I guess I'm on. Well, hello, everybody. Thanks for staying till Thursday and coming here. My name is Jim Merritt. And I'm speaking to you this afternoon as a systems engineer at Burton Snowboards. And like many small shops, I wear many hats. So I'm also a unique systems administrator. I'm the sand administrator. I am the backup administrator. And I'm also the storage administrator. I have a colleague who also is the network engineer. He says I'm only certified for layer one, so he doesn't let me do a lot with a network. With that, I want to say a little bit about my background. I came from genomics research in financial. I spent about six years in the research genomics field. So I wanted to say that because it gives a framework for how we ended up where we did with OpenStack and specifically OpenStack Swift. So I want to start off with this question. We've all heard about big data. If you're playing buzzword bingo, that would probably be one. But really, how big is big data? I came from genomics. Genomics, we were talking about petabyte scale. We were talking about exabyte scale at one point. That was big data. That's traditionally what you see and what you read about. I say that big data is any amount of data that becomes a problem for your business. That could be moving gigabytes of files, terabytes of files. But if it's problematic, it's big data. So this is where we started from. Burton Snowboards has about 250 or so, maybe a little more, unstructured and structured data. Of that data, the structured part databases really make up a small portion of that. The large portion of our unstructured data is really the video, photo content. We do video presentations. Burton presents. We do snowboard videos. We do snowboard imaging. It's part of our marketing. All of that data has tremendous marketing value. And we also have to retain that for a lot of years, tens of years, because we like to go back to that old footage from the US snowboard event. Events around the world. And we'll leverage that back in as new content. So we have to retain all of this video. And we had to protect all of this data and allow for that data growth. Because we had to save it all, we had to protect it, and we had to grow to keep that content. And because of that, our traditional methods of data protection for that were coming very expensive, both administratively and monetarily. Costs a lot of money to keep this stuff around, even for a small company. Probably more especially for a smaller company. And then if we sat and said, OK, how do we recover this data? Because that's the end game, right? We back it up, that's great. But at the end of the day, you've got to recover it. That's the end goal. When we ask that question, it started becoming more and more difficult to come up with a straightforward, simple answer to recover our data. So here's the infrastructure we started with. We have the traditional santa rays. We use NetApp. Pick your storage poison. There's a bunch of them out there. We had two disk arrays. We did the traditional disk to disk to tape. We had a tape library, 250 slots. LTO5, we had five of them. We still have that, by the way. We had an offsite storage facility for tape. So disk to disk to tape. Tape goes out to offsite storage. And then we actually had a company that we contracted to save us space and potentially hardware if we defined it correctly. So in the event of a disaster, we would go there and spin up all that equipment, hopefully. We have a mix of server hardware. We have Dell, Cisco, UCS. We have some HP boxes. I think we have a Sunbox kit around, too, somewhere. And then we use Commvault for data protection software. Again, insert your backup software here, because this whole thing is really agnostic to that. And then operating systems, we have Windows, Linux, Solaris. We're a pretty typical shop. We even have several distributions of Linux. We use SUSE. We use CentOS. We have some Debian in-house. We are also an SAP shop. So we have a very large SAP infrastructure as well. And we're heavily virtualized in ESXi. So the old way. So we used to use our storage systems, both as primary storage, provide LUNs to our databases, file shares for our end users. And we also used it as a backup target. So we had another array sitting there that was our other disk of the disk to disk to tape. And then inside the primary array, Storage Array 1 in this, we also had all the snapshot functions. So we're snapshotting in an array. We're the other array is used for both Oracle Databases, RMAN, we would write RMANs, NFS, out MSSQL, right out the SIFs. Or we would use agents, go through Commvault. And Commvault would write it to the second disk array first and then go out to tape. We relied on shipping of these LTO tapes out to the tape repository. And we had all these protocols, NFS, SIFs, that were all in play, including the FedEx protocol. Guy comes up, ships your tape off to off-site storage, worked well for a lot of years. Again, when we started to think about disaster recovery and looking at what we had is we grew extremely difficult to come up with a procedure with all of these lines. Where does everything really go? And this thing goes here, and that thing goes here, and you've got to click this button over here, and you've got to do it in the right order, or it doesn't work, you've got to start again. So we had some technical issues and not so technical issues. I think you heard at the keynotes earlier in the week, the soft part of this is really a large portion of the storage problem. We had the traditional data protection model. We had lots of tapes in flight.  We had lots of tapes to manage. We had the library maintenance. I don't know if anybody's maintained tape libraries, especially some of the newer ones. They take a little care in feeding. We had little deduplication in use. And we use it in place, but we have little in flight. Get to that in a little bit here. Besides video images, movies, they don't dedupe well anyway. Again, we'll get to that in here in a minute. And then we had the integration timing between all the pieces. And I kind of alluded to that before. Had all those lines going, they had to be in a certain order. We would do an R-man to a disk, to an NFS volume. We would have Commvault would come in behind it. You had to make sure that Commvault didn't come in. Before then, if a DBA, say, ran a job later or earlier, or maybe there was some glitch, an R-man took longer, now your Commvault hits it, it's not done. You don't have your data backed up. So there was issues around there. And then really, the soft skills, we had little data management and curation. This is a big one, and I'll come back to this, too, is we just had data everywhere. And I don't know if you ran into this, but users are really crafty.  They'll find another place that they have access to, and they'll start putting data there. They do this all the time. And that also becomes kind of a management nightmare. So as you fill up and you don't grow fast enough, you run into that issue as well. And then you've got the administrative effort. It's getting complicated to back up these systems or protect them, and it was even more complicated to recover them. So we decided to make a plan for change in all this. So we leveraged past experience in traditional big data genomics field. I've been looking at object stores for six years. We had, I've had to deal with this petabyte scale data management issue before. And I used the concept of raw and intermediate data that helped our governance. Raw data being that initial data that cannot be recreated any other way. Intermediate data being that data that can be recreated at any time. It comes from the raw data. So at the end of the day when you're doing data protection and disaster recovery, I can forgo the intermediate data. I can recreate that from the raw. It may take a day. It may take an hour. It may take a day. It may take a month. But I can recreate it. In a disaster, I can recreate it. The raw data is the important data. So it was a good concept that I brought with me from genomics and applied it in this circumstance. And the organization was very open to this. And then when you look at that, it turns out the problems with our data volume are the same exact problems we had in the big data. Same exact problems. Data governance, where's my data? How do I get it moved? How do I protect it? Same thing, just a smaller scale. So we came up with a solution. We're going to deploy OpenStack Swift as a backup target. So now all our backups are going to go into our object store. We're going to utilize a remote site. And we're going to get that site, get that data off site. And it's built into the OpenStack Swift. So it just happens. We're going to utilize commodity hardware. And networking, we're appropriate. And you'll see we kind of went outside the normal vendors for this. We're going to archive old unstructured data. So anything old, anything intermediate or raw data that we need to keep, we're going to archive that. And then, as I put here, because we used OpenStack Swift, we inadvertently had a disaster recovery plan. It goes off site. It was a little more complicated than that. But basically, it's built in. It's there. And then we drastically reduced our tape management. And well, we basically reduced our tape. We don't really use it anymore. And that was part of our plan to get rid of that. And then we utilized Swift Stack to actually do our deployment and ongoing maintenance and management. Made it much easier for us to manage that and made it even more transparent to our organization, especially our admin staff. Let's see. So what we implemented is we have an OpenStack Swift implementation. We have two regions, three zones, three object nodes per zone, and two proxy count containers. I have a picture of it here in a minute. Each zone is its own rack, separate power, AB phase, all those that are infrastructure guys. We have one region that's located in our main office and our data center, and one region at a COLO facility. I'll touch on this a bit. Because we had the luxury of certain availability to COLOs. We're not going very far away. We're going across town. We're from the state of Vermont. Across town means you're going through a couple farms, some cow fields, and things like that. So it is pretty far away. But it's not traditionally states. And you would really see region when they do the map in countries. We made our standard Commvault Cloud Library in Commvault. We made one for Ddupe, one for non-Ddupe. Very easy. Have a picture of that. And then, again, we used Swift Stack for the cluster deployment and management. And we also used the Swift Stack Gateway to do SIFs and NFS Gateway for applications and some end users. And we'll get to that here in a minute as well. So the server hardware we got was all silicon mechanics. We went to them. We went to several different vendors and basically did an RFP and said, hey, this is what we want. What do you got out there? And we literally chose the less expensive. We said, we don't need big HP boxes with all those built-in stuff. We don't need RAID controllers. We don't need anything.  That's it. And that's literally what we bought. So we have the three silicon mechanics. I said three. There's actually a lot more than that. I did three and six. I'll get to this, too. So we started off with a smaller cluster and then expanded. And I'm going to have what we did with that. So we bought silicon mechanics boxes. We've got CentOS 7 on them now. This is what we currently have. And we have two proxy account container nodes that I just call pack nodes. Netgear switches, less expensive, probably the least expensive ones I could find. They're 10 gig capable. We utilize HA proxy. And HA proxy was really put there for SSL offloading, not so much for load balancing. Although I do use it to switch between the pack nodes when I'm doing maintenance, or if something were to happen. But it was really there for SSL offloading. And then I have the Swiftstack gateway. Both of those are virtualized in our ESX. So there's no hardware behind those right now. So here's a photo of what our infrastructure looks like now. When we first deployed, let's see, everything on the left-hand side was what we started with. And we started on that about a year ago. So we brought that in-house. We actually had both pack nodes are over there. We had them all together. We have the HA proxy. We have the Swiftstack gateway that has Sips and NFS access. We have a 10 gig cluster replication network that was running across the Netgear switches, non-rotable network. Nobody can get in and out of it. We have a one gig outward facing network. It's all we needed at the time. And at the time, our infrastructure was only one gig capable across the entire infrastructure. Nothing at the core. I think I had four 10 gig ports on an old 6509 switch. And we were moving them around so that we could cook our Netgear switches into them to get 10 gear, at least to the Netgear, two Netgear switches.  While we were doing all this, we ripped out our entire core and went to Cisco UCS and Cisco Networking. We'll get to that here in a minute. So now we have 10 gig in the back, full 10 gig. We do have 10 gig available. I just haven't flipped it over yet. So in this infrastructure, Commvault and its media servers all talk Swift. We started working with Commvault about a year ago. It took a while. They had some little few niggly issues. But it's been working great. So they come in through standard HTTP, through the HAProxy, and into the cluster. Our archive storage plan right now is going through SIFS and or NFS. And we haven't really completed that yet. We're still working on that. It is not a technical issue. It is purely a governance and data management issue, which I'll touch on at the end here a little bit. User access, the users like SIFS because they're used to it. Right on the thing, they can do amount, windows, people like it. So they all use SIFS for the most part to get to the archive on what's there. And then I don't have the Swift Stack controller that helps manage and do the deployment because it's hosted. Better let somebody else have that part. So all of this took a bit of a paradigm shift for us. And this gets into kind of the governance piece. Before data was Wild West, we had data going everywhere. What we found out in the archiving was, and I don't know if you've seen the presentation before about container size, and we learned this. When you build a container, you don't want to build a container, one container, and just start putting stuff into it. And that's kind of what we did. And we had lots of objects, lots and lots and lots of objects. So what we've learned is, we had to step back and look at our data and come up with a data structure that was more appropriate. And we could build these containers yet let our end users have easy access into that. So we built what we call dated containers. And we went to the end users, and they had already started doing this pretty much themselves before. But we got them to think about dated containers on a file system level. So they started going, oh, I'm working in 2007. All my 2007 work goes in this 2007 container. 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12, up to 17, 16, or 18, whatever. So they're starting to get used to dumping that in the container. Now, we just take those containers, and they say, we're done with year X, move it to archive. We still have to manually move it to archive, but it makes it really easy for us, because we just take that whole file system in its entirety, move it. They start writing into the new one. If they need anything to come back, anything that comes out of archive is a recent raw data, and they will modify it and put it back into the newer container. We only needed to put a primary copy of our backups through COMBOL. So traditionally, COMBOL, I don't know if Syving Semantic is the same. You write data, then you take the data, and you make a copy of it. You ship the copy off-site. Well, my underlying object store is not taking care of that. So I don't have to think about that anymore. So I just go in once. So I don't have to worry about any of the tapes, where it's at, what data made it off. So it made it really easy. So noogs, copies, or whatever your backup software calls it. The databases, we said, well, why can't we leverage the gateway and just tell, for instance, Oracle R-Man right to this NFS share? And now, I don't have to back that up at all. It just goes into Swift. And the beauty is, when it comes time to do disaster recovery, it's there. It's easy to get at. I can literally go in through the website, bring my data over to the if I have to. I don't need much infrastructure to start my recovery process. So we leverage that. We do the same thing with MS SQL, which sips. That happens all the time. My vCenter backups. Don't even bother with native vCenter backup. I just dump the database into Swift. And then, yeah, the Commvault DR and DDoop database, which that's going to be different depending on your backup software. But we put that into Swift, too. So we have a recovery mode off-site ready to go. So I wanted to show what the configuration for Commvault was. And in the circle, that's the only thing I did. You go into Commvault, and you tell it I want a cloud library. And as of the recent version, it actually says, I think it says OpenStack Swift now. It used to say Rackspace, if I remember right. So but now it actually says OpenStack Swift. You click that. You put in your credentials. Just so you know, we use SW off. We do not use Keystone because we don't have the entire OpenStack. We don't really need Keystone. So we just use SW off. You put the v1 credentials in. It goes in. You're done. I create my containers ahead of time. I don't let Commvault do it. And that's really based, if you went to the performance one this morning, if you let Commvault do it, it picks the default storage policy if we ever wanted to do EC2 or anything like that, RacialCoding, I'm sorry. It would default back. So I create the containers ahead of time. So if there's 20 of them, I create 20 of them. It's a little bit of time ahead of time, but I know exactly what's going into the container, what storage policy I'm using. Your mileage may vary depending on the backup software you're using. But the three boxes underneath the tape library are it. It looks just like that tape library. Just like the SDK box. It's used just like it. The storage policy pieces, everything else is combo. You don't have to do any modifications. So this. I wanted to bring this up. So if you remember back, we have two regions. I apologize. I didn't do a good job describing that picture. So we had two regions. We had object nodes on the other side. We had a WAN link. That WAN link is one gig. I'm now going to talk to you the little bit I said before about we had the luxury of certain availability. So in Burlington, Vermont, they actually rolled dark fiber around the city. So when we talked to our Colo people, they said, hey, you've got strands behind your building. Great. So we actually have dark fiber that we run between our two locations. And that allows us to actually run layer two across our WAN link. So we don't have to go out our internet good layer three and all the routing. We started out with a 200 meg connection. Don't start out with a 200 meg connection. Um, we did it because it was easily changed.  And we wanted to see how it worked. And you can see, I think this is from this morning, 200 and or 124 megabytes a second. If you do the math, it's 996 megabits a second. So we flood that. Um, but you know what? It's OK. It just works.  But the storage just works, writes, gets an error, writes again, replication. It knows it needs to replicate. It comes back through. Auditor comes through. Hey, I'm going to replicate. Replicate process. It just does it. It's awesome. All the little bumps are our oracle and SQL backups in the night. So you can kind of see every week we have a big job that runs Thursday morning at 1am. And it may run for a couple of days. Some of our volumes that we're backing up are 20 terabytes, 22, 29, and we run those. We don't have Ddupe. If you have Ddupe available, this is where Ddupe really helps.  So it will lower your network. That's what we're working on next. So you're after initial deployment. So we have some initial issues with Commvault, not big ones. As of Simpana 10, SP11, I think 13's out now. We're on 13. No issues with it whatsoever. It just works. Really, it's the configuration and doing policies. And that's not a storage really issue. Again, governance part. We currently are backing up on a cycle about 160 terabytes of data weekly. We currently are archiving 25 terabytes. That was the first chunk of archiving we put in about eight months ago. And then said, hey, we have to rethink this and break things up into smaller pieces. So we have to get back onto that project again. And then we now have a much easier and much reliable recovery process. Right now, the plan, we can just spin up our Commvault in a remote site and attach it to Swift and read out. We only have the one zone there. So I'm going to be able to read out of it. But that's all I need for recovery, for whatever our secondary storage is to bring them over. Or to get the data back to primary storage once we get that in place. So now that question of, well, gee, how do we recover things became much shorter? So instead of these three-page list of how to recover things, we're down to one or two. So next steps, racer coding. A lot of people talking about it. Two use cases for me for racer coding. I don't know how many people do it. We still back up desktop laptops. I don't like it, but we do it. That data does not need to be spread across multiple regions. If we have a disaster, sorry, I'm not really concerned about your desktop laptop data, but I also don't want to spend three to one protecting it local. No matter how small it is, I'd rather take the 1.7. And here's a more important one that we just ran into last week. So Microsoft Exchange, we do mailbox backups. We somehow have people that delete whole portions of their mailbox. I have no idea how they do it. Well, we're going to take Commvault, make another container that's a racer coding, and do the mailbox backups into an eraser coded. I'm not taking a three to one hit. I do one to five. I already am doing my database backups. So in a DR, I do my database, but I don't need to do mailbox backups over there. In a disaster, I bring up my Exchange server, back it up again, doing the mailbox wherever my object store is again. But I can keep it in the one region, local, and I can get that very fast recovery of somebody's mailbox, because it's usually always someone important that's just getting ready to get on a plane, and then they've deleted half their mailbox. Now we can click it, put it out, ready to go. Archive, we need to archive more data. The importance of archiving is the more we archive, the less we have to back up. So our archive strategy is we get all the old unstructured data, we put it one time into an object store, and we never touch it again. So I don't have to buy any more Commvault licenses. Sorry, Commvault. I don't have to expand it. I can use the licenses I have on more important things. Metadata search, you've heard about that. I'm huge into the metadata search. Sorry, Joe, I saw your thing this morning. Yeah, love metadata search, big on that. And that's really leveraging our Elasticsearch. We're also Elasticsearch user, Elkstack. So I want to leverage that to put metadata in and search our archive data based on metadata tags. So now that fixes a little bit of my governance issue. Now I can find these files that are in my object store. And then the other integration point to Elkstack is for auditing. Who's writing files? Where are they writing them to? Who deleted files? When did they delete them? That kind of thing. So that's the end of my presentation. And thanks. I think we have time for questions. Five minutes for questions, except for you. I think you've got to hit the button. Testing. Hi, Jim. This is Mario from SwissTech. Which one of those people in this photo are you? Mario, that's a good question. See that roof of that building down there? I'm down there having a beer. No questions? Thank you very much for showing up.


Everybody forced here we've been 2022 elements football hobby six box half case number 16 random team style I dropped a link and chat for the results for you. You can always find them a late in sports cards calm Good look everybody. Let's see what we got Guys, I'm not gonna do a recap at the end of this break. It'll be a pretty quick one But I'm trying to make up some more time here as we're still behind Great start earth short print Mac Jones Grads Patriots Get that mag for you Pat's nice Mac Hey, I'm a recent for the Falcons Marcus Mario to 81 of 95 Buccaneers Jersey card Chris Godwin Number 45 of 70 Texans rookie neon signs Damian Pierce.  Let's ride Late in sports cards country, let's ride Steelers Najee Harris numbered 56 of 199 Chiefs Emory see him sky more 46 of 95 Panthers Jersey card Christian McCaffrey 27 to 50 Cowboys neon auto Tony Hill 15 of 50 and Steel signatures for the Bears Vila stones, Jr Bears 56 of 199 How to go Rory Do you like it? I think it's because you're actually holding one smaller piece. I don't know Taekwondo and Ricky Patriots 29 of 99 Hydrogen Davis Mills one-of-one Texans Nice Mills Mills mafia Hydrogen one-of-one and get them out for you bills Ravens Lamar Jackson Jersey card Eight of 27 Jersey number eight of 27 Packers nice hit here Christian Watson Ricky neon signs three of 75 Never pulled a hydrogen out of this and steel signatures Broncos Steve Atwater 15 of 27 We got Cowboys Michael Parsons 115 of 199 Emory see on Patriots Damien Harris 40 of 95 Packers rookie patch card Christian Watson. That's number 20 of 27 Yeah, I mean sky more he just had this crazy hype all about like just because your second round pick for the Chiefs so Then he ended up not making a huge factor so so far And then that's what happens Wanda Robinson to 125 rookie auto Giants neon signs and steel signatures Niners Raheem Moster 58 of 79. Oh, I think sky more can be good. It's just some guys aren't involved right away Early NFL season when values drastically change the most for every single player Not every single player would especially rookies Browns to Sean Watson 40 of 199 Steelers tungsten rookie Calvin Austin the third 36 of 74 Jersey card rookie for the Giants Juan del Robinson 33 of 75 Miners Eli Mitchell Otto 16 of 50 and Patriots rookie steel signatures Tyquan Thornton 46 of 199 looks like Bailey zappy cards going crazy when Matt got hurt like a week and a half Insane and if anybody had Bailey zappy cards sold them. Well, you probably did the right thing Niners Trey Lance 30 of 199 Neon rookie Texans John met you the third nine of 10 Almona same brown patch for the Lions number 18 to 27 Seahawks rookie auto bullye mafe. It's a 49 Her to 50. Sorry to the 50 and Seahawks steel signature Sean Alexander Nice hit Seahawks in the back 27 27 that'll do it for the break everybody. Thank you again We've got gold standard coming up next


I know. If you guys want to scoot forward, I feel like we're not using mics and we're all seated, so it may be better to try to get it close just because I feel like I talk really loud but I'm not sure about everyone. Great. Yeah, there's a lot of empty seats. Like I put this table, I put this table, there's some up here. So yeah, just getting closer. Let's get cozy. You can put your notebook in your lap. Yeah, that's fine. So I'm Amy Marsh and I am the literary director at Samuel French. So a lot of you probably spoke into me via email or on the phone at some point. I have a great group of artists up here and people that have been associated with us and what we do at Samuel French. So I'd like really quickly for them to take a kind of a brief introduction, maybe talk about their plays or how they work with us. One sentence. Go. I'm Matt Obermann and I was one of the winners of the, was it 2008? 2009? 2009. 2009, Samuel French of Broadway Festival. And we play the student, which is the one that's being done here. And then from that, that's actually part of a collection of plays that wound up getting published by Samuel French and it's done all around the country. Great. My name is Robert Kaseley. I run the playwriting program at the University of Idaho. And Sam French published my play Front last year and will be publishing my play Happy later this year. Yeah. It's very close. I'm Steve Yaki. I had a, I guess I was one of the winners of the Sam French short play festival in 2008. Yeah. And actually in 2000. And then since then I've had a really great relationship with them, but I think I have six publications right now with you guys. Yes. It's quite a few. I'm Debrae Archon. I participated in the Sam French press last October. Make up these names. Great. And so in addition to these guys, I just want to point out that there's actually more of our playwrights in this room. We're also people doing OOB or done OOB or going to be published. So can I just get a quick show of hands? So many people have a book with Samuel French or are doing the Sam French festival or have done. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Be proud. Be proud. That's awesome. For city theater, I'm raising my hand. Yes. And then in addition to that, I will also point out that we have this year's festival, which I'll talk about kind of at the end of a little presentation. We've actually used four plays. I think that have come out of, we came to city theater or city rights last year, talked to a lot of playwrights, read a lot of plays, and four plays from this upcoming festival originated with city rights. That's how we got to know the playwrights. There's Mark Swann, right there. Yeah. I hope you raised your hand. A lot of progress. I want to take this next. We're a little late, so we have 30 minutes maybe. You're fine. Great. So just to talk a little bit about what we do, and hopefully I can kind of answer some questions about publishing and the role of a publisher in terms of your life as a playwright. But we're a very old company. Most of you guys have heard us or got our plays or have Samuel French editions on your shelf. We started, I think the American Office started in 1850. The UK Office started in the 1830s. We have about 9,000 active titles. Titles that are, you can license them now. They are still under copyright. And I think the number of authors is even greater. It's something like 15,000 playwrights over the course of our history. So when people tell me that playwriting is a dead art, I'm like, really, I had no idea. Because our catalogue is just so, it's great. It's really, really great. And it's very vibrant and we get tons of submissions over here. So I work, I think the best way to talk about what we do is to kind of frame it through the life of the book and the life of an author's journey with us kind of through the door and then through publication and actually through marketing. We are publishing and licensing house. So we print actually as a result of licenses we do for plays. Our books are actually guides. The teleproduction company is how to do plays. So if you're looking to get things published, there's actually a range of types of publications for playwrights. You have trade publishers like TCG and Smith and Krause and Mary Weather who do kind of academic guides of your plays or reading copies. They'll do like the art town that you study in classrooms. Whereas our version of art town actually has like the sound effects list and how those go into the script. Those lovely set designs that I'm actually kind of trying to phase out. And I'm going to remember the early editions where it's just stick pen and handwriting and it's like a circle and it's just a chair. Those were in terms of Samuel French's history. Those were actually the blueprint for smaller amateur groups to know how to produce a play and to do it, to honor the playwright's intentions in doing that production. So we were really the framing device on plays that came in. We made sure the playwright's ideas were preserved that their intentions were honored. And of course that varies from playwright to playwright even today. Some people are very strict with how you do their plays. There are some authors that every time the show gets licensed we have to call them and clear it with them. I won't say who it is but there's one that actually requires to look at headshots. Everybody knows who it is, right? A lot of people know who it is. And then there are others that are like maybe some of you could speak to this but it's actually who want different interpretations of their plays and who are open to different interpretations and people that don't even use stage direction because they believe it's the director's prerogative and that all happens in production. So the way you submit to French and I'll kind of talk about our general things and then maybe some of you could tell your submission stories or how you came to French. But we have right now... We do not currently accept unsolicited submissions. So like a lot of clean publishers and regional theaters and such we take query letters, 10 page samples and then in that query letter there's several things that we ask for. So production history, your bio, why you think it should be published, why it's the right time for you. This isn't unusual at all and I actually have a huge believer in transparency. I think it's really good for any lit office to try to be upfront about the needs of the company and why you're submitting. And so on our website right now we actually have things that we're not looking at and all of that is basically for curatorial reasons. We're not taking holiday plays at the moment and that's just because we published six last year. Visibly we have to get those out to companies and kind of let them saturate the market before we take any new holiday plays. I'm not sure if I'll ever lift the van on Christmas Carol. I think we have 17 versions of Christmas Carol in our catalog. So if you're thinking about doing adaptations with Christmas Carol, it's really for your benefit.  So I think before you're submitting it's always a good idea to be like what's in the vein of what I have written, who publishes that play, do I want to be with that play, do I want to be... You know if you wrote a fairy tale adaptation like a TYA play, who's doing TYA scripts really, really well? How many fairy tale plays do they have or are those plays getting licensed? Often on publisher's website you can look up that information. On our website currently we have a now playing calendar. You can see what's playing and how many productions it's getting. DPS's website, they have a page to stage. You can look up how many publications or what publications are getting produced where and how many productions there are. So it's kind of in your best interest to find the publisher that's going to be the right fit and really can... You know, that really has a unique place for you in their catalog. You're not just getting lumped into a bunch of Christmas carols and then your play gets lost and that's the end of it. So yeah, so if you'd submit, you'd email your script to me. We look it over if we think that it's a good fit for us or if we feel like there's... We want to have a further conversation. We request the full script. That comes in. If you have representation or a lawyer, often we'll take full manuscripts straight from them directly. Which I think is how you guys, most of you guys have representation, right? Yeah. So yeah, in Robert's case, Marta Prager is the one that's sent on front to me. I'm not actually set with this for quite a while, I think. I think maybe I have the record... I think seven years. I think seven years, I think so. But the two titles that I have with you, both very different kind of submission stories. The first play, Front, I wrote, you know, back in 1992 or three. I mean, a long time ago and my agent was just kind of getting it out there and getting productions that way. And then after a decade, decided to submit it and that it was just published last year. So from 1992... Patience is a virtue, not just spalling the playwright, but patience as well. Whereas Happy, I think I sent it, I wrote it and within a year, within that year, I sent it to you and you folks responded within a couple of weeks, if I recall. Yeah, I can say that, actually, it's interesting that you bring that up because I kind of, I like to tell players how do I get my play published and what is it, how do I get it published? It's actually a large question that plays us in our offices. Timing, you know, a lot of publications about timing and where the script is in its own life, you know, it doesn't need publication, like is there a place for it? I think with Front, it'll be totally candid. We had some talks with Marta. When it came in, we all loved it and we were very enthusiastic about it. But we had just published a number of scripts that we felt like would compete with it. And so we were like, can we hang on to this? We're going to, strategically, we want to keep the baby in the office, but we'll contact you, you know, maybe when it's about our time and we think there's really something we can do. And that's what happened. It just took a very long time. And a bit of the French has had some new administrations and every time that happens, there's a bit of an educational, you have to go back and look at the scripts and I was like, is it still worth it? You know, should we hang on to it further? With Happy, that's a case where that's a national new play network and it had six productions in a year. We knew there was a lot of people talking about the play. We wanted to make it available while people were talking about it. And so we thought it better to act immediately and get it into print so that when we sent it out to theaters to license, it was all fresh. You know, they knew about it. It was very like, okay. And with Front, you know, that's who we've been sending it to many theaters, but there is more of an educational arm with that and we have to really be selective about who we send it to if they haven't been targeting colleges and some adventurous high schools. Yeah. It's big. It's big. So I want to say, you know, with your own scripts, if there's something you feel, publishers do look for commercial heat. That is a term that I throw around a bit. But if there is a play that you have that you feel like people are talking about it and you're getting licensing requests for it, people are emailing you and saying, how do I do this? How do I cut it up? Yeah, that is a really good time to contact a publisher and be like, hey, I need help handling me. Sorry, I think it's a really good. I'm getting six requests a year and there's all these little theaters, I think, that could be interested. Yeah, that's a really good reasonable contact someone. Also, if you have a play for a very specific market and there's a market need for it, for example, I just have to do something. We've got so many requests from bullying plays the past two years, every high school in the country, and also vampire plays. Oh my gosh, what's my next play? The vampire requests have kind of dwindled these past couple of years, but for a while, all these teachers at conferences were like, yeah, do you have anything that's kind of like twilight? Because that's what my kids want to do.  We have other avenues that people come to us through too in addition to the queries and to agent submissions and their relationship with us. We also have a number of partnerships and sponsorships throughout the country. For example, we published The Winner of the Princess Grace and we published the Weisberger winner. And so I always encourage people, the more awards and competitions, the better. There are some that strategically come with the option to publish at the end. So if that's something you're interested in, you can target those. We also have OOB, which is how three of you, Matt, do you want to talk about your submission story? Sure. Well, I just, I don't know if OOB is still this way, but you need a theater to nominate you. I don't know if you can, you can more self-nominate. You can self-produce, yeah. Self-produce. But at the time that I applied, you had to have a theater. So there's a theater in town called the Algonquin Productions and they submitted my play and it got chosen and me performed it and then it wound up winning, which was great. But it was this play, the student is, I had this idea because I was having trouble getting my shows done and I was like, you know, everybody's competing for, there's like five shows in a season and everybody's competing for the four slots and there's the holiday slot and there's Christmas Carol and if you're a smaller theater, eight reindeer monologues, Tuna Christmas and Dana Sedera's play. So I wrote five short comic Christmas plays and this was one of them and so when it won and it got published, then I made a pitch to you guys to produce the whole evening of Christmas plays, which you did. And it's been pretty successful. It's been pretty successful and you wanted to show my little box. Yeah, I do. Well, I wanted to get to marketing. So that's not like he has a... There's something coming that's going to be really exciting. Steve, you also came to us kind of through OP. But do you want to talk a little bit about that or like what had you been doing before OP? Like how was it? I was in graduate school at NYU and we had the opportunity through a vital theater company in New York who used to produce a lot of short work and just got a really fun group of people together and did this really weird play about terrible, terrible, terrible things happening in a small town in the middle of nowhere. It's just three like overlapping monologues and I thought like no one's going to listen to this. And it won, which shocked us. And so then I think, coming out of grad school I had two plays that both had two productions and had done pretty well, Octopus and this other play Cartoon. And I think you guys requested Octopus and my agent sent Octopus and Cartoon and was like, hey, he's got this other play also. And then they were like, we want to publish Octopus. And my agent was like, well, you can only have Octopus if you also publish Cartoon. And they worked out this whole thing where Sam Brunch is like, fine, we'll do that, but what was it? No, no, no, it was that they tried the two plays together. There's something called the cross-collaterizing which we love. Publishers and licensors love it where to recoup in advance and we tie the two plays together. So if one play pays off its advance against performance royalty, the money it makes will go towards the other play and so both of them are paid off. And what's great about that story though is that Octopus has been done maybe eight times, which is cool and really great productions. And that one's been done in different places around the world. Cartoon's been done 30-something times by all different levels of theaters, like colleges and universities do it, regular community theaters do it, like professional theaters do it, and everyone just kind of goes to town with that play. It's usually like the first play of mine that gets done in a new city, like in a new market, and then people go and kind of seek out my other work. So it's just funny how that worked out. It is really funny. Yeah, and that shows you, I guess the moral there is that sometimes what publishers say is not the deal and not a lot of people try to know our markets really well, but Octopus, alright, Cartoon probably would have gone on and had regardless of what we decided. This is a bizarre play. But I will say too about Octopus, and this is back when I was an associate of the company, we were getting so many people writing us and telling us about Octopus. Like we were carrying things on the LNDA board all the time, but we tracked, we hunt for playwrights. Like that's a large part of my job is reading message boards and looking at season announcements and calling up other lead managers and asking them who they're excited about, who's going up in their season.  It's amazing. He's really young. Someone needs to put him in the print. And I think we're like, we got to call up his agent and ask for the script. So that's another way, actually, to get the attention of a publisher is just get your work out there.  I've actually had a lot of publications come through other playwrights. Playwrights that we already published have talked to me and said, oh, you know, there's a writer that I'm working with or who's in my class. I'm really, really excited about them. You have to come to this reading. And that kind of recommendation he got you pretty far. I love getting my inbox full of, you know, read about this person and see this person's work. So that's very exciting. But I wanted to go on and talk a little bit about what happens after we acquire a play. What? Yeah? Oh, well, I'm going to circle back to OV. Oh, oh, oh. Would you, yeah, when you get to O-O-V because there was some rustling over here. What is O-O-V? Oh, I'm so sorry. It's the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival. It's the largest, I just assume that people know about it. But it's the oldest and largest continuous short play festival in the United States. It started in 1978. So we're in our, I don't know what year we're in. It's in 38 or something. So I guess if my math is wrong, sorry. But a lot of our playwrights have come out of there. We published Theresa Rebeck's first play in O-O-V. We published really Lara, a version of Open Admissions, which she went on and wrote a full length. It was on Broadway. It was Tony nominated. And that early version of the play was actually in like the third year of the Opera Broadway Festival, where she added, published. It was outsourced for a long time to a company called Love Cregan. And we took it back in-house the past couple years. So I think for the past six years, the Samuel French staff had an epiphany that we were all theater practitioners that worked in licensing and that we could actually run a really great festival if we hold our broccolines and did it. So we've been doing the festival. I also function as the literary coordinator for that festival. She's one of us who was here with me last year. She's an incredible stage manager. She's the festival coordinator. And also, by day, our licensing development manager. So it's very real. This is a night job. It's our passion. And we get off the clock in the office and then go straight to the theater and produce these plays. And we invite... It's kind of an American Idol format. So we have three judges. We're kind of playing with the format of this year. So in the past, it's been certain types of industry this year we're kind of taking that type hat off of the judges and so it can be actors, directors, people who are playwrights. We have a lot of playwrights to judge. But respected agents, we've had agents, although this year we don't think we're having agents to judge, yeah. But respected industry professionals who have opinions we value and they come and they watch six plays a night. They choose one or two to move on and then we have the finals and there will be 12 plays on the finals. We choose six for publication and licensing. So that is, you know, we published our plays from that. And Steve, Debra did the festival last year. So Debra's on our radar from here on out. We consider her a member of the family. It's a lot of culty actually, like once you do that at the Broadway festival, we're like, you're our family member. That's really true. It is. And you get to know us really well because we're at the bar every day after the show and dancing and you're like, wow, I don't know how much people have known me. But they also do this, they do this thing. They do this thing where they like stand up at the bar like on a chair and announce to the cast and playwrights of all of the participating plays which two are moving on. So you're like all in the room together drinking and having a good time and then they like crush the night. But then like two playwrights and their cast are like, woo! And it's like this, it creates this immediate like sifting effect. What I have to say, there's like many people, I mean it is like... No, it's great. It's social, it's fun, right? It's not even I would say that I, I mean when you were doing, when Love Creek was doing it, I had two plays that made it to this, then it was different. Now you just choose the top 40 and do it in a week. It used to be Love Creek, it was like the top 300 or something. Yeah. And it was over a couple of weeks. It went on forever. Yeah, it did. It's much more, it's much more better organized now. But I had a couple that didn't make it to the finals and so, you know, you just keep coming back. Well, I think that's it, as we don't, you know, you see a lot of people who've been in the festival before and not made it and then actually they come back and make it. And people that are in the festival that don't move on, you know, we've gone on to publish their plays because you always have, once you're in the festival, you have an open-door relationship with us.  We love you. We're so proud of you. So it gets very, I was saying family, but I actually use that term in earnest. Like, Samuel French loves to support the people that, because we're helping you produce this play, ultimately. So we feel very interested. Thank you. Can I just say that, I know some people were asking about like, are some of my friends just got into it this year and they're like, you know, self-producing, how much is involvement? It's really not that hard to self-produce your play. Because you're really, it's very minimal. Every, you know, you get it. It's a few set pieces. You just have to find a place to rehearse to teach your actors. We have the set pieces. Yeah. So it's very... It's not at all what Summer Schwartz does is the, you know, the coma. It's amazing for us. It's what we do. I tell people, it's not a stage reading because there are no scripts in hand, but we've had kind of a show after we were like, oh yeah, we just put it together in our living room last night. And they're like, okay, well, we hope it works. Yeah, this is good. Yeah, I just want to, I want to add something about that. Because I was able to go up and be on the judging panel this year since we've started this relationship. Being believers in the short play genre and being believers in visibility for playwrights and opportunities for playwrights, it's kind of a wonderful thing. Because, for example, we had cooked up our relationship a little bit. They had given me the galleys of the plays that had won the previous year, which had included this play, Bedfellows, which we wound up producing last year in summer shorts, if you remember. It was John Adams and Ben Franklin in the band. That was that play, okay. But meanwhile, we had also gotten Matt's play. We had gotten Matt's play from Samuel French and from Matt and from like everywhere else. And we were holding on that play to see when we were going to do it. This turns out to be that summer. But that we were finally doing it and we don't care if it's Christmas. We don't care. You know, Joe is Joe. But the other part of it is, is that is where I met Deborah and she actually then sent me another play all together from the one that I had seen at the reading. And that is the play that has become a finalist this year because of Friends and Family, I guess now, our new association. Yeah. And then Katia is McMullan, who is, where are you? I'm here. Oh, but she has a lovely play which you will be hearing in the readings as well. Either Friday or Saturday, I'm not sure which. But the good news around it is that we're all invested in the same thing.  Ahead of our, ahead of our submissions. And Amy and I go back and forth with what that is. And again, as she said, last year, she saw four plays in Summer Shorts and wanted them, they made it, they made it on to what they're doing and hopefully she'll see some more this summer that she will want to do that way. Well, and I actually too, I think last year even we took submissions directly out of, I mean, I left the festival with a good packet of 30, 30 plays and people out of city rights and emailed me plays to consider for the festival. They'd go, I'd like these to be in consideration. So I actually have a sign up here too, which I'll have all weekend long. If you want more information about the festival or the application and when it becomes available for next year, I'm happy to send you that. And we have an application fee now, we didn't use it too, but it's another conversation. We waived that fee for you guys as conference participants so, 10 year plays. Can I just say real quick, I immediately agreed to come here when Susie and Dan were like, hey, do you want to come down for this? I immediately agreed because I'm, I'm like a champion, a really loud, not even champions out the right word. I'm annoying about how an annoying proponent of short work. And like lots of times you sort of hear people say well, you know, there's not a lot of venues for short work or there's not a lot of opportunity, you know, and so like, with my time, you better spend somewhere else, but a really strong short play can be a fantastic calling card and also open a lot of doors in situations like this, like the one that you're in right now. And so I just got up on my soapbox a little bit, but I just think like this is so, that's one of the reasons I was so excited to come down here is because short work for me ended up being the, you know, like the first year I did the same French festival, I won. The second year I'm not allowed to do it anymore. I can't, there's some rule. We didn't know published authors. That's the other thing too. We put it in place because people were accusing us of nappetism and paperism. They're like, oh, it's always your authors that win. So we actually decided to be like, this is our open door to new writers who we do not have an existing relationship with. Because, because you guys I mean, whatever, you know, but we want new voices, new faces and new, and we've actually talked about, you know, representation and what are the requirements there and I think we limit people now to two plays, two submissions of these. So it's, really about putting our best foot forward and also just meeting the company and getting to know our team. So, yeah. I did want to fall up. I know we have work crunched for time so I might, I have a one-on-one session that's tomorrow and if you have questions, if you want to meet with me then and talk, let's do that. But for now, I just want to cover a little bit about publication and what that looks like and then also I want to show, I think you're going to be like the the grand supply. But we have, I brought in two books by our authors and it's very still and hard to see. Wow. Very still and hard to see. Which is actually, it's a, well do you want to like us? I don't need to. It's a, oh do I have to hold it? Yeah. It's, my favorite thing about Sam French now is that you can, you can ask them to use specific artwork as a cover thing which makes me super happy because it really helps things pop off a shelf in a way that acting editions don't. But, I sound like a spokesperson. But, this is a play that is sort of a cycle that's always based on sort of Japanese folk tales, but they all take place in a modern hotel that's probably somewhere like Miami, but, you know, and then that's the first, that's the second half of the book. The first half of the book is nine, 10 minute plays, like nine short plays. This is my second, so basically it's my second collection of short work from Sam French. Cool, and then I have Robert Sprint too. It's also a great image. I think the image is also for a Philadelphia production. Yeah. We tracked down, the guy was in school at the University Arts. Yeah. He designed it. We tracked him down, I forget how we tracked him down, but he was quite happy to get his design on the number of the book. Front, it takes place in London during the Blitz of World War II. It's about a group of women who work in a munitions factory and decide to sabotage the production of shell casings. Yeah. So we'll see what's really interesting. I mean, we obviously pointed out the graphic covers, but I think that's a really good springboard to talk about what you should be thinking about when you write about things a little bit. Right. I don't know if that makes sense, but I think it's a really good, Steve has a very interesting approach to publication because I think he thinks of it from the get-go, like from the time he posts like the pen on the page or maybe I'm reading and what that final book looks like. Actually, when you send me plays now, he often sends me a cover image to go with the submission. I was like, this is what I was thinking, and we love it because we're like, oh, we can picture that and as a publisher, it's a very attractive thing. But just in terms of the interior of the book too, also thinking of, you know, how is your idea, if someone else wants to do your play and you're not involved in that production, how are your ideas preserved and communicated? So, you guys are really specific set design you like and you want to use it. Have you asked a set designer, like, oh, down the road, can I use this as an example? Or we have a great playwright, Crystal Skillman, who is everyone knows her. She's a big personality. She, when I did her book, she really, really wanted, she's like, I have these amazing directors that I want to give credit to, can they all write forwards? And so the cut actually has the actors about how they approach the material and how they spoke to the actors. And, yeah, she pulled in her friends and she said, you know, I want to give them credit and I want this to be a really holistic reading experience for the licensees. So they know, okay, that's exactly how she meant to approach this text. And that's an event, you know, she's not talking production design. She's almost trying to preserve aesthetic. You know, they're supposed to be comical, what the place is supposed to sound like and feel like, and that's what she was really trying to speak to at that book. So I think that's a very, you know, thinking of preservation of your ideas from the time you start writing the play, or at least until the play starts to shape up is a really important thing. And in the back of mine, I have some topical references in my comedies and I'm like, as these things age because there's a problem, you know, it's also really important too. That's, I think so many people are writing about like Facebook and iPhones and social media and it's a challenge for us because we are like in 10 years that may totally shift like my space plays, which I got when I first started working at the company. My space is no longer around. It's coming back. Yeah, it's coming back. It's coming back. But thinking about that, the longevity of the play, you know, is this something that how do I preserve this idea in 10 years? You know, do I, do these jokes you know, if I'm asking them to play Jay-Z, is that because it takes place in a certain era or that's a certain feeling, while that feeling lasts later than the road. And then lastly, I know we only have a couple more minutes but I just wanted to talk on the same note kind of about marketing your work and also what happens kind of after a book is published. So we go through this editing process and then we come to the front, we put it out there, we email all the theaters, we get licensing. I normally have meetings and then we talk, okay, what are your friend's theaters that we should send this to? Who should we target?  But then we also talk a lot about, you know, ways to really make it stand out and to see a place that's out there, let's work on marketing it. I always recommend that writers have websites. If you don't have a website, get one. It is like your card. It is more impactful than having a card. The first thing I do when I get a submission is Google someone. I find information about you online. It shows me that you have some kind of presence out there. We like, it's much like conventional publishing. Nowadays a writer almost has to have a fan base and a following. So the publishers really know, okay, we don't have to build this person up. It's already there and we can move on that momentum. So the more work you've done in terms of getting a name for yourself and really, that's great. That's great for us to see if you have a gorgeous website. It's like, I mean it's okay. Yeah, I think it's okay. And it's become like a calling part.   Right.  Like extraordinary. It's extraordinary. And Matt and us worked on this great campaign for Christmas Shorts together that I do want to show you. So you have to know football but my dad is a marketing company so like I grew up being trained in this but I'm a very self-promotional writer and so, because I was marketing, from the beginning this was marketing you know, market and idea and time of year. I went into the American Theater Magazine and I looked in the back with December issue where they name all what theaters are doing what shows and I made a list of 100 theaters that were doing plays like Chris that I thought would be market for Christmas Shorts and then I came up with this and I said we sent this to 100 of them. So they got this box like this and then they opened it up and it says there are two kinds of Christmas Shorts and it says here's one and then here's the other and it was a copy of my script with a bookmark with all the license information and it's amazing. Did you see that? Oh it's really really cool. It's great but all right we're gonna have that in the book and then you see there's this underwear yeah and then you put the script on the other side yeah and now we got like great feedback like artistic directors were wearing the and we actually I don't think Matt knows this maybe you know this but we actually just picked up hands on a hard body a Broadway show and we actually borrowed that idea yeah I didn't know that we were so inspired and we were like this is a show that had it closed early and we wanted to make sure that the perceptions of it were so really strong so we ended up sending out the CD and a box and said with a script we put those hands on a hard body to all these artistic directors so I think they're sometimes taking that extra stuff while there are certain artistic directors that will not go ahead and be like Sam French was crazy you know it's also a really good way to get on people's most people are flatter they think most people are like wow you really put a lot of time you researched my theater and this is I'm sure you could you could describe your feeling I know it yeah so do you have time actually I participated in Sam French last year so I know there's some participants here so I'm around this conference if anyone has any questions she did the most current festival and had a lovely lovely piece in our festival so she'd be a great resource well let's do this let's take five minutes and then we're going to do the switch over to the next thing okay but go ahead yeah so does someone have real quick questions I submit the 10 page query and all the information at another time or once you rejected that place off the shelf forever I think not necessarily but really the resubmission has to be justified the play has to be rewritten or there has to be some big like maybe you just got three other productions and you're like I've developed it further it's a different submission you know and occasionally people will suddenly think I've rewrote it but it's actually just a couple lines like we know it's about quality it's not always and actually less often it's about quality it's more about the fact that we have like a competing play in the catalog or we we've published a lot of things this year and we just don't have the it seems like the best way in is through your OV yeah for short plays definitely um for full length plays of course OV isn't really an option but for full length family what was that but it gets me in the family it does exactly and for full length plays I would say the best way is really to try to secure some good productions of those plays get people talking about it good reviews submit those I mean theaters we can't take work that isn't production tested because publishing things about production I mean you're not totally sure that it works neither are we and people don't look to license world premieres they want to do them at their own theaters it's the coverage of the play like we need to know that there is a commercial that people are going to come to us and we can say you know we have a new play by Steve Gocchi and people are like oh I love Steve Gocchi's plays and we're like great we'll send it to you so it's harder for us to do that if we're like well you know it was produced at one college and for them it's like oh how is this going to sell seats for me like that but it really is what theaters ask us a lot so yeah and toad or do you have in-house lawyers that we do have an in-house lawyer we have a business affairs department when you use the contract stage they drop the contract often lawyers are involved with submission but once a play gets in the contract stage and then we've accepted it for publication and send you a contract that's on the drama to skill or lawyers come into play a lot and we go back and forth about what's really the best terms for the play you know it's a dialogue that happens any other questions about OV or San Franche yeah Mark I was just wondering what what you take on the sort of play publishing in the digital age oh yeah I didn't really talk about e-books it's an interesting thing I mean we're trying very hard to we just entered e-publishing about two or three years ago we started working with Apple and we were on that platform for a long time and now we're you know everywhere we're on Kindle we're on I have to say we thought the demand for e-plays would be a lot higher than it has been the sales have been actually really slow for us but I do still believe that it's going to be the way people get plays in the future I mean and really actually what we didn't anticipate as a side effect is it's been great in terms of preserving the play because no longer do we have artistic directors immediately like please send it to me can't you just send it via email you know we're like wow this is actually available online and you can go and purchase it so it's been more yeah I mean it's been interesting we'll see how it develops I think there's lots of exciting things happening right now where some of our biggest states we're actually talking about like enhanced e-books with them and so for Agatha Christie right now I know we're trying to put together kind of a drama in her bio while you're reading it your music and so there's there's lots of cool things happening it's just it's very young it's very young tell everyone to buy e-plays something like that yeah and you sign a separate I don't know that's when you sign a separate contract yeah now it's a part of the contract so it's when we first started it was actually like a an amendment to the agreements and it was optional I think it still is optional but it takes some dialogue with us so now it's in the agreement and unless you don't want it to be there and then you're a lawyer would come back and be like you know we don't want to do that okay can everybody give a nice round of applause Annie it's here


In this episode of Down the Rabbit Hole, I answer the questions that you didn't ask and for today's question, I want to ask myself. We're talking about key management and hardware wallets, but what if I can't afford a hardware wallet? What if I can't get one delivered? What if the amount of money I'm storing is not enough for a hardware wallet? What should I use instead? And that's the question I want to answer today because it's a complicated question and not everyone can afford or get access to a hardware wallet. So in terms of security, if you cannot afford a hardware wallet, your next best option after a hardware wallet is your mobile smartphone device. Your mobile device most likely has a secure element. Most modern mobile devices have a secure element and a secure element is a special security chip that is used to store parts of the phone's storage, the mobile device's storage, in such a way that they cannot be extracted unless by the authorized program. That provides isolation within the operating system. More broadly, mobile device operating systems are much more button down than your average desktop operating system, especially, you know, your average Windows machine that has all kinds of junk installed on it. A good clean installation on a mobile device with an operating system that is up to date, that is keeping up with the manufacturer software updates in order to fix vulnerabilities, is likely the most secure device you own. It also has very strong authentication in the form of pins, passphrases, fingerprints, biometrics, et cetera. I always recommend using a biometric and a pin, not only a pin. And if your operating system doesn't allow that, then use a pin.  And then once you have a properly set up mobile operating system, you can then install a reliable and powerful mobile wallet, which is a software application. You want that wallet to be BIP39 compatible, meaning that it uses a mnemonic phrase, you own and control the keys by backing up that mnemonic phrase. Of course, you want to make a backup of that mnemonic phrase. And you also want to find out if it's using a standard derivation path, the best ones do.  So you can do things like bump a fee using replaced by fee or child pays for parent, or you can manually adjust the fees depending on how urgent a transaction appears to you. These are all criteria that you might use to buy, sorry, to download the right mobile wallet. They're all free. I wish some of them would charge a subscription for support, but they don't. And you can do that even on mobile devices that are two or three generations behind the latest. It doesn't have to be an iPhone 11 Pro Max. It doesn't have to be a Google Pixel 4. It could be or Samsung 10. It could be an iPhone 7 or 8. It could be even a Nexus 5. So you can always go a few generations back. Finally, if you don't have a mobile device or if for some reason you want to run a desktop application, again, it's better than custodial, but you have to be very, very careful. Desktop operating systems are much, much less secure. My favorite desktop wallet is Electrum, which I use because of its very capable features and multi-platform support, and I've used it for a long time. But I use it with a hardware wallet for the keys, so I do not store keys on a desktop device ever. I don't trust them. On my mobile wallet, I also keep a small amount as petty cash, similar to what I would keep in my actual leather wallet in my back pocket. So think of this as a tiered solution. If you can't afford a hardware wallet, use a mobile device. If you can afford a hardware wallet, still use a mobile device so that you can have a smaller value hot wallet that you use for day-to-day small transactions, maybe a lightning wallet as well on your mobile device so you can do fast transactions, but don't store too much money on that mobile device if you have a hardware wallet, and of course, don't forget, back up both of those.