What's up everybody? Ricky Caruth here. Today I want to talk to you about why I deleted all the lawsuit videos, why I didn't do the Michael Ketchmark interview, all that stuff, because a lot of you speculate on why I did this, why I deleted it, why I didn't do the interview, why I haven't spoken about why I did all that stuff. And so you know what? I had to let some time go by to process the enormity at this, that the actual stakes were much, much higher than what I realized at the time. I'm just a guy on YouTube bringing you value, you know, giving you commentary, telling you what I feel like is the truth every step of the way about the market, about these lawsuits, about your business, about life, about anything that I can bring you value on. Okay, I'm just, somebody here having fun bringing you value and to kind of get called up in this little situation that ended up being much larger than I knew. And I got excited, you know, I got the guy, the number one guy, that the guy that's at the center of this entire thing. This would have been the interview of the century. This would have been, you know, this would have been the most dynamic interview out of all the interviews I've seen about the lawsuits, you know, on TV and on YouTube. This would have been by far the very best one. What you have to understand is that I had a lot to, I have everything to lose and absolutely nothing to gain in this situation whatsoever. It wasn't a risk I was willing to take. I want to tell you exactly what my thought process was. I want to tell you the exact thing that triggered me to back out to, to delete the videos, all the above. Okay. I want to get into all that, right? And as, as this happened and as this was happening in real time, you know, I had to, I took a step back because I had to do a lot of praying about this. Like, what are the different circumstances? Like, what are the different outcomes of these situations? This is not a joke, ladies and gentlemen. There are lawsuits on the line with billions of dollars, okay, the B word being thrown around, just B word, not even thinking twice about it, just billions and involving a lot of people, a lot of people. I mean, when you talk about the buyers and sellers that are involved in this, along with the brokerages and all the agents, this is, this is a, this is a large amount of the population that is actually involved in this. This is massive, right? And so I, you know, as I'm praying and, and really contemplating and thinking about this and, you know, I got to, it got to where I was like, wait a minute, this, this is like a risk versus reward. This is like a situation where there's a decision to be made here. This isn't one of these things. Oh, just do it. Nothing's going to happen or whatever. This was something that I had to really try to, try to be smart about. And when I think about what I had to lose, right, what I had worked 20 years plus of my life to build, it wasn't a risk I was willing to take, right? I think about some of the things that I accomplished this year, my rental portfolio, right? I added seven units, right? New construction, existing, commercial, flipped eight houses. I'm buying three acres to build 46 apartment complex. I'm building my net worth daily, right? I have a lot to lose. My brokerage. I've got 800 agents. We did $1.2 billion in sales this year. We did $1 billion last year. So we did more volume with less agents in a less transaction environment. We are crushing it. I have a lot to lose. I went from free coaching to paid coaching. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was one of the most liberating things that I have done in this entire process since I started coaching. It literally was because I, as I grew as a brand and more and more agents knew who I was, I didn't even know that I felt the way that I did about it until I actually flipped from free to paid. I didn't realize the amount of people that I felt were taking advantage of me. And you know how I know people were taking advantage of me because when I flipped from zero to $99 a month for the value I provide, right? Four sales calls a month, listing challenges, you know, et cetera, everything that we're doing in the group that's amazing. We're almost up to 400 agents. When I switch from zero to 99, people are hitting me up saying, okay, I knew this was going to happen. Look here, Ricky, I'm not going to help you build your wealth. Wait a minute. So what you're telling me is that you want me to help you build your wealth, right? You want me to help you double your business, triple your business, which I've done for free for thousands of agents. I've helped thousands of agents double, triple their volume. A lot of them will speak up. A lot of them will be, you'll see them in the comments. People have been following me for five, six, seven years, two, three, four years who double, triple their volume and haven't paid me a dime. And that's awesome. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to build my brand on helping agents double and triple their volume. But when I switch from paid, from free to paid, because I want to weed out the people that aren't serious and I want to build a real community, I want to do yearly events and go on vacations with people. When I've switched and you tell me, you don't want to help me build my wealth, but you want me, you expect me, you expect me to help you build your wealth. And $100 a month is out of the question. That's not building my wealth. You know how many thousands and thousands of people don't have to have for that to actually build wealth? That's not building wealth, right? For you to say that tells me that you are taking advantage of me. And I don't, I mean, it was a weight that was lifted off my shoulders. That's one of the, you know, are the calls now smaller? Is it more like 200 people right now instead of 1000 plus? Yeah, absolutely. But guess what? Those 200 people are serious. And that's what I love about it. I switched that, right? My speaking career, I'm starting to get big checks being offered to me to go speak at huge events. That's not something that was in my business plan. That's just something that's happening. But it is happening. Social media, I hit 100,000 on YouTube this year for every night, every 90 days to every quarter, I picked up another 20,000 brand new Instagram followers just because my content is getting better and better and better and bringing more and more and more value. I have a lot to lose and I'm not going to risk anything on an interview that I think might be the most incredible interview that we've ever seen. Am I going to do that to risk everything that I've got? Let me dig deeper here. The one reason why I deleted, I'll tell you why I deleted all the content first and then I'll tell you why I backed out of the Michael Ketchmark interview. The reason I delete all the contents because I don't want to get caught up in court. I appreciate you guys saying that you think that I would be a great voice and you would love to see me up there in court telling the plaintiffs and the jury and everybody else how it really is for us agents. You don't know how much that means to me. It means the world to me for you to say that, but I don't want to end up there because I don't know that I would fear being more harmful to the situation than helping the situation number one, right? And if I deleted the content, why did I delete all the content because they can use basically any video. They use a Tom Perry video from 2019. It wasn't Tom, it was a guest that he had talking about he doesn't negotiate commissions. You know, they could use, I mean, I've got thousands, I've got 2000 videos just right here on YouTube, not to mention the, you know, many, many more thousand probably have five, 10,000 videos on the internet. But when it comes to my videos, I've always had the same exact stance on commissions, negotiate them, be flexible, make the deal happen. I think that the coaches and the agents who say stand firm and never take less than 6% and all that are horrible negotiators.  I'll tell you to your face because the thing is, is I'll take that commission, I'll take that deal for 0.01% less, 5.99, you know, I'll take the deal and I'll get all the future business, all the repeats, all the referrals, all the referrals of the referrals, right? I know how to multiply the business. You're going to walk away over 0.1% or even 1%. That's not good business. That's horrible negotiation. You just, you just walked away from say 20 to 30 deals over 1% on one deal. And let me tell you the times I've negotiated, people say, oh, when do you negotiate? The deals are going to get out of that, the referrals and all that. They're going to expect you to be lower. No, they didn't. There's a lot of referrals that I got that I got full commission.  They're going to pay your price because you are referred by a trusted friend, family, coworker, whatever. And a lot of times they're going to pay you whatever. And a lot of times these people, there's been people that I went down on and then they ended up paying me full commission on the next one. Why? Because how good did I do on the first deal? They're okay paying at the second deal. They're not going to go look for another agent. Nevertheless, I digress there. I, my point is, is that my content has always been flexible commission from day one back in 2016, 17, when I started doing content, flexible commission, put the person over the money, relationships over transactions every single time from day one. That's been one of the core values of zero to diamond relationships over transactions. That's one of the very first affirmations of it. And so throughout my content over the years, I have never wavered from putting the consumer first over the commission rate always. That's always been a mantra of mine. So I'm not worried about them going back and going through all the content and sure, maybe they can find something and twist it up. That's the world we live in now. The media twists all kinds of stuff and takes all kinds of stuff out of context and twist it up for their benefit to turn around and using against you or to go with whatever narrative they have. Right? And maybe that can happen. Who knows? But I was, I've never been, I've never put out content that I believe was against the consumers. And I think this is a consumer, this is a consumer driven, I'm not going to call it lawsuit. Let's just call it movement. This is a consumer driven movement here because the consumers don't, don't know what's going on. They don't realize what we do and how we get paid on really both sides, buyers and sellers. And the sellers are pissed because they feel like they were tricked into paying the buyer and commission, even though it was in the contracts and all this stuff. And a lot of agents say, well, you signed a contract. Does contract not mean anything? Yes, it means something. And no, I don't believe you can go back and say, well, I didn't read it or I didn't understand it. So I can get out of it. I don't believe that. I don't believe that you can just say, I didn't understand what I was like, why was I signing? So I can get out of this. But what I will say is that I don't believe that it was explained to them the way that they want it to be explained to them. And I think the way that they want it to be explained to them now that they think they know what's going on is that they want to be explained that they are not a hundred percent, it is not a hundred percent mandatory that they pay the buyer agent commission, even though, you know, it's figured into the full commission. They agree to pay the listing broker, you know, and then the listing broker basically takes, you know, it's just like the seller agreed to pay this 5% let's say, regardless if there's a buyer broker involved or not. Okay. But when there is a buyer broker involved, okay, now on paper per the HUD, it looks like the seller paid the buyer commission. That, ladies and gentlemen, I think is the problem. And you can't just do an easy fix and go back and just adjust the HUDs, because now it's too late. Now they've already found that technicality and now they're taking the ball and running with it. And listen, here's the bottom line with the entire lawsuit. I want to get to exactly what triggered me to not do the interview and actually move forward with deleting some of these videos. But you've got the government, you've got the general public, the DOJ, the Federal Trade Commission, several other government entities that want to see this change happen where the listing broker, okay, through the seller is not offering that buyer, agent, broker commission. Okay. So when you think about that, a lot of you say, well, that can happen if a seller doesn't offer the buyer broker commission, then we're going back to the 60s and 70s. This is why we did it in the first place so that we can have more access to agents who are, you know, motivated to help us sell the properties. And that is all true. I do not want to see it go in this direction. But when you think about the direction it's going in, it's almost like it has so much momentum, you can't stop it. Maybe there's a presidential election this year that turns in the favor of this and maybe something changes with the momentum and the direction that this is going in as far as the government entities are concerned. Who knows, right? But all I can tell you is what I feel is happening. I feel it in my gut that we're moving in this direction. And when we take out the buyer agent commission from the, from being offered and on MLS as the, on the advertise on the listing, whatever the case may be, when we do that buyers are still going to show up either with an agent that they're paying with an agent that tries to negotiate the buyer agent commission in the deal or directly to the listing agent. But the buyer is not going to stop looking at a house that they love that they want to buy because there's no buyer broker commission offered. They're not, they're not going to do that. It's not going to happen. They're going to move forward with that deal. They're not going to let anything stop them. They're going to go in there. They're going to negotiate that deal. Now we're going to be in a world where, and you tell me, even the naysayers who think that this isn't going to happen. Okay. Let's say it does. Okay. Just think for a second that it does happen. How many buyers, okay, 90% of buyers use an agent now, 90% of sellers use an agent now. Out of the 90% of buyers who use an agent now, how many of them will still use an agent if they have to pay the agent? Okay. If you can't get it figured into the, to the price, you know, and they sign a contract that says, I'll pay you this much. If you can't figure it into the, to this price, how many buyers would sign that contract? How many, what percentage of buyers out there? Is it, is it 30%? Is it 40%? Is it 50? Is it 70? Is it 80? Is it 90? What percentage? Let me know in the comments your thoughts on this. What percentage of buyers will continue to use buyer agents if they have to pay? It is going to be a percentage. It's not going to go to zero. Okay. So you're going to have this group of buyers who are still willing to, to pay for a buyer agent because they really feel they need one. There's going to be this huge group of buyers who do not. What is that going to cause? It's going to cause a lot of dual agency. Then you got the states who don't allow dual agency. What's going to happen there? There's a thing in my state called transaction broker where you don't, you don't, it's not a fiduciary relationship, but you still have, you're still, you know, basically, you're not, you're not advising them, but you're literally like sending them documents to sign, letting them make their own decisions in so many words. How does it work with the dual agency, non, non dual agency states? And then how many lawsuits, how many more lawsuits are we going to see come out of this of these unrepresented buyers who feel like they were forced to go to the listing agent who was looking out for the seller, not them, because they can't afford their own buyer agent. Yes. I think we're going to see a lot. And so it opens up a whole new can of worms. Do I want to see it go in that direction? No. I think the current system is the best system all day long. But I feel like there's nothing that you and I can do about the momentum of this movement from the government and from general consumers and of course the lawyers who have a lot to gain when they see this go through. And so that's what we're dealing with. Okay. It's like interest rates.  You have to learn how to work or you have to learn how to work with higher interest rates. Same thing here. If this changes, we can't, we can't do anything about it. We just have to look at the new rules and say, okay, let's go. And that's why next week on our coaching call at zero to diamond.com, I'm going to actually lay out exactly how you can continue to build your million dollar year business without buyer agent commissions involved. I'm going to lay it out really simply for you because when this does go down and again, I'm speaking like it's going down for sure. I'm speculating. I feel like it's going to happen when and if this happens, which will happen this year, 2024, it's not going to be, we're not waiting for the appeal process. A lot of people say, oh, to get drug out in court for six years. You know, they haven't even officially filed the appeal. They say they're going to appeal, but do you know that they haven't actually filed for the appeal yet? FYI. It's not even filed yet. It's not even for sure that they're doing it a hundred percent. They haven't filed it. Okay. Speaking about in pills, and it's going to get drug out in court and this, that and the other. Okay. I'm sure it will, but they haven't filed yet. So I don't know that for sure. But what I'm saying, we've already got in my lessons. It went from $1 to zero and even are went from went from $1 to zero on offering buyer agent commission. What does that tell you? I'm going to let you answer that, but what does that tell you right there? Okay. Things can happen instantly. Brokerages can change policies instantly. MLSs can change policies instantly. We don't have to wait for appeals for things to happen. But we'll see. But in and when, when and if this, all this, all these changes happen, we're going to lose a lot of agents because let's just say 50% of the buyer pool will still continue to use buyer agents and pay the buyer agent. Let's just say hypothetically, I don't know. That's a good 25% because you got, you got a hundred percent of sellers, a hundred percent of buyers, right? If half the buyers, that's 25% of the total commission pool. That's 25% less of the total commission pool available, right? And you've already got agents that aren't selling much, aren't selling at all from what I understand only 800,000 agents, or I want to say 800,000. Yeah, 800,000 half the agents out there have not sold anything this year. You're going to see those 800,000 agents, right? Some of them may hang in there and we got some that are selling one or two properties, leave the business. You've got about half the agents out there that will leave the business when this happens. I want to talk Monday on our coaching call about how to crush it in the new world because I have a lot of ideas there. All right, that's at zero to diamond.com, log in, go to the weekly coaching call section. Moving on to the reason why I didn't do the Michael Ketchmark interview because a lot of you think that, you know, he said this or he paid me or he did something. I don't know what you guys think. It was literally just a 15 minute conversation. And basically ended up with us just saying, Hey, let's just do an interview. You know, we kind of went back and forth a little bit on the lawsuits, on our, on agents, whatever. It was nothing at all dramatic because I literally told him, listen, you know, as soon as we started to get a little bit, even just dipped our toe in the water, I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's say this for the interview, man. Let's talk about this on a video. That's how excited I was about the possibility of having him on and interviewing him. This is the guy. But the reason why I did not do this is because after that, and we scheduled it and everything else, man, I started to digest the enormity of the situation. I started to put all this together and it was really put in two and two together. It wasn't even like a complicated equation, right? It's like, okay, I'm with the EXP. EXP is in the new lawsuit that he filed for $200 billion. It can be troubled up to $600 billion. Here I am talking to the plaintiff's lawyer and actually going to do a live recorded interview with him on YouTube.   Again, nothing to gain. I would have nothing to gain from that except for an entertaining video. That would have been it, right? However, something that could have been set of that video could have been twisted and took an out of context. And I could have been pulled into this so far that I could have been in a situation where EXP decides that they want to cut me loose, where they want to retire me from the company, where they want to send my license back in, where they want to separate their self from me. And in so many words, I'm an independent contractor, but in so many words, fire me. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was what I was the most scared of in the world, right? Because when I think about, and some people are like, well, who cares about that? Let me tell you why. Because if I were to be let go from EXP, where would I go? Where would I go? Right? Put it in the comments. Where would I go? Because there's not even a close nowhere, nowhere in the same stratosphere of a company, for me personally, than EXP. There's not even, there's not even like a contender, right? And that goes for even if I open up my own brokerage, right? There's just nowhere even close to the equity that I have, to the group that I have, to the volume that we do, to the money that I make, to the liabilities, to the expenses, to every little piece of the puzzle, sales, everything, every little piece of the puzzle that you that you try to glue in and put together, nothing even comes close. And so that, ladies and gentlemen, scares me half the death, because I'm in this for the next 10, 20 years to build this company, right? And when I think about the coaching business, when I think about the brokerage, when I think about my rental portfolio that is growing by leaps and bounds, and the next next year, I'll probably add another 20 units, just single family homes, I might even buy a couple apartment complexes, and I might be up to 100 doors next year, not to mention the 46 units that I'm building, I'm going to continue to build that up to a billion dollars, right? There's a clear path for me to have 500 million dollars worth of real estate over the next 20 years, okay? When I think about the social media, the brand equity, all the opportunities that I'm getting left and right, this didn't even hold a candle to any of that. So with that being said, that's the reason why I backed out, that's the reason why I deleted the videos, and I hope that you appreciate the transparency. I hope that you're 100% clear on why I do this, and I already know that you appreciate the fact that I did it, you appreciate the fact that I had to let some time go by to process what had happened.  I mean, that's why I'm here, that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. So with that said, I hope you guys enjoy, you know, let me know what you think of the comments, and I appreciate you so much. Have a good rest of your week, and I'll see you on the next video. Let's go.


Hey, this is Brett and this 2018 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited 4-Door Sport is stock number 23J38A. I am here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, your new and used Jeep and Jeep Wrangler headquarters. This 2018 Jeep Wrangler has the 2-liter turbocharged 4-cylinder engine, puts out 270 horsepower. This Jeep has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop as a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off and it is 100% ready to go. I'm going to go all the way around in this video inside underneath started up and take a look under the hood to give you the most accurate representation of the vehicle possible. Billet silver is the color and I shoot all my videos in 4K so if you have HD capabilities turn them on now because it is your best way to check out the quality, condition, options and cleanliness of the vehicle before seeing it in person. As you go down this side you can see the doors are in really nice shape I didn't see any major dents or dings on there. Front fender is in nice shape. If you like the video you can subscribe to my YouTube channel which is youtube.com slash Summit Auto. Click the bell notifications and you'll get updates on the videos I do each and every day here at Summit Automotive. This one comes with the painted alloy wheels these are 17 inch wheels and it has Bridgestone Duler HL tires these are two 45, 75 R17s and they have right around half the tread left on them. Frame and underbody is exceptionally clean on this Wrangler and once again front fender no scuffs or scrapes. Front bumper is in great shape as well I didn't see any dents or dings on there it does have the factory fog lights and of course you get these seven slotted grille with the Wrangler you also get the little Jeep logo on the lights. The hood is in fantastic condition I didn't see any dents or dings on there and the passenger side front fender is in nice condition as well. Passengers side wheel no major scuffs or scrapes on there and as you go down this side of this 2018 Jeep Wrangler four door unlimited sport take note of how clean that body is how reflective and mirror like that paint is. I take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by you just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle you can see the Jeep here the Jeep and of confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here so when you do get here there's absolutely no surprises and you can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. If this video helps you make that buying decision let your salesman know that you saw the video that was helpful in that brought sent you back wheel is in excellent shape four-wheel disc brakes on the Wranglers and the back tires have just as much tried as the front tires frame and underbody is an exceptionally nice condition for an 18 and I did want to show the door hinges because they are always an area of contention on these Wranglers most of these look pretty good front ones are great back ones here this one's just a little bit of bubbling underneath but nothing's real bad on there but I always like showing those because those are problem areas on these Wranglers coming around to the back the rear bumper is in great shape this back wheel is in nice condition that's what a brand-new tire looks like on these back storage area is very clean you get the case for the front hardtop pieces you do get a storage area under here you also have door hinge roof and windshield bolt holders you have three bolts on the side two on top two quick disconnects to get the hardtop off we actually did a video on how to take your hardtop off your jail if you want to check that out that's in the upper right hand part of screen get the seven slots on the back door and then the jail badge on the back door here with two-door four-door wheelbase and overall length and water 40 so that's pretty cool those gates shut nice and easily way nicer than the old JLs coming around to the back wheel just as nice as rest no scuffs or scrapes or corrosion and down the rest of the side of the vehicle looks really good all the door hinges on this side look really good inside the sport package gives you the black cloth interior you get the bucket seats in the front no rips or tears on those seats they're in very nice condition you get driver seat height adjuster lumbar and then these do have side airbags now factory floor mat auto headlamps power mirrors power locks and power windows on this sport back seats are just as clean as the front seats no rips or tears back here does have the latch child safety system for any child car seats you may have and these seats do pull down they go down nice and flat which is nice if you have to haul a bunch of extra stuff and then the headrests stay down so if nobody's riding back here you get a little bit better visibility factory floor mats cup holders and power window buttons child safety locks on the back doors will hop inside check out the miles the radio and everything that this Jeep has to offer on the interior get the Wrangler animation at the beginning there and you can see that this one has 33,696 miles on it you get the seven inch LCD display digital speedometer compass display time you can put miles per gallon all all that good stuff up there comes with the leather wrapped steering wheel cruise controls on the right bluetooth and information center controls on the left this one comes with the you connect seven inch radio and FM and serious XM radio capabilities this is also where your backup camera shows up and I'll show you that once we start the vehicle or there we go there's your backup camera that's working nicely and you get projection manager we can project your cell phone to the screen so while this one doesn't have the factory navigation system project your phone up there with ways or Google Maps or some other nav program it's like you have never on the screen so that's a really cool system as well down here your climate controls including your dual climate control start stop capability stability control downhill assist control you get power windows usb usb-c and an aux jack 12 volt PowerPoint eight speed automatic transmission and your four by four shifter there keyless entry has the flipper key on it you also get this mineral gray dash trim which I always liked passenger side format and seat are in fantastic condition no rips or tears in there smells very clean on think this vehicle's ever been smoked in yet the crushed eggshell finish hard top pieces and they're in nice shape as well with the quick disconnects and we'll start it up and take a look under the hood starts right up no check engine lights or anything like that I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you've been able to verify the quality condition options and of course cleanliness of this Jeep inside and out under the hood we have the two liter turbocharged four cylinder engine 270 horsepower engine base very clean runs very smooth once again this Jeep has been fully safe eat and inspected by a service shop as a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped up and it is 100% ready to go there is the emissions sticker really a nice wrangler all the way around I would highly recommend it from a quality and condition standpoint and to see more pictures of this Jeep or one of our other 550 new and used cars trucks SUVs minivans wranglers half tons three quarter tons one tons you name it we got to go to that website right there summit auto.com full pictures and descriptions very single vehicle two locations all at summit auto.com if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there click the bell notification to get updates on the videos I do each and every day here at summit automotive in fact in a second you'll see link to subscribe my YouTube channel in the upper left links more wrangler videos that I've done in the upper right link to this vehicle on our website and lower left and a link to one of our latest YouTube videos in the lower right click those check us out we're super excited to help you with this ultra clean 2018 Jeep wrangler unlimited four-door sport and billet silver metallic thanks again for checking out the video remember to like subscribe and share on the YouTube channel I really appreciate it thanks again


Dear listeners, now I am going to speak to you on a very important subject, culture and communication. Culture as a concept has different connotations. Likewise, communication also has different connotations for different people. Culture and communication together make a very interesting subject of study. What exactly is the role of culture in communication? Or the other way, what exactly is the role of communication in culture? If we combine both of them, what exactly emerges is the important question being asked. We are talking about information society, the concept wherein information is capital, information is product, information is profit. From information society, we are moving towards a new concept called knowledge society. And today the world is talking about knowledge creation, knowledge as wealth and knowledge as the tool of wealth creation. And most of the developed countries are moving towards a new discipline called knowledge economics or they are becoming knowledge economies. Knowledge is applied to create wealth and to create a egalitarian society. Perhaps you remember the famous saying by Marshall McLuhan, a noted communication scholar. He said the world is a global village. In other words, this world is like a village wherein different cultures coexist peacefully. He also perhaps you remember gave another concept, medium is the message. In fact, this particular phrase has got some useful meaning for all of us. Whatever the medium we use that itself will become the message. Perhaps today you will remember that the medium of telemission is considered as a restaurant medium per se whereas print was not considered so. When we talk of communication as power, we also talk of communication as culture or culture as communication. In other words, communication is culture oriented. What exactly we understand by this phrase communication as culture? Perhaps again you will understand this world is divided into two societies, the Western society and the Eastern society. The Western society is influenced by the works of Plato and Aristotle whereas the Eastern societies were influenced by several scholars belonging to different denominations. The Western culture or the Western societies adopted the principles and philosophies given by Plato and Aristotle. Perhaps you remember again that it was Plato who wrote the famous political treatise The Republic. He in fact used dialogue as a form of communication. On his part Aristotle used his work Rhetorica to enunciate his ideas and give them to the people on how to communicate, how to write, how to understand others. You also go back to the Greek tragedies where communication was considered to be a powerful tool particularly in the form of drama. Coming back to the ancient societies like India and China we have Confucius who was the main cultural normative prescriptor and coming to India we have several sages. In fact our epics Ramayana and Mahabharata also speak of communication. If you read the Artha Shastra of Chanakya you will perhaps understand that communication was a component of governance. When I talk of Eastern societies and Western societies I classify these societies into two. The Western society is called as individualistic society and the Eastern society is called as responsibility society. You may ask me why I am making this kind of classification. The basic principle behind classifying them is the factor of liberty. Individual freedom is considered to be very important in Western societies. The individual plays a role whereas the individual plays a subservient role in the responsibility societies of the East. In the Western society nobody gives up his liberty but ultimately the approach is the same that everybody wants to have the self-realization of his merits and also his own potential. Self-realization as a concept plays a very dominant role in culture and communication. If you ask me there is absolutely no difference between these two systems as far as the concept of self-actualization is concerned. It is the ultimate goal of all the religions, all the societies and all the normative prescriptions of the political governors. Actualization may not have the philosophical connotation which we think of but it also has got some kind of such connotation when you move towards the philosophical identities of the people. Whatever it is if we go a little away from the religious overtones it becomes a little bit different. When I talk of communication and culture I also talk of the value system and the attitude of the people towards life. We always divide values into primary values and secondary values.  There is no question of any deviation from these core values in any society nor in their meanings attributed. But when it comes to secondary values we have got different interpretations because each society is different in its character. For example the western society attaches lots of importance to punctuality whereas in the eastern societies time as a concept has got different connotation. Manliness, competition, selling oneself in the market these are the highlights of any society in the west. Whereas in India when we talk of the responsibility society a person will have to be respectful to his elders and women occupy a different place in the society. They are on the higher pedestal at least theoretically. So culturally commodification of certain characteristics of the social prescriptions it may be a very important part of the western society. But in the east commodification of certain such things will not be allowed. What is decent in the east may not be so in the west. Or what is indecent in the west has got different connotations in the east. What is acceptable in the west may not be acceptable in the east. For example you take the dress code. The dress code in the east is totally different and the dress code in the west is different. And when you talk of stereotypes, stereotyping is very important in communication and culture. We have our own stereotypes in India. We expect every woman to be like Sita or Savitri or Ahalya. Whereas in the west a woman can be a model, a fashionable lady and she is used to sell products. In fact the very communication industry in the west depends upon the women models. You sell everything through the women models. But in the eastern societies for a long time it was considered as a taboo. Of course when it comes to the treatment of women we also lack behind perhaps we talk of equity, equality for women. Nowadays it is empowerment of women which has got very important role to play in government policies. Whatever it is when we talk of communication and culture, culture plays a very vital role in how we communicate with others. Perhaps you will understand that when culture becomes communication we simply mean that cultural characteristics of a people are reflected in the communication behavior of the individuals. When you use mass media, the mass media contents also reflect the culture of that particular society. When each society has its own distinct culture and tries to preserve its culture then the task of communicator becomes a little more complex than what it was before. When we talk of the mass media we all know that mass media were invented in the west they are western products. We adopted the technology to reach out to the people and give went to the aspirations of the people. Unfortunately this technology can also be used for wrong ends. When we go back to the western concept of communication we also think of language as a part of our cultural communication. Some countries are the melting pots of different cultures but there also you will find the ethnic minorities trying to preserve their own culture, their own identities, their own existence through mass media. That's why we talk of alternative communication channels or alternative media. It is perhaps again valid in the context of the United States of America. Or you can take India for that matter, India, a country of diverse cultures, diverse languages is nothing but a great challenge to any communicator. Communication in a multicultural society, multilingualistic society is very difficult. And this task is to be accomplished by careful use of the language, the media and the communication strategies. When I talk about technology dominating the world now there is a new concept called technoculture. That is technology induced culture. There is also a danger of the westernization of the indigenous cultures in other countries. What I mean here is western influence is taking over and there is going to be a uniform culture in all the countries. The multinational corporations who are producing different products, they are using media to promote their products. International advertising is a reality. International advertising I mean is selling products across the borders. When I talk of selling, they are not only selling products, they are also selling lifestyles. They are also selling dreams. Dreams are manufactured in studios. Culture is manufactured in studios. Should we have such kind of proposition? All of us know that culture is a product of evolution. It is a product of several centuries, the way in which people think, the way in which people react to situations, the way in which people try to protect and preserve their identities and their nativity. In the mad rush for development, in the mad rush for aping the west, all of us are moving towards what is known as Coca-Cola culture or McDonald culture. I also mentioned techno culture where technological determinism is very important for policy makers. It is technology which decides our culture. Should we have such a culture created by technology, we do not know. It is left to the people. We always say young people are quite technology savvy. Do young people forget about their culture? When we talk of developmental communication, we also have a concept called reverse modernization. It is a fine example of a person who lived in the west for decades coming back to his own roots and behaving like local people, forgetting that he lived in the west and he becomes one of the local people and becomes very rigid and conservative. We also call it as new traditionalization in our parlance. Culture is deep rooted. It is not a matter of instantaneous production. But what we are talking of is television or film producing what is called as instant culture. Fashion. It is only superficial. It exists only for a few days. Manorisms. All these we think that they are all temporary. Whatever is studio manufactured will not last long. Ultimately it is very important to know that the social institutions play a very vital role in the development of any society. The social institutions are school, family, religion and mass media. It is the family which is responsible for the cultural development of any child. Again it is religion which prescribes social norms and behavior for the people.  And lastly mass media, they also play a vital role but their role cannot be 100% precise. When I talked of culture and communication, any culture cannot be devoid of religion. Every religion has got its own influence on the culture of the society in question. For example, the western culture has got its moorings in Christianity. I spoke about Aristotle and Plato. The whole communication concept in the west is based on the Aristotelian model. If you come to the east, the eastern model is totally different. Each country had its own finer aspects and each country had its own band of dedicated scholars who contributed for the development of culture. For example, the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata in India have such a strong influence on the Indian psyche that cannot be so easily measured and imagined. The famous mega serial on Ramayana made the entire countries sit, glued to the television set and watch what was there on the small screen. Similarly, the epics of Mahabharata when it was telecast. Imagine it is not that television influenced the television viewing, it is the viewer's preference for the epics. Understand that culture played a vital role. If you ask all the procedures, processes that a society initiates is towards the collective welfare. If you just imagine that religion plays a vital role, you can always ask certain interesting questions. How we are going to classify them? You know, we classify again the eastern societies and western societies into two. The eastern societies have a strong oral tradition whereas we call the western societies as literate societies. For the simple reason that the western societies depend upon the written documents. Whereas the eastern societies have their epics, their scriptures, everything passed on from one generation to another generation orally. So the oral tradition has its own advantages and disadvantages. Precision is a problem in oral tradition. Authentication is a problem in oral tradition. But the way in which people have contributed for the development of culture cannot be underestimated so easily. You just take the example of the philosophies, religious philosophies of India. If you take Dwaita or Advaitha or Vishishtha Dwaita, the three major philosophies that emerged in the south, you will perhaps understand how they worked. One example is that of Advaitha. Ajishankara gave the philosophy of Advaitha where he considered that everything is non-dichotomous. Dwaita means dichotomous, Advaitha means non-existence of dichotom. In other words, he said, I am God. He meant there is no difference between the human being and the God. The God exists in the human being. He made a famous statement, you are not what you are, you are what you are not. For him, the entire physical world was nothing but an illusion and there was a metaphysical world which was real. So he wanted to find out the distinction between reality and illusion. When I talked of the perception, you know, in intercultural communication, when we talk of culture and communication, we perhaps talk of intercultural communication. In intercultural communication, I already mentioned that self-realization or self-actualization is the ultimate goal of any society or any individual. But they pass through different stages of perception. The Western perception, as I mentioned, is different. The collective welfare passes through different stages, first from the individual, then to the collectiveness. Whereas in the Eastern concept, it passes from the collective to the individual self-realization. So the approach is different, but the goal is the same. If that is the case, then these religious philosophical aspects of intercultural communication play a vital role. When I talked of Dvaita philosophy, it was the difference between man and God. We use communication channels in Advaita for self-realization which was nothing but intrapersonal communication. When you come to Dvaita philosophy, it is inter, it is communication between God and the people. Communication was a channel of communion. If you go to the other philosophy, Vishistha Dvaita, Saint Ramanuja added one more factor. He said, without compassionate communication, there cannot be any communion. So compassion, communication and communion became three vital aspects of philosophical communication of the East, especially in South India. So we can go on narrating how communication and culture are intertwined. We must understand at the same time a very important role of language. Language is also a product of evolution and language is a product of every society's culture. Language reflects culture and culture reflects language. If you take India as a classical example, then you can understand how each word has emanated from the cultural background of the people. We had very great scholars who have contributed to the development of language. Our grammar, our very expression of language will have cultural connotations. We talk of connotative meanings and denotative meanings of language. In addition to that, there is also a concept given by the Indians to the world of research, especially in cultural communication, that is the concept of meaning of meanings. That means every meaning has an inner meaning. You must have heard of the very famous scholars like Pani, Patanjali, Prabhakara, Mandanamishra. Prabhakara and Mandanamishra were perhaps one of the main contributors to the development of language. Mandanamishra's Bharat Katavallari was written in a different language and his contribution to the development of cultural communication is of very high order. Unfortunately, we do not have much evidence about what he contributed and whatever we know we have known from secondary sources. And when I talk of connotative and denotative meanings of the language, they do reflect the cultural component of each society. Every word has a cultural intonation. Every cultural presentation displays its language ability. By that I mean culture and communication, they are strongly intertwined. They blend together and without culture no language can develop. Without language no culture can develop. When I talk of the development of language and culture, a new threat has come from technology. Technology has started overpowering both communication and culture. When I spoke about technoculture, I meant the influence of technology over culture. And again, it is technology which is influencing our language, influencing our communication behavior. And these are the finest areas of research for communication scholars. When I spoke of developmental communication, I did not mention that culture was a component of development. And when we talk of national development and communication strategies for development, we must also realize that culture plays a very important role in communication for national development. And the new technology has changed the very face of the world. Today, the world is shrinking. The planet is becoming small, but we have to put these different cultures which will have to survive. Monoculture is not for the human civilization and mass media should aid in preserving culture. When I talk of culture, when I talk of language, when I talk of communication, they have certain meanings to us. And our scholars talked about language and communication in a different perspective. They also talked of word explosion, word implosion. That is how we can make words become very strong and effective to influence the culture and the thinking of the people. Today, the world is moving towards multiculturalism because of globalization. And in such a context, the study of multicultural communication becomes all the more relevant. Thank you.


The study used a discrete choice experiment methodology to quantify preferences for new injection treatments of patients and physicians with atopic dermatitis, revealing that while both groups preferred the efficacy of improving rashes and itching, physicians were more concerned about cost while patients preferred add-on treatments and were against self-administering the treatment at home. These findings have implications for shared decision-making and clinical practice. This article was authored by Yukorio Kubo, Keryon Ho, Simon Pfeiffer, and others.


Aaron, what does it say about this team to get another one of these wins in a close game like this considering it's now seventy one games in your record is forty eight and twenty three. You know, I would say one they're really good players in there. We're familiar in those situations. So I think, you know, they play with a lot of confidence in these close games. And, you know, I think the more you play in them, the more comfortable you get, you know, it's it's not always been easy or perfect. But these guys are really good at competing, you know, especially when the games in the balance. And obviously we've lost some in those situations. We've lost some really tough ones. But I think these guys do a really good job of of not dwelling on it, being able to bounce right back. And some of our best wins have come up after some of our worst losses. So it was another case of the guys really, you know, competing really well, you know, credit to Oakland for kind of crawling back in. And the bullpen from there was able to really, really shut them down and allow us to to put together a little bit of a rally there late. Early in the game, it was the two pitches to judge and Gallo that that really set everybody off, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about Jameson tonight? He's been lights out since July 6th. Yeah, probably one of your best starters since then. Yeah, what did you see out of him tonight? You know what? I thought stuff wise, you know, and mostly for me watching on TV. So I had the same view you had. I thought stuff wise, he was good. You know, I thought I thought his curveball was good. I thought the fastball was playing. I thought the A's did a good job of, you know, putting together some really competitive at bats, especially in that fourth inning where they were able to work some walks. I thought Chapman had a really good at bat laying off a tough 3-2 pitch. And then he made the mistake to Andrews on an 0-2 pitch, throwing a right down the middle that kind of, you know, cost him the outing a little bit there. You know, I thought there were some times where he had a chance to gain some count leverage where he, you know, were some of his worst pitches. So that pitch where you're 1-1, 2-1, he was taken into 3-1 and got in a little bit of trouble with that. But I don't think he was far off. And I thought stuff wise, he was good. Thanks, Aaron. Yeah. And the next, to Bruce Beck.  We are used to playing in these, Bruce, no question. We've, by far and away, obviously played more than anyone else. So the guys are definitely comfortable in these situations. And, you know, there's never any panic with these guys. You know, I think they play with a lot of confidence when the game's on the line and in the balance. And again, it doesn't mean you're always going to come through. But I know that they're not going to be rattled or overwhelmed by any situation. How significant was the job that Holmes and LeWisega did for you? Yeah, it was great.  And then Chappy finishing off and getting that 300 was everyone's very excited. You go next to Dan Martin.  You know, where do you think he is now in terms of performance and confidence? Yeah, look, I thought that was a big outing for him. Matt and Hark, you know, made some subtle adjustments with him today that I thought Chappy did a good job. It was able to go out in his catch play and before the game and kind of work it out. And he took it into the game and I thought he did a good job on the attack. And really you saw him use his fastball tonight and not shy away from the fastball. And I think the little subtle adjustment he made and his posture on the mound, I think really helped him.


Okay, here we go. Hi, everybody. My name is Eiji Galano. I'm one of the co-founders and the general manager for Infira and I'm joined today with my colleague Tim Meyers, one of our lead engineers at Infira. So you've seen the title of the talk. You might have caught our announcement at ETH Berlin a month ago. We're here to talk about decentralizing Infira. It's something that's been on the Twitter waves and crypto Twitter for years, something that people ask us about all the time, like is Infira is centralized? How are you going to decentralize? Are you going to decentralize? This is the talk where we answer quite a few of those questions for you. We gave you a preview at ETH Berlin if you were able to see the recording from that talk. This is going to go more into the details of the why behind it, the why now, what now, and especially the technical details that go into decentralizing Infira. So Infira was launched in 2016 with the sole purpose of providing utility for Ethereum and IPFS developers. It's something I say in all of my talks because I want to make it very clear that Infira was always about the developers and making sure that developers that are building on Web 3, which for us was initially Ethereum and IPFS, could quickly get started. And we did that at DevCon 2. It was four of us from the Infira team. We flew to DevCon at the time we were a small team within the larger consensus organization focused on trying to build something that would be useful. And so we all went to this conference and we were saying that we were going to get up on that stage and say, there is a lot of innovation that's happening in this space. We've created this new service called Infira. And it's a traditional SaaS service that you can use to connect to blockchains. And we had a lot of apprehension about that. Like what would the reception to that be? Because at the time we were all running our own infrastructure. We were all running our own nodes. There was very much a lot of interest in light clients, verifiability of data.  Trust us to run your infrastructure. And so the reception at DevCon was a little mixed. Some people were like, okay, great, I'm going to use that. Other people said, but why would I want to do that? I can just run my own node and it's going to sink in an hour and then I don't need you anymore. And so we said, well, that might be the case. But we're going to try it. We're just here to try to provide something useful and maybe it will be useful and maybe it won't be. And so we went up on stage and we announced that we were going to be doing this. And then during DevCon 2, the Ethereum network was subjected to the denial of service attacks that almost brought down the network. And some of the many of the heroes that helped save the network from that are either in this room or definitely at this conference, the people that helped mitigate the attacks on the network. And in fear's role in that at the time was trying to keep our endpoint up that was already being used to serve MetaMask. MetaMask had launched two, three months beforehand. And thousands of users were already using MetaMask every day to send Ether, do some basic interactions with some of the early maker contracts that were out there, some of the early other experiments that were out there around that 2016 time. And we said, well, we can't do anything actively to fix that client. We're not the protocol core developers. The core developers are solving that problem. But there was already this issue where we were in Shanghai, the Wi-Fi there was awful, even worse than at most conferences. And nobody was able to get access to their infrastructure to update their clients once the actual client development teams had put out these updates. And so our infira team was sitting there in the lobby of the hotel updating our endpoints so that the thousands of users that were using MetaMask that might have been pointing MetaMask at their own infrastructure could use infira until their infrastructure came back online. And so that started to highlight one of the value props that we saw, which was by having this centralized point, we could simplify or try to eliminate a lot of the pain for these users by, yes, we'll take on this aspect of centralization, but for the most part, it'll be beneficial. And we said, we're going to keep doing that until it gets to the point where we feel like it's crossed a tipping point and we need to try to do things differently. And when you look around the space, there's other points of centralization that have paths to decentralization. Things like fiat on ramps and centralized exchanges and how there's a transition from those to alternatives or truly decentralized ways of doing the same operation. My favorite example is when you talk about rollups and how initially rollups start as having a single entity that's creating the rollups and the rollup teams have a roadmap of how they will eventually get to being more decentralized. So that's how we thought of ourselves as Infera. Start the centralized and we'll see when we get more decentralized and we're going to have a solution for how we do that. And the reason is because we had to create quite a bit of proprietary infrastructure to serve the traffic that we've done over the last six, seven years. What we run today as Infera is far more complex than what we ran within 2016. If you had tried to replicate what we had in 2016, maybe a month or two after we launched, you could do it within a week or two. Now it would take you probably years to try to replicate the systems that we've had to build because between 2016 and now, we went through the 2017, 2018 ICO bubble, the 2019 crypto winter, 2020 DeFi summer, all of the explosion of NFT growth. And with every single one of those things, you might have run into an Infera production incident, something that showed, oh, this didn't scale exactly right. And every time it didn't scale exactly right, we improved our system. And so it forced us to innovate every single time. Back in the day, we used to send requests directly to Ethereum nodes. And there was really no virtualization, as we call it, custom services that would handle the traffic. Because we didn't ever want to be in a position of providing the wrong data to you. Because that would be really bad. That'd be the end of our service if we ever provided you the wrong data like that. And especially in 2021, we ran into this issue where we tried to be very conservative with how often we updated our clients. Because early on, the clients were a little bit bleeding edge and a little bit unstable, the closer you tracked to the latest release. And because of that, users were complaining, like, maybe give us a little more stability, less of the absolutely latest client. That ended up biting us in 2021 when we were running a client that was about six months old. And a bug was triggered by a team that I won't mention because it was an accident and they apologized to us. But it took down in fear for six hours. And that was our first multi-hour outage that we had ever had and still our worst outage that we've ever had. And so that really made us think maybe that was the tipping point. Maybe that's the point where we need to start considering now's the time, do things differently. Because for us, decentralization was always the plan. We said we're going to get there. It's just not the first step in that plan. We said that we are going to set out to prove that Web 3 could be served by SAS. We're going to say that we're going to run a SAS service and that's going to be beneficial for the ecosystem. And it's going to bring more developers in. It's going to bring in more investor interests. A lot of activity is going to come into the space because people will see, oh, I can actually make a living and support myself running a business in Web 3 when at the time it wasn't very clear which models would work. And so now, in fear is not the only game in town. There's dozens. They can't even fit on the screen anymore. And we feel like we've accomplished that goal. We've proved that SAS works in Web 3. And so now we want to prove that Web 3 models can be used to serve SAS. And that's what we took as our approach to decentralizing in fear. And that's where we are today. And the first step to that is open collaboration and transparency. We don't have the entire solution in a white paper form that we're going to upload to IPFS. And you're all going to read it right now. We're still in that design phase. But we've already started collaborating with other people in the ecosystem on that design. We've been working on it for a year and a half. This is where we want to start showing you more of the technical details of what goes into that. What does decentralizing in fear look like? People have said, oh, are you just going to create a DAO so that we can have some governments over what in fear it does? Is that good enough? Or is it some sort of utility function that we're going to try to have as part of this network? What are the incentives of participating? How do we incentivize the right behaviors? And what people were especially asking was, does participating in this decentralized infrastructure network mean like in fear still owns and controls everything? And that's the biggest question that we got in the last month since we announced it at ETH Berlin. And the answer to that's no. That defeats the purpose of what we're saying with a decentralized infrastructure network. That's supposed to be a permissionless network. So in fear is going to just be a partner in a decentralized permissionless network, one of an equal amount or one of equals in operators. So now I'm going to pass it over to my colleague Tim and we're going to start sharing some of the technical details with you. Thanks. Sorry. Yeah. So as EG mentioned, we don't have all of the details of this figured out yet. We're still pretty deep in the design phase. But the next 10 minutes, I'm going to try and walk you through as much as we have figured out right now as I can. And then hopefully save about five minutes for any questions you all might have. So first, I want to start with just a really high level overview of what we see as the network participants in this decentralized and fear network. So first, of course, you have your end user who wants to connect to a Web3 network. Maybe they just need to send a transaction to a blockchain. Maybe they need to read a bunch of data from it. Either way, they need some way to access the API that a blockchain node typically exposes. And so the first participant to support that are the infrastructure providers, of course, and they're the ones that are going to actually be running the blockchain nodes, all of the supporting infrastructure that makes that possible to allow for a high throughput of requests to send all the transactions to read historical data, all of those things that you typically do with the centralized provider. And they'll provide this service in return for a reward, which is what's going to motivate them to want to do this. The next participant, we're calling the network status watchers. This party will provide performance and capability reports of the infrastructure providers. So they'll be there to kind of check and keep them honest. They'll see that they're keeping up with the head of the chain. They'll check that they're responding quickly, that their answers are accurate, all of the things that you would hope that an API does. And finally, we have this concept of an ingress node. They kind of act as an intermediary. They will sell the actual network resources to users after purchasing them from the infrastructure providers. And later also show how they're not entirely necessary, but they can provide a UX option that I think is useful. So more detail on the infrastructure providers. The first thing, of course, to note is that instead of now with just a single centralized provider, we'll have many of them.  So here we just have a little simple diagram. We have Infira. We'll probably run one, of course. You'll also see other named providers that you're used to seeing that we hope will collaborate with us. And you might also have anonymous providers, so you never really know who they are. But through the mechanisms of the network, you can come to trust that they are going to provide a good service. So these infrastructure providers, they commit to providing capacity on the network. They'll specify the protocols and capabilities that they support. So we envision this network working for Ethereum, but we also envision it supporting all of the sort of new networks that Infira has added over the last couple years, the Layer 2s, New Layer 1s. But not every infrastructure provider is going to want to serve all of those. So they can pick and choose and specify what they want to support. They'll also say the capabilities. So you might be used to having, you know, archive nodes for Ethereum. And then sometimes you need that, sometimes you don't. And running archive traffic is a lot harder. So some providers might do that, some might not. They'll also give an idea of the amount of throughput that they're capable of specifying. And this may take a couple different shapes, but you know, you can think of it as like a thousand requests per minute. When someone registers as a provider, they're saying, I can support this much. And so that people can then buy that back. And of course they'll be compensated for doing this. I want to talk a little bit about what it actually looks to be a node provider. And so this is a diagram of what Infira does and what other big centralized providers do. It's complicated. As EG said, it's become much more complicated since 2016. To start, of course, you have your blockchain nodes. These are the ones that are produced by the client teams that interact with the peer-to-peer network that sync blocks to verify it. But there's a lot of supporting infrastructure around that. So first we have a snapshot system. If you've ever tried to sync a node, you'll know that it takes a very long time. So we typically take the disk of a blockchain node, save it to our own private secure storage. And then when we need a horizontally scale out those nodes, we use that as a seed for new blockchain nodes. So it's downloaded onto a server and then synced from there, which makes it much faster. You also have various indexes and accelerators.  So we have special indexers to speed that up. Also for things like NFTs. In front of that you have a load balancer that makes the decision of what accelerators to send your request to, maybe for just sending a transaction that goes directly to the nodes. And in front of all of that we often have a consistency system that helps make sure that users see a canonical view of the chain. So this helps with reorgs to make those a little less painful for the user and also make sure that if they like query a block it doesn't change in between requests. And this is something that is altogether quite complicated. There have been several projects out in open source land that have attempted to help with this. I think most of them are you know more on just running the blockchain nodes, running several of those, but to really provide good service you need a lot more than that. And we will be releasing our own open source infrastructure kit that node providers can use to help them participate in this network. Of course there's also going to be parties that already know what they're doing and will probably just run their own flavor of infrastructure to provide the same service in the end. Next we have the network status watchers. Again, there's multiple of these run by different parties. These will periodically test the infrastructure providers by sending them a small volume of requests. They'll measure the performance and check for correctness of those responses. They'll report all of this to a federated status page. So if you're thinking about using this network you'll be able to go there, look through the different providers, see how they perform, what their capabilities are, all of those things. And also in cases of provably incorrect responses. So there are certain requests on the Ethereum JSON RPC API that you could prove with Merkle proofs rather easily. So in those cases those might also be used to inform penalties with the node providers. And we hope over time as stateless clients start to improve that there will be more and more of that API service that is verifiable. A picture of kind of what it looks like to run a network status watcher. They will have to run some small amount of blockchain infrastructure themselves, not nearly on the scale that an infrastructure provider would because they're not serving a high volume of requests but they need sort of a baseline to compare to. They want to check that the infrastructure providers are near what they think is the head of the chain. And then of course they'll have all of these periodic tests that they're running to see if the providers are operating well. So they'll interact with the infrastructure providers. They'll potentially send things to a smart contract on chain for those provably incorrect responses. And then they will also send their results to a federated status page where you can view more detailed information. And then last we have the ingress node. So as I mentioned this kind of serves as an intermediary between the end user and the infrastructure provider. So an end user will send their JSON RPC request to an ingress node and then that ingress node may then forward that to multiple different infrastructure providers. Maybe they generally send it to one and if that goes down they have a fallback. Maybe they round robin. Maybe they choose to actually send it to all of them and do a quorum of that and return it to the user. This will be something that the ingress node can actually choose how they want to do it. And one reason for having this ingress node is that you can use it to give the same Web 2 UX of the centralized providers today. So I think there's a reason that Infera and centralized providers have been so successful. It's provided an easy entry point for people to come and swipe their credit card and get access to the network. And that doesn't necessarily align with the decentralized ethos but it's also brought a lot more people to our world. And so an ingress node might allow users to actually pay them in fiat and then give them API access but this will still have better results than the current model because they can then be sending the traffic to multiple infrastructure providers and get some of those benefits. In addition to that though an ingress node might purchase resources from several node providers and then register themselves as a node provider with the sum of all of that capacity. And then an end user can go and pay for that provider in crypto. And then you have a fully crypto native experience. So there's options here. The node provider lets you do a lot of interesting things with combining other providers. So the on-chain registry is what we're typically calling our smart contract that kind of coordinates all of this. And the main way to think about it is it's basically the data structure of your node providers. So we have a very simple example of what that kind of looks like this is just one detail. But you have your name providers and the protocols that they're supporting. So as in FIRA maybe we're supporting the five that are listed here. But maybe operator A is only supporting Ethan Polygon. This is where you would also be able to see things like maybe what region they exist in, whether they support archive nodes, things like that. Again, it looks sort of of the timeline of how this all operates. So first of course the smart contract is deployed. Some amount of time later your infrastructure providers come in and they register. They specify the protocols, the capabilities and the throughput that they'll support. Some amount of time later you'll have network watchers that will register. They may only want to participate watching for certain protocols. Maybe they're only capable of checking certain capabilities. Maybe you have a watcher that can't check that a node or that an infrastructure provider can support archive access but they want to help with the near-head request and see that those are good for providers.  So that might be an end user who wants to go directly to a node provider or it could be an ingress node that wants to combine them. And once you put all of that together you get sort of what we view as our decentralized architecture. So in the center you have the on-chain registry.  And then once that's all set up your blockchain API consumers can send their requests to the various infrastructure providers that they've chosen or to an ingress node which is sort of helping them do that. And yeah we hope once we have that all figured out that it'll give us a self-sustaining reliable and robust network of infrastructure providers that's built to really serve the high throughput that Infira can today or other centralized providers can today for all of the blockchain API requests that you need. But instead of what we have now they'll remove a single point of failure. We hope to hope to do this out in the open as much as possible and really follow that collaborative Web3 spirit. This is we hope really going to improve reliability for these for the users and get a lot closer to that kind of 100% uptime dream. But also which I think is important still provide the ability to have that really easy Web2UX if you want it. We could also have the crypto native. And yeah that's it. We're seeking strong Web3 infrastructure providers to work together with us. If you're interested in joining and participating in this network I encourage you to snap this QR code it takes you to a form that you can fill out provide a little information on your experience and your interest. And we'd love to work with you. That's it. I've got about four and a half minutes for questions if anyone has any. Thank you so much. Please raise your hand if you have questions so our volunteers can lend you the microphone. One, two, yeah. So do you plan this whole decentralization to be more created or censorship resistant? Sorry, what was the first you said censorship yes so either you have for example a list of created providers for quality or you have a censorship persistent list of providers that will treat any request from anyone regardless of definitely improve censorship resistance because it's permissionless anybody can participate in the network by meeting the criteria to join the network which is technical technical criteria of meeting a level of performance. If you can meet a level of performance you can participate in the network. We're not going to be selecting who can participate. And then as a consequence what if a provider constantly perform badly? They would be penalized by the network. There would be a financial incentive to provide the minimum level of performance and they would get penalized by the network if they're not meeting that level of performance. Additionally, that network watcher that or status monitor that we're talking about is continuously checking and reporting on both the capabilities of the network as well as the performance. So you can see here's a new provider that just joined they've only been part of the network for seven days. They support seven networks of those seven networks this is the performance criteria of that. Right. And all of that's going to be published in a stream of information that people can consume from to make routing decisions. So a user can a very technical user that wants to be in control of that can say this provider's coming from this region or this provider's coming from that region and this is their performance and make selection criteria of how their traffic gets routed or they can pick their level of decentralization and ease of use by going through an ingress operator that can make those routing decisions on their behalf. Can you give an example of what the centralized infrastructure currently looks like in terms of like number of servers and bandwidth and so on and what you expect will be when it's decentralized will there be overhead will it will it need more servers to to do the same performance that kind of thing. By number of servers are you talking about in fears current current turnout? Yeah. Dozens of subsystems hundreds of different instances or servers providing different types of functionality. So like we have a separate subsystem subsystem that all it does is index event logs and when you query events from like ERC 20 token events and things like that it's pulling from that subsystem and then we have this consistency system that tries to keep all of that in sync when you're querying one subsystem versus another. So that's the challenge that we've had is we built that as quickly as possible to solve problems and it's very proprietary cloud specific and we've been working on how do we retool that so that it's something that can be not just open source and something that somebody else can run but can run with like not a team of dozens of operations people and so it's not what we're going to release in the node kit is what we think is a minimum level of functionality of performance where this is better than running a bunch of nodes behind a load balancer because it now has some of these indexing and performance optimizing systems but it's something that can be taken on by hopefully an individual but at the very least a small team much smaller team than the current Inferite team Do you think it's likely that this on-chain registrations of the providers will be a new yet to be launched dedicated chain or is it more likely that it will be on an existing chain like this you remain it That's one of the things that we've been considering as we're going through the design we're leaning towards don't start a new chain for that like try to use something that exists and that goes back to the why are we doing it now rather than in 2016 when people are talking about like micro payments between providers and like to use state channels for that and all these other things like we would have had to devote a significant amount of our research just on that problem whereas now a lot of these primitives are out there and we can try to use some of the things that already exist to build the network Yeah, can you tell me who is the entity or people who decide what the requirements are to become an operator and who decides which operators or providers would meet those requirements and then how they would change in the future Okay, so multi part so who decides who can be an operator so this form to sign up is to participate in like a permission beta similarly to like how when other people are developing new networks we're going to have to start with a small group to try to test and iterate with and for that we're looking for people that already have experience with the infrastructure and that we can reach out to and get feedback from pretty quickly on the technical front but once we actually launch this network it's fully permissionless the criteria of that is what we're defining as a protocol in the design of this would be the amount of resources that you would have to provide or this would be the minimum level of performance so you have to at least support one network you have to at least support this level of performance and then as long as you can meet that it's anybody hey Lefteris here out from Rotky right in front of you I just wanted to ask about the ingress nodes will there be a requirement or will there be optional you should say like the indexing nodes no ingress of the ingress yeah it'll definitely be optional so I can't quite get to the slides it'll take too long but you can still have a consumer who will go directly to the contract to purchase resources and go directly to one or multiple node providers that they choose the ingress node is kind of an option where if you don't want to go to the trouble of doing that maybe you want to use one that allows you to pay in fiat that you can but it's an option this was our last question but if you have more questions please reach out to our speakers we're going are going to be here thank you so much


The Office of the Secretary of Defense has released new mask guidelines and we have them right here for you in this week's News You Can Use. Hello everyone, I'm Lene Burns. If you're on a military installation, you must wear a mask at all times. Here are the only exceptions. If you're alone in an office with floor-to-ceiling walls and your door is closed. When eating or drinking while still maintaining proper social distancing for CDC guidelines. Or when you have to lower your mask for identification or security purposes. Better reasonably accommodate a person with a disability. Acceptable masks are non-medical disposable masks or made with breathable or tightly woven fabric. Two to three layers or have an inner filter pocket.  Masks must still be worn at all times inside fitness centers even when doing cardio. For more My Navy HR News You Can Use follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.


What's going on everyone? Sam here with late in sports cards for 22. Peony honors photo, iMac photo, obsidian hobby, and prism hobby. Football six box mixer number 16, random team style. There's a look again at your random results. As always, you can find those on the website under the results tab, as well as the link in chat. It's good luck everybody. We're down to six to go. Six to go. Phil B, thank you Phil. Six spots left on 2020 Bowman. Four box mixer, 145 a spot. Get to a random team. A lot of big prospects we're chasing in there. Start with 22 prism. Got our base heavy product out of the way. So you can pull like a color blast out of this. That'd be cool. Manga.  Don't do that. I need to go to sleep. 7am. Nick Mangold to 225. Chets, Charles Cross and Hassan Haskins. And what a miss that was. Coming in, come back, napping, crying four all night. Garrett Wilson rookie, red wave boy and mafe to 149. Pierre Strong Jr. and Roger McCreary. Silver, Josh Pascal for the Lions. An orange, Josh Allen, that's Jags, Josh Allen to 249. Jalen Petrie and Aiden Hutchinson rookie. Silver, Alex Smith. She's a red wave, Tom Brady to 149. 79 of 149. Nice one there for the Bucks. A Trayvon Walker and Drake Jackson. Silver, Darren Waller. Purple, Khair Elam to 125. Rookie for the Bills. Ryan Cook, Cook Rook and Khalil Shakir. Silver, Julian Love, that's going to be Hunter Renfrow. Silver, Otto for the Raiders. Nice one there looming each. It's got our Thompson, John Dotson, Rookie. There's AJ Brown to 199. For the Eels. Derek Stingley Jr. and Elante Taylor. Can we do the rare double color blasphal. One out of prison and one out of obsidian. We got a Navy Camo. Matt Stafford, that's going to be Fred Warner for the Niners. 19 of 25. Nice one there, San Frick. Traylon Burks, K-Von Tivito. George Pickens. Going to the Steelers. Congrats Pittsburgh. That is going to be Randy S. Let's go Randy. Congrats, buddy. Hell yeah, man. Monca, George Pickens. That's sick. It's one of the nicer ones in the set in my opinion too. Super, super short print. We'll get that into a mag for you, buddy. Eric Azucanma to 175. Malcolm Rodriguez and Drake London. We did call. Maybe we can pull a color blaster of Monca. There's a Silver, Devin Singletary. Green Scopado, Aiden Hutchinson for the Lions. There you go, Detroit. That's sick. Jason A. Congrats, Jason. Nice hutch. Tray McPyrite and Tresson Ebner. Silva, Alec Pierce to 225. Zach Thomas for the Dolphins. Go Dolphins. Eke McIwanoo and Isaiah Spiller. He was actually a beast. That's pretty cool. That is Silver, Drake London. Fireworks. Orange Wave. Joe Burrow. Nice color match for the Bengals. 58 of 60. Got Garrett Wilson and Evan Neal. Nice first box there. Again, guys, we are down to just six to go. Six to go. That breaks next. Last break of the night. What's got Yordon Alvarez, rookie autos in there too? Maybe pulled one of those. Maybe it's not a rookie, but Yordon Alvarez autos in there. I know that. Second box of Prism. They'll go into Obsidian, iMac, and finish with honors. See something crazy on it.  Break my heart a little bit. Silver. Quinn and Williams. Nice big Q. Got an auto. Nine of 35. Reggie Wayne for the Colts on the Purple Power. Nice one there, Indy. He's got Indianapolis. The Colts out. Chris H. Yo, Chris. Boye Mafe and Tyler Algier. Aiden Hutchinson, rookie. Orange, 249. Trishon Werffs for the Bucks. Oh, Lyme Love there. Desmond Ritter, rookie. And a great dual set. Sova Derek Henry, throwback. Purple John Lynch to 125 for the Buccaneers. Alec Pierce, rookie. And Andrew Booth for some break. Kyle Pitts. Hyper Ramandre Stevenson to 175 for Patriots. Snoop Kanna and Malik Willis, rookie. Rich Gannon to 25. Nice one there, Matt Corral. It would be kind of funny. It would be kind of funny. I'm not going to lie. I don't see it happening. But it would be pretty funny. It would be awesome. Like Rodgers wants out after the first year or something. Oh, yeah, I'm rooting for him. Crating chariot. Damian Pierce, nice one there. Silver Rookie Auto for the Texans. Congrats, Houston. Jeremy Rocker and James Cook. Nice Cook Rook there. Sova John Dotson, new recruits. Orange Derek Henry to 249 for the Titans. Tyrion Davis Price and Devontae Wyatt. Sova Debo. Blue Wave, Mahomes to 199. 77 of 199 for the Chiefs. Bate, Kyle Hamilton and Nicoby Dean. Nice defenders there. Heirs, brilliance, Jalen Hertz. Zemir White on the Hyper Rookie to 175. Kade York. And Jalen Naylor. Pickens, fireworks, rookie. Blue Wave, Isaiah likely to 199. Ravens, rookie. Kyle Phillips and Wondale, a Robinson for the Giants. Sova, Lageria Snead. It's going to be a Khalil Herbert to 225. You need to just lock them in there. Try to make Taffy and George Pickens. That'd be nice. Throw them right there. Let's see what happens. Let's see how tough they really are. Silver Kade York. Blue Ice to 99. No offense. Just a big old swarm. It's Kway Walker and John Mechie. Who do you think jumps through that window first? I don't know. I think Donny. I think Donny too, probably. Again, guys, just six to go. 2020 Bowman, breaking next. Six to go. All right, Obsidian. 22 Obsidian hobbies. Just some angry ones too. Some wasps. Hornets. Oh, God. Green. I'm on Ross St. Brown to 50. So when they're on the white, that is going to be Derek Carr. Grats on that one there. That's like a case hit right there. I don't know what it's called. Let me look that up really quick. It's going to bug me. Obsidian because it's not just called white. It's got like an interesting name. Contra. That's what it is. Contra. Nice one there. Congrats on that, Steelers. I mean Raiders. League Willis, Silver Rookie. It's going to be first hit. Jonathan Taylor to 75 for the Colts on the Orange. Cutting edge jersey. Congrats, Indy. Got 37 of 199. Charlie Kolar. Oh, wow. For the Ravens. This will work right here. Going to Robert BU. Five of 10. Aaron Rogers, Lightning Strike Autograph. Hell yeah. Congrats on that, Robert BU. There you go, buddy. That's awesome with the Packers. And 112 of 175. Tyrion Davis Price, Rookie Jersey Auto. Grats on the TDP. Second box on the Obsidian. Oh, and we got a, wow. Josh Pascal on the Rainbow. Two of five. That's going to be the Neon Mojo. I think we got a color blast in here too, Sean. Stefan Diggs, we do. 93 of 99. Two case hits and two products. David Montgomery. Who's got him? Wow. Dan L. Justin Herbert. Color blast for the Chargers. Hit a Mangan Prism. And now a color blast in Obsidian. This is successful, man. Let's go. Congrats on that, Dan. There you go, buddy. Gorgeous Herbie coming your way. We've got 39 of 50. Mack Jones, two-color patch. Equinox gear for the Patriots. That is super clean right there. 68 of 199. Jeremy Rucker. My God, what a box. Going to Tyler M. 15 of 199. Brock Purdy. Rookie Auto. Unbelievable, man. Unbelievable box. A neon mojo to five, a Herbert color blast, and a Purdy rookie auto. It's kind of wild. It's kind of wild right there. Let's go, man. And 85 of 99. Jersey Auto is David Bell for the Browns. All right, guys, again. Just six to go. 2020 Bowman. Breaking next. Okay, on to iMac Photo. iMac first off Z-Line. I'll see a crazy RPA.  That's the already know. That's going to be nasty. Dalton Cook. Nice one there. Seven of 23. Hello, Forrest. Hello, Forrest. We've got four of 10. Three-color jumbo patch. Matt Corral. Rookie for the Panthers. Nice one there. What's up, Matthew? We've got Joe Cool. Joe Montana. 48 of 49. Nice one there. That is player warm for the Niners. Joe Cool. Followed by a three-colored RPA. That is going to be Isaiah Spiller. 98 of 99. For the Chages. The Chages. That's awesome. Two of 25. Two-colored patch auto. Jonathan Taylor. For the Colts. Colts actually did really well on this. Magnus next one. Because that is going to be going to Who's got him? Who's got him? Who's got him? Florem. That is going to be Seven of 18. Trayvon Walker. RPA, partial Jaguar's logo patch. Let's go. Tyler, congrats on that, buddy. Oh, that's awesome. Trayvon Walker. It's a gorgeous Trayvon Walker sig, too. Let's go, man. Very nice. Congrats, buddy. Empty, empty. All right, before we go on to the next one again, guys. Six, two, go. Trayvon, 2020 Bowman. Let's get this sold on out, everybody. Six, two, go. Almost there. We've got honors. First off the line. See something big. Two attack of Aloha to 99 for the Dolphins. Go Dolphins. There it is. We've got a purple Trayvon Burks for a soft line exclusive three of 12. Yeah, for the Patriots, that's going to be Jack Jones. 15 of 15 on the first off the line exclusive. Who's got this team? It's going to Tony H. One of one. Buyback JJ Watt. Two colored patch auto. That is Gameworn. JJ Watt right there, too. That's like Letter Patch right there. That is from what, 2017 Immaculate football. God, that's so cool. Congrats, Tony. Great hit for you, buddy. Let's do a quick recap here. It's a great break overall. Yeah, it was. Really good break. Look at the stack of mags right there. Got Joe Montana, Matt Corral, Mack Jones, Jonathan Taylor. Jonathan Taylor again. Isaiah Spiller, David Bell, Jeremy Rufford, Tyrion Davis Price, Charlie Kolar, Damien Pierce, Regi Wayne, Hunter Renfrow, Aiden Hutchinson. And for just a six box break. This is kind of insane, actually. Jack Jones for the Patriots. Surely he won't do anything bad in the airport. We've got to 10. That's going to be Aaron Rodgers. Five of 10. We had a Brock Purdy, a rookie auto. 15 of 199 for the Niners. We had a Trayvon Walker. First off the line, exclusive RPA to 18. At a one of one JJ Watt. Gameworn. Buyback auto. From honors. Justin Herbert on the... No, it's up Bradley. Color blast for the Chargers. And then at a Prismanga. George Pickens for the Steelers. That's going to do it for the break, guys. Thanks again for the fill. Let's get 2020 Bowman filled on up.