Personal finance practice problem using Excel. Change in bond rating impact on price. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Here we are in our Excel worksheet. If you don't have access to it, that's okay because we'll basically build this from a blank sheet. But if you do have access, three tabs down below. Example, practice a blank, example, answer key. Let's look at it now. We're gonna be calculating the bond price and the change in the bond price as there's a change in the rating of the bond. In prior presentations, when we calculated the bond price, we were basically given the market rate. But the market rate, of course, in practice will be dependent upon the market's perception of risk related to the bond. We do that oftentimes by comparing similar types of bonds. We can kind of group bonds to be similar types of bonds in part by the ratings. So we're gonna be dependent a lot on basically the ratings. Oftentimes, we're trying to determine the risk and the value and therefore the calculation of the prices of the bonds. So if the rating of a bond goes down, that's really bad news for the issuer of the bond, whether that be a government or a corporation, because the higher risk means that people are gonna want a greater return. They're gonna have to pay more rent for us to give us the money. More interest is gonna have to be paid out and that can be a significant problem for the issuer of the bond, whether that be a government or a corporation. So they would like to have strong risk, a lot of confidence that they're gonna be repaying the bond and that means that they can borrow at a lot lower cost. To us on the investor side of things, clearly if we have less risk, we're willing to have less of a return. So here we're gonna have the strong rating of AAA and that's gonna be the rate here. As the rating goes down, we're gonna expect and want more of a return. Higher interest payments, if we're gonna invest in those bonds issued by that corporation or that government because we could purchase bonds elsewhere that would be less risky. And so there's debate oftentimes or there has been debate as to whether the rating agencies, for example, I have kind of problems with them or what or could they get kind of corrupted or because of the ratings are so influential, but of course we would like to have faith and the rating agencies, that's really important to us as the investors so that we can have faith in terms of the risk involved and hopefully gauge the risk appropriately. Okay, so we're gonna second tab here is gonna be a pre-formatted worksheet on the right hand side so you can work with the practice problem with less Excel formatting. Third tab is gonna be where we're gonna do the Excel formatting. If you don't have anything and you just wanna open up like Excel worksheet, you can do so and then just select the whole worksheet. I would lay down the baseline formatting by right clicking, format the cells. I usually go to the numbers, currency, brackets, no dollar sign, no decibels as my starting point. I'm not gonna hit okay because we already have this. I'm just gonna X out, then add your data on the left hand side, adjusting as needed for things like percentages in the cells, make a skinny C column and we're good to go. So we're gonna imagine, we've got a bond, 1,000 years, 20 years, it's a semi-annual bond. It was issued at AAA rating. That's gonna be the highest rating. It was a very secure bond, but then the rating went down to AA3. So if the bond was at the AAA at the point of issuance in a thousand dollar bond, then we're gonna assume that the market rate was the same as the AAA rate because it was at the point of issuance. So let's just recalculate that and we should get to a thousand dollar price. So let's be our starting point. We're gonna say the price is at AAA rating when they issued it. We're gonna say, I'm gonna open this up a little bit.  We're gonna do our normal bond valuation, present value of interest, present value of friends, let's say present value of face amount. So I don't misspell principal and face amount. We're gonna open this up a bit. All right, let's do this. We're gonna say, well, we'll do this fairly quickly because we've seen these calculations in the past, negative present value, shift nine. The rate then is gonna be that 9%, which is both the market rate because this is at the point of issuance and the rate on the bond. That's a yearly rate though. So I'm gonna divide it by two because this is semi-annual comma. Number of periods is gonna be 20. That's years I need semi-annual or half year, six month periods. Therefore times two to get to 40 comma. The payment then is gonna be the $1,000 times the coupon rate, which is also the 9% because it's the same as the market rate because it was at the point of issuance and we had them the same at that time, but that's a yearly rate. Therefore I'm gonna divide it by two because we're gonna be issuing the interest semi-annual. Okay, the face amount's gonna be negative present value shift nine. The rate once again, market rate is the 9%, which is the same as the coupon rate divided by two because we need the semi-annual, six month, half year rate comma. Number of periods is gonna be 20 years once again, but we need half years. Therefore times two to get to 40 comma, comma, come nearly on because we don't need a payment because this isn't an annuity. We're now in the future value, which is the 1,000 and enter. That gives us the price at the issuance of hopefully a thousand dollars. Summing it up, we get to the thousand dollars because we use the same rate here for the market rate as well as the coupon rate because that's the rate at the point of issuance. Now let's make that bordered. Let's make it blue with the bucket drop down. If you don't have that blue, it's in the color wheel. There's the wheel of colors. I want that color right there. We're gonna say, okay, all those colors and you always choose the same one. Choose right now. Why don't you mix it up a bit? So I'm gonna say now the price change, your current price. Now most likely time would pass, of course, but I'm gonna keep it at that same 20 years so we can see the impact, keeping the time frame the same. And we're gonna say, man, that company got hit, scandal happened, big time scramble people and their rating dropped down to AA3. But now for them to issue a bond at the market rate, they're gonna have to pay out 11%. It's kind of like, welcome to the real world where people actually have to, there's interest involved when you take out a loan, just like everybody else around here. Anyway, home tab, font group.  Same calculation, present value, but this time, we're gonna assume this rate was the issue weight, the coupon rate, but now the market rates jumped up to 11% because these people aren't as trustworthy anymore. The trust has been lost and as you know, trust is everything. There is the trust. Trust is gone. Nobody, then you need to give me more money. So negative present value, shift nine. The rate is gonna be then the market rate, 11%, but that's the yearly rate. So we're gonna divide it by two and then we're gonna say comma. The number of periods is still gonna be 20 because we're gonna assume this happened like right after they issued the bond here so that we can get an apples to apples, same thing, the same thing comparison, but that's in years. So we gotta multiply it times two to get to the semi-year six month calculation. Comma, the payment is going to be the $1,000 times the coupon rate, which is the rate at the time that the thing was issued, which is the 9%, that's the rate on the bond. And we're gonna take that, but that's a yearly rate. So we're gonna divide it by two because they're gonna be paid out semi-annual every half year, six month time frames, closing it up, hitting enter, there we go. Now we'll do the present value of the face amount, PV, shift nine. The rate, once again, 11% at the market rate after they have fallen from the graces, the good graces of the rating agencies. You should have paid the bribe, Jen, just kidding. There you could trust the rating agencies, hopefully we could trust them. The rate divided by 12, comma, divided by two. Am I divided by 12? Divided by two, comma, number of periods is gonna be 20 times two and then comma, comma, cause we're not talking annuity this time, we're talking present value of one, which is the thousand dollars up top, 1,000. And then we'll sum that up equals the S to the U to the M and sum, give me a S, give me a U. Okay, so why did I say price, price? Price, current, so current price, price, current, price, price. Thought group, underline. Let's add a couple of decimals down on here. Home tab, add a couple of decimals so we can be a little bit more precise. Could you give me some pennies in that? Cause I'd like to know down to the penny. So now of course the price has gone down because the graces are no longer as good. They're less good graces. They're not in the good graces anymore. They're in like the okay graces of the rating agencies. Home tab, I'm not even on the board of the rating agencies.  They don't even, anyways, whatever. So that's the impact. So clearly if you're a government or if you're a corporation, the rating has a huge impact because that should be giving a reflection to the investors of the risk involved.


This is Corey Tomczyk. He's a Republican state lawmaker from Wisconsin and this man could singlehandedly take down an entire local news outlet all because they dared to publish a story about him that he did not like. So in August of 2021, the local outlet in question here is the Warsaw Pilot and Review, and they published an article about a heated debate that broke out during a board meeting over a diversity resolution. Now those opposed showed up to argue that it was un-American and Marxist and claimed that it was unnecessary because they've never heard of anyone being discriminated against before, therefore this resolution wasn't needed. Now at the time, he was just the local business owner and hadn't yet been elected to the state senate, but he was one of the individuals who showed up to speak out against this resolution. Now there were some teenagers that showed up to vocalize their support and he allegedly called one of these teenagers a gay slur after they spoke in favor of the resolution. And that's what the Warsaw reported about that he did not like. So on August 21st of 2021, the Warsaw Pilot and Review wrote, Julian Brown, who last week asked the board to be supportive of the ideals that we practice in school, again asked the members to pass the resolution. Quote, I don't know how people can direct so much hate to such a resolution, Julian said. His mother, Nora Brown, who also spoke at the meetings at her son, 13, and another speaker faced the slur at the executive committee meeting last week. Lisa Ort Sondergaard, who is a member of the County's Diversity Affairs Commission, witnessed the episode and said she heard a local businessman using the slur f***. This did not sit well with Christopher Wood, a vocal opponent of the proposal. Every once in a while, someone is going to be called a f*** Wood said. But we've got to get over it, Wood said, adding that in his view, freedom of speech was under attack. It was not clear whether he was referring to the freedom to call a 13-year-old a f***.  Sounds on brand for Republicans, right? Now, again, this is all alleged, but there is evidence, which is why the newspaper decided to report on this. But Cory Tomzik, the man who was accused of saying this slur, he was not happy with this reporting, and the New York Times explains, Mr. Tomzik, who is now a Republican state senator, denied using the slur and demanded a retraction. When the pilot and review stood by its article, Mr. Tomzik sued. Three additional people who attended the meeting later gave sworn statements that they had heard Mr. Tomzik used the word, and during a deposition he admitted having said it on other occasions. In late April of 2023, a judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that Mr. Tomzik had not met the legal standard for proving that the report defamed him. And get this, Mr. Tomzik has acknowledged using the word before, court filing submitted by the pilot and review's lawyer, Brian Spahn, quote Mr. Tomzik as saying in a deposition, I have a brother who is a gay guy, and I've certainly, out of joking and out of spite, called him a f*** it more than once. Amazing defense for himself here. So let's just pause right there so I can give you some additional context. What we have here is what's known as a slap suit. Now, slap is an acronym that stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. And these types of lawsuits are used by wealthy people like him to shut down their critics, typically individuals with less money and power. Now, even if there's no legal merit to their claim of defamation and or damages, that doesn't matter because the goal itself is not to sue and successfully win. The lawsuit or even the threat of a lawsuit is used basically as a form of intimidation to get critics to shut up. And getting them to be afraid of a lawsuit is the whole goal of this suit. They know they're not going to win, but they know that they might be able to bully people into silence if they threaten them with this frivolous lawsuit. Now, the problem with these lawsuits is that even if the defendants know that they didn't defame someone, just defending themselves could lead to them going bankrupt due to the legal fees, right? Even if they know that they're going to win, if they try to defend themselves, then that's going to be very, very costly. Now, as LGBTQ Nation reports, many states, but not Wisconsin, which by the way is where the newspaper is located, have anti-slap laws that prevent corporations and wealthy individuals from using the legal system to squelch free speech. Under such laws, journalists and others who have been sued can file a motion to dismiss a lawsuit if the case involves free speech. If the person suing can't show that they have a chance at winning, the suit is dismissed and they might have to pay attorney's fees for the defendant.  And I'll link you to anti-slap scorecards so you can see whether or not your state has these protections in place, but in my state of Oregon and along the entire West Coast basically, we have really strong protections against these types of suits, which is probably why Kim Iverson backed down after threatening me with the defamation suit after I published a video criticizing her that she didn't like. In states like mine, this sort of behavior is discouraged. Wealthy people can't use the law to silence critics because there are protections for us. But as you can see in Wisconsin, there's absolutely no protections whatsoever against lap suits. And it's been utterly devastating to the Wausau pilot in review because the judge, even though he dismissed Tom's case, well, guess what? He can continue to wage lawfare against them by simply dragging out the case as long as possible. And even if it was dismissed, well, he has the right to appeal and drag it out even further. And guess what? That's exactly what he's doing. The New York Times continues, Mr. Tomzick has filed an appeal and the publication's founder and editor, Shereen Seuert, said she has no idea how she can continue paying both her lawyers and her staff of form. Every time I opened the mail, said Ms. Seuert, describing how she dreads finding a new bill, I want to throw up. Those dollars could be going to pay reporters for boots on the ground coverage, not paying legal fees for a lawsuit that appears designed to crush us, she added. They continue, the Wisconsin case First Amendment experts warned shows how a single defamation suit can become a cudgel against the media in a way the law never intended. For small local news organizations, many of which are barely getting by financially, the suit's threatened to put them out of business. That is the case with the pilot in review. Even though there is scant evidence that it reported anything false, let alone that it did so with actual malice, the long-established burden of proof that public officials like Mr. Tomzick must meet in a defamation case. And that last paragraph is really important because proving defamation in the court of law is very difficult to do. Even if you can prove that somebody said something about you that was false, proving malicious intent is a very, very high bar to reach. But it doesn't matter because this Republican, he knows that he can accomplish what he wants by simply dragging this out, and that's what he's doing. His case was already dismissed and his appeal will be dismissed, but he knows that the longer he drags this out, the more money that they're gonna have to pour into defending themselves, which accomplishes what he wants.   Now, this is a small four-person news outlet that was created in 2017, and they cover really important local news stories that impact the people of their communities, such as contaminated drinking water and whatnot. But they might literally be destroyed because of this man and his refusal to drop this frivolous lawsuit. Now, this slapsuit has cost them $150,000, and when you go to their website, you can tell that they're hurting because their GoFundMe is one of the first things that you see, and even though they've raised $45,000, that's just a fraction of the money that they'll need to defend themselves. So I'm gonna link you to their GoFundMe down below, and if you can, throw them a couple of bucks because this is not okay. Corey Tombsick is using his wealth to silence his critics, and he also probably used his wealth to secure himself a seat in Wisconsin State Legislature. And in the event an anti-slap law or bill, I should say, comes up, he's now in a position to where he can block it as a state senator. And by the way, he got elected running on COVID restrictions and stopping any mitigation measures against the pandemic. So, yeah, kind of goes to show you who he is. If you look at his website, he's a very Trumpian Republican. He's an election denier like Donald Trump, and he has a lot in common with Trumpian Republicans who have also sued media outlets. For example, Trump tried to sue CNN, but that was dismissed. His lackey Devin Nunes tried to sue the Washington Post. That was dismissed, and we just learned that Mississippi's former governor is suing a local outlet after they reported on his comments about welfare fraud. So, I mean, these Republican tyrants, they claim to care about free speech, and they denounce the supposed weaponization of our legal system when it comes to Donald Trump being indicted over his attempt to steal the 2020 election. But yet, what are they doing? They are continuously waging lawfare against their critics in a blatant attempt to get them to shut up, to get them to go away. But what happened to free speech? Like, it's not okay, and it shouldn't be tolerated, but the problem is that this is not going to stop until we have national anti-slap protections in place. But until then, what we can do in the meantime is rally around outlets like the Wausau Pilot & Review so we can at least help them exist until this is addressed nationally. So, consider supporting them on GoFundMe.


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's casebreaks.com coming at you with 2022 Panini Select Draft Picks football. 12 box, full case, random team break number one. There is a group break checklist so we will be going by the checklist that's on groupbreakchecklist.com. Check it out. If you're watching live, I dropped that link in the chat. Big thanks to this group for making it happen. Appreciate that people bought the spot straight up and then congrats to the winners of spots and those ultimate draft breaks, those fillers. All the teams are in. Let's go, let's do it. Let's roll it and randomize names and teams six into two, eight times. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eighth and final time. After eight, we got Barry down to Adam. Six into two, eight times, four of the teams. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. After eight times, we got the Packers down to the Lions. Yeah, Steelers, Kenny Pickett, even New England with Bailey Zappie, it's been doing pretty well, pretty much any team with a rookie quarterback.  Suppose Reese Hall's still there too, Rick T, New York Jets, although sad times out for the rest of the season, Aaron with the Commanders, Daniel with the Cowboys, Barry with the Eagles, Dez with the Colds, Shay with the Chiefs, Allen with the Steelers, nice, last fall Mojo, Bruce with the Bills, Will with the Rams, Jeremy with the Vikings, Aaron with the Giants, Barry with the Titans, Grant with the Dolphins, Chris with the Cardinals, Alder with the Saints, and Adam with the Lions, Aiden Hutchinson there as well. All right, it's alphabetized by team and we're only in week eight of the season.  All right, gang, so I'm gonna pause the video. When we come back, we're gonna see if there's any trades and then we'll pop this case open and see who we get. Stick around, we'll be right back, we'll see you on the other side. All right, welcome back everybody. Trade, window closed, TWC, no deals were done, so let's get this done here. On Thursday to 27th, my Thursday, your Thursday, my Friday, a random team break here. Big thanks to everybody here for getting into it. We did load up another case of that. Is that up? Post that? Yeah, we loaded up another one. We may plan on some fillers for that, but if you wanna avoid those fillers, you know where to go. Grab your spot straight up and we can make that happen. Okay, there it is. Select draft picks football. Only three packs per box? I think I blocked out a much larger time here. Break my goal a little bit faster than I thought. Apologies for being a little sniffly today. Allergies are kind of bothering me. Is this a 12 box case? Let's take 12 out of the inventory. Let's see what we got here. We got Matt Corral on the front of the box. Three autographs, three packs, 15 cards per pack. What else are we looking for here? Yeah. Oh, color wheels and zebras. That's what we're looking for. Now, if you go to our Twitter, please vote in our poll. I wanna know who you think's gonna win tonight. The Ravens or the Buccaneers? So the Ravens traveling to Tampa Bay on a short week. And both teams kind of needing some wins, right? Well, the Buccaneers especially. The Buccaneers are three and four. Ravens are four and three. They beat Cleveland last week, 23 to 20, but that's probably a little bit closer than a lot of people thought it was gonna be. Buccaneers are trying to break a two-game losing streak. They lost in Pittsburgh. They lost their two road games at Pittsburgh, at Carolina, now they're at home. Maybe they're maybe home cooking. Would be good for them? Don't know. What does everyone think? Yeah, Matt Corral, I think it's out for the season, right? Someone at the Panini office was like, yeah, we're putting Matt Corral on the cover of this. I think he could be a somebody, and then maybe next year. All right, and of course, all card ship. And Carson Strong is our first autograph. Carson Strong is an eagle. Now, our shipping team will look all of these up, make sure they go to the right place, but for the hits, I'll tag these, so there's a small chance that this will go to, the hits might be there faster than that. All right, actually, he's on the none list, but we're gonna assign him to the eagles, because he was on their practice squad, so we'll kind of, I know on other sets, he's an eagle in the checklist, so let's just make that easy. All right, so that's for Barry and the fly eagles fly. Got Cortland Sutton, 39 out of 49. Went from a Mustang to a Bronco. Baker Mayfield, all card ship, of course. Desmond Ritter, Breece Hall, and Ronnie Rivers. Ronnie Rivers runs through it. Rivers is a ram. Jeremy says he may still start for the Panthers this year. Matt Kruller, and then they're trying everybody, right? There's Mahomes to 199, that's for the Chiefs. And we got a Dustin Crum, X Factor autograph. He's in the none section. Let's see if he was associated with anybody here. Dustin Crum was with the Chiefs most recently. Maybe, I don't think any relation to Victor Crum, and seeker. And there's Johan Dotson for the Redskins to 149. There's Max Crosby from our Raiders. Those hyperparallels, not number, we'll see Marjadson in action tonight.  All right, next box. Yeah, we'll talk to the joke writers about that one for next break. All right, we got another Carson Strong, Youth Explosion autograph. Just Barry racking up Carson Strong's two so far. Dan Marino to 199. We'll see Brady in action tonight. And we got Josh Ali, Josh Ali. And Josh is with the Falcons on the checklist, the ATL, that'll be for Aaron, Aaron Miller. We got Karloftus here to 149. We got a QB version of Logan Thomas here. And a Rage and Cajun, Levi Lewis. Levi Lewis is none on the checklist. So let's see if he was with an NFL team. Levi Lewis, maybe a practice squad or something like that. Yeah, he was with the Seattle Seahawks. He was associated with the Seahawks for a bit before he's now with the Saskatchewan Rough Riders. I also think that other guy, Ronnie Rivers. No, Dustin Crum, I think he was with the Canadian team as well. Yeah, Levi Lewis, that's a name that could play in the NFL. Also, I realized that CJ Strud and Bryce Young are in this set. So did we say anything about that in the description? We did not. They're obviously not on any NFL team. They haven't been drafted yet. All right, so we're gonna do a randomizer at the end of the break. And just going alphabetically, name on top will get all Bryce Young's. Base cards, parallels, autographs. Second name down will get CJ Strud. And then the third name will get anybody else that's still in college. I don't think there might, I don't think there's probably too many other people that are still in college that are in this set. Might be a few. And so for the others in the non-category, like we saw with Carson Strong and Dustin, we'll do our best to pack them up with an NFL team that they were associated with. But that's how we'll do this. We'll do that at the end. So if you think you ended up with a bad team or something like that, then you might still get a little extra chance. There's Tyler Goodson, youth explosion autograph. Packers, what do you think what's about? Oh, LeBron. Sorry, I missed the top comment. You see LeBron posted a tweet saying NFL fans are special now, you know? And that's gonna come out on IG live at some point today. I have no idea what that's about. Some sort of partnership, business venture probably. There's Randy Moss. And there is a Tiki Barber, it's a five. Wow, that's a really cool looking card there. Out of fives and under, get the world famous train whistle. That is Giants Tiki, but it has to be Giants. Yeah, New York football Giants on the checklist. I like the visor there, the big shoulder pads. Nice. So New York football Giants, Aaron Miller, all aboard the Big Hit Express. He still does a radio show, right? Oh, I see. Jeremy said he's doing a live broadcast of him talking about the game. There is Clavon Chasen. Clavon Chasen also a, no, I'm thinking of, that's Kavon Tibido. Chasen is a Jaguar. That'll be for Barry Jacksonville. So he's trying to do like a little manning cast or something like that. Is Michael Parsons to 149? No, I don't think LeBron's too smart to partner with someone like Kanye. Now, if you said like Kanye and Antonio Brown, we're gonna about to work together. That might make more sense. And there is a Ryan Tannehill zebra print and a Kenny Pickett. Look at that. Wow. So a short print zebra parallel for the Titans, Barry Robert with the Tannehill. And there's the Kenny Pickett for Pittsburgh. Who's got the Steelers? Alan Murdock, last spot mojo.  Not numbered, but still looks nice in his pit gear. Didn't have to go very far. I don't follow college super closely, but it was only until this season, when they were talking about Kenny Pickett and all that, it's only until this season that I realized that the Pitt Panthers, the college team, share a practice facility with the Pittsburgh Steelers. It's Bailey Zappie for the Patriots. All those Zappies will go to Adam. There's Chad Johnson to 149. There he is again. I'm sure he played for the Bengals the longest. Oh, what was the Mitchell and Ness thing? They announced this here. That I did not hear about that. Behind John Mechie is a redemption, Tariq Castro Fields. Tariq is with the Commanders. That'll go to Aaron Miller in Washington. Hey, you're welcome, Alan. Thanks for getting into the action. Appreciate it. And with the Commanders, there's a Kyler Murray Red 58 out of 149 for Chris and the Cardinals. Stafford to 199 for the Rams. And a Brock Purdy. A nice Purdy hit for the Niners. Daniel with the Niners. Daniel Fesserit. There's a nice Malik Willis to 75. I've seen Donovan McNabs in this. Yeah, has he college Donovan McNab? I think he's gonna start. Does he have ink in here too? I don't know, but he hadn't signed in a long time with Nini a bit so score. Oh. So maybe he has a new deal or something. Got a new deal with him. He barely signed. He barely even used them in cards. I think he'll start seeing Donovan McNab and stuff. Yeah, he actually sells pretty well. I ended up selling him one of my one of mine. I got like, paid him money back from what I paid for him. I guess probably because he doesn't sign a lot. Yeah, yeah, he doesn't sign a lot. Jaylen Peter with the Texans. It's Houston. And next box. Saw something else on TMZ. Well, yeah, on TMZ, a source that we love here. Flea says he's a beg the Lakers. That's Flea Speaks for the people. Flea's Lakers. Don't waste LeBron's final years. Well, LeBron and Durand became investors in Mitchell and S. That's pretty smart. Yes, there has been some Olaves all over card, like base cards, but nothing numbered and no ink, not yet anyway. There's Lewis Seen, who is a Viking. Minnesota Vikings tried to trade, couldn't trade mojo, Jeremy. Nick Chubb to 149. We love this tie-dye here. It's a Cade Auton Youth Explosion tie-dye autograph. Nice. It's 22 out of 25. He is a buccaneer. I feel like I think he's been getting some snaps, right?  Here's some Chris Olave. A little hyper-parallel for Oliver and the Saints. Maybe we'll find some numbered cards of him, maybe some ink points. We'll randomize that to somebody in the break. And a Sam Howell color wheel. I don't know how other select breaks, I think these are one like every other case or one per case. He is a commander. He is. That's for Aaron Miller in Washington. Nice, those look pretty sharp. There's a Carson Strong to 75. So when we do that randomizer, all the points cards will go to spot four. Yeah, according to the checklist, yes, Randy Moss, base, concourse, and base field levels all go to the Vikings. All right, next, the boss. Is kickoff happening soon here? I would imagine so according to about 15 minutes. Or in five minutes at the 15 minute mark. I do have Prime Video on my phone.  Maybe catch a little bit of the action. Audio, because we do not have the express written consent of the National Football League to broadcast this game on our stream. If I can still watch it. We want to moss this break. You want to get mossed? You got mossed. There's Roger McCreary. And another autograph right behind there. Are we going to get a bonus autograph? Only supposed to be three per pack. So let's keep an eye on this here. Roger McCreary is a Tennessee Titan. That will be for Barry. The David Bell is either, I want to say he's Cleveland or Cincinnati. Cleveland for the Browns. Cleveland, this is for you. That's for Anthony with the David Bell. And we've got a nice patch of Mahomes, 18 out of 35. Sports cards, when it's like basketball going it's been sold out for over a day. It has not been actually. If you look carefully, you'll notice that there's a filler that we have to do for Picker Team Two. There's two left in the team random and there's one last filler pack that we got to do. So they're right. If you look at the product of Picker Team Two looked right to the left of it and just above it you'll see those two things that we have to accomplish. So yeah, so we break everything as soon as they fill. So if you're wondering, hey, why isn't that gone yet? Then you can assume that there's like an extra step we got to do to give away the remaining teams. But yeah, we always break things as soon as they sell out unless other stuff's ahead of it. But we'll do them as quickly as possible. You don't want to sit on those. There's Desmond Ritter to 199 and Trelin Berks to 199. And you can always check the schedule too to see when your break is coming up. All right, there's Tre Lantz and a redemption. It is Brian Robinson Jr. That is a Washington commander for Aaron. I guess we did just get our standard three autographs. There might have been another one hiding there. All right, another box coming up. All right, 15 minutes left to put in your vote on who you think's going to win tonight's game and vote on Twitter. I don't think you need a Twitter account to vote. Currently, most everybody is on Baltimore. Plus one and a half with 68.8% of the vote. For what it's worth, my pick is Tampa Bay minus one and a half. We've got a Jalen Tolber for Dallas. It's going to be for Daniel and Dallas. No, I don't think we can use the blame Brian Robinson Jr. for not signing. He had a rough preseason. There's James Winston to 35, but he's back in action.  There's Derek Stingley Jr. They're getting shot in the legs, lower body. Stingley, I believe, is Houston. He is, he's a Texan. That will be for Barry. There's Micah Parsons to 149 for Dallas. And we got a gold, Ty Chandler. Eight out of 10 on that one. Ty Chandler is a Viking. So there you go, Jeremy 33 with Minnesota. Tried to trade, couldn't trade Mojo. There you go. Got an orange, Dalvin Cook to 49. Also for Jeremy. Dalvin's brother, James Cook, is in the league now. All right, next box. I heard a little nugget today on this Thursday night football game, or on the Ravens in general. Ravens, apparently, and Lamar Jackson usually do quite well in the first half. But I think a lot of, a lot of Lamar's interceptions and where they lose the games the second half. Let's see if they can put together a complete game here. Another redemption that's Traylon Burks, and here's Rhett Farve to 49 for the Packers. Traylon Burks, I believe, is a Titan confirmed. He is, that'll be for Barry in Tennessee. And a Matthew Stafford to 149. Is that a green parallel, maybe another train whistle? Green, Aidan Hutchinson, five out of five. Nice, one of the top picks of the draft. Adam Cupperman with the Lions. Wait, was he the number one overall pick? He was, no, he was the second pick. Wait, so was it Tibodeau who went, Trayvon Walker went first, Tibodeau went fifth. Trayvon Walker for the Jags, Aidan Hutchinson for the Lions, Derek Stingley Jr. for the Texan, Saas Gardner, Kavon Tibodeau. Nice one, and Adam, I don't know. When the last time, you got a train whistle, Adam Cupperman, but here you go. All aboard the Big Head Express, whoop whoop. There's a Jalen Tolbert for the Cowboys at 199. And there is a Josh Job. Yeah, Adam said it has been a while since his last train whistle, there you go. And for what should be a real solid player for years to come. Josh Job or Jobi maybe is an eagle. Wait, what happened? I thought the Buccaneers had punted. Oh, Muff's the catch and recovered by Baltimore. That's what that was. All right, Eagles, there you go, Barry. Now, Baltimore's first in goal. It was Justin Ross, 18 out of 75. Oh, we did get a one of one though, all right. And that's still good, that's still good. That could be a self-administered train whistle. That is okay. Helen's last train whistle was 1985. Maybe on a midnight train to Georgia perhaps. All right, behind Eli is Nikobi Dean. Nikobi Dean might be an eagle, right? He is Philadelphia Eagle, another eagle for Barry Roberts. That's where the spot he won in the filler. Got Mac Jones to 149. Is there a QB controversy out there for the Patriots? Maybe. And Kyle Phillips from UCLA, X Factor Autograph. Kyle Phillips is a Titan. She is. She was just in one of our breaks earlier today. And another Carson Strong for the Eagles. Barry racking up the Carson Strongs. There's Ezekiel Elliott to 35. Three more boxes to go. Good luck. They just, Baltimore's selling for a field goal. All right, we got John Mechie, the third, who I believe is a Texan. I don't know why that card's not sliding. There we go. Battling leukemia, maybe? Non-Hodgkins, it's something scary, but still mostly treatable, I want to say, but get well soon. Texans, that'll be for Barry. And the Brady to 149 will go to Buccaneers. Sensations insert, Kenny Pickett. I haven't seen too many parallels of the rookie QB names. Kennedy babbling Brooks is a Philadelphia Eagle. And has every auto on the Eagles checklist been hit? No, maybe not. We're still looking for Cameron, George Davis, and a few others. Matt Ryan to 149. There's a Malik Willis Silver, there we go. Kind of stuff we're looking for. A little surprise at the Colts decision to bench him for the rest of the season. Another Carson Strong, youth explosions. These are your autos. Got a Jake Ferguson to 199. All right, two boxes to go. Brady almost got picked off on that first play. Good luck, we've got more points. Add that to the pile. We've got Charles, oh, we've got Charles Woodson to 35. And QB on, played for the Raiders the longest. Yeah, that'll go to the Raiders. That'll be for Brandon. And the Roquan Smith, here to 149, is Barris. I think he was pretty bummed when Roger Quinn was traded. And we got a Derrick Stingley Jr. for the Texans. That's gonna be for Barrie. And we got a Kingsley, and Nagbarae. And Nagbarae, Kingsley and Nagbarae, Kingsley. I think, I know another Kingsley, Kingsley Shackle Bowl. This is for Barrie and the Packers. It's Trey Lance to 75. Last box coming up, and we'll do the randomizing. Oh, there's Brady connecting. There with, you guys have Mike Evans? All right, good luck everybody. Final box, final three. Good luck. And we've got another case of this in the store if you wanna get in on it. A redemption. Jonathan Taylor is gonna reveal a Tariq Castro Field. We have another Tariq Castro Fields earlier somewhere. I don't know where it is, but it's in that pile somewhere. He is a commander. Short-term memory, not very good. No, I do not get a lot of trigger-treaters. It depends on the year. Sometimes, there was a, I feel like in my neighborhood, there was a lot of younger kids in the neighborhood, but I think they've all grown out of trigger-treating age. But I think some of these streets to the north of me, where there's more single-family dwellings, that's where you see more of the trigger-treating. There's Jermaine Johnson II and Mark checking in from the East Coast. How's it going, Mark? There is Jermaine Johnson II. Jermaine Johnson is a jet, and that will be for Rick T. and the Jets. Wait, you guys are trigger-treating already? Gave me over 650 pieces of candy an hour tonight, ran out. Oh, now you're that house. It's Thursday. This is what happens when Halloween lands on Monday. It's chaos. All right, and DeMarvin Leal looks like our last autograph. There's a Matthew Stafford of 49. And that, my friends, is that. You know, Jeremy, I have no idea. I had completed all the orders when I started this break. There are six orders coming in now. Seven orders coming in now, so we'll see which way the wind is blowing when we go through all that. All right, there's DeMarvin Leal, and he is a Pittsburgh stealer. Not the pick-ins that Alan was looking for, but you got the pick-it, you got the DeMarvin Leal, probably a bunch of pick-it inserts and base cards and whatnot, so that'll be on its way to you as well. All right, let's do this random. There weren't any Bryson or CJs through autographs, but I know that there were some non-numbered cards in there. So let's do that randomizer. So let's go back to the list over here. Let's grab everyone one through 32, copy your names, and let's roll it and randomize it after they check it four and a one, five times. One, two, three, four, and a one, fifth and final time. So after five, Barry Roberts, nice break for you. You'll get all the Bryce Young cards. I don't think there's anything numbered or anything like that, so the most will be non-numbered Bryce Young cards. Spot two, Bruce, you'll get the CJ Strudz. Spot three, that's you, Adam. There weren't any autographs of any of the guys still in college. You'll get everybody else though, if there were any other base cards. I don't know if there were or not, but if there are, you'll be the one getting them. Spot four, Aaron Miller, you'll get the 650 points. There was a 400 points card and a 200 points card back there. There you go, gang. Oh, it's kind of a longer break, so let's do a quick little recap. DeMarvin Leal, we'll show you player team, player team going by groupbreakchecklist.com. Appreciate everybody getting into it. Like I said, we've got another case loaded up, jaskyscaserakes.com, nice Aiden Hutchinson to five. This is so excited by the train whistle. Got to mark that Detroit. Perkz, that's to 10 for Minnesota. That goes Sam Howell, tie-dye. I think Kate Auton, we'll have to watch the game, but I think he's been getting some snaps for Tampa Bay. There's the Kenny Pickett, nice. Ten in over the Titans. Claiborne, Tiki Barber, Seattle. A lot of Carson Strongs. And there you go, boys and girls. I'm Joe for jaskyscaserakes.com. Thanks for breaking with us, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time for the next break. Bye-bye.


But I think what's actually significant is not the way that culture was shaped by TV, but the way that TV is shaped by culture. Good morning Hank, it's two, you're here. Good morning John. Welcome to the New Year's TV Aware. Thank you so much. You don't have to say welcome actually, because I am the CEO and it's great. He's been doing it, he's been packing socks all day, being people. Awesomesocks.club. I'll tell you what, after spending a day at the warehouse packing the socks and learning about the processes that go into getting and shipping out the coffee and the socks. I believe more than ever in this company the people who work here are so awesome as you know Hank. I don't want to sound like a CEO, but I've never been so enthusiastic about a for-profit for charity venture in my entire life. Thanks for coming out. Thanks for helping out. Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm feeling okay right now. How are you? Yeah, right now I'm about to feel worse in about four days. So I want to stop you there, and I want to ask you a serious question.  I want to stay jokety-joky, but I do think like you and I both have this instinct to in hard times say blabba dee, blabba dee, blabba dee, it sucks, but. And we both have it, we put the positive spin on it. It's very hard to not say but. It's very hard to not say but when you're talking about difficulty, and what I guess I would want to emphasize is that you are doing amazing, you are, as they say, tolerating the treatment brilliantly, et cetera, et cetera, but this sucks. Yeah. Like you, this sucks, you get really sick.  Yeah, it's legit. Like the chemo has a reputation that it has earned is how I came out of it. I can count on two hands the number of times I've seen Hank take a nap. Not anymore.  You don't know how to be on. I do, it feels kind of similar to that, like that you're on a boat. You don't want to be on and you are kind of seasick. And then nobody else is on the boat either. Right. You're alone on the boat on a boat. And there's a lot of people who are on shore, like, do you need anything? And you're like, I'd like to not be on the boat. And then they're like, sorry, just stay on the boat. That's the one thing I can't do. I gotta, you gotta stay on the boat. Be really inseparable from the boat at that moment. You need you on the boat. And I'm like, I don't know a lot about boats. And I'm like, I don't either, but you got this buddy. Here's some YouTube videos about boats. YouTube's like, would you like boat videos? YouTube's like, I see that you like boat videos. That means you like boat disaster videos? I see how much you're enjoying these boat disaster videos. You know, planes also crash. I'd like to show you some plane crash videos. That has happened. I know. The chronic illness of other kinds of illnesses videos. Because we have the same YouTube. I also experienced this. And it's great in a way, right? Because it is just what? Says the guy who's not on the boat.  Is this from our dad? Just making a phone call being like, I don't know if it's true. We landscapeed a bit. To be fair, the tree doesn't look well. No, it's alive though. So it is worth his efforts. For sure. For sure. The tree is on its own boat. The tree is on its own boat. Except the difference is that it's not alone. It has Dad there on the plane. I have Dad too. Yeah, not in the same way. Like Dad can't just like stake you to the ground and be like, there you go. Standing straight up again. That's Dr. Carl's job. We love you, Dr. Carl. Because it's really the biases within culture that allow infectious disease to spread, right? Like that's the vector. At this point, yeah. We're fairly new to that experience. A lot of times in the sort of health care journey, people are like, why is it so bad? And like, lots of reasons. But it's easy to forget that 100 years ago, you didn't expect to be cured of a disease. Right. The main thing the doctor told you was, like what might have. Which direction you were headed in. So there's that, but there's also the fact that like, it does feel vaguely medieval a lot of times. Like the treatment for probably illness. Chemotherapy that like destroys your immune system doesn't feel super 21st century to me. Yeah. You know? Yeah, well the thing is, it's quite tricky and we didn't know this until we did it to distinguish between diseases that are easy. It turned out to be quite easy to cure. Right. And diseases that were very hard to cure. Yeah.   Yeah. And then they were like, OK, well, let's do that with cancer. And they were like, it turns out we can. Let's do it with viruses, let's do it with cancer. And that feels like a conspiracy. Yes. But it's not, it's just hard. Right. It feels like cancer should have been easy to cure in the same way that strep throat was easy to cure. It's not even one disease. Like strep throat is one disease. Cancer is a lot of diseases. I have started to think that it's silly of us to think of cancer as one disease when it's like saying, a vi- like the idea of a virus is one disease. Someone in our family just got diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, which sounds like a cancer because it has carcinoma in it, and it is a cancer, except that because the survival rate is 100%, nobody really says they have cancer. Right. Because we associate cancer with jeopardy. They don't even include it in the cancer stance. I've learned a lot about cancer in the last couple of months. And one of the big things we both learned is how unequal access to treatment is. Like both in the United States or like in rich countries, but especially between rich countries and poor middle-income countries, it's shocking. Yeah. Even with a disease that's very treatable and like we know exactly the drugs you need to get. Right. And they're not that expensive. They're not? Like the Hodgkin's drugs are not that expensive. Yeah, yeah, my chemo is the cheapest part of my treatment. Really? It's treatment in the scans. Wow. Now if I had to switch over to the new one because along the problem, it would go from $300 of treatment to like $15,000. What, what, what? What a good system. Dr. Carol Mitnick recently had an idea for me that never crossed my mind in my 45 years of being alive, which was what if we treated illness not as an opportunity to maximize value, but as an opportunity to extend the quality and length of human lives. And like I was like, well, how would we do that? And she was like, oh, we've done it before. Like what's Wikipedia except an effort to extend the quality and length of human lives? Yeah. In a don't-for-profit kind of way. Certainly in the quality anyway. I don't know if it's, I got it on, I don't know. I feel like Wikipedia has already extended the length of my life. Wikipedia was like, here's the concept for you called micromorts, which tells you every activity you do. How many minutes of your life does it decrease? Wow. What's the worst ones? Boats, I bet. Boat kind of boats and a lot of micromorts. A lot of micromorts and boats these days. Boats aren't great. Motorcycles up there. Not the best. You know what's got even more micromorts than parasailing, actually, is a free solo rock con. Oh, I bet. That's a heavy micromort. Even if you're good at it, which I'm not. So for me, it would be like a million micromorts. Yeah, which adds up to one mort. Exactly. A whole lot. A whole lot of micromorts you need to get to one. 1.0 morts, which reminds me, Hank, at VidCon. There was a pit that you could jump into to get a squishmallow. OK? And my children jumped into the pit, and they each got two squishmallows in the pit. And it was like a full, I watched them jump. It's like 15 feet down. And I was like, this is so great, because now you have a squishmallow. And you have a squishmallow. And you can both give your lovely cousin, Warren, a squishmallow. And they said, if you want to give Warren a squishmallow, you've got to jump into the pit. And so I did. I look like an eagle in flight. You've never seen something or someone so graceful. And the best part is, after I go down through all of the squishmallows, land deep, deep inside the bottom of this pit of squishmallows, the first thing you hear my squeaky little coward voice say is, well, that was thrilling. That's terrible. That's terrible. I have a new chemo symptoms, very weird. Oh, what is it? I, for the first time in my life, have gotten two ocular migraines. Oh, like with the auras? Yeah. With no pain. I had that once. Pain came after. So like, when it was happening, no pain at all. Yeah, that's what that usually is. It's like warning of the pain to come. And it did hurt very bad after the second time. But, I mean, much scarier than what it is. Because I was like. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because it feels like you're hallucinating. It feels like I'm hallucinating. It was in both eyes. So it wasn't like an eye problem. It's a brain problem. And I'm like, OK, it's a matter of stroke. So you've got the ocular migraines. Yeah, that's a real, that was weird. Very unpleasant. I was watching Wipeout. I was like, I can't see Wipeout? You know, there's a lot of things that I used to think sucked. Wipeout is a good example. That it turns out that they're just a gift of a different kind. That's right. They're a show for a different moment than the moment I'm in, maybe. But they're not a bad show. They're just a show for a different person at a different time.  Wow. And it was tough. They weren't all gazelles. But they all did it. They all made it. Dude, dad's just still, he's still at it. You know what I think, the last shot of the video has to be the extraordinary work that dad is doing. Hank, you may be alone on the boat, but look how many people are trying to ride that ship. If I extended the metaphor too far, anyway, dad, you're the best. We love you. Hank, I'll see you right now.


We thought in lieu of doing a PowerPoint like we normally do, today we are actually going to invite to the stage our very own Katherine Sullivan. Katherine is our illustrator and our graphic designer for Float On. She actually drew the conference t-shirt for this year that many of you are wearing. She's going to be live drawing during the duration of our talk to literally illustrate our points. So we wanted to talk to all of you today about sustainability, and not sustainability in the environmental sense, although obviously that's really important too, but sustainability in the sense of creating a business that can go on without you actively in it, something that can survive for beyond just your immediate influence. For those of you out here who have multiple locations or are thinking of franchising, this is a point that has probably become obvious to you at this point. You need to be able to get your business to run without your presence in it. But we think that this is actually important for everybody here, even if you're deciding just to stick in your shop and run it and you're very happy doing that, which is totally fine. There's nothing wrong about being happy in the place you are and not striving to make something completely different, but it's still an important point to realize that you need to get your business to be able to run fluidly. Yeah, and maybe at some point you just want to take a three-month vacation, and that means leaving your shop for three months in charge of your staff. Or maybe you end up taking a little bit longer vacation as well, or you just want to at some point do something else with your time and make sure that your float center doesn't completely perish in the meantime. Whatever the environment throws at us, we owe it to our businesses to be able to have them continue running. We owe it to the people inside of them, and we owe it to the very existence on our customers and everything to have it run without not just us, but any specific person to be able to have it to continue to exist. And that means creating intelligent systems, systems that can run your business for you and take care of new situations when they come up that you've never even thought of before. So let's talk about systems. When we're talking about systems, the first thing you want to know is something called the law of requisite variety. This was developed by a mathematician named Ross Ashby in the 50s, and the law of requisite variety basically states that on a long enough timeline, a system of greater variety will always destroy a system of lesser variety. So that probably doesn't make a ton of sense at first hearing to you guys. So let's start with something a little bit simpler. Take the entirety of the universe, for example. It's very complex, as I'm sure you know, and somewhere inside this massive expanding starscape is your business. And your business is never going to be able to respond properly to all of the chaos and insanity that the universe is going to toss your way. So according to the law of requisite variety, that means that the universe will outlast your business. If our sun explodes, for example, the universe is going to keep going. It's not in danger. Your business, unfortunately, will cease to exist. So the bad news is that there's nothing any of us here can do to make our businesses last forever. But the good news is that all we're really trying to do here is to make our businesses last a little bit longer than they would have otherwise before the inevitable heat death of the universe. So let's talk a little bit about variety. In system science, your variety is about how many different scenarios you're able to respond to and still survive and stay stable. So let's think about this in really simple terms. If you were to have a really bare-bones simple policy in your float center that no matter what a customer asked your person to work in the front desk, the only thing they could say was, yes, that would be having kind of the least amount of variety you could possibly have. And it's a really simple system. And sometimes it works well, like when a floater gets out of their float and asks if they can book another appointment. And sometimes it doesn't work well. Like if a floater gets out of a float and says, can I burn your building down? So obviously, that's not going to work. A lot of businesses basically try to implement a much more robust version of the same policy, though. They're trying to cover all of the different scenarios that can come up, and they're trying to make different policies and procedures for every possible scenario that could arise. And the thing is, no matter how complex or robust you start making all these policies and writing down, everything you could think that it's going to happen, there's just no way to predict what could possibly happen in your shop. Just in the last six months of running Float On, we had our HVAC system start to smell like fish. A self-proclaimed wizard came in and on multiple occasions ended up conning our staff at a free kombucha. And we had a customer email us with a complaint that started with the line, that float was way, way, way too salty. Which is probably like the best complaint we've ever gotten. So like never in a million years could we predict these things, right? And that's just a few examples of the many, many insane things that happen in a float center. So trying to make a policy for every contingency gets to be impossible. And most people's solution to this is basically to have a fallback rule, where if your staff finds a situation that they don't know how to handle, they call you and you have enough confidence that in the moment you can kind of figure out what to say and solve the situation. Because you at least trust your own judgment. And you know that even if you don't have the perfect answer, you at least will come up with a solution that you feel comfortable with. And this all goes back to the idea of variety. The more of these scenarios, the more kind of things that the universe throws at your business that your staff and everybody working in your shop can properly handle the greater variety your business has. And it means that if you're going to make an adaptable business, if you want to create a system that can roll with the punches, you need to look around and look at your business and figure out what the greatest resources for adaptability are. And that, at least for the time being, is still human beings. Humans have the ability to think, to reason, to deal with very complicated situations pretty well.  So let's talk a little bit about control. Allowing people to use their best judgment, as opposed to following some rigid system that you have put in place seems to involve the loss of a good deal of control. We believe though that by the very creation of flexible and adaptive systems, although you're giving up a little bit of direct control yourself, you're not making something completely out of control. You're in fact just giving the control over to the people who are more directly involved in the decision making. And it should definitely be noted that complete lack of control is certainly not the end goal of what we're saying here. We started float on days close to complete chaos as you could probably start any business. We didn't have any policies. There were barely any procedures. Yeah, we had no formal training process. We had interns coming into intern with us and we were just pretending to track their hours and lying to them. No system in place for that. We actually didn't even have a shift schedule for ourselves for the first several weeks of running our shop. We just all kind of showed up when we thought we should show up. And sometimes it'd be like four of us there all working and sometimes to be one person like looking around wondering why nobody else was there. And it took us a few weeks to realize like, Hey, maybe we should probably like write this down and decide who comes in when. Like, oh, this is like people have schedules. So as you can imagine, that whole system or lack thereof did not work out very well. And actually some of our first employees who we brought on started demanding more and more systems rather than just allowing people to clean the rooms however they wanted or set them up any specific way. I was interesting not coming even from us. People wanted more understanding and more control in place so that they knew what to do and felt comfortable running the shop. So obviously not all forms of control are stifling. You know, we need these systems to work together just like the human body where we have different organs that are kind of communicating each other and working in unity. We need that as our business and these policies when you make them well and when you implement them well can become tools. They can help people and they can help the organization as a whole and allow everyone to make smarter decisions. Let's talk about trust. So trusting other human beings can be absolutely terrifying. But it is completely essential to do what we're trying to do here, which is to build a system that doesn't require you in it. Trust is the connective fiber that holds the skeleton of these systems together. It's incredibly difficult to create a working system without trust because no matter how airtight you make everything and try to make every little situation accounted for, there's just no possible way to create a system that doesn't have loopholes or that can't be gained. I mean, you can just look at the lengths that it takes to write a legal contract to see what you have to do to try to make something that can't be manipulated. And even those still don't work. We have patent trolls and we have all sorts of things where people find ways to manipulate these kind of rigidly worded documents that attempt to control everything. So at the end of the day, the difference between the exact same policy being useful or being oppressive can just come down to trust. Imagine a shop where all the employees are micromanaged on every single little thing they do. They have tasks pop up to tell them exactly when to empty humidifiers, return voicemails, take out the trash, count Q-tips. Every kind of minute action of their day is displayed to them and basically demanded upon them at a certain time. And that is actually exactly what we do at Float On with our task generators. It pops up. And the difference here is that the staff are in control of them. They have total reign to edit them to change the times they pop up, to delete ones if they're no longer valuable, add in new task generators, they want to make sure they're getting done. So rather than trying to limit what they're able to do through these methods of control, we're trying to empower them to make their own wonderful decisions. If this exact same system was simply passed down by authorities, it would feel oppressive. People wouldn't like it, people wouldn't trust it, and ultimately it would probably fail. And all of these policies and systems are best just useful tools that you can put at the disposal of yourself and your staff, but having tools isn't the only part of the equation. In order for people to be able to use those tools, you need to trust them. And the great thing about trust is that it goes both directions. If you trust your employees, they'll trust you back. If you respect your employees, they'll respect you back. And if you have the respect and the trust of your employees, then when you start to create these policies, they won't be there to try to poke holes in them and find loopholes and manipulate them and game your systems. They'll be there to work with you. They'll want to improve these policies. They'll want to be a part of them and they'll want to help you develop them. And this alone allows you to not have to create a rulebook that has different policies in place for every possible scenario that you're doing because you know that your staff isn't there to try and game your system. They're there to work with it. And that's really the goal of all this, right? It's to set everyone up with the best possible tools they could have to make these decisions. And more importantly, your goal is ideally to set up systems that actually improve themselves so that there's something built in so that they keep responding to the new things that are happening around them and hopefully becoming better and stronger over time. And I guess the lesson to take away here is there by giving up your own control, we're not just saying thrust your business into chaos, we're saying give over control to another group of people. And in our mind, the best people suited for that are the ones who are actually on the ground doing the work, who understand the day-to-day operations, who know what the different policies should be. They're the ones who should be in charge of things. As an example, this is our company policy taken out of our employee guide about how to handle discounts and free floats at our center. Offering free floats and discounts that float on is based on your own judgment. If you feel like you should give your friend a free float because they just drove 37 hours through a snowstorm to come see you, go for it. If you think the joke a customer said is so funny that you want to give them a $10 discount, please do. The point is we trust you to use your own discretion for when and to whom to give discounts and free floats. If you ever want something more concrete to base your decisions on, take a look at our finances. You can be your own judge of what you think float on can and cannot afford. Enjoy. And we've literally had that policy since the day we opened and not once has anything bad happened as a result of it. In fact, even in sitting down to write this talk, Ashkan and I were trying to think of any instance of that even going mildly wrong and we couldn't think of anything that even came close. It's just worked solidly. And this is a big reason why we try to start all of our policies as small and as easy going as we possibly can. And the thing is when you start a policy there, when you started at the minimum requirement and make it kind of as loose as you possibly can, from there you just kind of keep ramping up kind of how strict and specific it is until you get it to work. And if you do the opposite, if you start with really strict methods of control, really strict policies because you're afraid of what might happen, you actually don't know if a more relaxed policy would have accomplished the exact same thing. It could be that you're doing a lot of work for absolutely nothing or even hurting things by having your policy in place. And as a result of that, they tend to stay there as well. It's really hard to remove something once you have it in place because you get afraid that without it things would fall apart. And then in cases like this where we write kind of the most easygoing policy we can and it turns out to work, that's great. We have for years never had to change this and now we have a great way that our employees get to feel like. They have some responsibility and we can see that we trust them, that we think they're intelligent and that we think they're responsible enough to make their own decisions. So a lot of our systems, a lot of our policies are kind of structured like this. This obviously is a really simple example, giving away discounts, free floats, very directly trusting people's judgment. As another example, on the far, far end of the spectrum is how we set up systems so that our managers can get fired. So we actually created the system first by sitting down with our managers and basically asking them to help us figure out how they would be fired. And so our one rule was that they couldn't rely on us for it. If at some point we had to swoop in and be the ones who are deciding to let them go or judge their performance, anything like that, we didn't want them to toss that idea out. So we had to come up with some way that didn't actually rely on us. And so in the end, we really decided that who we should be asking is the people who the managers are directly overseeing. They're the ones who have to deal with them on a day to day basis. And if our entire staff hates both of our managers, then maybe they don't deserve to be in the shop anymore. And this is where we hit a little bit of a problem actually. So he wanted to let the actual shop staff are kind of normal level employees have the ability to have a voice and their managers are as possible, and ideally to be able to fire the managers if possible. But what do you do as an employee if you try to fire your manager and it doesn't end up happening? And then you have to have your boss know that you try to get them fired. And you have to continue working under that person. And what happens when both people can fire each other and everyone's just kind of sitting there and you end up in some sort of Mexican standoff of seeing who's going to fire who is first. So with a little more brainstorming, we came up with the idea of an anonymous survey that goes out every six months and it's mandatory. So every staff member has to fill it out and the survey has 16 questions that are all along a five point scale. Here's an example of one of the questions from there. The question would be how well does this person handle the shop's finances and number one on the scale kind of worst possible answer is they piss it all away. And number two on the scale is they bleed us little by little. Number three would be they do OK. Number four is I think they do a pretty good job. And number five is I've named him the executor of my will. So the survey also ends with an open answer at the end saying is there any way that this survey can be improved? Are there any questions you'd like to see added? Are there any questions you'd like to see removed? And it's a good reminder that whenever possible you need to incorporate into the systems you're building a way for them to maintain a way for the systems as part of their actions to improve themselves. And then what we do is we take those scores that are anonymous and we aggregate them together and we find the average amongst them. And if that average percentage goes below a certain number that automatically triggers a meeting with all the employees to get together and basically discuss what should be done about the situation. And that's pretty much where all the specifics stop as far as the policies go. From there there's once again just too many different scenarios that a manager could be performing bad in, including they're not actually performing bad and the questionnaire was flawed and we need to really think about revising some of those questions because they've gotten an unnecessarily low score, right? So at the time that we call all of the staff together that's where we turn it over to their judgment and just trust that they can with each other and through their own intelligence dialogue and figure out what the best way to handle the situation is. And you know if they leave that meeting with the manager intact that means that because the questions were all anonymous in the first place everyone just gets to go back to work. The only way for a meeting like this to even be triggered is if at least multiple people actually had a lot of negative things to say so there's not way for one person to kind of tank a manager and there's kind of no way for after this there to be any fall out between people because there's no actual specific person that made this happen. It's just the system itself that triggered the situation. And it's kind of nice when you make really good systems the system is sort of allowed to be the bad guy and the system can take that role whereas normally you might cause some personal tensions between people. So in the end we use a very specific and rigid structure in order to get the questionnaires out and call the meeting in the first place and then we use a very loose and open system of just letting people hash it out once it gets to that point when things get a little too nebulous. And all this requires a huge amount of trust right. I mean we're basically giving our employees the chance to mutiny if they wanted to but this trust also lets them know that we respect them that we respect their decisions that we want them to take ownership of the shop and that in fact we're relying on them to make sure that the shop can run smoothly. So let's take this back to the big picture again. Remember that your goal isn't to create something that can outdo the universe something that can last forever. You just want to give your business the best chance of lasting a little bit longer than it would have otherwise. And that means making sure that it can adapt to the crazy amount of variety that the environment throws at it. And that means creating systems that can function and continue to function without you in them. And that means taking advantage of the intelligence and flexibility of other human beings that you work with which means trust. And even if you still don't believe a single word that we're saying here even if you think we're just a couple of young idealistic fools who haven't been beaten down by the great tyrant known as life yet. Consider this. There is no path towards running your business that's easy. Any direction you decide to go comes with its own difficulties and its own challenges that you're going to have to figure out and overcome. And there's nothing that you can actually do to guarantee the success or the thriving of your business anyway. So as long as you're going to be putting all this hard work into overcoming these hurdles then why not put the effort into a path that involves respecting people's intelligence treating them kindly and making it more enjoyable to come into work every day. Thank you. Thank you very much.


Welcome folks this is Tom O'Brien of TFNN. We have five days a week, we go seven hours a day, we go 24 hours a day on the internet at TFNN.com. Always remember folks, whatever you think about, you bring about whatever. You focus on growth. Hope everyone's having a great day, safe day. Let's make it a great night folks.  I love you Tommy O'Brien. Where's your shock? Where's your shock? Where's your shock? Get that shock. He loves shocks. He loves the animals. Loves nature. That is a beautiful thing. Don't take anything personally. The truth is personal to you. Your own opinions and point of view reflect your own agreements and are personal to you. It's no one's truth but your own. Mockin' wise! Let's take a look at it out here. We have the now industrials down to 18 Aztecs off 247, S&Ps down 56, gold contract down $3.50, trading $17.33 an ounce.  Ten-year note, up four ticks, $1.1926, the third year up 20 at $142.01 and $Kingdala. $Kingdala up 726, trading at $107.203, the euro is at $101, the yen is at trading at a price point of $136.70 and the British pound is at $120 to $1.00 US dollar. iPhone numbers 877, 9276648. Give us a call folks. Want to know what's going on in your world and the world of the S&Ps? Let's take a look at them. Let's get into the futures first. We take a look at this, okay? So you get the E-mini's down 56 bucks. We're at a price point right now. There we go. Let's pull this back. Okay. So it's been a one-way trip all day long. We had a high out here of $39.64. You get a low out here of $39.13 right now. We're laying right at that low. And, okay, so last time $41,000 contracts. We got $30,000 contracts right now, but that's a new 10-minute bar is going to stop. So you don't have a break with Hallym. That's the bottom line. We also have, now, this is going to be pretty cool. Now, watch this. We had one countertrend bounce today. Now, the countertrend bounce at $34,000 contracts going back into $36,000. So if you get a rejection of lower price right here, the bottom line, you're going to be right back top side into this $39.37, $39.37, which is not a lot, but the bottom line, that's where that bounced last time. That's in the E-mini's. We go into the NDX100. We take a look at the NDX100. Right now, it's down to $274 ticks, points that is rather, and same type of setup. When we got that pop, first pop was $9,100, and you went to $10,000. Different setup, different setup. No doubt about that, man. You haven't broken the B yet, you know. So we'll see how this is going to shake out, because after the close, we'll move the market. Number one is Microsoft and Google. Microsoft, right now, let's take a look at Microsoft. Microsoft is down $8.68. You're trading $250. And what's interesting about this, so look at this for a second. This is where this gets into. So the first time that we were downtown and got to the $250 area, we did, it's on a daily, we did 51 million shares. Then you bounce up to $277. Now you don't have the volume there, but then we come back down again with 46 million. So what is the correlation? 51 million, 46 million, 35 million, and today's 22. So when I look at that chart, that's telling me that Microsoft is actually going to pop on the close. This isn't, this isn't a great looking chart. I'm not, it's not that it's a great looking chart. What it is, is that you can see the force has evaporated pretty much going all the way back to the 12th of May. So the correlation once again is that you're down on 51 million, you're down on 39, you're down on 46, you're down on 35, and today we'll do, we might do 35. See, where could it go? But that's telling me that you don't have enough buyers to keep jamming that low. Google, Google's going to be coming out with numbers also. Google, bottom line, that's coming into basically where it went top side. So that's 10624. We had volume there 36 million to testing that with 21. And we test then, do we hit the 102? Well, we didn't hit the big volume here. See, there's a bar here that it probably wants to hit, which is 106395. Oh no, we hit it. Okay, so this is going to be interesting. We'll see whether we can get over it. We tested the highs of the lows that were established out there in the 24th. So this is going to be wild, just watching this whole baby shake out. Gold, as we go to the gold, well here, let's cut to the chase and go right to the dollar. The dollar, this correlation is as direct as you can get, folks. The bottom line, we've been talking about the dollar for quite some time now. And you can see, you're back over the benchmark, and where the benchmark is, that is the, there's the level right there. And that number in the benchmark is 106792. And we're at 107192. And what that benchmark is, that's where the dollar had monster strength. That's where we went up 1500 ticks. That's a penny and a half. And, you know, the market basically came down there four times, didn't break it, came down, broke it on Friday, stayed underneath it, stayed underneath it yesterday, and guess what, pops it once again. So bottom line is that that dollar is keeping pressure on the market in an extraordinary way. Let's take a look at some of the higher volume equities out here today. You get advanced microdown, $2.50, carnival's off 64.  Walmart, let's go to Walmart. Well, yeah, Walmart's down $10. They came out. Now this came out with a warning. This wasn't even their numbers, folks, because their numbers are coming out on August 16th. And bottom line, we take this, we look at this. And so last time, I mean, last time Walmart came out with this number, it went from $149, three days later it was down at $121 and bottomed out at $117. What we have out here today is that you got $26 million going into $34. We'll see whether, you know, I mean, when you get something like this, this very well, this is going to need a lot of testing to get to higher price because the bottom line is that when you get a fast price destruction like that, that leaves a lot of people out in a limb that as it moves up a little, they'll be selling out. Stay right there, folks who come right back. We have the Dow Industrial's down $231, Nasdaq down $231. Look at that. Point for point. S&Ps down $49 will come right back.


What's up YouTube? So let's have a little fun today and sneak behind the curtain or rather inside a physician's wallet to learn exactly how much they make. Hi, I'm Dr. Josie. This is Write Your Acceptance. Usually we will talk about everything medical and dental school admissions related from personal statements to secondaries to interview prep. But today we're gonna have a little fun. So after a bajillion years of schooling, preparation, residencies, rotations, audit, good stuff, physicians can make some pretty good coin but not all specialties are created equal. Let's find out some details. So today's information is coming from a couple of sources. My main first source is the AAMC's websites. The AAMC's 2023 annual report came out and so that's where kind of some of the numbers are coming from. I will link below all of the sources that I basically kind of scoured through. High level, the average physician's salary went up from five years ago at 299,000 to 325, possibly due to physician burnout, pandemic, and so kind of physician shortages and kind of the need is on the rise. Some physicians are also looking for shift work and virtual care. Most of these numbers or I believe the survey that these numbers come from are all full-time physicians. PCPs, primary care physicians are making on average $265,000. And while the average of all specialties and you'll see kind of how broad that range is, is 382K. So here are the top 10 specialty salaries. Plastics at 619, orthopedics 573, cardio 507, urology 506, and it goes all the way down to dermatology at 443, and then Peds at 251 and family medicine at $255,000. A couple of details I wanted to note from the report. There is a slight improvement in gender-based pay. If you look at the numbers through a gender-based kind of pay discrepancy, so there is closing of that gap somewhat. There is increased discontent with Medicare and that this survey was conducted with over 10,000 physicians in about 20 different specialties. Now there are some discrepancies with other sources and I wanted to kind of share those a little bit to just kind of cross-reference the information. On this survey, neurosurgeons are the highest paid specialty averaging salary of 788K. The results were drawn from about 190,000 physicians within a span of six years, about 31,000 being surveyed in just 2022. So according to their surveys, these are the highest paid specialties we have. Neurosurgeons, like I mentioned, at 788. Thoracic surgeons at 706K, orthopedics at 624. Plastic surgeons at 571. Vascular surgeons at 557. Oral and maxillofacial surgeons at 556. And it goes all the way down. I'll give you the entire list. 19, we have pulmonologists at 400 and nuclear medicine number 20 at 392. The biggest increases were in oncology, gastroenterology, anesthesia, very kind of procedure-based post-pandemic. Are you considering a career in medicine angling for a specific specialty already? If you are, I work with students on all aspects of the medical school admissions, from personal statement to interview prep. So if you are interested in learning how I work with students, get on my schedule. The link is in the description, but then also comment below and we can start chatting. So back to our trusted AMC survey and their numbers. Let's kind of go through, deep dive a little bit into the gender-based and kind of other breakdowns that they have for us. So in primary care, a male physician is averaging 286K, while female is averaging 239K. There is no current data stated for physicians who identify as non-binary or did not choose to identify with a gender. Male physicians earned 19% more, which is the smallest disparity to date, with 25% difference five years ago. For specialists, male physicians are making 415K, female through 27K. Male specialists make 27% more than female counterparts. Also, if we look at pay breakdown by race, white physicians are making on average through 58K.  So who feels fairly compensated? These numbers are pretty interesting to kind of think through. While 65% of a psychiatrist feel fairly compensated, about 35% only in infectious disease feel fairly compensated. If you look down at the lower kind of paying specialties, some of those feel very content and fairly compensated, and that may be not so much just kind of dollar for dollar, but smaller practice, less competition with peers. And it could be kind of a couple of different outside factors that we're not looking at when we're just looking at the numbers. So physician shortage, this is an interesting kind of group of data. So on a state level, the states with the greatest estimated physician shortage will be California, Florida and Texas. And just because I am in Florida, I work with a number of Florida pre-meds and Texas pre-meds. There's definitely kind of great, great competition in these medical schools for sure, but we're seeing at kind of what physician shortages are gonna be looking like in a few years. Something that should be kind of great to hear, a resounding 73% of the physician surveyed would choose medicine again, so that you hear kind of sometimes negative aspects of physician burnout, and I imagine it's very, very real, but this is kind of like very kind of heartwarming. So like I said, this was just a fun video to kind of deep dive into, or not so deep dive into some numbers so that you got kind of an idea asked to compensation and how that kind of changes between specialties. So just kind of, you know, if you were stopping by, hi, hi. I am Dr. Josie. This is write your acceptance. If you are applying to medical school, I work with students on elevating their message on really standing out in your application so that your white coat dream becomes your reality tomorrow. If you are interested in learning how I work with students, definitely get on my calendar for your free chat or comment below and we can start talking. I'll see you soon, bye.


The study found that a common component of spices, curcufinol, can reverse the down regulation of APM components in metastatic tumor cells, thus reversing the immune escape mechanism of cancer cells. This suggests that foods or advanced nutraceuticals containing this component could be used as a potential therapeutic candidate for harnessing the power of the immune system to recognize and destroy metastatic cancers. This article was authored by Lillian L. Noera, Lillian L. Noera, Lillian L. Noera, and others.


Well, hello and welcome to Understand Men Now. I'm Jonathan Asley of JonathanAsley.com, and I'm so excited to be shooting this short video for you today. Our topic, the six, wait a minute, six types of relationships, we'll go with this, six types of first dates for them go nowhere, okay? The six type of first dates. Okay, really quickly, if you're new to my channel, please hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you can be notified of new content. I shoot about three or four videos per week. All right, our topic, the six kind of first dates that go nowhere. Once again, I'm gonna be using my glasses again today. I'm trying to read my sheet here, but the first one is the most obvious. You go on a first date, and there's no attraction to for one another. There's literally walking going, ah, you know, and I know you've all experienced this. You've gone on first dates. I know I've gone on first dates. Immediately, there's a disappointment, most likely because they didn't live up to the billing in their profile, maybe the photographs were old. Men and women do this consistently, and a lot of first dates never go anywhere because there's no mutual attraction. And then there's the second kind of first date where one person's attracted, but the other person isn't attracted, or vice versa, right? You've been there.  So that's rather obvious, right? Now the next four get really kind of tricky, and that's why I'm gonna share with you those first two obviously go nowhere for obvious reasons. The next one is the third one is you have a small connection with one another. There's a little bit of banter. There's some humor. There is some emotional connection with one another. However, the person, one or both people, have a lot of unhealed childhood wounds and traumas, or adult traumas, and they're not healed. So they're not really ready for a relationship. And while it may get past the first or second date, because there's a small connection, those childhood wounds are gonna rear up and play havoc in the relationship. This is one of the reasons why I recommend the book, Getting the Love You Want by Harvelle Hendrick, so you can understand the dynamics. Most people fall into is this Imago Triangle. In addition, you definitely wanna check out the book Attached to understand avoidant attachment style, as well as anxious attachment style, because those unhealed attachment styles, while you might have a connection with someone, it's just the relationship isn't gonna form the bond needed to go the distance for it to be successful. By the way, I'm noticing I'm wearing this blue shirt. I haven't worn it in a while. A lot of people have been so kind to say, you look great in blue, so I wanna thank you for that. If that's still true, please post a comment below. I just wanna hear your thoughts on the blue. I do mix them up on any video, just like I mix up the pictures on every video. I bought these from Mixed Tiles. They're great pictures. They were actually a gift for me after Connor passed away and I've just been buying a bunch ever since. Okay, the fourth kind of first date that actually has some potential is where there is a small connection and both people are able to invest in the relationship. They are healing their childhood wounds and traumas. They're making an investment in themselves. Maybe they go to therapy, maybe they do workshops and such.  While it may not always go the distance, it certainly has the potential for it because ones where they're still dealing with their traumas, their spouses, issues at work, when their life foundation doesn't feel solid, they're incapable of leaning in, leaning in. You know how I'm big about leaning in instead of leaning back and I'm just saying that tongue in cheek here. Okay, the fifth kind. This is the toughest one when you have intense chemistry with another person. I mean, just off the charts chemistry.  I mean, it's just intense and you're literally attached to the hip right away and you're macking on each other and you're making out. I mean, that's the ones where it's lust driven, rarely ever go anywhere. I like what Marianne Williamson says in her workshops. When she does a workshop, she says when you have that intense chemistry, what's the first thing you should do and the whole audience screams at the same time, pray, pray. You gotta pray for guidance because guess what? When there's intense chemistry, it really, if it takes off like a rocket, it's gonna come crashing down to earth. Not always, but, and this really leans into that sixth one that we're gonna talk about today, the sixth type of first date. This is where you actually feel a soul connection with another human being. You feel a soul connection, not that intense physical connection, but just that connection where you're just able to laugh with one another, you get each other, you finish each other's sentences. It's just very easy being with them. And these are the people that have most likely healed their childhood wounds and traumas. They actively do what I talk about in my book, What the Heck Is Self Love Anyway. And by the way, if you're interested in any of these books, there's a link below to Jonathan recommends. I highly recommend. Have you purchased my book? If you have, please let me know. And I ask you to write a review as well. All right, but that soul connection where you're actually, has anyone seen the Black Mirror episode called Hang the DJ? It's in the fourth season. I think it's the fifth episode. But it's a great illustration of what it feels like to meet someone for the first time and just have that soul connection where you just feel comfortable with the other human being. It just feels easy. The relationships that progress are the ones that start relatively easy and there's no hangups. There's no need to analyze the relationship. One of my friends said to me, if you have to analyze the relationship most likely, it's not the right relationship. Or it means there's more work for one to do on themselves. And when I mean, there's no such, when I say right relationship, I'm talking a relationship that progresses forward with commitment and such, that progresses to a level of partnership. And it's relatively easy. And the only work that needs to be done is the work on oneself. So we're not caught up in our own stuff. This is why I highly recommend checking out the Hoffman process. The Hoffman process. There's a link below to that. Highly recommend checking this out. Because once you've done the work, you're open and receptive to love. You're open and receptive to love. And that's my invitation for you today. All right, if this resonates with you and you'd like some advice understanding men to determine which men are really ready for a relationship, which one of those fit into those six categories and which of the four you should get rid of? Well, the first two you'll know really quickly. Then check out a link to a schedule of discovery call to see if working with a coach is right for you. Free discovery call. I'm gonna wrap up this video as I always do.  I'm gonna reach into the camera and give you a hug of love. I'm gonna ask you to turn to someone and give them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love and we can all use more love in our lives. Thanks a bunch. Bye bye now.