Good morning everyone and welcome back to another apples and tiara's vlog. So this this vlog is going to be a teaching vlog and it's just going to be like a week in the life of a teacher so it's Monday January 29th and it's about 7.15 we just got to school we're running a little bit late but I wanted to show you guys over the weekend I came in because okay do the best you can whatever you can't get I'll have one of my students do okay I got a new table on Friday and I had to try to figure out what I was going to do with it whether I was going to just get rid of it and roll with my six tables or if I was going to try to use it so what I did was I came in on Saturday and I just kind of rearranged the layout if you guys follow me on Instagram you already saw this but today is going to be the first day we're going to try it so I redid the seating charts to accommodate the new table and I tried really hard to make sure that students who had a hard time focusing we're all facing like the TV like they're the set of chairs not the ones with their backs of the TV even though I do a lot of like whole group teaching down here I do want to make sure that when they're here they're able to focus so it is nice because I have about four students at each table and for each class there's gonna be like maybe one or two tables I only have three kids there so it's really cool we're gonna see how it goes with spacing one percent plug it in so we're gonna see how it goes today I'll let you guys know at the end of the day how I feel about how it went I still wanted to have like a carpet area for kids to come and sit down because I really do like having like a community space where we start class so I'm gonna have cash well I started having cash pick up the numbers but I'll probably just have a couple students do it I'm gonna do those and the rainbow numbers because I'm gonna like move them over a little bit because they do get cut off by the tables over there so anyway cash and I are gonna get ready for the day I came in over the weekend and I did a lot of prep work so I don't actually have any prepping to do this morning other than just like quickly going over like what I'm doing but I have all my copies ready for the week like pretty much all I'm doing is reviewing what I need to do which today I'm teaching quotation marks and I need to change my learning target I also moved this table over here to be more of like an independent space for a couple of cuties that need that okay so this is my really stylish maternity outfit we are 32 weeks today while we were 32 weeks yesterday but we're starting to run out of things that are comfortable so we're just kind of wearing leggings and maternity shirts and just kind of rolling with it we're also not doing our makeup as often because we tired and we want all the sleep we can get I need to pick up this trash leave everywhere I need to feed my frog and I wanted to show you guys what I'm having for lunch today you have some and you have some I'm gonna have to get more food for you guys starting to get low I think this nail is dead it hasn't moved in weeks it's kind of sad okay dojo store I need to do that I need to do dojo points okay that's something I definitely need to do all right um something I thought about doing the other day was putting a sticker on the back of these chairs with like the kid who sits there's name on it but I think that's overkill plus with how many times I have to move kids around it's like why why write their name on something when they're probably gonna get moved anyway okay this is what I have packed for the day this is a breakfast quesadilla on an Ezekiel wrap it's got eggs cheese and pepperoni in it I know pepperoni random and then for lunch I brought a vanilla yogurt I have a cliff bar for a snack I have a bag of like chocolate nut trail mix I've got granola for my yogurt I have a ginger ale just because we had them and it sounded really yummy apple banana and then for lunch I have some I'm not gonna open it I have some strawberries some cucumbers with um olive garden dressing from Costco a star cookie from Trader Joe's and then in this pocket I have a cube or a quarter of that Borsken cheese and some multi-grain like chips black bean chips so combined all of this will become my lunch which sounds delicious I need to eat this now I need to put this away and then I need to get everything ready for our one kids morning everyone happy Tuesday here's the outfit for the day I found these maternity pants at Walmart a while ago I haven't worn them in a while because they're a little short on the ankle and it's been a little bit cold out so I haven't been wanting to wear them but it's warmer this week we're in the 50s and low 60s during the day oh you guys I have to tell you about my new glasses hey guys so I wanted to interrupt this vlog to quickly mention my collaborator for this video and that is pair I wear so if you guys don't know what pair I wear is it is an online glasses company where you can enter your prescription purchase a pair of glasses and have them shipped directly to your door except for pair I wear is a little bit unique in the sense that you get to completely customize and switch out your style of glasses anytime you want so let's talk a little bit more about that if you guys have been following me for a long time you know that I am a very avid glasses wearer I've been wearing glasses since I was about seven years old my eyes are terrible my prescription is terrible but I basically live in my glasses and I feel like a person that has to wear glasses as much as I do should have tons of options as to styles colors sizes and we should be trading our glasses out like shoes right our style of glasses should match our clothing it should be a representative of your fashion sense and so when pair I wear reached out to me I was so excited to give them a try because you can do exactly that you order your base frame glasses and then you can purchase different style tops to go on top of them to match every style that you wear one thing that I've always struggled with with buying different styles and pairs of glasses in the past is that every time I want to change my glasses frames or change the style of my glasses I get a really really bad headache for one two days depending on how many days I want to wear the different frames and it's just a painful process so using pair I wear is going to be a complete game changer for me because I do want to switch my glasses out all the time to match whatever I'm wearing for the day and in the past I've had to struggle with these headaches and wanting to change my style of glasses so now I don't have to worry about that anymore and I'm so so excited I've been wearing my pair I wear glasses for the last about week and a half and I have not had a headache yet and it has been completely wonderful I've been able to switch out my styles each day even throughout the day and I don't have to worry about getting headache so essentially what you do on pair eyewear.com is you sign in you pick the frames that you like the best enter your prescription you can choose multiple different styles there's a ton of different lens options for your prescription you can do blue light blocking light responsive transitions progressive lenses and then of course premium plus which is going to be for your higher prescriptions like mine. Go on the website you pick your base frames and then the fun part you get to pick all of the different tops that go on top of your base frames so I'm going to show you guys all of the styles that I ordered through pair I wear and I will have all of them linked down below as well as a 15% off coupon code for your very first base frame pair of pair I wear. The first tops that I want to show you guys are the sunglass tops because I'm super excited about these I can't tell you how annoying it is to have to sit in the car and like take my glasses off and put my prescription sunglasses on anytime I want to go out in the sun I have to carry them around with me it's really annoying and so now I can actually keep a pair of sunglass tops in like every place I need I can keep a pair in the car I can keep a pair in my purse and anywhere I go I can just quickly put my sunglasses on and I don't have to worry about changing my pair of glasses I just pop these tops on so these are the tortoise sun tops and they're great I've tested them out at recess in the car and they're wonderful for blocking out the sun I love these they're just very classic I'm kind of a classic gal so a lot of the tops that you're going to see me try on today are very classic and simple however I have every intention of getting on the website and ordering tons of different style of tops to match like every holiday every like spirit day every you guys will see when I show you the different frames that are available they partner with like Marvel and peanuts and Harry Potter and DC and there's just so many different styles only the second pair of some tops that I got are just the basic black ones again what I typically do is I keep one pair in my purse in this really cool case it just kind of slips right in here and then I keep this pair in my sunglass visor in my car so no matter where I go I have a pair of sunglasses right there ready to go these ones are great for blocking the sun they're a little bit extra dark on the lenses I love these so much and those are just the basic black tops and then I did get four different style of tops that I'm going to show you guys so I'll show you the basic ones first again tortoise shell and black are simple and go-to these remind me of the frames that I've been wearing for the last few years they're the really big on brown ones that you guys have seen me wear in the past and I had to get a pair of these because I just love a basic tortoise shell and then I also grabbed just a basic black this is just the black top because again something simple I can wear with pretty much everything and then I ordered two funky styles and you guys know when I'm not eight months pregnant I love to wear like fun funky clothes and really express myself through fashion and so getting tops like these which I actually couldn't find these on the website when I was linking at them down below but so unfortunately I do not have a link for these tops specifically unless I can find one between now and posting this video but they are sort of like a purple I think this term is like bokeh bokeh they're like a sparkle confetti kind of situation but they're just really nice purple statement piece and then these ones are my favorite these are the rose gold sparkle tops and these are so me I've been wanting to get a pair of glasses this color for years and all of the ones that are in this color typically don't come in my prescription because they're usually way thinner so I thought these were really really cute and they kind of go like anything that has pops of pink they go great with black leopard print so I got those and then I love the base rooms that I picked because they're just clear and they can basically go with any different top of your choice but they have tons of different ones they have black blue tortoiseshell pink like you can pick any color base that you want I just thought the clear would be great because then on a regular day if I don't want to wear any tops I can just have a clear pair so anyway I have rambled on and on but if you guys are interested in checking out pair eye wear I will have links down below in the description box as well as a special link for 15% off of your first purchase of pair eyewear base frames and I'm just really excited to be able to share this with you guys because these have been a complete life changer not getting so many headaches being able to change my style of glasses only having to buy and wear one pair is completely life-changing so anyway you guys are interested check out the links below and let's return to the blog all right you guys so this morning was kind of a struggle I won't lie to you I slept in a little bit I wanted to get up a smidge earlier just because I wanted to do a little bit something with my appearance today it's funny when you watch my blogs you can always tell if I slept in or if I got up on time because the product is always different but I did get up in time to do my hair put some makeup on and cash took a while to get up he's not feeling the greatest he has you know obviously what we all have so he he took a little bit to get up but it's okay he's pretty good about getting up and getting ready to go I wanted to show you guys my lunch for today because it's really special okay so I brought another Greek yogurt cash actually ended up eating this yesterday after school he stole it from me he's looking at me now like I want that you stole it from me I mean I saw the granola to put in there for breakfast I'm just gonna heat this Trader Joe's chicken sausage breakfast burrito up and I have a little bit I have a little bit of Taco Bell salsa that I'll put on there just for breakfast and then you guys this is so bad I'm eating a different burrito for lunch because I literally like this equals no time to prepare anything healthy and delicious for lunch so we get these from Costco they're just the reds I really like the bean and cheese ones too and then I brought a chocolate chip cliff bar for after school snack I've got a ginger ale for lunch because I like to have a little something different and then I have these black bean and quinoa chips from Trader Joe's that I love and I have the buffalo chicken dip in my fridge so I figured if I wanted a snack I could munch on that throughout the day so I'm just gonna go put all of this in my fridge heat up my burrito and get started with our day my students are going to be writing a rough draft of an essay we've been planning for and I'm using our state test to like I pulled the what's it called the prompt and everything from the state test so we're really just doing the sample and practice test to learn about how to write an informative essay so we're doing that we've been planning for the last two weeks taking them through making graphic organizers what goes into a body paragraph what belongs in introduction I'm just kind of going step by step through the planning process of planning an essay so that they can really see how long the process takes and then today will be day one of writing their actual rough drafts so what I did is I went online oops that's not mine I just realized this piece of paper that came out with my copies does not belong to me so I'll put that back in there um but I gave my students a draft checklist on one side and then on the other side is a writing checklist from the actual testing website um and it's the uh the test is a asa it's called asa um and so the draft checklist just has like little things I want them to make sure they're doing while they're writing their draft I want them to try to skip lines because I want to be able to provide them with feedback and have them make corrections somewhere on the draft and so if they skip lines while they're writing that gives me and them a space to provide feedback make corrections add change whatever um hopefully they will do it some of them will probably struggle to but I'm going to hopefully try I'm going to try and make an incentive like if you skip lines you can get three more dojo points like try to motivate them to skip lines um indenting and spacing between sections readable handwriting good letter spacing introduction three body paragraphs and a conclusion so that is the checklist on this side and then on the back is an actual checklist that goes with the grading rubric for a writing task like this and it just has things like I introduced my topic or text clearly and explain the subject matter telling a surprising factor giving a big picture yes so when they're done writing their introduction they can then it goes into organization transitions um elaborating quotations things like that so pretty much anything and everything they need to include in their essay is here so that while they're writing their drafts or maybe like shortly after or halfway through they can go through this checklist and just make sure that they're including everything and um when I pull them to conference throughout their drafts like maybe in a couple days um we can go over this checklist together and just make sure that they have everything um so I'm going to give those out today and then we're starting to talk about Valentine's Day because it's February or yeah it's February or January 30th today um and we're starting to talk about Valentine's Day plans so my teammates and I are just kind of like sharing all the things we have um we do have to give a district writing assessment on Valentine's Day which is unfortunate but I think the reason why is because most students don't like miss Valentine's Day at school because they want to be here for all the stuff so we're planning on giving the writing benchmark test um not a test it's just an assessment to see what they took away from what I just taught um and to practice for um ASA so we're gonna give that on Valentine's Day the first half of the day uh the first like three hours of the day and then the last three hours of the day we'll do like Valentine celebrations so everybody's here um and they're motivated to get to that um event so anyway that's what's going on today I need to pass out dojo tickets this morning um I have tutoring scheduled today but I might have to reschedule it because I have a parent who would like to conference about her child um it's been some pretty rough things going on uh behavior wise and things like that so we need to conference um just so that everything is out in the open all around the table um and so I might have to cancel my tutoring session which sucks because that is like 60 bucks um off my paycheck when I cancel tutoring and I I could reschedule but I literally have no days this week to reschedule um so that's gonna be really hard but it is what it is um actually considering like pulling out of tutoring because in the next seven weeks um A I'm not gonna be able to do it anymore um I have doctor's appointments every two weeks and then we have so many IEP related meetings like MET ones red meetings IEP meetings coming up that pretty much all of my tutoring hours are gonna have to be either rescheduled or canceled anyway so I have half of mine to just pull out of tutoring and not offer to do it anymore because I'm just gonna have to like cancel anyway so I need to figure that out and look at my calendar and really like dial in when I can do it and if I can maybe just change it to one day a week but do like four hours after school which would be a lot because that's how many hours a week I tutor now is four hours two hours on Tuesday and two hours on Thursday so I'm gonna see um but for now I'm just gonna get the day ready and then check in with you guys when I can good morning everyone happy Wednesday I feel like this week is going by so slow I don't know about you guys but January just isn't ending today is January 31st and I just feel like this week has gone by at a crawling pace cash and I just got here it's um seven 20 and uh I don't have much to do this morning to prep because my kiddos are still writing their rough drafts today but I am wearing a pair of my new pair eyeware glasses this is gonna happen to me you just watch I'm gonna be like showing off my glasses and then drop them anyway I chose pink today and I wear pink butterfly clip in my hair and I've got like turquoise and pinky toned jewelry so um also how cute is my pickston class I'll just comment on that anyway I'm eating for breakfast a bagel breakfast sandwich that I made it's got egg cream cheese pepperoni and um colby jack cheese on it but it's pretty delicious I made scott one too let's do a fit check tag cash I'm trying to light on okay here's the fit jean shirt black maternity bum uh back maternity top these maternity leggings are from amazon I love them they have pockets and um their ankle length and then I just have my vans on today and again some pink and turquoise accents very cute also how adorable is this lanyard I got it from etsy a couple weeks ago I think it's really cute I love miss frizzle anything I can do with miss frizzle oh speaking of miss frizzle my teammate jocelyn has this system in her classroom and I don't know where she picked it up but I'm stealing it um and it's called the wizard and basically what happens is she has a stuffed owl that she puts on the desk of the child who is excelling at whatever assignment or task she's given them they're done early um they're an exemplar they've mastered it she puts this owl on their desk and that student is allowed to respond to questions and hand raises that come up during like independent work time so it's like an extra teacher in the room that can go around and help kids I thought that was genius um and so I decided to make one for my classroom so I'm using the frizz because science um so I made these little um graphics I made two of them and what I intend to do with them is the same thing that she does basically if I have a child that's excelling at whatever task we're doing they're done early and they could um be another helpful teacher I'll just put that on their desk and then they are more than welcome to go and respond to hand raises I'm also thinking about using Liz or something um I do have a class raider so um I have a student who is responsible for paying attention to behaviors in the classroom and at the end of each day our guest block they report on a scale from one to five what they thought um how they thought the class did for the day and so I might use Liz to like sit on the raider's desk I don't know yet um but I thought it would be fun to like utilize those okay I need to get planned and prepped for next week the problem is I don't necessarily know how next week's gonna pan out because kids are rough drafting today tomorrow we're doing science Friday we're doing science and social studies is kind of split and then some of my kids are gonna need to finish writing Monday and Tuesday next week so I need to either like find an I'm done activity for the kids that finish and like plan to do writing Monday Tuesday and then Wednesday Thursday Friday get back into science I think it's what I might do and then I might just keep it like that for a while until we're done with the writing project just so that I'm not wasting like the whole week on writing because they're at this point where like they've written a rough draft and now I have to provide feedback and then they'll go and type a final draft based on what I like think and what revisions they should make um so I feel like we're at a point where like if I reserve Mondays and Tuesdays for writing then I can conference with kids on Mondays and Tuesdays I can give all the kids like quiet independent work they can do if they're done and then Wednesday Thursday Friday we can get back into science stuff because I'm starting to run out of time I mean realistically let's see we have one two three four five weeks left five that's not very many um I'm going to do the birth of rocks mystery science unit it's five lessons long so if I'm doing science only on Wednesday Thursday Friday I'm only going to get one lesson done a week which would be fine but I wanted to cover more than that this quarter it is what it is at the end of the day but is what it is I'm doing the best I can so I think we might have to do that Monday Tuesday writing Wednesday Thursday Friday science sprinkle in social studies when we can and um holiday when we're done with writing I might do social studies on Monday Tuesday and then do Wednesday Thursday Friday science that way they're getting um a good amount of both it's just crazy how quickly time goes and then five more weeks is my last day of school for the year because I'm going on maternity leave that in itself is wild all right I'm gonna get to work planning and then we'll see how the day goes I have character council meeting today I need to do a whole video in character council honestly um I'll add that to my list because I want to tell you guys about it wow this whole professional youtube tripod thing I've got going here is fabulous character council video okay oh we have a spirit assembly today at nine o'clock too so that cuts into our writing time lovely okay I'll see you guys in a minute like literally a second good morning guys happy Friday I did not vlog it all yesterday because yesterday was a wild and crazy day um we had doughnuts with dames in the morning which is an event where we invite all of the moms and grandmas and it's basically female role models to school and the kids get to have a doughnut with them and it's kind of like a and it's kind of like a it's like a doughnuts with moms thing so anyway um we had that going on yesterday and then I also had my formal observation yesterday which went really really well um I don't ever I mean at this point in my career I just feel like it is what it is and I don't ever stress about it put it down just a little baby left so anyway that's why I didn't vlog yesterday but it is Friday today and it's a little bit of a rainy morning which is nice um it's great for winter today's groundhog day um so we'll see if we get some more winter which I hope we do because I really do enjoy the snow and just moving back here like I kind of want to have like a fun snow day like we need a need a real snow day so anyway I'm excited for that um today we're going to just chill um we started mystery science um the birth of rocks unit for fourth grade if you guys don't use mystery science for your science curriculum and if you are allowed to um you should definitely look into it is very high interest very engaging covers pretty much every standard there's a couple of little gaps you have to fill in along the way but overall like it's pretty amazing I've used it for the past three school years this is the fourth school year I've used it and it's just really good the kids learn a lot from it it's highly engaging um it's minimal prep and minimal planning all you have to do is get stuff printed um get the materials for all of the investigations and then um grade so it's wonderful um so I might start that second lesson today the kids were begging me um I was gonna do like a catch-up day with a social studies task that I gave but honestly it's kind of one of those assignments that I just want to check because it doesn't really give me any information anyway so I might just check it um I call it a day and um give them something else to do for that so it's been it's been hard because we've been doing writing the last few days and writing is exhausting um I have all of these notebooks I'm gonna have to grade this is only just the ones that are done I have three stacks of notebooks three stacks of notebooks um that I'm gonna have to grade so and it's gonna be a while but I'm gonna try and do it quick and just grade it on the rubric and call it a day um I might even like not grade them yet and wait until their final essays are written and typed and then grade those like do a quick glance through and not really grade grade but like give them feedback anyway um I went to Starbucks this morning because it's payday got me a sausage egg bacon wrap they're my favorite they're a little coffee just a little grande sign of the dead I'm gonna get ready for the day if we are gonna do this um um the science thing then I gotta get that rolled out it's a short day today though so um it could either benefit me with what we're doing or we could get more behind so we'll see all right you guys it is Friday afternoon the weekend has begun it was a crazy long week y'all but we did it we survived and um on to the next thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you in the next one bye guys


So do I really need to go to lectures? I enjoy going to lectures. You basically pay for them when you come to uni, so you might as well utilise them. It's really good because you can communicate with your peers, you can communicate with lecturers. My course is actually practicals and tutorials so I'm 100% here for them. Once I didn't go, I didn't watch them online and that sort of spirals into becoming behinds of my work. There's a lot more to gain out of going physically but there is a really great backup if that's not possible. This is the way you can view the lectures from online back at home on your computer. I look at the lecture, I can pause, I can write my notes and all that, I can rewind. That's the great thing, you miss one, you can catch up online so you're not always behind. It gets uploaded I believe an hour after.


Libra you really know about avocado toast. Well, yeah, that's important. Hey, does anyone happen to know how a bill gets passed in the Senate?  Wait, is that your horoscope? Yeah, is it telling you not to do this? If they're dead, they should at least let me know. I gotta quit stand-up.  I'm quirky and Adorkable Scorpio thinks I'm not chill. I am the most chill Decidantly less chill. I didn't go to your event because I did not want to and in a suitcase of rosé and a roller-bag of thin Someone make a Mimi out of my face. Did anyone hear that here? Can we go in the hallway? I want to say to get in front of people if I did drive an eco-friendly car would be a Tesla the expensive one at the peasant one The stars told me that I need to be more real Yeah, but the stars have never been ghosted when the horoscope says you got to sleep.


of all the things that you could talk about or write about, what of your content should be free and what of your content should be reserved for a paid course that you could teach? So I'm gonna answer that question in this video as long with another important insight about creating courses. So I just started teaching a series of workshops, online workshops, it's my own course, called How to Create and Market Your Own Online Courses Authentically. So I'm just gonna share with you two of the key insights from that course out of the several dozens that are taught in there. So one of them is this question of which of my content should be free and which of my content should be paid? So this is the way I think about it. Imagine a martial arts dojo, where people learn kung fu or aikido or jujitsu or something. And if you go to any martial arts class and you go to the beginners class, you're going to notice that there are a lot of beginners there, white belts, okay? And you also notice that there are some advanced people taking the class as well, practicing even the beginner moves. So the beginners are practicing learning how to just throw a punch for the first time. And the advanced people, the black belts are also practicing throwing a punch. But the difference is that the black belts know the nuances behind the punch, why certain parts of the body are doing certain things and why it creates a more powerful, a more stable punch. They might even know the history behind the punch and the cultural meaning of it. I mean, all the stuff that goes behind a simple punch. And the beginners are just trying to not hurt themselves by learning how to throw a punch that isn't completely weak.   Not that your paid course can't include any beginner stuff. You may in fact want to teach a beginner type of class. But most of the paid courses that people would love to pay for are things that are harder to implement.  But what you should teach in a paid course is something that's harder to describe and really allow people to implement effectively by themselves in a just by casually watching a free video, casually reading a free article. They're probably not going to have the motivation nor the nuances and the details to be able to really implement that piece of content. Does that make sense? So the free stuff is sort of the overview, the beginner stuff, the inspiration, the motivation about the thing you want people to change. The paid stuff is the how-to, the details, the nuances, I tried doing this, but then this problem occurred, what should I do? The troubleshooting, again, sometimes free content has some of that stuff, troubleshooting some of the how-tos, but generally your paid content is the organized curation and collection of the how-tos, the best of the motivation, the troubleshooting, the nuances, the advanced stuff. Does that make sense? So let me know if that helps just to have that idea of white belt content is generally free and black belt content is generally paid because in a course you are able to, okay, let's remember this. Somebody who is just watching a free video, like you're watching this free video, you're not in a space of like, all right, I'm going to get my notepad and pen and I'm gonna really pay attention to George for an hour, and this is not an hour long video, but I'm gonna pay attention, I'm gonna really make sure that I implement this really well. 99%, this is something also that Gary Vaynerchuk says, 99% of the people who watch your free content are not gonna do anything with it. They might enjoy it, they might click like, they might comment on it, they might even share it forward to a friend or a colleague or share it on their social, but the vast majority of people watching your free content are not gonna really take the advice that you have offered them in that free video, that free article, okay, that free piece of advice. Now over time, as they watch lots of your free advice, it might eventually shift their mind toward being ready and willing to apply some of the things you're talking about, but it's only when somebody decides to pay for a course, by paying for your paid course, they have already signaled to you that they are ready to be serious about applying something.  They're signaling to themselves that, okay, now I'm gonna be serious about making this change in my life or my health or my relationships, my career, whatever it is you help people change in that course. So because you are filtering in the people who are serious about that change, you can therefore give them more challenging steps to take to actually make that change. Okay, so this is the other nuance I wanna give you, right? When you are talking to somebody who is like, ah, just give me some easy ideas, some something really easy. I want to be entertained. That's what your free content is.  Entertain just means however you show up authentically in a way that it speaks to your strength. For me, my entertain, I'm not funny, okay? I'm not beautiful or handsome. That's not how I entertain you. I entertain you by my tangesters. That's kind of entertaining. I entertain you by my high energy. Now you don't have to have high energy like me, right? You can be entertaining just being really, really quiet. And people might be really, your audience might be really engaged with how you draw them in with your quietness. I don't know. But you have a particular strength for how you engage people. You ask your friends, hey, what do you find entertaining or interesting about how I talk or how I write? That's how you entertain your audience. So your free content is there to entertain them and if you are lucky, they might get some consciousness shift, some mindset shift, some, they might get some how-tos from you that they might actually do something with over the years. But to expect that your free content is gonna actually, that everybody is gonna take it and change their life, that is a tall order and that's putting too much pressure on yourself and putting too much pressure on them. The watcher of the free content, the reader of the article. I mean, for example, you've been consuming, I don't know, maybe this is the first video you've ever watched from me. I'd love to know if that is. But most of you watching this have been watching me for weeks, months, maybe years.  I'm just saying, hey, if you find this interesting, great. That's the bottom line. First of all, do you find this entertaining? Great, okay, you're engaging. I'm lucky if you do. And I'm even luckier if you decide to take one little thing and do something with it and try it out. And maybe it doesn't work and you're like, ah, that doesn't work. Of course, it doesn't work because you didn't ask the nuance. You didn't ask to get the nuances and that's why maybe that's why it didn't work. And that's what the paid courses are for is to go through the nuances and the troubleshooting. And just so you see the difference now between a free content and a paid course. Let me know if that helps. Comment below. The other key insight I wanna share with you from the course that I taught starting yesterday is, and I put the link in the notes of this video for the entire course if you wanna buy it and take it. It has several dozen of these key insights along with how to actually create your paid course, how to market it, my entire marketing plan, the tools and systems that I use in the backend to create market the course, all that stuff is in the paid course itself. But I wanna give you one more key insight that I think can be communicated for free in a way that's more casually consumable, right? That you can actually get here. So that you can actually consume and maybe do something with this. And the key insight is to understand where your paid course fits into your overall business model. So think about this here. Think about this with me for a moment. Imagine a series of concentric circles. I don't have a diagram for you here, but you can draw it out for yourself.  Just draw a little circle in the center and that's you.  It's called that the inner circle or one-to-one, okay? So that's the second circle from the center. And then the third circle, which is a larger circle that encompasses the two circles is group programs, okay? And then further out, the fourth circle is, oh, I'm sorry, yes, I think we're on the, yes, the fourth circle, the first circle was you. The second circle is one-to-one or inner circle. The third circle is, I'm sorry, third circle is group programs. The fourth circle is your paid courses. The fifth circle is your books, audio meditations, audio programs, low price offerings, lowest price offerings. And then the outermost circle is, which is the sixth circle, is your free content. That is what I recommend as a business model for all of you who are interested in possibly creating and selling online courses. Do you see that the online course is in the middle there?  Okay, so let me just go from the outside in. The outside most, the very outside is the whole world. The people who could become part of your audience, the millions of people who could benefit from your wisdom, from your knowledge, things that you could share with them, okay? That's the whole world.  Your free content is what contacts the rest of the world and draws in just the right people who resonate with your energy, with your style, with how you look, with how you sound, with how you write, or whatever it is, with your images, whatever it is you're posting on social media, on your blog, on your podcast, on your video channel, wherever you create and share free content. That's the outermost circle, and that's the biggest circle. That's the most number of people who will contact you is from your free content, you see, okay? That big circle, your free content, is the least amount of contact that the world will have with you. You are there in the center. Does that make sense? You are there in the center. The outermost circle is the world.  They can't have one-on-one time with you. That's not fair for your time management, and that's not fair, well, that's not, you can't expect them to say, oh, I want one-on-one with you for free because I contacted somebody with free content. Well, it's the outermost circle, okay? You're in there in the center. And then from the out of free content in, you have your lowest price offerings. You might not have this yet, but you'll eventually write books. If you want to create paid courses and share, you'll probably eventually write books. I would recommend you to do that. Maybe you'll eventually have some audio books or some audio programs or whatever it may be. Your lowest price offerings. Somewhere between, sometimes people sell books for a few dollars. Sometimes they sell books and audio programs for a few dozen dollars. But somewhere there is your lowest price offerings, right? One in from your free content, lowest price offerings. And the next level in is your paid courses. This is what we've been talking about. Your paid courses are, could be video-based. It could be audio-based. Usually it's either video or audio-based. And it's pricier than your lowest price offerings of your books or your audio programs. So these are, your paid courses might include some group Q&A with you, but it's mostly do-it-yourself. People buy it and you expect them to kind of work on, work through the material themselves. And then maybe they have some group interaction with you at a very cat, not one-on-one, but just a larger group level. Your paid courses. And then inside the paid courses, not inside, but closer to you from the paid courses, therefore, is your smaller group programs. This is your group coaching program, your group mentoring program, your mastermind program, something that is even more expensive than your paid courses. But people, therefore, get more contact with you. They get more contact with you. And guess what? They also expect deeper transformation as they go in further. And this is another key insight, right? People make the mistake. People who are creating and selling paid courses. They often make the mistake of expecting that their paid courses should create deep transformation for their student. Should be comprehensive and deep transformation. Again, that's putting too much pressure on you, the teacher, and on the student. It's a do-it-yourself course, isn't it? They're buying it maybe for $60. Maybe they're buying it for $100. And to expect that it's gonna create deep transformation for them is a tall order. It's not your one-to-one. Remember, you're in the center and just outside you is your one-to-one clients. The people who get the most contact with you, they should be expecting the deepest transformation that you are able to provide in your business. That makes sense for you to expect deep transformation from your one-to-one clients and for them to expect that. Makes sense. They're paying you the most and they have the most contact with you. Through video calls or through direct emails with you or whatever it is you serve your one-to-one clients with.  And then further out, your paid courses, you sell more of those than your mentoring groups, they shouldn't expect very deep transformation because it's a do-it-yourself and you may have some larger group Q&A calls. Does that make sense? I hope this kind of concentric circles model makes sense to you. Let me know, again, I wish I had a diagram to show you, I don't, I'm just using my hands. One of you designer, graphic designer, please create a diagram so I can share it with my audience. So I hope this is helpful. I wanna keep this, it's already gone on 17 minutes so I'll let you go today but just wanted to share those two insights with you from the course that I am teaching now on how to create and authentically market your own online courses. It's been going great. I hope you decide if you want to create online courses and you like learning from me, I hope you decide to join me for it. The price is quite reasonable for all the things that you're gonna learn and get as resources there. So click on the link in the notes and see if you want to buy it. If not, I just hope you continue enjoying and benefiting from my free content and I hope this video was helpful to you as well. Take care, have a great day.


Hello everyone, this is Amit Dan of AmitDan.com Today I'm taking you to a rental apartment in downtown Toronto and this is in the heart of Toronto and an old building The tenant was kind enough to let me video inside the place You'll see stuff around there because the tenant is still moving in and this is an old building and the rent is only $2,000 You might think that this is too much but keep in mind that the tenant used to pay $2,500 in a one-bedroom condo in downtown Toronto So this is an old building and then you're going to get lots of space and the unit was totally renovated Everything is brand new If you look at the closet right at the front entrance door there is a huge space in there Even one person can sleep inside the closet You're not going to get this type of space if you're buying in newer buildings And once you look at the kitchen and the living space the kitchen is huge and it has a deep sink and all the appliances are brand new and the living space is huge Right now you're looking at the den This is actually a den which can be even used as a one-bedroom and the den has huge space which is hard to find if you rent newer buildings in Toronto Now the front part of the unit You can see outside the window because there's a road in front no one is going to block you right in front and the washroom is also renovated Everything is brand new as you can see and there's enough space When I entered the bedroom I was really shocked that it's kind of two-bedroom in one bedroom so it's a huge space and there's a huge closet which I'm going to show you a little bit right now although there's stuff inside but you can see that the closet is so spacious that this type of inner space is hard to find in newer buildings So overall $2,000 is really a good deal for this type of space and in the heart of downtown Toronto Thank you for watching this video forget about subscribing to this channel forget about liking this video There will be more videos coming up so I'll see you shortly Thank you


Elon Musk spoon fed you his cherry-picked information, which you must have suspected promotes a slanted viewpoint, or at the very least, generates another right-wing conspiracy theory. This isn't just a matter of what data was given to these so-called journalists before us now. My name is Matt Taiibi. I'm not a so-called journalist. I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers. Before Matt Taiibi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this year over the Twitter files, he was a darling of the progressive left, appearing regularly on shows like Democracy Now, Bill Moyers, and Rachel Maddow. Matt Taiibi, his new article for Rolling Stone magazine, Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? The Bush administration, these are some of the people, these are some of the greatest liars in the history of politics, and even they couldn't come up with a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Though he was always a fierce critic of the Democratic establishment, the rise of Donald Trump suddenly meant that anyone nominally left of center, even progressive journalists like Taiibi, were expected to support Hillary Clinton unconditionally. So when he attacked her as a sellout, argued that the Russiagate narrative was mostly bullshit, and equated the manipulative tactics of both right and left media personalities, he found himself cold-shouldered by progressives. And Democrats started treating him like a puppet for the right. Do you think it's a legitimate objective of the FBI to stop foreign interference in our elections? I think it's the legitimate objective to stop actual foreign interference. Okay, I don't know what the difference is, but that's fine. In 2020, Taiibi started publishing his work on Substack, and quickly became one of the platform's most popular writers, earning far more revenue than he ever did at Rolling Stone. You yourself posted on your, I guess it's kind of like a web page, and don't quite understand what Substack is, but... He became even more of a pariah by publishing exhaustive reports that documented extensive governmental interference seeking to control what was said on Twitter about COVID-19 and efforts by Russia to influence U.S. elections. Congressional Democrats pilloried him as a fake journalist, a Putin apologist, and a stooge for Elon Musk. That's quite obvious that you've profited from the Twitter files. I think it's probably a wash, honestly. No, then you consider Mr. Musk to be the direct source of all this. No, no, you're trying to get me to say that he is the source. I can't answer your question. He isn't. He's a journalist. No, he can't, because either Musk is the source and he can't talk about it, or Musk is not the source, and if Musk is not the source, then he can discuss his conversations with the source. No one has yielded the general ladies out of order.  Reason caught up with Taiibia at Freedom Fest, an annual gathering held this year in Memphis to talk about the new challenges to free speech, why legacy media is dying, and how identity politics are poisoning political discourse. Matt Taiibia, thanks for talking to me. It's so great to talk to you again, Nick. So let's talk about the Twitter files first. When you went into the kind of sealed room and things like that, what were you expecting to find? Not much. I went into the Twitter files with a very old school antiquated kind of First Amendment conception of what we might find or what questions we might answer. We discussed with Twitter's management the idea of focusing on the suppression of the Hunter Biden story, mainly because Mark Zuckerberg had given an interview and had testified before Congress in which he suggested that the FBI had tipped him off about that story. So I thought if there were those kinds of communications with Twitter, this might be where we found them. And I wanted to know what those communications look like. As we discovered there, we didn't find them in that case, but we found an enormous quantity of them elsewhere and it turned into a much more complicated story than I anticipated. Does the Twitter files really, is it the final nail in the coffin of the idea that there is a clean distinction between the government and the media? Because that kind of informed for a long time, if you think back to the Pentagon Papers or something, it's like the New York Times is separate from the government and it's not communicating in the way that it seemed like in the Twitter files, it's like there are tons of people at Twitter saying, hey, FBI or whatever, take a look at this and then various government actors are saying, hey, you really need to look at this and do something about it. I would say that it puts the final nail in the coffin of that narrative. I actually feel guilty for being naive about that. Again, I grew up in the media. My father was in television and I was around newsrooms, most of my childhood. The idea that the FBI might call up and say, hey, you might want to think about not doing this story, that would be crazy. I couldn't have even imagined an editor or a news director who would have even taken that call in that way. And we found in the Twitter files all kinds of things that suggested that this relationship was not only tolerated but that it was ongoing, regular and collusive in a way that was kind of shocking to me. What's a specific example of that? A great example of this was the Aspen Institute Tabletop Exercise, which was technically not set up by the government. It was set up by the Aspen Institute, which is funded by the government in collaboration with some academic institutions that had been briefed by the FEC and some government agencies. But they all got together before the release of the Hunter Biden story. They were briefed by current and former government officials who talked about the possibility that a hack and leak story involving Hunter Biden and Burisma might come out and they kind of war game the possibility of what to do about that story. And then a month later, that story happens. Now, for me, if I had been in that room and that story actually happened a month later, I would feel obligated to do a story about that Tabletop Exercise. I would say, hey, what a weird coincidence that this thing happened. But these people had an off-the-record arrangement with everybody they were in the room with and they kept to it, they kept quiet. And that's a completely new level of cooperation and coordination that I would never have imagined. I guess, did it work or did it not to suppress the story? Because this is a slightly different question. Was it a Streisand effect where the New York Post publishes something about Hunter Biden a couple of weeks before the election and people are like, yeah, it's the New York Post. But then I remember going to Twitter when I heard about it and then it was like you can't link to it from Twitter or anything. And that was really chilling. That was the first time I felt I was in an Orwell novel or something where it's like, what do you mean? You can't link to it or discuss it on Twitter. But do you think did it work first? And then let's talk about why they thought it might or might not have. I'm not sure. I think that would be worth studying. It would be interesting to do some surveys about that and find out what the actual impact of that was. I think overall in the long run, certainly that story got more attention than it would have absent this. However, we're also learning, I think there's more about that story that's going to come out fairly soon. My understanding is that there are some depositions that are underway, that there are things that are happening in Washington where some of those committees, oversight committees are still looking at that issue and the stuff that was on the laptop. Because we didn't know a whole lot when that first story came out. All we knew was that they found the laptop. They didn't know a whole lot about whether any of those emails were meaningful. All we knew is that we had some racy looking pictures. It was embarrassing. But it's going to take some hardcore investigation to find out whether there's anything behind that. And that process in many cases takes years. I would just say they probably were effective in installing that. Also, there's the alternate story where they told people in mainstream media that this was Russian disinformation. That was effective with Biden voters. That story had an effect in getting people to ignore the idea that this was anything worth paying attention to. You obviously started your career in Russia in the post-Soviet world. Was this kind of collusion between the government and news, was that taken for granted there? Are we looking like Russia in the late 90s or something? Like 1999, 2000, I think that was when you first started to see directly the news stations resembling basically press releases for the Kremlin. In the mid-to-late Yeltsin years, the press was sort of stratified and fractured. Each of the different news companies was basically backed by a different mob or mafia interest. They all had their own ties to Yeltsin, but basically you were looking at the point of view of this or that oligarch when you watch the news. When Putin came to power, one of the first things he did is he really consolidated the media landscape. He cracked down on companies like NTV, which is one of the last independent stations, and he got it so that there was basically no dissent in Russian media. It's beginning to feel a little bit like that. Although it's not because, if you dissent from Biden, you're going to start eating polonium without knowing it, right? What are the steps that are happening? It's not against the media's interest or against media actors. They're bringing it on, and Twitter and Facebook was filled with people who had been in an administration and then moved there to do communications or strategy, and it goes back and forth. How are we getting to a place where Twitter, its first big glory was in helping to kind of platform the Arab Spring? It was great because it was anti-government and it was anti-censorship, and now it's like doing the towel boy for a particular vision. I don't want to say the deep state, but of a centrist mainstream ideological politics. Yeah, I think that's right. There's obviously a huge difference between what happened in Russia. I knew people like Anna Polikowska, who got murdered under the Putin regime. There were a couple of others I knew who had some pretty unfortunate fates. Nobody's getting shot in their doorway in the United States, and that's actually one of the more depressing parts about our story is that this is all voluntary of what's going on. The overall, the overarching narrative that we collectively working on the Twitter files decided was happening, was that there was a huge infrastructure that had been built up for counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism within the government. It was aimed at the messaging apparatus of groups like ISIS to prevent the successful recruitment of white kids in suburban England and California. Well, when that threat dissipated, they moved over to populism in the United States because, as you say, Twitter, which had been this incredible force for anarchy and the irrepressible political urges of the population in the Arab Spring, it kind of came out again with Trump. Trump bypassed the ordinary media in 2016, and his amazing insight was that I can just use my own Twitter account and I'll have much more reach than all of these different stations combined. I think that freaked out a lot of people in power, and what we saw in the Twitter files essentially was a long period of rollback which they achieved through various different means. Did they do that? And I realize you may not be in a position to know, but did they do that against the wishes of people like Jack Dorsey and the top kind of creators of Twitter? Because there's one narrative that's going wrong in kind of social media companies. It's not the people at the top who started it, but it's like mid-level managers who are all like, you know what, we are good liberal slash progressives and we're really scared of America and so we are going to censor people and Dorsey and these other guys are kind of walking around the C-suite like Howard Hughes. And they're like, oh, we don't have any power. Who made these kind of operative decisions? It's funny, before the first Twitter files I had one fairly senior Twitter executive joke to me that Jack Dorsey was more like the company's spirit animal than its CEO. I had talked to Jack before. I like him. I think he's at heart, got a lot of sympathy for free speech principles. I think they're important to him. But if you look at the Twitter files you see that he's not in the loop of a lot of these key decisions. The things that happened, particularly around that one incident involving the Hunter Biden story, he was definitely not involved in that. One of the weird ways that I know about that is because I found, believe it or not, on my first day looking at the Twitter files that Jack Dorsey had forwarded to Vijaya God, the woman who was basically running things, one of my articles complaining about the censorship of that article. He was definitely a free speech advocate, but he really wasn't at the helm when they came to the decision to take Trump off the platform. I think he was dragged kicking and screaming to that decision, and most of the company was against him at that point. With the kind of Russiagate, the Russiagate narrative is that the Russians wanted, and correct me or massage this into what you believe, is that Russia was proactive. They wanted Trump to win, and more than that, it was also that the Trump campaign was actively working with them. Is that the hinge point of, we're going to look back, and there's media before 2016 and after? How did the Russiagate story spin out? There have been tons of congressional investigations and others, and they've really come up with nothing in terms of collusion. Why did it get started, and then why is it persisting after we got nothing, except a dream, a desire that it's true? Well, the Russiagate story, oddly enough, became involuntarily very important in my life personally. I think it's really the reason I ended up leaving mainstream media, where I was very happy. You had the job everybody wanted. Who doesn't want to be the campaign reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine? It's the coolest thing in the world. It's one of the iconic gigs you can have. But when the Russiagate story happened, as you mentioned, there were really two different storylines. One was that Russia had interfered somehow, and they had a couple of different inflection points that they were looking at. Then they were working with WikiLeaks and some other things. But the more important narrative that I thought they were pushing was this idea of collusion. I never saw anything that indicated anything like hard proof for that. At first, all I said, I wrote a couple of very gentle columns in the beginning saying, this looks a little bit like the WMD mistake, where we have an awful lot of anonymous state officials who are telling us things that we can't reproduce in the laboratory independently. There's no way to check this story. But everybody was going for it, and I think it's as simple as people thought everything was permitted in pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump. There was a very influential article in The New York Times in August of 2016 called Trump is testing the norms of objectivity and journalism. The columnist Jim Rutenberg argued, we can't just be true anymore. We have to be true to history's judgment. That's also great where Trump was, it's just so weird, everybody's like, he is destroying norms. Therefore, we are going to throw over our norms preemptively to get rid of him. It's like, okay, yeah, whatever. It worked great in Iraq. Preemptive war against Trump has worked out pretty well. It's like they're incapable of learning anything from any of these mistakes. With the resurgent thing, it was like it was happening in slow motion the entire time. They kept stepping it at one story after another. Instead of walking it back or reexamining the evidence, they would double down. I realize this is asking a psychologist, but why were mainstream people, mostly it's kind of like liberal, centrist liberals, legacy media types. But also, I don't know, people in newer publications, they wanted that to be true. It was like, I'm old enough to remember reruns of I Dream of Jeannie, Freeze Company, where it's like every week Mr. Roper is finally going to catch Jack Tripper in a homosexual trist. It never happens. Dr. Bellos, this time he's got Tony down to rights. It never happened, and you would think 15 times in, you'd be like, let's write a different plot. Right, exactly. We still enjoy the show, though. Yeah, that's true. And they're still doing it, right? They are still doing it. If you go back and look, you can see why it was compelling television. You can see why MSNBC shot to the top of the ratings for the first time in 20 years. This looked like the end of the world. This was the Millerite prediction of the world was going to come to an end and it was going to happen on live TV and you better not turn it off, because it might happen while we're on the air. They would even do, if you watch the tosses between one show to another, they would sort of guide you from one show to the next and warn you that you better not turn the dial because between Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel, it might happen. And this was very compelling TV. I understand why they did it, but the problem was you were setting yourself up. You were writing checks that you were going to have to cash at some point and that's a very dangerous place to be. One of the things I always liked about journalism is that when you're done with the story, it's done.  This thing was like the sort of Damocles hanging over the whole business and I don't understand what people were thinking. I know a lot of the old-timers were very worried about it. But they're kind of all gone. They're all gone, exactly. What's interesting is that Russiagate was primarily among liberals. None of this is true, but during the Cold War the conservatives were the real Americans and they understood that the Soviet Union by extension the Russian people were evil and you can't really do business with evil. And the liberals were more like, no, we have to work peacefully. And now it's weird because it's liberals who are like Russia, Russia, Russia, like they're evil. And now we have conservatives who are like, give Putin a chance or something. How do you explain these weird flips? It's like every million years or something that North and South Pole flip. But then it feels like, okay, it's always been this way. Where is that coming from? Well, I originally thought it was because I had gone crazy. That something was wrong with me personally. I think that was a common experience of a lot of people. It must be me. This must all make sense somewhere outside of my understanding. But if you look back, I can't remember which one of them said it. I feel like it's either Jim Clapper or Ted Liu. But there was a prominent politician who said something like, the Russian is genetically predisposed to sieve or something like that. This was a comment a politician made and it flew all over social media and it wasn't condemned. It was sort of upheld. And again, as you say, back in the Soviet days, one of the principle liberal ideas was that the Russian person is not guilty. It's their leader. It was the Sting song. It was the children too. That was Sting. Richard Pryor said, if you don't have that hat on, the Russians don't have the hat on.  They're just people just like us. That all went out the window when this started. And why? I have no idea. Let's talk a little bit about leaving Rolling Stone. When did you leave exactly? I guess I left in 2019. And you went to Substack immediately. You were one of the original people, which also was fascinating when Substack started and then when it came out they were paying some people. Then there was, again, from kind of legacy media or like cub reporters who were pissed they weren't getting 200 grand advances were like, that's wrong. Why should people be paid to do independent journalism? It was bizarre. But what led to the rupture with Rolling Stone? What a great position to be in. It's a coveted slot, Rolling Stone. It started in 1967, but it quickly became like mainstream publication, mainstream journalism. What led to the rupture there? First of all, I love Rolling Stone. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for it. I think it had a couple of really long heydays where it did unbelievable work. It was great as music journalism for a long time. It was innovative in bringing Hunter Thompson's style of writing to political journalism, and I think that's become iconic now, right? They brought PGR work in. Then when I was there in the early 2000s and mid-2000s, the owner, Jan Winner, was absolutely against a lot of the stuff that I wrote because I was reporting on financial corruption that didn't look good for the Democratic Party sometimes. But he was cool with it. That was a rare thing. In journalism, it's not often when your boss says, I hate this, but go for it. That's what makes a magazine great. But that started to change. After Trump, everybody's tolerance for exploring different points of view dried up. I didn't leave because I was pressured or pushed out the door. It was really more that I had a sense that there was something more lucrative and more rewarding out there on the independent front. Are you making more money on Subsect than you were for Rolling Stone? A lot more, yes. And you say how much more? I don't want to say. Make us all feel bad, not just me, but the camera guys. Let's just say that I'm making many times over more than I was making at Rolling Stone. What accounts for that? Part of it is Substack. The code they cracked was allowing people to be able to easily monetize an audience. But how do you account for the idea? Basically what you showed, and I think Matt Iglesias leaving Vox has done this. I think Glenn Greenwald, it's interesting since he started The Intercept and then was like, God, I hate this place. And the feelings were mutual. But when you get to a place where a writer like you somehow, if you're making, I don't know, five times what you were making at Rolling Stone, you were carrying a ton of people at Rolling Stone. What's the appeal, do you think? Like for you, unbound? Well, there was a couple of things. One, any writer who's ever worked for editors, and I've benefited massively from the editors I had, like Will Dana, Eric Bates. I had great editors at Rolling Stone. And I would never say that they're bad for a writer. But there is something to be said for when you turn 50 and you want to write what you want to write about, and there's nobody to say no. That feels pretty good. And sometimes that comes out in the writing, too, by the way.  Yeah, we do copy-editing. Sometimes we do fact-checking. It depends on what kind of piece it is.  So I get that. But it's also, as an editor, I like, yeah, you know, my best work was done when I had to explain myself to a pre-reader on some level. Right, right. There is some of that. You know, I mean, like, on one level, yes, I would love to be working with an editor. But A, it's an expense. B, there's a speed element now to internet publishing that is new. Even the delay of an hour can be consequential in how well a piece does. And that's different. How do you describe your audience?   Yeah, so my overall list, which includes the non-paying people, I mean, it's, you know, it's around 400,000, 400 something thousand subscribers now. And it's funny, originally, I would say they were all sort of center-lefty people who knew me from Rolling Stone. But now, this is a very diverse audience that I have. I have hardcore Trump supporters.  I have libertarians. I have people who, you know, have never been a part of any political movement. It's really interesting, actually, because at Rolling Stone, my audience was relatively homogenous. And that's not the case here. You mentioned Jan Wenner, you know, who is kind of like an archetypal baby boomer, right? And on late 60s boomer, who among other things was, you know, one of those guys who, you know, is like, I'm in favor of free speech, no matter what. One of your most recent pieces, you know, and like if you read the headlines of your subsects of, like one is where have all the liberals gone, another is get off the First Amendment's lawn, why Julian Assange must be freed, the elite war on free thought. Like something has happened among people who broadly call themselves liberals or progressives, where generationally, up through probably Gen X, that was like, if not the most important issue, like free speech uber alas, then it was like in the top three. For younger people, maybe it doesn't seem to be as important. Do you agree with that? And if so, what do you think has shifted that younger people who are liberal and progressive may have the exact same political commitments as you, or like free speech is more of a problem than it is a solution? I'm less in tune with what's going on with people who are under 30 and... How old are you right now? I'm 53. Okay. Yeah. In my generation growing up, I didn't know anybody who wasn't relatively a free speech absolutist. Right. Everybody I knew supported Frank Zappa and Dee Snyder against the Parents Music Resource Center. We were all in favor of NWA when they, you know, every one of those controversies that you knew were... Yeah, two live crew. Yeah. Two live crew, even the tape delay for Richard Pryor when he went on Saturday Night Live, right? Stuff like that. It was automatic. It was a defining issue for a generation. But there, I think, has been a schism, you know, within former liberals. It's clear to me between boomers and Gen Xers like me.  There was actually a moment at Rolling Stone that I think was kind of significant, where in the primary season for 2016, Jan did a big official Rolling Stone editorial supporting Hillary Clinton. And I was a little bit shocked by that given the magazine's history. Yeah. And I went to Jan personally. I said, hey, would you mind if I wrote a dissenting editorial? And I wrote one in favor of Bernie. And Jan's whole idea there was that the world has changed since 1972. George McGovern got beat. We were wrong then. We have to win now. And winning is the most important thing. And so forget about idealism and all that stuff we cared about in the 60s and 70s and all that. I mean, I thought this is supposed to be a magazine for young people, theoretically. Right, right. Like, you know, how is that going to fly? But it did, you know. And I was a little bit surprised by the reaction to both my editorial and his. That's fascinating that he as a boomer is like, yeah, free speech. You know, we can leave it because clearly younger generations seem less enamored of that.  Can you talk a little bit about that? And again, in terms of policy commitments, I don't know that you're that different.  I don't believe a lot of the identity politics that are being proffered by the current version of the Democratic Party are genuine. And my first experience with this, where I really, really thought about this was when I was following Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2016. And there was a moment in that campaign where he first started to really draw blood against Hillary. Right. You might remember it was like in February or late January of 2016. He was hammering her on her ties to Goldman Sachs and other banks. The New York Post, interestingly, did this publish this big list of all of her speech commitments. And it was kind of amazing. And she wouldn't release the transcripts, right? She wouldn't release the transcripts. But I mean, even the schedule was amazing. She was doing $300,000 in the morning and then flying to someplace and doing 400 grand. A good shod or something. Yeah, exactly. In her circle of the Bilderbergers or whatever. And they tried everything to hit back. And nothing worked until she said, if we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism? And Bernie was paralyzed by that.  He's a real comedy. And I mean that where it's class and everything else is a distraction, right? That capitalists will use race in order to keep the workers from realizing now they're all on the same side. Well, I would say I almost wish he was that. Because Bernie also marched for a civil rights movement in the 60s. And he was terrified of the idea that he might be accused of racism. Right. It mortified him. And I think it really slowed his campaign down. Yeah. There was also that moment, I think it might have been in Seattle or something where he was almost literally pushed off the stage by a couple of black activists who were like, we need to be talking about racial concerns, not whatever he was talking about. Right. Not your class thing, whatever that is, right? And that was when they started to sort of demonize the white working class, right? Which is a brilliant strategic move. Also interestingly, it was the exact opposite of what the Clintons had done in the 90s.  And we feel their pain. We feel their pain, right? And that's, you know, they just got over the finish line doing that. And now they... So we can add to the sins of Hillary Clinton that she also injected identity politics. I think so. I think that was a conscious thing that they did, that they... Nothing was working for them. I mean, if you read those books, one of the books about the Hillary campaign, there's a hilarious chapter where they couldn't come up with a slogan because they didn't even know what they stood for. Like, they were toying with, it's her turn, you know? But this whole idea of identity politics being something that they could lord over somebody like Bernie who was legitimately an oppositional movement and who was drawing on the same anger that Trump was. It worked. It stopped them in his tracks. The, you know, let's talk a little bit about Julian Assange. Speaking of Hillary hated Julian Assange because she, among other things, felt embarrassed by him, you know, with the first big WikiLeaps dump from Chelsea Manning, you know, and on from that. How do you, how do you make sense of journalists who actually don't think that Julian Assange should be like free to walk the planet?  Yeah. And even publishing Assange at one point, right? I remember doing public service announcements with other journalists. I did one that was, you know, where everybody had to stand up and say, I am Bradley Manning. It was Bradley Manning back then. But there were a whole lot of people in the media business in that public service announcement because everybody at that time believed that, of course, this is right. You know, we're exposing war crimes. What could be wrong with that? Yeah. And there was no question that the files were true, like the information was accurate. Nobody had any, there's never been an issue of factuality. Not that I know of with WikiLeaks. There are some other ethical issues that I, you know, I think are legitimate, but with factuality, no. But the amazing thing about the reaction that journalists have had since the indictment is the total inability to see how this relates to the future of journalism. I mean, they're threatening this guy with 175 years in prison for doing basically the same thing that every national security journalist does every day.  Well, that happens all the time. I mean, this stuff doesn't even have to be classified, but we hear classified things all the time when we do reporting. If that's going to be a crime, you can go to jail for 10 years for, and they're going to enforce that. How can you do reporting anymore? And everybody's all for it. Does that disappear if Trump disappears? I mean, is this all kind of an epiphenomenon of Trump is so uniquely awful and, you know, and you have people. Hunter Thompson, actually, I guess said this more with George W. Bush, but that like, you know, Nixon was bad. Nixon, you know, the scumbag of the universe was bad, but George W. Bush is really bad.  And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Obama administration didn't feel like it had reduced to indict Assange as much as they wanted to. But that after Trump got elected, ironically enough, it was Trump's own Justice Department that did it. But, you know, politically, there was a lot of support for that after this story in 2016 about, you know, WikiLeaks possibly working with the Russians. Again, legally, it doesn't matter because the case is about an earlier time period. People don't think that way anymore, though. But I think you're right. I think absent Trump, this wouldn't be happening. But will Trump ever go away then? Or is the threat of the next Trump enough to kind of, you know, keep huffing this type of anti-first amendment? Or like where free speech is negotiable now going forward? I think one of the main things, and we found in the Twitter files, was that if it's not Trump, it's something. There's always demon acts that they're warning audiences away from, and they always come up with a word that is sort of a non-negotiable code for threat. So it's anti-vaxxer, right? Or domestic violent extremist or insurrectionist or anything, you know, something along those lines. Trump, in that sense, I think has been an enormous boon to the intelligence services. They've been able to say, hey, if you code as somebody who sides with Trump, you know, essentially they've created what I like to call the sort of one villain theory of the universe, which is if you're on Trump's side, that means you're on Putin's side, which means you're also on Assad's side, you're on Orban's side, you're on the side of domestic violence. And G somehow will end up in that mix, too, right? Exactly. It's all connected, right? It's like an edible arrangement, right?  Yeah. And rationally, it's a crazy conspiracy theory, but they actually do denialist and ban and de-amplify people based on ideas like that. You know, we're talking in Memphis where Freedom Fest is, you're speaking there, RFK Junior, Robert F. Kennedy Junior is speaking. One of the things that's interesting about RFK, we've reasonous talked to him and we've critiqued him and all of this, but he self-consciously says he is following a lot of Trump's playbook. Like he, you know, he, I saw an interview with him where he said, you know, he misunderstood Trump's appeal. He was very anti-Trump, but like now he's starting to understand why people looked at Trump seriously and he wants to kind of grab some of that. But what, you know, what is going on? Like why do people like Trump and now RFK Junior, what are they giving to people that they're not getting out of traditional candidates? I don't think it's that big of a mystery. I mean, the very first time that I saw Trump in person, I remember having the thought 20 minutes into his speech, this is going to work. I mean, I didn't know if he was going to win, but what he was doing was scoring. You could feel it in the audience. And why was that? Well, America since 2008 especially had become incredibly dysfunctional. We had had a massive financial collapse where the elite and wealthy class had been completely bailed out when a lot of them should have gone to jail. And everybody else sort of paid the bill, including millions of people who got thrown out of their homes, you know, in some cases justifiably, but in some cases not. And you add that to the, you know, the ongoing wars in the Middle East. There were lots of vets and Trump's crowds, you know, who had gripes about all kinds of things. And Trump picked up on anger at institutional America that I think had a legitimate basis. If you've read Martin Garry's book, The Revolt of the Public, he predicted this before Trump came on the scene. And he said, people are going to be pissed about all these different things. And all it takes is somebody who is tuned into that. And my only concern about Trump was that he was going to promise a lot but not really deliver. He was going to be a fake reformer. So if somebody were to come along and be, you know, a real reformer, if they were actually going to try to do something about some of these things, that would probably have a lot of appeal to the public. Do you think RFK is that person? I think he's more honest than Donald Trump.  I think they actually care about a lot of these issues. Trump for me was a master at the appearance side of the game, right? He was just so good at visual politics and virality and all these things that people didn't understand very well back then. But he wasn't a policy walk. He wasn't staying up at night reading position papers. You know, with Kennedy, it's still unknown, I would say. You know, what House in the series is, what he's really up to. I think we have to get to know him a little bit better. He's also coming onto the scene post-COVID. And Trump occupied a weird space during COVID, right?  I have experts, but he was criticized for not implementing a single policy, which in the end may have been better. But then he also, you know, he did Operation Warp Speed, which actually worked to get vaccines out quickly. They didn't come before the election, which he's obviously still pissed about. But he's also kind of an anti-vaxxer.  These are not working for us. How much worse is it post-COVID, do you think? I think it's a lot worse post-COVID. COVID has added to the dynamic that 2008, Iraq. Yeah. WMDs, all that stuff. Even the 2000 election where we couldn't really decide. Yeah, that too, right? You add that on top of it. But COVID has a whole long list of things that have added to middle America's grievances, beginning with the fact that it increasingly looks like they lied to us about the origins of the disease for some pretty weak reasons, maybe. You know, they were trying to cover up some research they were doing. That's thing one, that's looking increasingly likely. At the very least, they excluded the possibility of that illegitimately. And used, I mean, that was where the government was telling Twitter and Facebook at all, like, don't run this stuff or squelch it. Right, exactly. Squelch that. And then there was this whole idea of tying anti-vaccine sentiment to anti-mandate sentiment. Right. And they consciously blurred the lines about that. There were a lot of people, I did a story about Loudoun County, Virginia, when the Republicans won the gubernatorial election there. And there were people there who were furious at the way they had been portrayed in the media as racists or anti-vaxxers. Really, they wanted their kids to go back to school because they had done their own research online. They found the kids weren't really at risk. And their kids weren't learning anything. And it was a burden on them personally, right? So there's a million things like this that have added to ordinary people's dissatisfaction. And again, with COVID, there's the additional complicating factor of kids being involved. People feel strongly that once there's something about their kids, they go... And it became clear pretty early on that kids were not affected. And yet they were the ones whose lives were most clearly upended by this, right, by lockdowns. Where are you on vaccines? Are you an anti-COVID vaxxer? Are you anti-mandate? Are you pro-mandate, pro-vaccine? I'm anti-mandate, for sure. And my wife's a doctor. I'm pretty reliably convinced that vaccines have been a good thing overall in the world. I'm not a scientist. This is one of the reasons why I stayed away from the stories, because this is not my area of expertise. But I do think lockdowns have been bad. I do think the press lied about the threat to kids. And I don't understand why they had to do that. I'm not so sure about the efficacy of vaccinating children at all. This recent Missouri v. Biden case involves some doctors who just said some very logical things. If there's any risk at all with this vaccine, even if it's infinitesimal, it's probably more than the risk of sending your kid to school. Because this thing doesn't really hurt kids. And they tossed them off Twitter for that, or they tossed them off Facebook for that. That's crazy, you know? And I think people see that as crazy. You know, the other big story that paralleled COVID and the lockdowns, obviously, was George Floyd and kind of racial reckoning and whatnot. You had, it was in 2019 when you were at the Eric Garner book? Yeah, 18, I think. Which is before the lockdown and things like that. Obviously, the George Floyd story was huge. And it was, again, it probably wouldn't have been as big if we weren't in lockdown and whatnot. But go back to Eric Garner, who was arrested for selling loose cigarettes in Staten Island and then died while the police were arresting him. Where do you think we are in terms of kind of criminal justice reform, as well as race relations? Are we better than 2019 or Eric Garner time? Or is it worse, or is it just kind of like an open wound that we never quite can close or heal? I don't know. I mean, I haven't spent a lot of time in the last couple of years looking at local policing. I did, for many years, spend a lot of time in the courts and doing sort of street reporting. The George Floyd summer was very frustrating for me personally because the big lesson that I came away from the George Floyd story was that broken windows policing had massively increased the number of contacts between the ordinary citizen and police, which in turn resulted in a lot of these situations going wrong and people dying. And the one thing that's fixable in this whole milieu is we can change that. We can change statistics based policing. We don't have to order people to stop, you know, 20 people a month or whatever it is. And it never came up. I mean, it was like it was purposely excluded from the Floyd problem. It didn't seem to be serving anybody's interests, right? Right.  It didn't have a tie to America's racist past, you know, the inherent tendency towards white supremacy. Now, there are obviously enormous racial overtones to police brutality. And I detailed a lot of them in, you know, my book. But it's only part of the picture. I mean, this is just the same thing as like Trump coverage. People picked one thing and that became the entire lens through which they looked at that story. And they ignored all these other shades of gray and complexities. And I think they left audiences less informed than they were before as a result. Part, to kind of wrap up, one of the things I find most interesting about your kind of post mainstream media output, and you've started a podcast where you talked with Walter Kern, the novelist. And a lot of what you're doing is you're talking about stuff like Mark Twain's The Man That Corrupted Hadley Berg or classic stories, American stories, et cetera. What's the goal there and what has the response been? Part of it is just because Walter Kern and I both like talking about books. We don't get to do it very much. We've decided to experiment. What would happen if we did that? And what we found is people are so tired of the relentless sort of binary nature of media these days. Team X versus Team Y, Team Blue versus Red, and it's divisive. It's anti-intellectual. You don't get to talk about anything interesting in these shows.  I mean, this is the basis of Hate, Inc., your book about what's the subtitle, why today's media make us hate each other. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's kind of a bad product unless you have some kind of amazing breaking news that's about to come out. Why would you watch it? Because it makes you depressed. What we found is when we talked about these stories, we're getting into all these issues. And we're also finding that a lot of these old stories that may be dust-covered in people's imaginations, they're amazingly relevant today. The E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops has a lot of relevance to... Can you do a quick summary? What's the plot of that? The plot of that, the E.M. Forster imagined a world where people no longer had to do anything. They lived underground. Machines basically did everything for them.  There were legends about that. But one day, the machine starts to malfunction because the people who are taking care of the machine, they've started to die off. And so the thing has started to malfunction. And people slowly realize that they've been had that it's actually safe to go outside. And a lot of the legends they've been told to keep them afraid and keep them indoors and keep them from acting out on their own are fake. And that's very true of internet culture. I think a lot of us are captured by our neuroses now. We don't have as much face-to-face contact with people. It's very relevant today. And it was so much fun talking about that. And we got a great response from people who were saying, there's a whole world of thought out there that they're telling us doesn't exist anymore. But it is out there. And people are learning to enjoy it again. I think we're going to leave it there. Matt Taibbi, thanks for talking to me. Great. Thanks so much, Nick. Thank you.


Welcome back. It's still the breakfast and plus TV Africa away from the crack in the APC we're focusing on some issues here in Lagos what with the release of the white paper of the answers and panel and Lagos did government that's missing that just one person died as against the line that and you know was actually you know reported Joining us this time around to look at all of the issues is a Boused daily fire to me and incidentally he is one of the people that the Lagos did governor has actually issued An invitation to join in the peace work and the healing of the land many things for joining us on the breakfast of barista Faro to me Good morning to you very quickly. Let's just talk about the white paper I know you know, I'm sure it has been generating so many reactions and indeed you were actually you know Fingal mentioned yesterday by the governor asking you to join you know in the healing of the number first of How did you really react when you saw the release of the white paper? Because I You All right, well try and reconnect out with some barista daily faro to me indeed We were having some distortion with them the audio could barely hear most of the things that him He said, you know mercy, you know, indeed He was saying and what time he felt and that he was like as a legal practitioner that what you mentioned about Appropriating and repropriating, you know being a Georgian jury in your own case is something that actually is in The way to go about it, but I'm sure over time, you know Just in the next couple of hours and of course in the next couple of these Reactions will keep on training that particular development because this is one incident that has actually come so close to home That's I'm indeed every Nigerian is affected one way or the other because we know where it pinches You know see the policemen every day, we know how they brutalize our loved ones and indeed we just need to put a Foot down and ensure that we take a stand to make sure these things don't happen again Well, how do you even achieve all of that if the mechanism that's been put in place? Cannot work like we rightly mentioned you already would can tell what would be the outcome when you already have person of interest You know being a Georgian is on case. It's unfortunate and very very sad very sad We have embarrassed a delay roti me or far roti me back on land Can you continue with your postulations? I will lost you there at some point you were talking about How sad them the development has been legal state approving and also repropriating at the same time I hope you can hear me now. We can hear you. Yeah, go ahead The point is the complicity of this world as the governor of legal state was already We knew that it was complicit in the crimes that took place at that. Oh, the complicity of the LCC The operators of the franchise Was also clear to everybody who cared to look from day one that the military government Would set its lawyers the motion to seek his credit The report that was leaked was not a surprise But when you begin to read the Rather for me don't point in a dress of the governor yesterday You I'd initially had As I was reading towards the end where he now began to sample and start dancing and I'm causing himself in the keys and talking about higher To which himself and all of the people do not subscribe and then in short the memories of all those who died He wants to walk Walk to where and then it is a chemo to most of the one with the black maria at the footie I'm supposed to be walking with The one they call it is a black black white lion of black boots That's one too.  He's not them there And then you are talking about a piece of work look This is a rotten son into injury The of the Nigerian class and the Nigerians He's unbelievable You have children in your own home that you money country and there are people children in Kirikiri I know of a boy who has been before two charges of illegitimate and they could not even pay And at the end of the day all that came out of the DPT Was that they could be charged with a breach of the court will be a breach of the social order That was all they could be charged with and they are still in prison and this man is talking about a piece of work All right, let me tell you about me for the want of time I'm sure that we'll definitely continue this conversation But I'd like to ask you is there hope for justice With the fact that you know the state government has rejected the report saying No one died and all that's on it going on right now. Do you think that there's hope for justice? As told Regarding a kid who knows that he tries to find what you call an insurgent liar He's almost wasn't like my man. He has told different fashions. I mean, they don't define Because each and every one of the beneficiaries of the people's system I've sought to know about what is being on the night of the 20th of October Justice will be done Because the truth will not die I will die Just won't you we die Each and every one of us who are likely to be good the way of the flesh or the truth will not die Each and every one of the lives that they are telling they are ready almost because they are telling it again So they are just lying to themselves and I will say something and I think it's Not just to the ruling class But you each and every one of us every time anyone in bringing in leaky The person think about it. It's an every person who has had occasion to come out and speak against the truth of what happened in leaky The more intelligent they used to be The most stupid you can all right and thank you so much I'm barista daily pharaoh to me for your thoughts are concerning the work of hope and of course The white paper that was just released by the state government indeed Justice will be served them over time a very big. Thank you to your dad daily referral to me It's a legal practitioner and the human right activist as much as we can take you know on this this concert this morning Many thanks for being part of the conversation and we look forward to having this tomorrow I hope you enjoyed every part of the show and if you miss out on any part of the conversation It's all right to follow us on Facebook and Instagram what plus TV Africa and on YouTube as a plus TV Africa lifestyle I am messy before compliment of the season and I am Justin at the new standby for the news brief momentary