from the Regency Center in San Francisco.  Hello, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Serverless Conf 2018 here in San Francisco. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Pete Sparsky, who's the Vice President of Contact at A Cloud Guru, the company that puts on the show. Pete, great to see you. Thank you Stu, it's great to be here with you. Thank you so much for coming to the conference. All right, so Serverless is one of these things. There's a lot of excitement around it. I'm super excited to start a second year having theCUBE here at this event. You've done these events at a number of global locations. You're actually based in Australia, so set us up, you gave some of the intro with Sam Cronenberg. You were the first non-Cronenberg member of A Cloud Guru, so first, give us a little bit about your background and what we hope to accomplish for the show like this. Thank you Stu. So like you said, I'm VP of content at A Cloud Guru. I was the first employee. I remember back in 2015, in the end of 2015, early 2016 when I joined, it was only Sam and Ryan and myself. Small company grew really quickly, but we had a passion for high quality education from the very start. So it's been incredible to see how the business has grown and how much passion there is in the community for great education. And for events such as this, where we try to educate and continue to talk about cloud computing. Yeah, Pete, I love, you know, when I talk to the Cronenberg brothers, the company, if it wasn't for serverless, I don't know that the company could have existed, definitely not in the form that it is, because really lowers the price point to be able to create and deliver the content. Therefore, the training is much less expensive. I want to talk a little bit about the dynamic of cloud and serverless, because A Cloud Guru is not just about serverless, but it's a main piece of what you guys, how you deliver it, and I'm sure something that, you know, the show and how people get involved with it. Yeah, absolutely. So our entire platform, our learning management system runs on serverless technologies. We don't have a single server anywhere. It's all lambda driven. It's incredibly cost efficient. It's very flexible, very scalable, and it's actually a fun project to work on for our developers. Yeah, and Pete, I have to say, you don't have a server anywhere, but eventually somewhere on the service that you put. Absolutely, there is some, exactly, exactly. You're totally right. You got me there, but at least from the perspective of our developers, you know, they are dealing in functions, they're thinking in code, they're thinking in design, patterns and architectures, and that's incredibly powerful. And like you said, it has been a disruptive thing, right? Because we've been able to build our platform quickly, cost effectively, and then focus on kind of our business value, focus on creating great, high quality, curated content, right? That education piece that we focus on, quality courses, quality content that we can use to teach people. Yeah, Pete, when I think about this, this is a very big mind shift for users because it's one thing to go from a server to a VM, to a container. I'm just changing a little bit the construct, but it's the same, but the nirvana we've been thinking about for years is my developer and my application, I shouldn't have to worry about this, but networking and compute and storage, these all things all need to work, and when something goes wrong, it's kind of challenging. So maybe talk a little about the content you create and how you balance the here's what you do and here's the organizational changes you need to make and who's involved and who isn't involved and what happens there. Absolutely, thank you for bringing that up because I think the mind shift is incredible. So for our team that actually works on the platform, they now can focus on delivering business values because they don't need to worry about managing infrastructure, managing service, thinking about say security in the same way we were thinking about security before. So still important, incredibly important, but the equation is now a little different and this does allow us to move quicker, right? It allows us to be much more flexible because we can focus on that architecture, on the design, on the code and not on kind of that other stuff. And it also gives us an opportunity to focus on our product, right? On that high quality education. So we focus a lot on kind of just teaching users, teaching our students what cloud computing is all about, helping them get certified. And then once they have that, learning how to build things with server technologies, right? It's an incredible change and people are asking how do I actually get started? How do I build this scalable e-commerce platform or how do I go and do big data processing in a serverless way? So there's a lot of opportunity and we've been building kind of this content and these courses to help people understand how to do these things. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up certifications. So I want you to talk a little bit about certifications as well as you're a, I believe a serverless hero, which is in AWS. It's not a certification, it's more, is it designation award? Yeah, I think it's bestowed, yeah. Maybe talk a little bit about, you know, I remember 10 years ago there was discussion, well, maybe certification should be dead.  You know, how valuable it is. So cloud certification is very different. So give us a little bit of landscape of certifications, how a cloud guru helps and then kind of the designation type stuff. Well, we have realized that certification is very important because it gives your engineering team, your company kind of the same basis, right? It gives people the same language, the same level of understanding. So moving forward, teams can move together.  So we help teams kind of understand what this is about. We're helping get certified, so we have courses aimed at that. But then after they get certified, they want you to stay up to date, right? And they need to specialize and dig deeper. They need to become a depth of various technologies, whether it's DynamoDB or something else. So it's like a path, right?  And then you can circle back and maybe do like a professional level of certification. And so we help to really kind of guide people through that and help them understand how to go from no experience to a professional. Yeah, but one of the challenges is all of the cloud vendors have their own certification. Is there similarity between if I'm Google, Azure, AWS certified, are there any fast paths you can do if you've done one and you don't want to do the other? You know, obviously the fundamental skills, they conceptually, yes, absolutely, having an understanding of one cloud environment will help with the other. But the certifications are different, right? And that's why we have different video courses that you can take if you want to become AWS certified versus Google cloud certified. They have different focus sometimes. So it's kind of necessary to go and watch these courses, do the study, read the white papers and have the experience as well. You need to really have hands-on experience. So you need to start building things. Although, for example, for people who are not kind of from a tech background, they can take certifications like the certified cloud practitioner certification from Amazon, right? It's aimed at non-technical people. And it gives them kind of that understanding of the economics of cloud, right? What the services are without taking them deeper into the tech side of things. All right, and explain what it means to be a serverless hero which is in AWS. That is a great question. So, serverless hero is a designation. It's basically, it's given to people who are very active in the serverless community as a way to kind of say, okay, these are the people who share a lot of the community. And I guess it's a thanks from Amazon. So I was initially an AWS community hero and then they changed that to a serverless hero because I focus very much on serverless technologies. I talk, I have a book about it. So I've been really kind of focused on serverless tech throughout my career, over the past three years. Yeah, we're huge proponents of community here on theCUBE and look what you're doing at the event here. Talk about the serverless community itself because it's not just AWS, it's across lots of different environments. And I think back to Microsoft MVP or VMware vXperts. So tell us the state of the community. Yeah, I'll be honest. The community is my favorite part by far. Honestly, we have incredible people in the community across different cloud providers. We have people who are experts in AWS, Google, Azure, all kinds of different platforms just coming together, talking like this conference is a testament to it because we have speakers who are just starting with serverless people who've been doing it for a few years across different vendors, cloud providers, startups as well, huge enterprises. And it's incredible to see a conference like this that brings everybody together and it's very collaborative, it's very welcoming. And honestly, we're running for this. We're running for the community. All right, well, Pete, thanks so much for helping me kick off our coverage here at serverless.com. Thanks so much for joining me. Pete Sparsky, I'm Stu Miniman, and a hollow for watching theCUBE.


My name is Giovanni and for the last couple of weeks I have been competing against AI in an investment game. The rules of the game were simple. The AI and I had $100 each to invest in crypto and 2 weeks to make as much money as possible. The results of this experiment were mind-blowing. Before we get into it, make sure you like the video and subscribe to our channel. Before starting the challenge, I wanted to know more about my adversaries' investment skills. I reached out to my colleague Felix at Cointelegraph. He asked ChatGPT to build a strong crypto portfolio a couple of months ago. From the time we did it in March to now, we started at $100 and we're at $104 right now, so we made a 4% gain in that time. 4% gains in about 3 months. This sounded like rookie numbers to me. I was sure I could do much better than that. First of all, I had to give ChatGPT the right instructions to build its crypto portfolio. As you might know, ChatGPT knows nothing about events happening beyond 2021, so I had to fill it in. Basically, I asked the AI to process a summary of the main events in crypto in 2022 and 2023. Here is what I got as a result. BTC 40%, either 25%, XRP 20%, ADA 10%, and USDT 5%. As you can see, this is a quite conservative portfolio. That reflected the high degree of uncertainty dominating the crypto market in the last few months. Okay, it was my turn to pick my crypto bets. In real life, I am a quite conservative crypto investor and I just own Bitcoin for the long term. But this time, the goal was making as much money as possible, so a different strategy was needed. That's why I reached out to a good friend of mine, market analyst Marcel Pejman. In the competition, you should be more aggressive, so I would not focus too much on Bitcoin and Ethereum as the GPT did. The market goes up, you're definitely going to win the game. If the market goes down, I look for you. By then, I understood that the AI's main disadvantage is that it bases its decisions on already established price trends. It isn't really capable of anticipating new trends. Basically, it buys stuff that is already going up. So, the key to beating it is betting on cryptocurrencies that have been going down and now have the best chances to bounce back. When others are crying when there's blood on the streets, which sector was hit the most over the past few weeks, couple of months? The DeFi sector because of the curve, hack, and whatever happened there. So, here is the portfolio IP. Curve down 30%, half 20%, avalanche 20%, uniswap 10%. All these DeFi-related tokens were heavily impacted by the curve-finance hack, so a lot of potential in there. And finally, BNB 20%. Why BNB? Well, because the Binance-native token had been under pressure after the SEC sued the crypto exchange, so I thought it could also have a good chance to outperform. I'm rooting for you, I'm cheering for you, I think you definitely have a good chance. Thanks Marcel. So, the game was on. If you think that the AI will win this challenge, subscribe to the channel and leave a like if you are rooting for me. So, here we are with the first top dates on our challenge, after roughly three days. The market has not been doing great in the last couple of days, and chat GPT is in slight advantage. Our portfolios are both down, but I'm down more. I'm down 1.12% while the AI is down 0.26%. The AI's best performer is Tether, a stable coin. So, Marcel was actually right. When the market is not doing well, the AI's more conservative portfolio comes out ahead. But this is just the beginning of the challenge, so I'm still optimistic. Despite my optimism, I got quite unlucky. On August 17, Bitcoin crashed by 8% in minutes, bringing down the entire market. Okay, guys. This is another update from day 6. The situation is getting tougher. The market hasn't recovered. It is actually going down even further, and the gap between me and the AI is widening. In the morning, when I checked my account, it was down by 8 dollars, while the AI's account was down just 3.7 dollars. So, what seems to be dragging me down is the curved out token. It seems that this protocol hasn't really recovered from last month's hack, while what keeps the AI afloat is still mainly Tether, the stable coin. So, we are pretty much half a way through the challenge. Perhaps this is a good time to talk again to Marcel and see if we need to change a little bit our strategy. Yes, it was awful. Yes, it lost 30% of the price. Yes, the investor is still getting panicked, but I think that the worst is behind us. And I think our investment decision was sound. It still seems sound. I wouldn't change the portfolio right now. Marcel thinks I should be disciplined and stick to what I have until two days are left, then switch to even risk your crypto. Two or three days? If we're still losing, I'll shift the strategy to smaller outcoins below a billion dollar market cap simply because they have higher beta, meaning if the market moves up 10%, odds are those coins can pump 40%, 50%, so increasing our odds. Okay, I guess this is a game for very strong hands. Okay guys, there are just two days left until the end of the challenge. In the last 24 hours, my portfolio regained about one dollar over the AI, which is not bad, but unfortunately that's not enough. The gap between us is still about five dollars. And to be honest, I don't see the market recovering in the next two days. I don't know why Marcel is so optimistic and yeah, I just don't see it happening. So I took a decision. I think I will go against Marcel's advice. I will actually put all my assets into stablecoin because I feel that the market will continue crashing. In that case, my portfolio would have last chance to come out ahead. So let's see, this is my last chance. So here we are. The two week challenge is over, but before we announce the results, I wanted to talk to veteran trader Alessio Rastani, who analyzed my thought process during the challenge. The question you have to ask yourself is, did you have a plan, maybe a written down plan, that you're going to follow regardless of what may happen? From what you said to me is that you close the positions down because you began to question your own thinking, you question your own rules and your objectives. And I think an AI probably wouldn't have done that. It's not really your fault, Giovanni, because we're human beings. We have emotions, and these get in the way. Okay, so does that mean that emotions are always playing against us when we invest? We do need some emotion to be able to make decisions. The question is, can you use those emotions in the right way to follow your rules? Maybe do the opposite of your emotions in that case. By all means, listen to your thoughts and emotions. Ask yourself, why do you think this way? Is it fear that's driving your decision? And if so, maybe you should curb that fear and do the opposite of what you're thinking. Right, so do not ignore emotions, but learn how to interpret them and act according to the plan. That sounds like a solid piece of advice. And so here are the results. The AI is the winner. I ended up with $83.7, while the AI's portfolio is worth $88.43. Unfortunately, the market has remained rather stable in the last couple of days, so my last minute change didn't work. I didn't have my head clear. I felt very negative, very pessimistic. It's pretty normal for novice and even intermediate traders. It's never a good strategy, we discussed that in the last video, to rethink your strategy in the middle of the way. Another problem was the short timeframe we picked for the challenge. I bet that the market would invert its trend, which is less likely to happen in a short period. Just a few days after the end of the challenge, the crypto market rallied on the news that Grace Kale won a legal battle against the SEC over its Bitcoin ETF application, which means if the challenge lasted even a little longer, it could have ended very differently. That's so annoying. If you play short-term frames, one week, two weeks, three weeks, the odds are stacked against you, because the machine will play according to what it's seen over the past few days, and the market tends to continue doing what has been doing over the past few days. The human is much better on longer-term frames. We're talking about two months to six months at least. So here are the key takeaways from the challenge. First, you cannot get rich in two weeks, especially in a bearish environment and in a short timeframe. The AI's conservative portfolio worked better in this environment. It played it safe, and it won. So next time, either choose a different strategy or set a longer timeframe. Second, what made the difference was Bitcoin's abrupt crash on August 17. That hit my portfolio much harder than the AI's. Third, my approach was basically a gamble. If the market moved up, I would have won, but I was unlucky, so I lost. Only humans would take a gamble like this. And finally, my last minute change strategy was not successful. I fell victim of a panic-cell moment, which is a human weakness. The AI is obviously immune from these psychological factors. Getting rid of emotions is impossible, but understanding them and not let them guide our actions, that was the main lesson to be learned here. Anyway, this was just the first round. I will re-challenge the AI, and this time, I won't repeat the same mistakes. So stay tuned for our next video update. I'm Giovanni, your host. Thank you for watching, and see you soon.


Welcome, folks. This is Tom O'Brien of TFNN. We have five days a week. We go seven hours a day. We go 24 hours a day on the Internet at tfnn.com. Always remember, folks, whatever you think about, you bring about whatever you focus on grows. Hope everybody's having a great day, safe day. It's making a great night, folks. You are what you believe you are. Humans are powerful magicians. You have the power to make yourself what you are right now. But it's not your reasoning mind that controls your power. It's what you believe. It's all those electrons, folks. Fire them off, baby. Negative eyes! Let's take a look at them out here. We have the Dow Industries down 92. Nasdaq off 156. S&Ps off 36. Gold. Gold contract up $2.50. Trading at $16.52 an ounce. We have Silver down 4 cents. $19.62 an ounce. Lights recruit up a buck. $89.39 cents a barrel. Notes and bonds. A 10-year note. Trading $1.10.22. The 30-year up down 3 at $1.20.30 in Kingdala. It's all about Kingdala today, folks. Kingdala's down right now 134.6. Trading $1.11.343. The euro's at 98. The yen is out here at 147 flat. And the British pound is at 114 to one U.S. dollar. IPhone number's<PHONE_NUMBER>. Give us a call, folks. I don't know what's going on in your world. And the world of the S&Ps. Let's take a look at them. What do you have? Well, we're going to go right to the futures, because I want to show you what we're looking at here. So we take this 10-minute shot. And there we go. So what you're going to see here, and the S&Ps are a little bit different than in Nasdaq, the S&P already go back inside the range. So once you're back inside the range, bottom line, that's saying that, hey, guess what, man? You're going to go to the top of this range. Why? Because you get volume at the top of that range, folks. You get 162,000 contracts at the high. Now watch this. This is really intriguing, because the NQs are not set up like this. They were a nice setup, but they're not set up like this. They're still going higher, too. I just wanted to explain to you the differences that we have happening right at this point. So what the NQs did, you can see, and this is another indication that this market still wants higher prices. It's pretty amazing, actually, but the bottom line, it doesn't right now. We get a rally going. So here's the first bar on the way down, folks. That's when the announcement came out, $1,400, 56,000 contracts. Then bottom line is you go to the top side. See how we went to the top side? We tested, first we tested, the first test was $14,000 versus $56,000. So that's saying, hey, man, you're going downtown. What do we do? We go downtown. Now, watch how we're trying to test this 10-minute bar. We came in, and you came in with $49,000 contracts versus $56,000. That's like, okay, that's not bad. Then it blows it away, but see how it blew it away? It blew it away with $42,000.  What ends up happening is that if it gets back inside the range, you know, now I'm going to swap back into the S&P. Again, reason I'm swapping back into the S&P because we know that the S&P, this one has a good volume high, okay, $49,000, but you can see that was $56,000. But the S&P, bottom line, has a high volume high. So this is intraday. So my take is that it's going to try to get back up into that level again. Volatility is going to be here. In spades, no doubt about it. Fundamentally, what's going on out here is that the Fed did go up 70, here, let's put it up. The Fed went up 75 basis points. So now the Fed fund rate, which is the, you know, discount rate is laying a 4%. You can see it at 4%.  One of the things that we all should watch in the future is the aspect if you, we were listening to what he was saying out there. What he was saying is that there was a question, is that will the Fed funds rate go higher than the inflation rate? And the way he answered it, he answered it in the aspect that there's other things that are involved, okay, in that context. So watch what ends up happening, folks. When you're in inflation, you know, if the inflation rate is running at 8 and you're paying 6 for money, well, the bottom line is you're making 2%. That's convoluted, but the bottom line, that's how it goes. That's what he was basically, that's what the question was about. And he didn't answer the question directly. What he said is that there's other things that are involved. That being said, bottom line is that, you know, we'll see where this shakes out. I suspect what we're going to see out here is, you know, we go through the next 45 minutes and just watch this dollar, because the dollar did 100% move and move up and down, and now the kicker is going to be like, okay, where is it going to go for the rest of the 45 minutes here? And we'll see, you know. The last pop-up that got to 111.49, now let's look at this, because we want, I want to see, now it hasn't hit the trend line. What I was looking for is this, folks. I was looking for that it would come up to the underside of the channel line on the break, and that's a long way away right now. That channel line break is 112.80, and, you know, we only made it out here today to 111.598, you know. So bottom line, you know, we'll see. It's possible that this thing's going to get up there, and if that thing gets up there, that won't be cool, because that'll do some pretty good destruction to the marketplace. There's no doubt about it. You had, we had a blast in the past come out here about an hour before the great hike came out. That was Alan Greenspan, and he was coming out in the aspect of that he thought that no matter what the Fed actually does, that the dollar is going to have a tailwind, meaning it's going to stay strong, all throughout 2023. And then we had a question that, that's interesting. The premiums and eagles right now well over 200 per coin. You know what I'll do, Frank? I will call one of the guys that I use and see what he's getting for premium, but there's no doubt. What ends up happening now, that question is really cool. The reason being, folks, is this. When the premiums get that high, right? The bottom line, that is saying that the demand is explosive, versus the price.  When the eagles get that high, the bottom line is that, yeah, you can say that gold's at this price, but was it actually cost, well, in this particular case, it's costing 1865. Stay right there, folks. We'll come right back.


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Jimmy K here, Metal Voice. Look at this. The Metal Voice shirts are now on sale, just go to the video description to find out on how you can purchase one. Metal! Welcome to Metal Voice, today on the show, Alan. Who do we have, Alan?  The voice, the voice himself, Mark Staracci of Crocus fame, of course.  It's still going. The quality, Jim, the quality of the video is much better than the last time we had Mark on. It was the early days of Skype. We're going back probably 10 years now and it was very grainy and I'm glad that the technology caught up to us. Well, me and Mark had it. He just turned me on to it. Thank you, Jimmy. So, Mark, you know, thank you so much for jumping on today. You know, for me and Alan, you know, you're sort of, I don't know what the, how do we phrase this, Alan? This is somebody we always loved, legend, legend. That's what it is. It's love. Thank you very much. So, I guess we could start off, there's a solo album. I mean, can you talk about that? Can you tell us about what's going on there? I can only tell you what I know. Well, that'll help. Well, if you don't know, who does? You want to know, should I start at the beginning? But it's a long story. You know, as long as you've got, I don't know whatever you want to do. I mean, 20 years ago, I wrote, I wrote the title song of the album, Live and Let Live, you know. Wait a minute. No. Wow. I'll do what you did. And there we go. That's cool. All right. Back to you. This is, these are all, I painted all these, so these are going to be a part of the backdrop and the album title, but they're going to be slightly bigger for the stage, you know. I could hope so. You'll have a spinal tap situation. Yeah. The pyramids. Yeah. No, no. So, Live and Let Live was written with this guitar player who is a neighbor of mine, was a neighbor of mine, and I used to go over to his place, little studio, cold or rainy days and icy days, and we spent hours writing songs and came out with about 20 of them. And this is one of them, which fits for the album. And it's the opener. It's going to be the live opener. Live and Let Live. There you go. You know, it's great, great song. It's quite a doof daf, doof daf, doof daf, good opener, you know. Not headhunter. I'm not trying to, not trying to be like Crocus at all, you know. But anyway, so many years later, I, we re, did the reunion and I've been busy with Crocus. And as soon as lockdown started, and I first did some stuff, which I put on YouTube and Facebook, some karaoke stuff, which I found, and did duets with my daughter, Juliana, and we split. She's now, you know, oops, something came in. Don't worry about that. And yeah, then I went on, after that phase with Juliana, I kind of fell in a hole of the lockdown boredom, you know, and I thought, no way, I'm going to get creative.  And I thought, well, I've got enough material, and I need a guitar player. So this guy, I got in touch with, he's a new castle in England. We started communicating about ideas. He'd send me ideas and send him feedback and fit lyrics and build songs and stuff. And so we built quite a few, you know, and and then so I already went in contact with a couple of musicians whom I got to know whilst doing this big event film series for television in 2019. And this thing came out during lockdown. But what I was saying last year, while we were filming this, I also started thinking, well, we're on a farewell tour and I don't really want to stop, you know. So, yeah. And this thing came out during this contest, right? Is everybody sings each other's songs? Is that what it was? Exactly. It was a show. That's right. That's it. Who sang headhunter? Who sang headhunter? Nobody. Nobody. What crocus song did they sing, like from you? I said Bedsong Radio and Who the Woman. Okay. All right. Yeah. You know, Who the Woman was done by Francine Yordie. And she's like from the Chanson thing. And she said, Who the Woman? Who the Woman? Who the Woman? Wow. And yeah. So this thing came out, you know, which helped reduce the boredom. And in between, I was writing songs. And then I got to know these two other guys, the drummer and rhythm guitarist. And they also produced the whole music side of Sing My Song. Let's go. Sing My Song. Sing My Song. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and they asked me during the filming stuff, you know, in between, you know, you should do a solo album now. It's going to be over with Crocus, you know. What you're going to do? I said, Well, I don't know yet. It's not over until it's over. And I'm still enjoying it. So I'm not thinking that far.  And too much planning sometimes you do it for nothing. Too much overthinking is unhealthy, anyway. So anyway, I came to that point. And then I called them, said, Guys, you want to do it because I really enjoyed working with you.  There was one song called Devil on your shoulder.  And so we started and at the beginning of, at the end of last year, they already sent me two, two ideas. And beginning of this year, they sent me some more and I was got busy working, working with the demos and stuff. And here we are. It's ready. It's all recorded and it's in the mix. And I wrote down the names of the guys who played on it. I mean, okay, so describe the musical direction on this. Is this metal? This is, is this another headhunter? Is this a blitz? What is this? None of it all. None of the above. What is it? Completely new. It's kind of, it's, it's energetic, heavy, melodic, hard rock. And there's also a couple of ballads. You know, I'm a singer. We love ballads. And then there's something out of the ordinary. It's a blues song, which is not the typical blues song, which is like something I saw as a challenge when they sent me that, that music, I thought, what, you know, it doesn't really fit. But then I thought blues is always within inside the rock family, you know, it's part of the rock. The body of rock always has blues in there, you know, as opposed to jazz, maybe, you know, although that's also integrated sometimes. But then, and then there's this one song, I think it's going to be the last one on the album, which is quite acoustical, you know, and more lighthearted and paradise, you know, time just flies under a midnight sun, you know, it's great, great stuff. I mean, I'm saying it's great because I've worked for it and I'm emotionally involved with it. But people around us and around me have been telling me I'm on the right track and it's the results are good. So now I'm still, you know, nervous and excited for the release date, you know, 8th of December, we're doing the first gig in the mascot in Zurich, the first gig. Scorpions, you're opening up for the Scorpions, right? Yeah, but that's next year. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm so happy about that. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Do you have a previous relationship with them that made it easier or is it? Yeah, Scorpions and I go back to the days when they produced some of their early works, you know, Rock Me Like a Hurricane with Dieter Dirks in Cologne, Germany. And in those days, I was with the band T, TVA, a progressive rock band, melodic and heavy. And Dieter signed us up as kind of experimental guinea pig, you know, to use his new gadgets on and effects and stuff, because it fit fitted more to our music than maybe other bands and stuff. But anyway, it was an experience. And it was like my first big step into the professional world, you know, where you write songs, do demos, go record the stuff and go on tour, you know, the whole circle. And we did that, we kept it going for like seven years, you know. But then we got the seven year itch and every moment is his own way. So there's that. So did you ever actually, were you in the studio with the Scorpions at the same time? Is that, is that where the connection is? Yeah, well, you know, we were there recording and sometimes they'd drop in to say hi from Cologne, I guess, or wherever. And so we met or maybe they had a meeting with Dieter about something else. And then we later on met, I think it was the last T tour. This was in London. We were on the road with our truck and bus, and they were going the same way, I guess.  And so we exchanged, you know, a long time no see fancy meeting you here in the middle of nowhere or freeway in England, you know. And so there was a relationship and we opened for them. And I also opened for them with Crocus a couple of times. And I met them later on when I did an album called Blue.  Wow. That's, they really liked it and said, you know, it's going to take me places. But then the whole project landed, took a bad turning for, you know, business, business, business, wrong business decisions and stuff.  But then there was a re-release later on by Sony, no, by BMG, about seven years later.  Vic Versa and myself, we wrote the bulk of the songs together and we were produced by Robert Popst in Munich. So, and we did a tour and didn't have the expected results. So we went our ways and then came Crocus reunion, you know, life goes on. But looking forward to playing with the Scorpions, I really love the music. So it's Storaci, it's Storaci, that's playing with the Scorpions. That's just everybody clear. It's the Storaci band, right? Storace. Storace. Do you say Versace or Versace? I don't know. What should I say? You don't know. Okay, do you say Liberace? Liberace. Liberace. Okay, yeah. Okay, that's the other side of the phone. So I don't, I got it all confused. Do you want to say? It's Storace, I know. Storace. Storace. Storace. That's, that's the right pronunciation. The voice. It's an Italian name, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so the Scorpions have been retiring now for the last 10 years. Yeah. Is this going to be the same thing with Crocus? Like, okay, everybody has this trend. They're always retiring, right? And I get it. You don't want to leave the stage. I get it, you know, but. Yeah, apparently, it's quite serious with Crocus, actually with some members anyway.  And I think Chris isn't one of them either. Chris Bonrore would like to, first of all, we owe still, we owe the other side of the pond a tour. Yeah, yeah. And we, we had to do Mexico as well, which we'd love to do in Canada. So I mean, I hope we can do it. Now that I've been working on my solo stuff, I'm going to do a load of gigs here. And the USA is calling for a few gigs as well. So if I don't come over with Crocus, I'm going to be over by myself, maybe by next autumn. And hopefully then Crocus will, will follow suit in 2023, you know, would be nice. Yeah, yeah. And I'll still have a voice because I'm not going to stop, you know, hopefully. Thank you. What about the documentary? Crocus has a documentary. What stage are you at? Well, it's my document. Oh, it's your documentary. Okay. It's about my, me, and of course, Crocus, we've got Che. Che.  All right, Stora Che. Anyway, yeah, no, no, I've got this documentary I'm working on. We're so far behind, unfortunately due to COVID because the idea was to go down to Malta and do a few interviews there, maybe get 10 minutes coverage, you know, and then go to London, you know, go follow my old footsteps, you know, and meet a couple of people, maybe from Easy Money or whatever. The band I had in London, we did the pub rounds in those days. And that was just before I joined Crocus. And then obviously come to Switzerland and do the whole thing like the tea thing and the Crocus thing. And then, you know, maybe go to a couple of spots in Europe and come over the big pond and go to a couple of spots there and do some filming and tell some stories there, you know, maybe have some guests or make it as interesting that I can do it through all the people who are still alive that I can invite to talk, you know, make a part of it to make it interesting, you know. And so that we're in a stage where we're going to Malta now on the first November for four days and we'll film on the second and third. It's going to be jam-packed, you know, full schedule and we can rest when we can fly back home. That's where we're at right now. And do you have a release date? Like, do you have a goal? Like it's going to come out by 2022? No. We did, but we abandoned it because in the meantime now, SEP, SEP Sutter, he's the director and he learned his ropes in Munich working there for a long time. And now he's retired and he said he only wants to do stuff which he would love to do and he approached me. It was his idea and I said, yeah, that sounds great.  And in the meantime he got involved in my solo project and he already did the first trailer which is with the intro of Live and Let Live on it. So that was a help, you know, coming soon and did a great job there. And a couple of days ago, we did the first video which is a video of Live and Let Live, you know. Okay, good. So he's coming. It's not like a James Bond thing, is it? Live and Let Live? Great song. Wow. And then there's what's the new one called Live, Don't Say. Die and Live Tomorrow. I never say. It's always something like that.  Live on. Live and Let Live. Well, that opens many discussions. Live and Let Live. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the new album, Mark, is it a worldwide release where you'll be able to get it in North America? Yeah. My manager, Roli Egli, you want to know some background on Roli? He was the drummer in Tee. Okay, there's a connection there. Dall in the family. He's very academic, you know, and, you know, he knows so much, so much. And we still have a relationship. We started doing rock circus together, like ages ago when you look back today.  And you can only squeeze a thousand people in there. But it's like a cabaret kind of rock atmosphere people really get into it. And now he's produced his own show. It's called This Is Rock. And we've got shows coming up around in December, no, no, sorry, over New Year. We're playing, we'll have the dates up on my website as soon as possible, which will be pretty soon. I want to ask you, so what is the chances, like Crocus would record another album, at least if they're not going to tour? But they didn't even want to do that when they were, when we were still together without any thought of splitting up. And I was always like, hey, hey, hey. I love doing the studio stuff, you know, the whole writing, getting up in the middle of the night and with an idea and you write it down, stuff like it's like it becomes a part of you. And I don't know, I don't know, maybe the only, the closest I got is I was down at Chris's place in the Solethorne, we were doing this interview because we're both, we both become 70. I'm already 70 now in on the 7th of October, and he becomes 70 on the 22nd. Don't tell me it's today. It is today. It may be. The 21st. We're good. We're good. We're good. We were doing this. That was that email you got before. I forgot my birthday. Okay, go ahead. So, yeah. Yeah, we were doing this interview and in his living room, he's got this grand piano one.  And they started slick, slick, slick, slick, slick, slick, you know, like open up beer. And Chris played a few chords and I started singing to it. The lyrics just flowed out. This ballad and he immediately took his, took his mobile phone and put it there and recorded a bit of it. So who knows, maybe that's going to be a spark that started the fire, you know. Because you did. I mean, you did. I'm a positive thinker. But Mark, I'm trying to understand, like you did, was it, that was that Hellraiser, which album did you record by yourself where the other original members weren't on, right? With Chris and I mean, Yeah, but I took an ex-member. I took Mandy Meyer. You took Mandy. But I mean, how did you, like, can you not do the same thing? Can you not? I don't know. I'm just asking here. I mean, can you not just create another Crocus album the same way with Mandy or or is it just not politically right to do it right now to go there? I mean, right now anyway, because we're not officially finished. We are in Europe. But who knows what's going to happen. Maybe 2023 we'll be back on the monsters of rock cruise and that, you know, light the fire and start the whole forest burning. You know, one thing for sure is, you know, Fernando will not, cannot, for health reasons, take the flight over the big pond. He doesn't want to do the big tour thing. And at the most, he would, you know, do the short flights we have in Europe or take the train and do gigs because he loves, he loves playing.   So I'm going to leave you with this mark. I'm on the plane. I told Alan this before I'm on the plane going to Switzerland. I'm probably maybe 15 years old. And back in the day, they had those, those headphones, but they look like the doctor had stethoscope. You remember that? I was probably on KLM. No, not KLM. I was on Swiss air and they had those funny headphones that you plug in and every channel going to Switzerland was yodeling. Every channel I turn and they were yodeling, yodeling, yodeling, and then, and then crocus. And then back to yodeling and yodeling, yodeling, and then crocus. So it was yodeling and crocus. That's what they were offering us Canadians as we were going to Switzerland. Can you believe that? No, but, but that's still popular. I was just, I was just shocked that I get the, I get the yodeling on the plane, but then crocus comes on.  Yes. Now you would turn to one more, more and more, Jim, you get got hard would be playing. Yeah, that's it. That's it. But I'm just trying to say the magnitude of how popular crocus was. They're playing your music on Swiss air flight from Montreal to Switzerland. Amazing. Isn't it? That's in 1980. It was probably, the song was American Woman actually. That's what they were playing. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, in the USA, they, we were used 1984 for an advert on a Volkswagen advert. And one of the astronauts that went up onto the moon, not the first time. The third time. He had a cassette, a cassette for crocus songs. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. Amazing. What else? Yeah, there's a couple of things like that. Mark, we're going to have to cut the short. We're going to have to cut it. And we're going to do a part two because we got to get back to our work here in Canada. Appreciate all the time. Thank you so much. I'm happy we got the zoom working. Yeah, me too. Thanks for turning me on too. You got it. And we'll do this again very soon. Just send me. Yeah, closer to the release date. That would be great. Yeah, we'll continue all of this. So the video we'll be able to see it soon, the video? The video. Yeah, it'll be cut. I've got it all here, but I'm, you know, it's too early to, to let the cat out of the bag. It should all go in one day and the websites should be ready. And then the video will, will hit the screens and I'll do more interviews and stuff like that. And you know, we'd like to start with a bang. Now it's like a little bit trickling water, you know, and thanks a lot for talking with me. Any time. It's always a pleasure, Mark, to be with you. And we can do another one just before the release. Absolutely. That would be great. Yes. We open the floodgates. The water comes rushing through. Exactly.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com coming at you with 2019-2020 Panini Noir Basketball. Two box, random team break number 19. Big thanks all of these folks here for getting into the action. Whether you got spots straight up, thank you. If you won spots too, congrats Mosaic Sello winners. And all teams are in. And this is a half case break from a fresh case. Let's roll it, let's randomize it five into one, six times for each list. One, two, three, four, five, and oh one, six and final time. After six, we got Quentin all the way down to Brandon. After six times, teams one, two, three, and six and final time. After six times, good luck. Timberwolves down to Warriors, Warriors, come out to play. Right, Quentin with the Timberwolves, Nancy with the Hawks, Robert with the Bulls, Nancy with the Heat, Adam with the Celtics, Brandon with the Knicks and Thunder, Nancy with the Trailblazers, Brandon with the Magic, and Travis with the Palakins. Justin with the Mavs, Ryan with the Suns, Matt with the Raptors, Travis with the Wizards, Ryan with the Nuggets, Oliver with the Kings, Serenie with the Clippers, and Patrick with the Grizzlies. Anthony, you got the Cavs, Josh with the Hornets, Ben with the Jazz, Brandon with the Sixers, Patrick with the Pacers, Ben with the Rockets, and you got my Lakers, Brandon with the Bucks, Ben with the Pistons, Kevin with the Spurs, Brandon with the Nets, and the Golden State Warriors. All right, so let's sort by team, alphabetize by team, and let's switch screens for a second. Feel free to trade if you'd like, and let's see which two boxes we're gonna do. We're just gonna split the case in half like this. We'll use that die right there. We'll go one, two, three for the top two, and four, five, six for the bottom two, and four, one, two, three, four, five, six. So we'll save these for the next random team. There you go, RT for random team. Any trades? I don't think anyone's trading here. Yeah, Arthur, it's been wall to wall breaks. It's been good though. The eight hours filled really quickly and early on. All right, no trades. All right, let's roll. Oliver needs a deer and fox sneaker spotlight. Oh, you gotta randomize your team, Oliver. All right, that's lucky. TWC trade window closed. Let's print, let's rip. Lost Raptor's terrifying. You're gonna get gulped. His arm is done. All right, so here on the ninth, two box, RAM team number 19. Thanks everyone for getting in, really appreciate it. All right, let's see what we got in here. Obviously this is a really high end set. Think like, I feel like, when did this first come out? Noir, for the first time. Like, three years ago? Four years ago? I feel like the first time it came out, or maybe that was Gala. I don't know. I feel like people were just kind of, it was a new product. It was a little expensive. I think people weren't into it as much. But then next year, we got more people were interested in it. You know, Luka Donch at Trey Young helped. And then this year, it seems to be a lot of interest in it too. Obviously, Zion and John Morant helps. Let's help these cards out of the box. These boxes are notoriously bad for such a great product. You gotta find where it kind of doesn't catch cards as much as possible. It's like an operation. All right, there's usually a base card on the bottom and there's a redemption on the bottom, interesting. All right, we're also gonna use this blank card right here to kind of hide the hits a little bit. Five out of 25 miles of bridges for the Hornets. That'll be for Josh. We got Cam Reddish to 99 for the Hawks, Nancy. I feel like he still has a lot to show. It's a lot of upside for him. There's Bradley Beale, six out of 99. I think he's sitting it out. Shoulder issues, Travis with the wizards. And we've got Trey Young, 58 out of 65, a dish night for Nancy and the Hawks. We've got Chris Paul, 10 out of 65. Jersey Newsreels, jerseys. Going to the Thunder, OKC, Brandon. And a Zion Williams in New Wave jerseys. 25 out of 25 for the Pelicans. Travis with the Pels. Now what are these Zion, I feel like we don't see Zion Relics too often. What do these Zion Relics go for? Like this one, out of 25. Cause we know that as individual cards, autographs, obviously, RPAs, those are all pretty strong, right? You pull like a silver's eye on out of prism, it's a million dollars. But what about the Relics? I don't know how they react on a secondary market. But nice one, Travis, I'm sure it does well. Our first autograph is Aaron Holiday, 36 out of 49, Pacers. That'll be for Patrick. Ooh, that's a bold call, Ryan S. I'm not sure if I even wanna say it. Reigning Knights, Del Curry. Seven out of 99. Del Curry was on the, he's on the Raptors? And we got Jersey and Autograph, Carson Edwards, 12 out of 99. That'll be for the Celtics. That will be for Adam. And it hasn't been a minute or two. James says about 550 for that Zion page. In focus signatures. Card number 20. It's gonna be J, A. Oh, Jax, Jax and Hayes. I thought maybe John Morant. That's still for the Pelicans though, Travis. Now Travis won this Pelican spot in one of our Salopak breaks. So he got in for a fraction of the price and got lucky enough to get randomized the Pelicans, gets the rally. Yeah, Ryan S. was guessing Zion. He had the right team. Jax and Hayes is Zion adjacent. 10 out of 25, Jordan Poole. There you go. Jordan Poole for the Warriors. That goes to Brandon. We got Steph Curry for the Warriors, also for Brandon. It could happen tonight, Corey. If it sells, Jason is going live, going after me for just a little bit. He's gonna knock out that, there's Rudy Gaubert for the Jazz. He's gonna knock out that tier one break for us. And if that's the second half, this Noir sells out, I'm sure he'll do it. It's a fun break. There's Kyle Guy, 83 out of 99. So you never know. We've seen far more expensive breaks fill up in a shorter amount of time. Oliver with the Kings. Jordan Poole, 69. Nice, out of 99 new wave jerseys. Brandon with the Warriors. We've got two shot, teammates, the Andre Hunter and Cam Reddish, 70 out of 99. Jalen Noel, 49 out of 99, two color jersey and autograph. Yeah, I think it's gonna be right here, TJ. And we've got Julius Randall, Otto Noir, 12 out of 49. I think I'm doing the baseball in like another pack though. All right. And then we've got Chris Mullen, Pacers, 45 out of 99, spotlight signatures. And gold ink auto is a little hard to see, but let me try to catch that in the light a little bit better for Patrick and the Pacers. Nice, these are pretty sharp looking cards. And the last one is RJ Barrett. Nice, 44 out of 49 rookie autograph for Brandon and the Knicks. All right, there you have it. And there you go, ladies and gentlemen, a very nice break of Noir. We've got the second half in the store. Jaspy'scasebreaks.com. There's a good chance we could fill it tonight, folks. Get it going. Jaspy'scasebreaks.com, I'm Joe. I'll see you next time for the next one. Bye-bye.


Hello all. My name is Hedi. I'm CEO and co-founder of Cache. We are building an ecosystem of service to enable platform economy lifestyle and we do that by building flexible and very personalized insurance and other financial services. Before I go into more details my experience says that probably only around one third, maximum, of people know what platform economy and who is a platform worker. So platform worker is a person that earns their income via getting tasks or kicks from digital platform or shares their assets in order to earn income the same way. So this is whom we have taken in as a target. So Cache was founded by me and my co-founder Kalle Pelling 2018. 2018 is actually a very important year when it comes to platform economy and future of work because during that year GDPR was actually enforced. Also there was a very important regulation for companies like Uber or Bolt or others it was called Info Society Services Act and that was first brought out also in Estonia but now multiple countries in the EU are using it. And the third really important kind of foundation was that actually Bitcoin peaked the first time. So why is this one important? It was the kind of first larger service on decentralized kind of ledger which is gonna be the very very important in the future of different services financial services. So when we started our startup we didn't have any money but we wanted to work with the best people out there. So what we did we found who is the best in legal who is the best in finance and everything. So we went around and asked for people can you help us a bit and what we found out a everybody had their own small entity and be everybody were willing to do extra hours. So we understood that no one is unreachable. So what we realized from that was that actually they were all gig workers. So we started from building very good and flexible insurance solutions for ride hailers. So Uber drivers, Bolt drivers that work very very differently than often the regular taxi drivers. And soon we understood with that experience that we actually are not going to only build our solution and insurance for them but we're gonna build the insurance for the future workers. So literally we could say Uber drivers are building the way for the future of work. So let's let's take it into a numbers. Today or actually last year there was 28 million people that earned their income via platforms according to European Commission. And this was one in 10 person work each person in already few years time it's predicted to be one in five. So what is driving them quite a fast growth is actually four thing. There is a massive generation shift happening in the workforce in 2025 75% of the people will be millennia generation and younger who is in active workforce. There's a well we all experienced COVID and the work from home. People love it but I'm ex-banker so I understood quite quickly how large corporations are thinking. They find it as a good way to actually build additional efficiency into their workforce. And today this is happening so there in the boardrooms there is a lot of discussions if now the more flexible workers should be handled by HR or actually procurement because lots and lots of the corporations are pushing their kind of fieldwork or other into more flexible means of employment. The third is obviously UN sustainability goals which are the drivers for the sharing economy. Every city in the world has a goal to reduce the carbon footprint. So the sharing assets bringing in micro-mobility and so on and forth. And as earlier mentioned with a Bitcoin the overall massive shift that's going to happen in our web infrastructure. So in some years time we will all experience much more personalized and much much different experience in the web and via that providing services. But the industry is today at the crossroads because this way of working is not really sustainable because the majority about different benefits like insurance or or financial services like financing or home loans and then many others. So why is that? One of the core problem is that platform workers are not loyal. They choose the way of working because that allows them to work whenever they want wherever they want how long they want and to whoever they want. So which means that if we take let's say example ride-hailing drivers if they start to work they work for Uber for all off or free now depends on who is active in the market to maximize their income from this certain hour. And this means that the data is completely scattered and it's super hard for financial banks and insurance companies to understand the risks and how really the profile comes together. And this has caused that they have to pay for lots of services will actually they're not using them. But I wouldn't be standing on the slush stage if you wouldn't have a solution. So what we have built at Kache is that we have provided different technology to enable bringing the data together to one place around a person. So we have connected with multiple different platforms build multiple different technologies to get in the data that is today missing from the insurance companies or from banks or others. And by that we are providing it the kind of services much more flexible and much more personalized. So let's dig a bit deeper. So how are we doing it? So we are selling both to the directly to the end customer which could be then the Uber driver or delivery career or many others. But and we are also selling directly to different platforms depends on the area like let's say platform that like Fresca in Finland who they are not our customer but but alike. So who bring together let's say cleaners or gardeners or car washers you name it there are multiple. And we have built different technologies which which are completely unique to for example in case of mobility we are helping to do parking or booking or many other things to to get the data that is missing or aggregate the data from many many platforms. In case of let's say couriers one of the core problem there is is that if if a person works for vault they they are let's say insured by vault but the same time they do some other task kicks also for vault or delivery. So the insurance often overlaps so one company has to pay for someone else's deliveries let's say. And this is some of the problem that is easy to cause with actually building kind of platform in between like cashier who brings the data to get around the person which is why I'm talking a lot about the decentralized world. And why are that everybody actually wins. Plus if you talk about the cleaning shops and many others what is the core problem today is like to make sure that okay when one task started and when one task ended. And this allows us to for example provide insurance that we don't have to give a platform based on the number of people they have signed up. So a young startup like let's say platform who builds a product for cleaners on boards thousand cleaning ladies and guys but let's say out of those only 300 are working. And this is the problem. The insurance company often requires them to ensure them all but what we are helping them to do is to ensure only the tasks and lots. So many different ways to do that. But what I want to have you kind of remembered about cashier is that we are finding different technologies and different kind of data streams to make it flexible. So today we are live in three markets where we sell directly and basically all Europe where we sell indirectly. And we have many customers and many platforms who are super happy with our services. So our CSAT is continuously from the day of launch being around 85 to 90 percent. And NPS is I don't know how many of you know about insurance NPS but NPS has been it's one of the highest. So I'm very happy to summarize to say platform economy is here to stay. It's going to be the future. There's very many people already working this way. The goal of the future of work will be to kind of allow people to work in multiple places and have more flexibility. And we need to not build services that take us back to the kind of old century but build services that help take us to the future. And this is what we do at cashier. So thank you very much.