Hello friends, Joe here from Hackerboxes. Welcome to this build session for Hackerbox 0057. This is an extension to our Learn to Solder workshop that we're doing with the hardware hacking village as part of DEFCON 28 Safe Mode. Hope everyone's being safe. Hope you're having a great time. So Hackerboxes is the original monthly subscription box for DIY electronics, computer enthusiasts, and hacker culture. The theme of this particular Hackerbox 57 is Safe Mode. So the primary content item of Hackerbox 0057 that we're working on here is a really cool kit to build this exclusive indie badge, which we'll talk about more in a second. This Hackerbox also includes a practice lock for practicing lock picking and a set of lock picks. There's also some exclusive items. There's a branded tube bandana that can be used as a Safe Mode mask. It has a really cool circuit board pattern on it. There's also some cool hacker stickers. There's an exclusive lapel pin that has our BitHead logo wearing a mask. It's a special Safe Mode lapel pin. And let's see, there's also a USB cable.  It's kind of like a remote control mouse to use for presentations. And it also lets you control media functions, such as turning volume up and down and jumping tracks. So and interestingly, because of the IR features of our indie badge kit, you can use that remote control, that IR remote control, to do some cool things with the badge as well. So the badge kit itself will let you build up this badge. Of course, it has a pretty nifty PCB with the HackerBox logo on it as its basis. And then the processing module on it is called an ESP32T display module. Of course, it includes the ESP32. A lot of us are pretty familiar with this microcontroller. This microcontroller has a dual core 32-bit LX6 microprocessor that can run up to 240 megahertz. So it's very full-featured for a microcontroller. It also has a built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a whole bunch of like bus interfaces, all the standard stuff, a lot of GPIOs. This particular version of it, the T-Display, has an onboard IPS full-color display. It's a 240 by 135 display. It looks really sharp at that small size. It's actually quite a lot of pixels. And it has a built-in USB-C interface. It also has a battery charger. You can connect the LiPo battery to it. It'll keep it charged when it's plugged into USB power. All right, so the kit for this board also includes RCA interfaces for audio and video out. This can do composite video and audio out, sort of like what we used to have on the older 8-bit computers. And you may have had a composite output on your Commodore 64 or Apple II computer back in the day if you're as old as I am. So there's also a little five-way joystick. It's a little tiny joystick. It's a surface mount device. There's a couple of buttons. So with this joystick and these two buttons, you can do a lot of nice controls. There's a infrared receiver and a infrared LED for doing auto r-blasting. So you can receive infrared signals and then blast them back out or blast out different infrared signals. Let's see, there's also a little tiny surface mount buzzer there for making sound. So you can make sounds on board and then also output audio through the digital analog converter built into the ESP32. All right, so oh, and of course, there's a nice colorful exclusive Hacker Box's lanyard as part of that kit that uses a similar graphic to what's on the actual box itself. Great, so as far as getting started with working on this kit, we really recommend that you take the T-Display device, plug it in to your computer. Just when you power it up, it'll do a little nice graphic demo showing a little graphic image, graphical image, and then flip through some color screens.  And then also what you want to do. So before you solder anything to it or try to do anything with this little module, we recommend setting up the tool chain. So this is a good time to probably tell you that every Hacker Box has an online box guide, which has lots of different information about how to use the devices in the box. For some projects, it gets you started. For some of them, it gives you all the build instructions. Sometimes there's some sample code. Or if it's a device that's pre-programmed, we usually try to give you the code so that you can modify it and do other things with it and hack it and learn from it. So the box guide for Hacker Box 0057, the safe mode box, has some sample code for exercising the badge. But even before you put the T-Display module onto the badge, there are all the instructions for configuring the Arduino IDE as the software tool that can compile code for that board and interface to it. And then also, quite importantly, setting up the library for doing graphical displays and text displays on that small, the little IPS display that's embedded on the board. So when you go through and set all that up, then when you power the board up, rather, after powering the board up, you can program it and then just verify to yourself that your toolchain works well, that you have the TFT Espy library set up correctly, and that you can program the flash on the board and then have it boot up and run the code you put on it. So that really builds confidence and lets us know that our toolchain is good before we start taking it to the next level and putting the module onto the badge itself and then start programming the badge. Right, so probably now what we should do is just let's go to the overhead and we'll jump into soldering this badge together. And we'll just talk through it as we do it. All right, so for this kit, we have a baggie of components. We have the T-Display module and the PCB. So these are the three things we're going to be working with. Let's get the actual T-Display module out. This is the module that has the actual display on it and the ESP32 processor. The processor has the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality built into it. So this display comes without the, doesn't have the pins soldered on their separate headers and it comes with a little wire JST connector for attaching the LiPo battery to the battery charger circuit of the module. All right, like I said before, before we get to soldering this module, let's go ahead and power it up and just make sure that it works fine. And before we solder it, we want to go through and make sure all the tools can compile a program for it and load the program with the correct library, which is the TFT East by library for controlling the display, the display driver. OK, so let's check out the actual PCB. This is obviously what we'll be doing our soldering. You see it has a side that's a little blacker and a side that's whiter. The black side is the one we'll be soldering the components onto. So the front of this board, the silkscreen, is just used for some artwork. So the silkscreen isn't on here. It gives it a nicer look when it's finished. It's a little harder to build it, but that's kind of part of the fun. So make sure you go to the box guide and look at the there's a placement diagram that shows where the components go. So that diagram is sort of what would normally be on the silkscreen if you weren't going to have artwork on the silkscreen. So definitely check that out. And we'll go ahead and start with these three resistors. You can tell which resistors which by measuring them. There's a 220 ohm, a 330 ohm, and a 1K ohm. A 1K is 1,000, 1,000 ohm. You can measure them with a multimeter or you can just look at the little stripes. This one that has orange, orange, and black, that's a 330. So that's a 330 ohm resistor. Let me go ahead and put it through and then just bend the leads back so it holds it in place. And then the 220 ohm resistor is the one that is red, red, black, black, 1K resistor. So these go in right next to each other. You can, again, make sure you look at the component placement guide or if you can see really closely up here the three resistors, it almost looks like they touch each other. The holes for each neighboring resistor are very close to the one next to it. And in order, they go a 330, 220, 1K from order from left to right. When the wire gets a little kinked on the front side, it's hard to pull it through. You want to grab some pliers here. All right, so all three of these resistors are through and the wires are bent back so they're going to be held into place. And we'll go ahead and get some solder on here. I have to apologize. The white artwork that's on the silkscreen on the back of this board makes it a little hard to get contrast. Hopefully you can still see the soldering that's going on. We're using the standard techniques that we've discussed in the Learn to Solder videos of starting with a very clean tip, make sure it's tinned, have some little solder on the tip, because the solder that's on the tip helps conduct heat into the work. So we want to use the soldering iron to heat each join up so that it gets a little warm and then bring the solder to it and let the pieces of metal you're trying to solder melt the solder. Don't melt the solder just with the iron tip or you might get a cold solder joint. All right, and since there's not a lot of metal here, the vias, the through holes that these leads go through, there's not a lot of metal so they don't take but a very quick touch to heat up. You don't have to hold the iron on there for very long. That looks good. Let's go ahead and trim these leads off. It's where you want to make sure you're wearing your safety glasses and hold onto the leads while you cut them. You don't need the leads flying all over the place. And as we discussed in the First Learning to Solder video, we want to make sure we're not getting a lot of chunks of little solder around, because solder has lead in it. So when I'm cutting these, I try to keep the surface clean. My work surface, I wipe it down at the end. And also when I cut leads, I put them in a little pile so I can easily throw them away. Next, we're going to do the surface mount buzzer. That little dot just tells you that that's pin one. Pin one is at the top. When the board is oriented like this, the display up. So this is an example of a surface mount component. We're going to basically just set it on the surface and get the pad that it sits on, get some solder on that pad, get it tinned, and then get just enough heat onto the little metal lead on the side of the buzzer, just enough heat on there to melt some solder onto it. We'll get one side tacked down and then flip it around and get some solder flowed onto the other side and just make a nice solder flow that fills in the little L-shaped space between the buzzer and the PCB. The buttons are oriented with the leads up and down. They won't really fit if you try to put them the other way, but it doesn't matter if you completely rotate them 180 degrees. Like, there's no top and bottom to the button. We just don't want to have the leads going out of the sides. Although if they were going out the sides in this configuration, you wouldn't be able to solder them because they wouldn't be over any pads. So it's pretty easy. Again, just tack one little bit down. And when only one part of it's tacked, you can heat it up very easily and move it around again and make sure all the leads line up over the pads. Before you go ahead and commit the other three corners of the button to soldering, this one on here. You can see from the first one we did, we kind of go to the opposite corner. It helps constrain it nicely. It's a similar concept to tightening up lug nuts. You want to kind of distribute the tension around. I'm going across the, I'm going to say there's some, that looks pretty good. There's a nice flow, nice shiny flow all over the lead and the pad. So we get this, we have one more pin on each one. And if you want, you can hit the original pin just to, first pin you did just to get it reflowed real shiny and make sure all four of the pins look good. Buttons are good and the next component we're going to do is a little joystick, which looks very similar to the buttons, but it has a lot more leads because it's actually a five way joystick. So it has a lead for up, down, left, right. And then it has a lead for center, which is when you're just pushing it straight down. And then there's a common lead, which in this design, if you check out the schematic, you can see that this, the common lead on the five way joystick is grounded, which means that the other terminals will all float. So you should probably pull them up using the pull up description definition for your, when you do the pin declaration in Arduino, make sure they have a pull up. So then when you close that contact, it will go to ground and the ground will overcome the pull up and it'll go to zero. So when it's, when one of the contacts is not being closed, it'll be a high. And then when you close it, it'll be a low or zero or false. And we're just doing this nice and slow, getting each terminal and making sure the solder flows really nicely. Alrighty, we've got our joystick done. Now the button's done. We're cooking in here. Alrighty, so next we're gonna put the T-Display on, which has these headers that come separate. So it's gonna put the headers in here and then put something underneath it so that the headers aren't being pushed out by the desk just to make sure everything lines up right and it looks good. I'll get it on here and then we'll tack a couple of the points, a couple of the pins while it's in this position, while it's being held up. And again, usually kind of work from opposite corners. Make sure when you're doing this, you get the solder to flow all in down in the hole.  This tab is so you can pull the protective plastic off of the display, but I wanna leave the plastic on there for now to catch any flux splatter. When you see that smoke, you see right here some smoke will come out. That's when the flux is being released and that's when it's the easiest to get the solder to flow. So right as that smoke's released and the solder starts to melt, that's when you want to make sure your connection is hot and get the solder into the terminal. So we'll look at this and see there's, we need to reflow this and drop that down against the plastic of the header. There we go. Let me get the other one, yeah. So now that header's in there nice and tight. That one looks good. Put that back in. You don't need to solder the rest of them quite yet. Let's just get it mechanically seated and make sure everything fits right and all the headers are all aligned properly. Tack a couple of the pins all the way through on the other side. So for each pin, you actually have to solder it twice. You're soldering it once to the module and once to the board on the other side. And again, just like we did with the top, just make sure it's sunken all the way down that it's completely seated properly. And at least a few spots or at least the opposite corners. And then once it's all properly seated, we can go through and make sure we get a good connection and flow on each pin. There we go. It goes pretty quickly. It's kind of a weird angle to try to do this underneath the overhead camera.  That would be a big pain.  So maybe just stay to the outside of these headers. Don't go near that hole and avoid in the PCB. Let me get these a lot quicker because I have easier access from this direction. Always cleaning our tip a lot. Keep a nice clean solder and iron tip. Keep the solder flowing a couple more here. And now we've just got to get all the pins. So there's 24 pins on this thing. So we're having to make 48 solder connections. This takes a couple of minutes. Just take your time. We're gonna leave that plastic covering on the display in case you splatter some flux up onto the display. Just turn the temperature up on the solder and iron a little bit. Yeah, that works a little better. The header, the posts in these headers are a little thicker than let's say the pins on an IC or on a resistor or something. So just help them that I turn the temperature up just a little bit. Turn it up to 30, it looks like it's 360 here. All right, there's this last row of 12. It's nice when you have the pin and the through hole very nicely heated. You can see the solder almost gets drawn down into the hole and it makes a nice shiny kind of in cone shape onto the lead. So you can see the solder totally wets down into the hole and then totally wets the lead in such a way that it it fills it in all the way around to make some nice clean, shiny, well-flowed connection. So there's our T-Display. So I'll put the camera a little bit. Display is all done, all 48 of those connections. So let's get on to this little driver transistor. Notice that the one side of it is flat and if you look at the placement diagram that flat is down, it's kind of facing the joystick. So make sure the flat portion of that transistors in that direction and once you get it into place, if you want you can fold it over and make it flush to the board or you can leave it sitting up. That's totally your option. Just to keep it out of the way of the display, I don't think I'm gonna fold it down. I kind of like the way that looks. Fold it right down onto its flat face but you don't need to do that. You see that solder's real quick because the plated holes are very small on these, they're very thin. There's not a lot of metal there to waste the heat. It just solders very quickly, heats up quickly and solders quickly. We'll cut the leads off. We wanna keep checking back to our component placement. Diagram tells us what direction to put things in. That's definitely important, even though there's only two leads on this LED, it only works if placed in the right direction. The short lead goes towards the flat side in the diagram and I like to leave this sticking up about three or four millimeters so that I can fold it over and it gives it like a nice, like an edge firing edge blasting configuration. I like the way that looks and it feels like it's a little bit more like a transmitter like that would be on the end of the board of a remote control, like a TV remote or something. So it's just two quick leads. Remember the short lead goes on the flat side of the circle in the placement diagram. Just a few more components here continuing on with our through hole components. A little ceramic capacitor. This is part of the audio circuit. For the AV and with this, you could also fold it over if you wanted to. It was unfortunately where it's placed right there. It's kind of right next to the reset button.  It's pretty small. And again, heat flows on that real quickly. Very nice, very quick. Turn the leads off. I should mention we can take the leads off the headers on the back of the T-Display to make it nice and flat if you're going to put a battery on there. I'll just skip that for now. It's a little time consuming and everyone knows how to cut wires. They're not really in the display. The display leads are not really in the way until we try to put a battery on there. This is our IR sensor device. You want to put it on there so that the rounded lens faces down towards the bottom of the board away from the T-Display, the ESP32 T-Display. And again, that makes it so when you're, if you set this, the badge down, you can aim like an IR remote at it and it'll receive from one side and then it blasts out of the top IR blaster style. That's real easy. And all we have left is our two RCA jacks for our AV for composite video and our audio line out. So the yellow one is the video out. We're going to get that here. That's kind of on the left side. Again, check the component placement diagram on the box guide. So you're going to want to just get one of these, get just a little solder on one of these and then check the positioning, make sure it's the right depth. There's some alignment holes on the front of these things that don't always work very well. So we just let them hang off the edge of the board there. Once you get the three post-soldered, it really holds itself in very well but you don't really need those alignment holes at all or even in the front. And then once it's all positioned, we just get a lot of solder in there to make sure it's very mechanically stable and flows very well just because there's a lot of pressure. Sometimes if you have a tight RCA cable when you're plugging it on there, it puts a lot of pressure on that jack. So you want to make sure you have it well-soldered. So not only for a good electrical connection but to keep it very solidly seated from a mechanical perspective. Again, we're going to get one soldered and then we're going to pick it back up and move, position the connector around until it's right in the right orientation and seated the way we want before we put solder on the other three posts. All right, that looks nice. Last one here. So there's a little bit of the metal on the back there sticking out. So I'm going to heat that up and see if we can force it back into the housing. Looks a little better. I'm going to go ahead and get a lot of solder in there to hold it into place now that everything's positioned correctly. And that'll hold it real solid even when we're plugging cables onto it. Pulling them off and plugging them back on it'll keep everything seated properly. Real good, real solid there. All right, there's our fully soldered up board. We've got some keycaps. We can pop on the buttons and then also the joystick. So let's get these on here. And if you have other buttons like this, you can put different keycaps on if you have other compatible caps to make it customize it a bit. All right, so the first sketch we just loaded on here was, again, this sketch is in the box guide. It's just a really simple buzzer demo. And it does use the TFT eSpy library to just put some text on the screen and then it just plays some tones out through the buzzer. So let's power it up and you can see. A little Mario music there. So this is a really simple program that you can look at what it does. Like I said, it's fairly simple and it just shows you how to make some sounds on the buzzer. So really good first sketch to get running after you've soldered up this board. Part of the reason for wanting to do that one first is even if the library gets messed up or something's not quite working right or one of the pins is shorted or something for the display, as long as you have that one wire that gets between the ESP32 T-Display module and the Surface Mount buzzer, there's only one wire necessary for that. As long as you have that one wire right and you don't have a power ground as short elsewhere, then whatever else is going on, this sketch should work. So go ahead and try that one out first. If that works out out well, which it should. You know, the next sketch to try out on the, from the box guide, there are a couple of links to different sketches within a library, example sketches that do infrared receiving, infrared transmitting, and then also relay infrared signals. So that might be a nice thing to try next. They also exercise the serial output. They don't use the display because they're not specific to this particular T-Display module, but they do some really interesting things. Of course, you can add in some display outputs if you want to do that. But the, so trying out the infrared LED blaster and the infrared receiver next, that might be a good next step. Then probably another very simple one that doesn't, isn't too complicated. It's actually in the guide you can download it. Maybe let's go ahead and load it up, the one that exercises the joystick. It displays the state of the joystick on the display. So here, let me get that programmed on here. All right, so on this one here, we've loaded the sketch from the box guide that's the joystick sketch. So let's go ahead and fire that up so we can see how that works. All right, so just as it's launching a joystick test, and then when you put the joystick up, down, left, right, or press the center button on it, it puts it on the display and you can actually do button A and B also and you can actually hold them bolt down to get A and B and then go down or down and sideways and in all at the same time. And whatever of these contacts you close on the joystick and switches, it'll just put it on the display.  You've made all the right connections for the joystick and the two buttons. So that exercises the joystick and the buttons. Both of the sketches we've loaded use the display on board display and then there's some demos for the, for testing out the IR in and IR out. The easiest way to test the audio video is there's a really cool program, there's a link to it in the box guide called Don of AV. It's from Bitlooney. He wrote some really cool code that does composite output and an audio line out using ESP32. So let's load that on there now I'll capture the output so we can see it here. Hold on. Yeah, so outputting to the composite video and the audio line out is actually, it's pretty nifty. It does require a little bit of trickery but you can check out the Bitlooney's code and see how that works. Those techniques are the same ones that are used in a really neat project called I think it's ESP8 bit that lets you emulate Nintendo Entertainment Systems and 8-bit Atari computer systems. It's really neat. There's a link to it in the box guide. It's really kind of fun to play with. It uses the file system in the ESP32. So the flash of the ESP32 can be set up to have a file system in it and make sure you follow the instructions clearly in the repo for that. If you wanna mess around with that ESP8 bit project, make sure you set the file system up correctly. So there's a lot of other cool projects in the box guide, links to the projects that would be interesting. There is a thing called the ESP-Mirata which allows you to extend some pen testing tools to leverage the Bluetooth and other wireless functionality of the ESP32. So that's kind of a neat project. There's a couple other projects that are targeted specifically towards the T-Display. So they'll use the display without too much modification. Getting different on these TFT display modules, working at the right resolution for different programs can be a little tricky, but that's a lot of the fun that you get with working with these projects. So anyway, this badge is a really nice platform because it has an ESP32 processor which there's more and more stuff coming out for it all the time. And then it has some really nice IOs that are pretty easy to program. The buttons and the joystick and then the... You probably won't see a ton of programs out there, projects out there that use the AVIO, but they are kind of neat to play with and there are some, like I said, there's some really neat emulation out there that uses these for doing some retro gaming and some 8-bit computing. And then a lot of programs can be adjusted to use the particular driver for this TFT display. It's a pretty common driver. It works with a lot of the libraries for doing full color graphics displays with the Arduino projects and particularly ESP32 has the power to really do some nice displays on that. So anyway, it's a nice badge. Hopefully you enjoyed building it. Take some real pride of ownership that you made the badge yourself and you can program your own stuff on it. Maybe put a picture of yourself or your pet or your logo or whatever on there and do some neat stuff with it. Oh, we didn't get into it here, but the guide has the instructions on how to use these little pins right here to put a LiPo battery on here that charges when you plug the USB cable in and then there's a little power switch which came in the parts kit for this badge. So you can, that switch will let you turn the battery, the LiPo on and off, basically take it in and out of the circuit so that you can turn the board off when it just has the LiPo plugged in without having to reach in there and remove this little tiny JST connector. Just remember though, if you turn that switch off, it actually takes the battery completely out of the circuit so it won't charge. So if you want to charge it, you need to leave it in there and maybe write something in your program to have a sleep mode or something so that you can, your sound display aren't going wild while you're just trying to charge the battery up. All right, yeah, so we hope you enjoyed this and hit us up with any questions at hackerboxes.com or during the, if you're watching this live during the hardware hacking village workshops, we'll be online in the hardware hacking village channel in Discord, that's the Discord for DEF CON 28 Safe Mode. If you're seeing this later somehow, feel free to contact us at hackerboxes.com with any questions you might have and keep an eye out for future hacker boxes. We're always trying to come up with new things. We have some really interesting stuff coming up in the next couple of months and we usually have some nice things a couple of months after DEF CON because while we meet up and talk to all of our friends, they always have a lot of suggestions for projects they've been working on and ideas they might like to see in the future hacker boxes. And for those of you that aren't too familiar with hacker boxes, should just know that it's kind of like a self-fulfilling community thing because we get most of the ideas now for future boxes from members who've been playing around with our previous boxes and are trying something new on their own and then think, oh, everyone else might like this and they send it to us and we've had some guest designers from our community to help us out with some of the boxes. So if you've got some really cool ideas, please reach out to us. We really like that. And yeah, live the hack life. We look forward to seeing you online. Drop us a note. Bye-bye.


In the world of the line guard, Foley the cheetah, is known for her incredible speed and agility. However, her origins and the identity of her parents remain shrouded in mystery. This theory delves into the darker side of Foley's past, suggesting a tragic tale that goes beyond what meets the eye. The theory posits that Foley's parents were not ordinary cheetahs, but were instead members of an elite group of hunters who guarded a sacred artifact getting deep within the pride lens. This artifact possessed immense power, capable of bringing either great prosperity or catastrophic destruction to the entire region. Fearing that their existence and the artifact's location would be discovered, Foley's parents made a difficult decision to protect their cub. They devised a plan to separate, with each parent taking a different path to ensure the safety of their child and the artifact. However, their plan went awry when a group of ruthless hyenas, led by a power-hung regulant, infiltrated the pride lens. Intent on acquiring the artifact's power for themselves, the hyenas relentlessly pursued Foley's parents. In a desperate attempt to protect their cub, Foley's parents thought valiantly, but ultimately lost their lives. Unbeknownst to Foley, her parents' sacrifice and the artifact's significance were kept hidden from her by the remaining members of the line guard and other elders in the pride lens. They believed that revealing the truth would put her life in grave danger. As Foley grew up under the care of the line guard, she developed her remarkable speed and agility as a natural defense mechanism, driven by an inherent sense of danger and the loss of her parents. Although she had a strong bond with her adopted family, she couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing, avoid deep within her. The theory suggests that, as Foley continues her journey with the line guard, she will gradually uncover the truth about her parents' fate and the artifact they protected. This revelation would not only test Foley's strength and determination, but also plunge her into a battle against the remnants of the hyena faction, who still seek to claim the artifact's power. Ultimately, Foley's journey would not only be a quest for self-discovery, but also a pivotal moment in the history of the pride lens. Her strength, speed, and unwavering determination would lead her to face her parents' enemies and fulfill their unfinished mission, ensuring the artifact's protection and preserving the balance of power in the land. The line guard would take on a darker tone, as Foley's path intertwines with the hyena dangers and treachery, lurking beneath the surface of the pride lens. The story would explore themes of loss, sacrifice, and the enduring legacy of heroes. However, it's important to note that this theory is purely speculative, and not based on official canon or statements from the creators of the line guard. It is merely a creative interpretation that adds depth and complexity to Foley's character and backstory.


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I'm Joe for jaspeascasebrakes.com coming at you with 21-22 Panini court Kings basketball four box pick your team number four and if you follow the instructions little break credit giveaway could be something nice out of the boxes be some nice break credit in your pockets thanks everyone for getting into the action today is not the third it's the fourth and it was Mike with double last-bought mojo grizzlies and sixers so getting himself an entry good luck to him good luck to everybody remember we marked those boxes with x's so we know they're from the same case these are the final four boxes of this case right here that's where we're looking for right card on the bottom and then all the other stuff all right works in progress Franz Wagner for Orlando Trey Young Maestro's all-card ship too let's see what's back here we got Luca de Junta Jalen Suggs Zaire Williams and a Deandre eight eight out of 99 big contract for him that'll go to the sun that'll be for the x-line Jalen Suggs rookie card going to Orlando that'll be for Tibbo there's a level one right there so I think they go up to level four maybe I think four is the shortest print all right behind Deandre Russell is Jalen Suggs artistic endeavors relic also for Tibbet not numbered this should be the auto it is heir apparent Isaiah Todd rookie autograph that's for the x-line and the wizards you're a wizard you're a wizard Josh 10 out of 25 box one next box jammed my finger up golfing at the driving range I can't really can't really fully close that middle finger there like I could like this without it stiffening up I don't know are there any exercises I can do I just just been kind of stretching it out that's all I can really do I guess so it heals on its own it's Chris Duarte for the paces also is Harry Potter a Christmas movie do we consider those Christmas movies it's Chris Duarte first steps both Pacers going to Oliver that that injury does not impact my breaking one bit not one bit Steve Locke it's Jalen Suggs and de Montess a bonus to 75 all right behind Tyrese is Santy Santa Aldama I should be on the aisle not for that not for a little finger stiffness I'll come on come on that's that's that's not winning mentality that's not mamba mentality Santy Aldama goes to Mike Young and Memphis and Herbert Jones for the pelicans the X-Line 32 out of 199 I don't know like that now it's 5-4 Dodgers Tyrese Halliburton and his Pacers gear baseball players not the baseball players that have mamba mentality the winning mentality Rex you'd be surprised at how many little injuries that players play through their state of the art Anthony Edwards I don't know if that's a I feel like I haven't seen this insert a lot could be a short print that goes to Brittany and the T Wolves I don't know how short print that is but I feel like I don't see a lot of those Santy Aldama and a Jamal Murray for the nuggets that's 2 out of 49 there's Scotty Barnes rookie expression rookie relic for Toronto Steve Birch and the Raptors dino DNA clever girl and behind Miles Bridges is Charles Oakley bulls edition holding court autograph for Steve Birch in Chicago doubles 13 out of 75 all right final box Jeremy Harker saying diehard lethal weapon throwing bad Santa all Christmas I don't think of lethal weapon as a Christmas movie though are there Christmas elements in it maybe there is diehard I can be I could definitely consider a Christmas movie all right there's IO the sunmu and a nun maybe these are more common than I thought stay at the art jaylen green that'll be for Houston that'll be for tibba and the Rocks Dilo Luca Frans Wagner the sunmu and a first steps Scotty Barnes dino DNA 82 out of 149 you're reigning rookie of the year all right your hits we got a Scotty Barnes artistic endeavors relic clever girl that goes to Steve Birch and the Raptors and the last one here is is an autograph for the Pacers it's Miles Turner impressionist impressionist ink then that'll be for the Pacers Oliver with the Pacers wow the last state of the art Anthony Edwards sold for 300 so maybe they are short prints there's Miles Turner to 49 for Oliver it's pretty awesome well there you go Brittany all right and there you go Oliver with the last autograph and now break credit time so if you follow the instructions just got to buy at least two teams that gets you an entry let's sort by column a so britney two teams that's an entry the x-line got 10 teams that is five entries Lance two teams an entry Mike Young got two teams that's an entry Nico got four teams that's two entries Oliver got two teams that's an entry Steve Birch got four teams that's two entries and it's about got four teams two entries for TD touchdown all right I think everybody bought an even number of teams I have 15 on this list got Brittany Josh Lance Mike Nico Oliver Steve and Tivo nice all right thank you and good luck everybody let's gather these 15 names top two out of the 15 $500 of break credit each after five and a one six times good luck look one two three four five and a one sixth and final time and it's there you go tibet and josh x-line congrats to the both of you $500 of break credit each going your way after six I'm Joe for jasmiescasebreaks.com thanks for watching thanks for breaking with us and I'll see you next time for the next break bye bye


Hello, it's my pleasure to be speaking with you today from the traditional and unseated territory of the Moscow people. My name is Eugene Barosky and I'm the head of UBC Libraries Research Commons. Today I want to be speaking with you about Geodacy, which is the platform we developed to create geospatial discovery for Canadian research data. Geodacy is an open source discovery tool that allows our users to find open data from multiple Canadian repositories in a visual way. The results are driven by a map and we work with data that is geospatial in nature or simply associated with the location. Yeah, support us and provide complimentary search to the Canadian federated research data repository or further. All our work has been open source and all our code is available for free for others to adopt. As we all know working in a profession for a long time, data can be difficult to find. When we search for data about a specific place like a park in Northern British Columbia, using keywords is actually not easy. Here's a text below that will allow us to search for a forest in Northern British Columbia. So here we use tons of synonyms and proximity operators, which is not ideal when you look for something very specific. Wouldn't be great, we said that you could search for a specific area just by driving a map around it. And this is what exactly what Geodacy does. It allows us to find Canadian research data sets about a specific place by driving a map. I will just have one slide about Geodacy infrastructure. At this moment in phase one, we are working with scholars portal data versus, which have more than 60 various institutional data versus for places like University of British Columbia, McGill University, University of Toronto, Waterloo and others. We're extracting the data out of data versus and taking it into our Geodacy and middleware, the pipeline, where in the backhand, we are adding value by crosswalking the metadata into standardized format, but also adding bounding boxes, which really drive Geodacy. At the end, we ship the data into our Geo Blacklight instance, where it's available for researchers to use. Geodacy is based on bounding boxes. Everything that we take in goes through our pipeline to generate those. We either take the bounding boxes that were entered by the depositors, but these are really few. Most of the bounding boxes we use are programmatically generated from either the geospatial files directly or from the place named metadata that is available in the data versus files. Each geospatial file, even if it comes in a bunch of places, a bunch of files will have its own landing page and we will connect those together in a linked record. The datasets that do not have coordinates, geospatial coordinates, or geospatial file types, will be not eligible for the inclusion because they are not relevant to the geospatial discovery. For instance, genomics datasets that do not have a specific metadata about location will not be included. First, you'll try to analyze the geospatial files using GDAL. If we aren't unsuccessful, if we cannot extract the geospatial metadata out, you'll look at the bounding boxes that are provided in the native interfaces like DataRus. If we can extract the geospatial coordinates out, we will do so. And if not, you'll seek place names out of the country and states and cities that we discover in the metadata records. This is a quick overview of our metadata processes. The data we take from DataRus goes into geodesys metadata schema, where we cross-walk it into a standardized ISO metadata, ISO19115, and those records we ship to open geo metadata in GitHub for other institutions like Stanford or University of Michigan to use in their geoblack-like applications. But we also cross-walk it to geoblack-like schema metadata, which we use for discovery. In phase two, on which we are working right now, and it should be ready in the early spring, we are adding multiple other repositories into a geodesy pipeline. But we're doing so by harvesting the metadata into a furthest harvester and doing a cross-walk from right there. This way we do not have to develop cross-walks from each native repository, such as CCAN or DataRus. We just use furthest harvester as our metadata source. I have mentioned furthest before. Furthest is a federated research data repository for Canada, which is our discovery interface for Canadian research data. This is a place we expose more than 60 various data sources for Canadian institutions. Geodesy lives right within further and at this moment provides a complimentary map-based search for geospatial data.  We allow to search geodesy in two ways, either by a keyword or most importantly by a location where there's a map you can drive around and focus on a specific location to find the research data associated with that location. For instance, when I drive my map over Northern British Columbia, I find multiple datasets that focus on that geographical area. Moreover, each dataset will have its own landing page where we explain where we took the data, be allowed to download it in a standardized ISO metadata format, be allowed access to the original files but also link it to various other files that are connected to this study. If the data is geospatial in nature, you'll also display it on the map. Let's take a deep dive. As you listen to my presentation, feel free to go to or just Google Geodesy or go to geo.further.ca, you can also access it from the furthers homepage. As I mentioned, DataVersion is our source of data in this moment. So we are just a discovery interface. Everything we have in Geodesy platform is coming from a Canadian DataVersion at this point. And in early spring, you'll have the entire further index which includes more than 17 various capabilities included in our platform. Let's drive to Northern BC, draw a geographical area and I want to find what kind of research data can be found about this specific area. Interestingly, as I move my mouse over our data sets, the locations will change. For instance, when I go to Great Bear Rainforest, the data that we are taking it from will be displayed in the map. Each data file is a landing page which we allow to see from the Geodesy interface, but we also link it to connected data sets that have the same connections to that area. Also, we allow to download a clean ISO metadata record for each data set. It looks like this. Those XML files allow other institutions to pick up and search our data right away from their Geo Blacklight interfaces. If the data itself is geospatial in nature, we will allow to focus on the shape files, for instance, and display it right away in the landing page. For instance, I will grab one example where we can show how Canadian Boreal Forest is being displayed right into the landing page of the Geodesy platform. At this point, our users can take that data and export into their GIS applications or just use our platform to view the data. Of course, people can analyze the data by various place, granularity options, or by an institution, by a source where we take the data from. I'll go back to my presentation. Our next steps for the Geodesy are to complete the integration with the entire further index to allow more than 70 various platforms, including Haika Institute, different CCANs from the provincial and federal government to be inserted into the Geodesy pipeline. We also plan to complete the French translation of the user interface and contribute it back to the Geo Blacklight community. I would like to acknowledge and thank our great partners at the Portage Network. When we receive all our funding from the new Digital Research Infrastructure Organizations in Canada or in short, in the Rio. We have been fortunate to work with multiple institutions and multiple teams during the last two years. And I would like to acknowledge that we couldn't have done it without them. Thank you very much. I'm glad to... I will be happy to see your questions as they come, but also feel free to see our code and explanations and guides through our GitHub page. Thank you very much.


I thought this conference was just absolutely outstanding, we've had conferences in the past but I think this one seems to have surpassed the past ones in its initiative and in the topics that were covered. As someone who has been obsessed by Egypt for years, both as an academic and as a journalist, I found this conference absolutely incredible. The leading specialists on Egypt and in particular on the 1919 Egyptian revolutions were all here in person offering us their immense knowledge and often their extraordinary insights as well. The conference overall was very rewarding firstly because it was a mixture of academics and non-academics so it's nice to speak to the layperson as it were and it was a very broad mixture of things. I really liked that it was streamed online even though I was here so that I can go back and watch it later because taking everything in and making notes is a bit tricky so it's good to have a record to go to later. Looking more at these historical episodes before 1952 actually gives us a lot to think about about how Egyptian foreign policy developed over time, how the rise of nationalism during this early period kind of provided the foundation for several foreign policy pillars that we see now in Egyptian foreign policy. This event was really exciting because it was put together by the British Egyptian society and the combination of academics with a group that has come together to explore Egyptian society and Egyptian history. It was a very interesting combination to be at an event that's not just academics but combined academics with non-academics so it was a very interesting experience. The panel comprising members of the British Egyptian society and the CBRL and the London Middle East Institute with whom we've worked on three conferences got together. When the call for papers came in we found three academics including Charles Tripp who once was a professor here and asked them to look at the papers so that we got an independent view and what we wanted for the conference was a blend of academics and non-academics. So many people have contact me said no I've been looking at your website I've just seen the live streaming. Live streaming it is brilliant.


This is Startup Storefront and we have a special episode for you guys. We're living in the attention economy. Every day we're bombarded with non-stop notifications, advertisements, and emails.  And between you and me, I'm going to let you in on a little bit of a secret. Sponsored posts on social media do not hit the same way that they did a couple years ago. Apps like TikTok have leveled the playing field. So we've had TikToks organically reach over a million views within 24 hours and when clients wake up in the morning they see tons of orders coming in that they have to pack as a result of these videos. And so I think a common misconception that a lot of people have is that small brands have to pay a lot of money for ads in order to get tons of orders when in reality the playing field has already been leveled. So this begs the question. What do you post on Instagram and TikTok to see the same success? In this episode we're doing a look back on past episodes to dissect what works and what doesn't. So you can cash in on this attention economy. So first you'll hear from author motivational speaker and swimming legend Diana Nayad. Diana together with Bonnie Stoll founded Ever Walk which is a walking community that inspires people to walk a mile a day in order to build a better life. They have this awesome mission and cause but they're struggling to get corporate sponsors. So what's the missing piece? Listen into our conversation with Diana to find out. You've achieved it all. How do you kind of view the next thing that you want to do, the momentum you want to move into. Maybe this is where we talk about your new foundation, the Ever Walk program and the team you decide to bring in to kind of achieve this next step for you. Yeah you know I'm going to reach out to both of you right now because you know here I come in here sort of to be lauded and say wow look what you've done and look what you mean to a lot of people and that you know that that means something to me it's not shallow. And on the other hand I will admit to you and because you guys coach entrepreneurs and because entrepreneurs are listening to your podcast I will admit that I'm just used to catching lightning in a bottle. I every business I've started I have no business plan. I have no idea where the capital is going to come from. I just march into CEO's offices and talk my fire brand and I leave with a check for $300,000. But Ever Walk is this initiative. It's a national walking initiative. We've got a cool app. We've got a great website. We've got you know pretty cool little programs within it. But except for private funding it's kept us afloat. You know it's we keep open the doors open with our private funding. We haven't landed one corporate sponsor. No capital raised you know in the corporate world. And here we're in this world of walking and I'm pretty good spokesperson and Bonnie's right on my coattails with that. She's better sort of with the public like we're at a park. She's got them all doing yoga and starting walking whereas I'm giving the philosophical speech about you know walk the curvature of the earth the way I swam the curvature of the earth and people like yeah I want to walk the curvature of the freaking earth. So why has no company we have three different brand managers. All of them have a terrific track record companies who took us on a year at a time. We paid them from pretty good money out of what we had and not one of them landed a corporate sponsor. You know we're just talking about a lousy maybe a 200 grand you know for for the year to keep our doors open. So what am I doing wrong and you just sort of reminded me of Christopher Reeve saying to me well you said all those years ago you were going to live every day so you can't live in a fingernail bed is that what you're doing. And I was backed up against the wall and I said I right away no that's not what I'm doing. So you just said you're going after something. Do you recognize that you're not waking up with the fire in the belly that you're kind of letting it slide believing maybe some white knights going to ride through town and save you give you some money put you on the map or are you working at it because you're so excited and I have to admit since maybe about January this year. So that's we're going to be half the year I've been sort of stalling hemming and hawing not figuring out what to do about it upset and not sleeping well because I want ever walk to make it. I believe that we should make it but maybe I'm just tired maybe I maybe I needed to refresh the batteries and I've let it go for a minute but I have to pay attention. Do I really want it? Do I want this to make it and what what are the next steps because whatever I've been doing has been wrong. I'm not catching lightning at a bottle on this one. It's got to be more of a grassroots you know and build it up and get you know 700 people here walking with us and then another thousand there and build it because you know I want millions of people walking with an ever walk brand on them and participating virtually and real with our walks but we've done a lot I'm proud of what we're done but we have to say we're not making it and I need to figure out the next step. Do you have a dream sponsor like someone you would really like to have on board? You know there are so many but honestly number one is Adidas because under our umbrella we also have an organization called Oceans Commit to walk and raise money in the name of reducing plastics in the ocean and Adidas now with their Parley brand you know makes most of their sneakers out of plastic bottles so they're they're big in the end because it's they make a walking shoe you know you use a running shoe it just makes so much sense and they have sponsored us to a degree they've made t-shirts for our events things but we haven't landed a big financial contract with them but they're number one. It seems like a marketing no-brainer at least from my perspective right I know me too water I mean you could think of so many different things. Has there been friction from their side that they've at least told you like as to like have you had the negotiation where they've been like well we're happy with the t-shirts but we are just not ready to do like move to this next step have you gotten any kind of feedback? There has and that is that you know I'm not some huge celebrity and unfortunately or fortunately I just haven't spent my time with social media. I have a social media manager I have about 80,000 people who follow me on particularly Facebook it's more my generation than Instagram and all that so you could say well that's not shabby but it's certainly not Kardashian numbers and whatnot but but ever walk for some reason my fans haven't followed me over to ever walk as much as I talk about our events we've done these wonderful epic walks we walk from Boston to Maine and we walk from Philly to DC and from Canada down to Seattle and from here to San Diego we've done these epic walks but they've only affected 200 people who've come with us they haven't been a big news event it's not like some incredible thing no one's ever walked from Boston to Maine so we haven't developed a huge following for ever walk we literally only have about 20,000 people you know who are constantly on the website and part of it so Adidas will say build up your numbers you know get up there get a couple hundred thousand people who are following you and then we come in and we say you come in and help us build those numbers up I don't know anywhere to turn to anymore in terms of come on out and walk with us on Saturday you know we have our group and that's who we we market to I appreciate you being vulnerable with us I mean that's another part of this podcast like you're literally in the midst of starting a business and you're wondering how to figure this out and you have this chicken and egg problem which is what everyone who ever started a company deals with to me personally like that excites me that problem only because I know how hard it is but it means everything right it's like so let's pretend like you do get a celebrity on to endorse walking maybe like someone like Kevin Hart or somebody like that like somebody who really valued athleticism but with a big name then now it becomes a no-brainer for someone like Adidas now all of a sudden you're setting terms yeah and so that seems to be that's a that's a good idea the product yeah yeah and I know I mean there's plenty of people that exist and your mission is so like the beautiful thing around like how I view what you're doing you have you and that's it like you have you see that's when I say I don't understand why we're not bigger right I mean you look at there's so many walking you know groups programs initiatives but none of them have a sort of a tried and true known inspiring personality by them they just say hey come walk with us every Saturday morning virtually we do two miles over there and uh and some of them actually frankly not most of the big walking movements don't have big numbers either but they're not looking you know for like our board says to us all the time it's you guys are doing a great job your website looks great the app looks great you're offering all these different things we have a a naturalist and she's a you know phd a naturalist and if you're on your walk and you take a picture of a a rodent or a flower or a tree and send it into our app she will quickly come back to you and say oh no that is a cooper's hawk and the female gets about a third bigger than the male it's the only hawk where the females bear so you know we've got fun stuff you know while you're walking to lead lead into but you know it's so far because our numbers are low and your idea it's it's always this chicken and egg chicken and egg and I want it to be just solved I want to walk into someone's office and them saying we love it we're going to put ever walk on the map you and Bonnie are going to be the coaches for united health care and we're going to have our 240,000 employees walk in the ever walk mile downloading their calendar so I made all those proposals and I haven't gotten a signature on the dotted line yet yeah we went to the attention economy that's what it's all about now it's all about the attention economy attention economy where it's all around social media numbers and the pull you can bring in from that that's the thing that these companies need the most that's what they need and so I keep saying you build it with us and we'll get there you know you you do you have incentives you can offer them united health care has deals with apple watch all kinds of things so if they were we were going to be the coaches of all their employees for this walk they say whoever gets 30 or 31 days every day they're going to get an apple watch and they'll give it to them I don't know what the statistic is now but pre-covid is an American if you if you're starting a small business the chances are you'll be out of business in five years you know very few make it and you know are in the black or is it the red are in the profit after five years and if you want to start a movement so it's it's not even income oriented in any way now you're you're really marching uphill but then what I love about your story and you know this so well and this is something that I tell myself every day it's like you create your own data I throw that away when people tell me like oh you're going to like five years you might be alive I throw it away I go great that's that's why you're not doing anything right good for you for looking at that data it does nothing for me I'm going to go create my own data and if I fail four times well then the fifth it's going to be pretty exciting because you've created your own data you know and I think your story captivates all of it it's the it is failing that's part of it but the end of it is so much sweeter right it's and that's what I like about it I like this this is this is good it's it's it's it's sparking me well and these are the things right these are the things what I need to do then is find partners who aren't thirsty and bound to social media numbers right that's not there because so far that's the only road we've been traveling while Diane and I had struggles to get a following on social media stowed home actually got their start on instagram they were posting beautiful photos onto a highly curated instagram feed it was driving people over to their website and that's how they're selling their furniture now the algorithm has changed and instagram favors short-form videos over photos so now stowed has to completely change their social media strategy I mean we were just talking about social media because it really was a big part of how we started and got the word out and we were really grateful for it being a venue and a channel to really connect us to a lot of the designers that we know today it was mostly instagram right yeah specifically instagram all instagram okay and it was it was a friend to us we eventually used paid ads and we dabbled it in a couple different ways but we had a pretty great organic following we had a lot of receptivity and we met a lot of really great business partners through it as time went on we know about the ios and privacy rules and the changes that were made with with an apple it happened pretty much overnight where it got pretty bad we tried to really work against the grain for a while and we tried you know every single which way you can imagine we talked to specialists we talked to people years all different suggestions by saying use hashtags which okay to like grow your following to really engagement awareness yeah yeah yeah and to to actually just go back to where we were before yeah and you know it was like a steady flow of just new people and exposure to who we are and I think people really appreciated it and the ios was like the beginning and we were really upset and really like swimming against the current for a while but we were okay and then I I have to say like about a week to two weeks ago it really took a really big nose dive from even there and so much so that we don't even really recognize it anymore our brand is very visual it's based on imagery we enjoy seeing our trade partners on instagram and seeing their visual I can't see it anymore I can see it from one of my accounts but not our business account so it's very frustrating to use it as a tool and a visual tool especially within the interior design world I think it probably works for a particular generation that wants to see a lot of movement and action and loud noises and it really stimulates your senses when you look at it but for us it's not a really great channel we've been talking about this a lot with different founders even even like founders fundraising or founders that are really strapping in for like the impending recession and the whole question we're getting is where do I put my my dollars right and so what happens in a recession more often than not is people spend less and so because they're spending less the customer acquisition cost to get that person to buy with you has gone up and so then you have two markets you have the big brands to your point earlier that can like afford to pay for ads and get in front of all of these people then you have the other side of it where TikTok came out and everyone's making these cool interesting videos Instagram is losing eyeballs because of TikTok all of a sudden Instagram has to compete they do that by creating reels and if you're someone like me or someone who had like I think it was over 10,000 followers they pay me today Instagram pays me to create reels and I get paid on views and I'm just I'm what I would call like a little piece of you know a little grain of salt in their massive ocean and there's a lot of us and so all these creators are now getting paid to create reels and when Instagram first made the shift to giving people an ability to create reels and giving them incentive it was interesting because you could post whatever you didn't have to get that creative it just is something that like you could get eyeballs and then and then the algorithm changed a little bit where reels were really only meant to give you a new audience and so your current followers wouldn't necessarily see the reels and your post which is just like your photos that you're posting those are meant today to be shared with just the people following you and so the rules changed and so if you're a big brand with big dollars they're kind of dumb the money saves them the money saves them from being creative if you're a smaller brand with not too much dollars the reels give you an ability to get in front of a ridiculous amount of customers for free right and so let's shift the mindset a little bit and so that's like okay interesting but how do I play in that game and like still make my product look really good that's the hard part the way I think about the hack is this if a song you like is trending that song will get you eyeballs whether you're posting a tennis ball or whether you're posting a piece of furniture for no other reason than that song is trending and so what ends up happening is if you're on instagram reels and you're just going through it and instagram is noticing that oh you like this song they might show you a product that you'd never look up ever in your life just because this is clearly your your attention probably is with the song and so that's how people get like discovered that's where the virality is coming from so I would argue like that's almost easier so it's more about it's easier being on top of the trends and playing the game when I think about social media I just wish everyone hired a good social media team I think the number one thing to keep you relevant is always going to be a great social media team and and it doesn't matter what product it really doesn't it doesn't matter if your product's a million dollars it doesn't matter if you're an artist like James peter henry who you know charges five figures for pieces of art it really doesn't matter it's just a function of like the game has changed and I think like you have to put yourself in a position to be seen people will still go to your stills no matter what wherever they discover you they're gonna go to your stills wherever they discover that you're real they're gonna go on to your website and see like what it is because the buying process is that for your for your particular product so Diego said it best social media has leveled the playing field and if you're a small brand you can get the same amount of eyeballs without dumping tons and tons of money into paid ads now when it comes to younger talent and actors having a social media following is really important for getting cast into big roles but as Justina Machado explains in our next clip this could be really daunting if you don't know how to go about it I don't even like you don't follow it I just have to have it because of what I do you know what I mean right I'm not very good at it because you should really post a lot to have people always I think my last post was like a month ago you know and so no I don't really follow that I don't ever feel the obligation then to to be your own like cheerleader publicist no because I'm from a different era you know like where it wasn't it didn't matter how many followers you had that's never affected me like I know it affects the younger actors that's what I've heard like the really really young actors but that's not my world you know so I don't even let it creep into my mind because it's like that'll drive you crazy like I heard my daughter on one day at a time she'd be like oh my god this you know this curl has a million followers and it's like have you ever seen Black Mirror did you see that episode of The Followers you know oh my god you got to see that show it's so great it's a great show I just I don't care man there's too much to care about I'll drive myself crazy and the studios from your perspective they don't they don't care either based on you because you have the talent right I already know you but they would I think for the younger generation yeah I think it's important for the younger generation I mean look at all the people that do the movies but then I don't think the movies do that well I gotta be honest you know the influencer I mean they do good on like things like dancing with the stars from your view in the world of Hollywood what do you think like Latinos need to either be successful maybe get to get like how do how do we change the thing like the thing that's a problem today we just keep talking about it we just keep getting people in positions that are are more powerful you know we have I mean my old boss she's one of the best Gloria Calderon Kelly I mean she's just doing everything to move us forward Eva Longoria America Ferrera I can go on these women are really doing stuff you know so we just keep doing that and that's all I could really say I don't it's it's a constant fight it's a constant fight and I and I think what I like about the younger generation that's here now is that they're not scared you know like when I was working when I started out you really couldn't say anything because then you'd be fear of never working again you know of somebody blackballing you black listing you and now because of social media because of so many movements that doesn't really happen so I do like that everybody is really talking about it you and that's the way it changes you know but we also have to support like I have so many friends right I feel like this is where it drops off because they'll say like oh I saw that show was stupid and I said let me ask you something like what show Latinos I'm not gonna say because my friends have been I mean all my friends are on all the shows you know the Latino shows and I but the thing is is that why can't we okay maybe it's not the greatest but why can white people have every stupid show around why does ours have to be so incredible let's you know let's make it basic let's start somewhere and let's support it let's support it and then there'll be another and then there'll be another and then you know like one day at a time that was brilliant I mean it was not just because I was on it it was like a brilliant show you know I look at Goldita Chronicles that got rave reviews and it got canceled HBO decided that they weren't going to do family programming anymore so Goldita Chronicles just got canceled Baker and the Beauty was one season got canceled we need people to tune in though like we need the Latinos to vote with their eyeballs yeah and you know that's the thing that's that that's not the only that's not the only thing but but it is how they viewed it yeah but it is a big thing they're right but it's not the only thing you know because they also have to give shows an opportunity another thing that happens is that the studios don't put any money into marketing yeah they put no money they'll do all the rest of it yeah so then they're like oh it failed well of course it failed you know like back in the day they would put you you know on a talk show or if it was an ABC show then you'd be on whatever late night show was that show they're not even doing that right so so then does it become prescient to use your social media platform uh yes that no but it's true but let's see but me it's not that's not gonna happen because I'm not gonna do it you know what I mean even though you know like you are is it because like you just don't want to touch it because I'm not good at it hire somebody just hire someone to do it that's true but then I'm a control freak you know yeah and I'll be like I'll be a micro you know micro managing stuff while stowed home was resistant to the ever-changing social media landscape Sunday's furniture hopped on board and now they're seeing success with their social media strategy we're gonna talk with Noah and Barbara the co-founders of Sunday's furniture about their social media strategy I wanted to ask you guys so right now there's this like huge shift moving in the social media world to like video right and so Instagram is becoming TikTok and for some reason a lot of designers design brands people with furniture like yours they're just so mad because at the end of the day their pieces are pieces that look really beautiful in a photo and Instagram says we don't care about you anymore your photos are worthless and it forces you guys to like completely shift right and so when you think of design you think of this beautiful restoration hardware magazine or you know and that's gone Instagram is saying we don't like that we need you to make videos and so how has this impacted you know and give me the realities of it like I'm sure you hated it at the beginning and now how has it impacted your business and what do you guys see as the way forward I mean in some ways like yes it does give you a little bit of freedom takes away some of that pressure for perfection right I think as people in the design spacing want that beautiful that perfect image but we found that some of our best performing content is like Noah our other team members talking through a product in the showroom and like it's like on an iPhone in one take we're certainly getting more into the TikTok and Reels space and so when I was at the pop-up event like I'm not a TikTok or Reels taker but like I was trying to take as much content as possible raw content for our team to be able to splice together so we're learning and it's new for us it's definitely a departure from like that perfect shot and you know I mean we need both right we need those e-com images and lifestyle images for our website and for our pvp pages but we recognize that what performs well even on paid ads is some of that more raw content and are you guys hiring like like who's running it for you guys do you have you outsourced it to a social media team do you have someone in house that does this who's the person that's learning on you know it's crazy like changes every day right now which is insanity yeah we've got an in-house an awesome team member and who leads our social side and you know what just earlier this week I kind of had this little epiphany like is it time to bring someone on board to just do Reels and TikTok and I and I think that's on a lot of people's minds so we haven't pressed that button the answer is yes but it's definitely on our mind yeah yeah no the answer is definitely yeah I think this is the one and the reason I bring it up is because we have this conversation more and more and more and it's almost like the pendulum has swung and people just need to do it and I tell everyone it's like you know 10 years ago you'd hire a bookkeeper your accountant your lawyer and those are standard issue and that's what you need to get started today it's that plus your social media person if you don't have it it's a rough road ahead I think it's becoming really clear to us yeah I would strongly suggest it yeah no no I would strongly suggest it and there's and the problem with it too is like obviously with lawyers it's like usually they went to law school and so there's a sense of they know something about the law but you know maybe they're not the sharpest but whatever at least they know the law the social media landscape is literally people who don't know anything and so it becomes very difficult it's like sourcing a piece of furniture it because you have to be meticulous you have to be you have to know what you're looking for and I think is why so many people struggle with it because it's one it's already an unknown territory it feels younger we devalue that for some weird reason in today's society and then it's like and then we have to hire them and trust them that they're going to do well which is usually yeah and I think they have to trust themselves too right because it's about like testing ideas and seeing what stick and then there's Haven's kitchen so according to their founder Alison Kane they don't use content to sell their product the content is the product their goal is to empower home cooks and there's no better way to go about that than showing delicious recipes in the videos they create we have a lot of educating to do we need to show people how this is going to make their lives better and how to use it on a daily weekly right basis and the best way to do that is to show them not tell them so the qr code is there to just be a very easy I can make this the sort of secondary benefit is from a sales perspective we are not only showing recipes but we have textable shopping lists I think we're the only people that are doing that so you click into a recipe like a gingerly miso roasted salmon you're like that looks good you can click text me the shopping list and while you're in store you get the shopping list which if you are the buyer in right at the store you're like oh basket building very convenient mentality keeps them in the store you know those scallions are a little bit of a ring right so again like I said at the very beginning we don't use content to sell our product the content is part of the product because by necessity we need to be educating consumers and we need to be a resource for them right shopping lists prep lists cleanup tips how to store my herbs so they don't you know dry out and wither the day I get them home all of that is part of what we see ourselves as and the qr codes help a lot it's like the social media platforms moving to video made it easier to some way for you because now it's like oh who doesn't like food we know food statistically does really well yeah i'm tick tock and instagram actually it's and it's endless content yeah endless right and it's really fun to offer content that you don't have to pay for right so in what capacity does that mean people are are making it and sending it in or no in the in the sense that you know there's a paywall for new york times recipes there's a you know a spawn con for you know bone app right all of the traditional like places where you would go for food content have been a little sullied from my perspective and so they have to figure out a way to monetize that that's true ours is just you're giving it to free we're giving it free we're also like by the way you know if you look at our at our pinterest they're we're never like buy sauce you know even our tick tock like we have 50 000 tick tock followers i don't think we've had one product forward now the product's got to be in there to some extent right but like i guess what i'm saying is that it's not that hard to make content when you are you're just trying to show people how to make dinner right and then you can kind of slice it a certain way for the pinterest audience you can slice it a different way for the seven second tick tock and then you know there's youtube long form there's youtube shorts we have 12 minute videos we have you know 30 whatever second shorts or whatever it is and and it's all sort of the same pie we're just slicing it up differently and some people like we crossed we know on tick tock i think like 50 of the users will eventually make a purchase which is actually way higher than instagram yeah have you seen that like have you seen a translation of literal customers engagement all of a sudden in they purchase can you track that or is it we really don't send people to buy from us directly so that trackability is as you know a little bit convoluted right if we're we have seen our velocities increase like 30 percent year over year at a time where people are cooking a little less than they were a year ago and through a price raise so our hunch is that there is some awareness connectivity to purchasing but we can't say for sure yeah so also tick tock is very gen z and so is that is that your customer also also wow okay it's interesting because you know i remember very early on and some marketing class like you can't say everyone you know sure your target everyone everyone will love this but i don't think that ours is as like demographics based as it is psychographics based right i think you can be 19 and living in a in an apartment with three friends and love to make something good and just like sauce and it's worth it to you or you can be you know in your fifties and you're feeding a big group of people and you want to put chimichurri on your steak yeah they have a lot more in common like the venn diagram is not generational yeah i think it's who's hungry essentially or who who cares about you know flavor who cares about ingredient panel and who doesn't have time to cook which is a lot of people yeah what haven's kitchen is doing with content is not unique but they are big believers in creating their fans and loyalists into chefs which is pretty amazing when you think about it because it creates a lot of youtube tick tocks and a lot of viral moments that are possible through food now when it turns to authors in brit frank before she wrote a book the publisher asked her a question and that is does she have a platform here we hear from brit frank on what that meant and how she had to build a platform first before she had to write a book let's switch gears here for a second so when you write the book now you got to sell the book yeah what are you doing for anyone who's listening in ever which is everyone i think trying to consider maybe writing a book one day maybe about their life maybe about something specific but how did you go about either figuring out how to market it or you know your husband mentioned you had a really good story around around a publicist or a pr company so i have lots of stories around publicity in pr but really people who want to write books don't realize that you are not just a book writer but you are also your own business of book selling because you're and i'm published by penguin random house and they're wonderful and they're huge but if i want to sell books i need to sell books and so like anything it's learning what goes into selling books what goes into building a platform if you're listening and you want to write a book go build a platform because unless you want to self-publish no one will publish you if you don't have an audience onto which to launch your product right was that clear to you from the jump well from the beginning i was like i want to write a book i don't know how to do it so i went to conferences and i went to workshops and i read books and every single one of those hammered platform platform platform you have to build a platform don't even worry about writing a sentence down put all of your efforts into building the platform get known in in the building of the platform half the material from the book emerged because i got my message honed and i got my voice figured out and as i was writing every day to build the platform i'm like oh this is actually what i want to say and i could test ideas i'm like i don't really like talking about that i really like talking about that and so i could sort of clarify my own message and then by the time i had a platform then it's okay now i need to like put a book proposal together and get an agent and pitch and do all that okay how did you go about building a platform what did you do i used instagram i mean social media pick your platform i don't know all of them i used that one and i just slugged it out i researched and i spent hours and hours and hours every day i wrote original content every day i talked to people who were doing it and asked them how they did it you know most people unless they really suck are happy to share that's true those are monsters we'll tell you how they did what they did yeah okay so then you build your platform you have this book and then do you set a specific date in terms of selling it and then try to like do a bunch of awareness prior or like obviously you had a PR firm at the beginning of this yeah like how does the book publishing process work so you get your book deal and then your publisher says turn it in on this date and then wait a year and a half or to come out so oh wow so during that year and a half that's when you hone your marketing strategy and you talk to different publicists and figure out what works and what doesn't work and how you want you know what feels good to you a lot of the things i was told to do don't feel really good to me and so i don't want to do tiktok and i don't want to be making videos on linkedin nothing wrong with it i just didn't want to do it so figure out what you're comfortable with because if you hate you know you can be uncomfortable but if you hate what you're doing every day it's going to show in your work yeah and people aren't going to want it why not tiktok i'm just curious it's i'm like dating myself here it's so overwhelming to me i spent all my time learning instagram and now that i have a handle on how instagram works tiktok is like i don't know how it works i don't get it it's interesting i'll just say this much too just from a data perspective it's mostly gen z and so i don't know if that's your audience i'd rather have no idea but um instagram is certainly more millennial and so it seems more fitting i'm like i i'm not an elder millennial i'm like a geriatric millennial and then why not linkedin i don't like it i don't i just don't like it there's no rhyme or reason and my husband who's very business oriented is like you know you could do this and this and he's right but i have found if i am actually enjoying what i'm doing and how i'm doing it i haven't had a problem coming up with a book idea selling it and getting it published using one platform so yay virality on social media can also turn your side hustle into a real job next we hear from shira who went ahead and created a tiktok that tiktok led her to get 40 000 dollars in sales she leveraged that to go on shark tank and boom now she has a real job it's called nightcap look it up and here we hear her story what i was saying before is i made a tiktok like a month before he went on shark tank and it made us 40 000 dollars you said that was 2019 so that was must have been 2020 okay i want people to really understand us because we there's a lot happening right now with as we go into this recession entrepreneurs like yourself are always asking like what do i do how do i hedge all this stuff and everyone gets sort of tight around like dollars in marketing and i just keep telling people like tiktok can change your business and there's some people who believe me and there's some people who think i look crazy when i say that and you know lexie and our team has worked with countless companies that she sees it happening in real time yeah and so we have enough data right so we're using logic to say this platform that we just happened to call tiktok in today's society whatever it ever is like just don't don't shy away from it but embrace it and so tell us tell us your story so you're on tiktok so we started on tiktok right before shark tank because of covid we weren't doing anything we're just like oh might as well play with this so we had 28 000 dollars before we started posting on tiktok in sales okay after like about a year of having the company and we had a one go viral i think we had made like five videos and we had one go viral we made 40 000 dollars off one tiktok how many views did it have i think it had six million okay for the listeners what was the premise of the video it was like the beginning of tiktok i'm sure everyone knows the sound like i'm obsessed with it or something like that it was like i'm addicted to this yeah that one and it was just like a i'm addicted to this something like that it was like i'm obsessed with it um i don't know but it was just really quick putting it on the cup and just showing the packaging and people just were like wow this is it connected with them and resonated yeah and i didn't realize we could do that so we got to go on the show and say hey we made 40 000 dollars in the last six weeks off a tiktok yeah off of well so trump was actually going to ban tiktok so we said social media oh smart move yeah smart move but um but yeah we did that and and now our whole entire company is based off of tiktok the good news about tiktok is like half of the people that pay attention to videos on tiktok will eventually buy which is way higher than instagram and so you have a real like the demo at least is not only are they willing to watch but they're willing to spend yeah that's how i differentiate the two recently i kind of realized that i mean influencers cost a lot of money now and you're you're spending so much money on an influencer when you're not getting the return that you want so i kind of chose like oh maybe i should just be our influencer so like a you have yeah i'm able to like post anything i want for free and b i can put my face to the brand so you kind of have like instead of just seeing the scrunchie you have now like someone who's like oh doesn't that girl own it or you know kind of like a relatability factor which is really like really nice to have on tiktok and i honestly recommend that to like every brand to to create a fate like have a face it could be the CEO it could be it could be lexie could be anyone it could you could hire someone to be the face of your brand or you could do it yourself but i chose to do it myself we just came back from a shark tank reunion in vegas which i had never encountered before i didn't even know they did that what do you guys do is it like uh do you guys hang out do you have breakout sessions is it what is it yeah it's just a big party no it's like a bunch of breakout sessions i actually spoke at the tiktok panel oh nice and it was really cool but tell us about the tiktok panel what what what other brands are so it's funny because i didn't prepare and i barely knew i was i didn't even know i was speaking at it until like a couple days before and i kind of just like was sitting there before and i was like i was worried about what to talk about and then i realized everyone over complicates the platform tiktok so it's not like you have to be talking about getting verified and all this stuff when like everyone's just like what do i post so i just kind of like narrowed it down to like the basics and i tried to explain it in the most simple way like i just tried to give them examples of what i do and i said hey like you guys are on this room right now you've all been on shark tank you can leverage that like you can just put a photo behind yourself and say this is me and people love storytelling so it's not like you have to be doing these crazy things on tiktok like just tell them what happened so what do you tell like let's say there's a brand who's listening right now who's struggling to get on tiktok what do you say like your post should include these three things don't overthink it what are the things that you tell them i mean i would say three things i would say what is your product who are you and why is this product better than better than others i just think it's like so simple and people over complicate it and and i mean not to not to call anyone old but older people think that tiktok is like a gen z thing and that like we're just so genius about tiktok but it's like it's it's supposed to be simple and that's what i tried to explain because once you start to overthink the platform that's when you're doing it wrong and everything that all the videos that i constantly think about they they flop and the ones that i make in three seconds they go viral so it's just all about like transparency and like relatability and building a connection with the person watching and just talking to your phone as if it's your friend so in that clip shira talks about the importance of storytelling let's look at xcj as an example so we had jen the co-founder on our podcast and after that she became a client of the creator code which is my social media agency two of the videos we did with them reached over one million views and this brought in thousands and thousands of followers tons of orders and one exciting article in forms the big takeaway here is that both of these videos revolved around storytelling one tells the story of mistakes that you can make while steaming dumplings while the other was a founder story that we actually just took from our podcast people really love transformations especially for brands and so it's often over complicated so just tell your story and be authentic about it a few of my fair ideas include why did you start your business show a recipe with your product and what struggles did you face along the way and just remember don't overthink it whether you're getting one view or a million views the idea is that you're creating a brand identity people who can understand you the mission and the goal of your product and at the end of the day persist persist persist if you made it this far i bet you loved the episode so you should join our youtube channel membership for only two ninety and a month this gets you access to one the whole unabridged conversation two you get the episodes on monday one day earlier three you get two additional entries to our giveaways check out our instagram to see what you've given away and four you get access to seasons one through three that's over a hundred episodes of wisdom and life-changing advice what are you waiting for join


Lloyd Austin, the United States Secretary of Defense, during his speech at the Rammstein format meeting on October 11 in Brussels, has named five reasons why Ukraine's struggle against the Russian invasion matters, everyone here understands the stakes, and why Ukraine's defense struggle matters. Ukraine matters because Putin's war of choice is a great and acute threat to European security, Austin said. Secondly, Ukraine is important because the Russian aggression clearly challenges the US allies. He added, thirdly, Ukraine matters because Russian atrocities against civilians offend our shared values and threaten the rule of law, the official noted fourth, he said. Ukraine matters because Russian attacks on Ukrainian grain are deliberately causing hunger and suffering for innocent people. Worldwide, fifth, Austin stressed, Ukraine matters because if major powers can invade their peaceful and democratic neighbors with impunity, it will destroy the rules-based order that has made the world so much safer since the end of World War II. This is what brought us together again, and, as I have said before, I continue to firmly believe that our support for the forces of freedom in Ukraine will be strong in any season or any storm, the United States Secretary of Defense said.