the most existing content. And I say content, but we haven't really actually talked about that part. The words in the post, we've only been talking about metadata, dates, tags, authors and content, comments. When we say the contents in WordPress, we usually mean writing words. When I saw this slide in Petri's talk yesterday, I knew I had to ask her if I could use it because the word cloud is another, I think in some cases fairly denigrated or maligned data visualization tool, but it can be really powerful. It's one of the only tools that most of us are familiar with that is actually oriented around writing us to visualize words. And we don't think about it in those terms, but this gives us a sense of the breadth of language of this community. And the tag cloud, which ships with WordPress out of the box, gives us a sense of the breadth similarly of the topics that we write about in a visual way. Again, we're still in this case talking about metadata, taxonomy terms, but if we switch to trying to make a word cloud for post content, then we can begin to see a little bit more about the actual words that we write and what the focuses of our articles are. Unsurprisingly, for a post on the Boku blog, terms that occur in JavaScript's code snippets occur very frequently. This word cloud is sized by using word frequency, accepting that we have removed a number of what's called stop words, which are words like and, the or, that don't have any real meaning. So if you take the content of a post and you strip out all those words and collapse individual terms that are very similar together, you can start to build a sense just by count of what words you write the most, which probably have some correlation to the meaning of the post. But, excuse me, for a blog, for a company that does a lot of JavaScript open source work, knowing that we use the word function a lot isn't actually very helpful. So there's some interesting text analytics that we can do that let us take that and map it into a different set of words that still occur in the posts, but maybe give us a little bit more of a sense of not just what words are most common, but what words are most important. And text analytics, these are all topics that could be and are conferences in and of themselves, but just to quickly explain one way that this can work is that if you use a term in a post, then it occurs maybe in this category, this is actually representing a category's worth of words for web application development. So if we use a term like JS in every single category, it's not really necessarily specifically relevant to that one category that we're looking at now. And so we want to find a way to measure and limit the frequency with which we use a word by how broadly that word is used. And this particular example is a metric called term frequency, inverse document frequency, or TFIDF, which is basically multiplying together the inverse proportion of the number of documents in which a word occurs. So if you use JS in every one of your categories, that would be very low. And then you multiply that by how common the word is. So words that are fairly rare, but also repeated often within a document rise to the top. And we can see, ah, we don't just write about JavaScript, we write about Webpack, and hard source, which is a tool for making Webpack builds very fast. Or the audio API, or IOPort for Internet of Things work. This talk was really conceived just to give an overview. And so, of course, there's never enough time to go into any of these topics as much as I would like. But text analytics, drawing graphs, these are things that I think are interesting and I think are going to be very relevant to us as a field. So I'm going to keep in mind as we begin to step into this space and as we begin to learn how to put together these images. The first is performance. Because I've talked about the DOM and the SVG rendering, but that only gets us so far. The browser cannot render thousands of SVG nodes without a little stutter. For smooth animations with thousands of data points, you need to switch to a different technology. And one of the easier ones is something called Canvas. This is a drawing surface within the browser. It is used for a lot of video games and other high-performance graphics applications because it can give you a little bit of a lower-level API that doesn't have the overhead of the document model, the DOM. And it can let you draw those points in a very performant way. This is a demo reel put together by a developer and friend named Peter Beshai in the States. So for complex charts like large network graphs that show thousands of points across maps, Canvas is going to give you better performance than SVG. And you can still use a tool like D3 to help you do that layout. But because you're now drawing a static picture, rather than having a document node that has its own event system, you lose things like mouseover and click detection. And so you have to re-implement those. There's a trade-off between performance and complexity. That trade-off gets even more accentuated when we get above the many thousands of points. If you want to render tens of thousands of points, you really have to start looking at things like WebGL, which requires you to write what's called shaders. Shaders being very powerful parallel graphics code. But they're very complicated. They don't look anything like JavaScript or PHP, and they can take a while to learn. There's a great resource called thebookofshaders.com, and there's interesting tools like Regal or Reactive WebGL that give us the ability to maybe simplify the code a little bit and understand a little bit better. But this is something that you only need to step into if you really have that major performance problem. But regardless of how you're drawing the image, you're going to probably want to remember that an image is no good if you can't understand what's in it. So be mindful of your audience. Be mindful of contrast ratios. Make sure that your visualization will appear on a low-contrast screen in the sunny lit boardroom or for somebody that can't distinguish between different colors. Don't just use those colors to distinguish information. You should also be thinking about how can I convey maybe this difference not just by color, but also by texture or shape. I promised in the brief for this talk that I would talk about doing custom data bashboards. We don't really have a ton of time for that, but very briefly, to define custom data, which you can do with a custom endpoint or a custom post type, is that you're going to want to use register rest fields to build out a data object again that is more specific to your domain. I built a number of dashboards including this one before the rest API was merged and it took a very long time and we basically had to implement our own JSON API. So if you're dealing with custom data and you're dealing with anything that comes in and out of the browser, I feel things have gotten a lot easier than they were before, so we should take advantage of that. To close, just think about data as something that you deserve to see. We should not be, you know, too scared of the information that we have. It's easy to get started. There's a lot of things in this field that are complex, but the basics are simple and there's a ton of resources available for learning it. There's blogs like Flowing Data or Boku's or conferences like IO Festival, which is a little bit more of an art focus but still touches on a lot of data concerns, OpenVizConf, EuroViz, and many others. The tools that I mentioned today are only the tip of the iceberg. In the contributor day, John Meida gave a talk about the same topic and he was using P5JS, which is a canvas drawing tool based on processing, which is a graphics language devoted to artists. And all of these tools are available for us, so whatever your poison of choice, you can find a way to start drawing with it if you want. Something to remember about Big Data is that Big Data just means a whole lot of personal data. Most of us haven't ever really seen much of our personal data. We might have something like a Fitbit, but we might not have signed up for a developer account to try to get that data out. It's locked up in their systems. The REST API matters to me because I believe it's the most widespread free and accessible API that people have that lets them access their own information, their own content and data that's out there on the web. So we should take that data and we should see the other side of the picture. We should begin to see what you can do when you have all of this information because we should be able to empower ourselves and our users to take advantage of it for our own purposes, in addition to those that are the purposes of the companies that are collecting our information. Visualization can even be used to demystify things like neural networks and the algorithms that govern our lives. So know thy data and learn to read it like that. As John taught us yesterday, creativity comes from juxtapositions, so regardless of your background, I would ask you to consider trying to bring a visual side to the information you're working with and to learn to decipher these systems and to make things that the information that give us tools to empower each other to understand the information we have. To close, I want to make one more visualization which is of you, the audience of each one of us has something to teach each other and none of it is magic. Thank you. It was awesome. We did it. You had to wait so long to just talk. Are there any questions for Kay Adam? I can't see the mics. Are there any questions? The room is full. I can't believe there's not anybody that has a question. Somebody here. Thanks so much for another good talk. As somebody who might be a beginner for data visualization and if they want to get into it and try to find some way to just easily get started, do you have any recommendations for libraries or some approaches, something like that? That's a good question and absolutely. Some of the blogs that I mentioned, Dashing D3JS and Flowing Data are really good resources. All of the slides are available at the link up there and the links are in the slides. But also, if you just Google Data Visualization blog, you'll turn up a bunch. The great thing about DataViz on the web is that a lot of the designers that are working in it are absolutely stupendous and they really like sharing their work. So there's all sorts of really excellent blog posts out there about how individual graphics were made. You can learn a lot by reading them. And D3 is probably what I'd recommend if you're on the web. But it can be a little bit of a bear to get started with. So it's also probably worth looking at something like processing, which as I mentioned is a little bit more tailored to it was sort of designed with the intent to be used by artists as a programming language for that purpose. And there's a lot of good examples out there of using processing for Data Visualization as well. Cool. Hi. My name is Lisbeth. I work a lot with scientists and what I'm trying to do is not only do Data Visualizations but also through WordPress collect scientific data. So basically the scientist uses WordPress to collect our data and immediately visualize it. I've searched and I've found no easy way to do this either static or in real time because I want to use it in classrooms with live voting, polling, immediate visualizations, bar charts of what's going on and I would love to know more to do it in WordPress. That's a really interesting one. WordPress... PHP is getting faster and WordPress is getting faster but it's not necessarily representative of the data pipeline that you would traditionally have particularly for streaming scientific data. When we did things like that counter browser that was a lot of data folding and processing that goes into it same with the measurement lab internet speed visualization. So there's a lot of sort of processing required for some of these things. They might not all be suitable for a real-time environment in a WordPress environment but there's nothing to stop us from tying WordPress into other systems that may be handle and expedite some of that and also I would say that through a combination of sort of polling or I don't know if anyone's ever figured out a way to do WebSocket stuff with WordPress but you could certainly pull an API and pull in changes as they occur fairly easily. So I'd love to talk about it more. I'm just very curious about the challenge. Thanks. Wow, thank you. That was amazing. I'm curious for folks that are in a general web services creating sites for clients and things. Are there little ways that they might be able to integrate some of these things that are big wows whether it's a little widget in the admin area or something on a site that you have ideas around? Many of the sponsors of this event are hosts and hosts usually have great dashboards. I think that from a wow factor adding some flashy charts to your dashboard rarely hurts. It's not necessarily super useful but it's going to impress somebody at some point so if it makes it easier to make a sale sure go for it. In terms of actual utility some of those charts can be very useful. Things like site uptime and latency are good things to know about. But also even just for little plugins I was focusing on editorial concerns that I see as being very underserved in visualization. We have a lot of tools to tell us things about stuff we've put out in the world but not necessarily our editorial content. And so I'd say that if you are defining a data type in WordPress there's probably some way to slice that that would be interesting to present. Thank you. All right. Last question? Hey, I have a question, yes. So how do you decide what data is not to visualize? Or how do you prioritize? Because we generate north of 60 gigabytes of data a month so it's very easy to get pulled into this vanity metrics. So how do you prioritize and decide what is important and it's what not important. Thank you. Good question. Prioritizing data should be driven by your goals. So as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, visualization is made to answer a specific question. And different types of question are best answered by different types of graphics and different types of graphics are supported by different types of slice of data. And so figuring out what the major business questions you have about that 60 gigabytes of data is going to help funnel down to know maybe whether, like, are you concerned about matters of consistency or are there major outliers in the data set or are there questions that you have about being able to maybe drill down into it because all of those are going to suggest a different type of visual tool. There's a lot of stuff written out there about how to pick a visual form for particular types of data. There's many different diagrams that can represent things like uncertainty or a range of responses. So I would maybe just look around for that and see whether you can find a particular question that you have and then look around to see whether anyone else is answering that in a way that you find compelling. Cool. I think that's our time. Great. Thank you very much. Give him the biggest applause. I got a gift.