The Clyde Bady Show. The world's greatest wild animal trainer, Clyde Bady, with another exciting story from his brilliant career. This master of the big cats captures ferocious jungle beasts and trains them to perform under the big top in the circus where there are always thrills, action and danger. Hundreds of dramatic behind the scenes adventures are all part of the Clyde Bady story. Here is the story of Jungle Joe. On the west coast of Africa, just below the equator, lies the small port of Motadi at the mouth of the Congo River. It was there a few years ago that my wife Harriet and I journeyed hoping to procure some animals for our circus. The trip on the coast-wise steamer from Akra had been hot and uninteresting. We wasted no time in getting ashore. What about the luggage Clyde? All taken care of, honey. I don't see that it gets taken right from the boat to the hotel in town. I hope that hotel has an electric fan. I'm just gonna park right in front of it. From what I hear, I wouldn't bet that Motadi boasted such a luxury as electricity. But I'll settle for a few good animals. Oh, so will I. According to my figures, if we can get the ones we want here instead of from the dealer in the states, we'll save enough to completely redecorate the house in California, get some new clothes and pay all our expenses for the trip. You've got it all figured out, huh? Certainly. And what more we... Clyde, listen. Sounds like our menagerie tent before feeding time. This warehouse.  Well, come on. The door's open. Let's have a look. Clyde, look! Holy mackerel! Animals galore! Look, there must be a dozen lines in those cages. And over there are some zebras. Well, a little bit of everything. Looks like our information was right. This is the place to stop. I wonder if they're for sale. We'll soon find out. Let's go ask that native boy out there. There must be a small fortune in wild animals here, Clyde. Yeah. Somebody's going to clean up on this ship. Oh, boy! Oh, oh. How's your pigeon English, pigeon? You're on your own, Clyde. Boy! Animals inside. Animals. Who belong? Animals belong to Jungle Joe. Jungle Joe? Jungle Joe who? That animal belongs to Jungle Joe. Other than Matai, he lives... What does he mean, Clyde? I think he must mean the animals belong to some dealer called Jungle Joe in that he lives on the other side of town. Boy, you take us, Jungle Joe. He doesn't seem to understand, Clyde. Wait a second. Here, boy. Now, you take us to Jungle Joe. Bueno! Bueno! Wonderful. Our little coin of the realm will help a native understand English. Thanks, boy. We can make it now. Bueno! Bueno! See the sign, Clyde? Jungle Joe, wild animal dealer. Expeditions outfitted. Yeah. We're in luck, maybe. If this guy's animals are already sold, we'll hire him to lead us after some more. Watch the steps here. Oh. Come in. Well... Hello. Hello. What can I do for you? Well, we saw some animals in a warehouse down at the dock and we're told they belong to somebody called Jungle Joe. We'd like to talk to him. I'm afraid it'll be impossible to talk to him, mister. Huh? You see, I am Jungle Joe. And now, we return to our story, Jungle Joe. When Harriet and I learned that the attractive young girl was Jungle Joe, a wild animal dealer, our surprise could not be conceived. She wasn't more than 25, and it seemed impossible that she could have captured all the wild animals we'd seen in the warehouse. We discovered that her real name was Josephine Gerard. You see, Mr. Bady, my father was an animal dealer. He brought me here when I was only seven. He used to take me with him on all of his expeditions into the jungle. I could speak Swahili better than English by the time I was 10. It's amazing. I still can't believe it.  Well, to tell the truth, my reasons were more economic than sentimental, Mrs. Bady. When my father passed away two years ago, I had no family to go to, so I decided if I had to make a living, I'd better stick with something I know. From the looks of that warehouse, you've done all right, too. Yes, I've been lucky. Of course, the animals you saw represent a year's work. I'll be glad to get my money for them. I don't blame you.  Harriet's right. We'd like five or six lines. Oh, I'm terribly sorry, but they're already spoken for, Mr. Bady. There's a boat due in a week, and I promise to ship them all to a dealer in London. I was afraid it's something like this. Would any of the other animal dealers in this territory have anything for sale? Well, let's see now. I'm afraid you've come at the wrong time. Carter from Leopoldville upriver is on a safari now. Rogers, the other dealer here in Matati, just sold a shipment the other day. Looks as if we'll have to go after our own, then. Could you outfit and lead an expedition for us, Joe? Well, not right away, I couldn't. My next expedition is a very special one. Until I've made it, I'm not taking on anything else. A special expedition, you say? Very special, Mr. Bady. As soon as I get payment for the animals in the warehouse, I'm going after a full-grown gorilla. A gorilla? Well, you can't be serious. I thought capturing an adult gorilla was practically impossible. So they tell me. But there's bound to be a way, and if I can find it, it'll be worth $25,000. Well, for that kind of money, I don't blame you for being interested. Who is it that wants it so badly? A London zoo. They've had a standing order for one since before my father died. Well, I'd think every dealer in Africa would be after one, then. That's where I'm lucky again. If they knew where to find one, it'd be a mad scramble. But I'm the only one in the Congo who knows where to look. You know where you can find a gorilla? Yes. On my last expedition, I ran across unmistakable signs. I want to hurry back and try my luck before another deal discovers my secrets. Sounds interesting. I wish we could join you. So do I. Why don't you? Maybe it sounds silly, but we're much more interested in lions than gorillas. No, I guess we'll just have to look somewhere else for our animals. Oh, I'm sorry. I wish I could help you, but... Well, I've been planning on going after a gorilla for a long time now, and I just don't want to put it off any longer. We understand, Joe. And I wish you all the luck in the world. Oh, thank you. Mr. Joe! Mr. Joe! Mr. Joe! What's the matter, Carl? Mr. Joe, warehouse is big burn enough. What? The warehouse is big fire, Mr. Joe! Oh, no! The animals! We've got to get them out! Mr. Beatty! Look! That's no use, Joe. We'd still like to do anything. Oh, we've got to try. No, no, you can't go any closer. Oh, let me go! We've got to get them out of there! Joe, the animals are already dead. They couldn't live through that smoke. They're suffocated already. Joe, let's go back to your house. I've got a better idea, Harriet. Let's take Joe back to the hotel with us. How about it, Joe? I don't care. Come along, Joe. It's no good looking at this. How about this, anyway? Ice tea in the Congo. Would you like another, Joe? No, thank you. Try to stop thinking about what's happened, Joe. It couldn't be helped. I know, but... We understand how you feel.  How could that fire have started? How? It's pretty hard to tell. There was a lot of hay in the warehouse. It might have been started by a careless smoker. Maybe even spontaneous combustion. Seeing this man coming toward our table just made me think of something. Man? Who is he, Joe? Roger's. The other wild animal dealer here in the cottage. All right, Joe. Just heard about what happened at your warehouse. It was mighty tough luck. Yes, wasn't it? Mr. Roger's, Mr. and Mrs. Beatty. Man to meet you, folks. How do you do? Roger's. Looks as if your competition just went up in smoke. I guess I'm whipped. It's a shame it had to happen, Joe. Now, this game isn't for a woman. You should have gotten out when your father died. Maybe you're right. I suppose that equipment of mine you were renting was destroyed too? Yes. Everything. Roger's, I don't think this is quite the time to bring up business. Perhaps you're right. But surely can't blame me for being concerned about what belongs to me. After all, Joe here had almost $3,000 worth of my safari equipment in that warehouse. I'm sure you'll get your money when the insurance is paid. There wasn't any insurance. It wasn't to be in effect until the animals were loaded aboard the boat. Oh, no. I... I don't know when I'll be able to pay you, Roger's. But I will, somehow. I see. Tell you what I'll do, Joe. I'm willing to forget that equipment if you'll forget about being in the animal business and leave this territory to me. You've been wanting it that way for a long time now, haven't you, Roger's? Well, I would... Never mind. Your proposition couldn't have come at a better time. After what's happened today, I... I guess I don't have much choice. Wait a minute, Joe. What? You can't give up just because of what happened, Joe.  A gorilla? I mean... You'll have to excuse my wife, Roger. She has a vivid imagination, thinks her gorillas and all sorts of animals in this territory. Yes. Yes, of course. But Joe won't have to fold up if she doesn't want to. What do you mean, Mr. Beatty? You seem to have forgotten why we're here. We want some wild animals. We're prepared to finance an expedition for them if you'll lead it. But she... You're on, Mr. Beatty. When do we start? Good for you, Joe. I... I think you'd be smarter to do business with me, Beatty. And I think you'd be smarter to hit the road. I don't like the way you operate, Roger's. Very well. Let's go back to my place and make plans. Don't count on running any of my equipment from now on, Joe. I won't be able to spare it. All right, I won't. We'll manage, though. Come on, folks. Two days after meeting Jungle Joe, we arrived at the capital of the Belgian Congo, Leopoldville.  We've decided on trying to capture a gorilla first and then getting the other animals that I wanted. What I'd give for an air-conditioned room about now. It's pretty bad, all right. It feels like rain. Mind if I see that map, Joe? No. I was just going to show you where we are now. Good. All I know is that we're in the middle of a river swarming with crocodiles and bordered by the densest jungle I've ever seen. Well, we'll soon be in that jungle, Clyde. See here on the map? That's where we are now. In another hour or so, we should arrive at McCombie. McCombie? Yes, it's a very small native village. And you're sure we can get all the natives we'll need there? Oh, yes. Karo used to live in McCombie before he joined my father. You'll see that we get some good men. How far is this gorilla territory from McCombie? Oh, about 20 miles or so into the jungle, I guess. We'll have to stick to the game trails to get there. It sounds awfully exciting, doesn't it, Clyde? Sure does, honey. Being after a gorilla, it'd be plenty exciting in Central Park, let alone in this jungle. I promise it won't be dull. And by this time tomorrow afternoon, we'll get to the gorilla territory. How are you doing, honey? Oh, I'm all right, Clyde. We can keep going. We'll have to make camp in a few minutes, and we can all get some rest. But it's only four o'clock, Joe. I know, but in another hour it'll be pitch dark. It comes on awfully fast here in the jungle. Who's that calling? Karo, up ahead. What is it, Karo? What's he saying, Joe? Where, Karo? Speak English. He's trying. You come see. He says there are gorilla tracks just ahead. Well, what are we waiting for? Look, tracks. Good boy, Karo. That's a gorilla, all right. Brother, look at the size of those footprints. Karo, we must make camp at once. Hurry, tell the men. You, Karo. Stand by. Joe, you act worried. I am worried, Harriet. Those tracks are fresh. They weren't made more than 15 minutes ago. I don't know. I'm remembering what Dad used to say about gorillas. What was that, Joe? That they're the one animal that's not afraid of man.  We've got to be ready just in case. We return now to Clyde Beatty and Jungle Joe. Clyde and Harriet Beatty were deep in the jungles of the Congo on an expedition led by a young woman animal dealer called Jungle Joe. Just before dark, they discovered footprints made by a huge gorilla and hurriedly made camp. Harriet, you and Joe better try and get some sleep. I'll keep this fire going and see that the natives keep working on the net. I couldn't sleep now, Clyde. Neither could I. But I guess there's not too much to worry about now. I've posted a native on each side of the clearing to keep watch. How are the men coming with the net, Clyde? Oh, they're doing fine. You know, that's pretty clever, Joe, but I just hope it works. There's only one thing that bothers me. How are we going to know if it works or whether when it works? I don't know. I guess we'll have to go back from time to time and see if anything's happened. Why not take one of the rifles and hide it in the brush and attach a wire to the trigger so when the trap is sprung, the rifle will fire? Oh, of course. Like we used to hook up our cameras for animals to take their own pictures when we were in India. It's a wonderful idea, Clyde. I'll put you in charge of that part of the project. We'll have to set the trap fairly close to camp. Listen, hear it? The drums. Well, the Western Union of the Kongos at work. I wonder what it's all about. I don't know. It's one language only the natives understand. Oh, Carl. Yes, why, Joe? Carl, Carl. The drums, Carl, what do they say? It message from Big Headman at Macombie. He say, another safari come this way. Are you sure, Carl? Carl, sure. He say, one white man. Many bushmen follow our trail. Somebody following us? But who? It must be Rogers. Thank you, Carl. Rogers. So he didn't forget what I let slip about your capturing a gorilla, Joe. That's it. He let us lead him right to the prize, too. I'm awfully sorry, Joe.  Oh, forget it, Harriet. Anybody else would have been passed unnoticed, but Rogers isn't noted for being honorable. But how could he follow us? It's simple, I'm afraid. The natives in every village along the way saw us going up river.  He's going to try catching a gorilla and getting it back to Matati first. If it looks that way, and our chances of success won't be helped much by another safari coming this way. Well, he must be several hours behind us so they can't get close until sometime tomorrow. Well, that's right. He won't be traveling at night. We'll just have to get going with our plan early in the morning. If we're lucky, he'll be too late to spoil anything.  Oh, here. Lots of vines overhead. Oh, this ought to be perfect. Some good saplings here, too. Hold up, Carl. Tell the men to unroll the vine net. Well, Harriet, would you like some of the bait before we hook it up? Oh, thanks, Clyde. I love bananas, but I'm not hungry now. Imagine trapping a gorilla with a stalk of banana. That should be as tempting as anything to a gorilla. All right, Carl. Now fasten the corner vines to the saplings. Bend them back a little further. Pull that wire just a little tighter, Clyde. There. How's that? That's fine. Is it all set now, Joe? Well, except covering that little wire with leaves. Boy, talk about Rube Goldberg. This one really takes the cake. Gorilla number one comes down trail and discovers stalk of bananas number two. Gorilla grabs bananas, which pulls wire number three, releasing saplings number four, which spring back and throw net number five down over gorilla. And at same time, wire attached to sapling pulls trigger on rifle number six, which shoots and warns in trepid hunters trap has been struck. Oh, that's my husband. You know, I was pretty skeptical till we got this contraption rigged up, but now I think it might work at that. Well, let's just hope some other animal doesn't come along and set it off. Joe, don't even think of that. You want a jinx of works? Uh-oh. There goes some more thunder. Sounds like it might mean business this time. I hope so, anyway. You're hoping it rains? Yes. It'll wash away our sand here and improve our chances, and it will also slow rod. All right, Carl. Tell the men to come along. We're heading back for camp. It seems to be letting up a bit now. About time, too. The three of us cramped up in this little tent for hours is not my idea of a good time. Oh, it'll probably stop as suddenly as it started. Suddenly it's going on outside. Let me have a look here. What is it, Carl? It looks like we've got company. It's Rogers. I was afraid he'd show up just in time to spoil everything. Oh, well. Well, well, isn't it? Now, come in. Yes. Come in, Roger. Ah, thanks. I've made camp only half a mile or so back the trail that I should pay you folks a visit. Well, that was very thoughtful. But I have an idea. You didn't come just to be neighborly. What's on your mind? Yes, my girl, Joe. I'll be honest. I know why you're here, of course, and I'm here for the same reason. Nothing like taking advantage of someone, eh, Roger? Oh, I wouldn't put it that way, baby. Since my safari is on hand, I thought we might join forces in the hunt for a gorilla. Thanks, but no thanks, Roger. Ah, but we'd have a much better chance that way and we could split the 25,000 two-ways, Joe. The answer is no. As far as I'm concerned, it's all or nothing. Joe, that's not the way. I think you heard the lady. I'm talking to Joe, baby. Suppose you keep out of this and mind your own business. It happens. This is my business. Now, get going and don't come back. And supposing I should come back? Then what? Then I'm afraid you and I are going to tangle, Rogers, and I'd love nothing better than separating you from your front teeth. Clyde, please. That was a shot. Something sprung our trap. Come on. Where are you going? Stick around, Rogers. We may have a surprise for you. Just around this bend in the trail. Something's in that net, all right? Look! Oh, it's work. We've got ourselves a gorilla. And a big one. Look at that baby fight that vineset. Clyde, will it hold it? Carl, have the men get more vines. Hurry. Where are the men with the cage? They were right behind us. They'll be here in a minute. All right, Carl. Have them wind more vines around it. Hurry. Not too close there. Watch it. He's got hold of one of the men. Stay back. I'll club it his arm with my right foot. Carl, he's let go. Pull his men back.  Hurry. That's it. Right up here now. All right. Don't be pushing in here.  Hurry up. Well, Harriet, I'm sorry. We can't continue and get the animals you need, but I guess we'd better head back toward McCombie. And that suits me. The sooner we get rid of that ugly brood of a gorilla, the better. Now the cage will hold all right. I'm glad we made it plenty strong. It's one powerful animal. Has he settled down now? Yeah. Only he turned out to be a girl gorilla. She's pretty well worn out from the struggle, though. You're wasting no time in breaking camp, I see. We got what we came for, Rogers. No, you're staying around here. That's exactly the way I feel. We're leaving now, too. Shall we return to McCombie together? Yes, I guess so, if you like. We're hitting the trail at dawn. You and your party can bring up the rear, Rogers. We're going to have our hands full getting this gorilla back. All right, that'll be fine. We'll join you when you come along then. We're making better time than I expected. We must be almost halfway to McCombie already. You think we can make it before dark? No, I doubt it. We may have to make camp a few miles short. Clyde, what happened to Rogers? Huh? Well, he was at the rear of the column just a minute ago. Carl was near him. I'll ask. Carl? Yes, Ronald Bailey? Where is Ronald Rogers, Carl? He stopped back at Spring in Trill. He said he'd fill a water bag, catch up in minutes. Well, we may as well wait here. Listen. It's Rogers. He's in trouble. Carl, bring the man. Hurry. Clyde. It's another gorilla. It's Scott Rogers. Must be the mate to the one we got. It's a huge one. It's a terrible ribbon. What can we do? I'll have to shoot. But you won't get much. I'll have to take that chance. Clyde, you did it. You've killed the gorilla. Come on. He's still alive, Joe. He's in bad shape. We've got to get him to a doctor, Clyde. The nearest doctors in Leopoldville. He won't last long enough to make that. Isn't there anyone in Macombie who could do something for him? There's a native there who might help. He's hardly more than a witch doctor, though. We'd better get him there anyway. It'll mean traveling part of the way at night. But we can make torches and keep going somehow. All right. Carl, have the men make a litter to carry Buono Rogers. And hurry. We managed to get Rogers to Macombie, and the native doctors surprised us. Didn't have much bedside manner, but he got results. When Rogers was out of danger, we boarded the river steamer once more and several days later arrived back at Macombie. Our time was running short, so we made arrangements for the return to the states. I hate to see you folks go. You've been so wonderful. We hate to leave too, Joe. But if we're going to put a circus on the road this spring, we'd better get back. I was hoping you'd stay and go after some of the animals you came for in the first place. But don't worry. When your season starts, I'll have a shipment to you. Ah, that's swell, Joe. And it's a relief to know that Rogers won't be giving you any more trouble. He seemed to have a complete change of heart. Oh, we'll get along all right now, I know. But I do want to thank you again for helping me out. I could never have captured that gorilla without your help. Sure you could. But we enjoyed it. It was kind of a challenge to us too. A challenge Clyde couldn't resist, Joe. I think he'd let a gorilla make a monkey of him, do you? And now here is Clyde Beatty to tell about his next adventure. Why anyone would deliberately choose the hazardous occupation of animal training for a life's work even I can't explain. Whenever eager young men come to me asking for a start toward such a career, I do everything possible to discourage them. And usually I'm successful. However, a few years ago, a youngster named Donato pleaded with me to coach him on the not-too-gentle art of escaping death in the arena. And this young man, I wasn't able to turn from his purpose. You'll learn why in our next exciting story called Daniel in the Lion's Den. All stories are based upon incidents in the career of the world-famous Clyde Beatty and the Clyde Beatty Circus. The Clyde Beatty show is produced by Shirley Thomas. Jungle Joe was written by Robert T. Smith and Frank Hart-Tausig. All names used are fictional and resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a Commodore production.


My name is Andrea with Food and Mentory Adventures in Food and today I'm sharing a recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks. The recipe is for peanut brittle cream cheese cookies. These cookies are absolutely perfect for the holidays. So let me show you what you're going to need and as always I'll make sure to leave the recipe in the description box. You are going to need sugar, flour, butter, an egg, vanilla, baking soda, softened cream cheese and crushed peanut brittle. So the first thing we're going to do is to cream our butter which is softened and at room temperature, our cream cheese which is also soft and at room temperature, and our sugar. I'm just gonna use a hand mixer and beat it until it's light and fluffy. And now I'm going to add in my egg which is at room temperature and a little bit of vanilla and give it another mix. Now I'm just going to fold in my peanut brittle and my baking soda and my flour. So now I've got the dough all mixed up. It was pretty easy to stir. It wasn't very stiff at all but it is pretty sticky because we've got that cream cheese in there. So now I am going to cover the bowl and then I am going to refrigerate this dough for about three hours. Okay so I let my dough chill and so now what I'm gonna do is just take my cookie dough, roll it in a ball and just place it right on the cookie sheet. And I am using a one and a half tablespoon scoop to do that. Okay so now that I've got my dough on the cookie sheet I'm just taking a fork that I have dipped in water and then I'm just making the traditional peanut butter crisscross on my cookies. Now the directions say to dip your fork in flour and I've never done that before when I've made peanut butter cookies so I'm not gonna do that now. And then it also says after you make the crisscross on your cookie to sprinkle your cookie with sugar but I'm not gonna do that either. I feel like these have enough sugar but I'm just gonna keep going here. So I have crisscrossed all my cookies. I've got my oven preheated to 350 degrees. I'm gonna bake these for about 10 to 12 minutes or until they are light golden brown. Okay so here are the peanut brittle cookies. I let them cook for about 13 minutes each batch and they are pretty tasty. They are not very sweet. They're kind of like a shortbread type cookie. And my husband who is not a big fan of peanut brittle really likes these cookies. Now if you want your cookies a little bit more sweet I would definitely sprinkle the sugar sugar on top. Also another thing I want to mention is definitely use parchment paper. With that first batch you'll remember I did not use any parchment paper and they stuck to the cookie sheet. The next couple of batches I did use parchment paper no problem at all. So anyways I hope you guys really enjoyed this video. If you did please make sure to give us a thumbs up and if you have not subscribed to our channel we'd certainly love to have you. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you all next time.


Alright, so let's talk about today's agenda. So we're going to start by talking about like, what's the point, right? Why, why blogs, why do people blog and specifically why do you want to blog? We're going to talk about like what your blogs niche might be as well. So what it's very specific topic, what makes you stand out from the rest. We're going to touch briefly on making money with your blog and ways that people have done that in the past. And we're going to generate some ideas so that whenever you sit down to write your blog, whether that is a personal blog, something for your business or something in between, you will never be faced with a blank screen and unsure of what to write. So we're not going to cover how to set up your blog. So we didn't cover this last week, we covered this like last month. So you can definitely find that in the recording, recorded sessions. We also have a lot of WordPress basics. So if you're super super brand new, we've got courses there. We also have courses on block theme development, which I'm also posting in the chat. Either one of these will get you started like actually with the setup of your blog. So we're not we're not covering that today. Today, it's all about overcoming that writer's block. So you're going to need one of two things either access to Google Docs or word processor, or a place to write down your ideas. So a notebook, a word processor. I don't know if you want to write on your desk. Probably don't do that. Former teacher don't write on desk. It's not a good place. Or just like a notes program on your cell phone. So we're going to be using this Google Doc today to help us to brainstorm. So I'm going to drop this in the chat. And now you are going to have two options. So you can either go over here to file. And if you use Google, you have a Google Drive, you can click this make a copy button. Or if you have a word processor on your computer, there is a download button and you can download it to whatever you would like here. So whether you have Microsoft Word, an open document, if you just want to use a plain TXT file, you can download it there but this will help us to brainstorm and this will be the resource that you keep forever more. Or if you have just like a random piece of paper or notebook, you can just write it on here, either way. Yeah, so this is what we're going to be using today and talking about each one. Any questions on that any trouble finding this document again you'll go to file, either make a copy or download. I'm going to make a copy because I don't want to write on this one as well. So here I go. Overcoming writer's block I'm going to title this Burger to travel. That's what my blog topic is going to be and we'll talk about that in a minute. So now you can see I have my specific organizer here I can you should now be able to type in this that this is yours. Yeah, doesn't look like we have any questions yet so when you are ready you've made your copy you have your pen and paper, please type ready into the box or you can do an emoji. As I think it pronounced Rochelle did. I apologize if I mispronounced that. But let me know when you're ready and we will get started. I see jeans ready. I think it's Michelle is ready. Ready ready yes okay that's three readies do say wait stop if you need me to do so and I will be happy to slow it down. Okay, so the first thing that I would like you to do. I already talked about this but we're going to start by just writing down our blogs topic and then we're going to talk about why people blog. For me I'm going to this is number one your blogs topic what will your blog be about so that's one of the questions that I asked you when you were signing up. If you have changed your answer since then that's totally fine. But what is your blog going to be about this will just help you to find out later. So for me one of the things that I'm blogging about right now is RV travel with birds accidentally muted myself. So my mind is just. Okay. So just start by writing your topic in there it can be as specific as as that. Some reason I keep getting muted I'm not entirely certain why so I'm going to keep an eye on that. Do let me know if I don't notice though. I'm sure you hear some birds in the background that maybe why. But yeah so this can be just as general as travel this can be just whatever your topics are you can also list multiple I recommend just starting with one. And if you're you'd like to share if you care to share, you can drop it in the chat so I'm blogging about RV travel with birds. And if you've blogged about anything in the past you can drop that as well in there. Another one of mine is like teaching and open source is a blog that I was put a time wanted to start but haven't quite gotten there. I also have a parrot blog, which is just about living with parents. But yeah, anyone want to share. Give you a minute to jot that down. Looks like we are a touch shy that's okay. Let's start then by answering the question like why do people blog in general so rather than writing in that organizer let let's share here first. Why do people blog. Whether it's you, or somebody else, what is the point. The first thing that I think of is to share experiences and to connect with people from all over the world. It's one way that we feel connected to others. What are some other reasons go ahead and answer here in the chat box. You have information to share yes that others may find valuable why else do people blog. When I first started blogging it was kind of a personal journal I think I had like a Zenga or a live journal. Any other reasons why people blog information that you share may become information that you learn. Yes, in fostering a community on your blog. You can definitely discover what other people are doing as well you may find better ways of doing things. And discover that maybe the way that you were doing one thing isn't the way that you want to do it after all that's great. I think another one that is pretty popular is that people will blog to make money right the idea of being a professional blogger appeals to so many people I think that before there were influencers there were bloggers. And then another person said I have to learn blogging to share information about products and services for an affiliate program. Yes, we're going to talk about that today actually. And you also want to start a post a personal motivational blog next yes. So, and the other thing that people should know is that if you are starting a blog it might be for your business. One of the ways that search engines and Assad you can definitely jump in here at some point. But one way that you can get listed higher in search engines is to have a business blog, because updated content. Having relevant interesting content posted regularly is a very, very good way to keep your your website up to date that's one way that you can show that. Entertainment yes that's another reason talking about funny stuff that kids are pasted. There's so much connection there. So, does someone have a comment. So some of these reasons may overlap with yours why do you want to blog. We did just have a couple people hop in so let's actually hop over to our graphic organizer. And I started writing on the wrong one didn't I okay so for those of you who are brand new we are going to be working in this organizer. So I want you to really explore just for a minute why do you want to write this blog think about why you decided to start a blog or website. Think about the conversations you had all the things that prevented you from doing so. And think about the moment you decided to like to join us here to get started. What changed or influenced you to take action. And then another question is probably what will happen if you don't start this block. And I want you to take. Let's go with a minute and a half and I'm going to set a timer here to write about why you want to write this blog. So I'm going to look for an online timer and put a minute and a half. Click start. And I want you to start writing number two why do you want to write this blog. So I'm going to write with you. So you're not hearing hearing birds but your turn to write and it's the sentence that you are on. If you would like to share you can definitely copy and paste into the the meeting chat so that we can kind of see where you are. You can see some of my reasons here. I didn't answer. What will happen. If I don't write this blog. So for me one thing that may happen if I don't write this blog is that other people who decided to travel with their birds may not have that resource and some birds may get sick maybe unhappy may. I mean, for me it's the difference between people and birds living their best lives in an RV and not living their best lives not living maybe so for me it's a very personal mission as more and more people take to the road I want to do that we're all happy together. One of our members said that they want to connect with people through writing and share something they can connect with and that will actually help them in some way oh my goodness. I bet everybody has a blog that changed them in some way shape or form. Maybe you can think of one if you want to share that you absolutely can. I read some over the years where I read things like for example this is really personal but like for example when I got divorced there were a lot of relationship blogs out there that really spoke to to me and got me through really hard time so the things that you right now you're leaving a legacy for other people to find their way through as well. My idea is an accessibility blog so many people do not take accessibility into account when they create documents post information images etc. You've learned a lot attending meetups and webinars and would like to share this information with others oh my gosh yes. That's such a great blog idea please do that there's so much we can do to make the web more accessible and starting a blog about it that that helps us with actionable tips yes absolutely.  Michelle specifically. Okay so just not sure how or where to start so one thing that's exciting is that in doing this graphic organizer you are starting. So let's start talking about your blogs niches. So we already talked about some of these. We're going to talk about defining your niche. And I'm going to tell you a little story about a successful blogger. So the first thing is that this successful blogger the story that we're talking about is just travel blogger so when I say travel bloggers. What do you think about just drop it in the chat as does it excite you does it annoy you at this point like are they everywhere are they nowhere. That's something that you think of there's no wrong answer when you hear the word travel blogger. There we go. Sorry, I was typing. So some people say oh my gosh this is so exciting other people like that's not for me I'm not interested in that living vicariously through others experiences so. Yeah so I once upon a time though travel blogging wasn't really a thing so like we're going to go back like 10 years 2013 2014 travel blogging wasn't really a thing. But there were a couple of people at the time now I would say that a lot of people are trying to become travel bloggers right like it would be their dream to go off to exotic locations all over the world and share their experiences, but it's a really hard field to break into. So you really want to have a niche for your blog so for example, my original blog was one about parents right birdie dot blog, which I wasn't going to share but then I just did. There it is. But the more specific you can get the more people are going to who are looking for your topic can find that blog. So my partner was a successful blogger for a long time. He was a digital nomad he worked from an RV. And that was that was his niche right because in 2013 2014 it was really hard to be connected to the internet it was really hard like remote work wasn't all the rage that it is now. So, because they were he and his then partner were traveling. That was their niche they were working and traveling in an RV that they rebuilt from scratch. So, having a niche is really important knowing hey who is your audience who's looking for it and getting specific. You really definitely want to be specific about who your audience is. So their niche was they rebuilt an air stream and then they add and wrote about different systems. And because of the way they were writing they was consistent they had great ideas they were sharing about their experiences. They started receiving things that were just given to them for free so for example they were sent an air conditioner for their RV that they were then able to write an honest review about. They started receiving discounted items water heaters. I think they got tires maybe, but because of the consistency because they had built this audience, they started getting items sent to them. And then they started being paid for content so they were paid for content about other products, right so people will say hey you've used x thing, I would like you to write about it. And because they wrote about it they were and they ended up getting paid for that. And then they ended up doing something entirely different with WordPress. That water heater that I mentioned, they ended up creating a WordPress website and selling them to make money. So what started as we are just writing about something we're passionate about turned into hey people respect us. They trust us, and we've got a wide enough reach that people are willing to pay us for our ideas. So that's one of the main drivers for people to build a blog. And they learned how to use WordPress in different ways. So they made money a different way. So, I want you to think about your niche right so at the time like travel blogging now wouldn't necessarily be a niche which is part of why I'm writing about traveling with birds right I don't just want to write about travel. I want to write about what it's like to do so with two big parents and three little tiny ones. So that that's what their niche was remote work DIY doing it like drop traveling with three dogs like they did quite a bit. So heads here organizer now. And think about what will make your blog stand out among similar topics. What's your end goal. What does this look like especially for your readers. Take a minute and 30 seconds to write. So one of the questions I ended with was could I get more specific. So this document is a living document you're welcome to work on it just in the session or later. But as I was was writing I realized wow I've got two sets of parents big ones and little ones, and they both need different things. So I may want to get more specific depending on what the need is out there. Just think about what your niche is. So a lot of the times when people are writing they don't just, they don't just want to write for funsies they want to make the impact. Sometimes they want to make money so we're going to talk briefly about how you can make money with your blog so this. I mean there are a couple of things you've got to do first and foremost right like one, you need to post regularly to you need to be trustworthy, obviously you don't just want to regurgitate things that are already out there. And you also need to like build your credibility so I mean and most of that is done. I'm just writing this in the chat so one post regularly to be trustworthy three be fresh and original. So that helps you to build an audience that trusts you. So that's step one so before you can do that that that's something to keep in mind but it's a good idea to think about where you might go from there. So the first thing when we're thinking about money like eventually you want to think about, like what you might be able to do for affiliate links so does anyone can anyone tell me what are affiliate links and how do they make you money. Does anyone know the answer to this question, promoting someone else's product to my blog and our commission for each sales. It is definitely related to that yes it's on. So you're promoting somebody else's product you're not selling stuff out of your back room over here, you are promoting somebody else's product, but there are programs that go even further than that can anyone name one does anyone know. And if you answer before me great. Yes, Jean that is exactly right. So there are all kinds of links products blogs, you get the commission if someone buys the thing.  If you click the link from their blog. If somebody buys from that link you get a very, very small percentage of that sale. So let's say that I have a cooking blog, and I have signed up for lots of like there are tons of different affiliate programs I think the most common one is Amazon. If anybody knows a couple more than that. But what they do is it links out to a different product. So, for example, if I'm thinking about this wealthy affiliate might be one yes. But if you're familiar with Amazon there is an affiliate program there. And this is just an example there are lots out there affiliate links Amazon for blogs. At least they used to my mad a day here I don't think so yeah here we go there's an Amazon affiliate program. It's weird that it's not. There's lots of resources here that can teach you how to do that but basically there's a very specific URL that's generated for you. Apparently Elementor has an affiliate program yes. But one thing that I'm like if I wanted to sell through Amazon specifically and I'm not selling any of my products. One thing that I know that I really like for my birds is called Bird Street Bistro. I definitely search for this and say hey does this exist here this is something that I use at home on the road all the time like I'm not trying to do an endorsement for them now I'm just trying to give an example of an affiliate I might say hey Amazon. I have you know thousands of people come and visit my blog about parents. If I can get just 100 of them to regularly buy this through my link, the small sense to the dollar that I would make from having done that does add up over time if I have a thousand of them that every month from the you know 10s of thousands of people who might visit my blog. That is money there so like that that's what this next section is about is thinking hey. What are some products that you might be able to see if you could do affiliate links for so you can search through Amazon you could look through Elementor, but like basically with affiliate links. What are some products, you might be able to link to and make some money and again if you're just starting your blog, you don't want an affiliate link program yet because if only like 10 people are visiting. That's not going to add up to much. First you need to build your audience but this is fun to think about. We do have a question is it's important to post articles regularly how do you manage your time to write multiple blogs and how often do you publish new posts for each blog. Good question let's hold that to the end because I think that we will have time to get to that and we will talk about time management and question that is it's important to post your blog how often you have the new post. It's important to post we're going to talk about content and at the bottom I think that we will be able to answer that question over time. So that's the first thing start thinking about what are some products you might be able to link to and like some money like that if you get enough people if you have enough people on your blog that could be a really good thing. So the other thing that is important to think about. So the other thing that can happen is if you have a good following you can get paid to review products. So you might think about with your blog are there products or items that you use a lot that help with what you're doing. Who might be interested in what you have to say about their products. So what I think about our paid guest blogs so there are going within your niche there are going to be other blogs that exist that are credible. You definitely want to be you want to find what those blogs are and at some point you may reach out to them and say hey I want to write a blog on your blog and then they link back to you and you link back to them. That's really good for SEO. So our ads, who might be interested in advertising on your website. So I'm going to do this really quick just to kind of model this to think about this. Just to demonstrate it. So you saw when I was looking at affiliate links like the bird street bistro. That was one of the ones that I'm writing on the wrong thing again. So for affiliate links. I could think about like bird street bistro that was one product that I really liked. I'm sure that there are parent toys that I could link to and be like you absolutely need this parent toy. There might be parent carriers that I could link to like all of these are probably things that I could find on Amazon or another affiliate product where I could just sign up for the thing I don't even have to talk to that company. So the people who make birds through bistro I don't have to talk to them. But I could go through Amazon and maybe make some money by promoting that product. So that's an example of that. Another thing when I when we think about paid product reviews these are slightly different because these are blog posts about a product or item that you love so one thing that I use in my RV and again this is not an endorsement just an example. I'm with something called a window. I'm just going to show you it so you know what I'm talking about.  So this is something that I would probably want to write a paid product review about. So in order to do that like this is just off the top of my head right. I love the window so what I would probably do is if they didn't notice me initially I might reach out to the creators of this product and see if they want me to endorse it. The other thing I could do is let's say that they have a blog of their own. I might they don't but if they did I could definitely become active on their blog on their social media. And like you wouldn't want to like plug your blog super hard but you might be just say hey like I have this bird blog and like I really like your thing like here's a link to that post they may pay you for something like that. I think paid guest blogs that's I mean what is a list of other websites that are like yours that are slightly different though that you might post on. And the last one you might just think about like who might want to advertise on your website. So that's the other thing that I might do with with the window right so they don't have an Amazon affiliate like they sell directly through their website. So I might reach out to them and say hey do you want me to put a button like in my header and my footer in my sidebar on every page I say hey buy this window. Here's an ad that I made for you would you like this that might be a way that you can do that. So just take another minute and 30 seconds. And think about your affiliate links. What are some things you might be able to get a commission on that you could endorse paid product reviews. Who might pay you to talk about the product things like that. So a minute and a half and reset this. Just give it a minute. Finish the sentence that you are on. I did add these ideas to the documents now I don't know much about them so I your mileage may vary I don't know like what types of programs these are so definitely do your research but for affiliates as you're thinking about this and working on this going forward you're searching through them like what might you be able to do this for later on but again you have to have a following first but I like to keep this in mind because if you do have really popular blog posts and you're linking just in general to certain things. So at some point if you're like wow I'm getting 1000 visitors a month to my bird street bistro post or a post that mentions it. That might be the time to go back and insert like join the affiliate program and insert it. So, into that post. So, just thoughts. Okay. Now let's talk about topics because I think that this might help to inform the question like how do you manage your time to write multiple blogs and how often do you publish new posts for each blog. Some of this is going to show you how you can manage your time, but we're going to brainstorm some topics first. So, at this point, I want you to think about as many topics as come to your mind. So for this first brainstorm there are no wrong answers, you're just going to come up with as many blog topics as you can think up. If you're not sure where to start they're like, ah, that's my problem. That's just a blank screen. I want you to ask yourself what's something most people would be surprised by or get wrong about your topic. The second one is you can always Google it what does Google say about your particular topic so if you're looking for ideas there I'm just going to go to Google and say our being with parrots is safe worth it legal. There's some great blog topics right there. Let's see and then the last one that could help you. You can also use openverse to look for related images so openverse.org. I'm just going to look for parrot RV. And we're going to see if I can find anything here and see if it inspires anything. So here is the link to open verse any one of these things can help you. I'm going to give this a minute and a half jot down any ideas that come to mind. Nothing is wrong here. You can always pick the best ones later. So 30 seconds were number five and finish the bullet point that you are on. Did anyone come up with anything like particularly exciting. During this one I'm just curious. Drop in the chat. I think one that I hadn't ever thought of before for me was like hey like what why shouldn't I just like board my bird if I'm going to go away for two weeks on a trip like can I just like leave them at the vet's office. Like why not why do you that pros and cons like that's something new for me. And Jean thought of a lot of topics great. Yes. Sometimes just giving yourself permission to just like word vomit onto a blank piece of paper can can generate things. None will make money though yeah but it sounds like some of our blogs are passion projects right they make the world a better place and that's probably more important than than anything so. But you never know. Some of this will come to you later. So the next thing that we're going to talk about are other types of blocks so when I think of a blog post and I'm mistaken in this apparently when I think of blog posts I think about just like long form articles right like I think about the cooking blogs were like. They tell you their life story and then give you a little recipe and that that's exhausting to me right and I think that's exhausting to a lot of people it's a reason that micro blogging platforms such as Facebook Instagram Twitter are so popular. So you don't have to write 600 to 800 word things or 1000 word blog post they can be as short as 300 words so for search engine optimization one number that I found when I when I was researching for this was that recommended blog post should be at least 300 words in length. And that not every bit of content must be 100% perfect for search engine optimization like you don't have to sit there and spend hours agonizing over it did I like throw keywords into this am I using the right searchable things. Consistency is probably more important. So you want to mix in some shorter posts as well so you do have the option to write short form articles. So we're going to take a minute and a half and I want you to think of like look at your topics and just ask yourself what might be a good short form article 150 to 300 words or less. What and they can be topics that are up here like you could just move them down here or you could generate new ones but take a minute and a half and think hey, what would make a really good short form article. If you have no ideas are wrong, get them out there. Finish the sentence that you're on with a bullet point. So, from my understanding consistency is more important than having perfect 500 to 1000 word articles so if you okay like not occasionally but just you want to mix up your content a little bit. Right you don't just want to see the same 1000 words or the same like super short 300 words, but that allows you to write a lot faster. Do you have anything else to add to that or is that is that correct. Just curious if there's anything else I should know. So I said yes a minimum of 300 words is good to go as long as it's adding value to your right. Yes, as long as readers are finding it amazing, or it answers one or for two of their particular questions regarding a specific topic that works just really fine. That's what you said about adding value.  I mean that that's what more Instagram is for I would say, then like a blog right like my blog should be teaching somebody about something it should be inspiring them it should be, you know, encouraging them to do something. So two adds are really important but it doesn't have you don't have to spend hours and hours writing blogs that way. So do keep that in mind. For the sake of time. Your long form articles I think a lot of what we probably wrote up here under brainstorm topics could fit there, but just some key points about it, these are longer essays, these are 500 800 or even 1000 word posts. You want to break up your text into shorter paragraphs and you want to use headings appropriately and very paragraph like this is all pretty common sense this is probably what most of us think of. When we think about long form articles, but one thing that is really important that I'm going to give you to copy and paste into that is a resource on using headings. Because headings are really important for both accessibility, making sure everyone can find and understand your post, and because it's also very good for search engine optimization to be ranked higher. So I want you to take this, and I want you to stick this for later review just for the sake of time since it already exists into your long form articles because that will teach you very quickly how to write headings in a way that will best serve both you, your audience and search engines. So, highly recommend that when you're writing big long essays that resource that I just gave you is gold and it will also make the internet a better place. So do take that do use that to break up your articles in a way that makes sense. So I couldn't do it justice in the time that we have which is why I'm giving you the video for it, rather than going deeply into it now. Yeah. So, Elena great question do you recommend to use AI such as chat GPT to help create blog articles. So let's um, I'm going to leave this up to you today because I do know a little bit about chat GPT. So would you rather brainstorm some interviews I think it's pretty self explanatory and like, because like I can think about like bird people that I know that I could interview vets that texts, people who are groomers my friends who own parents, lots of people I could interview. And I could generally understand the schools and letters shall we go into AI or would you rather spend our last 10 minutes brainstorming. What is more valuable to you learners. Okay I see brainstorm. All right tell you what I will, if you're interested in chat GPT and you have time. Since we have a vote for brainstorm. We will spend some time talking about interviews and stuff and we may talk about chat GPT if there is time at the end. But that is definitely a topic I want to get into at some point because I know a lot about it these days, as it emerges. Okay. We talked about long form articles. And did I so interviews. So your interviews are another way that you can quickly generate information here. So these interviews are a, they can be a minimum of three questions or a max of maybe 14 like you don't want it to be super super long but it kind of depends on who you're interviewing. But again this is another opportunity to bring variety and value to your blog posts. Without having to spend hours and hours and hours like you could just talk to somebody for five minutes and write down everything that they say or even have AI do that for you to write write it down, edit it and post it. And the format can be flexible this can be written. It can be recorded aloud. It could be a short video that you post with the transcripts. If you have videos always always I'm writing this down this is important always. Post a transcripts and captions that will make your blogs super accessible and SEO loves it. And then you this definitely adds ethos and credibility outside folks like say I interviewed my vet. They can link to my blog post and if I have a vet saying yes this person like actually knows what she's talking about when we're talking about birds. It adds ethos and credibility to you and creates links and other parts of the internet search engines love it when other websites link to your post definitely boost that. So, let's go ahead and brainstorm and maybe we will do the chat GPT thing next on Friday. But think about who might you interview for three questions. Who might you interview for 15 questions. Who might you interview at all. And then would you rather have this be written a video or podcast. Take a minute and a half and generate some ideas like this. I'm going to set our timer and go finish the question that you are on one of the question but the sentence. So your last one. And I'm going to leave a little bit of time to just talk about like scheduling posts and time management so the last one that we're going to take a minute and a half for our what other forms of blog content might you want to write so these can be list of goals which are things like 10 things to bring not that you can see it because my eyes on the way 10 things to bring on the road to keep your parrot happy right there they're lists of like 10 things five things, two things they can be super short they can be just three things to get those 300 words right. Or there's letters like there was one that I wrote that was an open letter to my new rescue parrot that's on my old blog. But it was just it was a letter to my parrot to just tell her all the things that I would hope that other people would consider when they rescue an elderly parrot. So. Yeah so just think about other forms of content if there's any that you can come up with drop them in the chat but for right now. Definitely think about what other forms of blog content might you want to write so. Take a minute and a half for there. And again list of goals are three to 10 things that you might not know about X. Letters are just letters to to your audience or about a random thing a letter to the Bird Street Bistro people, a letter to the people who make my birds food. Those are definitely definitely good types of content so minute and a half and go in a sec. Finish the. The one that you're on, and we've got two minutes left so I just wanted to talk very briefly about scheduling right so I hope that this kind of answer the question hey how do I write so much so often like I want to write this every week but how do I do that. One thing that you may not be aware of especially if you're brand new is that you have the option in your WordPress dashboard to schedule posts ahead of time. So let's say you have two hours and you're like wow like I don't really want to write 500 to 1000 page posts every single week. What you can do if you go to posts, add new. This is a brand new thing you can write a post about any single thing or more in here so one thing that you can do for consistency is these these micro blogs, the short form articles these 150 to 300 words or less. You could take two hours and write 150 to 300 word posts. You just you polish it right it just as you would, you know do everything in the post settings but what you can do here is once you have those done and written you select your settings up here. Select post publish changes from immediately to whatever day you want so next week. And this time is set to whatever is in your settings so you will have to update that but you can schedule this post. So if I go back to my dashboard now. You can see this is scheduled and it'll tell you when it's scheduled to post on. So you can take two hours write a lot of content interview people just if you've got two hours and it's only going to be this week and the rest of your three months is going to be just wild with events. You can use this to keep that publishing consistently and then when you find time throughout you can come in and either change when a post is scheduled to be later or just let it post and write additional content. So we're going to end with with that today. Just to to help you with that I can help you create a posting calendar. And yeah we y'all did a really good job today thank you for your time and your thoughts we have I think what we'll do is we'll get into chat GPT next week so I'm going to stop the recording now and just give people just a couple more minutes for for questions if they have them and yeah so thank you for your time and I want to respect that so if you want to stick around great but otherwise. Yeah, have a great one.


An editorial was recently published decrying much of the multi-billion dollar marketing of dietary supplements in North America as misleading, deceptive, even predatory. After examining hundreds of sales claims made when supplements are being marketed over the years, the author concluded dishonesty or wild exaggerations are frequent occurrences in the marketing of supplements. My favorite quote was, The marketers of supplements like to use scientific evidence the way a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination. This is nothing new. Similar editorials have been published in the Journal of the AMA and the New England Journal of Medicine. What made this one special was that it was, to their credit, published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. It's like their own journal admitting it. In response, the head of global supplement initiatives at Novis, which actually started out as the livestock feed additives division of Monsanto before branching off into human feed additives, dietary supplements, starts his rebuttal with this counterpoint. In his review entitled, The marketing of dietary supplements in North America, The Emperor is almost naked. The author may be mortified to know the emperor is still dancing in the street dressed or not to the tune of $68 billion. This figure is much higher and is a much more relevant number than cited, indicating a very strong and respectable commerce. That's his first argument that it's highly lucrative? He goes on to say that, hey, they're safer than some pharmaceutical drugs, but how much is that saying, given that prescription drugs kill an estimated 106,000 Americans every year? And that's not errors, not abuse, not overdose. That's just deaths from side effects, ADRs, adverse drug reactions, which would make doctors, me and my fellow colleagues, the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. So for the supplement industry to say, hey, at least we're not the fourth leading cause of death, isn't saying much.


I love the SOTM products for their sound and their price performance, but when they introduced an audiophile PC motherboard and accessory boards, I wasn't interested in reviewing them for I'm no seasoned PC builder. But let's first mention my voice, for I bumped into a virus or so that felt like laryngitis. Just when I thought I had to skip a week, my voice came back, kind of. It still doesn't sound perfect, but I think it's sufficient intelligible. If not, please switch on the closed captions by pressing the cc button on the bottom of the screen. Back to SOTM. As said, I was not going to build an audiophile computer myself, but I told them that as soon as they or another party would build a ready-to-use PC using these parts I would be interested. And so they did. They shipped me a fully loaded system with every board they offer. Given my experiences with other SOTM products, I was expecting a lot. The SOTM products are built into a Silverstone case, hence the name on the front. But it's a computer, so it can play music and depending on the music player's software, it can be bit perfect or rather it should be bit perfect when using this hardware. Think of programs like Audivana, Amara, J River Media Center or Roon. I use it of Roon. It is intended to be used with a stereo, so an amp and loudspeakers. A DAC is also needed that is connected to the amp over RCA or XLR cables and over USB to the audiophile USB board on the computer. The computer itself can be connected over your router to the internet for streaming services and internet radio. And in my case Roon method data and license. Although you can connect a monitor, keyboard or mouse for normal use with bit perfect music player software, a tablet or smartphone can be used as remote control. So it's a PC that contains an SOTM motherboard and other components that are optimized for audio reproduction. A SMB Q370 micro ATX motherboard for the 8th and 9th generation Intel core processors, Intel Pentium and Celeron processors up to 95 watts DDP. It uses an Intel Q370 chipset and Intel HD graphics. Then the SNI-1G Ethernet card that is connected to an external power supply and to an M.2 port for data. The well known audiophile USB card TX USB EXP is also externally powered. Last but not least the CLK EX25-25-2448M50 board was mounted. This is an ultra low phase noise isolation circuit that will clock not only the USB card and the internet card but also the motherboard at two points. Furthermore the clock signal can sync to an external clock over a B and C connector on the rear of the PC. The complete kit would cost you $2250 USD. The ethernet card, the USB card and the clock card were powered by the SOTM's external power supply, the SPS500 that adds $500 USD. But to get it working you need a CPU, RAM, a silent cooler, a power supply and a case. The review computer was fitted with an Intel i7-9700 CPU with a No-Fan CR80EH cooler that looks like a copper crown. Samsung 16GB DDR4-3200x2 RAM, a 1TB PM981 M.2 NVMe SSD and a CSONIC TX850 power supply, all fitted in a Silverstone SSD GDO9B case. The SOTM products plus the rest now adds up to $4600 USD. That's a lot for a computer but if it's a very good digital source, it's a fair price. We'll see. The case and the ancillary equipment can be chosen differently, for instance a less powerful CPU, a more compact cooler and so on. But this is the configuration that was sent to me and there's nothing wrong with it. So let's take a look at the cabinet that holds it all, with the exception of the external power supply to power the critical components. It measures 440 x 360 x 170 mm and weighs 7.6 kg excluding the external power supply. The front has the power button on the right with next to it the sleep button. On the left two USB 3.1 ports with in between the 3.5mm headphones and microphone jacks. The internal power supply for the computer components is on the right here with on it the power inlet and main switch. On the opposite side we find the standard computer interfaces, two times USB 2 ports, two video ports, one HDMI and one display port, then four USB 3.1 ports and an Ethernet port. The through audio file ports can be found in the extension slots. The USB audio class 2 output has a switch to switch off the 5 volt power line on that USB port. Most DACs need these 5 volts to have their interface chip identify itself even when the DAC is switched off. Some DACs don't, these will not identify themselves when switched off which might lead to software losing its setting so you have to select a DAC time and time again. The motivation is to block out the polluted power line for that can cause distortion in the DAC. Not in this case by the way since all SOtM cards here are powered by the external power grid by SOtM power supply. So the 5 volts USB power is clean. Then to the next card which is the audio grade Ethernet card that can also be externally powered as it is in this case by an internal jumper cable from the USB card. One slot to the right holds the DC input which is for the master clock board that is mounted in a 3.5mm disc slot. That board also has a 50 ohm clock input that is connected to the B and C connector in the next slot. When the lid of the case is removed we first see the enormous cooler on the left side with below it the motherboard. The master clock board is mounted here while the USB card is in this slot with next to it the Ethernet card. But looking from above gives you a poor impression of it all so let's dive into the case to look at the cooler from another angle. You now understand why the case had to be this tall. It are countless copper tubes to get as much possible cooling surface so that the fan you can see here only has to work at very low RPMs to be virtually inaudible. On the right side we see the master clock board that is connected over these blue and white cables to the DC input on the rear. The four clock signals are connected from here over these black cables to the USB card, the Ethernet card and two places on the motherboard. This connector goes to the B and C on the rear of the PC. The small board here is plugged into an M.2 slot and over a cable to the Ethernet card. Here we see the normal power input of the USB card that is not in use here since it is powered from the external power supply. The PC came with Windows 10 installed. I installed the music software most accustomed to, Rune. I connected a 10 terabyte USB 3 drive holding my music to the computer. Logged into Rune, deactivating my Rune account or my Grim Audio player in the process and had it indexed all music and subsequently complete the metadata. It did that raving fast, so fast that I regretted not timing it. Rune on an i7 Intel Core with directly attached storage is very fast indeed. Of course I logged into Tidal and Coboose although Coboose currently does not seem to work comfortably with Rune, not on my Grim player and also not on this PC. But that's not something to blame the hardware for. There is one thing you must know using this PC. You need to first switch on the external power supply, in this case the SOtM SPS 500, before switching on the PC. Otherwise the PC will not start up since the motherboard looks dead to the booting sequence and it will attempt to start up again and again without any results. The SOtM setup uses the SPS 500 external power supply you see on top of the PC. It came with a splitter cable that is to be connected to the power input in the rear of either the USB card or the Ethernet card. Those two have the power connection connected internally so only one needs to be connected to the external power supply. The second connector from the external power supply is to be connected to the power input of the master clock board that is next to the Ethernet card. That Ethernet card was connected over an audio Quest Diamond Ethernet cable to the SOtM SNH 10G network switch that in turn was connected to the router over normal CAT6 patch cable. The SOtM USB card was connected to the Core Dave DAC over a network acoustics ENO USB cable. The Dave was connected to the air acoustics AX520 amplifier over Grim Audio SQM XLR cables. The Amp drives the PEMC FAC12 signature loudspeakers over Audio Quest Robinhood 0 loudspeaker cable. The equipment was placed on a creative 23-3 audio rack. After having it playing for quite some time I started my listening test. Crystal oscillators always need some time to get run in and to achieve a stable temperature and thus low phase noise. Right from the start it was clear it outputs a very clean and stable USB audio class 2 signal. Sibilance was clean, the lows were deep and texture full. Voices sounded clean, there was a good deep and wide stereo image with lots of focusing. This is the first PC that would be on its place in my set of 1A. It doesn't beat the Grim Audio but at half the price it's very good and by memory at least equal good sounding as the Airs G2 I owned previously. The idea of an only one device, storage and player software and hardware I like very much. And may you wonder, I didn't hear the PC's forced cooling at all. It is a big box that can be configured to your taste. If you like Amara or Ivana, Jayriver, Rune or any other bit perfect player it is easily installed and controlled using the TV as a display and wireless keyboard plus mouse as remote control. Or use a tablet or smartphone. If you install Jayriver Media Center you could even do video, although I have learned not to mix audio or video in one device. But unless you are an experienced PC builder, I would find someone to build it for you. The manuals by SOTM are extensive but unavoidably full of jargon while the many options offered don't make it easier. On the other hand, SOTM might guide you through the options and help you on your way. They are rather communicative. And that concludes this video. As usual, there will be a new video next Friday at 5 pm central european time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to my channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. Help me reach even more people by giving this video a thumb up or link to this video on the social media. It is much appreciated. Many thanks to those viewers that support this channel financially. It keeps me independent and lets me improve the channel further. If that makes you feel like supporting my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.


We discuss healthy habits for a healthy brain. Growing evidence suggests that people can reduce their risk of cognitive decline by adopting healthy habits. Here are 10 healthy lifestyle habits to boost brain health. 1. Challenge your mind by playing strategy games or building puzzles. 2. Staying socially engaged by finding ways to be part of your local community or share activities with friends and family. 3. If you suffer from depression, anxiety, or stress, seek treatment as prolonged mental health issues are linked to cognitive decline. 4. Get enough sleep to reduce problems with memory and thinking. 5. Eat a balanced diet that is higher in vegetables and fruit to help reduce the risk of cognitive decline. 6. Protect your brain from injury by wearing a seatbelt and using a helmet when playing contact sports or riding a bike. An injury can raise risk of cognitive decline and dementia. 7. Engage in regular cardiovascular exercise that elevates heart rate and increases blood flow to reduce the risk of cognitive decline. 8. Take a class in a subject area that interests you because formal education can help reduce risk of cognitive decline and dementia. 9. Quit smoking because smoking increases risk of cognitive decline. 10. Reduce risk factors like obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes for cardiovascular disease and stroke as these may also negatively impact cognitive health. When possible, combine these habits to achieve maximum health for the brain and body.


Atheist or the material reductionist only sees the horizontal aspect of things, never the vertical. This is called explanatory monism. For example, when they see a flood, all they see is water. They don't acknowledge the vertical aspect. They only see the asbab, right? The material means Imam al-Ghazali, he said, that's like seeing the pen writing, but not acknowledging the hand moving the pen. According to Rumi, they don't see that the objects of their love, their wealth, their families, etc., they don't see that these things are quote, gold plated by Allah's attributes. They notice the gold, but not the attributes. When Iblis looked at Adam, alaihi as-salam, all he saw was clay, right? And so he concluded, I am better than him, right? Isn't it obvious? I mean, look, look at me, I'm created from fire, this is created from clay. He's just looking at the material. The followers of shaitan, they don't see the test of Allah SWT in this world. They don't see the mercy of Allah SWT in this world. These stories of the past that are meant to be admonitions and warnings, they don't see the meanings in these things. All they see is randomly colliding atoms and fizzing stardust. And there is no moral component to their worldview.  It's just atoms striking atoms. Atoms and stardust do not have conscience. They have nothing to do with morality. You cannot be objectively immoral on atheism. Morality for atheists is simply a convention. There cannot be any moral absolutes for them, because there is no absolute for them. You see, the principles of the disbelievers are not grounded in reason and revelation, but rather in their own hawa, in their own caprice and desires. They will insist, for instance, that an amoeba, a single cell organism found on the planet Mars, constitutes life. That's life. That should be celebrated.  Yet, many of these people fully support the act of an unborn human child being ripped limb from limb from his mother's womb, because moral inconsistency does not faze them. They are guided by their feelings, by their hawa. For them, there is no higher authority than the self, the nafs. If the self is gratified by murder, then murder becomes justified morally. For atheists in moral, for atheists in material reductionists, the mind is simply reducible to the physical brain. Therefore, they'll argue that if a person suffers some sort of physical trauma to the brain, like a concussion, then that person's memory or mind is affected. Now, that's true. But to say that the mind can be simply reduced to some physical process to firing neurons is ridiculous. How do you go from a 10 pound lump of matter in your head to thought and memory and consciousness? As Oxford professor John Lennox said, and I'm paraphrasing, that is like saying that the meanings of the words in a book are the same as the ink and paper upon which they are written. See, the physical thing carries the meanings, but the meanings are not the same thing as the physical thing. In the Qur'an, Allah SWT says to the Prophet, This amazing statement that when you call them to guidance, they don't hear you. You see them looking at you but they didn't see. They're looking at you but they didn't see. So in the language of scripture, in the language of the Qur'an, you even find this in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, you find it in the New Testament, to hear something means to obey and to see means to understand the reality of something. And we use that even today. Like we say, oh, I see. To see with your mind's eye. Right? We mushrikim, those who do not see Allah SWT in all things. They don't know who the Prophet SAW really is. Exigits point out that this verse should be read in conjunction with the preceding ayah, They have hearts with which they don't perceive. They have eyes by which they don't see. They have ears with which they don't hear. They're like cattle. Or even worse than cattle. They are the heedless. You see when Abu Lahab, the uncle of the Prophet SAW, when he looked at the Prophet SAW, he said, this is my orphaned nephew. That's all he is. He's just judging the superficial. That's it. But when Al-Abbas or Sayyidina Hamza, when they looked at their nephew, when they looked at the Prophet SAW, they would see Sayyidu Waladi Adam. They would see the master and the children of Adam. They would see Rasulullah, the messenger of Allah. They recognized his essence. They recognized his reality. So that's the first pillar or support of our religion. It is to witness that there is no God but Allah SWT, and that the Prophet SAW is the messenger of God.


Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.conf 19, brought to you by Splunk. Okay, welcome back everyone live in Las Vegas. theCUBE's coverage of Splunks.conf. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here, our seventh year covering Splunk.conf. This is the 10 year anniversary for .conf. And of course, security data is at the heart of the core cyber security challenges for enterprises and for public sector. We've got two great guests from SAIC, Tyler Williams, Principal Cyber Security Analyst and Karthik Supermanian, who's the Principal Senior Cyber Security Engineer. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, great to be here. So we were just talking before the cameras came out about cyber and the global landscape. Obviously, the threats are everywhere, right? So general cyber is a couple things. There's national security in the U.S. You got overseas, it's digital. Packets can come from anywhere. This has been a huge challenge in managing this whole cyber. So you guys have a lot of experience on the public sector side and commercial. What's your take? Why are you guys here? What's going on here at .conf? So in addition to what you said, and we have done a lot of hardening on things coming into our network, one of the biggest things that we've started seeing now are insider threats. Like for example, our customer is the FRTIB, the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board. They manage a $500 billion sovereign wealth fund for the retirements of federal government workers. That's a lot of billions. And in addition to protecting from outside, you want to protect from inside people, either stealing people's data, stealing their money, or anything like that. So we're trying to provide that holistic cybersecurity of we're making sure that we keep people out, but we keep our data in. And that's what we're here to do. I love that use case, sovereign wealth, sovereign T. Concept of sovereign T and sovereign wealth. Obviously money's involved. Insider threats are just as important. It's been talked about a lot, but has anyone really cracked a code on this? What are you guys doing? Because if anyone can walk out, they have a lot of human issues around passwords. So how do you guys frame this? How do you guys look at the insider threat landscape and how do you guys attack that problem? Well, one of the great benefits of Splunk, obviously, is its capability to aggregate data across the organization, across the enterprise. And so we can really identify user behavior and find deviations in that. And when they start to trend towards something that's negative, we can note on it. And so our SOC can take action as necessary. Well, one of the things on the notes here, you guys I see are doing a talk here at the event, detect and mitigate insider threats using Splunk's machine learning toolkit and enterprise security. Obviously they're shipping 6.0, availability. What is that talk going to be about? How does Splunk play in all this? Can you unpack that? Because if people are talking more about the machine learning toolkit being, kind of leaning on that heavily, automation is certainly very important. But what does enterprise security 6.0 bring to the table? So can you take us through the evolution of where you guys are at with Splunk? If you want to handle the enterprise security standpoint? Yeah, generally enterprise security has traditionally had really good use cases for the external threats that we're talking about. But like you said, it's very difficult to crack the insider threat part. And so we, leveraging the machine learning toolkit, have started to build that into Splunk to make sure that you can protect your data. And Tyler and I specifically did this because we saw that there was immaturity in the cybersecurity market for insider threat. And so one of the things that we're actually doing in this talk, in addition to talking about what we've done, we're actually giving examples of actionable use cases that people can take home and do themselves. Like we're giving them sample code of how to find some outliers. They give an example of what the solution is. So the use case that we go over in the talk is a user logs in at a weird time of day outside of their baseline. And they exfiltrate a large amount of data in a low and slow fashion. But they're doing this obviously outside of the scope of their normal behavior. So we give some good searches that you can take home and look at how could I make a baseline? How could I establish that there's deviations from that baseline from a statistical standpoint and identify this in the future and find the needle in the haystack using the machine learning toolkit? And then, if I have a sock that I wanna send notables to or some sort of, some notification to, how do we make that happen? How do we make the transition from machine learning toolkit over to enterprise security or however your sock operates? And how do you do that? Do you guys write your own code for that? Or do you guys use Splunk? So Splunk has a lot of internal tools and there's a couple of things that need to be pointed out of how to make this happen because we're aggregating large amounts of data. We go through a lot of those finer points in the talk. But sending those through to make sure that they're high confidence is the challenge. So you guys are codifying the cross-connect from the machine learning to the other systems. All right, so I gotta ask, this is basically pattern recognition. You want to look at baselining. How do people, can people hide in that baseline data? So like, if I'm saying I'm an evil genius, I say, hey, I know these guys looking for anomalies in my baseline. So I'm going to go low and slow in my baseline. Can you look for that too? Yeah, there are, there absolutely are ways. Fortunately, there's a lot of different people who are doing research in that space on the defensive side. And so there's a ton of use cases to look at. And if you aggregate over a long enough period of time, it becomes incredibly hard to hide. And so the baselines that we recommend building, generally look at your 90 day or 120 day out, I guess, viewpoint. So you really want to be able to measure that. And most insider threat incidents that happen occur within that 30 to 90 day window. And so the research seems to indicate that those timelines will actually work. Now if you were in there and you read all the code and you did all the work to see how all the things come through and you really understood the machine learning behind it, I'm sure there's absolutely a way to get in. If you're that sophisticated, most of the times they're just trying to steal stuff and get out or compromise a system. So is there other patterns that you guys have seen in terms of the areas that are kind of low hanging fruit priorities that people aren't paying attention to? And what's the levels of importance to, I guess, get a hold of or have some sort of mechanism for managing insider threats. Or it's like passwords, obviously one. But I mean like, what's the levels of? There's been a lot of recent papers that have come out in lateral movement and privilege escalation. I think it's an area where a lot of people haven't spent enough time doing research. We've looked into models around PowerShell so that we can identify when a user is maliciously executing PowerShell scripts. I think there's stuff that's getting attention now that when it really needs to, but it is a little bit too late. The community is a bit behind the curve on it. And C-Sharp's becoming more of a pattern. So you're seeing a lot more C-Sharp. PowerShell's kind of hunted down, kind of crippled or like identified. You can't operate that way. But is that an insider going to do that? Do insiders come in with the knowledge of doing C-Sharp or is it going to come from the outside? So I mean, what's the sophistic, I guess my question is, what's the sophistication levels of an insider threat? Depends on the level. So the CERT Insider Threat Institute has aggregated about 15,000 different events. And it could be something as simple as a user who goes in with the intent to do something bad. It could be a person who's converted from the inside at any level of the enterprise for some reason. Or it could be someone who gets really upset after a bad review that might be the one person who has access. And he's being socially engineered as well. There's all kinds of different vectors coming in there. Yeah. And so in addition to somebody malicious like that, there's the accidental, you're phishing campaigns. Somebody important clicks on an email that they think is from somebody else important or something like that. And we're looking for that as well. And that's definitely. Spear phishing has been very successful. Yeah. That's a hard one to crack. It is. If they have that malware in there, looking at say HR data, oh, this guy just got a bad review. Good time to send him a resume or a job opening for, and that's got hidden code built in. We've seen that move many times. Yeah, and natural language processing and more importantly, natural language understanding can be used to get a lot of those cases out if you're ingesting the text of the email data. Well, you guys are at a very professional high-end firm, SAIC. I mean, the historic history goes way back in a lot of government contracts. They do a lot of heavy lifting from, anyway, from development to running full, big-time OSS networks. So there's a lot of history there. What is the state of the art? What do you guys look at as state of the art right now in security, given the fact that you have some visibility into some of the bigger contracts, relative to endpoint protection or general cyber? What's the current state of the art? What should people be thinking about? Or what are you guys excited about? What are some of the areas that state of the art relative to cyber, cyber security, around data usage? So, I mean, one of the things, and I saw that there were some talks about it, but natural language processing and sentiment analysis has come a long way. It is much easier to understand, or to have machines understand what people are trying to say or what they're doing, especially, for example, if somebody's web searching history, and you might think of somebody might do a search for how do I hide downloading a file or something like that. And that's something that, well, we know immediately as people, but we have, our customer, for example, has a billion, 1.2 billion events a day. So, if a billion seconds, that's 30 years. So, it's a big number. We hear those numbers thrown around a lot, but it's a big number to put it in perspective. So, and we're getting that a day. And so, how do we pick out that? It's hard to step on that problem. You can't stand, you can't put step on that. These are machines. The most cutting edge papers that have come out recently have been trying to understand the logs, having the machine learning, understanding the actual logs that are coming in to identify those anomalies. But that's a massive computation problem. It's a huge undertaking to kind of set that up. I really have seen a lot of stuff actually at cons here, some of the innovations that they're doing to optimize that, because finding the needle in the haystack is obviously difficult. That's the whole challenge. But there's a lot of work that's being done in Splunk to make that happen a lot faster. And there's some work that's being done at the edge. It's not a lot, but the cutting edge is actually looking at every single log that comes in and understanding it and having a robot say, boom, check that one out. Yeah, and also the sentiment gets better with the data because we all cross those billions of events. You can get a smiley face or a happy face, depending upon what's happening. It could be, oh, this is bad. But this comes back down to the data points. You mentioned logs is now beyond logs. They got tracing other signals coming in across the networks. So it's a massive problem. You need automation. You do. You got to feed the beast, right? The machines. And you got to do it within whatever computation capabilities you have. I always say it's a moving train. The target's moving all the time. You guys are staying on top of it. What do you guys think of the event? What's the most important thing happening here at Splunk.com this year? I'd love to have both of you guys take away in on that. There's a ton of innovation in the machine learning space. All of the pipelines, really, that I've been working on in the last year, are being augmented and improved by the staff that's developing content in the machine learning and deep learning space at Splunk. So to me, that's by far the most important thing. Karthik, your take on this? Yeah. Between the automation, I know in the last year or so, Splunk has just bought a lot of different companies that do a lot of things that now we can, instead of having to build it ourselves or having to go to three or four different people on top to build a complete solution for the federal government or for whoever your customer is, you can, you know, Splunk is becoming more of a one-stop shop. And I think just upgrading all of these things to have all the capabilities working together so that, for example, phantom, phantom giving you that orchestration and automation after, for example, if we have an ES notable event saying, hey, possible insider threat, maybe they automate the first thing of checking, you know, immediately pulling those logs and emailing them or putting them in front of a SOC analyst immediately so that in addition to, hey, you need to check this person out, it's, you need to check this person out. Here is the first five pages of what you need to look at. I'll talk about the impact of that because without that SOAR feature, okay, the automation orchestration piece of it, a security orchestration, automation piece of it, without it, where are you? No speed, what's the impact? What's the alternative? Yes, so when we're right now, when we're giving information to our ES or analysts through ES, they look at it and then they have to click five, six, seven times to get up the tabs that they need to make it done and if we can have those tabs free-populated or just have them either one click or just come up on their screen for once they open it up, I mean, time is important, especially when we're talking about an insider threat who might be taking a lot of money. The alternative is not having money fast enough. Yeah, and the alternative is a 5x increase in time span by the SOC analyst. Yeah, and no one wants that. No, they want to be augmented with the data, ready to go, ready to alert on it. All right, so final, you guys are awesome insights, walking data sets right here. Love the insight, love the insight. So final question, for the folks watching that are Splunk customers or were not as on the cutting edge as you guys pioneering this field, what advice would you give them? Like if you had to shake your friend, hey, get off your butt, do this, do that. What do people need to pay attention to? That's super urgent that you would implore on them. What would your advice be? Why don't you start that one? All right, so. Yeah, no, it's fine. One of the things that I would actually say is, we can code really cool things, we can do really cool things, but one of the most important things that he and I do as part of our process is, before we go to the machine and code the really cool things, we sometimes just step back and talk for a half an hour, talk for an hour of, hey, what are you thinking about? Hey, what is a thing that, or what are we reading and what are we learning and formulating a plan because instead of just jumping into it, if you formulate a plan, then you can come up with better things and augment it and implement it versus a smash and grab on the other side of just, all right, here's a thing, let's dump it in there. So you're saying is before you jump in the data pool and start swimming around, take a step back, collaborate with your peers or get some kind of game plan. We spent a lot of hours whiteboarding, but I would add to that, to augment that, we spent a lot of time reading the scientific research that's being done by a lot of the teams that are out solving these types of problems and sometimes they come back and say, hey, we tried the solution and it didn't work, but you can learn from those failures just like you can learn from the successes. So I recommend getting out and reading, there's a ton of literature in that space around cyber. So always be moving, always be learning, always be collaborating. It's a moving train. Guys, thanks for the insights, epic session here. Thanks for coming on and sharing your knowledge on theCUBE. theCUBE, we're running one big data source here for you, all the knowledge here at .conf, our seventh year, their 10th year is theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, we'll be back after this short break.