Welcome to this week's preview show where we are joined by club captain Simon Francis. Here's what's coming up this week We'll be looking back at last weekend's four-nil win over Luton in the FA Cup and then we'll be turning our attention to Sunday's game Here at Vitality Stadium against Watford, but first we're gonna start back at last weekend and that brilliant performance in the Cup Frano, it was a certainly needed and something that can build confidence from yeah, certainly that's the The mindset we had before the game we wanted to Put performance out there for the fans first and foremost obviously and for the players to Get a little bit of confidence back a bit of belief ahead of the Watford game Which is going to be crucial and it can be anything can be a cup game obviously to be a catalyst to kick start These next few games we've got coming up and I thought we we handled the game very professionally Obviously scoring four goals was great for us, but we dominated the game They did have their chances of course to get back into it They are VR playing its part again as per usual, but That was an entertaining game and one that we enjoyed and certainly we needed and how pleased were you and the rest of the lads for Dominic Solanke we thought he had one in the first half It was ruled out for VR as you say and then he comes up with a goal in the second half Yeah, we're delighted for him. Obviously. It's been a long time coming and for any shiker when they're not scoring goals I'm sure that plays on their mind, but He's been confident. He's been there in training He's been putting the ball in the back of the net and training and we knew it was was gonna come just a matter of time And for Callum as well obviously he hasn't scored in a number of games So hopefully that'll build massive confidence for them and all it takes is a tap in of course And we're hoping that come Watford they'll be firing again. You mentioned Callum there He came on with his first touch he scored It was it was great to see him back on the score sheet and Philip Billing as well two goals for him his first two for the club Yeah delight for Phil He's been excellent since he's come in Fitted and seamless leans that midfield and I know he didn't have much of a preseason at Huddersfield So fitness was was an issue for him, but I thought he came in he's looked stronger every single week Very laid-back on the ball slows the game down at times when we need it to very compose and he can attack as well And we saw that against Luton scored two goals Or be a deflection on the second one, but he's been excellent and again goals is what we need this team We've always looked like creating chances over the past month or two That's not necessarily dried up, but we haven't created as many as we would have liked to So scoring four at home is certainly a big boost ahead of this game And we can talk about the striker scoring goals at one end, but at the other end a clean sheet that as well can you know do wonders for confidence Yeah, again that that's certainly needed to go and win games Of course you need to keep clean sheets and that's something we have built our success on over the past few years I think injuries have played a part in that this season a disjointed back four at times Yeah, we're hoping we can keep more clean sheets, of course that will go a long way into winning games And when we're at our best I think we defend really well and we create chances and we score goals And that's the hopefully the Bournemouth we're going to see over the next few weeks and just a word on Alex Dobre He came on for his debut. How impressed have you been with him? You know on the pitch and in training? Yeah, really impressed. Obviously he's been training with us a while now And I've got to say I haven't seen many Young lads with his attitude and his desire to just want to be in the first team at all costs Sometimes he's very over enthusiast Enthusiastic and the manager has to slow him down a little bit in training because he's he's a hundred miles an hour at all times really but He's a maverick, you know, he's always got something up his sleeve that he can do He's got a lot of ability. He works really hard. Like I said, he's in early He's always working hard after training and he just wants it as much as I've ever seen a young player So I'm delighted for him that he's got a debut and hopefully many more appearances to come And just finally on Luton after that win. What's the mood like being around the training ground this week? It's been good it always is I mean Despite when you lose a game, of course, you're disappointed afterwards But if you let that play on your mind all week building up to another game It's only going to affect you in a negative way and the manager's been big on that Especially whilst we've been on the run we have of late, which hasn't been great You have to stay positive. It can be hard at times After the West Ham game was probably as down as I've ever felt over the past few years being in the Premier League That was a real real sickener for us. And I think the lads felt the same but the manager was Was positive in the build-up to training To the Luton game. We knew it was a big game for us Albeit a cup game against the team the bottom of the championship those can potentially be a banana skin But we handled it professionally and confidence is It's slowly coming back for us and I feel like it's gonna be a good few weeks Absolutely. Well next few weeks is where we're turning our attention to and it starts with Watford on Sunday Let's take a look at what Eddie Howe had to say in his pre-match press conference We're getting there on some A couple of problems with others the long-term Absentees won't really change and I think it's fair to say that without a doubt. This is a massive game for us Players know that we know that I'm sure the crowd know that how much we're gonna need them this weekend How much we're gonna need to create an atmosphere to show the importance of the match teams used to used to really fear coming here I think it was a tight stadium small ground obviously, but a really really good atmosphere and That's no no blame on the crowd because we haven't performed well enough here consistently this season only a couple of wins as you say it's not enough But we really need now between now and the end of the season that feeling That feeling back you go out with a good body language a good attitude a good mentality the crowd will back that and I'm desperate to see that this weekend and We have to show it. We have to show how much this game means to us. It's a time for everyone to unite together To be totally focused on achieving our goals and our aims Well, that was Eddie how speaking this morning in his pre match press conference Frano, it's a big game on Sunday on the TV and we're gonna need our supporters more than ever. Aren't we? Oh, yeah, of course And I think they've been excellent of late. Actually, especially against against Luton walking out I have to be honest. I didn't expect to see a full full stadium and it looked as as packed as ever And credit to the fans. They really got behind the lads and we're gonna need that every single game home and away The away support has been phenomenal again this season have to say and at home It's been great and I know when results aren't going our way It can be easy for the fans to not make as much noise But I have to say it makes a big difference on the pitch when you hear your home fans supporting you and getting behind you And of course, we'll need that Sunday more than ever But not just Sunday now to the end of the season the fans are a Massive for us at this football club. We know that we want to put performances in we want to get results for them And that'll start Sunday and a word on Watford. They've changed their manager with Nigel Pearson How impressive you've been with them since he's come in they're picking up results picking up points Yeah, they've certainly had that that new manager bounce if you like if you want to call it that or that that Effect of a new manager coming in the players are playing for him almost instantly really the results they've had of I've really turned their their season around from the bottom the lead to climbing up out of the relegation zone We're under no illusion. It's gonna be a tough game. We know they've got quality anyway Even even when they weren't winning games, they're always a dangerous team to play against we found that away from home on the counter They got good attacking players. They defend well. They're pretty solid and Nigel Pearson will have made a big difference for that as well defensively So it's gonna be a really tough game But we know what we can do to hurt them.  He's an important player, but they have defenders that to come in and take his place So that won't be a massive loss to them. I don't think Maybe an area that we could target during this week's training But we'll be working on our strengths where we can hurt them that that's what we're all about now Trying to score goals create chances like we did against Luton using that confidence that belief and and hopefully we're causing problems And I just want to ask you about VAR. What what is it like for a player? We've seen it last week come into play. We've seen it across the Premier League season What's it like for for you as a player and and the squad to deal with is it something that you you know You talk about in training talk about off the pitch Well, it's a talking point nearly every single weekend in the Premier League is every weekend almost every game at the moment So yeah, we talk about it I mean I watch a lot of football and it always seems to be having an effect and the problem is that it's becoming more of a Negative effect than positive. I think of late During a game it's strange. I mean, obviously the the biggest one was the Chelsea one away from home It was just strange emotions I've never felt in a game because you're never normally waiting that long for a result to be for a decision to be made Gozo celebrated three times. We all saw that and I haven't it almost became a bit of a Comedy act in the end which is disappointing. It does take the emotion and the passion out of the game You know the result went our way in the end. So we're very happy with that. But yeah, I'm just I just think there's a lot of Cleaning up to do with it. It's still a little bit of a mess at the moment Yes, they're getting majority of the decisions right, but sometimes just taking too long It's too fiddly. I mean with the offsides things I do think things need to be changed with that, but it's something they'll assess I'm sure at the end of the season and hopefully make it better for next season And just finally it's a big few weeks coming up. We've got plenty of home games, you know Brighton, Aston Villa Watford on the weekend, the way to Norwich next weekend How important of a period is this after you know the the rush of Christmas to kick on in the new year? It is an important period I think any any block of games that you look at when you think these are games that we can hopefully take points from Are always going to import be important But we did think that over the Christmas period there was some games that we could go on attack and and hopefully winning that That didn't go our way Chelsea probably being the surprise result out of them. So We know that the consistency needs to be there for us We need to go on a run of course to get us out of the danger zone that we're in We're confident we can do that and this block of games should be good for us And we're hoping to get off to a good start on Sunday Well, I'm sure I speak on behalf of all the fans and wishing you the best of luck for the weekend and the few weeks ahead Now then if you are coming to Vitality Stadium on Sunday Make sure you wear your colors and cheer on the boys at Vitality Stadium If you're not coming make sure you listen to Chris temple on BBC Radio Solent and on a FCB TV. Bye for now


I have big news. The biggest news. This channel now has 4 million subscribers. I don't know how this happened. I don't even remember getting 1 million subscribers. Then I log on and YouTube says I have 4 million. Well, I guess I need to welcome 4 million of you to the show. I hope we have a good action figure to review this week. Let's see who we have wind up. That'll do. Hello everybody, HoodieCobraCommander788 here. It's time for another vintage GI Joe Toy Review. And this week we are doing our first Patrons Choice Review of the Year. Supporters on Patreon voted to decide what would be reviewed this week. It was a close vote between Deep Six and Voltar. But Voltar won. Speaking of Patreon, we have a new patron to welcome to the club, Mike Murdoch. At his support level, Mike gets a codename. I don't think Mike is a viper. Mike Murdoch sounds a lot like Matt Murdoch. I have detailed reports from my network of spies about Mike's personal life. Turns out he's quite the nerd. I've got it. Mike, your codename shall be the Square Devil. Agent Square Devil, welcome to the ranks. Voltar comes from Destro's Iron Grenadiers. As you may know, I'm a fan of the Iron Grenadiers. I thought they made a good adversary for GI Joe and Cobra. Not everything in Iron Grenadiers was great, though. Was Voltar one of the good ones or one of the bad ones? Let's find out. HCC788 presents to four million of you, Voltar. The K means million, right? This is Voltar, Destro's General from 1988. This figure was first available in 1988 and was also available in 1989. It was discontinued for the year 1990. In 1988, he was also released in a two-pack with muskrat, which was sold exclusively at Target. The two-pack was billed as the ultimate enemies. I don't know why Voltar and muskrat would be ultimate enemies. They seemed to have no relation to each other at all. Voltar was in the Iron Grenadiers sub-team. The Iron Grenadiers were led by Destro, at that time wearing his Version 2 uniform with the gold helmet. Destro was a formidable opponent of GI Joe. Destro started out as the weapons supplier to Cobra. Back then, he wore a silver helmet. In 1988, Destro formed his own faction, the Iron Grenadiers. They used Destro's futuristic weapons and vehicles. In general, the Iron Grenadiers were awesome. The basic Iron Grenadiers soldier had a black uniform with gold and red accents. Most of the vehicles back then also used that color palette. Later Iron Grenadier figures strayed from the black-red-gold colors. Most infamous is Anaya later from 1989. Orange and purple is pretty far from the classy black uniforms from 1988. Voltar, however, proves that Iron Grenadiers had crazy colors even in the beginning. Voltar may take his name from Voltaire, the French Enlightenment philosopher. I was always fond of Voltaire's writing. Some of his ideas were incorporated into American theories of government. Other than the name, I don't see much similarity between Voltar and Voltaire. He may also take his name from the comic book titled Voltar. It was a Filipino comic book from the 60s that was published in the United States by Marvel in the 70s. It was a tone-in-the-barbarian-like story. There isn't much similarity between G.I. Joe's Voltar and the comic book Voltar either, but Larry Hama, the writer of G.I. Joe's comic book, worked at Marvel and may have come across the name that way. His name may be modified from Vulture. He comes with this big black bird, but that is not a vulture. It's a condor. A few of his prototype names include Grafkondor, Lordkondor, Madagascar, and Field Marshal Null. Graf is a German title of nobility, like a count. Grafkondor is basically the same as Countkondor. All of those names are bonkers. Madagascar, Field Marshal Null? That sounds like something out of a Flash Gordon serial. There were no other versions of Voltar made during the vintage era. Iron Grenadiers kind of petered out after a couple of years. There was a modern version of Voltar released in 2012 as a Jo-Con exclusive. Let's take a look at Voltar's accessories, starting with his weapon. He comes with what the card contents call a modified Uzi submachine gun.  This looks nothing like an Uzi, modified or not. It is made of gold plastic and it has this fin on the back. It has wrapping or cloth around the foregrip and it has a ventilated suppressor. This is a science fiction looking weapon. It doesn't look like a laser since it has a traditional magazine. But the fin makes it look like science fiction from before the 1950s. Maybe there is a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers influence. There was a modified Uzi submachine gun in the Iron Grenadiers. The basic Iron Grenadiers soldier had one. It was a pretty wicked looking weapon. Maybe they originally intended Voltar to come with that weapon, but decided he needed a fin gun instead. He comes with what the card contents identify as a condor.  Why would Voltar come with a condor? Who knows. It is in this black plastic with a painted red head. The California condor has a mostly bald head, which is probably what they were trying to replicate with this red paint application. It is not a very attractive bird. The plumage around the condor's collar is sculpted but not painted. Could this be a trained condor? I have no idea if you can train condors. The feet of the bird form a C-clip and you can use that to clip him on the bar on Voltar's backpack. He just clips on like that. In addition to clipping the condor to the bar on Voltar's backpack, you can clip it to his wrist as well. And I prefer this. It fits better and it doesn't wobble around as much. The feet on the condor are often broken off. If you're looking for a complete Voltar, make sure you get a condor with the feet still attached. There were other bird companions in G.I. Joe. The first was Spirit in 1984 with his eagle Freedom. Then there was Shipwreck in 1985 with his parrot Polly. Then there was Raptor in 1987 with his falcon. Usually the birds were sculpted with their wings open, so you could pretend they were flying. The exception was Shipwreck's parrot. Voltar's final accessory is what the card contents call a high-frequency communications pack. It is in gold plastic. It has that bar, which could be an antenna. It sticks out to the side. It even has a sculpted microphone with a cord. I do like that. It has this open space here, this rectangle, and it kind of seems like a lenticular sticker could have gone there. This backpack is fine, well-detailed, I guess. Voltar, I assume, would use this to communicate with his troops. One inconsistency between Voltar and the other Iron Grenadiers is both Destro, version 2, and the basic Iron Grenadiers trooper came with ceremonial swords. But Voltar, the general, did not. I think they should have given him one. That would have kept him more within the Iron Grenadiers theme. Let's take a look at the articulation for Voltar. He had the standard articulation for GI Joe figures from 1988, so he could turn his head from left to right and look up and down. He could swing his arm up at the shoulder and swivel at the shoulder all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow that allowed him to bend at the elbow about 90 degrees. He had a swivel at the bicep, so he could swivel his arm all the way around. The figure was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside. That allowed him to move at the torso a bit. He could move his legs apart about so far. He could swing his leg at the hip about 90 degrees and bend at the knee about 90 degrees. Let's take a look at the sculpt design and color of Voltar starting with his head. And on his head, he has a non-removable helmet. It is gold. I am okay with this. I have less of a problem with the bad guys having non-removable helmets. He has a red eyepiece over his right eye, and the helmet has a fin on top. We can see most of Voltar's face, and he has a black beard. The fin on the helmet somewhat mirrors the fin on the helmet of the basic iron grenadier soldier. Gold is a standard iron grenadier color, so that makes sense. His head with the helmet looks sinister and futuristic. On his chest, he has a fuchsia shirt. This has been described as purple, but to my eye, it looks fuchsia. He has gold highlights. He's got a gold collar that is raised in the back. He has gold bands over his shoulder. He has a gold-handled pistol in an unpainted holster, and he has gold checker patterns behind the holster. He has a black band that goes across his lower back. On his arms, he has long sleeves in that fuchsia color, and he has sculpting on the upper arms. It's kind of hard to make out what that's supposed to be. But based on the artwork, it looks like this is supposed to be padding, and he has spikes sticking out of his upper arms. On his waist, he has black crisscross belts with a gold circle belt buckle right there in the center, and gold clips on the belts.  Here in the front, he has some black padding that covers his crotch, and there's a ridge pattern on that. On his legs, we have more of that fuchsia uniform color. He has black pistols in black holsters, one on each thigh. Then he has black bands that go around the thighs. He has black padding with a ridge pattern on the outside of his legs at the knees. He's wearing black boots with gold bands around the top, and down pointed tips on those gold bands. For all the detail on the figure, there isn't much detail on the boots. The entire figure does remind me of something out of an old 1930s science fiction serial. The helmet evokes the pseudo-futuristic faux-Roman helmets worn by the henchmen of Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon. That's what they may have been trying to do with this figure. Maybe this is an homage to that era of science fiction. I'm not against the idea, but they could have done it in a way that fit better with G.I. Joe and the Iron Grenadiers. I understand they wanted to make Destro's general distinctive from the troops, but that fuchsia is hard to look at. Let's take a look at Voltar's file card. There is a variant of this file card. The Voltar that was released with Musgrat in the two-pack had a yellow-orange file card with the same text. I would have tried to track one down to show you, but honestly, I forgot it existed.  If you happen to have a Voltar file card that isn't a yellow color instead of this gray, it doesn't mean you have a fake or there's anything wrong with it. It just means you have a rare variant. His faction is the enemy, not Cobra. There's a portrait of Voltar here. His codename is Voltar, and he is Destro's general. There is no autobiographical information. This first paragraph says, Voltar was an extremely successful mercenary commander. In fact, he was too successful for his continued presence to be tolerated by the provisional government's revolutionary councils and military dictatorships that employed him. He could pluck victory from seemingly eminent defeat in complete defiance of the odds. Always one step ahead of disaster, never looking back. Winners never look back. This first paragraph speaks to his martial skills as well as his ruthlessness. He was so good, the factions that hired him couldn't trust him. As soon as they secured victory, they wanted him out of the picture in case he switched sides. This bottom paragraph has a quote from Destro. He says, He has that quality I admire most in a general. You know that Napoleonic anecdote? The Field Marshals of France were extolling the tactical prowess of a certain young commander.  All very well and good, but tell me one thing. Is he lucky? This Napoleon quote is paraphrased in a few different ways and may or may not have been spoken by Napoleon. There's a lawyer I know who likes to say I'd rather be lucky than good. I was able to find this Napoleon quote. All great events hang by a hair. I believe in luck. And the wise man neglects nothing that contributes to his destiny. Taking a look at how Voltar was used in G.I. Joe Media, Voltar was never animated. He made no appearances in any cartoon series. He made a few appearances in the comic book series published by Marvel Comics. He first appeared in issue number 87 where he helped defend Castle Destro from an attack by Cobra. He reappears in special missions number 26, but by that time, Destro and Cobra were working together again. Voltar even has a Cobra undershirt. He commands Cobra vipers against an attack by the October Guard in the fictional South American country of Sierra Gordo. In that issue, the October Guard are on a mission to rescue L.J.F.A., a political prisoner being held by Cobra. In that issue, most of the October Guard is killed and a squad of Chos is captured. It's a pretty heavy issue. Voltar doesn't have a lot to do in the comics, but his early appearances are not bad. He seems like a serious-minded soldier and a good leader. Perhaps more could have been done with the character, but readers may have been tired of looking at that fuchsia uniform. Looking at Voltar overall, of course I don't like the color. You know me. You know a fuchsia uniform is not going to work for me. I have seen purple work on some action figures. I'm not totally against the color range, but on this figure it's hard to excuse. Yes, I understand they were trying to make him distinctive from the troops he commands, but they could have done it with a different color. What other color could they have used? Well, the basic Iron Grenadiers colors are black, gold, and red. Voltar already has a lot of gold. He has black, so his base color could have been red? Am I just nuts for thinking this is obvious? A red figure would have stood out among the throng of black Iron Grenadiers figures. He would have looked like a leader. Red still isn't suited for combat, but Cobra and Destro didn't often use traditional military colors. Red would not have been as ugly. It would have fit with the Iron Grenadiers theme. Just make him red. The accessories are strange. They look like something out of a different toy line. Why would he carry a condor around? Is it a trained condor?  Can I get this figure into the middle tier? I guess so, but only by a hair. The sculpting is mostly very good. The arms aren't great, but the rest of the figure is good. His Flash Gordon helmet is amazing. I do have an affinity for those old science fiction serials like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Commando Cody. Anything that evokes that aesthetic does appeal to me. It doesn't appeal to me enough to put the figure in the top tier, but it's alright. That was my review of Voltar. I hope you enjoyed it. Patreon has been a big help to this channel. Thanks to Patreon support, I have been able to buy new studio equipment, new lighting, new microphone, new camera, new tripod. In other words, all the things I need to keep this show going. The whole idea behind Patreon is to support in an amount that is small enough that you don't even notice, but those small amounts add up for creators. You never have to pay anything for this show. It is always free. But if you like a few extras and if you'd like to help me continue improving the show, please consider Patreon. One thing you can get is a secret code book that will allow you to read this secret code. Thanks for watching. Thanks to everyone who voted. Thanks to Square Viper. I'll see you next week for another vintage GI Joe toy review. We have a doozy for next week. I hope to see you then. Until then, remember only GI Joe is GI Joe.


Hey everyone, this is Dan with another episode of my weekly analysis. SPY closed last week up 1.9% when QQQ was up 1.8% for the week. The market certainly looked more bullish than a few weeks ago. Yet today, SPY is still down 19% and QQQ down 27%. Commodity prices have been down since the beginning of June. Even though June's CPI came in at 9.1%, some people say it's the last of the bad CPI numbers and that they expect inflation to calm down in the next few months. Is the market heading up now? Let's look into the current events and the charts to see where the market might be heading in the next few days. First of all, let's look at the chart for SPY and QQQ. As you can see, SPY has been down 19% since the beginning of the year and QQQ has been down 27%. SPY has been following this downward sloping trendline since April. However, since June 17th, SPY has been making higher lows and has been following this upward trendline. As of last Wednesday and Thursday, SPY dipped below the lower boundary line which was somewhat of a bearish sign. QQQ has also been following a downward trendline since April. It has also been making higher lows in the last few weeks following this upward trendline. QQQ has been more bullish than SPY in that it popped above the upper boundary line twice in the last couple weeks and it certainly closed last Friday above the upper boundary line. From a technical perspective, both SPY and QQQ will have to stay above the upper boundary lines and then they have to make higher highs in order to confirm the new bullish trend. In the meanwhile, there is a possibility of ending up in a bear flag like this pattern if the prices drop below the lower boundary lines. The outcome, of course, will very much depend on the macroeconomic events and corporate earnings that will be unfolding in the next few days. Let's look at the major current events that have been influenced in the market. First of all, there has been a war going on in Ukraine since February 24th which has caused unimaginable human suffering as well as supply shortages of oil, natural gas, weed and other commodities. Because of the high inflation rate, the Fed decided to raise interest rates by 0.75% in June and they are expected to raise the Fed funds rate again by either 0.75% or 1% in July. In addition, the Fed has been doing quantitative tightening by reducing the Fed asset supposedly by $47.5 billion a month for the months of June, July and August. Starting in September, the Fed will be reducing the Fed assets by $95 billion a month. Many cities in China are still in partial COVID lockdown which has created supply chain delays for many commercial products. The June CPI came in at 9.1% which was higher than the May figure of 8.6% and which was higher than the April figure of 8.3%. Many people are saying that the June CPI number is probably the last of the bad numbers. They expect CPI to go down starting in the month of July because of the recent drop in commodity prices. The leaders of the European Union said they would eliminate 2 thirds of the Russian oil import at the end of 2022. The G7 agreed to explore imposing a price cap on Russian oil. President Biden just wrapped up his visit to the Middle East which included a stop in Saudi Arabia. Regrettably, there has not been any announcement about Saudi Arabia increasing oil production. That means oil prices will probably go up in the next few days because the hope of more Saudi oil has been dashed. OPEC did not reach their production target and actually came in 3 million barrels a day short in the month of June. In other words, OPEC is not doing anything to relieve the world shortage of oil after the ban on Russian oil has been imposed. As of July 11th, Russian shut down the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline for maintenance which further restricted gas flow to the EU. Between April and June, Russia already reduced natural gas by 50% to Italy and Slovakia and they have cut off gas completely to France, Poland, Bulgaria, Finland and Denmark. This has driven up natural gas prices in Europe. In the US, we have a different picture for natural gas because on June 9th, there was an explosion at the Freeport Texas Liquify Natural Gas Facility which will take many months to repair. The damage to the facility will limit the ability of the United States to export natural gas to Europe. Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations have started to negotiate about opening up a corridor for exporting grain from Ukraine. A recent New York Fed computer model showed that the chances of a soft landing for our economy is at just 10% whereas a hot landing is at 80%. This is certainly a bearish piece of news. The CFO of J.P. Morgan Chase, Mr. Jamie Diamond, recently said that he saw a hurricane coming over our economy. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said that a recession is almost inevitable. The Atlanta Fed GDP model indicated that the US economy is already in recession. Commodity prices have been falling since the beginning of June which will hopefully reduce the inflationary pressure on the economy. This is a chart showing the prices of a few major commodities. From the ranking on the right, we can see that natural gas went up the most since the beginning of the year by 86%. Oil went up by 28% whereas SPY has been down 19%. A few pieces of very important economic data were posted during this past week. The API weekly crude oil stock increased by 4.7 million barrels which will reduce the pressure on oil price. CPI as I mentioned came in at 9.1%. Crude oil inventory also increased by 3.2 million barrels. Initial jobless claims went up slightly from 235,000 to 244,000. That means the economy is still fairly strong. Retail sales came in higher than expected at 1.0%. Industrial production is at 4.16% which is still pretty strong. The Michigan consumer sentiment is 51.1%, still fairly positive. And Baker Hughes oil rigs count went up by 2 which is not a big increase compared to the increase in oil prices. Overall, I don't see a clear sign indicating a recession is starting. The oil inventory seems to be going up which tends to stabilize oil prices. In the meanwhile, because President Biden's trip to Saudi Arabia failed to generate any increase in Saudi oil production, that'll probably cost oil price to go up in the next few days. A few key pieces of economic data will be posted this week. On Tuesday, it'll be building permits. On Wednesday, it'll be existing home sales and crude oil inventory. Then on Thursday, initial jobless claim and Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index. I will be watching these numbers very carefully. At this point, I'd like to remind you to subscribe to my Twitter account. In addition to subscribing to my YouTube channel, my Twitter account is DanMarketL. I share with my Twitter subscribers almost on a daily basis, some of my trades, as well as any significant news events. If you like what you've seen so far, I'd like to encourage you to click the like, subscribe, and notification button. That'll enable you to receive notification when I publish my next video. It'll also encourage me to make more videos like this in the future. Thank you very much. Let's continue. This is a chart showing the five-year inflation expectation, which is about 2.1%. The lower chart is a 10-year inflation expectation, which is at about 2.2%. Both chart have come down slightly in the last month or so. It is remarkable that the inflation expectation is just about 2% when the CPI is at 9.1% for June. That means the general public still have a lot of confidence in the Federal Reserve Bank's ability to bring down inflation. Recently, the former Fed official, Mr. Bill Dudley, mentioned that the Fed funds rate might have to go as high as 6% in order to keep inflation down. As of today, the Fed funds rates between 1.5% and 1.75%, which is very far from 6%. Based on my own analysis, by comparing economic data in the 1970s to 1980s, when inflation rate was 8% or more, I believe the Fed funds rate will have to go even higher than 6% before the Fed can get the inflation rate under control. If you want to learn more about my analysis, please refer to the video that I posted on May 22. The cryptocurrency market has lost $2 trillion of its capitalization since November of last year. The crypto market cap has pretty much flatlined since the end of May at about $1 trillion. As long as the crypto market is depressed, it certainly does not help with adding any upward momentum to the stock market. Even though the stock market has been rebounding in the last 2-3 weeks, my view of the market for the next few months is still bearish. Mainly because the Fed is raising interest rates and doing quantitative tightening to try to control inflation. So, when would the Fed stop tightening? I believe if and when CPI is less than 5% or if unemployment rate is higher than 6%, then the Fed will stop raising interest rates and stop quantitative tightening. Of course, if the Ukraine war can come to an end in the next few months, the market will rebound quickly, although it will probably be a short recovery for just a couple months. After that, if the inflation rate is still high, the Fed will continue to tighten and the market will sink again. I've been tracking and trading a few ETFs that have been going up while the market has been heading down in the last few months. They are SQQQ and SPXS, the 3x inverse ETFs paid to the NASDAQ 100 and S&P 500. TMV, the ETF paid to the 20-year treasury rate. UCO, the 3x leveraged crude oil ETF. UGA, the gasoline ETF. XLE, the energy ETF. WEAT, the weed ETF. And UNG, the natural gas ETF. Because of the ongoing negotiation between Russia and Ukraine and the United Nations to open up this corridor for shipping grain out of Ukraine, I will stay out of the weed ETF for now. And because of the continuous lockdowns of many cities in China, I don't think copper-related ETFs are a good investment anymore. This is a chart showing the price movements of the ETFs that I just mentioned. Yet today, UNG is pretty impressive at 88% gain. SQQQ, the 3x inverse ETF, paid to the NASDAQ 100, is the second-best performer at 79%, then TMV came in at 65% gain since the beginning of the year. The one-month picture seems to be flipped from the year-to-day picture. As you can see, the best performers are actually QQQ and SPY at about 5.2% gain. I believe this market rebound might be short-lived as far as the Fed is hiking interest rates and doing quantitative tightening. As the market continues to trend down in the next few months, there will still be some short-term ups and downs in the market. I think we are looking at one of those short-term rebounds, which will probably fizzle out in the next few days. I'd like to remind you that I'm not a financial advisor. I share my stock trading strategies and analyses for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you want to buy or sell stocks, you should make your own decisions and you should definitely consult with your financial advisors before you do so. This wraps up my video for now. I will chat with you again in the next few days. In the meanwhile, I'd like to wish you the very best of luck with your financial investments.


Instead of, because we've seen some fairly advanced topics and things. Actually, I should just mirror my screen, because otherwise I won't be able to see what I'm doing. But not everyone has been doing this forever. So, each time we have a meetup, we'll basically color some basic element of CSS, or in this case, SAS. My screen's now crazy. So, I'm just going to do an intro to SAS, basically. As you can see from the text, SAS does rock. Less than SAS are kind of competing with each other a bit. SAS, I think, is winning, maybe. Go SAS. I'll show you a few times. Then there are other things like post-CSS, which lets you do all sorts of crazy things, which is kind of the same, but not quite. SAS is fairly well documented. So, if you're curious about diving into something other than basic CSS, SAS is probably the way to go at the moment. I'll just explain a couple of the features. This is meant to be five minutes long, but I haven't timed it or prepped it properly soon. Just to give you an idea of how it works. So, I've got a really basic HTML structure here. It really doesn't do all that much. I've got a header section, paragraph list, nothing really major. Using boring old CSS, so variables, actually. Let's go through this in order. I've got my paragraph and my list item colored right here. Now, ordinarily, if I need to change the color because the designer said, hey, red's probably not so great as a text color, then I'd have to go through and change each one like that. This is easy because I've got two, but imagine you've got a massive CSS file here to go through each and every one. If I have variables, I can just grab the variable and drop that in there instead. Now, if I want to change the primary color, I can just go and edit my one spot in the SAS, and I'm done. That basically sells SAS on its own for me. CSS variables are coming in as a standard, but to adopt them until they've got 100% adoption, it's basically impossible to put them into your projects. That's really difficult, but this alone is really good. The other thing that you get by naming things is it's easy to understand what's going on. Here, I've got primary, secondary, tertiary color according to what they actually mean. When you're going into your code, it's like, well, I need this thing to have whatever color you can just refer to and it makes it a whole lot easier to understand what's going on. Obviously, here, I've just got colors on the variables, but you might put your video query breakpoints, font stacks, anything else that might be relevant to you. If you're putting it in there more than months, then it should be a variable, basically. Nesting. Nesting is really awesome. I'm going to color my section. Except I've broken my code now. Here, I've got my section. I've got different things inside. This is how you'd normally write it in CSS. When you go sass, everything is nicer. I already know I'm in the section to save a lot of trouble like this. This is basically the equivalent. You've got to be really careful with nesting, regardless of which programming language you're using. If you contribute to the Linux core and use more than three levels of nesting, and then a storevolta probably can't shoot you or something, not that I'm suggesting he's prone to violence, probably quite the opposite. I don't know the man. But nesting is something to be careful of. If you're using namespacing along the lines of BEM, then you're probably not going to nest all that much anyway. But when you do, this is pretty handy to be careful about how you use it. Partials. Partials, according to the SAS spec, are one of the most important. Actually, no, I don't think. Partials. It's basically an import like this. With the projects that I'm working on right now in my work, we have a global font size. It's got a global style resource, basically. And everything's split up. So within an individual project, you can override it in any one of these particular things. Using imports, it all basically gets thrown into the one... I can't find the code for it. Too much. Too many tabs. I'm just going to show you. So you can see how I've just basically imported all these different modules. And within an individual project, if I want all of them, that's great. If I don't say, for example, I don't have any tabs, I can just comment out this bit here. And I'm done. So that's pretty good. But instead of having to combine your CSS files or anything else like that, it doesn't include imports. Same thing, basically. Not much difference. Mix-ins. Mix-ins are basically variables of functions. You've got to be careful about using them. But it's just like anything else. When you're repeating your code, then usually you want to actually abstract it in some way. In this case, all you basically need to do, if you need to do a clear fix on something, is call this, and that code gets injected into the element that you're in. And that's fantastic. You don't have to then refer to how to do that. Actually, I've broken my code, but it's important it's nothing.  Extensions and inheritance. Apparently this is one of the best parts of SAS. I've never used them, and I've tried to avoid them. So good luck. The last one is operators. Operators basically let you do basic maths. So you've got fixed width of 900, and you need somewhere that needs to be 900 divided by two or something like that. You could just calculate that yourself, but by putting the calculations in the SAS, it makes it really clear the logic behind what you're doing. I don't really use them very often, because it doesn't really seem to come up, but maybe I'm just really bad at it, I'm not too sure. But that's the basics of SAS. So if you're not using it, and you no longer have any excuse to try, not to try, you can go to saslame.com and they cover all the basics and everything else from there. So have a go. We're kind of short on time, because we're minus the speaker. A little bit more time, so I'm just going to chop in a talk. I don't have any slides, because I wasn't planned on speaking, but it's fine. So I'm just going to talk briefly about performance when it comes to CSS animation.


I'm not Fluffy Pony. Sorry. Come on in, everybody, grab a seat. My name is Mike Savi. They flew me all the way in from Philly, and boy, is my block folio tired. Actually, you know what? Before we get started, while you guys are getting a seat, I just got to do one thing. You guys are actually in for a treat. I heard Fluffy Pony's going to make some really exciting announcements about Monero. So hold on. All right, buy 20 Monero. All right, cool. All right, my buy order's good. All right, so I don't really have much to sell, except for some jokes. I hope you guys laugh. That's pretty much it.   Showing myself. Now, we took an Uber on the way over here. I just wanted to point this out. It's kind of messed with my head a little bit. So we're on the way here, and we came to a stop sign. And we stopped. But on the stop sign, it was like, it's not like vandalized, but somebody put something on the stop sign to make the stop sign look like a mess. They made it so that the stop sign said stop rape. Great idea. That just means somebody's walking around in Las Vegas right now with a bunch of stickers. They just say rape on them. Like, I don't, could you imagine getting caught with, like, are you driving down the street? Cop pulls you over. Officer, what did you put? License to registration, hang on. It's right here in the club box.   So now we've got the rape jokes out of the way and the cop shooting jokes out of the way. Let's get into some crypto stuff. I'm a realtor by trade. So I sell houses to whoever still wants to buy them. I, we don't sell them for Bitcoin just yet. But honestly, I'm looking for a different career. Okay, I've been doing it for about 15 years. And one of the biggest reasons I want, I'm just like, I like people.  Should they think that I should know? Like I'm a real estate agent. I can tell you about value. But when somebody says, is there a lot of sex offenders in the neighborhood? I'll just go, yeah, they're everywhere. Like, they'll come knock on your front door. So I never happened to anybody here. I had a guy that came knock on my front door and said, hi, like I looked outside first. He didn't have a clipboard, didn't have a badge. I'm like, okay, this guy might be okay. I go, I open the door, tells me he's Steve the sex offender. I said, okay, by Steve the sex offender. That was all our entire counter. But I looked them up online. You know, you can do this. That's cyber stalk everybody. I'll probably cyber stalk half of you.  Like, 1907, look this up on your phones if you don't believe me.  I don't have my like smart. I bought one of these because I'm scared to death.  What up, marijuana is legal in Las Vegas. I just found out two days ago. It does affect the memory.   Cause he has three motorcycles. And we're like the best of friends now. I don't want to say that they're like, these guys share like, anything disgusting. Like not anything gross. I just gotta imagine like, hey, I got a bunch of kids coming over next door. I'm on crayons. Do you think that you could, I like when they color. Another reason I kind of got into crypto, honestly, aside from just the money, because one thing I believe about crypto is that I do believe that Bitcoin is going to eventually destroy the dollar. Cause I personally destroyed thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency. And if I can do it, I know that together we can all do it. But what I did, I was, I got into crypto cause it was kind of depressed. And the community is really what brought me back out of my like funk, right? And for anybody that's felt that way, I know what it feels like to be depressed and introverted, not want to leave your house. And it's hard. It's even a little nerve wracking just to kind of talk about some of the things that I felt like I went through. But I want to share one of the things that really helped me in my depression. So, you know, just personally like, you can look this up online.  Like these girls look right at you and they're just like, stroke that cock. And I'm like, I am. Like I don't want another reason to be sad, you know? So I got into crypto. It was a little bit better. It's true. Oh, okay. I do want to share this one last thing with you. I sold some Bitcoin last night to make some bad decisions.  Like she's my wife. I'm like, honey, I'm sorry. I swear, if you go back up, I will never ever sell you again. She still hasn't talked to me. So I've been texting gold for like, oh, one and two, just like it's a backup. You gotta have a backup, you know? Listen, if all in love, those sort of things happen. All right, we'll bring up our friend of mine. I just want to tell you what am I doing in Las Vegas? I was brought here for a show that was called the Crypto Shit Show. It was just evolved into something called the Crypto Integrity Show. And we got a lot of real, which, whatever you can make of that, which you need to. But I'm here with a really good friend of mine and Ken Bozak, Nathan Hawk from the IoT Village who put this all together. And Nate is like, he doesn't want all this fame but he's gonna at the very least get this credit that he wants to establish this thing where there's like bulldogs and crypto. So that you're afraid to like, like if you have something to show, you're afraid to do it because there's people that are gonna come along and within three seconds, go that's bullshit, get that out of here. And yes, we have a level of professionalism we have to keep, but I'm from Philly, okay?  So gotta forgive me, I'm a little rough around the edge. That guy wasn't me, by the way. But it was a little rough around the edges. But I think, and I think that's important. Like when I was younger, let me listen to rap. Awesome, Paul, three of you. Okay, well, I'm 40 and I love the Wu-Tang Clan. If you haven't heard of them, look them up, they're a great group of youngsters. But I gotta remember like, if I was an up-and-coming rapper, there was a lot of like scary names and stuff like that. There was a rapper named Ghost Face. Somebody knows this guy, Ghost Face Killer.  Those are scary and intimidating names, but man things have evolved. You know what the scariest name in the space right now is Fluffy Pony. So with that, I'd like to bring up my new friend, Mr. Fluffy Pony. Come on on, give it up for Fluffy Pony. I don't even want to know his real name. I appreciate you. Hello. That's fine, I got him. All right. Thanks for having me. So I'm here to talk about Mineros Emerging Applications. I don't actually know what that means. So we're just going to make this up as we go along. I'm going to talk about that in five minutes before I came here, so they might not be up to my normal standard of excellence. But for those of you who don't know, I'm Ricardo Sputney. You may know me as Fluffy Pony. You may also know me as that gigantic troll on Twitter.  I'm not the lead developer of Minero. That's a fallacy, a lie. I'm also not the lead developer. Oh, I said that already. I'm not the creator of Minero either. That's a Russian guy who I'm thankful for today. We don't know who he really was. We think he's Russian. And he created Minero in 2014. We had a little tiff with him off he went into the ether and probably went on to hack the American election. So that's cool. At least he accomplished his life's work. You can find me on Twitter and on Reddit and more recently on Mastodon, which is like decentralized Twitter because we decentralize all the things. And there is my GPG fingerprint, which is very important if you wanna validate the Minero binaries. Or if you're cool, you'll just compile from source. So what I wanna talk about is there seems to be this desire to blockchain all the things. And I think part of it is because Bitcoin was open source and so people realized they could just clone the repo and create the Bitcoin scam coin. And that led to this desire to just make everything a token or shove stuff onto the blockchain.  My favorite one is, I read an article, this was probably like three, four years ago and it was all about how in emergency situations, and this is true, responders struggle to get hold of each other or to get hold of the joint operation center and whatever because the cell phone networks are clogged up and sometimes they don't have access to radios, they've only got their cell phone on them and now the cell phone network's clogged up. And so this article posited that we could use blockchain to fix that. So you can't get on the internet but you're gonna use a blockchain to fix the comms problem.  But it's also for some things, it's awesome if you need tamper resistance, it's awesome if you need trustlessness, it's awesome if you need some sort of like a censorship resistance finality. These are all things that a blockchain can provide but it shouldn't be like the go-to and I think what I really wanted to sort of think about is this idea of tokens and you know, why do we need a token in this application and why do we need a token in that application? And the reality is you probably don't need a token if you're creating an application, although that seems to be the go-to and I think the reason it's the go-to, I think the reason why people try and model applications with the idea of a utility token is because they wanna do an ICO and buy a Lambo and I applaud that, I mean if that's your goal, no problem but just be outright about it, just be like we're doing an ICO so daddy can buy a new Lambo instead of being like we're doing a utility token. So you know, that said, there are some times where tokens are useful but before I get onto that side and there are some times where tokens are not so I wanted to sort of just talk a little bit about some of the applications that have been built without requiring a token. So things like obviously Tor, I mean what's the token that we use to pay Tor routers? There we go. But we don't, there's no token that runs I2P, there's no token that runs FreeNet, there's no token that runs Signal or Wire or any of the comms applications that we've become so accustomed to using. You know, OTR over RSE is incredibly powerful and RSE itself is incredibly powerful as far as decentralized, relatively decentralized federated protocols go and yet there's no token running that. And even in the blockchain world, the probably the first decentralized exchange is BitSquare which is now known as Bisk. And BitSquare like doesn't have a token. I mean it does have a token now but the token is just sort of a way to unlock certain things and they did that because they ran on a donation model for a long time and then decided to do this like internal mechanic to try and fund some stuff and that's cool. But the core functionality of BitSquare or Bisk doesn't require a token at all. So tokens can be largely meaningless and yet there are situations where I can see that a token is useful. And I think an example of this is of course, Counter Party which I value as an extremely underutilized protocol and Namecoin as well. I can buy that, that there's a native token that is required for the functioning of that protocol. But in general, I don't think that most applications need a token. So if you're building on Monero, how do you build on Monero? How do you leverage Monero? So there's several ways of leveraging Monero and I've been thinking about this a lot over the past few years because what's the point of programmable digital money for not programming it? If all we're doing is just sending it around, I mean that's cool, there's nothing wrong with that but I mean we kind of want to take advantage of the fact that this stuff's digital otherwise we can just carry on using cash. And I think that some of the advantages of Monero and maybe the key advantage of Monero is that there's this massive grassroots movement and people are ideologically motivated. So I think about miners as an example. Miners in Monero and this is certainly not across the board, there is a massive cabal of miners who are motivated by profits. They are mining because they want profit. And yet if you look at the stats, if you look at the potential profit from mining Monero, there are many times where Monero's hash rate stays relatively stable or even increases and yet at that point in time it's not profitable to mine Monero. So I have to assume that there are either a bunch of miners who have extremely low electricity costs and have purchased their GPUs for like super cheap and that's certainly possible. But I think the, and of course we've got the botnets and thank you botnet operators who are here for supporting the Monero network. I love your work. I mean I don't but thank you for following the rules of the network. But I think that there definitely is a, there's a large group of miners who are purely ideologically motivated. They're mining Monero because they believe in Monero. They're not mining Monero to sell and cover their electricity costs. We're talking about people who have like three, four, five rigs at home. They're covering their electricity costs out of pocket and they could be selling their hash rate on nice hash. They could be mining, I don't know, Tatatou, whatever coin is super profitable right now. That's also a legit coin I found out the other day. That Coinbase is thinking of adding. Thanks Coinbase. And yet there's this massive ideological core and I think that that's really powerful. And so when you're thinking of building applications on top of Monero, leverage that core. There's all this talk about proof of work being unsustainable and destroying the environments. And my wife's vegan so you're like, I understand about like destroying the environment and all the poor trees and all that, I get it. And so if you're building a new application, consider merge mining as a way of leveraging Monero's proof of work. With merge mining, what you're doing is you're building your own chain but you don't have to go and recruit miners. You don't have to go and find miners and try and motivate them with profit or ideology or whatever. You can just be like, hey, existing Monero miners, would you like some extra tokens for free? Because that's totally a thing you can do. Now with merge mining, you do have a native token because you've got to incentivize pools to add support for your merge mine chain and that's cool. But I think that there is massive benefit to that. Another component of this is of course, if you do end up going down that road, you build a merge mine application, then you have to try and leverage the existing plumbing. So you'll obviously want to do things like, oh, atomic swaps. So atomic swaps can be achieved in two ways using existing plumbing. There's hash time locked contracts, hash time locked contracts, HTLCs, and of course lightning. Now Monero has support from neither of those. So as existing plumbing, I mean existing plumbing in the world, not existing plumbing on Monero yet. But we are working towards adding HTLC support and adding lightning support. There are multiple groups that are focused on that and I think it's something that is achievable within the next sort of 12 to 24 months. And then we'll have the plumbing and the infrastructure for easy and virtually free atomic swaps between Monero and other coins. Now, there is of course an application that is being built called Tari. That is being built on top of Monero and this is something that I'm deeply involved in. I'm one of the founders, along with my co-founders, Dan and Naveen. And I wanted to talk a little bit about Tari as like a case study because again, we thought about many things that we can leverage and we are leveraging, the stuff I've just described, merge mining and we're trying to, at Tari Labs, we're trying to support HTLCs and lightning on Monero as particularly as a mechanism for atomic swaps. And lightning of course is great from a scaling and privacy enhancement perspective. But you might wonder why we rejected other ways of building a top of Monero at Tari. I mean, the Tari design is certainly not set in stone, but we thought about other things. For example, Monero transactions have this little field called TX Extra. And you can basically just shove whatever data you want into TX Extra and it's not at no cost. You're paying a transaction cost per byte. So it's not free to shove data in the blockchain, but you could ostensibly, like you could build a service that uses the Monero blockchain and backs up your entire computer to it. So if you're so inclined, I wouldn't advise doing that because it would be horribly expensive, but it is certainly something you can do. The problem with TX Extra, and this is something we've realized over the past few years, especially the Monero Research Lab guys, is that TX Extra only works really well if it's uniform, otherwise your transaction starts sticking out. And so you're busy shoving data into TX Extra and now everyone can pinpoint your transactions and now they start being able to perform large data analysis and that's not great. So we're working towards, I think, as a development work group and as a group of researchers, we're constantly working towards ways of creating transaction uniformity. And so anything like that would break transaction uniformity. And so we kind of have rejected TX Extra as a way of building on top of Monero and instead gone the sort of merge mining routes. It's something to consider if you are building an application. In terms of Tori and of what we're building, so Tori is a decentralized assets protocol. So in many ways we think of it as like this spiritual, I guess spiritual successor to Counter Party or spiritual sister to Counter Party. Counter Party's built on top of Bitcoin and Tori's built on top of Monero. And the whole idea is that there are natively digital assets that could benefit from a blockchain-like structure. So think about things like in-game assets, in-game tokens, loyalty points, tickets, ICOs, and other things. And of course one of the most exciting things is if you think about in-game assets and in-game tokens. So if you're a World of Warcraft player and you spend a bunch of time building up your character and you just play it and play it and play it and now your character is really built up and it's worth a ton of money and you're bored of World of Warcraft and you wanna go play Fortnite or whatever, it would be great if there was a dex where you could sell some of your World of Warcraft stuff and buy some Fortnite stuff or just move from one game to another as like a, you're not a pro gamer, but you play on weekends and you enjoy it and you've spent, you've invested time and you've maybe invested money and being able to perform that lateral shift from one game to another in a permissionless environment would be great. So these are things that we're thinking about that we think Tori will enable. And Tori, the way we're trying to build it is in a decentralized manner. So we're taking a leaf out of Manero's playbook and the design isn't set in stone. Like I said, we have a bunch of ideas. We have a community that's forming around Tori. We have a company in South Africa called Tori Labs that has a bunch of developers and researchers that we've hired pretty recently over the past three months and those developers and researchers will be contributing to the Tori project as well as a whole bunch of other people in the ecosystem. There's some Manero people who will be contributing to both Manero and Tori and there's some Tori Labs employees that are gonna be focusing on Manero as well. And I think that this is an interesting fact pattern in terms of building a decentralized application because it means that we're not the source of all knowledge. We're not saying, yeah, as our white paper go forth and we're gonna go forth and build. We're saying like, we have this cool idea. We have some ideas about how to build it and we've got some resources we can leverage but ultimately we need a community to build it. And in many ways that community is something that rises up out of the larger Manero community without poaching resources from the Manero community because we're able to feedback and share resources as much as possible. But this is an application that leverages Manero's existing technology or existing security model rather but we're able to play around from a technology perspective. So, you know, we've looked at things like DAGs and we've looked at, we're very excited about like Mumble Wumble as a technology and we think that Mumble Wumble can be leveraged because the whole idea of Mumble Wumble really is let's put as little information onto the blockchain as possible. Like what is the smallest nugget of information that you need for a transaction? How about just a unique identifier and that's it. And that's a really powerful thing that we're trying to leverage. And then of course lightning and other scalability solutions. And I think what's really interesting about this is that we can potentially create a fact pattern for other projects that wanna build on top of Manero to imitate. They can come into the fold and they can go, oh cool, that's the way we should be building things. Not let's write a white paper, let's do an ICO and then let's centrally issue our security token which totally isn't a security token. That's a utility token, I promise, SEC. You know, it's like yeah, that's a fact pattern that might actually work. And so I think that's kind of exciting. And I think this could be the start of a new class of applications emerging that are built on top of Manero. And one of the most exciting things about building on top of Manero and about inheriting that user base in that community is that there's a culture in Manero that is unavoidable and that is a culture of privacy first. Of privacy being a basic human rights and a basic tenant of the application that you're building. And I think that that is something that if you're building on Ethereum, you're thinking, eh, World Computer and purple cat t-shirts.  And so you end up with this amazing culture of like I want to protect myself. I want to protect the other people that are using this tool. I want to protect the user base. And I think if that's the one key takeaway from today, if you're building stuff, you've got to be users first. So to sum up some of the things, blockchains are mad hype right now. If you're working for a company, you probably have been told, hey, should we investigate blockchain technology? But mom. And I think to some degree, you can leverage that.  If you are building a decentralized app, you probably don't need a blockchain. Think about models like BitSquare, Bisk. Think about things like Tor and ITP. Think about all the things that have been built thus far that didn't need a blockchain and yet are decentralized. Also tokens can be useful, especially in merge mining scenarios, but it's imperative to first try a less constrained model because tokens also add a bunch of complexity. Incentives are really hard. And honestly, stuff like Monero and Bitcoin is, it's not just like, oh, slap a token in it and off you go to the races. I mean, there's this delicate balance of incentives, game theory, cryptography, and just pure unadulterated code. And you've got to try and balance all these components and all these different people in the ecosystem.  And the reality is that users don't care about your token. So a case in point, and this is not to knock any other project, but a case in point is bat, the basic attention token. I love Brave, the browser. I think Brave is an excellent effort at building a browser that is user-focused and to some degree privacy-focused. And I love the work that they're doing there. And yet they've got this token that they did a nice year with and then they've got this whole little in-browser token thing where when you're browsing someone else's content and that person wants to get paid for the content and you can send them some bat and it's a nifty little thing that you can build into it. The problem is like people aren't gonna go buy bat, right? So they airdrop bat onto people that installed Brave and then when those people ran out of bats because they were sending it to people when they watched videos and read articles, they weren't really incentivized to go buy more. So it's like, well, congratulations, you've built a reasonable token economy and yet users are just not incentivized to buy more. And I mean, what are they gonna do? Are they gonna go tell their boss, listen, when you pay me my salary at the end of the month, please put 0.5% in bat so that I can use my browser. I mean, it's just not feasible. So it's unfortunate, but token economics are really hard and users don't care about tokens. They don't wanna have a playthrough of tokens. No user wants to be browsing and then hit QR code and then pull out their phone and scan and then, oh, she's plugging the hardware wallet and then they're able to do things. It's not a good user experience right now. And you also don't need to invent a new security model unless you're an IOT and wanna win a Pony Award.  If you have a token, take advantage of existing plumbing. So stuff like HTLCs, which are being leveraged pretty widely for atomic swaps. And of course, lightning, which is being leveraged for everything, for privacy, for laps, for lightning apps and obviously for scalability. And above all, defend your users first, make money second. I think that this is probably the most important thing that I've learned from working from an error over the past four years is you will make money if you're focused on building a product that is amazing for your users, for the people that are using that application. And I think that we're in an incredibly nascent space where everyone has the potential to make a bunch of money and buy their own expensive watch. But we've got to build applications that protect our users first. Making money should be a secondary concern, it'll come. But the focus has to be on protecting users and that means dogfruiting. Use the stuff yourself, see where it breaks, like hate yourself for making that mistake and this other mistake and then go and fix it. And I think that's when an error needs most of all right now is just more people improving the user experience because we've got the privacy stuff done okay, we're doing okay there, we've got the security stuff okay, we've got the decentralization stuff okay, but the user experience kind of sucks and there are a lot of people working on it. But if you haven't played on the Minera code base, now's a good time to learn. So that's all I have to say. Thank you very much for listening to me ramble. And I guess now we'll take questions. Oh good, no questions. There's a question at the back there. Right at the back. Hi Fluffy Pony, thanks for doing the talk man. Thanks. What do you, you talked about atomic swaps. I've heard some other conversations about what's needed, kind of like what the underlying cryptography needs to be invented or researched for that to be able to happen. Could you talk a little more about that? Sure, I think the underlying cryptography largely exists. There's a bunch of stuff that, I mean we don't really have like op codes in Minera for obvious reasons. It's extremely stripped down. And I think that that's probably one of the key things is not a sort of generalized op code, but we can do a specific type of op code that is specifically for HDLCs. So I think there's just some plumbing that needs to be done there. We have multi-sig, which was of course a big component in pretty much everything. And multi-sigs are leveraged in a lot of HDLC type applications and things like zero knowledge contingent payments. A lot of the stuff leverages multi-sig, so now that we've got that, it's sort of time to take the next step. But in terms of the cryptography, I think we're largely there. Next question. Oh cool, I answered everyone's questions.  You can't have a favorite. I love them all equally. Sure, so I think there are a couple of things. I think that the first thing is stuff I've been thinking about is how do people earn Monero? How do they acquire Monero? I think that if we create a culture where it's like, oh, congratulations, you're not using Monero, please swipe your credit card, that's not ideal. And I think we can create models where people earn Monero. So I was thinking the other day, what's the fiver of Monero? How are we building tools that enable people to earn Monero? What's the mechanical turk of Monero? There isn't anything that's solving for that, really. So I think, I mean, there's probably some ICO that is, but there isn't anything really cool that people are building that enables that. So I think that's the first step, is getting people on board from an acquisition perspective, but doing so in a decentralized manner. Getting them to earn Monero without needing to go to some central repository and swipe their credit card, or use PayPal, heaven forbid, and the data goes to 600 companies in Europe.  You know, what's a VUGEE? Like what's, and my favorite, I didn't realize this, but I was in Panama for a few days and I was chatting to regulators, and I kept using the term address. I was like, and then you just send to that person's Monero address, or their Bitcoin address. And after like 30 minutes, someone put their hand up and there was like, so is an address, like their postal address. And I was like, wow, okay, so that's the level we're paying on. And I think that we, you know, there's this terminology that we just take for granted.  Sorry, what? Connected to peers. You know, like none of this stuff makes sense to people. We've got to either change the terminology, which I don't think is gonna happen. We went through a phase where we try to change the terminology from address to account. You know, this is your Monero account. We thought that was better terminology, did not take. And even if it is better to terminology, like no one's gonna use it. You know, address is the thing that everyone uses. Wallets is the thing that everyone uses. So fine, we're gonna use these terms, but let's try and define them. You know, maybe we can have overlays. The first time you hit a screen, maybe it can be like a little overlay that describes some of the elements. Just anything to try and get people through. And I think we'll get there eventually, but yeah, it's like for a newcomer who's new to crypto, the UX is just bad all around. Sure. So that's a good question. I think that anything that holds people earn Monero doesn't, firstly, it doesn't have to be Monero-specific. It can be sort of a more generalized crypto thing. One of the things we've done at Globy is we'll ingest all of the scam coins. No problem, you can pay in Ripple. Even Ripple. Maybe we'll even add Verge. But in terms of being settled, you can only be settled in Bitcoin and Monero and Fiat. So that's massive because then it becomes a funnel. It's like cool, pay us in Ripple. But we'll just convert that to Bitcoin and Monero for the person like when no one's keeping Ripple. So I think that's really powerful, XRP the standard. I think that's really powerful and I think an application that lets people earn Monero can do the same thing. It can be like pay people to do jobs in any currency and then settle them in Bitcoin or Monero or just Monero, whichever. And I think that there's lots of scope for, you can go do VC like no problem with that. And I think that given the conversations that we had with VC firms about Tari and the fact that we were able to raise money from tier one venture capital firms like Trinity and Redpoint and Slow Ventures and all of those guys, I think they've come to some sort of appreciation of Monero, the technology and the fact that it's not going anywhere despite a whole bunch of people's desires. And so there's some, there's tacit respect for Monero. So you just go build something and go raise VC if that's what you need to do. Or just go build something in your garage, do it after hours. I mean, have a side hustle. I had side hustles for ages and they were great. And I think like one of the most powerful things there is building an open source application and doing it in a sort of semi decentralized manner. Open up a GitHub repo, start an IRC channel, invite some people in, get the conversation going. Start a subreddit and just get people helping out, chipping in and helping out. Pick a technology stack, whatever that is. Go, Node.js, Rust, whatever. Build your application and people will pitch up and help if it's the right application and it's the right group of people. Cool? Sure. So I think to answer your question, I don't know, is everyone yet familiar with Eternal September? So Eternal September is this thing where like the internet used to be cool and underground and then AOL came out and dished out a bunch of CDs and suddenly a bunch of people got online in September of like, I don't know, September of 93 or 94, whenever it was. And suddenly the internet and IRC in particular went from being like this cool underground place to like a whole bunch of kids coming in and they didn't know the lingo and they didn't know the parlance and they were like all these running jokes that they didn't get and the culture was like all sort of like upset, you know, the apocat is upset. And I think one of the most telling things was if you were on IRC in the early days, like nobody pretended to be someone they weren't. Like people would, you would go to meetups and people would be the same at meetups as they were in IRC. There was no catfishing, there was none of that. People just like, stupidly, inherently trusted everyone over IRC. Can you imagine doing that today? You know, it was like, oh man, yeah, I'd love to come meet you but I can't pay for the plane ticket. Can you wire me some money? Sure, no problem. I mean, that was a legit thing that happened. And then eternal September happened and that just ruined it for everyone. And I think that to some degree as the Monero community itself gets bigger and as, you know, it's sort of tarry grows and we start heading more mainstream participants or more mainstream people, then yes, we are gonna have our own eternal September. And I think to some degree, like I realized that last year with the consensus announcement, which I thought was hilarious and a whole bunch of people didn't.  And I think that we are gonna face that in waves.   And you're not gonna be able to control that.  But I think what we can do and what we have already is a culture that carries. We have a culture where people come in and they're like, when Lambo?  They get shuffled to different areas where they can go and post memes, where they can go and talk about price and whatever. And it leaves the sort of, the main thoroughfares, the main areas where people chat about Monero are largely free of that sort of thing. And that's really powerful. And I think as long as we continue pushing people into different areas, then that'll be the best way to try and stave off eternal September for as long as possible. Yes? What is this consensus? Oh, sorry. No, no, no, that's fine. At consensus last year, which is a conference in New York, I made an announcement which was a fake announcement. I announced the Monero Enterprise Alliance, which doesn't exist. And... I lied. You see, yeah, you are using a trustless digital currency and yet you trusted someone. Rookie mistake. But anyway, yeah, and I took a lot of heat from that. Not so much from people who'd been in the Monero community for a long time because they found it hilarious, but there were people that on the wake of the, or on the expectation of the announcement bought Monero. And I mean, I'm sorry that sucks for them, but it wasn't my intention to try and sort of upset the market and yet that's what happened. So I think my point really was largely about just as the community gets bigger, it just becomes harder and harder to try and manage expectations and to have in-jokes continue to run. So regulators are interesting. I mean, some of them have... Well, there's two things. The first is that a lot of regulators, not so much in Panama because they have a fantastic banking infrastructure, but in Venezuela, there were a lot of politicians that love Monero, unsurprisingly, so that they can keep all this stuff hidden. And so there's a lot of like, well, we like Monero for our own use, but we don't want the people down there using it because we want to be able to extract blood. And it's very two-faced. And so then they, but they don't express concerns that way. They're like, oh, we really like Monero, but we're deeply concerned about its ability to fund terrorism and send money to North Korea. And I'm like, yes, I'm deeply concerned about cash as well. Gold bars, those are the problems. Expensive wristwatches, we should stop sending those to North Korea.  I tend to, whenever regulators talk to me and they say, oh, we're concerned about the potential for using Monero for X, I just repeat the thing back at them, but use, replace the word Monero with cash. I'm like, yes, I am also concerned about cash being used for that. Cash is indeed bad. And they get the idea. It takes them a few tries before they realize what's happening. Is that too? Cool. Thank you very much.