Falcons fans, heck NFL fans everywhere. I am so excited to have today's guest on. He's a former sports agent who helped found, correctly if I'm wrong, premier sports and entertainment, represents coaches and athletes. He's represented a ton of athletes, including Shaquille O'Neal, Akim Balajuan, Ronnie Lott, and probably a ton of other NFL players. I know he has, and I don't know how many former Falcons he's represented. We'll get into that in a minute. But he's appeared on ESPN, CBS. I worked with him at CBS Sports. He writes agents take. And he's been on countless radio shows across the country. Ladies and gentlemen, Falcons Nation. I am so stoked to introduce my friend, former colleague, Joel Corey. Joel, great to see you, man. Hey, thanks for having me. Good, you look good, man. Where are you these days? sunny Las Vegas, Nevada, where it is going to be 70 degrees today. Wow, yeah, rub it in. All right, so coming up on this show. Have you lived in the deep South? It never gets that cold. I remember when I was at Emory, they canceled class once because of a forecast of snow. And I'm like, wait till it actually snows? Growing up in Nashville, we actually had to have snow before high school got canceled. Well, you remember, I was down in Fort Lauderdale with CBS. So coming up here is like, you know, coming up to the North. Yeah, that is true. That is true. So, well, let's get to the topics we're going to cover. We're going to cover the looming salary cap with looks like a reduction. We're going to talk about the Falcon salary cap, Joel, and how that's going to impact roster decisions. I hope you've been studying up on the Falcons roster. I know you've been writing about a lot of different teams. And then if we have time, I want to talk about the New Orleans Saints because, you know, Falcons fans feel pretty bad about, you know, the impending gloom and doom of the salary cap. Well, the Saints actually have kind of a worse situation. Look, let's just jump right into it. Let's just get right into the salary cap. And there's so much to unpack, Joel. But if you could, and I'm not saying cliff notes, but what is the big issue right now with the salary cap as far as this possible reduction and what's it mean for just teams in general? Well, revenues went down drastically because of the coronavirus pandemic. There were no stands in the fans for no fans in stands for the most part had that reversed the first time. So local revenue is approximately 35, 40% of league-wide revenue. So when you don't have that, that's a major piece of the pie. So the NFL and NFL PA in the preseason agreed to limit the losses for this year, at least how they count cap-wise, the salary cap floor of 175 million. The losses may be more than that, but the cap won't be any lower than 175 million. If they have to, they'll borrow from future years and spread those losses out over 2022, 2023, and 2024. If necessary, the cap right now is 198.2 million. Pre-pandemic, the planning the teams had was conservatively the cap would go up roughly six, seven percent to the $210 million range. So you're talking salary cap planning and teams planning three year snapshots of 210 million to now you're dealing with worst case scenario, 175 million. If the NFL can get the new meteorites deals done before the league year starts on March 17th, the 2021 league year, that could be a game changer. And the NFL would feel more comfortable borrowing from future years and keeping the cap as close to remaining flat as possible, knowing the infusion of revenue would be certain. If you don't have new TV deals done, then expect the cap to be 180 million, maybe 185 at best, which is terrible for players because teams, since they were planning for- Joel, we're talking about how much, how much drop per team? Is that 20 some million? Yeah, you're talking about planning for 210 initially and you're going to be at 180. So we're talking 30 million below what your expectation is. That's going to be a buyer's market. Teams are going to have to cut players they wouldn't otherwise cut to be cap compliant, which means that there will be a great amount of supply exceeding demand in free agency. So you don't want to be a free agent unless you're one of the top guys.  If a team asks you to take a pay cut under those circumstances, you may want to consider it because a burden a hand, maybe worth two in the bush this year. Hopefully everything gets back to normal in the 2021 season. You have fans in the stands, the whole year and the Super Bowl is a sellout like it always is. And in 2022, then the cap can start going back up. TV deal should be done by then and it'll be business as usual. So if I'm a free agent, I may take a one year deal if I'm a younger guy, if I can't find the money I want in a long-term deal and try to hit it again in 2022. Just unfortunate that you would happen to have an expiring contract in this year if you didn't have a great year. So yeah, a lot of guys are gonna have to bet on themselves is what you're saying, right? Yes, more so than would in the past. Yeah, you talked to a lot of GMs and a lot of front office people still. What is your sense? If you had to make a prediction right now of what you think will happen, what, you know, with the TV deal and what you think that number is, you know, what's the solve? What do you think happens, you know, based on what you're here and what you think? Well, nobody, the TV deal is the unknown variable. Nobody knows if those are gonna get done, but some teams are using 175, the floor for planning now, some are using 180, but teams aren't using anything remotely close to the current level, 198.2 million for their cap planning for the 2021 season. And by now- So they're planning for worst case, you're saying?  And then if it doesn't, you've been planning for 10%, you're kind of screwed. One thing which it is gonna affect is the later that the NFL sets the salary cap because typically projections preliminary are made in December. We have a conservative range where the cap is. And then into February, when the combine takes place, typically, which it isn't like it would normally in Annapolis, is when the cap is finally set early March. So everyone knows what they're doing. The franchise and transition tag numbers are a percentage of the cap. So you won't know the exact numbers until the 2021 salary cap is set. But regardless, since the cap is expected to go down, those numbers are going to drop. Like I'll use an example for one. Derrick Henry's franchise tag was 10.278 million this year as a running back. Now, if the cap is at the floor of 175 million, then that number is going to be 8.4 because of the way the franchise tags worked that it's the average of the top five salaries at a position over a five-year period where it's a complicated formula more so than it was under previous CBAs. Where you take the some of the franchise tag numbers for the past five years or some of the salary caps, divide those two numbers into each other multiplied by what the salary cap is. And that's what the number is for position. So if the cap drops, those numbers are going to drop dramatically. Yeah. Wow. Whoo. So I can't, obviously it behooves everybody to get this TV deal then. And I've read on pro football talk in different places that they, and then you tweeted out something yesterday that CNBC story about how this could be a game changer this new deal. Correct? Yeah. Because if I haven't seen television or media rights deals go down. Right. God forbid the sport for if it's a cap sport for that, because then everybody's salaries go down. The expectation is there's going to be a substantial increase in the media rights deals. If you look at the highest rated TV programs, even though the Super Bowl number of viewership was down, the ratings were down. It's dominated by NFL Telecast. Yeah. Because TV ratings are down across the board because of court cutting, primetime TV isn't what it used to be. But one thing you can count on to generate ratings is the NFL. So why do you think it's going to go up because there's other players in the game and because there's talk of going 17 games less preseason and then ESPN wants to be, from what I read ESPN wants to in ABC, ESPN ABC wants to get in that Super Bowl rotation. Right. Is that kind of the next factor? Yeah, that also helps. Anytime you're going to add more inventory, extra game to add more inventory by increasing the playoffs. And if you have a party which is on the outside looking in wanting to get in, that's a league's dream. We've seen the last round of baseball rights go up. The NBAs went up dramatically. The NFL is still the ratings king. So the anticipation is that they're still, they're going to go up dramatically as well. The deal's going to get done before the new league year. Your guess is as good as mine. People thought they might be doing during the regular season. I have no insight and knowledge about that. So if they get done, that's great for the cap. If not, then it's going to be a year where you don't want to be a player unless you're a marquee free agent. Yeah, how big too was it to get that 10-year CBA deal done before the pandemic hit and everything like that? Well, as it was hitting. Well, the funny thing is that thing barely passed by the players because there was a faction of players and Aaron Rogers, who was Green Bay's player rep and on the player rep board was very vocal in his opposition that he didn't think that the players were getting enough to give up the 17th game. Now, nobody knew the pandemic was coming. I would hate to see what the situation would have looked like if we played the 2020 season in the last year of the CBA under 2011 CBA and then they're going to have to go and negotiate a new CBA in a pandemic environment. I would imagine there'd be a work stoppage and there would be a lockout like in 2011 because the owners would use the pandemic is a reason to extract concessions from players that they've always wanted. In 2011, they clawed back a lot of stuff from the 2006 CBA which they thought was two player friendly. And I think you would see the same dynamic again where maybe the players would have a little more resolve just because they would feel that the owners are unfairly or unjustifiably using the pandemic to try to rectify or remedy a situation that didn't necessarily need to be remedied. So some players weren't all that happy about the new deal but given what it could have been in this environment, yeah, it worked out well for the players. Really well. Under the circumstances that we're going to be that we're unforeseen at the time. Yeah, thank goodness we're not in that situation. All right, well let's segue right into the Atlanta Falcons, Joel. How bad is it? I get questions all the time and that's why I'm really excited. How long have I been asking you to come on? I think since what, 17 since I got here, right? Oh, not so long. Come on. It feels like it. But how bad is it? Falcons fans, you know how it is with fandom.  What's the Falcons situation in a nutshell?  It's one of the worst in the league. It's probably bottom five but there are a couple of teams which are way worse. If the cap is going to be 180, the Falcons are roughly 32 million over the cap. There are ways for you can try to create cap room. There's some obvious guys you would release like Ricardo Allen, James Carpenter, Alan Bailey, the ones that come to mind about releasing if you released Ricardo Allen, you're going to pick up 6.25 million a cap room if you release James Carpenter, that's about 4 million. Alan Bailey gets you about 4.5 million. There's some obvious guys to restructure. Jake Matthews has the highest offensive line cap number in the NFL at 20.2 million. Grady Jarrett, highest offensive line cap number in the NFL, Grady Jarrett's number four at defensive tackles at 20.833 million. And then Dion Jones, it's got a 12.63 million cap number. That's another one that screams restructure. By restructure, I mean you're pushing cap obligations into tomorrow, kicking the can down the road where you take base salary or other salary components like a roster bonus, convert it into signing bonus and you can take the amount that you convert into signing bonus and prorate it over the life of the contract. Or if you want to get it really creative like the Saints do, you can start adding voiding years to the contract so you can stretch out the proration for over more years, create more cap room because the voting years count for proration purposes. But there's a cost to that because then you're going to have more dead money when those years void. Now, if you're talking Grady Jarrett, he's under contract through 2022. So you could take like 12.5 million because that's our minimum base salary at least. You have to drop it down to a minimum base salary. You can take a restructure and cut the base salary to whatever you want. And the reason I say you can cut it to wherever you want is in these contracts over the past decade or so, teams have inserted in the addendums automatic salary conversion rights. So it's no longer a negotiation between the agent and the team on the restructure, which it was 20 years ago. And I had one, I'm not going to name them, one of the top guys in terms of managing a cap cursed me out because we had a player on his team where we'd restructured a year before. And to me, I'm like, I'm doing you a favor. I don't want to do you another favor. So why need something in return? Like more money or something, exaggerated payment schedule. Otherwise it wasn't going to do it. And he cursed me out over that. Teams, to avoid that, it started putting automatic conversion rights in the contract where they can convert however much money they want. And then it's considered a breach of contract if the player doesn't execute a new contract, which has the terms of the restructure. Now, in Grady Jarrett's case, you chop them down to his minimum base salary. It's not 90, but let's say a million for a round number. You can take 12, five, convert it in the salary cap in the signing bonus. She creates 6.25 million a cap room. Jake Matthews under contract three years. His minimum base salary is 1.075 million. You can take a little over 11.9, convert that into a signing bonus. You can save almost 8 million. Deion Jones under contract through 2023. 7.2 you could convert. So that's 4.8 you could create. Two guys I wouldn't touch, Matt Ryan, Julio Jones, even though Matt Ryan has a second highest cap number in the league, soon to be the highest because Ben Rottlesberger's number is gonna come down one way or another. Matt Ryan's is just under 41 million. You've restructured that three times. So I wouldn't touch that Julio Jones, top wide receiver cap number to lower 23 million. I would kind of leave that alone as well. If you have to, if you're gonna restructure, you're one of those guys, you don't do the full restructure where you take the base salary down to the absolute minimum, you would do it at a different level. So Joel, I'm gonna break it down even more simpler. What I'm hearing from you is that, the rookies that you draft and the guys that you draft in those guys, they're gonna get their paid, right? And then you're talking about not touching Matt Ryan and Julio Jones because of their high, high cap number. And you just don't wanna spread that out. You're talking about the guys that are kind of in the middle class, so to speak, in the middle and either working with them on the solve here is to do it quickly as possible. Either you're gonna have to make tough decisions and part ways or restructure some of these guys and other guys are gonna have to just either take one year deals, bet on themselves. And it's not like they're gonna find a lot of other takers because everybody's kind of in this situation. Is that make sense? Yeah, that's fair. It also means in free agency, even though the Saints one year when they had no cap room came out of nowhere and signed Jarrett's bird, maybe Nye's paid safety. They did it in a manner where you had a small first year cap number ballooning second year cap number. So if the Falcons create enough cap room or at least start a new league year, they're compliant. They could sign one of these guys under that approach. Also the Falcons use a contract structure which has now started to come back and vogue which had really gone away which is a signing bonus option bonus structure. We have a signing bonus which gets probably over five years. And in the second year, you have an option bonus to exercise and option year which would be the last year of the contract. You prorate the option bonus like a signing bonus and that's gonna keep the second cap year number low as well. The problem with that is, and this goes back to a guy several years ago, it was used with Sam Baker and Sam Baker didn't pan out. And when you released him, you had a ton of dead money because you have multiple sets of proration. You've got the signing bonus proration and the option bonus proration. That type of structure was used with Matt Ryan's contract and they restructured it three times. So that's why his cap number is so high and why if you cut Matt Ryan which nobody's thinking about doing, it would add to the cap. And even if you traded him before June 2nd, it goes from being almost 41 million to almost 44.5 million in terms of the dead money is more than the cap hit. One guy, to me, that's interesting to take a look at is Dante Fowler. He's got a cap number about 18.5. He's got 6 million of his 2020 base salary already guaranteed. It's 13 million as a total base. The other 7 million is fully guaranteed fifth day of the 21 league year. He's a guy that if he's on the open market doesn't do well. If you cut him conventionally, he doesn't make a lot of sense because he's got the guarantee then you got the bonus proration accelerating from 2022 hitting 2021 that it's not worth your time. You either have to make him what's called a post June 1 designation where you carry him on the cap until June 2nd even though he's released. And then at that point, you can remove the 7 million that's not guaranteed and you delay the proration from 2022 from hitting the cap in 2021. You pick up almost 11 million cap room that way. I might go another route instead. I would approach him about a pay cut because he's got the 6 million no matter what.  And also knowing that he has a 6 million, he's not looking most likely to chase money. He's looking at opportunity. So I would try to get him to take a pay cut anywhere between 5 and 7 million personally. And then he could have the opportunity to make it back through incentives where if he's sacking the quarterback at a pretty high rate, he can be made whole.  He came from the saints as you know.  You can, but there's a cost. You could, but there's a cost. And eventually, you know, you could do different deals where you can spread it out but you eventually gotta pay the bills. And so how do they have success in 2021? And is this an opportunity for Terry font know?  How do you fix this situation? How do you put your stamp on this team to have success in 2021 and beyond?  What do you think makes sense, you know for them as they kind of head into free HD the draft and look at this roster to be able to have depth. Can they have depth to be able to do they trade down? Do they get more draft picks? Is this an opportunity where you maybe try to make some moves and acquire more picks because if you hit on draft picks that's the ultimate contract, right? You get those guys and you know, if you tell me so and if they do or do not have success in 2021 what how long will it take realistically you think? Well, you guys have been kind of stuck in neutral the past couple of years where you are better than the record indicates you have to pretty much assume Tampa Bay is going to win the NFC South the Saints are a wild card because that team is going to be dramatically different Drew Brees is retiring as well. So I don't think you're winning division. The way Matt Ryan and Julio Jones' contracts and cap numbers are structured you're probably keeping them at least for one more year. You're not going to be able to make substantial additions through free agency unless you're able to get guys when it's a complete buyer's market that's going to be higher quality talent than would normally be available to take one year deals and for bargain basement rates and you go there you're right about you think that's going to happen? You think there's going to be if the cap around 180 if the cap around 180 or less yeah, you're going to see guys doing that left and right then it's going to become I'm trying to position myself for the best possible way for me to have success to hit the market in 2022. So you did touch on one thing which is very important if you have a low cost quarterback then you can amass talent around them. You have the number four pick Matt Ryan's no spring chicken he's on the back nine of his career. So that's your opportunity to have a successor in waiting that can take over in 2022 because nowadays you play quarterback sooner rather than later or possibly if the season's going terribly you trade them before the trading deadline and that way after June one the probation from future years doesn't hit the cap in 2021 and you go from there. I have a radical idea of how you hit the reset button this year it's never been done and it will require a lot of patience and I'll explain it. There's one ready-made team that's looking for a quarterback to me inapolis Colts that a quarterback older than Matt Ryan this year in Phillip Rivers. Now, knowing that if you traded him before June 2nd that you're pretty good with that old quarterback. Yeah, they did probably would have been better if they went after an older quarterback that they didn't chase at all who won a Super Bowl but that's a different story but if you trade Matt Ryan before June 2nd it's going to increase the cap. So you're going to put about 4 million 4.5 million on the cap that way if you trade them before then if we have an unconventional off season like we had last year then there's no OTAs, there's no mini camp. So what would Matt Ryan be missing on a new team? Not all that much compared to what you'd have in a normal year. So you require a lot of patience but if Indianapolis doesn't get their veteran quarterback and then maybe post June 1, June 2nd that's the trade, he goes to Indy. You don't have all the acceleration from the massive bonus pereration from the multiple restructures hit the cap in 2021. That's a 2022 cap charge. That'll be about 26 million. You only have to 17.9 a per ration this year. You pick up 23 million a cap room because you're not paying a salary and go from there. That's just the radical extreme idea. You never see a team, teams talk about a trade or have something in place and then delay it for cap purposes. So that's just food for thought. I don't see that realistically happening but you never know if Indianapolis is still looking for a quarterback, a veteran quarterback come. Well, what are the teams out there that need a quarterback? You've got New England possibly, right? Possibly. Yeah. You've got Chicago, right? Yeah, well, someone's gonna presumably end up with Carson Wentz. I always thought Indianapolis made the most sense. And if I'm Indianapolis, I'm insisting on a package deal to get that done if you want more compensation. If you're looking for significant compensation, I'm like, hey, let's send his best target over there who they already have a ready-made successor in Philly for Zach Erts and Carson Wentz go to Indy. And I don't know what you're at. I mean, I don't know. I don't know Carson Wentz after what I saw but Frank Wright, that's with them. Yeah, that's true. Bears scream quarterback. The Redskins scream veteran quarterback. Alice Smith, isn't the answers. Great comeback. Never thought we'd see that happen but. Phenomenal story, yeah. Yeah, they're limited with him at quarterback. We'll see what happens with this DeSean Watson thing. I wouldn't trade him if I'm Nick Casario. To me, he's gonna have to sit significant time but for me to consider trading him. So we'll see how that goes. Well, I'll just, I'll say this too. What if you say, you know what? Hey, Matt Ryan, look at the production from Matt Ryan. You know, 10 seasons, 4,000 plus yards. What if you bolster that offensive line like I had on my mock draft today? What if you say, you know, quarterbacks are playing longer? They are. What if you say, you know what? Let's, is it realistic to restructure Matt and say, you know, he's our guy for the next five years? Do you save money that way? Yeah, he's what, 36 now? 35. Then you're gonna, yeah, they are playing longer. I don't know if he wants to be Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers in terms of. I don't know either, but he's still playing at a high level. Yeah, he is. But his cap number next year is like 41.6 million. So that's gonna be an albatross around your cap as well, because of the multiple restructures. You've done three already. You keep doing it.  Then you're committing to him to be your quarterback, giving him significant leverage to get a new contract because you'll need to do it to lower the cap room. Tom Cotton ain't taking a discount. So whatever the top of the market is, if it's 45, every time you sign them, you make them the first or second highest paid guy. So you're committing to paying a quarterback who at some point starts to have diminishing returns. I know guys are playing later, but Ben Rothelsberger on the elbow was part of the problem. It wasn't the same guy pre-surgery. Rivers can't throw the ball deep anymore. So retired at 37. Brady's an anomaly. So you got the number four pick. That might be the time to get a quarterback. If you're not going to take the quarterback at number four, then you trade down and get more picks, auction that pick off to the highest bidder who wants a quarterback and try to recoup draft capital to try to rebuild your roster. Lisa, it's one of those two plays to me. Yeah, or you could just trade down a bit because there's, depending on who you talk to, there's four guys that have first round grades, four quarterbacks. I don't know how soon they're going to go. Yeah, if you think it's Trevor Lawrence and then you can stick the names in a hat and pick one, yeah, you trade down because you accumulate additional picks and still get a guy where you're like, what's the difference between Tray Lantz, Zach Wilson, Justin Fields, and we'll say, Matt Jones. If you don't think there's much of a difference between them, yeah, that's another route you could go as well. All right, well, speaking of cap issues. New Orleans Saints in quarterbacks, the New Orleans Saints have a lot of questions, Joel. Who's their quarterback going to be? Drew Brees has not announced officially he's retired, but it looks like it. Oh, he's retiring. He made a move this contract, which I thought. Yeah, he restructured, right? If he was going to retire, his cap number was going to be 25 million. Yeah. So they renegotiated where they dropped his base salary to his league minimum 1.075 million. You only do that if you're going to retire because what you're trying to do is you don't want to have all the onus proration from the voiding years hit the cap in 2021. So you carry him on the roster till June 2nd, and you can delay the proration until next year. So that was done for that reason. You have Taysum Hill under contract. I wouldn't have given him an extension. He could have played on his first round restricted tender. And seems like Sean Payton has an affinity for James Winston. So it's probably going to be one of those two guys because I've never seen a situation like the Saints in terms of the salary cap issues. This is unprecedented. Even if you did have the cap go up to 210 million, they were still going to have to make multiple moves in terms of restructuring contracts and cutting people. And they kicked the can down the road with the best of them. So it was, I don't expect it. Talk about having to pay the bills here. When you look, I'm just looking at Spotrack, but they are 32, negative 70 million, 70.1 million, let's say, of cap space. Yeah, it's really 94 because there's, I don't know how it got reported this way, but Jared Cook has a real year in 2021. They have to physically cut him. Whereas I know some people have thought it was a voting year. So there's no cap charts for him, but he had a roster bonus which had an escalator. So right now he's got a $22 million cap number. When you cut them, you're going to pick up, you have 2 million of dead money. So you're picking up 20 million of cap space for cutting Jared Cook. But that's not reflected in what you're looking at. What are they going to do? I mean, what if it's the worst cap situation in the league? What do you think they end up doing if you just? Oh, they're going to go through multiple restructures. Like they're going to pick up like 10 million of cap room from Cameron Jordan, add the voteable years. So I can stretch out the peroration over five years. People have talked about restructuring. Yeah, Michael Thomas, where they were going to trade him. That adds to the cap. Plus if you don't have Drew Brees, why are you going to get rid of a weapon? Because when he's healthy, he's great. So you're going to restructure him. You're going to pick up 9 million there. You're going to restructure Camara. No, actually, he didn't really give him that much. You don't restructure him. You restructure Andres Pete. You're going to cut multiple players. Quant Alexander, you get 13 million for cutting him. You know where Jenkins is probably gone. Some of your mid-tier players like Malcolm Brown are probably gone. So you're going to see multiple restructures, multiple releases. And we're going to see how good of a coach Sean Payton is. Yeah, I would not want to be their GM. Mickey Loomis has got a lot of decisions to make here. Joel, what is the worst when you look at some of these bad cap situations?  Well, until this year, it was the 2002 Jacksonville Jaguars. And teams fall into a trap where if you think you can win a Super Bowl, don't worry about tomorrow and you're worried about today. So your moves are made for the short term. That's back when Jacksonville had a lot of stars on their team, kept restructuring contracts. They were saved by one thing, the expansion draft. The Texans took multiple guys off of them. That they took Gary Walker, Seth Payne, and Tony Bicelli. And if I correct the bonus proration, when you took someone in the expansion draft, went to the Texans. So you didn't have the type of dead money you would have. And then they cut a client of ours who from a performance standpoint didn't deserve to be cut. Kingdom of Cardo, 90 catch, 11 under yard season. They cut him. And back then, there were no post-June 1 designations. You had to wait until June 2 to get cut. And in that secondary market free agency, back then the money already dried up. He went to Tampa and got a Super Bowl ring. But you don't get rid of a 90 catch, 11 under yard guy if you've managed to cap well. So that's probably the worst one I've seen. The Raiders had a pretty bad one when Reggie McKenzie first got there because I don't think Al Davis was thinking long term. He's thinking, hey, I need to win now. And he had like 55 million in dead money one year trying to clean up the Raiders cap situation to get them in a position where they could go forward and did get them, make them competitive a couple of years later after that.  You just feel like, you know what, we're going all in.  Yeah, you can outrun it when the car or maybe mostly outrun it when the cap goes up six, seven, eight percent each year, but when we have this unusual situation where the cap's going to go down, that's your problem. Then the chickens come home the roost where the credit card bill is due and you have to pay them.  That deal was set up for you to restructure it if he'd been what they thought it would be, but now they're going to have the biggest individual dead money charge in league history of 33.8 million for trade versus like a $34.3 million cap number. So they would save $850,000, but still that's unusable cap space, but I never thought he'd be traded this year, but that appears to be what will happen. Matthew Stafford goes to LA, Lyons get a starting quarterback, they get a hall of draft picks, rumor is reports are the Eagles want that kind of deal. You're going to see a lot of quarterbacks, right? Move around, there's the whole Deshaun Watson situation down there. I believe when I see it when he's traded, I don't think Nick Casario wants his first major move to be, I traded a franchise quarterback who's 25, when the idea is you try to find those guys and keep them. And I don't think he wants to set the precedent that if you, you can get what you want as a player, if you're disgruntled, that's a factor that I think people are underrating. Him not wanting to set that precedent for other people to be able to come in the door afterwards and go, hey, if I'm happy, I can force my way out. I know from personal experience, when you got a new regime, that is a difficult obstacle to deal with when you're trying to get a new contract in a holdout situation or trying to force a trade. All right, well, let's wrap this up. I'm just going to put you on the spot here. Thumbs up, yes, no, thumbs up, thumbs down, wherever you want to do it. Do they get a deal done before the new league year? You think? You mean TV money, TV deals? Yep, yep. I'm going to say yes, because I think the owners are motivated to try to get it done. Does Carson Wentz get traded? But yeah, but Philly is going to have to come off that Matthew Stafford Hall, because part of that was the Rams were given away, Jared Goff, that was part of the Brock Osweiler type thing. Here, take them, we'll give you a second round pick. So you're not getting a Matthew Stafford Hall. You have real estate expectations, you can trade them. Who's the quarterback going to be in New Orleans? James Winston. Matt Ryan, does he stay? Stays. Leo Johns? Stays for another year, because you've got Calvin Ridley who proved this year could be a number one. So I think maybe a farewell season for both Matt Ryan and Julio Jones, unless it's a very successful season. Wow. Woof. Number four, you're Terry Fontenau. What do you do? In what respect? Take a pick. Do you draft best player available or you trade down? Based on what you just said. I'm taking mine. If I think the quarterbacks are all equal, then I trade down and snag, if you want to get additional picks, if there's one guy I like more than any others, then I'm taking that guy unless he's gone a pick ahead of me at three or something. Okay. I could determine if another quarterback, if the quarterback you want is gone by a team who picks ahead of you, then that could change what your philosophy is in the draft. Okay. So you're saying you're Matt Ryan, Julio Jones, Gray Jared are all going to be here. You trade down to get some picks. New head coach. You saw what Arthur Smith did with Ryan Taney Hill and how he adapts to his players. You got Terry Fontenau wanting to put his imprint on this team. You think the Falcons can be competitive and push for a division title? If that's the case? No, it's the Bucks. Bucks are going to win the division. I think the Bucks take it again. Yeah. I don't think it's going to be as competitive as it was this year because New Orleans, they're going to take a step back. So I think it's really, as long as Tom Brady's upright, they're winning the division. All right, Joel. Awesome to have you. We got to have you back when, well, once the dust settles here and we get through that draft, I'd love to have you back on, man. Oh, anytime. Appreciate you having me on.


So we're here with a third eye and hi, so who are you my name is Nick cherry curry. I'm one of the founders of third eye and This this is your third eye right here. So can you take them off and explain what's going on? Sure So third eye we make mixed reality smart glasses. These are our x2 Mixed reality smart glasses.  That's about six ounces So it's really the lightweight you can wear it indoors and outdoors for an extended period of time And you can do hundreds of cool AR and our applications on them. So it's got a 3d scanner system. Yeah, that's the word It has two depth cameras in here And then we run our own proprietary slam based off this data that allow you to do inside out six degrees of freedom tracking plane detection Occlusion and really the kind of tools you need to make real-world powerful and memory applications Is it hard right now on batteries? So it has a built-in battery here about 1750 milliamp batteries. You can use it for about 40 sure This one out of check I could check and then you've got User interface a system in there. Yes, so we have four forms of UI we have head motion gaze controls We have gestures We have audio commands and we also have a touchpad that we're going to include. So anyone can pick whatever they prefer These are our smallest pair of glasses are x2 that's our x1a. It's a little wider field of view a little high resolution It's a little bigger. So it really depends on the preference what type of optics you like So most people prefer this because these are the smallest leak is on market, but we have another option as well So it's up to the end user


Hi, I'm going to read from Catcher and the Rye, which is a famous or even infamous book that's frequently been banned, and I do think this book has done some damage. I think this book has ruined a lot of good writers by making writing a good book, writing a great book, look very easy, which of course it is not. Here are some of the places where it has been a favorite target of censors. Recent examples include its removal from the Issaquah of Washington optional high school reading list, the required reading list in Middleville, Michigan, and the Jackson Middleton School Libraries in North Jackson, Ohio. It was removed from the school libraries in Morris, Manitoba along with two other books because they violated the committee's guidelines covering excessive vulgar language, sexual scenes, things concerning moral issues, excessive violence, and anything dealing with the occult. This is a scenes late in the book, which Holden Caulfield is on a date. He's on a date at a Broadway play with another young woman. At the end of the first act we went out with all the other jerks for a cigarette. What a deal that was. You never saw so many phonies in all your life. Everybody smoking their ears off and talking about the play so that everybody could hear and know how sharp they were. Some dopey movie actor was standing near us having a cigarette. I don't know his name, but he always plays the part of a guy in a war movie that gets yellow before it's time to go over the top. He was with some gorgeous blonde, and the two of them were trying to be very blasé and all, like as if he didn't even know people were looking at him, modest as hell. I got a big bang out of it. Old Sally didn't talk much, except to rave about the lunch because she was busy rubbering and being charming. Then all of a sudden she saw some jerk she knew on the other side of the lobby. Some guy in one of those very dark gray flannel suits and one of those checkered vests, strictly ivory lead, big deal. He was standing next to the wall smoking himself to death and looking bored as hell. Old Sally kept saying, I know that boy from somewhere. She always knew somebody. Anyplace she went or thought she did. She kept saying that till I got bored as hell.  He'll enjoy it. She got sore when I said that.  You'd have thought they hadn't seen each other in 20 years. You'd have thought they'd taken baths in the same bathtub or something when they were little kids, old buddy ruse. It was nauseating. The funny part was they probably met each other just once at some phony party. Finally when they were all done slobbering around, Old Sally introduced us. His name was George something. I don't even remember. And he went to Andover, big, big deal. You should have seen him when Old Sally asked him how he liked the play. He was the kind of phony that had to give themselves room when they answer somebody's question. He stepped back and stepped right on the lady's foot behind him. He probably broke every toe in her body. He said the play itself was no masterpiece, but that the lumps, of course, were absolute angels. Angels for Christ's sake. Angels, that killed me. Then he and Old Sally started talking about a lot of people they both knew. It was the funniest conversation you ever heard in your life. They both kept thinking of places as fast as they could. Then they'd think of somebody that lived there and mentioned their name. I was all set to puke when it was time to go sit down again. It really was. And then when the next episode over, they continued their goddamn boring conversation. They kept thinking of more places and more names of people that lived there.  One of those tired, snobby voices. He sounded just like a girl. He didn't hesitate to horn on my date, though, the bastard. I even thought for a minute that he was going to get in the goddamn cab with us when the show was over, because he walked about two blocks with us. But he said he had to need a bunch of phonies for cocktails. I could see them all sitting around in some bar with their goddamn checkered vests criticizing shows in Brooks and Women and those tired, snobby voices.


All hands, sat down with Seknav to talk about the Affordable Care Act and how it affects you.  Make sure that you've got that health care as you transition out of the Navy or as you move off your parent's plan. It's really important to keep your health care and this is the way that ACA does it. It doesn't have much of an impact or any impact on active duty, but retirees, keeping track care, that's fine.  From the Defense Media Activity, I'm Petty Officer Tony Rosa.


Good morning, God bless you. Thank you for those songs, brother Nathan, brother Linwood. Second to last verse we sang in that final song says thy saints in all this glorious war shall conquer though they die They see the triumph from afar and sees it with their eye The church that overcomes Satan We've been singing but I'd like to invite you to stand one more time and we're gonna sing one more chorus as we begin Let's go ahead and sing and stand You could just have this mic off. Let's sing together that chorus. We've got the power in the name of Jesus We've got the power In the name of Jesus We've got Enraged we will not be Defeated next verse says for many years now Satan's tried to stop us, but the church of Jesus is still alive Like a mighty army we keep marching onward winning every battle with the Lord by our side Let's sing the second verse. It says so come now. Let's agree together that all our enemies are under our feet So come now Let's agree together That all are under our feet And whatever we bond shall be bound in head and at the name of Jesus Satan has to flee of Jesus I noticed five months ago that a name originally appeared beside the title to this message and then disappeared one year and seven days ago My second youngest brother Was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident throughout the past year intense challenges setbacks difficulties Spiritual warfare was so much part of my journey and actually still is that I wasn't sure I asked the team I said can you find someone else to preach this message? They consented to that and looked for another brother. They knew what I was going through When that brother declined the team came back and said would you reconsider? Here we are by the grace of God today the church that overcomes Satan open your Bibles with me to Revelation chapter 12 we're gonna begin reading in verse 7 verse 7 says and There was war in heaven Michael and his angels fought against the dragon and the dragon fought and his angels and Prevailed not neither was their place found anymore in heaven and The great dragon was cast out that old serpent called the devil and Satan which deceiveth the whole world He was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him and It heard a loud voice saying in heaven now has come salvation and strength in the kingdom of our God and the power of his Christ for the accuser of our brethren is cast down which accused them before our God day and night and They overcame him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony and they love not their lives unto the death Verse 12 yet therefore rejoiced the heavens and ye that dwell in them whoa Whoa to the inhabitants of the earth and of the sea for the devil is come down unto you having great wrath Because he knows that he hath but a short time This text says they Overcame him Who is the they that this text is referring to it's the saints those who have a A sworn enemy the accuser of the brethren I Would like to call your attention first of all in this verse our key verse here is chapter 12 verse 11 To the second word in this verse it says they Oftentimes we read the passages For a text too quickly. I want us just to pause and think about that plural pronoun for a minute they Overcame together They overcame him It's no secret in both the Spiritual realms of light and of darkness that united we will stand But also the opposite is It's absolutely true as well divided we will fall They overcame him you can have a coal burning on a fire in the hearth And you take that coal and set it out It doesn't matter how hot that coal was initially if it is not with the rest of Those embers it will quickly be extinguished They overcame him Collectively together the scripture says two are better than one Though one may be overpowered it says in the book of Ecclesiastes I'm quoting from a different version now though one may be overpowered two can withstand him and A three-fold cord is not quickly broken they Together overcame him they Let's look at the second word overcame This word is Nikao in the Greek. It means to win to have victory over to defeat. It's a battle word It appears 28 times in the New Testament It's often translated most often in the King James version as overcome or conquer But also as prevail and to get the victory They overcame Another passage where this word is found the same Greek word is Revelation chapter 3 verse 21 It says to him that Overcomes Nikao will I grant to sit with me in my throne even as I also Overcame and I'm set down with my father in his throne again Romans chapter 12 says be not overcome same word of evil But overcome evil with good and finally first John chapter 5 verse 5 for another sampling of how this word is used Who is he that? Overcomes the world, but he that believes that Jesus is the son of God The repetition of this word brothers and sisters in multiple contexts reminds us that the Christian While living in this present fallen world is in a battle They overcame the next word in this phrase is him They overcame him and I want to pause just a minute and consider who it was that they overcame The accuser the devil the one who has come down with great wrath because he knows he has but a little time The dragon who made war in heaven is now come down and this text says whoa unto you The inhabitants of the earth, but it also says they overcame him What do we know about the dominion and power of the enemy from the passage of the scripture that we could look Out this morning. We could glean many things. I want to just look at two more passages We get a brief glimpse into what happens sometimes in the heavenlies a mysterious glimpse in the book of Job in chapter 1 want to read two verses there we're familiar with this context Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan came also among them And the Lord said unto Satan once come as thou then Satan answered the Lord and said From going to and fro in the earth and from walking up and down in it first Peter chapter 5 says be sober be vigilant because your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walks about seeking whom he made a vow or Whom resists steadfast in the faith knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren, which are in the world our adversary the devil in These passages he's called a great dragon. He's called the old serpent, and he's called a roaring lion But the keys prophetically given by revelation of God to John for us are Given in this passage how we can overcome also those of us upon whom the ends of the world are come Those of us to whom this text says whoa unto you So how did they overcome key number one they overcame him say it with me by the blood of the lamb Praise God friends this morning. There's power There's wonder working power in the blood of the lamb never let anyone cause you to doubt that Would you be free from your burden of sin? There's power in the blood Would you or evil a victory win? There's wonderful power in the blood praise God hallelujah this morning for the blood of Jesus Scripture tells us that we are redeemed by the blood. We are cleansed by the blood and justified by the blood First Peter chapter 1 says for as much as you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things like silver and gold But with the precious blood of Christ redeemed First John chapter 1 says the blood of Jesus Christ his son Cleanses us from all sin Romans chapter 5 says much more than being now justified by his blood. We shall be saved from wrath Through him There's many places we could go in Scripture to think about the power of the blood many texts we could consider But I want to challenge us this morning to recognize That though there are many who believe take our Muslim friends for example I sat with a Muslim young man about two years ago and had this very discussion That God is merciful and he can choose to pardon us if he so desires though there may be many who may believe that The Scripture says the wages of sin The payment or punishment for sin is death God told Adam and Eve in the day that you eat thereof speaking of the forbidden fruit in the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die and We know according to the scriptures that death rain from Adam to Moses to John the Baptist the last prophet of the Old Testament both physically and Spiritually separation from God. We saw that initially in the garden. They no longer could have access in the same way To the very presence of a holy God I believe That the even the Old Testament Saints brothers and sisters could not enter into heaven But through the blood of Jesus Christ by the new and living way that he has consecrated for us through the veil That's to say his flesh scriptures. Tell us. There is no other name Give it under heaven among men whereby we must be saved Hebrews chapter 10 verse 4 says It is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins Hebrews 11 goes on to say these all the Hebrews of faith. These all died in faith not having received the promises First Peter chapter 9. I'm sorry first Peter chapter 1 verse 9 talks about us Bond whom the ends of the world or come receiving the end of our faith even the salvation of our souls verse 10 says of Which salvation the prophets inquired and searched diligently? Searching of which salvation the prophets inquired and searched diligently who prophesied before of the grace of God That should come unto you on to whom it was revealed but not unto themselves But unto us they'd administer the things which are now reported unto you by the Holy Ghost By them that have preached the gospel with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven The prophets inquired and searched diligently who prophesied before of the grace that should come unto you So then consider with me Before the death of Christ where were the souls of the departed who died in faith? Those who had died not having yet received the promises Jesus tells us a story in Luke 16 that gives us maybe just a small glimpse into this reality pre-cross There's a story about a man who died and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom Another man who died and was buried and lifted up his eyes in hell in Hades and saw Abraham and Lazarus across this great golf That was fixed between them and said father Abraham sent Lazarus to come and dip the tip of his finger into water to cool My tongue for I'm tormented in this flame first Peter chapter 4 says For this cause was the gospel preached to them that are dead that they might be judged according to men in the flesh But live according to God in the spirit Ephesians 4 unwraps this mystery just a little further saying when he Jesus ascended up on high He led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men and again now that he ascended What is it? But that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth The lower parts of the earth what is this talking about and who were the captives who were held there? I believe you scriptures are speaking of the abode of the dead pre-cross before the cross and the resurrection before the New Testament Offering of the blood of Jesus Christ and the rending of the veil Both the temple and tabernacle were only a shadow of the heavenly But now Hebrews says Christ is not entered into holy places made with hands Which are the figures of the true but into heaven itself now to appear in the presence of God for us But this man Hebrews 10 says after he'd offered one sacrifice for sins forever sat down on the right hand of the majesty on high Hebrews chapter 2 verse 14 brother Ken quoted this verse this morning says this for as much then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood He himself also likewise took part of the same that through death. He might destroy him that had the power of death That is the devil Satan had past tense Satan had a rightful hold on all who were ever born from Adam and Eve until the second Adam Jesus Christ The one because of whom the Apostle Paul could say oh Death where is thy sting? Oh grave? Where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin and the strength of sin is the law But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ The scriptures tell us for this cause For this reason the Son of God was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil The little boy from the carpenter shop Born in a stable his mother a virgin Raised in a carpenter shop His parents were poor his people were slaves his friends a lonely lot His chances in life were very slim.  Where is thy sting? Who is the king of glory the Lord God mighty in battle is he who is the king of glory? Master of hosts of heaven supreme who is the king of glory the one that not even death could stop He is the king of glory That little boy from the carpenter's shop brothers and sisters in Revelation chapter 7 John heard this question. He says them one of the elders answered saying unto me Who are these which are raid and white robes and whence came they this multitude? Unnumerable before the throne and I said to him sir thou knowest And he answered saying to me these are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes And have made them white in the blood of the lamb They overcame him by the blood of the lamb Secondly this text tells us that they overcame him say it with me by the word of their testimony say it again by the word of their testimony Proverbs chapter 18 verse 21 says that death and life are in the power of the tongue We're created in the image of God and as image bearers We have creative potential in the words that we speak both death and life are in the power of the tongue It says in the book of Romans if thou shalt confess with thy mouth That Jesus Christ is Lord If thou shalt confess with thy mouth and believe in thine heart that God is raising from the dead Thou shalt be saved we could talk about the confession that takes place at baptism We sometimes think of testimony in a more traditional sense and I want to talk about that But for just a minute consider the power of spoken words at your confession at baptism or the ordinance of marriage When you speak many of you have had this privilege I stood before the altar one day and the pastor asked me it was Kelsey's husband. It was Kelsey's father She asked me he asked me. I'm sorry, brother Kent asked me He said Joel will you take this woman by your side to be your wedded wife? Will you love and cherish her and keep yourself only unto her as long as you both shall live I will the creative potential and power of those words I don't know what the questions were asked. I don't know what questions were asked to you at your baptism Do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God? I do upon this confession of your faith I baptize you the power of the spoken word Margers at their death Were very well known to continue testifying right up to the end They continued praising and thanking God with supernatural grace and power talking of their commitment to Jesus Christ at times As we know their persecutors became so enraged at this testimony that they attempted to silence them by cutting out their tongues or screwing Their tongues to the roof of their mouths They continued praising and thanking God Gospel of Luke Jesus speaking says they shall lay their hands on you and persecute you delivering you up to the synagogues and Into prisons being brought before kings and rulers for my namesake and it shall turn to you for a testimony Settle it therefore in your hearts not to meditate before what you shall answer for I will give you a mouth and wisdom Which all your adversaries should not be able to gain sin or resist starting with Steven in the book of Acts We see the promise fulfilled that Jesus had spoken to disciples just a few years earlier as Steven spoke they could not resist the wisdom or the authority the Holy Spirit was on him and he as he spoke he He quoted scripture and he cut to the heart with the words that the Lord had given him instantaneously in fulfillment of this promise Jesus also when standing before the Sanhedrin as they provoked him to speak Finally before the high priest he quoted Daniel chapter 7 which speaks of the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and authority Jesus and Steven both stood before the councils and they spoke with authority. Not only that they spoke the Word of God Think about that for a minute. They spoke the Word of God the martyrs were known to quote scripture They knew the Word of God. They knew the written Word of God Jesus also overcome overcame as we know the devil in the wilderness Three times he said it is written. It is written. How could he do that? He had the Word of God Written on his heart a challenge. I'd like to leave with us here this morning. We think about the the word of our testimony Yes, let's rely on the power of the Holy Spirit Let's also continue to commit the scripture to memory. That's one of the things I appreciate about Kingdom Fellowship weekend This year. We were memorizing Psalms 127. This is meditating on that I saw that there's a verse here that directly relates to this particular section of this of this topic Speaking of how that our children will be like arrows in the hand of a mighty man the psalmist says they shall speak They shall speak with the enemies in the gate Our children will speak they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate You know, do you ever feel ashamed? Do you ever feel quiet? Even the Apostle Paul in the book of Ephesians? He's sitting in Rome bound and chains and he says pray also for me That utterance may be given unto me that I may open my mouth boldly to make known the witness of the gospel For the witch and I'm ambassador in bonds if even the Apostle Paul needed to ask for prayer that he could be bold for the Gospel how much more do we I know unfortunately what it feels like to be ashamed and to be quiet I Also know by God's grace what it feels like to speak and to testify with boldness May God help us to be ready to be prepared in the book of Acts After the Apostles were beaten. What did they do go back and pull together a circle and pray for God's protection No, they prayed for boldness that they could speak the word of God and the place was shaken Where they were assembled and they were filled again with the Holy Ghost and they went out everywhere proclaiming boldly the word of God They overcame him Though the enemy was trying to silence them they overcame him by the word of their testimony So number one they overcame him by the blood of the lamb number two by the word of their testimony and number three It says in this text they love not their lives unto the death the most powerful The most powerful and the most dangerous people on the planet are those who are living for a cause For which they are not afraid to die Whether a jihadist or a Christian martyr the most powerful and the most dangerous people on the planet are those who are living for a Cause for which they are not afraid to die Hebrews chapter 11 speaks of these kinds of people It says they quench the violence of the fire remember Shadrach Meshach and Abednego They said to the king our God is able to deliver us But if he doesn't choose to deliver us be it known to you oh king We will not bow down no worship the golden image which you have set up and God did choose in that case to deliver them They quench the violence of the fire the text goes on to say they were stoned They were sawn asunder they wondered about in sheepskins and goatskins being destitute Afflicted tormented of whom the world was not worthy. They wondered about in mountains and in dens and in caves of the earth these all died These all died in faith They loved not their lives brothers and sisters unto the death and now they are recorded for us as Examples now we are as it says in Hebrews chapter 12 Encourage to look at their example as a great cloud of witnesses as we continue running the race that's set before us I used to wonder What it would feel like to be a martyr and I honestly had this fear in my heart That if I should be called to give my life to burn the stake or to be Sawn asunder as Isaiah was the intensity of that pain that suffering Lord I don't know how I could could do that. I don't want to draw attention to myself here But I earlier felt led to tell you this story when I was 18 years old I was working on scaffolding at a job and I Remember the scaffolding starting to fall and I remember jumping that's the last thing I remember I was about 25 feet in the eyes the last thing I remember before I woke up laying flat on my back Looking up at the sky and I instantly knew that I had severely injured myself I figured I'd probably broken my back. It actually was the case Remember verbally crying out to Jesus right there laying on the ground just stunned and The peace the tranquility the tangible grace that washed over me in that time was palpable I've never since that time wondered If God can give us the grace in those great and intense times of affliction and suffering As he has been faithful to give the martyrs in times past Actually remember praying and telling the Lord God if you want me to and I meant it be in a wheelchair The rest of my life. That's really okay God's great grace in times of great and intense suffering is real Climb up your golden height Champion of the band of holy souls a light who followed Christ's command we sing this song It's in the back of the Christian Henry. I looked up the history to this song and preparing for this message It was written by the author of the martyrs mirror Tillie man von brought brother Nathan can probably say his name with the German pronunciation translated into English first in 1886 and was then recast in the addition we sing today by the late John Jay overhauled And according to him Mary org and I confirmed this with brother Nathan This recasting was done in 1975 Which marked the 450 year anniversary of the radical reformation brother Nathan said yes Joel He wrote me an email. I wanted to see if this was actually true. I said he said I can remember going around brother Nathan Are you in here this morning? How old were you? 1975 Nine years old brother Nathan said I can remember traveling around the United States with my family My dad would preach and we would sing that song in 1975 praise God This song was originally written as a tribute to a martyr named Gerardus who quote for the testimony of Jesus Went singing before his companions Five other men two women and a girl on their way to burning at the stake They love not their lives Climb up your golden height champion of the ban of holy souls alight who followed Christ's command This hero went before them. He did fight his way through the straight gate to heaven Through Christ's living way, can you see him singing as he marches before his companions? to burning God's banner God's banner read in blood Oppression misery where smoke and vapor stood burnt Sacrificially the sacrificial fire ascending to the skies of dreadful human offerings who there won the prize Nor makes it them a shame to bear the name of Christ until they are consumed and meet the Lord They prize Lord our thanks for blood of martyrs and for prophets slain This thy heritage still offers Christ's Eternal gain in the famous words of Jim Elliot He is no fool brothers and sisters who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose This light affliction said the Apostle Paul and he knew what affliction was about we read of him being beaten Many times with rods shipwrecked left for dead and yet he said this light Affliction which is but for a moment Works for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory Hallelujah Jesus Through his death conquered the enemy and destroyed him that had the power of death and thereby he left us an example That we should follow in his steps Take up your cross Are you a soldier am I a soldier of the cross the Calvary Road the way of the cross through the straight gate to heaven? This is Christ's living way Philippians says he humbled himself and became obedient unto death Even the death of the cross Wherefore God also that wasn't the end God also has highly exalted him and given him a name Which is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow What a landslide victory Was won at the cross Corinthians tells us had the princes of this world known it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory The power the wisdom the mystery of the cross They overcame him by the blood of the lamb by the word of their testimony, and they love not their lives Unto the death in conclusion. I Want to challenge us to recognize this morning that after we've done all within our power We're still humanly speaking no match for the enemy But Romans chapter 8 says if God if God before us then who can be against us. We're not the right man on our side hallelujah The scripture says it's not by might nor by power But by my spirits saw him 46 I was speaking earlier this weekend to brother Makai about this song And he reminded me that in the context of this famous word that he said we often see framed in pretty mottos on The wall be still and know that I am God. It's a battle context He breaketh the bow and cuts the spear and thunder he burns the chariot in the fire The waters are roaring the heathen are raging Be still and Know that I am God brothers and sisters. There is a battle. It's real But the scripture tells us there are more with us than with them Greater is he that is in us than he that is in the world keep that connection to him Guard it above all else in heavenly armor will enter the land the battle belongs to the Lord No weapon that's fashioned against us can stand the battle belongs to the Lord When the power of darkness comes in like a flood the battle belongs to the Lord Let's not forget that the battle belongs to the Lord He's raised up a standard the power of his blood the battle belongs to the Lord so we can sing glory Honor power and strength to the Lord glory honor power and strength to the Lord Though the accuser of the brethren stands ready to accuse us according to this text we read before the throne day and night We have an advocate with the father a mediator Jesus Christ the righteous Romans 8 goes on to say who shall lay anything so there's an accuser But the scripture says who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect. It is God who justifies Who is he that condemns it is Christ that died. Yes, rather that has risen again Who is even at the right hand of God who also makes intercession for you and I for us praise God and Finally thinking of overcoming Through our willingness to love not our lives into the death the scripture says who shall separate us from the love of Christ Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or sword as it is written for thy sake. We are killed all the day long We are counted as sheep for the slaughter No in all of these things. We are more than Conquerors through these things. We are more than conquerors Overcomers through him that loved us We are more than conquerors through him that loved us Praise God. Jesus said in the world you will have tribulation Aren't you thankful he didn't stop there But be of good cheer we can sing joyful joyful I adore thee for the joy of the Lord is our strength be of good cheer. I have Nikao I have overcome the world and Again Jesus said I will build my church and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it brothers and sisters We will Overcome the scripture says they overcame him how? Let's say it together by the blood of the lamb by the word of their testimony and they loved not their lives unto the death Thanks be to God


When I started Protocol Labs in 2014, there was no institution that could actually support the development of IPFS and Filecoin to be open source projects deep in the R&D chasm and to build them with a community-first and open source orientation. So I set out to build an organization that could actually turn into that kind of group. As we built IPFS and Filecoin and scaled it, we encountered many other groups that worked with us in those projects and that built other applications and systems on top of them. We've assembled this group into a very strong network and we've created a product to support all of the builders across the network. So this is the infrastructure of the Protocol Labs network. And we'll talk to you about six major areas that we help many groups with. The first thing that we do is that we build a well-connected network. We gather many companies and projects across many stages of development and we help connect them to facilitate strong connections in the relevant stages. So think of groups getting to meet each other in their same stage, groups being able to learn from folks further along, and groups being able to learn from each other in specific industries. We've also created a network directory and infrastructure to be able to facilitate interactions across all of these teams. These network profiles have a set of directions around how to contact people, what to ask about, and so on. And we've built an Office Hour structure in there to help facilitate knowledge sharing. It's been great seeing everyone here at Lab Week. And what would a network be without in-person connection? The Protocol Labs network hosts hundreds of events every year. These range from conferences like Lab Week to summits like CryptoEcon Day to in-person social gatherings like our monthly Lab Day dinners. Most of the teams in the network are fully remote, fully distributed. So these in-person events and conferences are a great way to connect, collaborate, and just have a great time. Stay tuned as well for our network events page. This will allow you to see all the events that teams in the Protocol Labs network are hosting so that you can join in those events as well. The other thing that I'm excited to share today is our PL Network portal. So we've heard some feedback from teams that there are so many resources that the Protocol Labs network provides to its teams, but they don't always know where to go to go find them. And so today we're launching PLNetwork.io, which is the Protocol Labs network portal, where you can get access to information about the network directory, launch pad, Discord, the services marketplace, and more. We also have a network handbook, which has even more detail on each of these programs. But essentially, if you're ever wondering about where to go for information about PLNetwork programs, PLNetwork.io is the portal for you to go to.


Luke 2 verses 41 to 52. Now every year, Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover. And when he was 12 years old, they went up as usual for the festival. When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it. Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day's journey. Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him. After three days, they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished and his mother said to him, Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety. Jesus said to them, Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father's house? But they did not understand what he said to them. Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favor.


Hello everyone, it's 11-10, I think we'll start. My name is Bill Michaud from the University of Illinois. My colleague, Alessandro Cabana, could not be here today, so I'm doing both parts of this presentation. The presentation is actually, the slide deck is an amalgamation of two different presentations, one on information about machine learning and the other on our practices. This is more on the second part, which is really our practices. This is really a work in progress, maybe a snapshot of a process. So, Aaron decided to put in a lot of slides for background, so you can refer to some of these later. First, I think it's useful for us to do environmental scan. In our case, we emphasize the fact that we have tools that we can use to implement interconnected services. These include things like robust APIs, DOIs as a glue that allow connectivity, inter-connectivity, asynchronous GPU parallel processing, and for the most part open data sets that can provide data and content. So the question here is the hope is that we can use machine learning computational tools to add to our armamentarium in terms of what we can use for system development. If you look at machine language and AI and library services, what we want to do is focus on using systems and services and service frameworks that provide the scaffolding for these interconnected services. For example, in our bento style discovery system, we sometimes start doing 14 to 16 asynchronous API calls in order to retrieve results. That scaffolding and that inter-connectivity is extremely important. So we want to look at machine learning in all these different systems and see where they can apply. This whole thing really began with a question, which was, can we add topic modeling component to our API-based bibliographic database service? And as an extension, what about adding ML to a bibliometric and discovery and delivery services? More deep background, so machine learning, I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this, takes sets of observations, identifies patterns and anomalies. Pattern recognition is really the heart of any machine learning algorithm. Machine learning uses a mathematical model. In fact, all machine learning is numbers, so documents, for example, be vectorized. Our focus is on document clustering. We want to try to identify key concepts from a corpus of documents. Devise a way to partition the corpus in the groups of related documents. What we've done is develop some tools to extract words and phrases and build systems that can be presented to the clustering software. More background, clustering is unsupervised, unsupervised machine learning versus text classification, which is supervised. Supervised learning uses a predefined set of training data, so that you've already pre-assigned documents into one of pre-established classes. Again, all machine learning is numerical, so vectorization is done on everything, and you're doing that in order to use some similarities or distance measures to find related documents. In the work we're doing, we're using the cosine function, but there's a dot matrix function, a linear algebra function, and also Euclidean distance that's sometimes used. Most clustering uses what's called a bag of word approach versus text as phrases, and we'll talk about that later. Certainly, explainability, reproducibility are critical in all ML projects. And an important point, a lot of projects actually are, time is spent on processing, cleaning, and preparation of data. That's integral to any successful project. So we looked at a number of off-the-shelf clustering environments. With the idea that we're going to determine if any of them were really ready to be used literally off the shelf. I've got a list here of some of the things we've looked at. We've been focusing a lot on Scikit Learn, the Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Toolkit, the Google Platform, Wolfram Mathematica. Some of the other ones are not being used as much. Amazon and Copper End, we've had a project or two we did with that. We tried to test a lot of these different systems. We also tried to test particular algorithms, K-means, K-means Plus, LGA, spectral clustering for phrases. It turns out that the choice of the initial clusters is important within any machine learning clustering algorithm. Supervised algorithms and classification algorithms use a number of different techniques, and then regression is also a supervised activity. One of the things you see in the literature is that people are using a lot of different algorithms. Sometimes people try multiple algorithms to see what fits their data best. That's actually one of the issues in terms of machine learning. A lot has been done already in machine learning libraries. Notre Dame and I, in the last grant a couple of years ago, looked at topic modeling in discovery systems or in library discovery. Library of Congress has done a lot of work and had a number of seminars and conferences. Notre Dame has actually released a set of papers done in machine learning libraries, which is what I'm linked to here. There's also an IDEA Institute on AI, which is IMLS funded, which I've been involved with. Overall, there's a feeling that, as Ryan Cordell's report from a commission by LLC indicated that libraries could become really focal sites for the translation collaboration that would be required to cultivate responsible machine learning. But for a lot of other people, machine learning is kind of like the law of the hammer.  It is important to pause and consider if AI techniques are the best approach before trying to use them. Real quickly, a lot of hype and hope already for machine learning. I've got a couple of references here. A couple of examples of positive machine learning projects. Including the Library of Congress, and particularly some in medical AI. And then some projects that did not work out, for example, the Google Flu Trends, some of the AI radiology problems, were still at a very early stage on all of these. And it's clear that real-life experience was clustering within libraries and elsewhere still shows that there are some real issues. One of the terms that's being used now is augmented intelligence, to sort of describe the interface between the human component and the machine learning. A couple of other slides here are issues with AI. It's a very famous column in Science where the AI people themselves are questioning the value of what they're doing and how it's being done. A number of clustering comments taken from some of the literature. Typically, specifically, topic modeling with clustering techniques still has a lot of issues and a lot of questions. So I'll talk a little bit about what we've been doing. We have a database service where, for example, we provide access to articles on a topic using the Scopus API. This particular project is a database we downloaded of 57,000 articles from Scopus API on biofuels and worked with a couple of faculty members in civil engineering to do topic modeling. They wanted specifically to look at these articles and say, what are the research fronts? What are the hot topics in this area? We used a couple of the clustering techniques. We settled on a technique that was actually called comparative text mining CTM. We had a computer science faculty member who we consulted with who had worked on this project and eventually ended up publishing the article here in a journal called Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews. The K-means biofuels analysis revealed seven clusters, I'm sorry, eight clusters. Again, because K-means is a bag of words approach, you get individual words and you have to try to interpret those individual words within the topic clusters. The CTM results actually allowed us to do some more phrase generation and that produced 12 clusters. I've got some of these listed here, low emission diesel, fuel cells, et cetera. The clusters were all analyzed with the K-means cluster and we derived six topics of interest for this particular article. So the other project we've been working on extensively with clustering techniques is our research impact visualizations. We've put together a database of 500 faculty research impact indicators from nine different departments in engineering and physical sciences and database of metadata over 10 years of publication. So the visualizations themselves of the Kansas Center of Illinois indicate the number of publications a particular faculty member has generated to times they've been cited, the number of co-authors, the number of grants received. This is a research impact indicator service, a research impact service. But we have all this data and we can use this for a correlation of different impacts or different indicators. So we can ask if the people that publish the most articles also have the most grants, also have been the most cited. We can look at the data we've collected in clustering and try to identify, again, research fronts or research areas within each department or more interestingly across departments. So the Kansas Center topic extraction yields this sort of K-means analysis in the visual terms. Again, a key point is that there's often a need for domain knowledge or domain experts, disciplinary experts to look at these clustering results and turn them into something that's useful, phrases and particular terms. So if you look at cluster four, optical coherence tomography, cluster four in the original K-means or individual words, we can drive the semantic meaning of those. So we've been looking a lot at clustering examples that use phrases rather than a bag of words. So there are a couple of different techniques that are available and our assumption is that using phrases instead of words should better capture a semantic meaning of the documents and help us do better topic modeling. That turns out to be somewhat true. We've been looking at a couple of different clustering techniques. One is called kernel K-means. One is called spectral clustering. To test this, I've generated a sample discovery set of 4 to 55 documents or 4 to 35 documents from the Scopus API that I understand because they're about library discovery systems and put together specific phrase indexes. We've been using one of the Microsoft cognitive services tools to generate the phrases. So you see on the left-hand side, abstract and the phrase is derived on the right-hand side using the Microsoft tool. Ran these through our scikit-learn K-means, the spectral clustering that was not successful, used the Wolfram spectral clustering tool which actually did break the corpus nicely into 4 different clusters. And you can see here the results you get back from Wolfram. Again, the results you get back from any of these systems are problematical in the sense that you have to interpret them. So Wolfram system gives back the documents that are in each different cluster but then you have to characterize those documents by driving keywords and looking at the term frequencies. So again, here under the wood vectorizing, if you look at the discovery set, the total number of words are 72,000. There's 7,300, 370 unique words, but actually 9,711 unique phrases. So the phrase derivation yielded more elements. We're using again some of these similarities or closest measures. This is the cosine value. There's a number of other techniques or issues involved with vectorizing. One is dimensionality reduction, which is really linear algebra techniques. I've had the privilege here of digging out my old linear algebra from when I was a math major and trying to figure out some of these techniques that are being used in these clustering models. So there's a question here about clustering versus classification. Can we actually do a real good topic modeling without additional classification of a few articles? This slide I know you won't be able to read. It shows how we're building the word indexes, the phrase indexes. And then if you look in the center section on comparing two documents, you'll see that these values, which are between zero and one, don't differ by much. And if you start looking at comparing all the values in the corporates of a small number of sets, for example, just the 430 documents, it's 92,000 initial comparisons. So this is a lot of machine processing and a lot of machine time. So we've learned a lot from our experience with the clustering algorithms. One of the things I think that's an interesting question is, can we use what we've already learned in IR systems? For example, using inverted file structures, proximity searching, field limiting. Can any of these techniques be passed into the machine learning environment? Can this be our contribution? Can our augmented intelligence application here be adopting into some of these ML algorithms the experiences and the knowledge we've already gained from information retrieval systems? And as Cliff mentioned in this plenary, we need to see a generation of tools that will open this up, make this all easier to use. And as information professionals, we have a role that we can play here. All right, let's stop here. We've got a few minutes for questions. Anybody needs questions? I have to come up to the front. Or if you just want to shout the question out. Tom, are you? Oh, you may have mentioned this, but we have done some experimentation on full text versus just bibliographic records. Have you found that just bibliographic records has yielded anything useful? Yeah, that's a really good point, which I should have made. A lot of this analysis you do see is on full text. Again, I think here is where you end up with not knowing what we already know. We've learned an awful lot about full text searching, proximity searching, looking for words within the same paragraph, within the same sentence. One of the sort of fundamentals that we learned with IBM stairs and systems like BRS is that it's important to be able to do searching within paragraphs, within sentences. When you load up the full text in a machine learning system, you've lost all of that. So that becomes a real problem. Because of convenience, we're using the metadata. We're using abstracts and title words. We haven't actually looked at the difference between that and full text, but when I look at the literature, there's huge processing times and computational issues with doing comparisons with full text ones. Remember, you're building these huge vectors. One of the vectors is essentially your dictionary, your universe of terms. So it's an N by D vector where the D value is the total number of terms. Any other questions? The slides will be available, so please refer to contact me. So you're... I'm counting on your last question. No, that was great. I'll follow up if I may. So it sounds like abstracts are key. Have you found a difference between metadata without abstracts versus metadata including the abstract? Yes, yes. The abstracts are extremely important. Title words are trying to outgast an author, so they're not always descriptive and sometimes we've all seen a few titles of articles. So the abstracts, I think, in terms of document description are extremely important. And it's a substitute, really, for the full text processing, which does take an awful lot of computational time. So this is an extremely important area. It's going to be very fruitful. We're going to see a lot of work in the next couple of years on this. And we're looking forward to making some inroads and putting together some insights about how we can use machine learning and library applications. Any other questions or comments? I'll thank you for your time.


You're eating wings, do you want drums, flats, flat sauce? Flats. That's what y'all call them, flats? Flats or drums, yeah. I didn't know they were called a flat, I just, did you know that? I'm getting flats, it's a flats. You can just put them in and like the bone just comes out. Flats all day. Flat sauce. Lemon pepper. Honey barbecue, plain. Plain, I'm dipping in blue cheese, love it. Sometimes barbecue is a little too sauce, you don't want too much sauce on there. It takes away from the actual wing. This is wing science right here. Ranch blue cheese. French. Boneless chicken wing, mild buffalo sauce. That's it. I'm a plain Jane when it comes to my chicken wings. Ideal like a wing, like what sauce? Ranch, blue cheese, drums, flats. I need ranch for sure. I need my wings cooked, well done. And I need a sweet, spicy barbecue. I need something that's kind of still hot but yet sweet, dip them in ranch and have, I gotta have a side of fries and maybe some carrots.


This research paper examines the role of circular RNA, CERC RNA, in the progression of osteoarthritis. It was found that CERC RNA can regulate the expression of genes such as TGF2, which plays a key role in the development of osteoarthritis. Additionally, it was discovered that CERC RNA can increase the production of TGF2 by sponging mere 1208, which leads to increased phosphorylation of SMAD-15 incondrocytes. This process ultimately results in the progression of osteoarthritis. Furthermore, it was shown that intraarticular injection of chesacrab, a short hairpin RNA, CERC RNA, designed to block the expression of CERC RNA, could reduce the severity of osteoarthritis in mice. These findings suggest that CERC RNA may be a promising therapeutic target for treating osteoarthritis. This article was authored by Yang Xiu, Thuping Mao, Zhen Bo Long, and others.


The wellness environment is currently a residential environment for first year students at the University of Vermont. We focus on four main pillars of health and well-being, fitness, nutrition, mindfulness and mentorship. We've developed a course, Healthy Brain's Healthy Body, Surviving and Thriving in College which shows a student the impact of doing mindfulness, yoga, fitness, tai chi, taking a run, eating in a certain way, getting a good night's sleep, how that affects your genome, how that affects your brain and how it affects the outcome of your life. Students then can take those ideas that are learned in class and implement it in the wellness environment where we have the resources right there, right in front of you. For fitness we have a whole team of exercise movement science majors who are there to be personal trainers, same for nutrition. For mindfulness we have daily offerings with all the yoga instructors and mindfulness instructors that come in from the Burlington community to help teach students how to engage in mindfulness. We wanted to do that in an environment free of the distraction of alcohol and drugs. This wasn't about drugs and alcohol, we just didn't want it in the dorm. One of my favorite things about living in Wee is like the sense of community. Everyone on my floor has been really tight. It is not just another high school level class where they just say, don't do this, don't do that, you know, they're there to provide you with evidence-based research and we actually look at a lot of brain scans, you know, both of our professors are both neurosciences. We have a saying, we don't judge, we just provide gorgeous neuroscience to young people aged 17 to 22 and let them decide. When you make the decision to become a part of the wellness environment you're making a decision to be part of a really engaged and vibrant community that has at the heart of it a person, Jim Hajak, who is the most inspiring mentor you could ever have. One of the central ideas of our work is if you train your brain, your body will follow. Most people know if you do weight lifting, increase the size of the weight and dumbbell in your hand, your biceps will get bigger. The same is true for your brain. That's what I think is a forte of the wellness environment is that it's an environment where those choices don't have to be off the beaten path. Kids are having fun, they're learning, they're partying but they're doing it in ways that are also good for themselves. The community of the Wellness Center is really amazing, people are always there to encourage you and help you do better at what your goal is and what you want to achieve. It puts a new spin on the way that you look at what you're doing during your college career. If you're someone who's interested in leading a healthy lifestyle, fitness, nutrition, mindfulness, mentorship, wellness environment, great program for you, you should definitely come check it out.