This is Mike Moore. Has anyone heard of Blomage on the internet? Yeah, Mike. Blomage. I didn't even actually know that. I'm not French enough to say it that way, but I'll try. Blomage is someone who has spoken at Ruby conferences before. I don't know if you've seen him around. Primarily pony content. A lot of ponies, bronies, different ponies, and ponies talking about ops. Mike likes to speak. Mike likes to organize. He organized Mountain West JS last week, right on top of Ember Comp. He's primarily known for organizing conferences on top of Ember Comp. Then he flew here and then he wrote a talk and then he's going to give that talk here at this conference. Then he's going to fly home for Mountain West, where I assume some number of you are also going. Who's going to Mountain West? Yeah! Mountain West train. All right. I mean, we're way better in stuff, but you're okay too. All right, Mike Moore, please. A round of applause. Thank you, John. All right. So I love Ruby on Ails. I think this is my third time being here and I just can't get enough. So thank you guys for staying and I can't wait to have a good time with you. I'm curious about the makeup of the audience. Who here is the first time at Ruby on Ails? Wow, that's at least half, if not more. Who here has been coding less than a year? That's good. Good job. All right, so Tenderlove is kind of known for what would Freddie Mercury do, right? That's kind of what he tells himself when he's not sure what to do. And I don't, that's not me, but today I was just thinking, what would Corey the front man for Slipknot do? Because I know like, I don't look it, but you know, I'm a moderate kind of Slipknot fan and I had this live album and they're gonna play this song that was off their first album but they've never played it live before. And Corey says, it could be a trainwreck, but we're gonna do it anyway and that's kind of how I feel about this. So this could be a trainwreck. I literally wrote it last night in this morning. So we'll see where it goes. The title is Stupid Ruby Tricks. Now there's three things that you could focus in that title. You could focus on the Ruby.   So like John said, my name is Mike Moore. This is kind of the picture I was, I'm usually known for. It's not my Twitter avatar. I probably should have changed it back, but I didn't. But my name is Mike Moore and I go by Blumage. But everyone says Blumage. It's kind of like mirage or fromage. But when you say Blumage, everyone thinks I'm like a medieval sex worker, but that's not me. I'm okay with Blumage. I will answer to it. So I loved all of the talks that I've seen so far. One thing I'd like you to know about me, kind of like Akira or Akira, is that I too have a GitHub profile and it's got full of all sorts of really wonderful things. The thing I'd really like to point out first is I have a URL up there. Now, it's not a long URL. You could probably commit it to memory. Just kind of think about that. It's not too many bits to kind of fit in the old brand there. I've got a lot of stuff on here. The other thing that's on my profile is my name, which is important, which I think is pretty neat. Also, I've got my username on there. So it's like two names. So that's pretty neat. It's not my full legal name. I can only tell that to people that are really meaningful to me, like the bank and the IRS. But you can find that on there. So that's great. I'm from Cedar Hills, Utah. So there's like a Utah contingent here of at least two people, right? Who's from Utah? Yay, we've got three, four, including me. I'm from Cedar Hills. Utah is a wonderful, beautiful place. The mountains are awesome. The people are friendly and nice. And there's a really wonderful Ruby Conference that starts in two days. So if you want to keep this party going, absolutely come on down to Utah and come to Mountain West Ruby Conference. The other thing I'd like to point out in this, and this is here, this is on my GitHub profile, is that my company name is Humane Code LLC. And I think Ernie Miller should expect a cease and desist letter from my lawyers pretty soon. It's very clever, Ernie. Glad you thought of that before no one else did. The other thing is I've actually got some contributions. So here you can see my repos. The thing I'm most known for is many test rails, which is a really fun little project that I run. Now many test ships with rails, right? So this doesn't really do anything at all. It's of no value. And that's my most starred gem. So, yay me. The other thing that's kind of embarrassing on my GitHub profile is it shows you your contribution calendar. And I want you to point to this section right in the middle. Can anybody guess what was going on in my life at this point? Vacation? Alcoholism, yes. I will get to the alcoholism a little later. No, I was at a startup during this time. I like to consider this my trough of disillusionment period. This was after the peak of inflated expectations. And before the slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity began, unfortunately they didn't. And so, in October, late October I started, I went somewhere else, so I'm contributing again. That's nice. The last thing I want to point out is that something that, you know, like Acura's got to GitHub profile. I've got to GitHub profile and we're both really close to a thousand followers. Like, really, really close. So, anyways, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm kind of a big deal. Really, if you think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Who was here for my pony talk like two or three years ago? Yeah? Okay, yeah. This is going to be worse. Just letting you know. Right. Again.   So, actually, I do feel a little bad. Before the conference, I've got the run up for Mountain West JavaScript and then here and then going back to Ruby. And so, I was messaging Josh and I was like, dude, is there any way we could move me? Because I was supposed to talk yesterday morning, right? And I literally did not start until last night on this talk. I was like, can you tell me if you could move me until later on in the conference so that I actually have something? And Josh, being a super nice guy, he's like, no problem. We'll move you to Thursday and we'll just move Terrence up. And I'm like, awesome. That's so sweet. Thank you so much. Then, of course, when we get here, like Terrence shows up and is like, guys, Friday hug is my thing. And so I was like, oh, we'll bring you up and you can do Friday hug. But then Ernie shows up, right? Totally takes over the Friday hug. Seriously. All right, so those who know me, I'm not a big beer drinker. I'm a lot like Ryan Davis, you know, Ryan I think of as like a mentor and I like to follow him. And so, I also prefer Scotch on the rocks. Yeah? All right, so I think I should apologize. I feel like I'm starting to lose control a little bit. No? No, see, the difference is that tender love is what would Freddie Mercury do and blowmage is what would Corey the front man of Slipknot do, right? Totally different. Very different. And all right, so I know what a lot of you guys are thinking right now. Is this going to go on much longer, right?  And this is for Jonan. Like I got a space picture in. I am on the theme, right? Today's theme. I'm moving it forward. We're just going to happen. We're going to make this happen today.   Something that requires no brains at all. So let's talk about file.write and file.read. So this is the way, like, I've been in ruby since 2004, late 2004, early 2005. And when I came to ruby, this is how you open and read from a file, right? You open the file and then in the block, the closure there, you actually read from it. And then the file takes care of closing the file for you, right? And then when you read the same type of thing, you use the open block and then you have to pass the W flag in order so you can actually write to the file. And then, oh, I'm sorry, I got those reversed. I wasn't even looking at my slides. I'm so nervous. Anyways, you guys get what I'm talking about, right? All right, so we have that today. Instead, you can just call file.write now as of, like, ruby19. Like, who has used file.write, right? Okay, only like eight of you, so it's still good advice. It's still good. This is knowledgeable, right? And then the same thing for reading. You can just read right from a file without having to open it and it's stupid, right?    Did anybody here know that ruby has optional parentheses? All right, so here is the code that we just had written. Everything's uncommented. Now, look at all of these parentheses. I'm gonna highlight them in fuchsia so you can really stand out on this projector. I did miss one. Dang it.  All right, you can remove all of these. None of these parentheses are required, right? You can come up with something like this. I actually think this is a huge improvement.  File.read. File.read, okay, here we go. So, how does this work, right? That last line, it's like, you've got put s that's receiving file.read, that's receiving the string and what's the priority and you don't have the parentheses to help you out, right?  If you can't remove all the parentheses on a line, you have doing too much stuff on that line. Just add another line. If you're at a place where you've got to, like, keep all of your methods under, like, 10 lines of code, then, you know, don't just jam all that logic into a single line. Don't use ternary and stuff. Like, actually respect the absence of parentheses and don't overload it. Just make it simpler, right? I think it's good advice. So, I imagine, like, all of you knew this already, right? And, like, what am I doing up here to present these tips to a self-slucting crowd and those, everything? I would just like to point out that I do have the necessary qualifications to present. I've been programming professionally for 20 years. I've been in ruby for a decade. You may think that my qualifications are irrelevant, but they are not. And don't worry, this will be over soon enough. All right, let's talk about default hash values. This is kind of fun. So, let's imagine we have a hash and we got a phoonabar key with a phoonabar value. And what we want is we want to ask this hash for Baz and we want to get Baz. But Baz isn't in it, so when we ask for Baz, it says nil, which is the default value when there is no key that we're requesting. But we would really like to have Baz return. We know that we want Baz. And maybe this hash is really, like, only an exception hash. So, one of the ways that we can do this is that we can just call fetch and provide default value. So, now our hash will go out, look for the key if it doesn't find it. Instead of giving nil, it will give this value instead, right? So, if we instead put a new exception in this hash, like TrollFace, when we ask for TrollFace, even though we give it the default value of Baz, we're gonna get TrollFace back out. So, I don't know, I think it makes sense for this presentation. What else can we do with the default value? When you create a new hash, you can't do this with the curly braces, but you can, with the new method, you can pass in an object that will give you for the default value so that we don't have to call fetch. You can just use the square brace accessors. So, in this instance, we have a brand new hash list. It's completely empty, but we're gonna wanna get an empty array when we come back out, right? So, when we call nope, right, we expect to get an array. And when we can even start adding stuff, like we can add an x and a y and a z symbol. And so, this nope array, even though we haven't really set it to an array. And we get, you know, x, y, and z in that array. The problem with this is then if we ask for not even on this hash, we get the same values. And the reason for that is because the object that we gave for the default value is being manipulated for all of the times we're accessing the hash. So, even if we don't use the square brackets, even if we use array.new, same behavior, right? So, the way we get around that is instead of passing the object, we're gonna pass, oh, I'll illustrate this again. So, let's say our default value object is a string called default value. We create a new hash. When we ask for nope, we get the default value. And then we modify that original default value. We ask for nope again, we get the updated object, right? So, that's why this happens. So, we can instead pass a block that takes two arguments in the PROC object. It'll take the hash that it's being requested for and it'll take the key that it's looking for. And then you can decide what you're gonna do. You could convert the key to a string or do whatever, right? In my case, with Baz, I would have just converted to a string and upcased it and gotten the same behavior. But we're dealing with lists here. Because this is a PROC, we can create a new object here. And then whenever we ask for the default value, this PROC will get executed. We'll create a brand new array in this instance. Now we won't be sharing arrays. So, we can add x, y, and z to nope. And then ask nope. We got the x, y, and z. We ask for not even. And we don't have, we have an empty array. So, yay! All right. What else can we do? Oh, we can do the same thing with another hash, right? So, maybe instead of a list, we want like some sort of recursive hash. Like a PHP dictionary or something. So, you know, we use that same constructor block. And we just say if we don't have a value, we're going to use a brand new hash. And so, our hash is empty. We ask for x. We get an empty hash again. We ask for x is y. And we get nil. And if we ask for x is y is z, we get a no method error. Because that hash only goes the first level down, right? So, x is a new hash according to our default proc. But y is nothing and then calling z on nothing is an error. So, how can we make this even better? I meant to break this into two lines. But you can actually reference the original parent hash's default proc object. And set that on the newly instantiated hash, right? And that's pretty cool.  And when you look at the original hash, you've got all that structure in there. And every time you access something, it just adds a new hash for you. Which is pretty cool. All right, so, let's make a mess out of this. Let's torture Ruby a bit. Let's create a Frankenstein hash, Frankenstein object. And we're gonna start out with the list behavior, okay? So, we're gonna add x, y, and z to nope. And then we're going to call not even. We're gonna get our empty array. We print out Frankenstein, right? And we get that array. We get nope with the three and get not even with nothing. Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna change the default proc, right? We're gonna set it to the recursive hash proc. And then we're gonna call x, y, z. And then when we look at Frankenstein, now we've got the different behavior. So that default proc object, you can swap it out, change it, even on instantiate hashes. So if you have a hash that you're using, you wanna add this behavior, just update the default proc object, right? That makes sense. You guys following this? I'm gonna leave the code up here for a few seconds, just so we'll let that sink in for a bit. Okay. Let's talk about include and prepend, and our friends super. This is one of the things that I really like about modern Ruby. I actually, I wanna find a really great use for prepend because I think it's a really fantastic facility. So let's take this example. We've got our foo module that does a thing, right? And we wanna include the foo module into me, right? Because I do a thing and then I also want foo to do its thing as well. So, you know, foo does a thing. I do a thing. We should both do a thing together. When I call this, though, me.new, do a thing. It only puts out me because we're not like calling super to tell foo to do its thing as well. But see, I wanna do my thing before foo does its thing. So to get around that, right? To make this work when you're dealing with calling up the call chain of your inheritance here, you need to call super. So I'm gonna go ahead and add that. I'm gonna call super. And now when I create a new me and I do the thing, I do the thing and then foo does the thing. That's kind of the way that it works. And that's kind of nice. Now, what's nice about the new prepend method here is that instead of being at kind of like the end of that inheritance chain, it'll put it up before you, right? So if you looked at the ancestors of me, foo would actually show up before. So I wanna switch that to prepend because I could call super beforehand but I wanna keep super at the bottom. I want foo to do its thing and I wanna do like all of the other modules that potentially do a thing that I'm including to do it before me as well. And I don't wanna change my code to do it. So you can call prepend and it will just put it at a different spot in the inheritance chain. Now, when I call to do the thing, foo does its thing but I don't do the thing anymore, right? And that's kind of a bummer because foo is not calling super. It's not going up the inheritance chain. So let's have foo also call super, right? Does that make sense? So I'm gonna create a new me to do the thing. I do the thing and then foo does its thing which is good and then I do my thing which is good. But then we get this error because I calling super and there is no super, right? And that's kind of a pain. Now, there's lots of ways that you can go and guard against this. You can be really anal about, you know, which modules are intended for include versus which are intended for prepend. But I think a better way and I didn't know that you could do this until, you know, relatively recently is that you can actually check to see if super is defined and if super is not defined then just don't call it, right? So put a guard conditional on this and now it doesn't matter, right? If foo does its thing, I do my thing. We added a bar that does a thing or a baz that does a thing. They just call super. It's not up to the module to determine if it's gonna be included or prepended, right? It's just gonna kind of do the thing and then call super if it can, right? So I'd like to see more of this. I'd like to see more defined super in code. And then we can switch it back to include. Create a new me to do a thing. Now, I do it and foo does it. Code doesn't change. The only thing that's changed is include to prepend. So, yeah, I think that's pretty cool, right? Yeah? All right. I think this next slide really says it all. That obviously did not work. I'm sorry. These are very terrible puns. Okay. So you may be asking why am I doing this to you? And the truth is, the truth is that I love t-shirts. I love conference t-shirts. That's one of my most favorite things about coming to conferences and putting on conferences is the t-shirts. In fact, and this is, God's honest truth, last night I had a dream that all of us together, we went to China, right? And we are going through customs. We're all going through customs together. We all had our passports and we all had our visas and we're waiting to get through and we're hoping, you know, like the customs lady is asking this like a year for business or for pleasure, you know, who is your visa signed by? Where are you staying? What hotel are you in? And everyone was getting through and we were all happy. And everyone looked awesome, by the way. You all looked fantastic in my dream. And everybody was wearing a white-pressed dress shirt except for me, I was wearing a t-shirt and I could not get through customs, right? And so you're all like, let's go, let's go. And I'm like, I can't. Like, they're not letting me out. They're going to arrest me. And you're all like going to China without me, so. Anyways, I love conference t-shirts, right? I'm here for the t-shirts. I'm also here for the stickers. Like, I love stickers. I like to make stickers. I like to put them on. So I just want you to know that this torture I'm doing with the puns, it's not about what I know. It's not about who I know. It's not about whether or not you know me. It's about whether or not I get a t-shirt and a sticker and whether or not I can travel through China.  How many people have code like this? We've got a constant with like a lot of data, like strings or just values in their code. Like I've got some files that are like, I don't know, like a hundred lines of just all this data stuff in a constant. And it's kind of ugly. You got to scroll through it. So here's a neat little trick that is pretty cool. There is the underscore underscore end keyword, right? And what this will do is it will take everything after underscore underscore end and it will throw it into data, all caps data, right? It's an IO like object, right? So what you can do is take all those values, throw it at the end of the file and then read from data and then split on commas or however you're formatting your data and you don't have to scroll past all of those constants because we all put our constants at the top of the class declaration, right? And then we have that long list of data. So you can just throw it at the bottom of your file and it's still diffable. You're not like going out to a config file or something. So that's, I thought, pretty neat. You can even go a little further and you can even format that data. So you have structured data with YAML or with JSON under the end, right? So it's, I think it's a pretty good crap. All right, I'm running out of time.  So I'm there on the line. All right. Pstore, who here has used Pstore or is aware of Pstore? Cool, only like a third. Oh, cool, this is nice. All right, Pstore is in the standard library. You don't have to do anything to get it. It's pretty nice. You require Pstore and then you create a new Pstore. You give it a path to where this file is going to exist and it's going to create a binary file that is transactional. So you can have multiple processes work on this file and it will lock and do all the things the right way. But it is the simplest database, the file-based database and you can, within the transaction block, read or write from this object, right? It acts like a hash. You give it a key and you shove in an object. You access a key and you get an object back out, right? So I think so far this presentation has had two useful pieces of information and that's like eight nines of puns, right? And then to pull it back out if you pass through the transaction, it's a write-only transaction, or read-only, sorry, got those reversed again. And then it just shows you how you pull it out, right? So you can kind of see how you could use Pstore, create like some sort of repository object. Maybe you're doing like an IRC or a Twitter bot and you don't want to actually spin up a whole other service for this. You could just use a flat file and access it and that's actually really useful. Here's another example. Like here we can set the useful information for Pstore. We can increment it, right? And then we can set puns to infinity and we can pull them back out and it actually works and it'll actually say so far we've had infinity puns. So that's pretty cool. The other thing which is nice is that it's not just like the raw values, you can actually do something like an open struct object, right? So here I'm going to create a new me with my name and my username. I mentioned that earlier on my GitHub profile. I've got the two names which sets me apart. Create that local object in my database transaction. I'm going to set my user to that object and then in a separate transaction I'm going to get that object back out and those objects are two instances of that same data. The object IDs are not the same but they're both open structs. They both have a name and a username with the same values. The object IDs are different but they're all for all intents and purposes the same, right? Which is cool and it's not just the kind of the standard library types. You can also create your own class with accessors. Create a P store. Create a new user instance. Write to the P store and read from the P store and it works the exact same way, right? And if you ever wanted to look at the file it's all binary and you can't read it. But you can, this is really fascinating. I like this as well. You can just swap out P store for YAML store and P store for YAML store in your code and it's the exact same code, right? So the only thing that's changed is what the database object is but it's API compliant between the both and then you can open up that YAML file and see all of the structured data, right? So I know you're, I think this is pretty cool. Like who thinks this is cool? Raise your hands. Everybody raises their hands. It's like hit, thank you. All right, so I can feel what you're asking. Like you're hoping that we've got a lot more tips and I'm afraid not. That was my last one. That was my last tip. But don't worry, everything's going to be all right. You get that a moment. Think about it. Yeah. You all right, John? All right. So I thank you so much for letting me speak. I'd thank the organizers for having me back and I hope that I get lots of fan mail from everybody who's watched us today. Please, it would be fantastic. If you want to, if you want like useful Ruby information there's a couple of links.  That was just out recently. And thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thanks.


Awesome. Excited to start the day with a conversation about the startup ecosystem. Yesterday we talked quite a bit about the benefits of thinking as an ecosystem, and I'm quite lucky to have two amazing people here, Link and Dave, very accomplished, very involved in the New Zealand and Wellington startup ecosystems, and excited to get your thoughts and your wisdom from it. And why don't I start by asking some of you guys might know them, and some of you might not, just to tell us about your involvement so far with the startup ecosystem here in New Zealand. Tina Koto, everyone. It's good to see you here. I guess if you don't mind me taking a walk down memory lane, I've kind of got a foot in both camps because I was born in Los Angeles, and I moved out to New Zealand as soon as I was done with university at Berkeley in 1981. And yeah, so I've been living out here for many years, and my first encounter with the startup ecosystem really is when my wife and I, Kate Frickberg, she's just sitting over there, started a business doing a web development company in the early 1990s, and we sort of grew that and eventually sold that company in 2002, and used the proceeds for both philanthropic and investment purposes in various startups. So I've been active mainly as an advisor and investor in startups since 2005, 2006. And yeah, I've really been enjoying watching the whole startup arena grow. The word ecosystem, I think, is slightly deprecated in startup circles, and so I know there's been some context around use of the word ecosystem in the last few days, but an ecosystem is generally something that's fairly mature. It's got balance. It's got organisms that contribute in certain ways, and organisms that contribute in other ways, and everything sort of functions well. I think the startup world is a lot more chaotic than that, though. And so to describe it as an ecosystem is actually giving it more credit for development than it really has. And I think that chaos is something that really drives the energy in the startup world. So I use the word ecosystem all the time, so don't get me wrong, I always sort of question whether or not it really is an ecosystem, or whether it's a chaos system, or not a system at all, just a collection of weird behavior. So anyway, for all of that, I'm a director in a number of startups. Just one of the key things in New Zealand is developing relationships outside of New Zealand, because to try to do a startup in New Zealand that's focused at four million New Zealanders is generally tears before bedtime. We really have to be globally focused in everything we do here, and be globally relevant, otherwise we become irrelevant to the rest of the world, and trying to do something for four million people is just not economic. So I spend a lot of time trying to encourage startups to think globally, to connect with global markets, to connect with global investors, and to generally do stuff that's going to be of amazing value to people everywhere in the world. So I guess that's kind of the long and the short of what I try to do. Hi everyone, so my name's Link, and I'm actually Australian, and it's, I know, one of the only people to come the other way it feels. It actually began in Los Angeles, so before I arrived in New Zealand, one of my first startups, when I was 23, was acquired by Pop.com, which was a DreamWorks company, and that's how I ended up in Hollywood. It was actually one of the biggest failures of Hollywood history, but it actually was a really great experience and got me into America, and it was basically a precursor to YouTube was what they were trying to do, and we were basically providing them the community to do that. And so about four or five years ago, I moved to New Zealand to start a family. I now have a three and a half year old daughter called Phoenix, and the reason, and basically when I arrived here, I really got the startup bug again, and that process led me to Inspiral, and then it also led me to realize that there were some real challenges in building startups in New Zealand, and around the lines of what Dave was saying is that the ecosystem in New Zealand is just really underdeveloped, and it's still in that pioneer phase that was talked about by Gary, and there is a lot of chaos, but in order for it to function well, it seems that there are a number of things missing, and the process over the last year or two has been finding out what those things are and trying to work in the next couple of years of how to fix them. So one of the missing things really that my business partner, Stefan Korn, who is now the Chief Executive of CreativeHQ, the incubator, and I looked at several years ago was a lack of an accelerator, and so a couple of years ago some planning went into starting a startup accelerator here in Wellington, and that came to fruition last year with what we call the Lightning Lab, which was a 12-week program based on the Techstars model, which takes companies from idea through to investment in this 12-week period. The first month of the three-month program is focused on achieving product market fit. The second month is focused on scaling, and the third month is focused on preparing investor presentations and that sort of thing, and so we ran through our first iteration of that in 2013. We're looking at doing the second iteration in 2014. The 2013 cohort, there were nine companies, four of them achieved investment on demo day, over 2.1 million I think was invested into those four companies, and so all four of those companies are still going, and yeah, it's a very exciting sort of model to be working on, and we're looking forward to even better results now that we think we know what we're doing more or less in the second year. We're kind of making it up as we went along to a large degree in the first year, which everyone does, so the second year should be much better. I've got a question. Dave, you talked about how you're encouraging startups to think globally, and I'm curious to hear both your thoughts on how New Zealand can make a global impact. What are some of the opportunities that you see coming up in the next few years for us to incubate different types of solutions that are scalable and make a positive impact in the world? Well, that's an interesting question because I don't think there's, in terms of the startups that we see coming out of New Zealand, sure there are some that are based around primary industries, which are really important, so for example, one of the startups I'm involved with, Expander, is doing anti-counterfeit by attaching custom QR codes to product packaging, which then gets exported to China and Asia. So, I mean, using the New Zealand context, you know, milk products are our biggest export, and so that's one example of how you can apply a technology solution to something that New Zealand is really good at and then export that and then take that same technology solution and apply it in other verticals and other geographies all over the world. So, we can do that with some things that we're good at, but I think, you know, many of the other startups that we see coming out of New Zealand could be coming out of anywhere, and I think New Zealand produces really great computer science graduates. So, you know, we have a strength there. People in New Zealand tend to be very self-reliant. Now, there's this whole number eight wire, sort of ethos. People know what number eight wire is for the Americans here. It's a fencing wire. It's used to make the fences that you see between sheet paddocks, and there's this New Zealand myth that, you know, a very skilled farmer can make anything out of number eight wire. So, for example, you know, there are these stories about, you know, entire cars made out of number eight wire and so on.  I actually think that number eight wire mentality is holding New Zealand back because New Zealanders aren't particularly good at scaling things. We're really good at, you know, doing everything ourselves and trying to do everything ourselves, and when we don't know how to do something, we get one of our mates to do it, who we think has some experience in that area, and they may not. Whereas people from larger countries and larger economies tend to say, okay, well, what needs to happen? How do we farm this out to people who actually know that we're doing? How do we scale this? How do we take, you know, this great idea that I started and actually grow beyond that in a much more large-scale way? So I think these are some of the things that we need to work on in New Zealand and perhaps some of the areas in which people, like the people who gathered here today, can help us. So I've just come back from a trip where I was invited to Israel to look at the other ecosystems around the world and to look at how they relate and what we could learn for New Zealand. And one of the things that came out of that was a quote from Brad Fowle, which was, sort of, be the best boulder that you can be. So in this case it's, you know, be the best New Zealand that you can be. And what does that look like for New Zealand? And to answer your question, Yosef, basically it seems to be that really things such as primary industries are an example of that. But there are some others that, for example, Matt talked about yesterday. Around video and the film industry here, it's basically looking at things that have already developed over a number of generations such as the Wellington film industry with Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit and that sort of thing in Avatar. And what that has done has brought a whole lot of expertise into this country that doesn't exist in other locations. So an example of that is John Lemon who arrived here to work for Weta and then left and started Lumio. And it's those sorts of skills that come in through Weta create an opportunity for all sorts of startups to come around that industry even if they don't seem to be related. And another area that's really unique to New Zealand is because of its size means that government is really accessible and that means that you can actually solve a lot of problems on a small scale here in New Zealand that could then scale out to other countries. And so that's already been seen in various startups with Inspiral and in other startups, but it seems to be a really great opportunity to do here in New Zealand. Well, I think that the counter argument to that is that the government in New Zealand is about 40, 45% of GDP and so it tends to be dominant and so it is easy to become over reliant on government as a revenue source in New Zealand and I think that's something that we need to diversify as well. You know, one other really interesting thing about New Zealand is we have, I believe, the second highest rate of immigration in the world. So I think 25% of New Zealanders were actually born in some other country and the only other country with a higher rate of immigration is Australia. And so particularly in Wellington, you know, we have an incredibly diverse population. We complain about the brain drain, but in fact I think it's actually a brain gain because we're getting smart people from all over the rest of the world who want to come here because of the amazing environment we have because of the appropriate scale that we have who want to live here and contribute and use their international connections to help improve the world generally. I mean, one of the things that I found really attractive about Wellington when I moved here in 1982 was the scale and that is an incredibly attractive thing about New Zealand and a real strength that we have because you can walk from one end of Wellington to the other in 15 minutes and in that time you'll probably bump into about 20 people that you know just walking along the street because everybody walks. People don't drive, either they walk or they take the bus and if you don't meet them in the street, you'll meet them on the bus and everybody takes the bus. So, you know, it's a very close-knit community where we have two degrees of separation and if you don't know someone, you'll know someone who knows that person that you want to talk to.  That's actually a strength and I think there's an opportunity there to develop more of a Wellington ink and a New Zealand ink sort of approach to the world where people that we're nominally competing with turn out to be our best allies on the global stage. Question to Link, you're working on a project called Free Range and as I understand it you're trying to create a much more developed technology ecosystem here in New Zealand. Can you talk to us a bit about what that project is and what are some of the key gaps that you're trying to fill through that? So, Free Range came out of Inspiral and it came out of a challenge which was the lack of capital here in New Zealand and it seems to be a similar theme across other isolated ecosystems and so the goal was to create a start-up to cultivate other start-ups and so Free Range started with looking for a capital by inviting international VCs such as Horizons Ventures which is owned by Lee Ka Shing as part of his foundation to New Zealand and basically try and fill that sort of capital gap here locally and over that time it became clear that it wasn't just capital that was missing but it was actually a number of those elements in that ecosystem that were also a lot more pressing than just capital and those come down to a number of issues. Number one is that there is a lack of experience in New Zealand and it's a similar situation to Australia and other ecosystems is that over time it takes a while, it takes a number of generations to build up particular experience in an industry that is really, really specific such as technology and so what ends up happening is that the particular type of brain drain that we're suffering is the ones where companies get acquired or they go to work for another company overseas and that experience is then not shared back into the system and so that the younger generation doesn't really understand what it takes to scale, how much effort it takes and specifically they lack the type of networks that older more experienced entrepreneurs have in a more advanced ecosystem and so I guess the opportunity is around bringing, inviting more serial entrepreneurs, more experienced entrepreneurs into New Zealand but also to develop the younger generation and to really work out ways of encouraging younger entrepreneurs and giving them really great experiences to learn their skills and to develop as well as the other missing area is engineers and so working out how to fill those gaps and is basically one of the main priorities for the next year and that comes from, for example, basically filling it through overseas options as well as local ones so it's working with local universities but also working with international organisations. The really great thing that's happened over the last couple of months has been that Immigration New Zealand has come forward and really decided to sort of get involved and become really quite proactive. They're putting a whole team together for next year and they've really identified this as an area that they'd like to focus on as well which gives me really a real hope for New Zealand and filling some of those gaps. Sir Paul Callahan, his great vision for New Zealand was a place where talent wants to live and I think that's going to be a key part to building up our capacity to actually deliver on some of these great things that we want to do. Dave, you talked about how the start-up ecosystem is more of a chaos than a calm, thriving ecosystem. In that chaos, what are some of the biggest gaps that you identify that are keeping it as chaos that are not helping it develop as we like it to develop? Well, I think access to capital is a key one. There are a lot of start-ups around who would try to do something on $100,000 in New Zealand that they would get $10 million to be doing in California. So you end up with people who very scrappily try to execute on an underfunded plan. So I guess access to capital is one of the key things. Link pointed out access to engineers and very specialized knowledge, I think, that's also a really key element. We're great generalists, but generally don't have the opportunity to specialize in a market of 4 million people, but we're getting there in things like the film industry and things like primary industries. We are able to develop expertise in those areas. But I think that, again, the scale, even though it's a nice scale and a very comfortable scale to live in and work in without... People don't understand what... Local start-ups have a hard time understanding global competition and often they'll build something up and build something up and build something up and then discover that when they finally make that jump overseas that they're at least a dozen competitors out on the international stage. So I think that sort of contributes to some of the chaos as well. And our distance, the fact that it is expensive and time-consuming to hop onto NZ8 whenever you want to do anything in California, actually, it is an impediment. And as wonderful as Skype and Google Hangout are, there's nothing like being there face-to-face with people. And so it's easy to become isolated and then when you get a key piece of information, it causes that chaotic behavior. Something that we're really pushing for next year is to really reduce that tyranny of distance and that can be done, as shown in Australia, through export development grants, specifically aimed at small and early-stage start-ups through basically giving some type of tax credit for travel, which reduces that distance down. You guys talk about talent and the talent Dave mentioned about how we're developing really good engineers, but yet we don't have enough of them and we're not meeting the demand. What are some of the attractiveness of New Zealand and the ecosystem here for not just engineers, but for talented people to come and move out here? Oh, well, there are lots. I mean, it's the same thing for anybody in many cases. The fact that you can live in such a livable city, that you can send your kids to school, that they can walk around and actually walk and bike to school and that you can feel safe wherever you are, that you can live in a community where you know all of your neighbors' names and what they do and all their kids' names. It's living a dream, really, that you just couldn't have in most places in North America where you tell your kids, don't talk to strangers, you buy guns and all the rest of it. We don't have any of that here. Something that's just really so obvious, no one mentions it, is how safe it is here. When growing up in Australia, there were about 14 options to be killed in my front yard. My grandmother almost died just bringing in the washing because she had a white-tailed spider underneath in the sheet and it bit her on the arm. She was in the hospital for months. It just gives you an example that doesn't really even come up here. You don't realize just how safe you are compared to some other places like Australia. Other things which are really interesting. When I arrived in 1982, most of the people my age had not grown up watching television because television didn't arrive in New Zealand until early 1960s. Most people didn't have them until the late 1960s. Most of the people my age did not grow up watching television. Consequently they read books and they talked to each other. I felt in some ways more intelligent on average. There are no statistics to back this up. I felt that they were more intelligent on average than the average people that you deal with in countries where people grew up watching television. I don't know whether or not that's all evened out now or what. I do get the sense that even if you go talk to a petrol station attendant or somebody behind the desk at a dairy or anybody you talk to, generally in New Zealand they have a pretty good understanding of world politics, of current events, of important issues and more than anything Kiwis care. They actually care about what's going on. Not only in New Zealand but in the rest of the world. That really struck me and I think that's a really important aspect that people do care here in a way that they don't in other places. Something about the local market here as well is that yes, start-ups here have to be global from day one but the local market here is used around the world by companies like Facebook to do their first trials. One of the reasons for that is because we are a country of early adopters and we're willing to try things and that's really great when you're starting an early-stage start-up to actually have people willing to give it a go. So the counter argument to that and something that gets me really worked up like is that New Zealand start-ups that use New Zealand as their first market are learning all of the wrong things because they're designing their start-ups for a market of four million people. They take them offshore and all of a sudden they discover that in the rest of the world they need distribution. What's that distribution? In New Zealand, you want to sell something to somebody, pick up the phone, you rang them up and you say, hey, would you like to buy this? And they say yes or no and you generally do a deal with them. It doesn't work like that in the rest of the world where you have distribution to worry about and so New Zealand start-ups that are using New Zealand as a test market are, as I say, often learning really the wrong things and not focusing on the key thing that's going to kill most of them, which is distribution. Which is really highlighting the fact of how important it is to bring in that higher-experience talent to give those sorts of pieces of advice. Bring it in but also to bring it out. So I think there needs to be this bidirectional flow of talent and the more integrated we want to be with the world economy the more we have to be prepared to travel in both directions. So something that they've looked at Israel and one of the things that took them up to the next level was a scheme with America where Israeli start-ups actually spent time in America and it really helped them understand the American market and they say that that was one of the key things that took them up. I want to open it up to questions. If anybody's got questions we'll take about three out of five questions. It's kind of natural for young people to want to have a look at the other side of the world, especially when you are in a foreign market. So my question comes back to the fact that it would be great to be able to have people experience what it's like overseas but then to attract them back because everything you've mentioned suggests to me that it's a great place to raise your children to come back once they've learnt and had that experience and have fun in the bigger overseas metropolitan markets and that's really why we lose our young bright people and we're at a case in point with our son and even though he'd like to come back, he probably won't. Zeroes now started up and might attract them back so perhaps there's a comment there that you'd like to make about that as an example but that's the point that everyone wants to see what the grass is like on the other side of that number eight fence. So that's one of the strengths that New Zealand has is that our young people do go overseas and travel the world widely and every New Zealander when they graduate from university goes off on their OE, their overseas experience and it's just an expected rite of passage that it's something you're going to do in your early 20s. Unfortunately there is going to be some attrition and we're going to lose some of these people permanently to places overseas. I think we'll make that up in people we get back and I'm sorry that they're probably not going to make up for your son. My own son is currently over in Los Angeles. I don't know whether or not he'll ever be back but people do recycle and they do come back and he may not be able to come back now when he's 30 or even when he's 40 maybe when he's 50 he'll decide to come back and recycle that knowledge. So I don't think we can't really hold on to them but I think if we let them go there are over a million New Zealanders overseas so that's a fifth of the population 20% of New Zealand is in the New Zealand diaspora and these people are actually really critical to our integration with the world economy and these are our 1 million ambassadors that we have all over the world so I think that's really important as well and we shouldn't lose sight of that. There was some recent research done and it was found that the average successful start-up founder was 35 and so the fact that young kids are going overseas is actually great and it's just about creating an environment here that this is where they choose to come back to and that the so-called ecosystem is here that it actually supports them coming back and building their start-up here later on. In the business that I'm involved with we actually send a whole lot of New Zealanders and Australians overseas to get work experience thousands of them a year but we actually interview them all and ask them what they'd like to do when they come back to New Zealand and the majority of them didn't actually want to come back to New Zealand and work in large corporate businesses but actually wanted to come back to New Zealand and get involved in small businesses and helping some of their skills and indeed even injecting their capital into those businesses if they wanted to and that was 45% of the Kiwis that lived overseas were of that attitude. I think the main issue for them is actually educating them about what they can do when they get back because the ecosystem is chaotic they don't really have any visibility of what they can do when they come back so they just get sucked into that trap going and working for a big corporate despite the fact that that might not be what they want to do. So... Sure, my question was just surrounding this 1 million Kiwis living abroad and I've definitely seen a lot of stats from the Kia network that speaks of the relative success of that diaspora often leadership in international organizations you see a lot of prominent Kiwis in the US in leadership positions in big companies I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what are some of the things that New Zealand companies or friends of New Zealand can do to take advantage of that community this dispersed but well connected and sort of values align group of people how can New Zealand really tap into that more or do you feel like that's already happening and just maybe share your thoughts on that? I think that one of the things that we've looked into recently is that those overseas New Zealanders represent potentially some of the country's best ambassadors and I think there's an opportunity to really unlock that by allowing them to actually identify people that they'd like to invite to come and live in New Zealand for example so basically formalizing that process and I think there's a real opportunity there Yep, so the Kia network is fairly well defined I think they've always struggled to actualize what they're trying to achieve mainly because people have busy lives and they get off doing whatever it is that they're doing overseas and they come back to New Zealand for the Christmas holidays and hang out with their family and then go back overseas so one initiative that we started came out of an idea last year was a thing that we're calling Worldwide Wellington Week and this is the week leading up to Wellington Anniversary Day where we've got a Facebook page we're going to try to get all the Wellingtonians that we know all over the world to have barbecues in their garages and do other things that are very Wellingtonian to wear black and yellow and celebrate whatever it is their connection to Wellington is so if we can keep these people connected in some way I think that will be really helpful as well Kia ora, I'm Viv Materbourne a couple of things, of course living in New Zealand for women and children isn't safe and I just want to make that point that we kill more of our women and children than any other developed country in the world so let's not romanticize the work that there is to be done in our country and our culture in that way the second thing I want to say is when we're talking about startups I want to really make the distinction between just any old business starting up a business starting up to be another profit taking extractionist company that's about profit making for shareholders and startups that are about changing and disrupting the current power dynamics in the world and finding new ways of redistributing wealth in the broadest possible sense so I guess I'm interested when you're talking about startup to really address this challenge of how do we do more than just grow more rip-off businesses that accumulate wealth in individuals and ignore the common good so I think that's the challenge and that's what I'm really interested to hear how do we grow an ecosystem of that kind of startup so to be fair Viv I think there are very few startup entrepreneurs in New Zealand or anywhere else who go into their startup thinking that the reason that they're going to do this startup is to make a shitload of money and oppress people so I just wanted to get that out of the way I think most people who are doing startups are really passionate about one particular idea that they want to see disrupt the entire way that things are done in that particular area and extract value from that by making it easier for people to do whatever it is that they're already doing in that area so I think it's really good that there are lots of people doing this in all sorts of unexpected ways and they pick really odd things to be passionate about and develop and make a lot more efficient and more interesting and more fun and easier to do and I think that the value that's unleashed by that actually contributes to increasing increasing levels of well-being everywhere so I think it's really important that that kind of stuff keeps on continuing as it is I do think that the question that you ask is a valid one though and that how do we focus people more on addressing issues like inequality in society or poverty or violence or other social issues how do we encourage people to focus on that as well as all of the other things I think the only answer to that is to make sure that we get people passionate about that to the degree that they want to risk everything because that's what you do when you do a startup you basically risk everything in order to achieve that goal so how do we do that I think the interesting thing about New Zealand is that we've all chosen a lot of us have chosen to be here and that the reasons that the types of reasons that we've chosen to be here are exactly that are quite similar in the very reasons that we want to start those sorts of businesses and I think the emergence of Inspiral as an example of that it has really is a really good example for the hope that I have in New Zealand's role in those sorts of startups and I think that you're sort of bringing up let's not sort of paint a rosy picture I think that the other thing that we haven't discussed is that the feedback from international VCs on the New Zealand ecosystem is that there is another issue here and that issue is around not the fact basically the feedback was that startups here have great design the design thinking is amazing for this country and the startups within but what's missing is basically a way of creating something that has as type of protectability and the fact that IP is not protected well means that these startups can't get the sort of capital that they might attract if they did that well and there's this local that seems to be a local trend in the past of let's just get it let's just get something going quickly rather than thinking about how to protect that intellectual property hang on Link who are we designing these startups for are we designing them specifically for investors or are we designing them to change the world and to create value so if you're trying to design something for an investor then definitely you look at IP protectability as being a key a key aspect of something that you want to work at on the other hand there are plenty of other business models I'm a really passionate open source sort of person don't get me wrong I think it's completely possible to have really good business models around stuff that's essentially free and that comes down to how well you can execute so there are lots of different business models but I think in terms of the IP protectability you really have to ask the question who is it that's benefiting from that protectability I guess it's just a balance so if you're too far on the open side that it becomes harder and harder to actually get the scale and to attract the capital to actually grow it so there's a balance and ultimately it's just the feedback is that it's just too far on that side to attract if you're going to try and attract VC funding to do something otherwise you're going to have to look for other sources which we end up doing and start up to like Lumio finding really interesting ways of doing that but it's just harder it is harder one last question Josh over there I'm just curious about next three years if you could wave a magic wand around here what would you like to see change what do you want to see that's not here right now personally I'd like to imagine that we're further down the track of that more complete ecosystem and that there are more I mean Yosef and I talked about this earlier in the year and it was sort of imagining that more people were moving here then more people were moving back we were attracting more experienced serial entrepreneurs that decided to move to New Zealand or even part time to start things here and that there was more of an awareness of entrepreneurship as in the local environment so make no mistake we're as a country and as a start up world we're still bootstrapping and we have to do that one success at a time and there are no shortcuts it's not like I can wave a magic wand I mean as nice as it would be and immediately everything is there the way we want it to be so we have to keep on building our resilience we need to celebrate failure better than we do and give people the the permission and the encouragement to try something really hard to the degree where they might fail because I think Kiwi's probably have less sort of resilience to failure than say people in Silicon Valley for example so keep on encouraging that so I want to see more people trying harder and failing and having those failures be celebrated but at the same time I think recycling the talent that we have well is really really important and that is the key to success in bootstrapping is build more success stories have those people come back and do it again and come back and do it again and encourage others to do it again by recycling their own capital their own expertise so it's a bit hackneyed but if you look at Rod Drury and the way he's built up his career he's the chairman of Zero and the founder of Zero the accounting software firm but if you look at the way he did it he started with a web development firm he built that into another technology company developed that into another technology sold that came back and started Zero so it's that recycling recycling thing which is really good and keep on striving at solving problems that are really really hard that people are passionate about I remember when Rod Drury first started Zero I thought he was trying to solve a problem that was just too hard to solve and yet he's made a huge success of it and took huge amounts of risk and applied huge amounts of his own money and other people's money to make it happen and did it and so good on him so we need more of that recycling effort happening in terms of talent and capital within New Zealand Thank you guys so much for sharing it's really inspiring Dave Link I'm curious, especially for anyone watching this on video, how can we learn more about the projects you guys are involved in and websites and URLs Right, well for me the key ones, I've got my own blog dave.moskovits.co.nz Lightning Lab is lightninglab.co.nz I guess those are the key ones for me freerangefarm.co.nz That's good, so thanks everyone really appreciate the opportunity to be here Thank you both for sharing the many exciting opportunities but also challenge that we face here Just one last comment I want to make is relating to the scale of New Zealand here and the opportunities to make a big impact is something that we have noticed when we moved here and when I moved here about 11 months ago and what's exciting for us is just an opportunity to contribute and help some of the chaos thrive better I don't think we can stop it from being a chaos but we can help it thrive and utilize some of the skills resources and relationships that were built in the Silicon Valley ecosystem to meet some of the needs and investments some of the needs and talent because a lot of the people we've been talking to in meeting are looking for something a bit more meaningful to do and ways to utilize their skills and knowledge and I want to give them an opportunity for them to come here and contribute in the ways they can so we're setting up an entity called KiwiConnect where it's in very early stages and we'll be launching our website quite soon but we'll send you guys a quick note about it when that is out but thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and skills wisdom and hope to continue this conversation and contribute to the thriving of this chaos, thank you


Hey it's Missy! Thank you for watching. Today's tutorial is a picture I post on Instagram and so many Riaspo tutorials so I thought I would film that today. Be sure to subscribe to my channel if you haven't yet and let's get started! With my part on the right side I'm going to divide out a section of hair on the left side from the part down to the left ear and clip the forward hair out of the way. Now I'm going to divide out a similar section on the right side from the part down to the right ear and then I'm going to divide out a section of hair at the crown of my head twist this hair together and pin it against the back of my head with bobby pins. Now I'm going to take the hair underneath the pin section and tie this into a low ponytail but on the last strap of the hair band I'm only going to pull the hair halfway through to form a loop.  Then with the hair left sticking out at the bottom I'm going to tuck this into the hair band to form the bottom portion of the bun. Now I'm going to let down the front section of hair on the left side and divide it into two sections a top and a bottom. With the bottom section of hair I'm going to divide this into two sections and cross the left strand over the right strand while adding in new sections on the left side of the twist. Then I'm going to cross the left strand over the right strand again and add a new section of hair into the left side. And as I twist the hair I'm going to pull on the edges to make it fuller and just continue the twist down to the ends. Then I'm going to lay this twist over the top of the bun and pin it in place with bobby pins. Then with the remaining hair from this front section I'm going to pick up a piece and divide it into two sections for a second twist. I'm going to cross the left strand over the right strand and then add a new section of hair into both pieces. Then I'm just going to cross the left strand over the right strand again and just repeat those steps continuing the twist until I've brought in all of the hair from this front section. Then I'm going to continue the twist down to the ends and then go back and pull on the edges to make it fuller. Then I'm going to lay the twist over my bun and pin it in place with bobby pins. Now with the hair on the right side I'm going to create a third twist, lay it over the bun, pull on the edges to make it a little bit fuller, and pin it in place with bobby pins. Then I'm just going to take any extra pieces that are left sticking out and pin them into the bun. I hope you enjoyed today's video. Make sure to click the thumbs up if you did and be sure to subscribe to my channel if you're new. You can click my little picture right up here to subscribe. Then you won't miss out on any future videos. Thank you so very much for watching and I will see you next time.


Yes, hey, famous superstar, amazing. Ati? Kenya's biggest machine. Hey! Sawa, atuna vita. Atuna vita. You're looking amazing, my dear. Thank you, as usual. What inspired you to wear this outfit? I'm an African woman, so I had to spice it up with an African theme, kidogo. Black, then Nikaibrekna. You're wearing white, but you wear it here. So you're wearing yellow. And I'm saying that, the number of people wearing this outfit, is the number of people wearing this outfit, that is the number of these people wearing this. So I think they're probably wearing it here. Just go, go to your mat, Maria. I'm so energetic. What keeps you going? God. Yes. Yes, so what keeps me going? I think it's just God, nimungu, nimungu, nimungu, nimungu, kila kitu nimungu, nimungu then myself because mimi sasandia ule monoma, big machin, big machin, big machin Tuliwa nukati a kuku alpata kuku onjeka, ule ismama na e, ukwa go thru alot na e, nambaka leo hiu mbaki na e, maybe unu zashiyana sisi, what is that one thing you learned, ama you experienced being with a kuku? Ako tu sawa, haina shida, ono je shida ni kila mtu, sisi tuko tuko hiu dunia unesa pata shida leo keshonini, but he's not hold it at heart, but when you have a problem like this, what one is a kuku toka, that's what he's learned Ako tu sawa, because one thing he keeps on saying and I'll repeat again, he is not his friend's responsibility, so mtu anasa idea at heart, at will, akitaka, kama piya kuna insawa pisi ni wasani tu na je lewa Yes, but friends have really come through for him, friends in the diaspora, friends in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, you know he has so many friends who have come through You remember 2 million isn't u lichanga, ni ma fans u alichanga is 2 million, you can imagine, ma fans you are the best, you are the best na na onan kama miya choka Because ono piya pay bilbado, pesa inazidi, inazidi kuhu, inazidi kuhu mimi nika, mimi ni toji, kwingia, siku mimi nika Ya, inazidi kuhu kwingia, ya and we are here today for the show, it's one mic, one cause Today we gather here as artists, we laugh, we have fun, na tuchangisha, that is our main aim and goal Ya, I'm just hoping for the best and I can see people coming Wasani piya okopa, we just want to stop the show Ok, just to let you go and understand you are very busy, maybe one word to a kuku and to a kuku fans A kuku fans, aha, now nadiwa ta fanya na interveni ni skwingine, but a kuku is really appreciating you guys He has sent his gratitude, my God, ata akiongia na liya because what you people showed him Imagine fans contributing 2 million, 2 million to a person they look up to, to a person they love That means a lot, so thank you fans, thank you so much to a kuku dangerous fans, to my fans, to churches fans, to Jalango fans Thank you so much, thank you, thank you, thank you and may God bless you Mali pesa ini metoka, izidi, izidi kuru di hapo na hapo Yes na piya, jambwingine bifoni hende Artists have really supported a kuku danger, sana, sana, sana I don't know if you're in the group, you're not in the group Because I was the one collecting money, wasani have really come through wali changa vizuri Ya ni wasani, I cannot even, by wasani I mean the actors and the comedians Oh my God, they've really come through for a kuku danger Thank you so much, this was how Thank you namja choka, biga, may God bless you Mali pesa ini metoka, iru di tena, amen? Amen, thank you so much for your time, let me let you go And then I hope everything will be a success Everything will be a success Thank you so much Wanwatu wa kuku wambiru nampenda From the online media team to nampenda sana Nampenda kabisa? Yes Nampenda jumkwa pawengi sana?


Good morning. Welcome to the morning prayer set at the Radiant City Center downtown Kalamazoo. We're so glad you're here to worship and pray with us this morning. If you have your Bibles, go ahead and turn to Psalm 26. I just want to read just a couple verses from this Psalm, Psalm of David. Beginning in verse six, it says, I shall wash my hands in innocence, and I will go about your altar, O Lord, that I may proclaim with the voice of thanksgiving and declare all your wonders.  And in Isaiah 56 verse 7, Isaiah came along hundreds of years after David and he gave definition to that house that David said he so loved and it was the house of prayer for all nations. And so as we gather at this altar this morning, we, like David, have come to proclaim the worth of Jesus Christ to enter his courts with thanksgiving and with praise. And so let's just posture our hearts to do that as we enter into worship. Lord, we love you. We love who you are and we love what you do. And like David, we've just come to this altar, this corporate altar in Kalamazoo, Michigan this morning to make much of you, to proclaim your worth before angels and demons alike, to lift high the name of Jesus in exaltation over our own hearts, over our homes and over our city and this nation. Lord, we enter in with thanksgiving for all that you have done and all that you will do. We come with adoration. We just say, Lord, there is nothing like your presence. We love your house of prayer for all nations. We love basking in your glory, beholding your beauty, partnering with you from that place of intimacy with your heart as the great intercessor. Lord, we don't take it lightly this morning. I pray for an outpouring of grace this morning on each one of us. Lord, would you just grace the singers and the musicians who are ministering to your heart, Lord, with a spirit of prophecy? Would you anoint their fingers, God, to declare things through sound and instrumentation? Would you anoint the singers, God, to release on earth what is being released in the heavenly sanctuary even now? I pray for grace to pray, grace for supplication, grace for intercession. Lord, just lead us, help us, grace us. In your name we pray. Eyes of faith this morning and we gaze by faith into an invisible realm.  Our hearts are moved, God, just by beauty. Oh Lord, we long to see you more, that we would love you rightly, that we would walk worthy of who you are, this beautiful goodness. We just hold that gaze corporately. We're going to shift a little bit into intercession, but we're just going to pray that, that very cry for more revelation of the beauty of the Lord, everything that Natasha was singing about changing our filters and readjusting our lenses concerning the beauty of the Lord. So I'm going to pray from Luke, chapter 24 to chapter or verses. This is where the disciples were on the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. And as they're walking along depressed, Jesus shows up and walks beside them, but they don't recognize him. And it will pick up in verse 27, it says, and then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, he explained to them the things concerning himself in all the scriptures. And they approached the village where they were going and he acted like he was not going to go further, but or he was going to go further and they urged him saying, stay with us. It's getting towards evening. So he went in to stay with them. And when he had reclined at the table, he took the bread and blessed it and breaking it. He began giving it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him and he vanished from their sight. And they said to one another, were not our hearts burning within us while he was speaking to us on the road while he was explaining the scriptures to us. So Lord, we thank you that it is the desire of your heart to unveil your beauty and worth to your people. Lord, I thank you that it's the desire of your burning heart to ignite a flame in our weak human hearts that we would burn in love for you, God, in every chapter of our story. So we stand in the gap this morning, God, on behalf of our own personal hearts and on behalf of your church in Kalamazoo, Michigan, God, we lift our corporate hearts, our individual heart before you. And we just say, Jesus, would you draw near?  And we ask for a spirit of revelation in the knowledge of who you are to be granted to us. God, all that Natasha was singing that you would just change the filters that suddenly, suddenly we would behold your beauty in the mundane, in the well-worn paths of our life, God, in the daily tasks that we do, in the pressures that we encounter. I'm asking, Lord, would you walk beside us, Holy Spirit, would you reveal to us the man Jesus Christ that our eyes would suddenly be opened, that we would see Jesus rightly, Lord? We're asking for a spirit of revelation in the knowledge of beautiful Jesus to be granted to your church today in greater measure in your name we pray, hear the revelation, adjust our ideas, your quarry comes in on us, Lord, heart, sun, fire, fight us, Lord, revelation, set our hearts on, set our hearts on fire for our sons beside us, Lord. Talk to us, Lord Jesus, that in the kindness of your heart you love to draw near, you love to speak the language of our heart, you love to lift our gaze once again and surprise us in revelation of your beauty. So Lord, I'm asking this today even now as we're in the gap as just a remnant in this city, Lord. I'm asking that you, Holy Spirit, would break in right now with the spirit of revelation, Lord, to the men and women on the business commutes or in the office already. I just pray that you would break in, Jesus, walk with them as they do their tasks, as they plan their day to the moms and caretakers, Lord, at home with little ones, even now break in, God. Break in, Holy Spirit, to moms and dads at home with little homeschooled families. God, suddenly break in with your presence, suddenly break in with spirit of recognition in the beauty of the Lord.  We're asking spirit of recognition in the knowledge of Jesus, God, be granted to your people today. Students on campuses, break in, walk along with them, God, even as you walked with the disciples on that road to Emmaus, Lord, talking to them, suddenly revealing who you are, enlightening their minds and their hearts with the truth of the scriptures concerning you. God, I'm asking, would you do it again in this hour? Draw near to your people with the spirit of revelation. Cause the scriptures to come alive. Lord, as we just draw away today to have quiet times and prayer times and Bible studies, home work for students, God, I'm asking, let open minds and unlock hearts to find Jesus in the written word. Holy spirit, do what you love to do. Take your favorite subject and make it our favorite. Draw us, draw us with revelation to Jesus in the scriptures and in creation and in conversation and in the mundane. We're just asking for more of Jesus, more of Jesus, more revelation of His beauty, goodness, kindness, we pray in your name, illusion, even as you drew near just our filters, you still cause our ears to hear your to understand.  Do it again.  I just want to burn for you, to set me apart, to burn for you, I'm going to go back into a time of worship. So I just invite you all just to stand, just kind of reset. to stay. It never gets older. Your beauty on display got the beauty of your mercy in catastrophic circumstances. God, we gaze again. We say thank you for the cross. Thank you for mercy. Thank you for love. Thank you for rescuing us. Love you Father. We love you Jesus. We love you Holy Spirit. Just stay in that posture of Thanksgiving. Remembering the love of God and we're just going to broaden the scope a little bit to our brothers and sisters. In Hebrews chapter 13 verse one says let love of the brethren continue and in verse three the Lord commands us. He says remember the prisoners as though in prison with them and those who are ill treated since you yourselves also are in the body. We started our prayer set this morning by just remembering that the Lord said his house, his habitation would be called or function as a house of prayer for all nations and part of that is our remembering in the place of prayer our brothers and sisters who live in areas of the world the nations that are hostile to the gospel and so in obedience to the word of God this morning we're just going to step into the gap as intercessors and we're going to pray for our brothers and sisters who live in areas where they are persecuted and even martyred for their faith and and I'm going to go ahead and open but we're going to shift them and we're going to go into a small group prayer at the very end and just call out those nations where our brothers and sisters dwell where they are suffering for the sake of Christ and so Lord I just thank you I thank you that your inheritance will be from among the nations every tongue and every tribe Lord will be on that sea of glass like crystal I thank you Lord for purchasing every people group God with your blood and we thank you Lord in remembrance and in obedience to your word for our brothers and sisters who are holding fast the testimony of Jesus even right now God across the time zones and across the terrain Lord and across the nations they are holding fast the testimony of Jesus in just in great persecution and in great fire of oppression and Lord we remember them and we hold them up before you right now as if we were in the prison cell with them as if we were in the shackles with them God I lift before you our brothers and sisters all throughout the Middle East and I pray Holy Spirit that you would rain down your grace even now all throughout the Middle East God our brothers and sisters who are suffering today even the very staples of life being denied them because they love you who are in hiding because they love you who are widowed because they love you and orphaned because they love you God I'm asking that you would take note of the threats against them that you would stretch out your right arm of power or that you would be their defense that you would be their provider that you would be their healer that you would be their comforter I pray that you would draw near to the broken hearted and that peace despite all the circumstances that they face would rain in their hearts right now peace of God in our brothers and sisters all throughout the Middle East Asia India God all throughout North Korea all throughout the nations of Africa God that are opposed to the gospel that are rooted in Islam and animistic religions we just say all the father remember them even as we prayed for the church in Kalamazoo that you would walk with them and open their eyes and strengthen us Lord I pray the same for every persecuted believer Lord you know the hair upon their head draw near to them Lord with peace with hope and with faith we pray in Jesus name oh just be the brother brothers and sisters who suffered today and now we're just gonna uh just go ahead and gather in groups of out specific nations people groups whatever the Lord lays on your heart we just want to pray those things peace hope faith protection provision and then we'll just re gather as we close out in just a minute or two but you would just sing over our brothers and sisters in these hostile regions the songs of deliverance we pray that you would deploy angels even now to bear them up to strengthen them to minister to them in every circumstance and pressure that they are facing we declare the hope of God over each heart we declare the peace of God faith ever being renewed perseverance and endurance we thank you Father we thank you for your faithfulness and Lord we just thank you for all that has transpired this hour at the altar and we end right where we started just declaring we love your habitation God we love your presence we love your house of prayer we love partnering with you Lord concerning your kingdom purposes in our city and in the earth and I ask that all that has transpired right here Lord that it would be multiplied many times over in this very room at this very altar across our city across our nation and the nations of the earth Lord we just say build your house of prayer God raise up the intercessors raise up the prophetic singers and musicians Lord that you would find on earth as it is in heaven a mirror of the heavenly sanctuary perpetually declaring the worth of Jesus we love you Lord and we bless you in Jesus name amen and amen well thank you all for coming out this morning thank you for joining us on the live stream we are back here in this room at this altar at noon and at 6 30 tonight God bless you


Hospital worker arrested after cops find video on his phone. Maryland police were investigating an unrelated robbery when they stumbled upon a very disturbing crime. A hospital worker has since been arrested after the cops discovered what he had done to an unconscious patient, thanks to the video footage on his phone. Travis Brooks, a 35-year-old now-former hospital worker of Trap, Maryland, was arrested on a slew of heinous charges after an unrelated robbery investigation led police to a disturbing video, which he recorded while at work. According to Daily Mail, Easton police were called to the University of Maryland's Shore Medical Center for a theft report, sparking an investigation. What they uncovered, however, was much worse than any robbery. After officers were told that a patient had money stolen from her wallet while having a procedure done, a case was opened and investigators identified Brooks, who was employed by the hospital at the time. As a suspect in the robbery, ABC News reported. Over the course of the investigation, authorities subsequently learned that Brooks had been taking photos of patients' credit cards with his cell phone, according to the police. Several search and seizure warrants were executed, leading police to review the contents of Brooks' phone as well as his home, and that's when things went from bad to worse. Detectives found a troubling video that police say was recorded by Brooks months prior to the reported robbery. It showed him sexually assaulting a different patient than the one who had money stolen at the Easton Hospital, where he was employed.  According to police, detectives were able to identify the victim, and they also confirmed that it was Brooks who both carried out and recorded the sexual assault on the unconscious patient. Travis Brooks was arrested at his home, taken into custody, and transported to the Talbot County Detention Center. For his alleged crimes, Brooks was hit with multiple charges, including second-degree rape, third and fourth-degree sex offense, abuse of a vulnerable adult, and second-degree assault for sexually assaulting an unconscious patient, WJLA reported. He was ordered held without bond on the sex charges, but they weren't the only charges he faced. In addition to the sexual offenses, Brooks was also charged with misdemeanor drug possession and several counts of theft, including two counts of credit card, steel and others and eight counts of theft, less than $100, stemming from the robbery investigation that led to the discovery of the sexual assault, according to WBOC. Sadly, this isn't Brooks' first run-in with the law. He reportedly has a long arrest record, including being charged with assault in July 2019 in a separate case, according to CBS Baltimore. Although it's not clear when his arrest record began or what else it may have entailed, it leaves one to wonder whether he should have been working in health care with a vulnerable population in the first place. Simply put, the importance of thoroughly vetting employees who have access to some of the most vulnerable among us can't be understated. It's simply unacceptable for someone with a long rap sheet to be given a second chance at the expense of other's safety. The last thing anyone wants when going through a medical problem is to be targeted by a criminal, and the facility employing those tasked with our care should do everything in their power to ensure our safety when we simply can't. When they fail, we can only hope that the justice system will teach the responsible party a tough lesson by throwing the book at them.