Are you guys enjoying the conference so far? It's great. So, like you said, my name is Annie Sexton, and like a lot of time thinking about how people absorb knowledge. And that's why I'm really excited to talk to you guys about tribal knowledge and why it's so dangerous, and how by learning to address it, you can not only learn how to scale your team much more quickly, but help them become self-sufficient, which I think is the most important thing about this. But before we get into that, I know she gave me a bit of an intro, but I'll probably say the same things once more. I'll tell you guys a little bit about myself. So she mentioned I was a digital nomad. I'm a retired digital nomad. I just bought my first place, but I basically spent all of last year like living out of a suitcase and globe trotting, and it was a lot of fun. But I got sick of airports really quickly. So I'm also a volunteer English teacher at a non-profit in my hometown of Austin, Texas, which is a lot of fun. I really enjoy teaching, and as she said, I'm a full stack developer and have been for about five years. And I worked at lots of different web agencies and just spent a lot of time farting around on my own Rails applications. But of course, this was all before I was hired by the man. And by the man, I mean Salesforce. And by Salesforce, I mean Heroku. And it is great. Totally candid photo here, definitely not staged. But really, it's an awesome place to work. My coworkers are super smart, super friendly. I get to work on my dream platform. And Salesforce, our parent company, is really awesome. They're like, hey, what's up? We're Salesforce. We have this guy. So it's great. Overall, I really, really like work. It's the best job I've ever had. But, you know what had some room for improvement? Was the onboarding process. Yeah, you see, Heroku is a bit of a complicated platform. Easy to use, right? We pride ourselves in making it easy to use. My mic's still on, there we go. So it's easy to use, but there's a lot of things going on behind the scenes. And there was a lot of information that I needed to know to ramp up for my job. And I'll tell you guys what I actually do at Heroku. So, and what we call a support engineer, which sounds about as vague as solutions architect and success developer. But all that means is that I'm on the support team. And we're called engineers because we are engineers.  So, Heroku doesn't have a tiered system when it comes to our support. Instead, we break it up like this. We have core support, and these are sort of like the generalists, right? We're the first line of defense whenever tickets come in. And then if we need specialized help, we can get someone who has specific knowledge about Kafka, about Postgres, about Heroku Connect. If any of you caught Caleb Thompson's talk earlier, he is our resident Heroku Connect expert. So, say hi to him in the hall. But I am on the core support team. So, as a generalist, it's basically our job to be the power users of Heroku. So we basically have to be better at Heroku than everyone else in this room combined. And there's a lot to know. There's a lot of moving parts, and it's a little difficult. And boy, howdy. Lately, the ticket queue's been getting out of control, which is why Heroku is hiring. All of RubyConf, congratulations, you're all hired.  This is just a bit.  So, just to get you started as a new support engineer, we're gonna need to make sure that you're all familiar enough with the platform. So I'm just gonna give you guys a quick download of what I know about the platform right here right now, so take notes, okay? So, Heroku lets you deploy, run, and manage applications written in Ruby Node, Java, Python, Clojure, ScalaGo, and PHP. Languages which are provided by our buildpacks. But if you need further dependencies, you can use third-party buildpacks or even Docker, which is a container, like a Dino. Diners are containers, but not the same as Docker. But they make scaling really easy. Domains, if you'd like to use your own custom domain, you can do so by running Heroku Domains ad, yourdomain.com, and creating a C name record for any subdomains, and an A name record for any root or apex or negate domains with the respective DNS targets. And, you know, somehow I feel like that's not the best way of conveying this information. Maybe there's a better way, huh, maybe. So, for the record, that's not what Heroku onboarding looks like. Thank goodness. Because, let's be honest, there's just too much about the Heroku platform for me to convey that information in a timely manner, right? There's just, that would be a poor use of your time and mine. Wouldn't you agree? Now, luckily, we don't have to do it that way. We have the Dev Center. Who in here has read articles in the Dev Center? Thank you. Yes. So, yeah, we've got it all documented, right? We don't have to convey it verbally. Thank goodness. But when I was being onboarded, there were things about the platform that were not in the Dev Center, things about the architecture, how things were interconnected, what were its limits, what were its edge cases, stuff that was kind of documented, but it was kind of documented all over the place. And on top of that, I had to learn so much more just to learn, like, the things that I needed to know as a support person. Here are the internal tools that we use for debugging customers' apps. Here's how to use Splunk. And all these other CLI commands that I've never used before. And we have our own support system as well, because we're all developers. So we were like, we'll just build a system ourselves. And so that's what we did. And so there was a lot to learn. And like I said before, it was kind of documented, but some of it wasn't documented. And if it was documented, it was, like, all over the place. And I had to look in five different places to find that. And there was just a lot to learn. In other words, there was a lot of tribal knowledge that I had to absorb. So what is tribal knowledge? Let's define it. So tribal knowledge is that information that exists in the brains of your coworkers, your tribe, and nowhere else. And this is no bueno. It's dangerous. And I'll give you an example. So how many of you can relate to this? You're like, headphones on. You're in the zone. You're super focused, and you're only, that's probably not you, because that's not Ruby. Hey, you're in the zone, and that's also not Ruby. What about? Perfect. OK. So you're in the zone. You're working on your super focus, right? When all of a sudden, something distracts you from the corner of your eye. Hey, yeah, sorry to bother you. You have a real quick question. Hey, how do I, you, the senior experience developer, reluctantly remove your headphones? Yes? Concentration is broken. That sucks, right? But let's say the roles are reversed. Let's say you're the new kid, and you just want people to like you, and you're trying to work really hard, and yet the answers you're looking for aren't documented anywhere. So what do you do? Well, if you're in that situation, then guess what? You get to be the one to wake the sleeping dragon. And that's always fun, right? First of all, stop hiring dragons and be nice to your new people. So that's one thing.  And especially when you're a growing business, it is unfortunately very common for all of this important information to reside in the brains of just like one or two people, right? Times this is harmless, right? Hey, where do we keep the PSDs for the marketing side again? No big deal, right? But sometimes, it's not so harmless. My website is down. I can't get ahold of my developer, and I don't have access to the app on Heroku. Let me insert here by saying that credentials should never be tribal knowledge, ever. But this happens an unfortunate number of times. And you know what we have to tell these well-meaning business owners? I'm sorry. Your email isn't listed as an owner or a collaborator. I'm afraid I can't provide you any details about the app. You're going to have to do your best to reach out to your developer. Sorry.  Tribal knowledge is dangerous. And as we've seen, it's dangerous for two reasons. So number one, it creates bottlenecks for both senior people and junior people. And it creates liabilities. Because when, not if. When those people leave with that information, you're screwed. So, oh, sorry. Too fast. That's OK. So some of you might be thinking, listen, Annie. I don't know how they do it at Heroku, but we do document our stuff. It's just that these other people don't know how to look things up themselves, right? They can't do their own research. OK. That's fair. Totally get it. So where are these articles kept? Oh, you know. Google Docs, markdown files, GitHub issues, Trello cards, emails, Google Hangout Threads, Quip. So that's a lot of places to store stuff. And maybe it's a little hard to find that information. But no, listen, I get it. I do understand that sometimes people are just lazy. OK? That's worth acknowledging. But here's the thing. If this is a serious problem, where people aren't looking up the answers themselves, the first thing that needs to happen is you need to set boundaries. Without boundaries, you can't have a self-sufficient team at all. So you need to train your clients, your co-workers, your managers, your mom, that they can work around your schedule, right? And so this is really, really important. But now, so if you have some of this tribal knowledge documented, maybe, like I said before, maybe people aren't able to even find it. Like, it's written down, but no one even knows where to look. It's like the Ile de Muerta, a location that cannot be found except by those who already know where it is. Yar. Which is fine if we're talking about cursed treasure, but we're not. So what do you do? Well, there are two main issues. There's people not knowing what is documented, and then there's people not knowing where it's documented. OK? And these seem like really solvable issues, right? And yet they're really common. And that's why I want to go way in depth with you guys about how you address these problems and why they need to be addressed in this way. So let's assume this is a worst case scenario. You have nothing documented. What do you do? Well, since you can't just, like, the giver the information away, how do you transfer that information on? Right, what do you do? By a show of hands, how many of you, when you get a new appliance or a new car, you read the entire user manual? OK, you guys are the outliers. Personally, I like to see how far I can get without the manual. I like to live on the wild side.   And who wants to sit through and read through all of that? Four people do, but that's it. First of all, I admire you people who do that. So instead, we need two things to ensure that the tribal knowledge we're documenting is actually digestible. And since we can't just, at least at this point, we can't just plug you in matrix style and you're like, oh, I know, kung fu. Here's what we need instead. Number one, we need a crash course. And number two, a knowledge base. If there is anything you remember from my talk, it's these two things, a crash course and a knowledge base committed to memory, OK? Now, in their simplest terms, these two things are really just two different sets of documentation. They can take any form you really like. They could be webinars. They could be videos if you wanted, but they don't have to be. It's just easier for instruction's sake to talk about them like two different sets of articles, OK? So with that being said, let's talk about the first one. We've got the crash course. Now, I'm calling it a crash course, but you could easily call it like a getting started guide. Now, the point of this isn't to document everything you need to know for a particular job. It's just enough information to get someone started so that they can then self-educate, so they can look up the answers on their own. It's not everything. It's just a primer. It's just the basics.  Engineers, developers, you know who you are. Now, listen, I'm totally generalizing. So take that with a grain of salt. But also, hear me out because I know there are people in this room who need to hear this. So we are regularly criticized as a group that we can't just talk in like layman's terms, right? They make TV shows about how poorly we explain things, right? Terrible, awful TV shows, I might add, but whatever. And the problem is that we explain highly technical terms in highly technical terms. And that doesn't help, OK? And I'll give you an example of what this might look like. So I have a buddy of mine who happens to be an expert in Postgres, very smart guy. And so I came to him one day, and I said, hey, I was wondering, what's the difference between Truncate and Delete in SQLand? And this is what he responded. Truncate is more like a DDL, data definition language statement, than a delete, which is a DML, data manipulation language. Yeah, duh. Can I get you to the right? Yeah, duh. That was good. Yeah, so OK, what now? OK, well, OK, well, so essentially, Truncate is a fixed cost operation versus Delete, which is closer to, oh, parentheses n, where n is the number of rows affected. Maybe we're getting closer here. Maybe I don't really know. OK, OK, OK. Truncate is like, give me a fresh table. Boom, that is what he should have started with. That is a good sentence. And later, he went on to add, oh, yeah, yeah. Truncate is like the big guns. But you guys see what I mean, right? When asked to describe the forest, we immediately go into describing the molecular composition of the bark, right? So we need to be able to step back a little bit. And by the way, I'm not throwing my friend under the bus here. He's usually quite good at explaining things. I just thought that particular example was great. So this is something that we have to be aware of when we're writing our crash course. We need to be aware of the terms we're using so people understand it. Again, the biggest thing about the crash course is it has to be digestible, right? And this even applies to non-technical things, right? Even to give you a non-engineering example.   And that's normal. So you have to think about this. When you're writing your crash course, you've got to think of these questions. Who am I writing this for? What is their background? What terms do I need to explain? And what am I assuming they already know? Like, do they know what the Aloha portal is? That kind of thing. So the last thing I'll say about the crash course is it's a crash course. It's not like a whole Udemy course that you take over the course of several months. It's got to be really quite short because it has to be digestible, right? It can't be too long and it can't be too short. It needs to be as long as a skirt. It needs to be long enough to cover the material but short enough to keep it interesting. OK, so there's, let's talk about the knowledge base. This is the second part to this. So your knowledge base, where we were concerned with the crash course not being too long, the knowledge base is where you put everything else. It's all the rest of anything that needs to be documented within your team. It's this expansive repository of articles that people can refer back to, right? And this is a really great place to store things like playbooks, procedures, checklists, all of the documentation, right? And because we are prepped with the knowledge that we learned from the crash course, we kind of know how to navigate this and we know we're more equipped to go and search for answers. So to facilitate the ease of use of our knowledge base, it's got to be these three things. It's got to be easy to find, easy to update and easy to find what we're looking for. Now I know one and three kind of sound similar so I'll explain. So easy to find. You have to pick, this is gonna be hard, but you have to pick one place to keep all of your knowledge base articles, one place. Now I don't think this is possible for like a really big company, but within a team, absolutely possible, okay? Pick one place, otherwise, you're not really getting around that bottleneck problem, right? You're still gonna get people tapping on the shoulder, hey, did we keep that in Dropbox or Google Drive or where do we keep that thing? And we don't want that. Pick one place, it doesn't matter, right? Choose amongst your team and then stick with it. Next, you gotta make it easy to update. Give your team right access to these articles and then get out of their way because the people who are using the articles really should be the ones who have access to edit them and just, you don't wanna have a lot of hurdles and checks and stuff like that to get in their way. Which is a pretty simple thing, but I wanna extend this to, if you have documentation that's also intended for non-engineers, don't make the place, don't make them do a pull request to update those articles, right? They may be able to figure it out, but you're adding friction where there shouldn't be, okay? So we gotta reduce the friction on updating these articles. Last thing I'll mention is that if you've reduced the number of, sorry, if you have your knowledge-based articles in just one location, and as long as that one location has the ability to search through those articles, which like, I don't know what tool wouldn't have that ability at this point unless you have your stuff in a filing cabinet, a physical filing cabinet, which I'm sure you're not gonna do. As long as you can search through them, then how you organize those articles within your knowledge-based doesn't actually matter at all. You can stack them in a big old pile as long as you can search, right?  It's like a really weird hobby of mine. I love to plan. You know what I asked for Christmas this year? A spreadsheet. So just know that, just know that when I say you don't need to organize your articles, I really mean it, right? As long as you can search for them. But you can go back and organize them a little bit more if you want, but it's not super necessary. So now that we understand the two pieces to addressing tribal knowledge, we've got a crash course, we've got our knowledge base, let's look at what this actually looks like in real life. And I'll give you the example of, not just Heroku, but Heroku's support team specifically. So we started to adopt this model kind of unknowingly, definitely with my influence. But it's been really helpful. And some of this stuff was in place before I even got started at Heroku, which is awesome. So when we onboard new people now, we have them read three articles. Remember how I said the crash course should be short? Ours is like three articles. So really it does not have to be long. One of those things is this thing that actually all new Heroku, Heroku read when they're onboarded, and it's called the Heroku Academy. It's this big long document that talks about sort of the basics of the platform. Here the feature is these are pipelines, these are review apps. Here's private spaces, that kind of thing. And we have a couple of other articles that are more specific to just support engineers. Here's our tool, here are the CLI commands we tend to use, here are the internal tools that we use, all sorts of stuff that gets them started. Here's how we work through the queue, here's how you deal with an angry customer, that sort of thing. And so this is our crash course, it gets them started to be a support engineer. Then we have our knowledge base. And because we're talking about the Heroku support team, our knowledge base is actually just the help site, the articles in the help site. And you'll see we have them kind of categorized. This is honestly more for your benefit than ours, because it's easier to open up a ticket that way. So we know more about what you're talking about if you have an issue. But you can just search for what you're looking for. Like I said before, searchability is key. And then you can find the articles that you're looking for. And we have both public facing articles, which is what most of you would search through if you had a question. And we have internal ones, with super Heroku secrets and stuff like that, that are just specific to our job. Now, you might be wondering, wait, hang on. Heroku has a dev center. Why even have this? What's the point? Well, in Heroku land, we support, realize that there was a need for a place to provide answers to common questions that didn't really fit in the dev center. And I'll give you an example. I didn't just wanna put Lisa Frank in my slides. I promise this has to be an explanation. So we were noticing that there were a lot of apps that used Unicorn as their web server that were experiencing these seemingly inexplicable request timeouts. Specifically H12. H12 is what it looks like on Heroku. We time your request out after 30 seconds. So why was this happening? Actually, that basically explains it. So Unicorn can be a bit harsh. So what would happen is you would have these slow web workers that Unicorn would, instead of sending it like a sig term, it would send it a sig kill. So it didn't have any chance to output an error or wrap things up gracefully or anything like that. It was just like, boom, sig kill. Muffling your app's cry for help. And so what would happen is with fewer web workers, your app didn't have as many workers to handle requests. So they would pile up and your performance would tank and then you would run into these H12s. So this is a Unicorn issue, technically, but you wouldn't see H12s anywhere else than Heroku. So we decided to create a knowledge-based article for it. Oh, and also, I don't know if I mentioned this before. To customers, these are like the help site articles. We literally call this the knowledge base. I think it used to be called the knowledge base as well. We call them KB articles. And this is one that I wrote. But we have hundreds, thousands, I think, actually thousands probably of these KB articles that really, really help our customers and us support our customers, which is great. So why do we have so many articles? Why is it so, so useful? It's useful because all of our engineers at Heroku have the ability to create these KB articles, all of our engineers. And especially the support team. We've basically had this gut reaction that when we notice something that's important, that's not documented, we're like, oh, gotta create a KB article for it. It's just an instinct, right? And you need to build that up in your team. And having that has been so, so helpful. And our engineering teams have noticed that when they create more knowledge base articles, then support stops bothering them so much. So they like that as well. So there you go, these are, this is what the example can look like in real life. You have a very short crash course which preps you with just enough knowledge to get you started. And then a knowledge base where you can search for everything else. Now does this mean that Heroku's onboarding process is like totally seamless and totally hands off and we just hand them the articles and walk away? Absolutely not. But it definitely helps. Especially the knowledge base that we have is so, so crucial to having our team be self-sufficient. Now I haven't even, I'm not gonna go into, in my talk, cross-team tribal knowledge, that kind of stuff because I feel like that's a whole other talk so I won't dive into that. But just know that this does cover most of your bases with tribal knowledge and it's really important to try and implement something like this. Now, let's talk about how we keep these docs up to date. So you've created your crash course, you've created your knowledge base, how do you actually make sure that they stay up to date? Well the first thing is, I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but make them easy to update. Again, give people right access and get out of their way, okay? Just let them do their thing and they'll keep it up to date. The second thing is a really actionable tip which is to add expiration dates to all of your articles. So in Haruka's knowledge base, after three months we automatically mark that article as like, hey, this is due for a review, right? And so the next time one of us comes to that article and we see that notification, that's our cue to go, oh, I should probably just double check that this is still true, right? We don't get like a notification or anything like that, it's just the next time we visit it, we're like, oh, looks like I should check on this, we can go back. So this is an easy thing to do.  Now, do not just put when it was last updated, that doesn't count, okay? Because think about this, what if you bought milk and they put the, instead of putting the expiration date, they just put like, when the cow was milked on the milk, carton, you're like, wait, but can I drink it? What's the deal? And so that doesn't work because we don't know if that article is still relevant one month, one year, two years down the line. It may be, but we don't know. So just pick an arbitrary date, one week, one month, one year down the line and then stick with it, okay? Now, how do we make sure that these docs are actually useful? Because you can write them once, but they may not be perfect, right? And they probably deserve some iteration. So let's say you're the new kid and you're reading the docs, maybe something in the crash course of a knowledge base, and you're like, I don't understand this at all. What, I don't understand this. First of all, that's important. Take note of that and then go and improve that documentation, okay? As a new person, you have to feel empowered and if you're a manager, help your team, help your new people feel empowered to go and make these changes as they see fit because their fresh eyes are so valuable, right? And so as the new kid, do not let the feeling of I'm a new kid, what do I know? Get in the way of improving crappy documentation because I know what this is like.  Spoiler alert, it's always okay to say, I don't understand this.  Look, they explained it twice and you still don't understand it.  I was like, my slides need more Pokemon. So what I've found is that when I'm feeling big and unafraid and frankly entitled to a decent explanation, that is when I feel comfortable to step up to the plate and say, yeah, don't understand a word of what you just said. All right, and then I forced them to explain themselves better. And if you've ever been too afraid to say, I don't get it because blah, blah, imposter syndrome, right? We can all relate, I've got a tip for you.  I never just say, I don't get it. I'll say, okay, I understand what this term means in this context, but it sounds like you're describing something different. Like you said the word index and this is what I understand an index to be to mean, but you're using it in kind of a different way. Can you clarify? So be specific, okay? Do not let the other person get away with explaining things in terms that you don't understand. Make them describe the forest, not the bark. Now, there's one more thing I want to address. I know that there are folks out there who have worked very hard to get to where they are. And they had to sweat and they had to labor and there probably was not nice documentation all bundled together for them so that they could easily learn. They had to learn this on their own, right?  They made it, and now they're at the top and they know all the information, all the information. And that's great, right? That makes them feel really important because they worked really hard for that. And they should feel important and they should feel valuable, good for them, right? But because of the pain they endured, they can tend to feel a little protective, like they need to cling on to the information that they learned. The idea of properly documenting what they know can feel a little bit like they're giving away their treasure, that in some way, they might actually be less important, right? So the question is, will I still be valued if I share everything I know? And I hope it's obvious that the answer is an emphatic yes. Because what you learned is not something you can learn in just like a few articles, right? Doing what you do is hard, so be proud of that. We should not, and for the most part, we do not hoard knowledge. This is why we have the open-source community, right?  And there's people who rise to the top as well, right? And that's amazing because getting good at what we do is hard, and that's something worth valuing. As I mentioned before, I spend a lot of time thinking about how people absorb knowledge. And I think what fueled this talk was my own curiosity about how you educate people in the workplace. And in the workplace is key here, right? Because if we have infinite time and infinite resources, we could just create a whole academy for onboarding new people, and wouldn't that be great? But we don't have academies, and this isn't school. This is work, and we have to do work. So how do you provide the time to educate people with what they need to know to do the job, and help them be self-sufficient? You do that by teaching them the basics and giving them the resources to continue learning on their own. That is how you address tribal knowledge. Thank you guys so much.


The main challenges that are coming is related at the present with COVID-19, preconditions that have to be in place to avoid spreading first of all and to create a situation to affect not only the health of beneficiaries but also our staff that is as well as service providers when we have the transportation or lab or other entities that cannot come to office and have to work from home or team has to work in three locations at the same day. So it's constant constant pressure that I believe with additional funding we will be able to deploy at least on full staff that will assist the emergency response and make things happen and to show that I am the main player when it comes together with other agencies definitely but when it comes to the assistance to the ground workers.


Hey there friends. Thanks for checking in and welcome to another video on my series called one handgun One shotgun and one rifle the handgun that I'm featuring today is my six hour P220 in 45 ACP I've owned this gun a long time. It was produced in 2010. This is the carry model They don't make the carry model anymore. They make the full-size models with the 4.4 inch barrel This has a 3.9 inch barrel. It does have the same anodized aluminum frame siglite night sights a rail and an eight-round single-stack magazine and 45 ACP absolutely love this gun. I think I've Owned it since 2012 and really have enjoyed it ever since Let's see how it fires Yeah, just as I remember what a great gun this is and I am told that the P220 model was the first gun that started six hour that the two 20 models have been around forever and They've evolved into something like this in the full-size models. They are super cool handguns Now let's get to that shotgun The shotgun that I'm featuring today is a Remington 1187 semi auto 12 gauge that holds four shells of two or three-quarter inch in the tube one in the chamber for Five rounds total 26 inch vet rib barrel comes with three chokes in here right now is The all-purpose modified choke does have a bead and a bead to align most commonly known for waterfall Definitely a hunting shotgun Very nice Remington make some great shotguns and this one is no different. Let's check it out. There it is Nice butt pad here kind of need that on the semi-auto Very nice shooting shotgun now. Let's get to that rifle The rifle that I'm featuring today is a Ruger PC9 carbine with the new anodized aluminum Handguard with M lock slots on the top the side and the bottom of this handguard It does have a 16 inch Fluted barrel that is threaded with one half inch by 28 threads. The lower is essentially the same Very functional. It does have spacers The back of the stock that allows you to custom fit that to your shooting style and it has there comes with a 17-round Security 9 magazine also an insert that allow the shooter to use Glock mags Very nice setup real space on top if you want to add a dot or an optic and A rear and front sight available come standard. Let's see how it shoots I'm having trouble picking up the I need to paint these targets orange and there we go And joys a phenomenal Reputation and this handguard Looks cool, but very functional as well Thanks for watching another video in my series called one handgun one shotgun and one rifle If you like videos like this, please subscribe and share. I always appreciate thumbs up button Thanks for watching and you guys be safe


The Justice Department on Wednesday named former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Can a sitting president be prosecuted? Can a sitting president be thrown in prison? Or is impeachment our only hope for removing Trump? For more on this we're going to be joined in Washington DC by Dylan Matthews who writes for Vox but first a few words about Vox. Vox was set up three years ago by Ezra Klein who left the Washington Post to basically do over at Vox what he was doing over at the Washington Post and that is to explain the news. Vox.com explains the news. The explainers at Vox are essential great clear concise writing. Vox I cannot recommend Vox enough if you see something in the news you don't understand it go to Vox.com. Vox.com understands that most people see every news story as a soap opera that they're watching for the first time and from what I have been able to see over at Vox is that Ezra Klein and his staff they get that everyone including the experts everyone we're all flying on instruments we can't remember how we got there and that's why Vox is so great it lets you feel okay for not knowing anything. Welcome to the show Dylan Matthews. Great to be here and that's I think the best and most complementary description of what we do that I've ever heard so thank you for that. Well I mean it and that's kind of been the mission statement of this show is I have children and I've always been trying to explain to them the news I always wanted to sit with them and watch the New York watch the New York Times go over the New York Times and my father used to explain to me how to read the New York Times and how we got to where we're at because you really can't understand a news story unless you put it in context and Ezra Klein I would assume is in his 30s and talk to people his age and younger and they're lost because there's a shorthand I'm getting angry there's a shorthand this makes me really angry people use a shorthand not to inform but to exclude to make themselves sound smarter it's why mass used to be delivered in Latin thank you for joining us we're done thank you that was quick but yeah no we try to make things accessible and and yeah that I think a lot of that is people writing this inverted pyramid format and news stories that made a lot of sense for print newspapers since you needed something where you could cut off the end if you absolutely needed to for for regional papers and like and it doesn't make as much sense online and so we're trying to play around with some new ways of presenting the news and trying to put it in more context so I'm glad you're a fan I'm a fan you know I go to the intercept for great investigative reporting and I go to Vox to understand what I just read which is the intercept does really great work yeah there's a very exciting new media happening I think Vox we have to talk about Robert Mueller but I think Vox changed the New York Times I think Vox single-handedly changed the New York Times the New York Times is my my bible as is the Washington Post but I've noticed that the New York Times since Vox got it that most of us don't get it and we need to be told what happened and how we got there okay we're going to talk about that was me clapping my hands out of excitement we're going to talk to Dylan about whether or not a president can be prosecuted in a second but case in point since we set up the interview yesterday you wrote a piece for Vox entitled and I love this nine questions about Watergate you're too embarrassed to ask and that's such a great example of the public service Vox.com provides Vox.com provides not just for millennials who only heard about Watergate but for aging baby boomers like me who live through Watergate and can't remember a damn thing so the news is happening really fast is it faster than Watergate it really seems that way and it certainly seems to be having really negative repercussions for Trump faster than Watergate I think one of the remarkable things for someone like me who didn't live through it and is sort of reading about it as history is that in the midst of the beginnings of the scandal that after the actual Watergate break in after people were arrested it ties to his campaign he won the biggest victory in modern American history in the 1972 presidential election that he seemed unscathed and it really wasn't until almost a year after after the initial break in that things started to escalate the Senate set up a committee to investigate the matter a special prosecutor was appointed and it was kind of a slow burn and from there it took another year or so until sort of things got to a point where it was clear that that Nixon had tried to interfere with the FBI investigation which was sort of the smoking gun that that led a group of Republicans to go to the White House and say your presidency is over and it's really remarkable to me now that we have this this memo that James Comey wrote saying that the president asked him to scuttle an FBI investigation that it's a pretty close parallel to a very late development in Watergate that sort of sealed the deal in a lot of ways it doesn't seem to be going a lot faster right could Nixon have been prosecuted for obstruction of justice I know that he some of the articles of impeachment were about obstruction of justice but was Archibald Cox who was a special prosecutor who was fired could they have pursued obstruction of justice that's what you wrote about right so the conclusion that Cox and Leon Jorsky who succeeded him after Nixon fired Cox came to you was that the president can't be prosecuted outside the impeachment process while he's in office they were absolutely of the view and I think it is sort of uncontributable among legal scholars that the president can be prosecuted for crimes committed as president once he leaves office so there was a really real possibility after Nixon resigned that Jorsky or another prosecutor which filed charges against him now that he was sort of lost presidential immunity in their view that was was rendered moot after Gerald Ford pardon Nixon and it actually made it impossible to prosecute him for any Watergate related wrongdoing but that was the view of the social prosecutor was the view of the Justice Department the Justice Department looked into it again in the late 90s during the Clinton impeachment scandal when this sort of became a newly relevant question and came to the same conclusion that the president is immune from prosecution by normal federal prosecutors until he leaves the office I do remember Clinton was deposed in the Paula Jones lawsuit which was a civil suit which how was that different than special prosecutor or special counsel so yeah so as you say that the difference comes down to a distinction between civil and criminal proceedings that I think the conclusion that the Supreme Court came to in Clinton v Jones uh the ultimate case they held about whether or not the president was immune from civil suits was there's nothing in the Constitution including it and it wouldn't cause an undue burden to the functioning of the presidency that it had already been a stylish and Watergate that you could make the president testify or give up documents and sort of do the same sort of thing as that and if the court ruled against him then the most that would happen is you would have to pay some money and I think the argument by people who say that you can't do a criminal prosecution is that that's just a whole other ball of wax that you you might be able to be president even as you're paying off a legal settlement to someone you can't be president from prison can't be president from prison yet that's that's the argument and I should say that this is not uncontroversial that right this is the prevailing view that the Justice Department uh has adopted it's the view of a lot of lawyers the Supreme Court hasn't rolled on this and there are a lot of professors who read the lot differently and think that it would be totally legitimate in practice it's hard that a lot of the crimes the president could conceivably commit and the crimes that are being discussed in Trump's case are federal crimes and the entire federal law enforcement apparatus including the special prosecutor are serving at the pleasure of the president so if a normal federal prosecutor like the u.s. attorney for d.c. say hadn't been died from Trump to fire them and that was the issue for him get ready folks we're going to talk about the 1819 Supreme Court ruling McCulloch versus Maryland but as an explainer oj so people understand the difference between a criminal prosecution and a civil prosecution talk to me as though Trump were oj right which is unfair to oj uh i suppose i i just finished the the great new documentary about oj last night so this is a timely uh huh it's so so in a criminal case there's a different standard of proof so let's say the trump sort of you know as he's threatened to do sometimes goes to the middle of fifth avenue and shoots someone and and sees what happens so the district attorney for minhatten could indict him for murder and then as as anyone who's seen law in order could tell you you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed it if they're found guilty you're subject to to prison and other criminal penalties that's a pretty high bar of proof it was one that that the jury and oj in some case didn't think they met in a civil suit there is a lower burden of proof so the jury when the goldman family sued oj after the criminal trial for for uncle death they just had to prove that the preponderance of evidence that for 51 percent of the evidence in the case indicated that he had done it and then if the jury came to that conclusion which it also doesn't have to come to unanimously the way a jury in a criminal trial in most states does then they can decide on on punitive damages and there's additional damages from there which would all be monetary so i think the reading of the law that the department subscribes to is that someone could sue trump for wrongdoing and it could go through the federal courts and wouldn't necessarily be tossed out of court just because he's the president and did you say it's you did i you did you just say that the reading of the law is from the justice department's office of legal counsel is that their interpretation of it is that what you just said right so they're they're the people who think that that the president is criminally immune the supreme court is actually wrong that he's not civilly immune so that's that's a sort of uncontroversial difference between criminal and civil criminal you're being prosecuted by a government agency a prosecutor's office if you're found guilty you can go to prison defined civil you're being sued by another private actor typically so say the family of someone you killed in the case of oj the difference between criminal and civil that's important for readers and listeners to know it just is and and and it's just bandied about as though we're supposed to know that difference trump university before trump got obama's chair he was being sued for trump university was that a criminal suit or a civil suit that was a civil suit so he was not being prosecuted he was being sued by the the new york state attorney general's office he was being sued by the new york state attorney general's office so that is a a state government not prosecuting criminally but in a civil court going to a civil court right it was at schneiderman is that who it was schneiderman yeah the state attorney general can go into a civil court or you and i as civilian civil can go into a civil court and sue somebody for damages that's right so use the example of obama care a lot of republican states sued president obama and the federal government for implementing obama care because they considered it to impinge on the rights of states simultaneously from their Catholic groups and hobby lobby sued on religious freedom grounds as individuals and they were the same kind of case because in each case it was an actor saying that this this law had violated their rights and that they needed a remedy but it was different kinds of actors bringing that claim you know why i love talking to you because i couldn't enjoy my stupidity i mean there's a real difference between stupidity and ignorance and i think the latter is much more common and much more acceptable like i'm very ignorant about physics and most sports and i don't think that's that's a sign that there's like something wrong with my brain i think there's a complicated world out there and you can only know so many things about it right now you're not a lawyer right i'm not a lawyer i i just play one on the okay you present some scenarios over at vox on how to get rid of trump and by the way i'm partisan you're not vox is not partisan it's been accused of having a left wing slant only because it remembers history if we try yeah so you paint some scenarios you say that the federal prosecutors are going to have more difficulty than state prosecutors bringing a criminal case against donald trump why does the chain of command make it so difficult for federal prosecutors to go after trump federal prosecutors as a rule are part of the justice department and the justice department is an executive cabinet agency run by a presidential appointee whose members serve at the pleasure of the president and who runs the justice department who runs the justice so it's currently run by jeff sessions who is the attorney general right who is a big trump loyalist sessions has recused himself from this particular case and so now robert rozenstein who's the deputy attorney general serves as acting attorney general on cases involving trump and russia who is robert moeller who appointed him and who does he answer to so robert moeller served for about 12 years as fbi director in the dirsh of you bush and obama administrations prior to that he was a career federal prosecutor with a pretty good reputation he was just appointed by rod rozenstein the deputy attorney general in his capacity is acting attorney general on matters concerning trump and russia and he is is going to be what's known as a special counsel so a special counsel is an independent person who is brought in by the attorney general of the justice department to investigate a case that for whatever reason the department doesn't feel like it can impartially investigate on itself okay he's a special counsel ultimately who is his boss ultimately his boss is rozenstein so and who is rozenstein's boss rozenstein's boss's sessions and sessions boss is trump can trump fire a special counsel he absolutely can and richard nixon did or was archival cox a special prosecutor so the terminology gets confused here so cox was appointed under the same statute that meler has been appointed under after watergate there was a different law that was in effect for a couple decades known as the independent counsel law that set up a system for appointing prosecutors who were not just accountable to the department of justice but were also accountable to a panel of judges so they could be more independent that was the system through which iran contra was investigated and it was the system that saw kind of star appointed as independent counsel to investigate bill clinton and people i think we're so exhausted after the bill clinton saga that the law authorizing that position was what lapsed during watergate john michael attorney general or whomever they appointed a special counsel who was archival cox and he was investigating watergate he was a special counsel not a special prosecutor correct i think special counsel and special prosecutor you can use interchangeably in this case okay great after watergate to avoid was it the saturday night mass what was it called when they fired the saturday night massacre so and that was just so people know when nixon was upset with what cox was doing and ordered elliott richardson who was the attorney general to fire him richardson refused and resigned richardson's deputy refused and resigned and it came to the number three person in the justice department to actually carry out the order was that robert bork it was robert bork who was later appointed to the supreme court by ron reagan and lost senate confirmation probably because of that and other things okay so after watergate just to review after watergate congress passed a law that created something called the special prosecutor correct independent counsel an independent counsel and a kenneth star who tormented clinton was operating under this new special independent counsel law as i remember janet reno was the attorney general under clinton you say there was a three judge panel that had a what approve the appointment of a special prosecutor how did how did that law work and it no longer exists because it was like torque amada right but how did kenneth star work and it seems like he had a lot more freedom than say archibald cox or uh moeller's gonna have right so under the law you can only remove independent counsel for cause that janet reno could wire the independent counsel but she couldn't do it for whatever reason she wanted to she she had to prove that they had they had misacted and and show show that and if the council had been terminated and they didn't think it was for cause they could sue her and overturn it additionally there was a three judge panel which in that case was was run by some republican appointees on their dc circuit that also oversaw star and actually replaced star's predecessor who they didn't think was aggressive enough and replaced him with star i think it was fit your hitch or something yeah something like that something like that okay can you give me seven more minutes absolutely okay great moller is over at the justice department he's a special counsel fbi head for almost a decade very respected it is conceivable that donald trump will fire him we're learning that jared kushner is whispering in trump's ear just to fire everybody and be an authoritarian estate prosecutor cyrus vance jr son of jimmy carter's i believe state department secretary of state and vivian vance's grandson from i love lucy did you know that i'm making that up i'm making that up oh my god you're too young to get that referenced knock it off knock it off behavior so don't make me uh okay so cyrus vance jr is not a federal prosecutor is that correct or is he a federal or is he a state prosecutor he's a he's a county prosecutor so thursday's fans is the prosecutor for new york county which is the legal entity that encompasses manhattan so the way the prosecutors work in new york city is that each of the boroughs has their own prosecutor who's elected by people there so there's a brooklyn prosecutor there's a bronx prosecutor there's a statin island prosecutor there's a queen's prosecutor and five answers to manhattan prosecutor and it's it's probably the most powerful local prosecutor's office in the country just because of how many people live there and wall street and wall street and and because state crimes cover a lot of really serious offenses so murder cases in new york are all tried through the district attorney's offices great okay so get ready folks because we're about to discuss the 1819 supreme court ruling of mccullough versus maryland all right so cyrus vance jr decides he's gonna prosecute donald trump for crimes can donald trump fire cyrus vance he cannot play response does not serve at the pleasure of donald trump he is not a federal employee he is an elected official for new york county and can be removed i am not an expert on the removal procedures for for municipal offices in new york but you look accountable ultimately to the voters of manhattan he decides he's going to indict donald trump what could donald trump then claim and here's where we get to in the cullough versus maryland 1819 supreme court ruling so under that ruling which was by john marshall who was an early chief justice of the u.s supreme court who who laid down a lot of sort of the foundational rulings for how the federal system of government works basically said that the federal law trumps state law and that the states can't pass laws that try to limit the behavior of the federal government and and so before any trial happens what would occur in a case like that is that trump could use his power as president to remove the case from state court to federal court he could argue to the court that under mccullough of the maryland is unconstitutional for a local prosecutor to charge him in such a manner and then the federal courts would have to consider that and come to rulings and it would almost certainly be appealed by both sides depending on who wins at the district court level and then the court of appeals level all the way up to the supreme court which would be forced to put the first time ever say definitively whether you can prosecute a president and so it's highly unlikely because i'm thinking what would happen if they pulled this with obama what would happen if alabama tried this right we would be outrageous right and and i think a lot of the reason why some law professors even some left-leaning law professors don't think this is acceptable is because of that that they think it opens the door to frivolous use of prosecutorial power to try to bring down presidents before you go nixon was an unindicted co-conspirator that's what he was named as during watergate because jurorski who replaced archibald cox realized he couldn't indict nixon great well thank you so much this has just been this is heaven for me because it really is you are very generous with your time and i thank you for your hard work and you know anyway dylan mathews writes for vox everybody should go to vox vox dot com and i hope you come back i would love to thank you for having me


Hey, fellow buddies, thanks for watching. All right, you guys, I have Noel Farm Girl Scavenger here with me, and she sent me this. And you ask, what is this? Hey, fellow buddies, thanks for watching. My little pony. Amazing, right? All right, let's get started. Do you want to say ball of plastic? It's a ball of plastic. And where did this come from, Noel? It came from Ms. Donna Teller, but didn't he know who I lovingly call Donna? So I was live one night, and Noel was in the chat. I think I was doing a live listing. And I saw that Donna, or somebody came over to the chat and was like, hey, Donna's selling plush. So I don't know if Noel was bopping back and forth or what, but she was over there sneaking behind my back. And she ordered me this plush. So this is a gift from Noel, but you got it. I think both Donna and T were there. But the funny part is, was you were in the chat when I told him I wanted it, but you were busy going back and forth between here. I didn't have my volume on, on where. That's what it was. Yeah. And anyways, it was hilarious. It was hilarious. So this says, make new friends, but keep the old. One is Silver and the other is Gold. Joseph Perry, thank you, Donna Tella. Auctions by Donna, and it's got her selling everything from crystals to crayons. And that's just something she throws in her packet. So I did cut the top because it had the address on it. So let me show you. Oh my gosh, I've never got a plush lot from Donna yet. So I'm really, really excited about this. She sent Dren this huge Five Nights at Freddy's plush that he saw behind her one night. And I made a comment that he was, he was like, that's, that's Foxy from, from Five Nights at Freddy. And so I told her, I said, when are you going to auction that off? And she goes, she just, she gave it to him. So she said to, he got here yesterday and I made him open it up. He was, it was hilarious watching his facial expressions trying to get to it anyway. So that thing is huge, right? It's almost as Dren, Dren, bring your, bring your, it's almost as big as him. It's huge. I thought it looked huge. Yeah, I was there when that all took place. But she's so good about packing stuff you'd never know that this big. Oh, that is so cute. Stucker is huge anyway. So I sent her pictures of him with it. It's amazing. It's amazing how good she is at getting the air out, sucked out of those things. So one time she had me on, like where I could see what she was doing and she was packaging this stuff, you guys, this stuff takes forever for her to pack and to get squished down. So she's got it all wrapped up here. So I'm just going to make a hole here on the top and we're going to see what we have. You better turn around and let it fall into what you're seeing. It's going to be a plush explosion. I'm going to find a bag to put it in. It's going to be like a plush bomb.  Okay, so I'll just put it into this Ziploc bag. I am going to put you, go ahead, what? Go ahead, put me little. How do I do that? I forget how to do that. There you go. That works. Okay. That video that you and your husband did, it cracked me up so bad. He's hilarious. Have you seen the one that he did where he got stuff off the side of the road? Oh my gosh, that one. I was losing it on that one. I think I actually commented on it. It was a while ago. Yeah. Okay, so how Donna does her plush is she just throws it and like she just makes a pile. So I think she had what? Probably, I don't know how many orders. She had a lot. She had, you could either get a $50 lot or a $100 lot.  Yeah, this is huge. Yeah, I know you already have a lot of stuff. Anyway, I got to support two of my very good friends in one. That's true. It was a foul scoop. Yeah, there you go. Well, I'm glad you could come on today and help me. I know you're so busy with your house and moving. And you guys know, Al has an awesome channel. She has a reseller channel, but she's also doing, she's remodeling the house she's moving into. And she's doing like a series on that, which is super cool. So definitely check out her channel. I needed a play date. What's that? I said I needed a play date, and this is cheaper than... Yeah, this is a play date. Okay, so I don't know what's in here. Noelle doesn't know what's in here. Donna probably doesn't even know what's in here. I don't know if she like, I have a picture and I'll try to pop it up like here or here.  So I don't know if she just made them all up and then stuck stickers on them. I don't know how she did it, but this is, we're going to see what we got here. So this is a, is it TY or is it Ty? Some people call it TY, some people call it Ty. I don't think it really matters. Everybody knows what you, I shouldn't even say that. There's a community discussion as to whether these are worth anything or not. There are some... Some of them are, some of them aren't. It's just like the, is that a beanie baby one? No, I don't know what you mean. Well, it probably... 2010. So the, the, the, the, the, the Ty... Oh, the beanie booze. The beanie booze with the big eyes. Those do pretty good. But some of those are too, you just, it's just like with a lot of things you have to look them up, right? But they're not $10,000 and $5,000. Those are all fake, you guys, but can you still make money as a bread and butter on some of these? Yeah.  It really just... Especially the ones like that that are a little more realistic rather than just the little flat ones that are... Yeah. And it doesn't have a tag, so... You know, probably, probably seven, eight, nine bucks. This is a gunned. Ooh. And he is cute. He is cute. Look how cute he is. He's super cute. He looks like my youngest boy's little teddy that he had for years. And he got mean with his teddy and pulled the arm off. So I told him I told him that he couldn't have it anymore. And I found it the other day up in the closet in his bag of baby stuff. Aw. Oh, that's cute. Press here. All right, I gotta turn it off because some of those songs have copyrights. You can have 15 seconds. Is it 15 seconds? Yeah, I try not to. I have a few videos from long ago, long before. I never thought I would get monetized. I mean... Oh, yeah. So he's got some... I'm gonna clean him up a little. Just a few areas that need spot clean. That is one thing that's tough about items that are white is, but he's animated and fun. So I don't know if he wants it. If you can either get the Clorox bleach pens, if you can find them. But if you find them, you wanna sell them because they don't make them anymore. Yeah. Or I just sold three of them for quite a bit of money. Actually, you'd be surprised that that's the kind of stuff you find in the estate sale laundry room. Yeah. Oh. Right on. There you go. Anyway. I've not heard of this brand. Clorox wipes. Clorox wipes. And then sometimes if I can't put them in the washer because of that, I will... I have a small bottle of water that I add a little Clorox to. And I'll just spray that on that spot and let it sit. And it's white. Yeah. And then it just kind of wipes off. Yep. So that's 2017 Simply Genius. So what I'm gonna do is, I am just gonna unbox it now.  And I am going to list everything and I'm gonna pop up screen shares of how I listed everything. I'll probably... You should do a live listing for your plush. I know, but I wanna edit this video and then pop them in, but maybe I could live list and actually list up. That's Arthur. Ah, he's so cute. That's Arthur. He is by Eden. It would be cool if you had a book that went with him. Yeah, Eden. Eden, Eden. Is that how you say it? Eden is who made him, but that's Arthur. Yeah. That's what his name is. He is so cute. He's cute. Look at those little glasses. One of the nice things about having a grandchild is, I know all of the... Oh, that's a weasel. It's a fox, isn't it? Oh, it is a fox. That's funny. But the tag is completely wiped out. I can't read it. That's all right. So I don't know. I know, but I can't look it up. I don't know what brand it is. So maybe it's vintage. I bet it's vintage. I bet it is too. And I bet it'll sell well because... So cute. People love foxes almost as much as they love the owls and stuff. Little seals. 2003... Or no, wait. Yeah, 2003 K and M International. So it's a little seal. That's cute. Cute. We have another little T-Y or tie. This is... What is that? A cat? Cat? I don't know. It looks like a bear. Does it got pointy ears? It's got pointy ears. Does it say on the inside of the tag? Okay, don't... Don't... Don't... Okay, I shouldn't say that. If you can open that without ruining it, it'll have a name and all of that in there on that paper. Okay. It says 1993. It should have... It should have its name inside there. Yeah, it's a cat. Cat Trina. That's cute. Okay. So little T-Y there. Oh, what is this? Why? That is cute. Is that a... Like a pajama? I don't know what it is. That is... It is a tummy stuffers. Just play 2016. You... You put stuff in it. And then after you put stuff in it, you can never see one of those. You can put your jammies and stuff in that when you go to grandma's house. Isn't it cute? That is very cute. Like a little... Think about it. How much fun would it be to be with the people that are designing those and coming up with the name? I mean, that's why there's a marker for it. It's like, they get to play with toys all day long. What's that? We're doing something wrong. That's cute. We're playing with toys right now. That is true. That looks super soft. It's so cute. It's by Douglas Cuttle Toys. And you guys, I'm definitely not a plush expert. So I have to look everything up. So this is not going to be... I'm not going to have a lot of information right now until I go and list everything. So that is cute. Does anybody know what kind of dog that is? I don't know. Maybe I can Google lens it. Okay. Oh my goodness. It's a build a bear. Build a bear. What's it say on it? It's Ryan's world. Oh my goodness. I wonder if that's a good one. It's a little spot right here. He needs some... That's all right. On the black permanent marker. I'll take care of that. I'm just kidding. Just kidding. No, no, no. It's just needs sewn. Oh, there you go. I'm looking at that. I'm just going to wait and list it because that'll make the video too long. What is this thing? Is that a dragon? But wait. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And it holds stuff. Oh, it's a, it's a. Oh, there's a search. There's a specific name for those. Those are so cute. Pop out. Pop out pets. It's two when you pop it out that way. I think it's three. It can be three. So there's this guy. Carrot. And then. This thing. So. I think you stuff two of them in to make one. And it can be three different things. Okay. We have. Made in Korea. Definitely looks like a vintage tag, but no brand. Look at his little glasses. Oh my gosh. And he's jointed. But I don't know. He's got a mustache. Oh, that is so funny. Plus just as fun. Hi. Well, oh my gosh. Oh, that is so cute. This is right up my alley. It's high low. Made in Korea.  So cute. That is totally vintage. There's way cute. Stuffed PVC pellets and cotton. That is funny. Yeah, that's really cute. Here's another bear. This one is. Chelsea teddy bear MCM group. Never heard of that. But again, just. This one is not jointed. It's. But you can still. That's super soft. Somebody love that bear. Yeah, but it doesn't. It's not. It's not. It's not a little, it just needs fluffed up. No, no, I mean, it's super, it looks super soft. Like that's one of the images. But it's not like matted or, you know what I mean? It looks still. Yeah. That's cute. All right. Let's keep going here. We're getting close to the end. Do you ever, do you ever. Go on Wednesdays when rebel. Has her lives. I do. I love her. I think she's fantastic to the rebel reseller you guys. If you want to learn about flush. I actually ordered another bag of plush from Donna and rebels ordering one. And we're going to do like a collab where we send each other to each other's channels. So stay tuned for that in the future. It will be cool. She was talking on her live show about doing a collab with just anyone, you know, and I'm like, I'll do one with you. I said, I just ordered some plush from Donna. Do you want to do it with me? And she said, yeah, so we're going to do that. Okay, so what is this? That looks like supper. Young people's shop. I cannot read what it says. Oh, Lord and Taylor, maybe. What? Let me check that out. I'm not sure if I'm reading that right. Does that say. Lord and Taylor look like that. Young people's shop. Well, it's almost Easter. So I've done really well with bunnies in the past. Um, this is really cute too. Great condition. How cute is that? And it's pretty big. All right. And the last one. Oh, Popple. Oh, is that. Are those vintage, right? I feel like I feel like popples have been in my videos. They did. Didn't you sell, didn't you sell one that was made out of more parachute type material? It wasn't a pop. Oh, that was a puff a lump puff a lump. Well, these are right up there with the puff a lumps. What on earth is this? Is that a bottle for it? Wow. Um, I don't know if this comes with it or not. Yeah, it does. Oh, okay. So you pop it out like this, I think. Yep. I've never, I don't think I've ever seen one of these. I know I've done videos that have had popples in it, or I featured someone or something. I've done so many videos. I can't keep track. Look at its tail. Um, it's in pretty, I mean, I don't, I think it's from the 80s. Um, I think it's from the late 80s, early 90s. Yeah. And then it was born in 1986. Uh, that was the year my oldest son was born. I can't believe that. The bottle is hilarious. I bet I could sell the bottle separate. I bet you could. I mean, I'm not going to, but I probably could. I bet. I bet that, um, let's just look and see if that. I don't know what they do for this one has a little bit of on the nose, but I mean, I would expect that from an eighties toy, right? Oh, yeah. You know, another thing, another eighties toy. That is huge. If you can find them. Oh, shoot. No, I just lost it. Fragile rock. Oh, okay. It's it was an offshoot of the Muppets from Jim Henson and they were huge. Let's see, Justin was born in 86. And his grandmother, his dad's mom, when he would go in and stay with her, they would watch Fragile rock and and he had all of them.  And then I was watching somebody go through the bins the other day and they go, Oh, I got to go check this plush out. It's something cool. It's big. And she turns it over. That is so cute. And it was the Wiggles. Oh, yeah. It was a huge plush, like a look like a car that you would lay on on the floor. Like it was super soft. And it had the Wiggles on the front of it. And she throws it back. And I was like, Oh, yeah, the Wiggles I don't think it was mass produced. I always pick up Wiggles when I see it. Because they're they're a lot like the octanots. They don't make them anymore. Yeah, get them. Wow. And the people that liked the Wiggles stuff, the videos, everything, almost anything wiggles with the Wiggles on it. That's awesome. If you know, right? I'm wondering if she even knew that was in there. I bet she didn't even know that was in there. Probably did not even look. Nope. She probably she has been. She had so many to pack, I kind of felt sorry for. So there's some Lord and Taylor listed, but nothing like this. And I can't find anything even on worth point. So it must have been a loaded run. So I'll probably just price it high because it's in great condition. And I might even send a little message over to the rebel reseller and see what she thinks about it. Um, she fights with herself on how to say gunned. Well, she said gooned. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, I've been saying it wrong all this time. No. So she said she's this is so funny. This is one of the reasons why I asked if you watch her on and I don't know if she talked about this on her live or if it was one of her. Either a live hall or or was one of her wet souls. Because every time she'd say that I'd be like the goon. You know, and so then what she said was she was raised. Yeah, I was there. She knows German. So I don't know if her family was German, but she was raised German and and that you in in German would be pronounced like that. But and then she and Robert were going back and forth as to how it should be pronounced right now giggling because it was so funny. And all I could think to myself was gunned, gunned, no, because here and and she may not have them because she was raised learning German too. But if you think about it phonetically, because a lot of us learned how to pronounce pronounce things phonetically. Anyway, it was cracking me up. I love it. I love it. I even put in her comments. Oh my gosh, I've been saying that wrong my whole life. And she's like, maybe I'm saying it wrong. And I'm like, who's saying it wrong? Who's saying it wrong? Then she was just like, well, I'm just going to say it that good, because that's how it is. Yeah.  So this is all that flesh. Look how big it is. Like once it's not squished and that and that's still kind of stuffed. Every time I'm at the bins and I see poster tubes in the bins. Yeah, I buy the I just throw them in my cart. They don't they won't charge you for them. If if you're over 25 pounds, they'll take them out and they won't charge you for them if there's nothing in them. And if there's something in them, you're only paying for the cardboard tube, which could could weigh less than six ounces. Yeah, true. Good packing. I found a piece of artwork in a cardboard tube once, and I comped it right then and there. And it was worth about $600. And I put it in my cart and somebody stole it out of my cart. Are you kidding me? Like just while you were at the bins, they took stuff out of your cart. Yeah, I've had that happen twice now. Really? I had a whole a whole big basket kind of like this of Lego mini figures that I dug out of the bottom of this bin that was there when I got there. It hadn't moved for three hours and I was just going down and I dig through to find all the I'll I'll I'll claim all the Legos because I got I got a I got a grand kid that loves them and when he's done playing with them, I'll sell them. Yeah. And there was just nobody like spent the time. I saw two pieces. I saw one mini fig head and I was like, Oh, there's Legos in here. Yeah. So somebody must have been watching me because after I I spent like 45 minutes, I literally emptied that bin, you know, and went through and I and I I think I ended up with about 45 mini figs. Anyway, some of those mini figures like for one can go for decent money if you can find out which set it goes to and everything. Yes, they can. Yes, they can. Anyway, so now I very rarely comp anything at the bins anymore. There's so many resellers there. You know, the younger the younger kids, they don't care. They'll take stuff out of your bin in a hot second. So and it was right behind me too. I was literally probably looking in a bin when they just came up and took it and walked off. So and you were probably recording. Oh, no, this was the year. So this was before before you were recording. Yeah, before not recent.  Really? And you wear it around your neck. And it's magnetic. It goes underneath your shirt.  And it clicks right on your shirt. So you can raise it and lower it to whatever wherever you want it to be.  So it's it's called the GoPro necklace. And as a matter of fact, I should order that today. I'm about done ordering presents for myself. I got a wireless relay. I don't have a GoPro. I just use my phone. I do too. But you can't use both hands when you're using your phone. I want you to tell everybody about your channel. Oh, my channel. Something on my channel for everybody. There is reseller content. There is landscaping content because I used to own a landscaping business. I have my I built I started my channel for my kids. So because I have had cancer, I've been burnt. I've had thyroid issues and I wanted I used to never let anybody take pictures of me because I was extremely overweight. I weighed close to 300 pounds. And I didn't want pictures of myself.  But come and come and remember me how I was and how they knew me because it's not about you what you think about you. It's about the people behind that love you. So let people take pictures of you because you may not like how you look but they see you every day like that and that's how they remember you. Somebody told me that and I was like, duh, I mean what are you hiding? Yeah, what are we hiding? Yeah, not. So I started on YouTube and and then I started then I started doing YouTube content for everybody and you know I talk I everybody knows my grandson Dren and my youngest son Ryan is now made a few appearances in my house renovation videos and he'll have more. Wait till the next one comes out.  Anyway, hopefully it'll be out this weekend. We'll see. And then and then I started doing reseller content and now I'm doing and I have recipes. You know, I'm no Martha Stewart but I can cook like her. You don't everybody forget my channel. No cooking started out just like the rest of us, right? Hey, speaking of Martha Stewart, were you I don't know if you had come in yet or not. Um I sold this just we'll show you guys a Bolo real quick. Was it some of her J-dites? Anything Martha Stewart's worth money you guys. It's a cookie cutter. Oh yeah. A copper cookie cutter. You may have been at the live show. I was there when you were when you were showing those when you were listing them when you did that. You did those. Yep. Yep. 125 bucks. Yep. Now, if you ever see Martha Stewart stamp stuff like she has a old crafting line. Yeah. Those those little they're huge. You can hold them in your hand to to cut out a shape. Those are off the wall too. Greeting cards. 60 bucks. I sold those last night. You sold a whole a whole lot of them. Yeah, just a lot.  It took a while to sell but yeah. Are they are there a lot of Easter ones in there? Um there are I see some bunnies. That's what I was kind of thinking if somebody was buying them to craft with. Probably. Yeah but I mean I was surprised. Like there's some chicks like the little chicks but there's some really cute ones. A lot of like um babies but yeah 60 bucks. Pretty good. Can't beat that. No. Well thank you for the plush. You're welcome. I'm most excited about this. I'm I I hope you get I hope you get Buku dollars for that popples because it has the it has the bottle. That guy's he's probably a bread and butter but he is just so cute. He probably is but he's he's really cute. I don't know what it is about monkeys and sloths. Yeah, that's funny. Alright for you. It's been sitting here for a while but I'm going to send it to you. What is it? Oh cute. It's a vintage Christmas card. That is so you know it's it's got writing in it. It's from uh I don't remember when there was a date on it here somewhere but I pulled this out of the I pulled this out and I was like oh my gosh I have to send that to Courtney. The little owl. I love owls. So cute. My pup is hanging out. She's getting old. Anyway, alright, I gotta get to Home Depot and get some boxes. Alright, we'll have a good day. Thanks for coming on and doing the video with me and thank you for the gift. I appreciate it Noel. You're welcome. Oh, the puppy. I see a real puppy. Yep, she's down here. Alright, I will talk to you soon. Bye everyone. Thanks for watching.


Hey it's Alex here from AlexFergus.com. Today I'm gonna talk to you about red light devices and in particular what you should look for and what you should look out for when it comes to buying red light devices. So first things first actually first things first if you don't know what red light is head to AlexFergus.com and check out my article on red light therapy it's called everything or the fascinating benefits of red light therapy or something like that AlexFergus.com I'll put a link to it below in the notes so you can check that out. Read that first because it's gonna blow your mind once you learn about red light therapy you're gonna look this is the coolest thing ever why have I not heard about it that was me like a year ago okay now I love this stuff but I've also learned a lot about the market the brands the products okay and speaking of products behind me you can see a red light device yes I just worked this panel with my finger tip and it kind of hurt. It's a juke panel device for disclosure I have an affiliate link with them coupon code as well the coupon codes AlexALEX that will give you a discount if you buy a juke panel and it will also give me a cutback you don't have to use that panel but for disclosure right um so I've been using that for a while I've done a review on it I've noticed massive benefits from using it skin pain all that sort of stuff again there's a full video and article on this so I won't go into it into detail and I don't want it to be about the juke. I've also got another panel here sorry it's not a panel now another red light device here which I'm gonna turn on right now and then we've got the juice panel here alright so since buying since receiving this panel I've learned a lot about red light okay and as a result of those articles I just mentioned a lot of people have asked me hey what about this and can I buy grow lights what about these other brands which one's best why some of them so expensive when I can find this on eBay what's the deal right and to be honest I didn't know at first I was like I don't know they can't be right they're cheap you know I can't they can't be beneficial anyway so since then I've done a lot of research a lot of reading and I've looked into this into this and here's my takeaway here the facts you need to know one we know red light therapy works there are hundreds if not thousands of studies on low light low light low level laser therapy I think it's called LLT photo biomodulation red light therapy light therapy there are hundreds of articles published articles papers showing that it works everything from arthritis to acne you know it's it's beneficial okay so that's not right but what's important is the wavelength which is the color color and the visible wavelength spectrum but once you get into the non-visible range such as near infrared far for it you can't see that but it's every piece of every lightweight has its own unique profile like wavelength profile right so what you need to know is well wavelength because different wavelengths have different impacts on the body so for instance blue light which is around that 4500 nanometer wavelength that has a stimulating effect on the body again I've already written about this in my blog on blue light how it suppresses melatonin increases cortisol it's beneficial in the morning that's why devices like this human charger device here you know you can use them in the morning and it has an impact on the body right red light on the other hand is therapeutic it's healing maybe relaxing I'm not too sure but the key thing is it heals the body all right and there's tons of research on that so we know that it works but what we need to know it what you need to know when you're looking for a device or looking for a panel is what is the wavelength like what is the light being admitted because there's all sorts of different wavelengths when it comes to red light just Google like a visible light spectrum and you'll see the colors of the rainbow and you'll see how red goes from you know maybe 600 to 750 nanometer light I'm not 100% sure but you know you'll see this range right and then when you look at all the studies you'll you'll see that only some of those ranges have been studied and only some of them have been effective in regards to healing the body okay sorry I'm just trying to pull up an article I had here so I've got the stats next to me you know so you need to know the wavelength of the light that the panel is admitting and then you need to know the power density or the power intensity all right so let's say we know that red light at 660 nanometers is good for I don't know college in production or when healing which which it is okay so we know that 660s all right so we go out to the manufacturer and we ask them does your light admit mid 600 wavelength yes it does 655 great awesome it's in that range that's a big take but that Christmas tree decoration you have or that little like nightlight you have glowing and your toilet I don't know maybe that little torch you have lying around as well they might put out exactly the same wavelength they might be 650 660 great right but there's another thing you need to look out and that's look out for and that's power intensity all right so just because the light is in that right range we need to know how much that power is actually being emitted all right and how intense it is so just like the Sun you know you can feel that intensity the Sun's a intense light source and a heat source okay but that little LED you know literally little LED red light is not an intense heat source okay so there's two things you look out for wavelength and power intensity now with the juve which I have here this is the juve combo right so I've got the fact sheet here they came with it I started got started guide sorry and this isn't meant to be a plug for juve it's just that I have a juve and I like it and if I had some other panel I've got the handheld one I'd be using that as an example so anyway this one here does 850 once it focuses in here we can see it does 850 and 650 nanometers now when I turn it on it might be hard to see but you can kind of see a bit of a pattern there right so the lights that aren't glowing at least on the screen that you're near infrared 850 nanometer lights but I said are glowing are the 661 they're in the visible range now on this piece of paper it's also got your down here irradiance numbers all right so it's got a milliwatt per centimeter squared number now this is important this is showing how much of that energy is being released how much of that energy is being transmitted and then do go even further I don't know if it was in here it's on their website I think and it tells you the ratings at each distance so right on the surface you're gonna get maximum power put right as you come like two three four six inches back it drops off I think it's exponentially drops off so if you're standing right back here you know like a meter away from the panel you're not getting much light you're not getting much energy on the body whereas if you're standing right here you're getting a lot okay so that's another thing you need to look up for the power intensity of the light source and then you need to find out is that power intensity at the device or six feet back six inches back or a meter back all right because that's important because some some devices may have a really good number but then they say that's at the source which means you've got to be hugging it the whole time which you know you might not want to do and then there's issues with the emf and all of that so to summarize you need to look out for wavelength and power intensity all right now the other device I have here this is retails for around a hundred dollars it is also 660 and 850 nanometers and again I can get all the stats on this and I know the power density I don't know if I'm trying to say intensity or density either one works but anyway um so I know the stats on it I know the wavelengths in fact I had this manufactured myself and it's got right here on the sticker 850 nanometers and 660 nanometers and it's two thirds and 660 and one third and 850 right so I know that I know that for a fact and then the lab the manufacturer that made this did some testing and sent me the report card on the power density right so I know that stuff which is great so that's what you need to look for when it comes to devices now there are also devices out there or red light devices out there that um don't publish their wavelength numbers that's cool uh personally I wouldn't buy that because you don't know what you're buying uh so for instance in my article the fascinating healing properties of red light at alexfigus.com I talk about how some wavelengths in the red light spectrum namely like around the 700 750 nanometer wavelengths there isn't much research showing that they're beneficial in fact like they may do more harm than good I'm not too sure but there's not there's not much data on it showing that they work right but it's a red light so it'll look just like let me turn this on it'll look just like that you won't know right so you could spend all this money on a device you know a thousand bucks or something on a device that's emitting red light in the 750 nanometer light range but it's not doing what it could be doing if it was 650 nanometers right so this is why it's so important to figure out or find out and ask the manufacturer what the wavelengths are and the and the panel and the LED is what the exact wavelengths are and doesn't have to be exact it could be a range like 650 to 660 that's okay but if they say oh it's in the red light you know somewhere between 600 and 800 I mean personally I wouldn't buy that because you don't know what you're buying and it's just like a supplement right like it's when a supplement comes out and says our proprietary proprietary blend of B vitamins and you're like okay great but then another company will do it's a might release a B complex where it's like you know you get x milligrams of B12 x milligrams of B3 x milligrams of B2 you know what I mean and you can then use that based on your needs if you know that you have some genetic disorder where you know folate acid is is really bad for you you know you want to avoid that but if it's a proprietary blend and they just say oh it's all of this stuff and in total you get one gram out of it you don't know whether 99% of that is like something harmful or something good like you don't know that right and and again some people will find with that just personally I wouldn't do that myself because you don't know what you're buying all right so that's wavelength and then the second thing is the the irradiance the power density all right if the manufacturer is not saying that it's either because they haven't tested it and if they haven't tested it then the chances are they don't really care about their product right because if you were a bit making these you would want to test that so you'd want to show off to the customer hey look this is how much light you know we're putting out right so you want to check that if they don't have that number there they haven't tested it or they have tested it and they're embarrassed by the results and they don't want to share it or they come up with some crazy marketing idea where they figured that hold all that data for themselves and not share um and again like for me those are warning signs right like it's always like going to buy a car and they say you know we're not going to tell you the engine size and we're not going to tell you the mileage but we can tell you it's good and you're kind of like well you know I'd really like to I believe you and my friends over there said it's a good car but I would like to know the engine size and it would be nice to know the mileage because maybe you tested it was really bad and that's not why you're telling me do you know what I mean it's just for me it's just not something that sits well so when you're looking at red light therapy we know for a fact that red light works we know the the wavelengths that work and have been official to the health and we know how much energy you should be getting you know we we know the power density numbers all right and how much exposure the body should be getting and those three things are all covered on my article elixperius.com which I'll link below I'm not going to explain today because I've already explained it but again we know the wavelengths we know the power density uh and kind of remember what I'm saying now but anyway so once you know those things buy something that matches up with those right now if you can find a grow light if you can find some I call them knockoffs though they might be coming from the same manufacturer if you can find a light on ebay or alibaba or aliexpress or amazon that has verified power density numbers that has the right wavelengths that you're after buy it I mean why not right why pay five times ten times more for a label um do you know what I mean like go back to that car analogy let's say you wanted to buy I don't know like a Porsche or something and then right next to it was a car that looked like a Porsche had all the same specs you get the reports on fuel performance power you know north to 100 speed everything comes back exactly the same as the Porsche but it doesn't have the Porsche logo and it's like one tenth of the price you might be tempted to get that maybe that's a bad example because a lot of people pay a lot of money just for their branch badge so maybe that is a bad example but hopefully you get what I'm saying right if you're just looking at the health benefits wavelength power density that's what you're after so uh to answer the question can you buy these grow lights can you buy these alibaba aliexpress ebay lights um sure just make sure you do the research and make sure you know it's a quality device if they're not admit if they're not sharing any numbers then I probably wouldn't the good thing with brands like juve they happily share all their numbers you know it's right here on the document you can go on their website and get all information you can see all those numbers right it's right there other brands who are charging you know just as much maybe a little bit less uh they might hide all these numbers from you in which case that sends alarm bells ring and then if you get something like this which I just got a box of 10 off from aliexpress or alibaba I got a 10 I got them made specifically for me uh I chose the lights I got 660 and and uh 850 2 3rds going to 660 um if you can buy them at cheap price and you know that the good wavelengths and the good out power outputs then again do that I mean just go on with your buddies like why not um but if you like the convenience and everything I am going to do a little plug here if you like the convenience and you want a full-size panel and you just want the simple option of buying it online go with something like the juve um use code alexaliex you'll save some money I'll get a little bit of money um otherwise do some research and you can probably save even more money by finding going straight to the manufacturer and cut out the middle man because that's what I've done with with this beast oh it's not really a beast it's actually quite small it's actually really good so by the way while I'm here what I'm going to do now I'm going to do my morning session with the panel but I get too sensitivity right and I've noticed that this is really helping with my my teeth and also I want it I want to see if I can get some hairy growth so what I used to do is like front on side on back on and then I'll do my cheeks now I can just go front on and hold this or front on and do my head or back on and do my nostril and my chest and belly button if I want to do those things so anyway guys that's enough for me hopefully that answers your question of like what red light panel you should buy or shouldn't buy um really it's really simple at the end of the day you want to know wavelength you want to make sure it matches with the wavelengths you're after and you want to know power density you can't get those numbers then effectively you're taking a risk and I'm sure these panels will work but if you're if you're paying really like bottom dollar for something that doesn't have these numbers you're probably going to find out it's not really doing much good so that's all for me check the show notes below because I've got heaps of articles on red light I've got that discount code for the juve um I have got my reviews on other products and also I hit the elixir so come I got lots of content like this if you enjoyed this give me a thumbs up if you like these reviews and if you like learning more about health wellness by hacking tools etc hit subscribe if you're on youtube sign up to my email list if you're on my site and peace out and I'm going to run away and quickly have a shout because I'm going to see startlers tonight