Welcome to the session Carbon Markets, a conversation with Bill Gates, Mark Carney, Annette Nazareth, and Bill Winters. My name is Nicole Schwab. I'm the co-director of the Platform to Accelerate Nature-Based Solutions at the World Economic Forum, and I will be your moderator for this session. We are delighted to have you here with us for the launch of the final recommendations of the Task Force for Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets. This Task Force was launched in the fall of 2020 to answer the following critical question. How can we build well-functioning voluntary carbon markets that can support net zero and carbon negative climate goals? The group consists of 50 of the key industry experts, as well as another 150 experts in a consultation group who serve to challenge the recommendations throughout the process. We have us today to talk about voluntary carbon markets and the Task Force. We have a fantastic lineup. We have Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, and the initiator of the Task Force work. Bill Winters, Group Chief Executive of Standard Charter Bank and Task Force Chair. Annette Nazareth, Senior Counsel at Davis Polk and former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioner and the Operating Lead of the Task Force, and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We will spend the next 30 minutes to dive into the recommendations of the Task Force with our panel, and if time allows, we will try to take a few questions from the audience, so please use the chat function to send us your questions and comments. And if you are watching this session on social media or the website, you can also share your reflections with the hashtag WEF21 or hashtag Davos agenda. So with that, let's go straight to the heart of the matter and let me turn to you, Mark. What is the role of offsets in the context of a 1.5 degree climate ambition? Well, thank you, Nicole, and let me compliment the leaders of this Task Force. It's a remarkable achievement. First thing to say is that this carbon budget is very precious on business as usual. So pre-pandemic emissions, we have less than a decade of a carbon budget to remain within 1.5 degree temperature increases. So it is a limited carbon budget. And in that context, really a voluntary carbon offset market does four things. The first, it's complementary. I underscore that complementary to companies' efforts to reduce absolute emissions. Companies' responsibility, first and foremost, is to reduce their absolute emissions. And as the report says, they need to first reduce then report, including net zero plans. I'm sure we'll get into the specifics of that, and then only then look to offset. The second thing that this does is it is catalytic. It's catalytic not for renewable projects in many advanced economies where the economics are absolutely clear. They are profitable and they will be driven, but they're catalytic for projects that many of which are emerging in developing economies where the economics are not yet quite there. And this can help tip the balance for those projects to come in. These offsets can also be catalytic as part of helping the economics of absolutely essential breakthrough technologies that need to happen for us to ultimately get to net zero. And I'm sure that will come up more clearly because Bill Gates has led on those technologies. The third thing is this market is cross-border. This market is being driven, it's a voluntary market, but it's being driven by companies making these net zero commitments. Most of those companies, the vast majority of those companies are in the G7 advanced economies, so-called advanced economies, they will be looking for a high-quality, high-integrity offsets, and most of those offsets will come from emerging and developing economies. So this is a potentially huge cross-border flow. And then the last thing, and I'll hand back to you, Nicole, is that this market has the potential, again, properly structured to have enormous co-benefits, co-benefits for biodiversity, co-benefits for other SDGs, although rooted in a high-integrity, highly credible, open, transparent carbon offset market. Thank you, Mark. Let me turn to you, Annette. So we understand the importance of getting to net zero, but the voluntary carbon markets are not new. However, until now they haven't achieved scale. Can you tell us what is different about this initiative and how it is going to help us achieve the Paris Commission? Sure. Thanks, Nicole. Well, you're correct that there is a voluntary market that is already operational, and it has made strikes in terms of credit integrity and transparency and efficiency since its earliest days. That said, from experience, we know that there are structural challenges that need to be addressed. In our blueprint, we set out six topics for action with 20 underlying recommendations that we believe will materially enhance the market to make it more robust and transparent and further increase the quality and environmental integrity of carbon credits and their use. Each of these topics for action and recommendations are important levers, but to me, the three most important elements that will really help us achieve our goals are quality, government, governance, and legitimacy. Quality comes through the development of a set of core carbon principles, which we refer to as the CCP's and additional attributes. These principles set out threshold quality criteria to which a carbon credit and the supporting standards and methodologies should adhere. This is a foundational step to ensure quality and also performing the basis for reference contracts. Reference contracts will in turn drive liquidity and price transparency and allow more high quality projects to be financed. The second element, governance, is critical. We have to get a governance body in place to oversee the CCP's. This should include embedding transparency, standard setting and oversight of verification of emissions reductions from projects. It will also include ensuring projects boost biodiversity and carbon capture while respecting community and land rights. And beyond overseeing credit level integrity, a governance body should oversee participant level and process level integrity as well. And finally, legitimacy. We focused on developing a strong and legitimate demand signal. Nothing will happen unless demand is in place. But having said that, organizations need guidance and clear standards on when offsetting is legitimate. We need to see transparent climate commitments from firms that include how much offsetting they plan to do in the coming years. Companies should publicly disclose commitments, detailed transition plans and annual progress against these plans to decarbonize operations and value chains. Industry consortia similar to Corsia for other heavy industry sectors can also move the needle significantly. And clear and aligned narrative on offsets and what claims corporates can make will also help drive demand. So again, quality, governance and legitimacy are crucial drivers and I think that those will animate our work in the coming days. Thank you, Annette. So quality, governance, legitimacy, let me turn to you, Bill Winchers. Why aren't we doing this already? What problems then in the way and how does the report address these? Now, I've been around the voluntary carbon markets for probably 30 years and at various points got very excited about the prospect of this market really taking off. But as Mark and Annette Bo said, it didn't. It's there, but it's nowhere near as robust as it needs to be to get us to net zero by 2050, which is something that already 1500 corporations have committed to. I guess that the majority of businesses in the world will commit to that. We've seen countries committing to net zero. But we know that the real carbon mitigation and the carbon reduction is coming from businesses, overwhelmingly from businesses. Of course, individuals and consumers can contribute as well. What do we need to do to get this market properly scaled up? But I think that the first thing that's changed fundamentally is that we've made these commitments. The fact that net zero is even a term, not just a term but used by 1500 corporations already. And I guess after this week, it will be many more. If we refer back to letters that are coming from the owners of many of these businesses, I'm thinking specifically about the letter from BlackRock just this week that makes clear that every corporation that in their portfolio will need to have a very clear plan to get to net zero. And in those plans, they'll be very clear that you must start with reductions. And this is really Mark's very first point. Every business has to start in the bulk of the migration to net zero is going to have to be improving our own carbon intensity, reducing our own emissions. That's recommendation number one in our task force and not something that we spend a lot of time on because we're focused on the voluntary market. But clearly, reduction has to be first and foremost. But we also know that it'd be very difficult for many businesses to get all the way to net zero, much less carbon negative as Microsoft has committed without tapping into the offset market. Now, why offsets? Offsets are the most convenient and efficient way to migrate the tens of billions of dollars that need to move from the hands of people like my bank, Senator Carter bank into the hands of the people that can actually remove carbon from the environment or structurally reduce carbon in the environment in the most efficient way. In addition, we have the tremendous benefit of creating price transparency, which has all sorts of other benefits, not least in terms of making clear to those of us that are polluting in any way what the cost of that pollution is. So what's different this time? Number one, we've got these these net zero commitments that have been made. Number two, the stakeholders that are urging us to make these commitments, our owners, our employees, our clients, are intending to hold us strictly to account. So this idea that you could buy an offset that was occasionally referred to as a greenwashing contract, it's simply not going to work. As Annette went through, we spent the last six months developing the standards and the standards setting bodies, the governance oversight, to make sure that we are using the latest and best technology instruments and with the right level of transparency to be absolutely certain that these carbon offsets or carbon credits that are being created are legitimate, that they're permanent. So it's not here today and gone tomorrow when the forest burns or the tree has got down. Tracking leakage, so leakage outside of the project in terms of gradual diminution of the affectedness and making sure that these projects are additional, additional meaning these are projects that wouldn't have happened, but for the fact that there was a carbon benefit to the to the climate. So these are the steps that we've taken. As Annette said, 20 recommendations, lumped under six key themes, with 200 participants very actively involved. What we're coming out with today, and I hope everybody gets a chance to read it, is 17 page executive summary, easy read, you can definitely get through that, 139 page report, you've got to put a bit of time into. But the opportunity for all of us is to take this framework that we put out today and to convert that into an implementable action plan this year so that we can start to see the real benefits of scaling up this market immediately. Because without that, we will not get to net neutral carbon net zero in 2050. Thank you, Bill. Let me now turn to you, Bill Gates, and you are also the founder of Breakthrough Energy. Bill Winters just mentioned technology, and we know that nature based solutions are going to be a critical part of the solution to achieving net zero. But what else is needed? Well, I'd say the good news is that a lot of companies are taking carbon into account as they make decisions. They have some per tonne hurdle price, and they are going to stay away from investments that are generating carbon because of that price signal. The big step, the next step there is getting people to monetize those things and put that money into things that are provably have an impact. And a number of companies now are willing to do that. Now, some of these offsets are very complicated. You know, trees, for example, have a 40 year lifetime on average. So to match the carbon residency time, you'd have to replant 250 times. And trees generally grow where there's good soil and good water. And so the number of places where you can do those 250 plantings is very, very small. So, you know, over time, the understanding and the quality of these efforts will go up. You know, as I went to do offsets for myself personally, you know, long term offsets, the prices were about $400 a ton. You know, that's very, very high. And everything we think of here, it's 51 billion tons of emissions. And so everything has to be considered as a percentage of that. For a company that's a electric utility, a steel company, a cement company, any sort of industrial thing, you know, you see the increase in price that they'd have to have is still significant. So innovation is going to be key to this as we do the carbon markets in parallel with funding the innovation activities. Thank you. Let me turn back to you, Mark. Some say that offset markets are just greenwashing and that it lets companies off the hook, allowing them to buy their way out of doing anything. What would you say to that? Well, I categorically reject it. And I think the part of this is putting companies on the hook, this process that Bill Winner has referenced, you know, we have 1500 of the world's largest companies are now in a position where they're making these commitments. All of a sudden, once you're in making those commitments and participating in the type of offset market that this report recommends, it's not just a commitment. It's a commitment which is has a net zero plan, which is rooted in science based targets, if those are available for your sector and as those watching will know, that is spreading across the sector. So not just a plan, not something you've written on the back of an applicant, one rooted in science based target, annual reporting requirements. That's one of the recommendations in terms of your absolute reductions. And then alongside that, if you are using offsets, well, offsets that come from a market that has the type of transparency and integrity that Annette and Bill have Bill Winners have outlined. But let me just reemphasize. So there's those elements, it's it's it brings companies into a it's part of what brings companies into a formal system. And by the way, all stakeholders around those companies will be scrutinizing and have the information they need to scrutinize in terms of absolute reductions and those offsets. But just if I can make one last adjacent point, if I will, which I started with, which is this is about preserving or conserving maximizing the use of a very limited carbon budget. And what are we supposed to be doing during that time? We need to do two big things. One, we need to turn over the capital stock for proven economic technologies like existing renewables that solar wind and others to get emissions absolute emissions down. And secondly, we need to put big money and a lot of focus and a lot of smart people around the type of breakthrough technologies that we need ultimately to get to absolute zero whether around hydrogen direct air capture or sustainable jet fuels. And so we need we need all of that, which is why I started with this is complimentary is one piece of the puzzle. But we do need this market. Thank you, Mark. Annette, I know that you went through a public consultation. So what what did the public tell you in the consultation? And what were some of the other concerns that came up? And how did those inform what you will do next? Thanks for that question. You know, we've been very fortunate to have a very broad engagement for the task forces efforts. Of course, we benefited from the work of a very engaged task force itself with the members representing the broad cross section of the value chain. But we also had very valuable input from our consultation group, which I believe we mentioned before, which was subject to comp composed of subject matter experts from over 120 institutions. So we took all that input. And then we put out a draft report during our consultation process. And we were very pleased to receive over 160 responses during that consultation period. The reception to the report has overall been really quite positive with 73% endorsing the blueprint and 88% agreeing with the need to implement the six topics for action. So, you know, the full debrief of the feedback can be found in the report itself. But some key takeaways for me were on credit quality and governance and reference contracts. On credit quality, we received feedback from across the value chain that solving the issue on quality, including permanence, leakage and additionality, which Bill Winters mentioned before has been highlighted as a top reason for getting mass adoption. On governance, we had 77% agreement for stronger governance for all identified governance needs. And for reference contracts, respondents were in favor of the development of standardized reference contracts, including over 60% of the buyers who responded who would commit to purchasing through such contracts in the future. So concretely, this input led us to the conclusion that we need to address a few additional steps. First, to drive up quality, we need to get one level deeper on the CCPs, which includes designing specific guardrails per project. For example, renewables only in least developed countries. And to review historic credits to ensure that they would meet the high quality criteria of the CCPs. On the governance process, we have to get more specific on the roles and responsibilities and help propose a way forward for its establishment. And on reference contracts, the task force can help develop the contract templates that will be used by market participants to trade. So again, overall, I think we had a very productive and informative consultation process. And it's certainly going to inform our work going forward. Thank you, Annette. Bill Gates, I have a second question for you. How do you see the role of private sector climate commitments to drive the scaling up of voluntary carbon markets? And what is the risk of getting this wrong? Well, I think the way forward here is to connect these private sector payments to innovation. If you just have some wealthy companies that aren't in the industrial sectors, where the extra green cost would make their products non-competitive, if they're just dealing with their portion, it's a very small percentage. On the other hand, if you're taking this offset money and you're bootstrapping the markets for the difficult products like green cement, green steel, green aviation fuel, then you can start the learning curve. And as you get that volume and learning curve, then these premiums can come down. Because after all, to be at zero by 2050, all the products that middle income countries buy for shelter and lighting and transport are going to have to come at such a small premium that they're willing to shift all their purchasing. And so taking the lesson from solar energy, where country policies drove up those volumes and the prices came down, and now shifting that to the hard areas, including industrial and things like green hydrogen, if we can take this money and start those learning curves, and so we're driving up the volume and causing success and more innovation to get those premiums down, then I see these voluntary carbon markets and the acceleration of innovation through the marketplace as really coming together and giving us that chance of getting to zero. Thank you. Last question to you, Bill Winters, before we turn to questions from the audience. What are the next steps and how will the task force strive for fairer representation? Good question. We spend a lot of time thinking about representation, and I mentioned that the 50 member core task force for another 120 people in a consultation group, and many others that were providing advice or perspectives, including 160 responses we got to the consultation paper, but there's an overweight in the task force and the consultation group in the developed markets. So we have a good representation from Indonesia, from China, from Latin America, but not enough. And when we look at the carbon equation in the world, something like 90% of the practical major-based solutions that the target areas are sitting in developing markets, whereas on the flip side, something like 90% of the natural offset buyers, at least so far, are coming in developed markets. So we wanted to make sure that we balance that out so that we really have both sides of the market represented in the efforts as we get into finalizing the implementation plans to take this framework and put it into reality. Some have said that the carbon offset market will relate to a result in a meaningful transfer of wealth from the developed to the developing economies. There's clearly some truth to that. We know that the developed economies are at, certainly in Europe, they're well ahead in terms of establishing infrastructure and also mindset. And we know that the developing markets, number one, are most exposed to the effects of climate change, but also can have the most important marginal impact from here in terms of improving their emission efficiency. So clearly, the key for us is to have this market be as inclusive as we possibly can, and we want to make sure that we bet that down during the implementation phase. So next steps, we obviously are beginning today with the next round of stakeholder engagement. We had really good, strong, robust feedback after the consultation document. These issues are not without controversy. I mean, there are people that have focused on this market for years, and Nicole, your very first question was, why now, and why hasn't it happened before? The reason is it's tough, and we've had to change some things, and the world has had to move on. Now we need to bet that down and take the controversy and resolve it. I think we have a reasonable shot at getting something close to consensus, but there may be some naysayers and we'll want to make sure that we understand those concerns and factor those into our plans. Second is to get the governance frameworks in place. So we've made recommendations for what the governance should cover. Now we need to actually create the governance body that can, in many ways, be the self-regulating organization for this market and can address the legitimacy and quality issues that you talked about. We need to get the standards agreed, both for the core carbon contract or the core carbon principles, as Annette mentioned, but also for the nature of transactions that are happening off outside of the core standards. We'll continue to work on addressing the remaining issues around the integrity of the carbon market, the legitimacy of the market, making sure that we've got the latest and best technologies and capabilities to track the quality of these instruments. That work has already begun, of course, but we'll begin now in earnest for the broader population now that our report is out. And we urge the most inclusive possible set of interactions with everyone in this community that all has the same shared interest to get to net zero by 2050. Thank you, Bill. So you mentioned a number of controversies, and I would like to now turn to the questions from the audience. And I would like to start with a question from Peter Becker from WBCSD. And his question is, in parts of the NGO community, there is a fierce rather ideological debate underway about refusing the use of offsets to get to net zero. How does the report and the work of the task force help us to break through towards a more pragmatic approach? Who would they like to take this question? Mark, would you like to take this one? Yeah, well, why don't I start and colleagues can jump in. I think the first thing is something we were talking about earlier, which is, I mean, obviously, having a legitimate market, a high integrity market where the offset is the offset and things such as the point Bill Gates made about the role of reforestation over the lifecycle of reforestation and being absolutely clear about the transitory nature of that form of offset. That's essential, and that gets clear first point. Second point, differentiation when it's necessary in types of credits. So either on exchange trader to OTC credits, so it's clear what's being used and the clarity that comes from being in company accounts. Because remember, ultimately, these offsets, and this is one of the core recommendations, not just of this task force, but of the overall finance process is we want climate disclosure in companies main accounts. So it has that level of integrity, and CEOs and CFOs don't sign off company accounts unless they know that it's real, either on the profit side or on the offset side. But then the process point, this would be my last one, but it's a critical one. And part of this will be finally nailed down with the governance body and the final terms of the market. But there's some leading sense here in terms of the principles in the report, which is if you're going to be participating in this market as a buyer, you can't just show up and buy a few offsets and put them in your window and feel good about yourself.  And by the way, there are 1500 companies with net zero plans. Not all of those plans are comprehensive net zero plans, which would meet the standards of those markets today. This will help ensure that those are the case and then that number increases. And then also what other requirements would be, will there be for those companies that would include the annual reporting on the plan, the market, the relative contribution. So all of that is a way to enhance the legitimacy of this activity. My last point, though, was my first point, which and Bill Winters said this, which is we're all looking for the same objective. We're all trying to get to net zero. We need to maximize our possibility of getting to net zero, our probability of getting to net zero. And this is part of the answer, only part of the answer. And it maximizes the ability to turn over the capital stock as quickly as possible, and to make the kind of innovations that Bill Gates was talking about a moment ago. Thank you. Would anybody like to add something? Yes, Bill Winters. I think some of that perfectly. But I think clearly at the heart of this question is a concern that the all sets that are created in the first place, we're never going to deliver the benefits that we're hoped for, or that they're slippage after the original agreement. And when you read through our Task Force recommendations, you'll see that we try to address those questions very directly, both at the outset and then over the life of the project. But maybe the thing I take most comfort in is, and this is getting back to what's different this time around, think about the number of people that are watching this time who weren't watching before. Our owners are watching. Our regulators, if you're in regulated industries, are watching. As Mark says, to the extent that some of these commitments make it into financial reporting, you got auditors who are watching. You got NGOs who are watching. And if you have an orchestrated market, that these credits eventually are being delivered into an exchange, and somebody's on the other side of every one of those trades, and they're watching very, very carefully. And like every other market that we've seen that's managed to get to critical mass, the best way to make sure that people don't cheat is to have lots of eyes on the process from end to end with complete transparency. So at the very heart of our recommendations is finding ways to make that transparency very evident at every stage of the process. I think if we get that, the confidence that these credits are legitimate, not just now, but through the life of the projects will soar. Thank you, Bill. I'd like to bring in a couple of other questions. So this one on a slightly different angle is a question from Jules Quartenhorst, RMI. And his question is, the focus of the report is the market for offsets. But as Bill Gates highlighted, we need to actually establish the pricing of the carbon attribute in the real economy to drive innovation and create the solutions for hard to evade sectors. Do you see the possibility to expand the voluntary carbon carbon market scale up move in that direction? Would anybody like, yes, Bill Gates, please. I think some of the best money ever spent on climate was what Germany and Japan did buying solar panels when they were still being sold at a high premium cost, which I call the green premium. And so companies willingness to fund activity, we need to connect that to the innovation cycle. Because after all, when if a green product is very high priced, there's no market for it. But if you drive that volume up, then that price delta can come down. And so I do think that really proving to people that the quality of these offsets is strong, that's over the next few years, we'll do better and better than that. But the other is the idea of this catalytic impact and getting some of this money to go into taking the tough, the hard parts, the high green premium parts, and getting those on the learning curve and getting companies that do that, that, you know, buy all their buildings with green cement, green steel, and bootstrap like solar panels, we want to give credit to those companies, because that learning curve is the only way that you get the entire market for those products to shift to green. Thank you. Just to chime in, it's clear in our report that Bill's enthusiasm for this angle is infectious. And we all agree that it's critical that we find ways for the voluntary carbon market to help support these frontier technologies. So that's, it's a central tenant. Now, do we have all the details of that workout? No, we don't. And I think we'll be one of the really important and challenging and interesting issues during the next phase of implementation is finding a way to get comfortable, but we can have the same sort of confidence in these frontier technologies that we have in some of the more established technologies where they have their own questions. But we're all committed to finding a way to do that. If I can make one quick point, which sometimes those are the frontier, it's hard for them to realize how others are behind them. So Jules, I know Jules, well, who asked the question, he's at the frontier. He understands these issues intimately in the financial sector, issues intimately in some of the technologies. Bill Gates, obviously at the frontier, some of these technologies. But one of the things that this architecture, this overall architecture does, companies having net zero plans, clarity on what is and isn't an offset, linkage of those offsets to breakthrough or catalytic technologies, is it shines a huge light on what needs to be done, not over the next few years in terms of currently economic technologies get put in place, but what issues need to be cracked and Bill Gates referenced some of them, you know, hydrogen aviation fuel as well. And that will mean brainpower, money, activity, innovation flows into that. So we get those technologies in, we maximize our probabilities, a better way to put it, that we're going to get those when we really need them. And that's why we need this as part of the overall architecture. Last point, if just to reemphasize, if I'm a company and I'm offsetting, I get to make a decision, how many of my offsets, do I just want to buy the cheapest high integrity offsets, or do I want to buy offsets that also have co-benefits, biodiversity in or co-benefits, which are buying down the green premium in some of these key technologies. And I will know which type I bought and I can disclose it and people can rely on that. That's what this market can help create. I think that's a great point, Bill, because Mark, because we, you know, what we focused on as well with the additional attributes and being able to determine, you know, in the capital markets that that's where your investment is going to go to that kind of activity is going to be within the, you know, within the remit here. And so I think it's going to, you know, as Bill Gates had really catalyzed these processes as companies decide to employ their resources for the purposes. Thank you. And I have a last question from M. Sanjayan from Conservation International. And that question is, one area of offsets, natural climate solutions, have huge potential as offsets, yet only attract 3% or so of the financing available. What does the panel's take on the role of nature-based solutions or natural climate solutions, and its potential for cross-border funds for many countries in the global south? Who would like to start? I mean, many of us start. So that's also my day job, in addition to what I'm doing on the task force. We can look at this as the problem, which it is, is $10 trillion, something like $3 trillion per year that's needed in the developing economies to get them on track to meet the commitments that we all need to make to get to net zero. Only about 10% of that is making its way into the right hands at this point. And we understand the reasons why. And that was pre-pandemic. There's a country risk premium, there's questions about the efficacy of the implementation of some of the projects, and there's a history of projects that have been botched in one stage or other of their execution. It's absolutely critical that we deliver that financing into those hands with well-structured projects. The other side of the equation is, if we're going to hit the sustainable development goals in the world, we need something like $50 trillion of capital to be deployed over the next 10 years. That's $50 trillion. And how much of that is available today? Well, most of it will become available, actually, through a combination of normal risk return activities in markets, together with government actions. So think about blended finance, where governments are helping to catalyze this flow of money from the developed markets typically into the developing markets where the bulk of the nature-based solutions are to be found. There's a role for banks to play in this. There's a role for capital markets. There's a role for governments. There's a role for multilateral institutions. But we can't wait too much longer, because, as we understand, the candle is burning at both ends right now. Thank you, Bill. We could go on. There's a lot of topics, a fascinating conversation. I would like to thank you all for your engagement and for this great panel. For those who are following on top link, we will post the links if you want to read the full report of the Task Force or the summary. And I also want to highlight that as a follow-up to the Task Force report, the World Economic Forum has issued a report looking at the critical role of nature to deliver on that zero and that we will be working to ensure high integrity, high quality nature-based solutions, which is a critical part of what we talked about today. So thank you all. You can find the recording of the session on the World Economic Forum website. And I look forward to, you know, this Task Force really gaining momentum and traction. And with all the wonderful recommendations that you laid out. Thank you.


Hey everybody welcome back to Magic Barthodoxy. My name is David and this is a deck review. Hey today we're going to look at the light blue crown deck from the Blue Crown. If you don't know the crown deck this is the Blue Crown the website. This is their steeple deck and so they release this back design continually throughout the year. Whenever they sell out they try to make more and this is a new color that they have added to their collection. The crown deck they basically describe this as simplicity meets elegance. The entire line of the Blue Crown decks are designed to evoke this really wonderful sense of quality and elegance and style. The crown deck kind of has a tally hoe inspired back design and you'll see that on the back and then you're going to have that married with the classic arc of faces so you really end up getting a deck that has very timeless appeal. The front of the tuck ace has a little crown and it says crown deck and playing cards right underneath that and then you have this giant pip shape right there. One side says the blue crown and the other side says the United States playing card company. At the bottom there's some ad copy about the blue crown and the top is left blank. There is no tuck flap on the tuck box and that's nice and on the flap itself it has their web address which is the blue crown dot com. The back design of course is the back design of the cards and that is pretty much it for the tuck ace. Let's take a look at these cards. Each crown deck is printed from the United States playing card company and they use their standard retail stock. They also have an air cushion finish and a modern cut and if you'd like to learn more about stock cut or finish you can click the link below in the description. And let me just say cards printed from the United States playing card company are high quality stock and they have a finish that ensures long lasting durability and handling superiority. People often ask me about how well decks handle. I will always recommend United States playing card company over any other printer. The result is a deck that looks good feels good and it just adds a really beautiful touch of class to your magic or your flourishes or your poker games. The back design is the same light blue color and it has a nice thick border around there and again like you can see it does kind of have that teleho inspired design the triptych kind of in the center here with a larger circle in the middle and then you have four bordered accents all laying on a beautiful field of light blue. With this deck you're going to get two identical jokers. Simply says Joker across the top and it has a nice large crown design there and if you notice the crown carries each one of the four different pips. With this deck you're also going to get two extra cards if you're going to get a double backer which is great for magic and you're going to get a blue crown ad card. Your ace of spades is very ornate it's a humongous pip that almost kind of like carries off into a sphere or a really sharp point. It says the crown deck right there at the bottom and the United States playing card company. Like I said all your pips and indices cards are going to be completely standard completely recognizable to anyone. The blue crown is also a card company that I think manufactures mostly to magicians and so magicians usually prefer cards that are recognizable to their spectators. The court cards are all the classic arco faces which I think is nice and it adds a very timeless quality to this deck. All right so that is my review for the light blue crown deck from the blue crown and if you'd like to purchase your own you can find it at thebluecrown.com. That is it for this deck review. As always we recommend that you like this video just so other people can find it faster. We also recommend that you subscribe to this channel just to stay up to date on the latest in cards and card magic. Now if you want to follow me on social media you can. I'm at facebook.com slash magic orthodoxy twitter.com slash magic orthodoxy and instagram.com slash magic underscore orthodoxy. Thanks bye.


Ok, so this is another one of those types of questions where it asks whether the solution of the following salt is going to be acidic, basic, or neutral, and if it's going to be any one of those things we want to show the reaction with water to prove to ourselves that we're making H pluses or OH minuses to make the pH go up or down. So the first thing we want to do is think about, well, this is the combination of two salts, right? So our two ions for the salt, what are those two ions? So let's break it up into its two ions first. Can you see one of them? Maybe? That's what's kind of the tough one, so I don't want to throw you off by saying that though, make you feel like you couldn't do it, because you're going to have to be able to do this one. CH3? No, no, but that's a good guess. The two ions are going to be CH3 and H3 plus, that's one of them, and the other one's going to be NO2 minus. So remember how we get these, right? So we say, well, where did this acid come from and where did this base come from? So this thing comes from HNO2, right? Is HNO2 a weak acid or a strong acid? A weak acid. Okay, so it doesn't really do that. What does it do? It goes like that, right? So this is going to react with water, okay? This thing here, is this going to be coming from a weak base or a strong base? How do we get this? CH3 and H2 with a lone pair, right, and it'll react with an acid to give you CH3 and H3. So do you remember us doing those before, figuring out those weak bases? This is a weak, so since that's the case, we're going to have something like that. So this thing, is it going to react with water? Yes. Yes, it's going to react with water to produce H3O plus, like that. This thing, is it going to react with water? Yes. Yes, it's going to react with water to produce OH minuses, okay? So this one here is going to make the pH go down and this one's going to make the pH go up, right? So together they're going to cancel each other out and make a neutral solution. So if you do these step by step and don't get too scared of thinking about all these reactions, you should be able to logically produce the result, okay?


Today is our Christmas dinner, and I wanted something special. We have a special guest to taste today. I love cheese and lots of things. Everybody likes cheese. What do you think? That's really good. You like it? That's really good. I like it too. Very very good. Love it. You have to make it from Tammy's cookbook. Hey, I'm Eddie. I'm Tammy's brother. That is cream candy. When we grew up, there was a lady that lived close to us, named Nail Casey, and she was about the only person that I know that made cream candy. And they live in? Collar Valley. All right, we're going to start out with our pasta first. You're going to use egg noodles, bring your water to a boil, and we're going to add a little salt to it. Never put oil in your water or your sauce won't cling to the noodles. Slide off. Salt. And we are doubling this recipe. So just look at the recipe if you want to make this. And we're just going to boil egg noodles. All right, so I'm using two 12-ounce bags because it's double the recipe. We're going to boil these egg noodles until they're al dente. Now we're going to saute some spinach and onion. So we're going to slice an onion and thin strips. And of course I'm doubling this, so I'm using two onion. We're going to take this onion over to the stovetop and start sauteing it in some olive oil. We're going to put some olive oil in a skillet. We're going to add the onion. This recipe is in our second cookbook. And we're going to saute these until they're soft. Let's go ahead and throw in a couple of teaspoons of pepper. And remember, this is a double recipe. So if you're doing a single recipe, you wouldn't use this much pepper and roasted garlic. The roasted garlic is really good y'all. I'm going to go ahead and turn the timer off and take the noodles over here to drain them. I'm going to use cream mushroom soup in the 15-ounce can. We're going to add our cream of mushroom. We're going to put in sour cream. And then we're going to use Lipton onion soup mix. You can buy beefy onion or the off-brand, whatever you want to do. And just make sure you get a packet in the mix that adds salt. And of course, the soup has salt in it as well. All right, I'm just going to use a whisk and whisk this together. And this is our cream sauce that goes over the top of our chops once we get them in the pan for baking. You're going to take your spinach and put it in the skillet with the onion until it's cooked all the way down. I am cooking so much today. Y'all didn't have a bigger pot, so you're just going to have to wait on it to reduce an egg wheel. Then it just reduced. It's going to be good. So we're going to mix it in, give it its onion. I'm going to turn that off and we're going to layer our casserole. We buy mechanically tenderized pork chops. Boneless. We're going to put these on the bottom of the pan. And remember, we doubled the recipe. You would normally make six chops at a time, but we're doing 12. So everything's doubled because we're cooking for a crowd. Today's our Christmas dinner and I wanted something special. Now we put our veggies in here. Make sure you get some greens on every chop. That looks good. Now we're going to pour in half of our cream sauce. So I'm just going to put about half of it in the middle and then spread it out. Next, you put in your noodles.  It seems really strange and different because I invented it. It was just something I threw together one night because I thought it would be good. And Chris was like, oh my gosh, this is so delicious. Tell them how much you liked it, Chris. It's delicious. I loved it. So then you're going to take provolone cheese and you're going to top it with provolone cheese. Provolone. We're going to get this in the oven, y'all. Y'all, I forgot to pour my milk in this pasta. It actually goes in the cream sauce and I forgot to put it in there. So now we've got to put some holes in it and put some milk down in it so that it's not dry. But that's part of cooking and this just goes to show you if you mess up, you can fix it. Oh yeah, now it won't be dry. Hey, y'all, it's time to get this out of the oven and it's almost time for my family to be here. Let's get this out and taste it. We have a special guest to taste today. This is our creamy pork spinach dinner. So you pick up the chop on the bottom with it, put it on the plate. She's fine. We got us a youngster. You can see the onion in there and the noodles and the pork on the bottom and the cheese on the top. It's going to be delicious. So let's get it over here and taste it. This is a collard valley cook original dish in our second cookbook. Here you can do it. It is. You like it? Do you think you might could taste the green part? Yeah, she'll eat spinach. Here, I can eat spinach. She can eat anything. Uh-oh. Is it good? Look, it's kid approved. Tell him you're not. Kimber. This is Kimber and Shirley and Seth. You tell them who you are. I'll let you cut into the pork chop and try it. I'm her dad. My name's Seth. I'm her nephew. And he talks country. Yeah, I can't help that. Y'all can know that my accent's not fake. It ain't. She really talks like it. It's good. And the cheese. You'll have to cut it. It's provolone. She likes lots of things. Everybody likes cheese. What do you think? That's really good. You like it? That's really good. I like it too. It's a winner, winner chicken dinner. Is that good? Yeah, you get on TV. Here comes Holly. She's all beautiful in her red dress and her lipstick looks great. Hello. This is Holly. Hey, Seth. Do you like it? That's really good. You have to make it from Tammy's cookbook. All right. Yeah, we didn't want you to miss that on your New Year's meal, on New Year's dinner, or have to eat it twice. Not that it's not good. Here, let me introduce, Eddie, introduce yourself. Hey, I'm Eddie. I'm Tammy's brother. And he's going to make our gravy for tonight or today. Tammy's going to test you because it's going to fill that whole thing. That is that. And it shouldn't get real thick. I want it to be kind of a fan gravy. But see how it's turning clear around the edges? Already. But once it's all clear, it's ready. How much cornstarch did you put in it, Tammy? I don't think so. It turns pretty clear. Just a coat of spoon. Yeah, um, this. Yeah, I'll put it this thing. Yeah, we can cook with it in a while. It has been a while. Get him on the show. Yeah, it's been a long time. It's been like that, right? It's been a long time. It looks so weird with the beard. You think? Yeah. Okay, tell them about this candy. That is cream candy. When we grew up, there was a lady that lived close to us named Nail Casey. And she was about the only person that I know that made cream candy. Who made this? Her daughter. It's good. It's very good. It is so good, y'all. It tastes like cream. But it's got the consistency of peppermint, soft peppermint. A little softer than that, actually. Yeah. It kind of melts in your mouth the way a soft peppermint would. We got all kind of old candy today. We got that ice box fruitcake, orange balls. I think Miss Noly made that, which is her daughter. Okay. And they live in? Colorado Valley. All right, let me see them where y'all will say thanks for watching. Thanks for watching Colorado Valley Cooks. You want to say it? Where we cook like mama did.


Okay, sorry. I think the online students were not able to hear me. Okay, would someone be willing to open us in prayer before we get into today's discussion? Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you Jesus for this time Lord that we are here again Lord I pray as we will learn your word. Lord just help us Lord. Lord give your spirit to let we will understand more Jesus about you. And Lord I give the faculty also in your hand. Lord just give your wisdom and knowledge Lord. So they will teach us Lord in a proper way Lord as you want Lord. Thank you Jesus and we will whatever we learn Lord just help us to apply in our life. Not all glory all honor I give in Jesus name I pray. Amen. Thank you. Can we raise the volume a bit? Will you just check the mic? Check. Okay, I think just so the fans can hear. Okay, so today we're going to be discussing first, second and third John. So I thought instead of doing the usual covering since these are just three letters written by the Apostle John we can share our learnings from these books. Right, so has everyone had a chance to read through it? No. Okay, so what we'll do what about those online because for us to be able to have a discussion we need to everyone needs to at least be aware of what all is included in the books through the books and come today. Okay, let's just take a few minutes and go over the outline in our textbook. That will help you get an idea of what all it talks about. And then maybe we can go into a little more detail and discuss some of what's in the book. So just take a few minutes and read that outline. That's on page 108 in your textbook. Sister, it's on mute. Since Lucy I just asked everyone to read the outline that's on page 108 I think. Okay, okay sister. Thank you. So what we'll do is we'll cover a bit of the background of first John and then we'll go into a discussion. Okay, we'll look more in detail of what first John talks about. So the author is not mentioned in the book itself like we see in other letters where there's an introduction of the writer we don't see that here. But according to the church fathers, an early tradition, we know that John the Apostle who wrote the Gospel of John and Revelation also wrote these three letters. Okay, so he wrote this later in the first century so 85 to 95 AD. And it's believed that he settled in Ephesus. This is something we discussed earlier that he settled in Ephesus and did a lot of his writing from there before he was exiled to the island of Fatmos. And so these letters are believed to have been written from there. So some of the main things we'll see in this letter, the first letter of John is that he talks a lot about false teaching that had come into the church and he's warning the church about false teachers. He talks about love for one another within the body of Christ. He talks about walking in righteousness. So these are three of the main topics we'll see him address and he'll keep going back to them in each chapter. He talks about it and he uses certain images. Are you all familiar with the images that he uses in the book to talk about these things? What's that, sorry? What are the images he's using to talk about living free from sin? Love. Yeah, so he talks about light and darkness, walking in the light versus walking in the darkness. And he describes what walking in the light looks like. And walking in the light means walking in obedience to Christ, walking free from sin. And then he talks a lot about love as evidence of obedience to Christ. And then he also talks about remaining in the truth. So we'll go into more detail into each chapter as we're looking at the outline. So let's see if we can have a discussion if you are able to share your thoughts, please do. So the first is he begins with our fellowship with Christ. That's chapter one versus one to four. And how does he describe Jesus in these first few verses? Physical manifestation and the appearance and the experiences they've actually had with Jesus in person. So he focuses on the fact that he and the disciples had physically experienced. Yeah, they as eyewitnesses had experienced Jesus in the flesh, had seen him, had touched him, had seen his ministry and were sharing whatever they had shared as eyewitnesses. Why do you think he's beginning the letter that way, considering what he's going to continue to talk about? The tangible experience was shared so that their joy can be as written in the fourth verse. Yeah, to welcome them into fellowship, the fellowship that they had shared. Also, anyone else wants to share why he might have started with this that they were eyewitnesses and had experienced Christ firsthand. So that the new believers will have fellowship with these people who have shared their experience. Okay, to invite them into that same fellowship that they had had with Christ. Yeah, and if we go on in the letter, like we talked about, he is addressing false teaching. And does anyone have any idea of what that false teaching was? Okay, let me just give you all the reference. Okay, so he talks about it several times in the rest of the letter. I don't think I have noted down all the exact references. But he's mainly, he calls these people as people who are anti Christ because they are denying that Christ has come in the flesh, that Jesus is the Son of God. Okay, so he is saying, we saw Christ, we touched him, we experienced his ministry. So people who are denying that Jesus came in the flesh are people who have not seen Christ, have not experienced him. But the testimony that we are giving is coming from the fact that we ourselves witnessed it. So you can trust our testimony. Okay, so that's why these, like I've said several times, these introductions to the letters are important because usually the writer will emphasize the main themes of the letter right in the start. And then we'll go on to expand it later on in the letter. Okay, so he begins with Jesus, who is the word of life, who existed from the beginning. Okay, that is similar to what we see in Genesis, similar to what we see in the Gospel of John as well, right? Talks about Jesus being right there from before creation, being the one through whom creation came to be.  And then he talks about having experienced Jesus himself. Okay, so verses 5 from chapter 1 to verse 2, verse 27, he talks about proofs of fellowship and he talks about it in different aspects of what is the proof that we share in fellowship with Christ. Okay, so the first is walking in the light and this is where he uses that image of light and darkness. What are some things you see here that he describes about walking in the light? Okay, can you repeat it in the mic? In starting scripture, he says like God is light and the later he tells like if we are walking in darkness, so like no use of telling like there's no truth that we are walking in light with God. Okay, so what does it mean to walk in light or to walk in darkness? The mean is like when we will obey God then obviously we will walk in light with God. Okay, so if we are walking in obedience to God then we are walking in the light, if we are walking in disobedience we are walking in darkness. And so proof that we are walking in the light is that we are walking in obedience to God. So if we say that we are in the light but we continue to walk in darkness then the book says that we are lying that we are in the light. Okay, anything else? The denial of not living in sin is by itself true. The denial of not living in... Denial of sorry? If one denies that he or she is not sin, itself implies that he's been still in the darkness. Okay, so being freely confessing our sins is evidence that we are walking in truth, walking in the light. Okay, brother Sanjay, yes, you can go ahead. Just adding to what I think brother Akhila just shared that being in denial of sin, in the world in which we live, there's a big debate on what is sin and what isn't sin. And to acknowledge that we are in sin or to acknowledge that we are sinners is the first step to coming close to Christ. The first step, just to acknowledge that we are sinners. And I mean in the world in which we live today, most people would rather deny they're in sin because they don't want to give up sin. They want to continue in sin. So it takes a lot of humility, it takes a lot of I think courage actually to accept you're a sinner and then come to Christ. Thank you. Yes, I think being willing to come into the light and have that sin exposed is evidence that we want to walk in truth. So what is very interesting here is that he says, first of all, that we are walking free from sin, meaning light and darkness. The distinction is if you're walking in the light, you're walking free from sin. You're not walking in sin. But the other aspect is that when you do sin, you confess and you're further purified. So you're becoming more pure as you are walking in the light. So that is something that is unique to walking in the light is not that we are not expected to sin at all. But that we confess and we allow God to purify us as we're walking in the light. So walking in the light is walking free from sin, walking in truth where we can freely confess our sins before God and receive his forgiveness and his purification. We go to the next part, chapter 2 verses 3 to 14. This talks about keeping his commandments and it talks about it in different aspects. Are you able to share what you'll see about walking in obedience or keeping his commandments? Chapter 2 verses 3 to 14. We can see in chapter 2 verse 4. He who says, I know him and does not keep his commandments is a liar and the truth is not in him. If we are just saying that we know Lord, we accept him as a Christ, our Savior, but our works are not right. We are continuing in sin. Whatever works we are doing, our life, what we are spending, whatever we are doing, it's just like before what we are doing. So it's not only like you accepted it, but it's also about your works, what works you are doing. You should walk on, like earlier we discussed, walk in light. So is it like keeping the commandments and work on the right path? So in the sixth week, you can see, he who says he abides in him, ought himself also to walk just as you walk. So it's like keeping his commandments is like how Jesus walked. If we look on all the Gospels, we could not say, Jesus just teased something and the disciples wrote it. Jesus actually lived the teachings whatever he shared. So walking in light and walking in righteousness is just like how Jesus walked. We just try to become like more him, more to become like him. Thank you. So if we claim to really know God, if we claim to really be people who are in fellowship with him, then our lives should evidence that. The way we are living our lives should be evidence of the fact that we know him. That means how are we living? We're living in obedience to what he has commanded and we are living like Jesus lived. That's evidence of our fellowship with Christ. So this is another theme that we can see from the first chapter, living in fellowship with the Father and the Son. And later on, he'll start to talk about the Holy Spirit. So he also talks about another aspect. Is there anything else that you'll see in this section? We cannot claim that you love God and we cannot claim that we love God and we are living in the light but choose to hate our brother and continue to live in darkness. But choose to? Hate our brother. It can't contradict. It has to be mutual. It has to be on the same page. You love God and you love the brother as well. Yeah. So evidence that we love God is also seen in loving one another in the body of Christ. If we say that we love God but we hate our brother and sister, then we are liars. Okay. So this is another thing, not only obedience to God's commands but and we see that in the rest of scripture, right?  So if we are saying that we are walking in obedience to God, if we are saying that we are living in the light, then that should be evidenced in our love for one another within the body of Christ. We then see verses 12 to 14 where he addresses people who are in different stages in their growth and faith, right? Verses 12 to 14. So what are the, what do you see as the stages of growing in faith in these three verses? He addresses the children. He addresses young men and then he addresses fathers. So do y'all think he's literally addressing children, young men and fathers or what is it? Stages of knowing God. Stages of knowing God. So children in the faith, young people in the faith and then elders in the faith. So what are the stages here that he describes when you're a child? What level of faith do you have? What level of revelation do you have? Okay, our sins are forgiven. Yeah. So when we are at an early stage in our faith, we have a recognition that our sins are forgiven. And if we look in verse 14, we also have a knowledge of the Father that we know that we are God's children. What is the next stage? You've just overcome the wicked one and then you've just started growing a little more stronger in God's word and the word of God starts abiding in you. Yeah. So he says in the first part, verse 13, you have overcome the evil one. And then verse 14, he describes how you've overcome the evil one.  And then the last stage of being fathers or being elders in the faith. That they have known God from the beginning, that they cannot deny him. There's no doubt that they cannot deny him. Yeah. They know God who is from the beginning, right? So this is the same revelation that John shares right at the start. We know him who was from the beginning. That's what he shares in verse one of chapter one. And so he's saying as fathers in the faith, you share in that same knowledge that we have as Christ's apostles. You also share in that knowledge of the Creator, the giver of life who was before creation. You have that same kind of knowledge that we have. Okay. We'll move to the next section. Okay. The next section is not loving. That's a very short, just three verses. Chapter two verses 15 to 17, not loving the world. What does it say here about not loving the world or about loving the Father? What do we see here? That when we love the world, the love of the Father is not in them. That the world is passing away. And the things of the world what we love is not permanent. But if we love God, then it is forever. God abides in us forever. It's eternal life. And because the lust of the eyes, the pride of the life and the lust of the flesh, all these are passing by, passing away. Yes. So all the things that we desire that are of the flesh are things that are temporal, but the desires of God are things that are eternal. So he's calling them to love the things of God rather than the things of this world because the things of God will be the things that will last for eternity. Okay. Let's continue verses 18 to 27, abiding in the truth. So here is where he begins to address false teaching from this passage, from this section onwards. And he's talking about people who had gone away from the church. He's saying that the fact that they went away showed that they never actually belong to us. But what is their confidence as believers? Where can they stand firm? Where does their knowledge of truth come from? Can we look at verse 21? This is chapter 2 verse 21. First John chapter 2 verse 21, I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it and that no lie is of the truth. Okay. And if you go back to verse 20, how do they know the truth? But you have an anointing from the Holy One and you know all things. Okay. So this is their confidence. Until now he's talked about the son and the father being in fellowship with the son and with the father. And now he comes into the Holy Spirit's role in the life of a believer. So our confidence in our knowledge of what is true and what is false comes from the Holy Spirit. And here he'll start to distinguish between the Holy Spirit versus the spirit of the Antichrist or the spirit of the world that is bringing false teaching into the church. Okay. So he encourages them at the end of this passage, remain steadfast because when we stay in the truth is when we remain in God and in God is true eternal life. We'll go into the next section, the fruit of fellowship with God. So chapter 2 verses 28 to 3, 24. The first is eagerly expecting Christ's return. Okay. So some things that he talks about here is living righteous lives.  We live in purity, we live in obedience. And then he goes on to talk about the practice of righteousness. Chapter 3 verses 4 to 10, what does he say about practicing righteousness? Chapter 3 verses 4 to 10. Only about occasional sin, it's talking about perpetual sin of knowing God and then continuing to still live in sin. So it's contrasting where we practice righteousness versus continuing in sin. So both can become a habit. You can practice righteousness, you can continually live in righteousness or you can continually live in sin. So if you are continuing to live in sin, then you cannot be someone who is living a righteous life. It's different from you sin once and you confess that sin. That's different from walking in a life of sin. So he says if we've truly experienced Christ, we cannot continue in sin. But if we continue in sin, what is that evidence of if we are continuing in sin? We're not born of God. We are not born of God. We are of the devil. So he used actually very strong words. These are not words we would use to describe a sinner. We wouldn't say you're of the devil. We wouldn't call people who say something about Christ not coming to flesh as Antichrist. But he's using very strong clear language to distinguish between the spirit of truth and the spirit of the world or the spirit of the Antichrist. But in verse 9, what does it mean when it says for his seed remains in him? Chapter 3 verse 9. Yes, whoever has been born of God does not sin. For his seed remains in him. Because they have been born of God. So it's just using that the spirit has been planted in us. So that is the seed that is put in us. And that seed begins to grow and the Holy Spirit begins to help us grow in righteousness. But he's using the language of being born, receiving that seed of planting of righteousness and growing in it. We also have another question on chat. What does pride of life mean? That's in chapter 2. Chapter 2 verse 16. The last of the flesh, the last of the eyes and the pride of life. So these three are usually connected back even to the sin in Genesis. Where we see Adam and Eve take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So they take from it because they give into the desire of their flesh. So see, if we go back to Genesis chapter 3 verse 6. It says, when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom. She took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her and he ate it. So we see here that last of the eyes described. She saw that it was good for food and pleasing to the eye. It's the last of the flesh, desirable for gaining wisdom. And if we go back to verse 5. When Satan tempts them, he says, for God knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God. That is the pride of life, wanting to be like God. So having this pride that I as a human can take the place of God. Which is what Satan essentially did, which is why he was thrown out of God's presence. He wanted to take God's place on the throne and he tempts us as human beings to want that same kind of power and authority to take the place of God. So the pride of life is in our own hearts or minds imagining that we are equal to God or we can be equal to God. It's also very similar to the temptation of Jesus, right? Can we equate that to it? Where Satan comes to tempt Jesus and he says, hey bow down to me and you'll have all of this. Yes, in terms of if you bow down to me, you will have authority over all these things. So you will have this place of authority, you will have this place of power that belongs to me and I'm going to give it to you. So again, temptation coming in the form of tempting you to pride. We got it. Thank you. So we'll continue from there. We just have very, very few minutes so we're not going to do 2nd and 3rd John, but those are just single chapters. So there's not a lot in them. Sorry, where did we stop? We stopped at chapter 3 versus 4 to 10. So we'll just continue quickly from there. So from there he goes back to loving one another within the body of Christ.  So he then talks about a clear conscience that true love is lived out in action and he uses the example of Christ's sacrifice. And he says that if we say we love one another, it's not sufficient to just use words, but it is in how are we showing love to our brothers and sisters? Are we recognizing the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ? Are we meeting their needs when we have the ability to meet their needs? And then he ends with the spirit being proof that Christ is in us. So here, again, he's this last part of the letter or from the middle of the letter, he starts to talk more about the Holy Spirit and the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer. So the presence of the Holy Spirit in us is proof that Christ is in us. And why is it important that we have the Holy Spirit is where he goes more into teachings from the false teachers in chapter 4. So he begins with testing the spirits. So if you have the Holy Spirit in you, you will acknowledge that Christ is the Son of God. But if you don't have the Holy Spirit in you and you have the spirit of the Antichrist, then you will deny Christ in the flesh. And so he says, depending on what you state as your faith, that Christ is the Son of God or that Christ has not come in the flesh, it's evidence of which spirit is in you, whether it's the Holy Spirit or the spirit of the Antichrist. And then he goes on to loving one another, to continue to see these teams, loving one another. Evidence that we are born of God is by the fact that we love one another. He goes on to Christ sacrifice as evidence of God's love for us. And the fact that we, when we love one another, we show that we are in communion with God. So if we truly are sharing in fellowship with God, then we should be loving one another. So these are the, that's pretty much all that he says in this book. So the main themes are, what are the main things that we've seen repeated throughout the book? Sorry, main themes that we've seen from, as we've gone from each chapter to the other, to the next. Fellowship, fellowship with God and fellowship with one another, yeah. Love, love for God, love for one another. Walking in the light versus walking in darkness, overcoming the world, okay. Not living according to the world. And mainly he's talking about the world from the perspective of that false teaching that was coming in. So overcoming the world and not living according to the world. Walking in obedience, right. That is another theme that we see. And then one theme that is not repeated throughout, but is definitely there underlying is that of life. Okay, so eternal life as Christ, the source of eternal life. And if we remain in him, then we share in that eternal life. So we didn't go into second and third John, but those, both of them are very short books. And your textbook also just has a little bit of information on them. So please read through those two pages in your textbook and read through second and third John, both very short letters, just one chapter each. And we'll come back on Monday. We'll do the book of Revelation and in the class with that. Jude, we finished with James, right. So we just have Revelation left on Monday. Okay. Thank you all so much. We'll see you on Monday.


And first up on this panel is Joe Knuckles, who has various affiliations. One of them is the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, the National Library of Scotland, and he is also a satellite member, you could say, of the co-operative. So yeah, very well-established in the academia, at least well-known there. Good. And the Talkers of Titans, how to best facilitate our work, study of transcribers of free processing requests, people are putting the free credits that are available through our scholarship programmes to good use in practice. Then the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your introduction. Thanks everyone for coming. And it's good to be finally physically present in Innsbruck, three years into my current PhD, of which this is hopefully going to end up as a thesis chapter in some sort of way, shape or form. We had yesterday the privilege to hear six presentations from those who've benefited from the free processing scheme or the transcribers scholarship, which is how I'll refer to it during this presentation. This presentation attempts to take a broader lens to kind of show the extent to which the free processing scheme is being used, taking more of a quantitative approach. It also attempts to address the broader question of to what extent free processing initiatives from digital humanities platforms are supporting early career researchers, students, and those with limited funding. As we're all aware, especially those who are within university institutions, it's clear that financial support is necessary to increase the diversity, but the quality of DH research as well. So as such, this paper, this presentation helps clarify who is making use of the free processing scheme, whether the scheme currently is helping mediate access issues in a sector which is increasingly becoming more unequal, sadly. So our general trajectory for the talk, hopefully the slide. So our general trajectory, we're going to focus on three main things, depending on the time and how much I elaborate and talk. So we'll provide a bit of background to the transcribers scholarship and the free processing scheme, which I'm sure some of you are familiar with, especially those who presented yesterday, will then present the findings from quite a large content analysis of over 150 request forms, which was sent via email, and also kind of blend that with a supplement document, which was drawn up by the main contributors who help with the free processing scheme over at READ. I'm also going to present some preliminary findings from a current survey, which is really bad practice because the data collection hasn't ended, but I'm going to give you a kind of insight into that ahead of time, and just some roundup thoughts as well. So DH as a sector is now recognising the historical barriers present in accessing digitised material, digital tools and digital infrastructures. This inequality goes well beyond financial barriers. It raises issues of language, hardware requirements and skill barriers, both as isolated factors and combined as this toxic brew. As a result, there's been a healthy weighting historically in digital humanities towards the global north, and that can often be seen in the sector. And to name-drop a really, really good researcher who's working in this area is Rupika Rizam, who focuses on kind of coalescing a global south approach to DH to correct that balance. So these issues present the need for a data ethics approach, compiling counter data in order to name impression when seen. As a response, those in DH should always seek to centre social justice minded approaches, particularly when building tools, designing new workflows and considering means of access, challenging these previous inequalities and resisting the reinscription of exclusionary behaviours. Though mindful of the fact that inequality can come in various shapes and forms in DH, this presentation is going to look purely at funding, answering whether the Transcriber's Free Processing Scheme can be part of this social justice approach, making DH a sector more equitable. The paper will also seek to address the following questions. What are the demographics of those using the Transcriber's scholarship? Again, we saw six great presentations yesterday, but what work is the scheme enabling? Are these schemes being utilised by the intended groups? So early career researchers, students and those with limited funding and how can the scheme be extended to enhance this equitable access to DH platforms? So as most of you are aware, just to give a bit of context, on October the 19th, 2020, Transcriber's transition from a free to use tool to a pay for model with HDR training corresponding to a required amount of paid for credits. This formed a sort of freemium structure, although that model doesn't quite fit where Transcribers' base functions, layout analysis, the text editor to perform your ground truth transcriptions were free to use with additional features, HDR training coming at a cost. Although the success of freemium models, especially in the business community, is unclear. Such strategies are well used by software companies and are seen as a way of moving beyond one of customer interactions towards long term engagement. Newly registered accounts of Transcribers, I'm sure you're familiar with this as well, receive 500 free credits. And that's, you know, roughly, approximately in my own work is kind of enough to run a model over 400 to 500 handwritten pages. It obviously varies if those pages are printed text as well. So Deng in 2022 stressed that the free version may allow customers to sample the product before making a purchase decision and subsequently increase demand for the paid version. But it might also cannibalize demand of the paid version. Transcribers, in this case, is well positioned because users can train a model, you know, experiment within the tool and work out actually if the tool is for them and important to their work. However, in the case of individual researchers working on small collections, these free credits could be enough to train a model initially for, you know, simple searching. Therefore, whether users purchase credits from Reed is very much dependent on the size of their collections. So actually, what's behind me, those applying to the Transcribers scholarship program must fill out an online form. They have to indicate the amount of credits they expect to need. Their home institution, although this can be left blank, has no bearing on the process and a short description of their work, which is where it gets really interesting. If accepted, credits are then allocated in an email notification ascent. Credits can be checked and monitored through the online portal of Transcribers Light and applicants can request up to 3,000 credits. We'll get more into that as well. So the broader study formed a content analysis of emails generated by the scholarship system, which looked like this. This is what I received every time someone made an application to the scholarship program. So it's almost kind of 20 emails a day on top of everything else. So I got quite used to checking them. And the emails that we've kind of factored into our analysis were sent between the 7th of November, 2020 and the 16th of March, 2022. So it broadly encompasses a year and a half worth of credits. And this allowed for the exploration of individual cognitive processes of applicants related to the characteristics of their requests. So students, those conducting workshops and those with limited funding were quite easy to identify. Early career researchers were harder to pinpoint because a lot of people didn't elaborate on their position within their given institution. In total, 161 requests were collated and interrogated. These were then aggregated, anonymized in accordance with the University of Edinburgh's GDPR guidelines. And alongside that, a set of six semi-structured questions were sent to Reed staff, which they kindly reply to in a very well-organized one document that was quite easy to read and follow. So those responses have acted as a supplement to this study. So to actually get to the findings of the second bit of our presentation, the free processing requests submitted to the Trans Groupers team came from a total of 99 institutions. It's not surprising that most of these institutions were universities and research institutes, 91 out of the 99 roughly. But it gets quite interesting when you dig deeper into the additional eight institutions. Two free processing requests came from high schools, high school teachers, one from Turlock in California and one from Vienna. Elsewhere, national and state libraries were involved, publishers, and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew who were looking to apply Trans Groupers to some of their field notebooks. It appears then that Reed is reaching their main demographics, content-holding institutions, university researchers, with the scheme only being used beyond these groups to a minimal degree. The publicity and targeting of the scheme appear to coincide with the aims listed by Reed's staff of facilitating research and contributing to the spread of methodologies and the history in the era of historical documents. So looking at the dataset geographically, applicants came from a total of 31 countries, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and Switzerland are the best represented. But compared to previous quantitative studies of the Trans Groupers user base that we've completed, mostly of materials found on Google Scholar where Trans Groupers is mentioned in scholarly research. This appears more diverse than those, that formal published research. So more work geographically seems to be happening in the remit of informal experimentation, research tutorials. They seem to be distributed a little bit more widely. So Reed's focus on enabling common transnational activities is clearly still a work in progress, although more diversity is seen in these requests done in those cataloged research papers. Despite a lot of these nations recognizing English as an official language, we had free processing requests from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Egypt, Estonia, Greece, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal and Slovakia. All of those were represented in these requests that weren't represented in scholarship that is easily found online through Google Scholar. So Trans Groupers appears to be at a center of transnational practice when looking beyond this scholarly research at grey and material like credit requests, moving away from purely a Western European view of digital humanities and this global north perspective that I mentioned as well. That said, the caveat is amongst the 161 requests, 140 came from European institutions, so 87%. So we've got a long way to go before Trans Groupers is used worldwide. The range of applicants domains was also broad, reaching across different trading zones between the humanities and sciences and the variety of research interests is hard to summarize in this presentation, but we had people working on the history of the 17th century Dutch Republic investigating poor relief in Zurich in the 19th, 20th centuries, someone working on the 18th century burning of Kingston, Jamaica, the 19th century Irish potato famine, histories of Jewish families, and that's just to name a few. Others had kind of more space to offer more insight into how greater access to transcribes was solving issues in their work. A lot of people struggling with Roman cursive and current drift who have kind of seen transcribuses as a major help in their research to make, as Reid says, the past readable. So in taking into account language materials, the diversity is even clearer. Free processing requests range from work on ancient Aramaic, Arabic, Peruvian administrative documents, 16th century Slovak evangelical sermons, parliamentary speeches in Scots, the Sengali's written press check, Spanish literature, a huge amount of stuff. I'm just going to check the time so I'm not running over. Am I doing okay? Thank you. I didn't realise there's a card. That's quite snazzy. We're okay, I think. It can be identified that the transcriber scholarship is being used by the intended groups. 70% were students ranging from the undergraduate level to PhD candidates. Early career research has made up about 3%. So it's actually quite a small number. And those performing tutorials made up about 15%. Although not prevalent, a few credit exemption requests came from quite established lecturers in the field. Whether that's because maybe they misinterpreted what the free processing scheme was attempting to achieve, or whether it's an indication of the current state of academia that even established lecturers need help from the transcriber scholarship. But one read he, the applicant, is the author of more than 100 scientific publications in newspapers and conferences. And one has an edited book. His research interests include pattern recognition, machine learning, deep learning, and image analysis. So yeah, quite interesting that even someone of that high esteem is still using the transcribers scholarship. Just being conscious of time, I'm going to throw some more stats out. Broadly, if all the applicants gained their required amount that they enlisted actually in their applications. Although many asked for more than the 3,000 limits for credits, transcribers and read have deployed and offered a total of 666,882 credits. And using the calculator on the website that corresponds to about 128,000 euros. So it's a sizable chunk of money that's gone out to ensure that people have access to such a wonderful tool. One of the major things that came out from the review is that applicants sometimes struggled with figuring out the amount of requests that they need. So a lot of people are uncertain. I don't know if 10K credits will be enough about dot, dot, dot maximum. I'm assuming I won't need more. I really don't know how many credits to ask for as a reasonable number to distribute while giving workshops. Advice would be welcome. Read staff also highlighted that sometimes working out credits could be difficult. Pressing perhaps the need for streamlining that aspect of the service. Although the current structure enables longer discussions between read staff and researchers, usually via email and any streamlined structure could potentially jeopardize that sustained contact with our user base. So just to plug the next step quickly, again being conscious of time to kind of add body to this quantitative study, we want to hear from you if you've benefited from the Transcriber Scholarship and if you've managed to evade me so far because we have sent multiple emails out. So hopefully the slides will be made accessible and you can find the enclosed link. The survey began in August 1st. It's due to end. Hopefully don't leave it too late on January 1st, 2023. I'm not sure I've got much time to actually tell you any of the preliminary findings. Two, three more minutes. Thanks, Andy. I don't want to deprive everyone else. So a lot of people have said that without the scheme, you know, their work would otherwise not be possible. In some cases, the sheer scale of their work was cited as the main obstacle prior to gaining financial support. So free credits helped me transcribe and scan through larger quantities of material than I could have physically. Another person said, without receiving free credits, I would have had to minimize the text corpus to complete my research, which would minimize the outcome and its reliability. Even those who had enough time to complete large amounts of work or were even willing to pay themselves thoughts similar with granted credits, which would make processing easier and faster. Someone said yes, but it would have taken longer to process and I would have had to overhaul my methodology. A few people, again, as perhaps in the document of current academic funding, hinted at more structural problems at their institutions. Someone said there is no funding available for postgraduate talk dissertations at my institution, so that money would have had to come from my own pockets. Another cited that the prospect of gaining any sort of financial support for student-led work was an impossibility at their institution, which made for quite sad reading. The vast majority of respondents, 78.95% were happy with the scheme, offering no suggestions. Some improvements were mentioned, mostly directing more training materials towards those who are unknown to have received funding from the scheme just to reduce the learning curve when people first use transcriptus. As a follow-up, just as a brief visualisation, this goes back to the free processing requests and not the survey, but here are the most frequent words used across all 161 requests. The size corresponds to how often the term was used. Of course, it's no surprise that the biggest term is transcriptus, which is mentioned 148 times, but elsewhere you have some quite interesting findings. I realise I've still got iron, which I probably should have removed as a stop word. But student, university, PhD studies, which all have a clear association with students applying for free processing, again show that readers is probably meeting its current user base, its intended user base for the free processing scheme. So just to finish off, to ensure that DH remains, well, is as equitable as possible and that the re-co-op remains sustainable, having a solid dialogue with our users is essential, whether it's free, free processing, free surveys. So as such, handwritten text recognition requires new approaches both to historical material, to public engagement in order to best support our intended communities and support the ways they're applying transcriptus to cultural heritage materials. So that's far, far, yeah, certainly enough from me that I'd welcome any questions. And thank you for listening to a lot of stats, but hopefully it wasn't too dry. Thanks a lot, Joe, for these insights. And yeah, this is really a very important aspect of the cooperative to be able to support early career researchers and also people offering courses and trying to, yeah, sort of educate the next generation of researchers what's possible these days with the help of AI. So are there any questions related to the talk? Just a question about, did you take into account the big projects like ours that by bulk soft credits that benefit directly the student researchers? I haven't, that's a really good, really good point to make. This is purely a study of requests that were made by the students themselves. Often you get supervisors who are quite supportive of obviously what their students are doing. That's certainly another step we could take, definitely. And then the stats are even more impressive for the sheer amount of credit set of being. And also we asked in the summer schools, we ask transcribes to like 40,000 credits to run this school in the summer school or the course also, you know, that we are giving. So this gives another level. Yeah, we have done work, a survey went out last year that was the second major survey of the trans group as user community after Melissa Terrace's one back in 2019 that looked at institutions instead of individual researchers. So this was kind of an attempt to get to the nitty gritty more individualistic studies. So hopefully between those studies we somehow captured the actual makeup of the cooperative. But it's a real, really good suggestion. And the nice thing here from a process kind of view is that for the scholarships, we have a very good database, you could say. And so there you really know how many scholarships have we granted, how many credits have gone out with projects where we, yeah, provided some free credits in order to facilitate, for example, summer school or something like that. So I don't think we have a central record of those. So those would be harder to find out about. So that's just a one, a pragmatic aspect of this study. I think you should say as well, the biggest amount of credits that was applied for, but obviously read. We are quite close to the end. Obviously read couldn't give their required amount, but we did have a few applications that came from very big distribution-wide projects. So someone asked for 30,000 credits. I think was the top end. And of course, a big dialogue happened. So we've still got an indication of some of those projects happening. Yeah. And we've also supported researchers with larger projects in emerging economies, at least for part of the project. So we've done that too, which did not happen strictly. Yeah. Under the flag of the scholarship program. But so, yeah, this is basically just the numbers that you are able to get in a clean way. So yeah, maybe we should keep better track of the others as well, because they are impressive too. So, yeah. So that's more our fault and no fault of yours, of course, for not keeping a good track of those numbers. Any other questions? I think we've got time for maybe one more. Otherwise, we can move on to the next talk. So, sorry. Thanks a lot, Joe. You got a transcript with mag two. Feel free to fill it with tea, coffee, or IPA. I hear. Thank you.