Y254 Imagine Y254 Y254 Y254 Y254 Y254 Y254 Y254 Y354 Y254 Y254 Y254 Y254기자 We should understand what is health and what is wellness. Monika, let's start with you. How would you define the two? Wellness, I would say it is that aspect of the state of being spiritually, emotionally, financially, physically fit. Actually it is defined as having seven or eight dimensions that cuts across even being well in the mind. And that's very in depth. And so health again is the lack of, you know, when you have, when you don't have an illness, then you are healthy. When you don't have stress of factors, then you say you are in good health. Nice. So the health focuses on the physical aspect? Yes, yes. And the wellness is more around it? Yes. Jared, would you share her opinion on that? Kanunit emphasized half points. He has actually explained health in the eight dimensions. It's more spiritual, it's physiological, psychological, mental. At the same time, it is our entire body and our entire spirit. That's how being healthy means. And many factors contribute to our being well. Our factors like our social, cultural orientation, our diet, our lifestyle, they all influence our well-being. Currently, because it's a talk show, we are not going to have a lecture here. You can see this culture of kwaendakwa base, the youth culture, the achuying mera and so on and so forth.  At 30, that's basically unhealthy, but today we're going to be real. We're going to address all issues pertaining health and we're going to be real to the public. They are our audience. We are not offering a lecture, they will drive the conversation. We will attend to the issue and I believe it could be a robust talk and we're going to help our people and that's why we are here. Thank you. And that's very well said, like that, because you know we are here to help and educate our audience. We want people to amend the habits that they may think are healthy but are causing more harm to their bodies than they are causing any wellness to come about. So let me start with focus on health. Let us focus on health because Monica, I'm aware you do some supplements that boost the immune system and our health overall. So can you talk to us about some things that you have noted that boost our health? Maybe even before I talk about supplements, I'll first want to say that being well, it is something that has to be self-driven. For you to be well, you have to be cogn... it is your subconscious, you want to do it, you want to be very well. So you have to start with doing a wellness assessment as frequently as possible.  Just like the way we maintain our cars, we take the car for service just to make sure that it keeps running and it doesn't just stop one day. So having a wellness assessment done, then it is very, very important for us. So we are saying that you have to start it as early as possible. You don't assume now that I'm not coughing, I don't have an abdominal pain, I don't have a headache, I'm okay.  Then you are given a clean bill of health and you are told good, you are well. Again, if then you are not well, we start treating that as early as possible. So somebody said that the future doctor will not be giving medicine. They will be advising on diet and lifestyle changes, not medicine anymore. It has to start now. So before we talk about supplements, you know, supplements you're going to... So we start to know what you do before getting that. So first you've mentioned doing a wellness check, you have to do frequent checkups. And these are things that people don't really do. If we are being honest and realistic, the youth will not go to hospital unless I feel a headache and it's been bothering me. We also have to factor in the economic aspect. Like Jared said, wellness encompasses everything. There's social, economic, emotional. With the economy and the healthcare prices and the costs, most people opt not to go to hospitals. So Jared, how would you advise people, regardless of these factors that may influence them against going to get the checkup? How would you advise people to go about it? Maybe I can make a joke. This joke used to say that I saw our Honorable President who wanted to introduce the healthcare aids in our interiors. And we used to say that if men could do their job, we could be able to diagnose breast cancer if they could do their job well. That was just a joke. But people, I can't advise them to go to the hospital on a daily basis to be able to be cured. They are their best doctor, number one. And our first objective is to educate them. It is to empower them. When they are empowered, we will have lesser workload on the health sector. Because believe me, they are bringing a lot of strength, the pharmaceutical interest in our country. We really export much. That's why when we are sick, it drains our economy. Our budget countrywide is just a small percentage to the healthcare. And we can advise them that the way to go is to have unhealthy habits and healthy lifestyle for them to come to the hospital. We are here to empower them. Look at imagine, you see somebody at 14, they are using pills to regulate their pregnancy at 14, 15, 16. And you feel somebody has infertility issue at 22. There is a burden on health that could be avoided if they could be educated, empowered on time. And that's why we are here to empower the public. We are not here to commercialize on daily basis. And that's why he is not trying to tell them about the supplement before he empowers them. And that's why you want to have a very thorough conversation on how should they live healthy. And from there we can talk. So there are some of the, mostly it's the habits. The habits that we do, the things that we take in are what affect us in future. So this goes very well hand in hand with the diet. So what is the value of maintaining a healthy diet? We know right now we have so many junk food places. We have Glovo, Uba It, they will deliver to your doorstep. And people order, you have discount codes and whatnot. Monika, what would you tell the youth who are in university or they are just starting out their lives and they prefer not to cook or eat healthier options? Even kids who are younger, we take children out and they just eat pizzas and chicken. What would you advise the parents and the people who do these habits? And this is more to what we are eating. And I will just quote one philosopher who said that if we don't take care of our diet now, medicine will be the lifestyle in future. So we have to be very cautious of what we are eating. That is to say you have to drink a lot of fluid water. In fact the highest percentage of our meals should have some amount of water that is fluid. We need to take a lot of vegetables, we need to take minimum carbs but we have a problem why the vegetables are very expensive. So what is available is the carbs, the Ugarli, the rice and because you want to take a large portion so that you get full then the diet then becomes inadequate. And so by the time you are getting to 35, 40 then our immunity is so low that we cannot fight infections or diseases. Again the other challenge that we have with food and this is something that I think that need to be addressed well the availability of food. We need to grow our natural food because there is availability of, you know, global of course my daughter will ask for the pizza and you know, somehow I will have to buy it but what am I doing after buying that pizza? What is it I am doing after buying that pizza? Am I advising this girl that after you eat that pizza then you need to drink a lot of water so that you detoxify your body so that you clean out your body of the toxins believe you me we don't drink water and you will even hear somebody comes to the hospital and they tell you by the time I don't love water mi is kunyua gemaji na kunyua gatu glass moja please, please water is the whole medicine in this life and we have to include it in our diet. So you've mentioned water and foods that are also high in the water content as well because water detoxifies our systems and our bodies and people will argue as I was talking about the economy investing in healthy foods is expensive they'll tell you buying all this vegetables buying the healthy oils and whatnot is very expensive also working out and paying for jib memberships they argue that it is expensive Jared, tell us the value over why we need to put money into our health and the things that will benefit us internally as early as now let me just pick a point on preventive health there is a program I was brought by Bishop Zambu he had a lot of work load in his cancelling desk where the women were struggling with sexual transmitted diseases and also a very heavy load on HIV but the funny part, they were innocent it was the effect of our culture nowadays there is this command that says do not commit adultery but our culture has changed the lexicon and the wording we have gone light touch on morals we speak about cheating and we go light and we have a vibe so I am not here to bring a moral principle on the public wherever your orientation be but I am here to say this that if we empower the public on preventive health that's why we had to take those women who are working on high risk areas through preventive care they can take preps or they can be able to be immunized based on the condition or disease that are affecting their areas therefore it's more of empowerment we could empower this kind of people I can't close all the clubs there are people working generally in high risk areas where such encounters is the world of the day but if we can empower them we can prevent the counter effect of their diseases that's why we are here to empower the public can we work on preventive before we work on curative curative is very expensive before if you knock my clinic when you are on curative condition you can prescribe at a fee but on preventive it's more on your side but if you can approach it easy you know your husband you know he's a striker probably not from my new he's a striker are you an arsenal fan genre? that was a long shot you know your husband so you take preventive measures early so that there is no I think I'm breathing a point to the public and that's a very good point because it's better to prevent something than treat it let's talk about something like cancer cancer is something that is very hard to it's almost impossible to get rid of so if you can prevent it by doing the assessments eating right, watching what you put into your body then you'll go much ahead than people who just disregard all that now Monika let's picture someone who has a good diet they drink water they do frequent medical checks but they may have a job that requires them to sit in an office so they're not very stationary or they work from home so they're always in a position where they're seated they're not as active and they do not prioritize working out and even walking what is the need if any working out and walking because I've had about 10,000 steps at least what is the essence of all these things in our health you see actually the way our bodies are made if I just sit there is that aspect of the blood circulation in the body if I just sit the whole day without moving then there is going to be stasis what we call the blood will not return so you will be advised to not only sit in the morning when we wake up the first thing you do just jog in the house you don't need to walk out create a place for yourself do jogging make yourself sweats in the evening when you're leaving work okay I leave work and maybe just dive into the car and I drive home but after that what do I do in the house for me before I sleep I must do squats I must jog just on spot jogging just raising why? because I want to improve my circulation if there is no circulation into the vital organs then I'll start feeling those feelings of you're feeling tired you're feeling fatigued you don't want to wake up you don't want all those challenges so it is very important to create some time to do some physical activities regardless of whether you feel like or not you need to move your body and you see the way that's very well said you have to at least do something and when we paired with what Jared was saying when you start early you prevent all the issues that can come about when you're getting older and your bones are tired and whatnot so Jared why would you advise someone to at least walk like the way she said most people will jump into the car or call a ride to take them home or even if they do walk it's very short distances because now we have convenience of forms of transport we have convenience of figuring out if we can walk from home or at the office or even if we have classes we can do the classes at home what is the essence of just walking around and taking a walk and breathing in fresh air even as part of the preventative measures let me I'll just throw the ball back to her because wellness is much of her specialization but I'll build the body a little bit on positive self image I think because you're speaking about jogging, you're speaking about dietary we are having an issue with the people who are having a negative self image on themselves I've seen this procedure for enlarging breast, this procedure for enlarging your waist, it's common and we charge very expensive we don't mind making money you can come on board, I'll do it very fine but I'm saying to say why do you go to that extent is because of negative self image and that's why we encourage them if they can jog, they can defeat their self image their vibe will be enhanced their confidence will be build up that's why we are telling them eat healthy, jog, keep fit so that you can have a positive self image for ladies, I'm sorry you have to look good and then so forth and it affects us a bit more even the way we walk yes, you can see even this is, dermatologists will tell you most of our products maybe for you want to change your orientation in terms of color and use extreme products, you see negative self image that pushes you to try to change your shape your orientation, your color but I want to tell people if they can embrace, it's a spiritual basically from inside outside self acceptance they can go and accept themselves they can work on their positive vibe positive self image I love this campaign and that's also with wellness this campaign they said I love it, I support it because now we are not bleaching much and now we are accepting so I just want to take a very short break and come back on that note because that is part of the wellness we want to talk about the overall wellness such that you feel confident in your body and you're okay such that you do not need any other additional services so let us take a very very short break but I want you to go on our social media platforms right now and write a comment if you have a question ask our professionals over here and they will advise you what to do and we will come back right after this break this is power talk stay tuned to Y254 TV


This book opens with some of the most original, laugh-out-loud, viciously and accurately pointed sociopolitical satire you will ever see anywhere. It is about an alien anthropologist named Benaroya, who, after many years of filling out applications and taking tests, finally has the opportunity to come to Earth to study the human race firsthand. She thinks we're adorable. Unfortunately, about halfway through the book, all of the sharpness and humor that characterize the first half of the book disappears. It becomes a dull, typical slog, and it basically has no ending. Okay, that's it for the short review. Now I want to say a few more things about this book. If you've watched my reviews, then you know that one of my pet peeves is an author who can't finish what they start. This is a classic example of an author just dropping the ball. I don't understand it, and it infuriates me. I was so disappointed when I first read the book that I loaned it to a friend of mine to see what she had to say about it, and her evaluation was the same. It was jaw-droppingly great at the beginning, but then halfway through it just turns to crap. But the first half of this book is so strong and so original that I've kept it in my library ever since I found it 15 years ago. I'm so enthusiastic about what little is original about this book that I want to read you a few examples. Right here on page one, never forget these bushmen must eat other creatures in order to survive. Not a single one of their leaders, presidents, popes, kings, basketball players has a shred of ethics whatsoever. Carry a weapon at all times and don't hesitate to kill. The anthropologist was taken to the hospital wing and x-rayed as she lay under a sheet. Her teachers had said that earth treatment was laughable, now to find out if this was true, but just being here was exhilarating. Benaroya had studied these bush people. She examined their artifacts, watched a zillion films, read books, tried to understand their seemingly senseless customs, but this was reality. Genuine human beings, how awesomely thrilling. They moved about, starched coach, rustling, pinching and probing her, little hearts beating, warm breath going in and out, sweat glands hard at work, taking themselves ever so seriously. Benaroya felt suffused with love. She stared rapidly at their faces and was overwhelmed when they sneezed, blinked, coughed, or licked their mucous membrane lips. Especially she loved to hear them chatter as they strutted and posed and performed their rituals like earnest chickens. Okay, let's recap briefly. We know that male bodies are incomplete because of that stunted Y chromosome, hence the male's lack intuition, which merely means they're less intelligent having a closed off awareness. But since primitive earth exists at a level of barbarism, the male is the chosen sex.  Flattering movies about them are turned out by the hundreds. They run government, business, religion, sport and crime, which are all actually the same thing. These two paragraphs on page 86 kind of sum up the whole book here. The course called Primitive Food was really tough, boy. It took a full semester to learn to distinguish earthy food from their droppings. On the final exam, you had to tell a bowl of beans from a bowl of hot rabbit raisins.  The color and temperature were identical for Pete's sake, and the taste was only slightly different. Then came Savagery 1 where you learned that earthies lived under a dark cloud called law, and that law was based on threats of violence. Put money in the meter or we'll drag your car away.  Fill out all the blanks or you lose your job. Then the do-gooder groups arose, condemning violence and advising a return to law, but law was based on violence. From this circular non-reasoning, the Rysemian students learned what it meant to be earthy. It meant sick from word go. Jody Scott wrote a sequel in 1984 called I Vampire. It's about a 700-year-old female vampire from Transylvania named Sterling Oblivion, who falls madly in love at first sight with Virginia Woolf, who happens to be Benaroya wearing one of her favorite human bodies. I tried to read it and I couldn't. It was awful.


What's up everyone it's your girl Kenzie here from Leighton Sports Cards and I'm ripping a personal here for Kevin H. We've got a 2021 Panini Prism football hobby. All right best of luck Kevin. Thanks as always for hopping in. See some QB color. See some nice little number. Color. QB ink. About a little bit of both. Bada boom bada bang. Marry Rogers. Kyle Trask Rookie. Got blue ice of Nelson Aguilore to 99 and emergent rookie of Kyle Pitts. Jabral Cox. Chuba Hubbard Rookie. We've got blue waved to 199. Brevin Jordan. We've got four minute forest camo up next. Rookie. Texans come on. Give us Mills Mafia. Ah Brevin Jordan on the forest auto. Forest camo. Love the camos. Cool one there. That is 20 of 25. You think so Drew? Yeah you never know. I mean for a hundred bucks taking a chance at some of these you know up and coming high schoolers and even we've got a Tom Brady base. Kids in college that still have a few years. Felton Jacob Harris and that would be like their first autograph card to you know red waved to 149. Fred Warner and a DHOP brilliance. You never know and that was out of what three I think it was. That orange was sick. Look cool against the basketball. Too felly. Joseph we've got orange waved to 60. Devontae Parker Dolphins and silver. Keva Kyle Vinoy. Sean Bateman. Sam Ellinger. We've got purple to 125. Trayquan Smith Saints. Silver. Akeem Hicks. Chris Evans. Jalen Phillips. Purple ice to 225. Steve Largent Seahawks. And we've got sensational signatures. Tua. Taga Vi Loa. Boom. Here you go Kevin. Nice Tua. That is 20 out of 149. Second Tua auto that we've pulled tonight in personals. That's crazy. We'll mag that to Aforia. Pulling out a contender's optic out of 20 as well I believe. That's crazy. Eric Stokes. Micah Parsons rookie. Orange to 249. Denzel Mims. And hype of the Andres Swift. Terrace Marshall Jr. Jamar Jefferson rookie. Purple ice to 225. Big move for the Steelers. Champ Bailey lockdown. Head reporter. Sand Tylen Wallace rookie. Seth Williams. Hyper to 175. Walter Payton Bears. And break rookie. Najee Harris. Not sure. Joey B. Second year. Kenneth Gainwell. Khalil Herbert. Red Wave rookie to 149. Jake Funk Rams. Silver Tom Brady. Nice. I don't know if I have pulled the Silver Tom Brady out of prison yet. That's crazy. Pulled a really nice blue shimmer last night out of first off the line. That was the 25. Putty Pay. Greg Russo. Purple ice to 225. Michael Gallop Cowboys. And fireworks rookie Zach Wilson. Last pack here for you Kevin. Jamie Davis. Ambry Thomas rookie. Orange to 249. Young Ho Ku. Falcons. And Silver Rookie. Shane Buccelli. Chiefs. All right Kevin, that'll do it for your box. Congrats on your hits. Thanks for hopping in as always and we will get these right out to you.


Welcome to our webinar, How to Navigate the Charitable Giving Landscape. I'm Susan Hope Bard and I'm going to be your host for today's event. We are super excited to bring you Melinda Rolf and Yuri Lukachev from the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth for this engaging and interactive webinar. Before we actually get started with the content, I do want to review a little bit about the platform that we're using today for the webinar. We are using ReadyTalk. ReadyTalk has a far left hand side which is a bar for your chat. So you can feel free to chat in any questions you might have. So at any point in time during the event there is no need to raise your hand. You can simply chat in if you have questions from Melinda or Yuri. If you are having any technical difficulties please also chat those in and we will try to work with you to resolve them. All of the phone lines if you did need to call in are muted. Sound should come through your computer speakers. If for any reason it doesn't, Becky has chatted out the dial-in by phone number or you can also use Skype and the passcode. If you lose your Internet connection you can simply reconnect using the link that was emailed to you in your confirmation or your reminder email. You can find upcoming and past webinar archives on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. The great news is we are recording this event and you will receive an email with this presentation, the PowerPoint presentation along with a link to the recording archive and any links to resources that Yuri and Melinda provide. You can also tweet us at TechSoup or use hashtag TS webinars. Just as a reminder, audio does play through your computer speakers. If you are hearing any type of echo it may be that you are logged in more than once and need to close that instance of ReadyTalk. I am going to introduce our presenters today and then talk a little bit about TechSoup. We have two amazingly talented and kind-hearted people on this event today. Melinda Rolfs, she is the Senior Director of Data and Analytics at the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth and Yuri Lukachev. He is the Senior Specialist for Data Philanthropy. As I mentioned, I am Susan Hope Bard and I am the Training and Education Manager here at TechSoup. I have two wonderful folks on the back end that will help you with your chat questions. That is Becky Wiegand and Alicia Kitt and they are both here at TechSoup as well. I am going to talk to you a little bit about TechSoup. TechSoup is headquartered here in San Francisco, California. While I talked to you a little bit about TechSoup, I do want you to tell us where you are joining us from. Let's practice using that chat box. Go ahead and chat in the city and state that you are connecting from. Or if you are from another country, please let us know where you are located. I see folks coming in a lot from New York. So Melinda and Yuri, a lot from your neck of the woods. Yay!  We have 62 partner NGOs and we have provided more than $5.2 billion to the nonprofit sector. So that is a little bit about TechSoup. As you are chatting in where you are coming from, a quick reminder, no need to raise your hand at all. You can simply chat in your questions or if you have any challenges with the technology, you can chat that in as well. And to get us started, before I turn it over to Melinda, our first presenter, we've got a poll question for you. So I want you to get your fastest fingers ready. We want to ask you, what are some of the issues that your organization struggles with? Is it fundraising performance? Is it access to data? Access to data analyst? Or is it other? You can select multiple things. And if it is something that is other, go ahead and use your chat box to chat that in. I see people are really fast. We've got a lot of people responding. And I'm going to give you a few seconds to do that. I have some people chatting in, turning audience members into donors. All right, all fundraising performance. There's a lot of folks chatting that in as well. So I am going to give you five seconds as we get in the last few responses. That is 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And you can see here the results from all of your peers out there in nonprofits and libraries. And I see some folks are still chatting or indicating their challenges. So thank you for that.  So that's really good for us to know as we begin this event. So Melinda, without further ado, I would love to turn this over to you to talk about what you do. Thank you so much. Great. Thank you, Susan, and hello everyone. And thank you so much for joining us today. This is our first webinar on how to navigate the charitable giving landscape. We are really excited to be here today. So we will start off with a brief introduction to the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth, who we are and what we are doing. Then we will go into donation insights. This is our guide for individual charitable giving trends. Then we will take you through some insights and share ideas on how to use the information. But first, I do need to just touch base on our terms and conditions. This reading and we are using this donation insights report or any data within it is subject to the terms of use and it's available on our website. So who are we and what is the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth all about? So Mass created the Center for Inclusive Growth as a separate subsidiary to address the issue of income inequality. And we do this by combining expertise technology, data, and philanthropic investments to empower on the front lines of social good. So at the Center we are working to uncover new approaches and actionable insights that we then share with our community that we continue to build. So we will share our insights at presentations, on our websites, panel discussions, and webinars like we are doing today. We do have three key efforts. We have an academic research effort, a programmatic effort, and an effort on data for social good or what we also call data philanthropy. And that's focused today. I'm sure a lot of you have heard a lot about data and big data and there sure is an abundance of it available today. But there is a growing digital divide for those who are working to solve society's problems and those with the resources to unlock that data. We are at the beginning of our journey and using this data to help bridge this divide. Now we have a polling question. Great. It's another opportunity for everyone to get their fastest fingers ready. Does your organization currently use external data sets and or insights to help your fundraising efforts? Yes or no? And this is a super fast one so I think I'm going to give you 5 more seconds. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Wow, look at that, Melinda. Great. Okay. So I'm going to start off a little bit about a personal journey regarding data philanthropy. So for me it really started about 2 years ago when I was working at MasterCard Advisors. So what is Advisors? It's MasterCard's professional services arm which leverages the company's anonymized and aggregated transaction data to provide commercial products and services that helps merchants and financial institutions grow their business. Oh, there was a period of time while I was at Advisors in which there seemed to be one major international disaster after that. And in our office space, it's an open office space. There's this huge screen TV and there's CNN was playing every day. And I would see these images of people who had so little and had lost absolutely everything. I always wanted to do in philanthropy. So it got me thinking, is there something that we could do as a company to help have a positive impact? Is there something we could do with our data assets and our expertise? So maybe nonprofits could benefit from similar insights that merchants and financial institutions have, especially to help improve their fundraising efforts. And wouldn't it be if we could offer these insights for free, essentially creating a form of data philanthropy? So the more research I did, the more I noticed a real information gap around individual charitable giving trends, a gap that I thought we could stage. So I just want to give you an example of this gap that I was seeing. So let's think about retailers, right? They have access to free, open source, granular, and timely consumer data provided by the U.S. government. And this has been available for years. And typically, if a for-profit organization wants to have more detailed information or more detailed data, they have the resources to purchase it. And what they do with this information provides them insights into consumer spending patterns so they can understand, well, where are the inflection points? So where are consumers buying? Are they shifting from, say, apparel to restaurants or jewelry to travel? It also helps them to benchmark so that they can understand how they are performing versus ears. It can also highlight opportunities for which direction or strategy opportunities for them. But this type of granular data is not readily available to nonprofits. So this is the gap I was seeing. So I took this idea and I entered it into an innovation contest with providing me with a great platform to make this concept a reality. Ultimately, the idea won and I was presented with an exciting opportunity, a career move within MasterCard to bring this idea to life. And this is how I came to the center. The concept is now what we call donation insights. We launched it back in December of last year and it consists of a report and a data set that answers questions such as, are people donating more or less? Which types of charities are they donating more or less to? When are people giving? What factors impact giving? How do they donate? Are they donating more online versus in person? And how is that trend looked over time? The data set consists of monthly data for total donations with a breakout for 9 different categories. This is the first time we've open sourced MasterCard data and made it to everyone for free. And you can download the report and data at themastercardcenter.org and we encourage you to share any questions that we may not get to today, any suggestions, tell us what's on top of mind for your organization at donationinsightsmastercard.com. This way we can work on improving this offering and everyone can benefit. I am going to touch just a little bit on our methodology so you can understand how we're doing this and understand what donation sites is and what it isn't. We leveraged Anonymized and Aggregated U.S. Donation Activity on the MasterCard Payment Work. So this is not an estimate for all tenders, meaning we are not making an estimate for check and cash. It is a view of electronic payments. As I mentioned, there's total donations, 9 different categories, monthly data starting in January 2009 and currently runs through December 2016. Now these queries, because you might be wondering which category do I really fit into? We based it on the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities or otherwise known as NTE system and this is determined by the IRS and you can find it on the web so it's publicly available. So some of the categories we have broken out are Education, Envoys on Animal Related and Human Services, just to name a few. So now we'd like to touch on some insights on donation growth. So this is a view of total growth. So if you look at the black line here, that's annual growth and orange bars represent the donation amount. So in 2011, you can see the growth was nearly 5% going down to 3% which was pretty much below in 2012 and then we steadily see an increase up to 8 and then we're at about 6% for 2016. Some of the category drivers in 2016 were Public Safety, Access to Relief and International Affairs because there was certainly no shortage of US and international natural disaster in 2016. So then if you look here on the right, we can see quarterly donation growth. So if we look at the first quarter of 2016, the growth here is 7.5%. And what we mean by year-to-year growth is that's the percentage increase from 2015. So first quarter of 2015 compared to first quarter of 2016. And what we can see in our data is that with each quarter we can see a decline in the growth rate, ending at over 4% in the fourth quarter. We believe that could be in part to the fact that people do donate in US President election cycles to political organizations and Yuri is going to touch on that in just a little bit. So now let's look at the actual data set that's on the website and it's in an Excel file. So on the far left you can see we have the month and as I mentioned earlier the data starts in January of 2000. Keep in mind this is a view for electronic payments. And the column here for growth and donation index amount. So you can see here in December of 2016 there was a 2% growth over December of 2015. Other information we have is the number of donations. So the growth in the number of donations so the number of times people are donating in a given time period. We also have the average donation size. So that's the average size that people donate each time they give. And then off to the far right we have an online index amount which is a growth that we're seeing in online transactions. So you can get a sense of how that is shifting over time. And then here on the left in the second column is what we call donation index amount. And the purpose of this is really to help people who want to look at the information on a quarterly basis or an annual basis like I showed you before. You can easily do that by doing further insights. So now we are going to touch a little bit on insights by cats. So this is to answer questions such as which types of causes are capturing more or less donations. So here in the yellow bars is environmental and animal related donation growth on an annual basis. Orange is disease and medical research.  We talk about total donation growth. It's not just the sum of the 9 categories that we have broken out. It's actually all of them. So they go from A through Z according to the NPEE system which I mentioned earlier. So what's interesting here is if you look in 2011 you can see that the donation growth to environmental and animal related causes started to exceed, well exceed, that of total donation growth. So you can see 7.8 and 8.2. And that is consistent throughout 2016. Conversely you can see that the growth in disease and medical research causes is actually significantly underperformed. And that too has been consistent through 2016. For reasons we suspect that the growth in environmental and animal related causes is so strong it's just potentially building more awareness out there about environmental concerns. So this slide is an example of how you could use your data to compare what we're seeing in the category. So again we're using environmental and animal related causes as a guide or as a comparison. And then the orange this time is just a sample charity that falls in that same category. So if we look here from 2010 through 2013, this particular charity pretty much inline to outperform the category. And their growth was pretty stable and strong from 2014 and into 2016. But if you didn't have access to data or how your category and peers are performing you wouldn't know that you're actually significantly starting to underperform your category. And so just having this knowledge gives you an idea of where you can start doing some research to understand what's changed. Is there something in our organization that's changed and is something different that our peers are doing from a fundraising perspective? So now Yuri is going to take you through some of the additional insights, factors that impact giving such as how people are donating and when people are donating. Thanks so much Melinda. So on this slide we combine charitable and political donations data and learn that there appears to be a substitution effect during US election cycles. So this effect is reflected in both Senate and presidential elections. And basically here just to look at the graph a little bit the access to the right is the share of political contributions. So it ranges from 0 all the way to 14%. The access to the left ranges from 80 to 100% and that's the share of charitable donations. So one thing to note is that charitable giving is consistently the lion's share of total. But it does seem that those donations to political causes are a headwind for charitable giving. And similar to how we talked about NTE categories in the beginning, political organizations are another factor that we can track within our payments framework. On the next slide we have a breakout that's similar to the previous slide, but here we're looking at the monthly distribution of political contributions. And we see that historically donations to political organizations start to increase in February of the year in which there is a US presidential election. In 2016 the share exceeded prior years for nearly every month leading up to the election with a surge in November relative to historical trends. So here again we look at 2004 and the 2.5% is the total share of political contributions within that year. In 2016 the share has almost more than double to 5.8%. So basically this growth is increasingly a headwind for charitable giving. We're basically seeing that the share of political contributions during those cycles increases. On the next slide we look at recurring payments share as a percentage of total donations. And here again we see that there is an increase. And in 2012 recurring payments share was around 3.8% and in 2016 it was 6.1%. So in this context when I say recurring payments we're really looking at recurring donations. So a donation where a user chooses to contribute either on a – it could be on a daily, it could be on a weekly or annual basis, but more frequently than not people elect to make contributions on a monthly or quarterly basis. So in this case this is something that's important to watch out for because as recurring payments share grows it's important to have this functionality enabled on your website so that you're able to participate in this trend. Now the next slide is a slightly different breakout for how people give and we're looking at the average recurring donation and comparing it to the average total donation. And what we see is that essentially the average recurring donation size increased to $43 from $41 in 2015 after experiencing decreases for six consecutive years. And this is the case for both average recurring donations and average total donations. And one of the things to note is that this reversal was driven primarily by strength and education, human services, and environmental related causes. So this 43 right over here compares to the average donation size for total donations of $63 which has also been steadily declining. Basically the reason for this decline is that the frequency of donations has increased. So people are donating more often but they're donating smaller amounts. On this slide we're looking at recurring giving and we're looking at again the different NT categories and what the average donation size is by category type. So now we see that the disease category has the highest average donation of $86.60. And environment has the lowest at $34.40. So this compares to total average recurring donation size of $43.20. So even though environmental causes have the lowest average recurring donation, people are still donating more often but with smaller amounts. So that's like the one thing to keep in mind in this case. And here we see that the average recurring donation size differs wildly by category. That's actually also the case in terms of share. So some categories have a much higher share of recurring donations than other categories. And now we have a poll question. Great, thanks Yuri. Another opportunity for you to participate. So the question is does your organization leverage digital resources for fundraising? And check all that applies. You use your website, you use email marketing, crowdfunding, mobile, or other. You can select as many as you want. And if you do select other, chat in what your other is. And I will give you, you guys are getting really good at this. Maybe five more seconds. Five, four, three, two, and let's take a look Yuri. Wow. And I see some people putting in, they may not have been able to click, but Facebook, social media, and for some folks they don't do that. They don't have some of the technical resources. So thanks for that question and thanks for answering everybody. Wow, that is very interesting. So here on this slide, this is a different slice of online giving. And now we are looking at just pure online donation growth. And we are comparing that to online and in person card donation growth. So the yellow bars represent online and in person growth. And orange represents just regular online donation growth. So here in 2010, we see that online and in person donation growth was at around 3%. In the same year, for just online, it was 9.3%. We see that the difference between the two is quite substantial. It is at around 6%. Now when we look at 2016, online and in person donation growth was at 5.9%. And just online donation growth was at 8.6%. So the gap here is at around 2%. So this basically signifies that there is increasing maturity within the donation space for online giving. But nevertheless, the industry has not really kept pace with online growth for total retail sales. So in 2016, annual online growth for total retail sales continued to exceed growth in online charitable giving. And this suggests that the shift to online is happening at a faster pace for retail purchases compared to donations. And when we speak about online retail growth, we are really talking about any purchases that are made through a website, any retail purchases.  Now on to the next slide, we are going to explore when do people give. And we see that increasingly, December is a very important month for giving. So in 2016, December represented 11.1% of annual volume. And same as for recurring payments, within the monthly distribution, some causes are much more reliant on donations in December. So for example, food and agriculture category received around 36% of their donations in December, while the international and foreign affairs only 23%. So you can also use this data set to basically compare how reliant your organization is on year-end donations versus year peers. And specifically within December, December 30th and 31st ranked as the top two volume days from 2013 through 2016 as people likely wait until the last minute to donate in order to give their tax deduction benefit for the year. So how does giving vary by day of the week? Essentially we know that more donations are being made online. But what are the variances when people donate in person versus online? And we see that people are more likely to donate offline on the weekend compared to online. Nearly 24% of offline donations are made on either Saturday or Sunday compared to almost 18% for online. However, Tuesday is the strongest day for online giving and Friday is the strongest day for in-person. Sunday is the weakest day of the week for both channels. And this intuitively makes sense because people have a lot more time on the weekend to get out of their office or out of their house and make that in-person donation. And now I will pass it on to Melinda for closing your remarks. Thank you, Yuri. And we are certainly getting a ton of really great questions here through the chat. So thank you everyone. We are working diligently to answer them. As I mentioned earlier, please go to MasterCardCenter.org, check out the report and the data set. We would love to hear from you. Any questions we can't get to today we need to answer via email. Please feel free to review all the insights, share your learnings, tell us what's top of mind for your organization. I mean, you are the fundraising experts and we would love to hear from you so we can learn as well. Thank you all for your attention. And I think Susan, we are ready to move to the Q&A portion of the event. Great. Thanks so much. We do have a lot of questions and maybe a few little bits of things that we want to clarify. Some questions came in to the chat about comparing the MasterCard data to other cards. And I just wanted you to clarify where this data comes from and how you share the data with nonprofits. Sure. So this data is based on MasterCard's transaction data. So we do not have access to competitor's data. And this is not something that is estimated for all of the tender. Great. Thank you. And I think I want to go back to the slide where we talked about the comparison between the performance of donations during political campaigns. And I think the question was, it was more of a speculation about the Johnson amendment which prohibits nonprofits from either endorsing or opposing political parties. So we think that there would be any effect of removing that amendment on the insights or the donations. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Just keep in mind that these are trends in individual charitable giving so I'm not sure that it really would have an impact from that perspective. Thanks. What about categories? Now we talked about NTE and a lot of folks have questions about where their organization fits in. Because it's determined by the IRS, we always recommend that you, I did shoot out a link where you can find out more about the NTE categories and perhaps determine where your organization falls. But which category has the highest volume of reporting in your data set? Yes, so the highest in our data set is education. So as a percentage of the total donations education in 2016 is 14%. Arts was second at 12.4 and the environment came in third, 10.2%. Great. Thanks. And I think what about strongest and weakest growth? What categories had the strongest and the weakest growth? Yeah, so what we saw in 2016 is we really saw strength in public safety, housing and shelter and also education. And so as far as the weakest, we saw weakness in food and nutrition but I would tell you that category tends to be quite volatile. Human services was another weak category and then the health related as we talked about earlier was also pretty weak. Thank you. A question from Sharon, do these numbers, the data that we're sharing include purchases of merchandise that benefit an organization or are they only reflective of cash donations? So we try to decide for merchandise but we can't always do it. So it is possible that there are some merchandise purchases from an organization in here. Great. Thanks. Also I believe we reported that there was some decreases in both. I believe it was on the slides. I'm trying to find it. Eric had a question about decreases in both of the years in 2013. So I don't recall if that was total donation around total donations or? In 2013, yeah. We can go back to that slide. Right. So total donation growth was 3% in 2012 and 3.5% in 2013. And if you look at what was happening in the economy, there was a blip and we think that there is a relation to that. Great. Thank you. Thank you for that insight. And there are people who want to make sure we've reach out at the link and actually download the report. And we will continue to chat that out. And I will also include that in the follow-up email. And we'll also include the email address where you can connect with the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth to ask any specific questions. So if you do have any other questions you don't need to raise your hand. You can simply chat them in. And I will ask Yuri and Melinda. And as I do that, I wanted to make sure that you guys were aware of the frequency of the reports and when you can expect new reports to come out. And we also chatted out where you can connect with the most recent reports. So Melinda, will you talk a little bit about the frequency of the reports where you house the archives of previous reports and when we can expect the next one? Sure. So although the data is monthly, what we are doing is releasing the report and data set twice a year. So the release will come out in September and the next one will be early fall of this year. Great. And just to double check, where can people archive previous editions of the report? They'll be able to get that from our website. Perfect. Thanks so much. And a quick reminder to everybody, we are recording this event. A lot of you folks are looking for the PowerPoint presentation and links. Not to worry. We'll send out the follow-up email today. And that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint presentation, and all the links that we've chatted out and we've talked about. We do have a couple other questions for in-person donations. What does that mean specifically as opposed to online donations? So how does MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth define that? So in our database what we have is we have a flag for when a transaction is online. An in-person donation would be, say for example, if they go to an event, or you run for a particular cause or do a walk or those types of things, that would be in-person. So where there's what we call a POS system where they can take a card. Okay, so I think that answers the question. Great. Thank you. You're welcome. As I move through the end portion of this event, do feel free to chat in any questions you have about the data that was shared. We do want to know at least one thing you learned today. This has been very data-centric and pretty data heavy. The goal is to help you understand how the charitable giving landscape, the data that MasterCard is providing for you, and also their insights how it can relate to your nonprofit. So we want to know one thing you learned, one thing you might try to implement, or one thing you might share with a co-worker. So go ahead and chat that in as I talk about some of our other opportunities. We have TechSoup courses which is our online and on-demand learning management system. So you can get tech training online anywhere, anytime. The majority of our courses are absolutely free. We have a lot of design courses. We also have some branding courses and some tips on fundraising, specifically using social media. We have something called TechSoup 30s, and we've run a series of those. You can go to that at techsoup.course.tc.catalog. You create an account, and then you can go in and register for any of the courses. It is just like a library card. Once you get your library card or your account, you can go in and check out any of the courses. And we do want to hear your feedback on the courses. We have some additional upcoming webinars. Next Thursday we have a very interesting topic. It is the third wave of nonprofit technology, technology for social change. So how nonprofits can be more active in instigating social change. Also on the 27th we are going to talk about security, getting the most out of semantic endpoint protection. You can go to our webinar events page that Becky will chat out so that you can register for those events that are coming up. Or you can also look at our archives where you can view previous events. We do record the majority of our events and post them on our archive pages. You can do a search by category or simply do a search in our search bar. And you will come up with webinars, articles, or other resources to help you with that particular topic. Wait a minute, is there one more question? There is. There is one more question from Jill. How do you account for a sudden mass increase in giving like the Cecil the lion campaign or the ice bucket challenge? That's an interesting question. Thank you Jill. So it's captured of course if people are using the MasterCard so I can tell you that when I looked at when the ice bucket challenge happened and I looked into the category for disease and medical research we did see an increase overall in that category around that time. So we are capturing that. And I also wanted to add, the one thing that it's kind of difficult to say is whether there's statistical significance, whether it did happen because it's Cecil the lion campaign or whether it was just some other increase but we do observe those sort of campaigns occurring in other categories as well. So for example, I'm forgetting now the date but whenever the movie about Blackfish came out there was a very big increase in donations specifically within the environmental related sector. So we do observe those spikes. It's hard to attach statistical significance due to those campaigns or whether it's some other reason but it is likely that it is as a result of the campaigns. Great. Thank you so much both of you for the insight on that question. Let's see, I think we don't have any other questions specific to this event so I do want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Melinda and Yuri. Everyone on this call, all nonprofits and libraries, any of you that have joined they worked really hard in this presentation to make sure that it was relevant to you and that's why we wanted to give you lots of opportunities to ask questions. Like I said they worked really hard. They practiced a lot so I want to thank them from the bottom of my heart for doing this for us and we hope to perhaps do it again or perhaps take a different angle and do another event. I tell you that I also want to thank Becky on the back end for chatting out all of the resources that we've mentioned and Alicia for also monitoring our chat. And most of all to all of you because if you're working in nonprofit or libraries I know your most valuable asset is your time so we appreciate all of your time today. We're ending a little early which is we're giving you back a little bit of time but we also want to make sure we answer your questions. So please do chat in any questions for Yuri and Melinda now before we sign off. And also everyone keep your eyes on our webinar and events page on TechSoup.org and please do join us for other events. Okay, well Melinda and Yuri I guess I want to thank you again. I don't know if you'd like to say anything to our guests today and then we can sign off. So thank you everyone so much for joining us. I hope you found some valuable insights here. And feel free to reach out to us. And thanks so much Susan and the whole TechSoup team. We really appreciate it. Great. So I also want to thank our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for providing this platform. And again everyone have a great rest of your week. Have a wonderful weekend. Have a great summer weekend. And we'll be seeing you on another webinar soon. Thanks so much. Bye-bye.


We're here at the ID Tech X show with Paul Label from Adaptive City Mobility. Tell us quickly what your company does. Yes, so we are developing a competitive and emission-free e-mobility system for cities which consist of an ultra-light vehicle which we see here. Fantastic, so you built this vehicle? We built a vehicle with 10 partners also with a manual battery swapping system and an intelligent connectivity software which collect all real-time data of all entities. Right, so does it mean it collects data about how it drives and issues in the car and it sends that to someone for diagnostics or what sort of data does it collect? So it's not a single vehicle, it's an E-flate system. That means we will search for operators in big cities and they buy a whole fleet and therefore they need the real-time data. Where are the vehicles, where are the end users with their reservation app and where are the battery swapping systems and in this way you can guarantee that you have no problems with charging time, with limited range, things like that. So it looks like here you've got the battery system which just slots out from underneath the car and a new one can be put in. Is that correct? So it's easily to click in and to open. Nice. And then you easily can put it out like this. Oh, great. And then we have a trolley, you click it in and drive the trolley in a bike garage which is connected to your solar panel. Right. There you use your own renewable energy, store it, use it in the building or in the vehicle. Right. In that way you realise CO2. Right, that's great. What are some of the other innovations that make this vehicle different from other electric vehicles? So the vehicle weighs only 550 kilograms including battery weight. Right. We have a carbon-fibre safety cell which protects the guests which weighs only 40 kilograms. Okay. And around this safety cell we adapt all the other parts which makes the car light and safe. I noticed you've got some e-paper displays on the back of the car, why? Yeah, so we also have advertisement panels at the back of the car out of e-ank technology because we want to be competitive as objective. That means we have to reduce costs wherever it's possible so we make the car cheaper than other cars and we create new income sources like a digital advertisement on a whole fleet. Right. So we as a system operator we get commissions for the right reservation, payment process, energy sales, digital advertisement and mobility services. So the income model is not any more selling cars, producing cars, it's dealing with data. And so what is your progress in terms of getting this to market? What are your next steps to commercialise this vision? At the moment we are now developing the prototype system of the vehicle, the energy system and the software as well as the advertisement system. The next step is to do the industrialisation. So do the serious development and start planning a production. Yeah. Very nice. And do you also provide the software to manage the fleet of vehicles as well? Exactly, yeah. Is that really developed? Yeah. So the space of the software is software which already works for, for example, for BMW. Right. So it's a high-end software which we first develop and we integrate new innovations like, we call it multi-mode. Right. So you can use the vehicle as taxi, in the car, sharing the tourism or the logistics. Right. And you just have to switch the modes from taxi to logistic. Right. So you drive tours around the lake during daytime in the evening, there's no more tourists. Right. So we switch the mode and say you are logistic now. You click out each single backseat and then a euro pallet is in the back and you can do city delivery. Okay. And our objective is that the vehicle runs 24 hours. I see. 24 hours. Because you can swap out the batteries very easily, so they're charging. So we achieve that vehicles are better utilised. Right. We can reduce traffic density massively. How long did it take you to get to this stage of having a prototype now, a real vehicle? Yeah. So I personally started the project five years ago to set up the project, find a partner, find investment. And then the first year where we already were public funded we do market research, concept work. Yeah. And since three years we developed the vehicle and the software and all the other technologies and in the end three years. Right. Yeah, for development. Fantastic. I want to see what's the proudest thing about this vehicle that you're most proud of. What's the big thing you overcame that, yeah. So I was inspired 30 years ago when I did a world trip in Bangkok. I drove the first time Tuk Tuk. Right. And it was real fun. Right. So I always carried that idea with me, small vehicles, three-seaters for the inner city, that's the perfect solution. And then it started the electromobility time and now I could realise this idea of a smart three-seater which a lot of function and that's where I'm very proud for that and we reached that in a small team with top experts. Fantastic. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thanks for watching.


Is this the end times? It sure seems that way. With the Bitcoin cash-holy war, profits drying up for miners and an almighty apocalyptic market crash, it is hard to see sometimes the light through the darkness. But please, hodlers, do not lose faith. Wise sages foresaw this sell-off and told us not to panic. Like technical expert Willie Wu of Wuble, who said the bear market would continue until quarter to 2019, and Mike Novogratz, who warned Bitcoin would not break 10k this year. Also this week, me too in crypto, crypto and religion, the IMF loves CBDCs and the battle for Bitcoin cash. Ladies and gentlemen, here's your weekly hodlers digest. For the first time since October of last year, Bitcoin's market cap fell below $100 billion, breaking the recent trend of low volatility. In just 12 hours, the total market cap fell from around $210 billion to $180 billion. Almost all major cryptos, including Ethereum, XRP and Bitcoin cash, were similarly affected, posting double digit losses. Following the heavy depreciation of Ethereum, XRP became the number two crypto. Though still too early to identify the cause of the market crash, many immediately linked it to the uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin cash's hard fork, which was scheduled for November 15. From its inception, crypto and blockchain were believed to be the means to bank the unbanked and change the world for the better.  In developing economies and even in some developed ones, it is often the men who control the finances, depriving the women of financial agency. Well, an unexpected use case for crypto and blockchain appears to be helping women enjoy financial independence. In China, a previously suppressed story of historical sexual abuse was uploaded onto the blockchain as a way of circumventing the Chinese government censorship. In Afghanistan, a woman was able to support herself using Bitcoin during a difficult divorce. Sex workers, the majority of whom are women, can find themselves in precarious financial situations because banks can often refuse them everything from checking accounts to mortgages, a decision not based on income, but on dubious moral grounds. More recently, a sexual assault survivor was able to use innovative crowdfunding to support herself while recovering from an attack. When most people think crowdfunding, they think Kickstarter, which is a great way for raising funds for health care, but not so good if you need anonymity. Well, now there is a token-based system on the Ethereum network that allows survivors to post requests for help, which doesn't require a government ID or a bank account to raise the money. Only the organization who runs the scheme needs to know the survivor's identity. We spoke to Rachel Cook, CEO of Seeds, about the project and more broadly how it relates to the overall Me Too movement. Women in those situations, people in those situations who are being exploited often feel that they have to stay because they need the money, because they have to pay for, they have kids or whatever, they have bills that they have to take care of. So the extension of that that I saw was, okay, we need to start creating opportunities to make it very easy and anonymous if necessary for people to get funds when they're in those circumstances. And the current system, the non-crypto system, makes it often very difficult to do that. Even if you're going to a non-profit or whatever, they're just all of these hurdles. We wanted to make it super simple and super easy to access help. Yeah, and blockchain can obviously facilitate that in ways that other stuff can't. One of the requests for help we granted was for a guy in South Sudan who wanted $500 to open up a small business. And that guy's network, we can assume, isn't going, he's not going to be able to source very much money if he had like a GoFundMe or something. So it's sort of like a distributed GoFundMe that allows you to reach people that wouldn't otherwise see your request. I discovered crypto in 2013, so it wasn't like I was crazy earlier anything, but I mean the Bitcoin that I bought in 2013 I had to sell later to pay employees when investors were ignoring me. In large part I think because of gender discrimination within the VC world. So I'm also solving a problem for myself, which is that it's been way harder for me to get the funds I needed to do the things I wanted to do than for many of my mail, like peers. People were really afraid of like being attacked if they spoke up. I've been so disheartened so many times that I just didn't have any hope. So it was really encouraging, astonishing really to see like that me too happened. So there are real shifts happening that I couldn't believe that I didn't believe that I would necessarily see, at least not for a longer period of time. Ethereum based stablecoin X8, issued by Swiss crypto firm X8 AG, was recently declared compliant with Shariah Law. The Shariah Review Bureau, a Katari consultancy and audit firm specializing in Shariah advisory services, issued the certificate of compliance. Crypto trading has often associated with sheer monetary speculation, which is forbidden by Islamic law. However, X8 crypto asset, which is backed by eight fiat currencies in gold, proved it can be trusted by Islamic investors. X8 AG is now planning to launch a crypto exchange that will include a Shariah compliant trading platform. We talked to Mansour Ahmed, representative of the Shariah Review Bureau to clarify the issue. The first thing is to understand the platform, its protocol and the native currency and how it is issued. Once the structure has been understood, then the next level is to review the TNCs, the terms and conditions based on which the coins or the tokens are going to be exchanged, transferred or sold. Without those TNCs, there is no Shariah compliance. If a certain coin is linked to an activity, an underlying activity, which is involved in interest based lending or involved in the production and manufacturing of ammunition or pornography, then those coins would not be considered as Shariah compliant. Global religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism have maintained a cautious and often skeptical position on crypto currencies, mainly because of their highly speculative nature and shady reputation. However, these very same religious organizations have shady reputations of their own. The Catholic Church, for example, was guilty of institutionalized anti-Semitism in medieval Europe and beyond for exploiting anti-Yursary laws by limiting Jews to money lending and effectively creating a mercantile class. The tax-free status of religious organizations gives the impression that they are not financially savvy entities, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Like any kind of organization, religious ones have revenue streams and complex investment portfolios. But what are their attitudes towards crypto in general? In Jewish law, Bitcoin currently doesn't have the status of currency, but it does have monetary value. We spoke to Rabbi Sharpen to explore Judaism's attitude towards crypto. If cryptocurrency is the common currency used in our official or even an unofficial way, but it common, it used in a country or a municipality or whatever it is, so then it becomes a currency. But until that happens, it would not be considered a currency, it would be a commodity. Just like any other foreign currency somewhere else is a commodity. I think that is a very important lesson that the whole crypto currency teaches, which is not really just about cryptocurrencies, all currencies, but cryptocurrency is really where it drives home that point that we really have to be looking for things that have intrinsic value to them, not just things that are made up value.  And that has intrinsic value. While the the money, you know, today it's here, tomorrow it's gone, tomorrow it might be back. But it doesn't have any any lasting value. Last year, the Buddhist organization Lotto Network launched a cryptocurrency based on the principles of the Buddhist economy. The Catholic herald came out last year actually defending crypto, arguing that it shouldn't be dismissed simply because it's a new technology. The Vatican actually flirted with the idea of wanting a crypto of their own, but it never materialized. More recently, however, the Pope actually condemned Bitcoin for its use in the modern slave trade. We spoke to God's bankers author Gerald Posner about the fascinating financial history of the Vatican. The Vatican uses its its financial apparatus, mainly the Vatican Bank, as a cross between sort of a central bank like the Federal Reserve and a private bank like a JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs. And they invest in all types of properties, the stocks, currencies, bonds in order to get a return and make money for the church. And it's remarkable to think that the Catholic Church 150 years ago was absolutely against the idea of capitalism. They grudgingly got into capitalism because they had no other choice in the 20th century. And then they embraced it wholeheartedly from 1940 and 1950 and on. It has no shareholders. It has only one director, the director in its in its charter is the Pope. It operates as a central bank because all the money that comes through the Vatican goes through that, but it had no disclosure laws, no transparency rules at all that applied to it. So what it was able to do is it was essentially an offshore bank in the heart of a foreign capital room. So who were the Italian who had a lot of money and you wanted to hide it before cryptocurrencies existed or and you weren't able to have an anonymous currency. You didn't know what to do with that money. If you took a suitcase of cash, and you walked across one street corner and one street you're in Italy, technically, that's the jurisdiction across the street. There's no wall barrier customs. You're in the Vatican City. You give that cash to a person who has an account in the Vatican Bank and they deposit it and it disappears. What I mean by that is Italian authorities can no longer follow it. Nobody in tax authorities can follow it. Nobody in the United States can follow it. And with these transfers with that currency to another entity that it deals with, it's out of the international system. So they have a foot in the banking system, but without having to buy by the rules. Now that's changed in the last years because the Europeans are now enforcing rules of transparency on them. But before that, it was just a wild offshore bank. I remember someone in 2017, the Vatican was going to adopt its own Vatican Bitcoin or the equivalent of a crypto. There was talk that maybe recipients of it or people got the point and use the point would pay a small commission. That commission would go to poor people would be recycled into good deeds for the Vatican. They haven't done that yet. Blockchain protocol EOS is being targeted by a new wave of criticism, pointing at its alleged lack of decentralization. Last week, a Reddit user posted a screenshot showing how an EOS arbitrator reversed a previously unconfirmed transaction in order to solve a dispute between two users. The arbitrator Ben Gates referred to the EOS Constitution to legitimize his intervention. He wrote, Under the powers afforded to meet as arbitrator under article six of the rules of dispute resolution, I Ben Gates rules that the EOS account in dispute should be returned to the claimant with immediate effect and that the freeze over the assets within the set account is removed. The kind of authority exerted by this arbitrator was seen by many as a form of power abuse, indicating the essentially centralized nature of the EOS protocol. According to critics, this way of solving disputes is reminiscent of traditional customer support services provided by centralized organizations. Others wondered what the point was of investing $4 billion to reinvent something, which essentially does not differ from traditional banking and legal systems. Criticism towards EOS was reinforced by a research paper published by blockchain testing company white blocked, indicating that EOS does not meet the criteria to be considered a real blockchain, asked Zach Cole, chief technology officer at white block to summarize the research team main takeaways. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of other nodes or whatever that are all keeping track of this ledger or anything like that doesn't really matter because as soon as the transaction reaches the block producer, that block producer has total control over saying this is a good transaction or this is a bad transaction. That's it. And if that block producer arbitrarily decides that this transaction is bad, it's gone. That there's really no unique value in using EOS. Why, why use that? Because first of all, the throughput is slower than it would be otherwise. And now they have like a committee of people that arbitrate, right? I mean, that sounds just like a bank. Why not just use a bank? Why not just build traditional software? What is the benefit?  So it's not decentralized. It has no security. And it actually presents a lot of vulnerabilities. On the other hand, Robert Kahnstorf, CEO of EOS Detroit and an EOS enthusiast stood up in defense of the technology. EOS is the first government blockchain that has attempted to do governance on this level. It isn't a recreation of the existing legal and judicial system at all, because it is not enforced through violence, which nation states use. Anyone who doesn't want to participate in the EOS experiment are welcome to get rid of their EOS. When an arbitration order comes down, the transaction history is never actually reversed. History isn't altered. So we still have censorship resistant properties. That's really important because you can unwind, you know, the transaction history and see how you can still see what the state of the blockchain was in the past without any alteration. And I that's a really key point that is missed in a lot of these articles. The latest controversy shaking the world of crypto reached its peak this week. Bitcoin Cash, the fourth top cryptocurrency for market cap, born out of a hard fork of the original Bitcoin, found itself at crossroads. With a new hard fork taking place on November 15, the Bitcoin Cash community was deeply divided on which path should be followed. On one side, Roger Ver, Bitcoin Jesus, author of the leading implementation Bitcoin ABC. On the other, Craig Wright, a man claiming to be Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto, although without showing much evidence of it, has been pushing for an alternative implementation called Bitcoin SV or Satoshi's vision. The essence of the controversy seems to lie in technical details. While Bitcoin ABC is supposed to tweak the original protocol, Wright supporters want to maintain the fork closer to the original. But the technical debate seems to hide a power struggle over who will control the future of Bitcoin Cash. As the controversy heated up, Wright even hinted at the possibility that miners supporting his version will use their hash power to jeopardize the competing technology. His radical statements sparked wide criticism in the crypto community, with Vitalik Buterin calling Wright a lunatic in a tyrant. As a result of the controversy, major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase decided to freeze most of the transactions involving Bitcoin Cash on the day of the hard fork. Many claimed that Bitcoin Cash's hash war is the main cause of the market crash, bringing Bitcoin and other crypto's value to record lows on Wednesday morning. Bitcoin Cash enthusiasts fear that the struggle will result in the creation of two weaker versions of the original protocol, once viewed by some to be the closest to Satoshi's original vision. Earlier this year, the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, took a combative stance towards crypto. She wanted to fight fire with fire, meaning that to essentially defeat Bitcoin, you could use its underlying technology blockchain against itself. It is then no surprise to hear that her approach and by extension the IMF hasn't exactly softened. She remains not exactly convinced on the virtues of crypto and instead appears to be fighting them on a new front. By shilling centralized digital currencies, Lagarde wants the international community to consider endorsing central bank issued currencies. Speaking at a FinTech conference in Singapore, the IMF head laid out her vision for government back tokens and digital assets. She said, I believe we should consider the possibility to issue digital currency. There may be a role for the state to supply money to the digital economy. Her speech follows the publication of an IMF report hot off the press on the benefits and drawbacks of CBDCs. Last week, the Swedish central bank announced the proposed 2019 launch of the E-Krona and Lagarde pointed out other jurisdictions were considering their own versions as well. For her, the benefits include satisfying public policy goals, financial inclusion, security and consumer protection and privacy and payments. The latter is perhaps the hardest to believe because the very reason that consumers are guaranteed privacy is that payments are not private. Governments and central banks can see everything. It is unlikely that IMF will ever come out in favor of crypto. If they do, Hodlers, be worried. Very worried. Bitcoin believers want control over the levers of monetary policy, not to seek the approval of the hegemonic institutions that control it. After such a stressful few days in the crypto market, now even going to your favorite US fast casual salad bar won't let you escape the crypto hype. Sweetgreen, every American's favorite for a quick and overpriced healthy lunch, announced a new $200 million funding round with the goal of introducing blockchain for bringing transparency to their food chain. Which would you rather have? The blockchain Brussels Sprouts Bowl or the crypto Cobb Salad? Let us know in the comments. And as always, like, subscribe and hodl.


Hey everyone, Coach Mike Vrable here. These are difficult times but we all need to work together to help prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Please help execute the game plan and remember to wash your hands regularly, seek medical care if you display any symptoms, maintain social distancing and stay home whenever possible. Together we can stay healthy and help prevent the spread of COVID-19.


TV show. It was interesting. A TV show and I kept a Brinkton Brighton Brinkton something like that on I think it's on Netflix. It's a it's a bit of a silly romance show set in an alternative kind of history of 1813 London. And it's romance and you know Bridgeton Bridgeton thank you Bridgeton and it's it's it's mostly silly and it's not a series I'm gonna recommend but what I found really intriguing about it and actually really liked it is that they basically cast black actors and white actors and it didn't like there wasn't black roles and white roles.  They were all you know that the show is about aristocrats.  Oh that's weird. They're just aristocrats. There's no issue with in a marriage there's no issue with anything other than the stupid hierarchy of classes in British society but a complete colorblindness now they had a kind of explain this they had a stupid explanation for it something about the king marrying falling in love with a black woman and making it queen and therefore now it's a colorblind society but that doesn't make any sense because they're families that have like the dukes that have long history that are all black going back way back into history in this thing right it's a historical bit so what it's fiction it's an alternative history but the beauty of it is you don't care what difference does it make the actors are acting a particular type it's alternative history historical fiction but why should historical fiction be focused on the color of people's skin why shouldn't historical fiction be focused on the character the culture that's what historical fiction should be about I mean why shouldn't James Bond I mean I'd love to see address all address over his name play James Bond I think it'd be a great James Bond but the whole idea of the color of somebody's skin is you relevant it's unimportant it doesn't matter it doesn't matter you're writing fiction and you're changing history that's what often happens in historical fiction and you're making race irrelevant and choosing to focus on the romance and it's completely appropriate and I found it quite charming and and refreshing and cool so the ideal Idris Elba thank you Idris Elba is he's I really like him as an actor I could discover Idris Elba in in the wire he played one of the one of the drug dealers he played the one who who goes to business school because he wants to run it like a real business so he goes to business school at night to study up to figure out how to run the drug business as a real business but he's a really good actor then he did he's got a kind of a really really really dark cop show in the UK Luther it's called Luther highly recommended but very violent very dark very upsetting but he's brilliant in it so he's he's been one of my favorite actors since I saw him in the wire and and I think he's got that charm and that presence that would make a good James Bond although he's getting now he's getting older it might might not be appropriate so the ideal the goal before I get to that it's an interesting question if you made a movie about slavery would you cast white people slaves maybe so it depends on what the purpose of the movie was and whether I wanted to focus on the fact that slaves were black but even historically slaves have been white I mean Spartacus is a good example of a white slave so if you were doing a movie about slavery in America in the 19th century no you would make them black because part of the issue of slavery was that they were black but they but the issue of romance in the court of King George in the eight early 1800s and the relationships between people and how they played out and the hierarchy between Dukes and whatever the other hierarchy the other people within the the hierarchy of aristocracy is has no relevance race has no relevance to that story now you could make a movie about 1813 where race is very important for example about you know slave trade or about anything that related to to the conflict between white and black or the conflict around race but if you're making a movie about where the theme the topic everything is about something unrelated to race where race is irrelevant then race is irrelevant it's about the romance even if at the time race was relevant that's not what you're dealing within this movie what we need today what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason by the intellect not by feelings wishes women's or mystic revelations any man or woman who values his life and who does not get want to give in to today's cult of despair cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought all right before we go on reminder please like the show we've got a hundred and sixty three live listeners right now 30 likes that should be at least a hundred I figure at least a hundred of you actually like the show maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it but but at least the people who like it you know I want to see I want to see a thumbs up there you go start liking it I want to see that go to a hundred all it takes is a click of a click of a thing whether you're looking at this and and you know the likes matter it's not an issue of my ego it's an issue of the algorithm the more you like something the more the algorithm likes it so you know and if you don't like the show give it a thumbs down let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes but if you like it don't just sit there help get the show promoted of course you should also share and you can support the show at your own book show dot com slash support on patreon or subscribe star or locals and and show your support for all for for the work for the value hopefully you're receiving from this and and of course don't forget if you're not a subscriber even if you even if you just come here to control or even if you're here like Matthew to defend marks then you should subscribe because that way you'll know when to show up you'll know what shows are on when they're on you're good notified right so yes like share subscribe support like share subscribe support there you go easy do one or all of those please


After the latest Nintendo Direct, it's fair to say my mind is swimming in just the possibilities of tears of the kingdom and this is without even diving into the other stuff that happened in the Direct. As an example, I'm literally downloading the Metroid Prime remaster right now. It's apparently a very brilliantly done game and for only $40, I mean it's number one on the eShop. No surprise, you should definitely be playing this game if not now when the physical version releases on the February 22nd, but that's not the topic of today's video. It is Tears of the Kingdom. Expect a ton of Tears of the Kingdom content because that is my most anticipated game ever. It's a sequel to my favorite game of all time, but here's the thing, there is one thing they didn't announce during this Direct that some people, including myself, did expect and that is a special edition Tears of the Kingdom Switch OLED. Now they didn't have to announce it in a Direct, in fact a lot of the other ones that they've announced in the past weren't actually announced in Direct.  So that's really not that surprising, so we might not even see an announcement of this thing until March or early April, but the thing is I can tell you quite confidently that not only are we getting a Nintendo Switch OLED, Tears of the Kingdom edition, we've already seen it and I can prove it. Now look, we know all about the leaks that were reported out before about this potential Tears of the Kingdom Switch OLED. You've seen the images, here they are again. Look, it's been called real, it's been called fake, no one's been able to really fully debunk it, although there's been like, oh because the box art isn't 100% perfect and maybe things don't run perfectly to the edge and there's just some things that look a little off, maybe you don't like the design, maybe the art looks a little lazy, but there are now some things that we can look back on and look at this and look at stuff today after that Direct and go, you know what, that was real. It might not have been a finalized, you know what, it could have been a prototype, but it was real and as such we are getting that likely design soon. Here's why we can say this, there are two things to look at. One of them is the symbol on the front of the Joy-Cons, alright that symbol on the front of the Joy-Cons that has that egg-like shape with the two wings and the eyes below it. We had never seen that symbol anywhere before, it was not in any prior trailer, any prior art released by Nintendo, it literally looked like something that maybe even a fan made up, they looked at designs in the game and they said hey I'm going to make up my own little thing here and throw it on the Joy-Cons, but here's the thing, the collector's edition has that exact symbol in it. Remember we had never seen this symbol officially before, that was the only place it ever appeared and now it's on the collector's edition stuff and likely going to be in the game, so that's very interesting, but that's not the only thing. The symbol on the back of the Joy-Cons, there's a four pin set that we are getting with Tears of the Kingdom collector's edition and while we only really get a full look at a single pin and just a tiny smidge of the edge of a pin, when you look at the back of the Joy-Cons you'll see symbols that look very similar to the one we see, but obviously not exactly. So what are we talking about? Well that second pin that we only see just the edge of seems to line up exactly with one of the symbols on the back of the Joy-Cons. Now what these four symbols mean, their importance in the game, we don't know, but what we can say is it does appear that those symbols or at least one of them is on one of the pins. So with those symbols also having never been seen before, combined with the symbol on the front of the Joy-Cons having never been seen before, it's highly likely that that leak of the Tears of the Kingdom Switch OLED edition was in fact real and is what we're going to get. And I know some of you are going to be very disappointed in that because you were really hoping it was fake and that you would get a different, better design. I know there's one aspect of the design I never really liked and that was using the old family crest symbol from a prior, you know, Nintendo 3DS special edition on the dock. I'm not really a fan of that and I'm not really a fan of, you know, that symbol also being used on like other books by Nintendo. It doesn't feel like that symbol fits with Breath of the Wild, if I'm completely honest, let alone Tears of the Kingdom, something more Zonai related or whatever. Look, Nintendo does what Nintendo does. They tend to reuse some of their art assets on their special edition. So I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. But the thing is it obviously looks like this was really real and it's weird because like there are other things that look off in the images, right, like the way the lighting is and some of the blurriness on some things, but bottom line is this looks like it was a real leak and maybe it just wasn't the best quality phone photos. And one thing we don't talk about with phone photos that happens a lot more now than back in the day is our phones actually add extra processing the images to try to make them look better and sometimes that extra processing messes with edges and stuff like that. So that could explain why some of the stuff doesn't look perfect in the shots. But all I know is those symbols had never actually been released by Nintendo before. So to have multiple symbols exactly right now confirmed with the collector's edition.  So we are clearly getting a tears of the kingdom special edition OLED. That was clearly a sneak peek, you know, intentional leak or otherwise of the actual special edition. And we should be able to buy the thing here in the next couple of months. It's going to come out before the game because all the other special editions also came out before the game. When we can get pre-orders in, I don't know. People are fighting right now over pre-orders for the collector's edition because they haven't gone live at most retailers here in the U.S. At least not online. I believe they went live in Canada on GameStop and I was informed by a couple of people from Canada that they sold out within seconds. And obviously here in the U.S. There was a temporary listing up at Best Buy that seems to have sold out. We don't know what in person stuff. It's too early in the morning that I'm recording this for me to even call retail outlets around me to find out if they're taking pre-orders today because the first one I'm going to call is GameStop because they're local. And, hey, if they happen to be taking pre-orders to that collector's edition, I'm going to go in person and get a pre-order in, maybe two, because maybe we can give away one. We'll see what happens. I'm not sure if they'll let me get multiple pre-orders. Sometimes there are sticklers about that kind of stuff, one per person, right? Anyways, I'm really excited about this. I hope you're excited about it as well. I'm just trying to do the very, very best I can. To bring you all of the Tears of the Kingdom stuff, not just the stuff that was announced or even like deeper analysis because there's brand new features in Tears of the Kingdom that we could talk about as well. And we likely will talk about things like crafting and just some really cool stuff going on. But I wanted to get to something that wasn't technically announced yesterday, but is true in hindsight of the information we have now obtained. So we're getting a Tears of the Kingdom switcherled special edition. And this is it. Love it, hate it. I don't know, let me know your thoughts on it down in the comments below. Now that we actually have some concrete proof that this is real, not speculation, actual proof from Nintendo themselves. That being said, you guys, let me know what you think about this and drop a like, subscribe to the channel. We are on our road to 100,000 subscribers. I really do appreciate you guys being here. I appreciate all the support. We will be live streaming again tonight at 8 p.m. central time. This probably won't even be our only video today. I just wanted to get this one out there because I don't know, or at least I haven't seen a lot of people talking about it. Not yet. Everyone's focused on the new enemies and the new crafting and all this other stuff, trailer analysis. I'm not going to be doing any deep dive trailer analysis here. We sort of did it on the live stream yesterday, but we will be talking about a lot of this stuff in the coming days, weeks and months. Thank you guys. I'll catch you in the next video.