All right. Welcome to stage C and we are running a little bit behind time, but we're hoping to catch it up as we go along throughout the day. It's my very great pleasure to present to you, Jenny List, who's going to present on making, understanding, and appreciating cider. Thank you very much. Hello everybody. Thank you very much for all turning up today early on in the camp and I hope I hope you all have a wonderful camp. OK, I'm Jenny List. Some of you may know me because I write for Hackaday. I also write for Hack Space Magazine. This is a slightly older version of the presentation, so it's got oxhack.org and hackaday.com. I'm also a member of Milton Keynes Makerspace, so that's mkmakerspace.org.uk. So without further ado, inter. OK, making a quality cider is simple. You just take some apple juice and wait, which is not far from the truth. You press apples in about September, October, and you leave it over winter somewhere quiet, and next year you have cider. Obviously there's a bit more to it than that, which I'll go into, but that's where I always start with this talk. This is based on my background. I'm an electronic engineer and technical journalist, but I grew up on a small farm in Oxfordshire, and my parents tried to do the self-sufficiency thing in the 1970s, and they planted a large orchard, which had all sorts of apple trees, and of course by the 1980s and 1990s, it had far too many apples, far more apples than any normal Oxfordshire family could eat in ten years, let alone a year. So I ended up with all these apples to play with, and my parents were great because I realised afterwards this was them introducing me to alcohol. Other people, it's like behind the bike sheds with vodka and coke or something. With me, they reckoned the safest thing to do was if I could make it, I could drink it. So there is almost nothing that grows in North Oxfordshire that I haven't tried to make alcohol out of. But we're talking about apples today anyway. OK, so next slide. Right, the traditional cider making process. This is probably universal to most cider making regions of the world. So in the UK it's mostly the west of England, sort of where we are now, sort of a belt from sort of here, bit of Wales down through Somerset into the west country. But it's actually across a lot of the country. You'll find eastern county ciders. There's a bit of cider made in my part of the world commercially. I'm not a commercial producer, but there's a bit of cider made. But you'll find it across most of the southern half of the UK. There are more here. You'll find it in Normandy. You'll find it in the north of Spain. They each have their own very individual and distinctive cider styles, which I'll touch on a bit later. Anyway, apples, obviously they grow over summer. My apple growing year begins around Christmas. I prune apple trees. Ours is a traditional sort of eating apple orchard. The trees need to be kept in check, so you're cutting off stray branches and stuff like that. This is, well, this frost on the ground around Christmas. The leaves come out sort of April-May, blossom time in May, small fruit forming through June, July, August. In September, late September early October, I'm harvesting apples, and then I'm pressing them to make the juice. That's in October. Then, as I said earlier, they sit there, they ferment. The yeast does its job over winter. With beers, some beers, particularly ales, with the higher temperature yeast, they will ferment quite quickly at a higher temperature. You have to heat them. With ciders, the slower the better, and the colder the better. You leave them over winter.  I've heard tales of big vats of apple juice fermenting and having ice on the top from the frost, for instance. You leave it to ferment slowly all over winter, because the flavours, the complex flavours, come from the slow fermentation. If you have a very fast fermentation, then you might not have as technically good as cider. It will be a good cider, and it might have some of the extra flavour notes. In March, you rack the cider. What's happened by then is the fermentation's mostly completed. The yeast has died off. It's insisted because the alcohol has got to the point where it can't do any more work. It's dropped out. You've got a loader cider, and at the bottom you've got a layer of dead yeast, a thick layer of dead yeast. You don't want that yeast getting in your cider, and it's the stuff that gives you headaches. If you've ever had bad cider, it probably had yeast floating in it. It was cloudy. You rack it.  Then you end up with your clear cider sitting there for a few more months till May, June, when any yeast that's still in suspension has settled out. Then you bottle it. You bottle it in May. Traditionally, on West Country farms, they said that you would give last year's cider to the workers at harvest time. For instance, you would give them August, September. You'd give it a few months' maturing in the old stone flagons or whatever. In terms of my cider, I would mature it six months to a year. I would usually crack open my first cider at Christmas. It would be a year and a month or two old at that point. I find with my cider, it just gets better and better the longer you leave it. It's like a fine wine. I've got ciders that are about 10, 15 years old. You open a bottle. I rarely open a bottle of the oldest ones. I haven't got many left, but it's still good. It's still really nice. It's just got better with age. Anyway, the most important thing that tells you what cider you're going to have comes from the apples that you choose. There are basically three types of flavor note inside apples. There's acid, which, as you probably guess, is the sour taste. There's sugar, yet again the sweet taste. You're probably used to both of these from the apples that you'll buy in the supermarket. A cooking apple will have a load of acid in it. If you pick a crab apple from the hedge, it's probably mouth-puckeringly sour. That's the acid. Sugar, if you've ever eaten a golden delicious or something like that, that's full-on sugar. Lovely and sweet. Tannin, if you're used to west countrysideers, you'll know the tannin flavor, but it's that sort of dryness on the tongue flavor. If you ever picked a slow off a hedge in autumn, that's the same tannin. I believe there are tannins in stewed tea as well, but it's a kind of a different flavor, but the tannin is what gives west countrysideers their flavor. Not all ciders have tannin. West countrysideers traditionally have tannin, but certainly most British ciders, unless they're specifically not a tannin kind of cider, will endeavour to have some tannins, some tannin apples in there. Generally, they're more tannic this side of the country, and eastern countrysideers are less tannic. If you get a cider like Aspals, for instance, which you can buy in British supermarkets, it's a mass market cider. It's from Suffolk, and it's almost no tannin at all. I notice somebody's got a western's flag end down at the front here. If you eat westerns and compare it alongside of Aspals, you'll instantly see the difference between tannin and not tannin. It's just the style of the region. Ciders don't have to have tannic or cider apples. You can make cider with any apples. It just tells what the kind of thing comes out. Now, if you look at apples, you can represent any given apple on this triangle. Each of your different types of flavor at different corners of the triangle, and any given apple, you can say, this has got so much sugar, this has got so much tannin, this has got so much acid, and just put it anywhere on this triangle. At the top, for instance, for sweet, I've got golden delicious. Personally, I find golden delicious a very insipid apple. It's a dessert apple. It's just sweet, it's just mush. I'm not a great fan of golden delicious, but it is very sweet. You're probably all familiar, if you're Brits at least, with Cox's Orange Pippin. I don't know how far for you people who aren't British, how far Cox's Orange Pippin has gone beyond the UK, because Cox's Orange Pippin is your classic sweet with a bit of flavor kind of apple. That's about halfway between sweet and sharp. If you're used to British cooking apples, Bramley seedling, that's quite sour when you taste it. Bramley actually has quite a lot of sugar in it. It makes brilliant drinking juice. If you've got a Bramley tree, never make cider with it because it's far too sour. Your cider will be rather unappetising. For God's sake, if you've got some Bramleys, press them, pasteurise the juice, it makes great drinking juice. I put the hedgerow crab apple in the corner. Usually hedgerow crab apples are very sour. I always try one when I see one, because occasionally you find one that's tannic or sweet, but it's about one in 20. The ones on the right are all different cider apples. Here's where the magic of the cider maker's craft comes. They want to make the perfect balanced juice not much acid, but a bit of acid for interesting flavour. Enough sugar to have lots and lots of fermentation, but lots of tannin to give that tannic bite to their cider. Dabinett, halfway at the right-hand side, that's the classic cider apple. Well-balanced, a mixture of sweet and bitter tannin.  Some people hate them. I love them. They're sweet and tanninated. A good sweet cider should. I like them. Dabinett's well-balanced enough. You can make a single varietal out of it, and you make a good single varietal as well, with just one type of apple. There are other types of cider apple. I've put down the Yarlington Mills a bit more bitter. Stoke reds are bitter. Prims and King is a so-called bitter-sharp, so not my sugar, but midway between acid and tannin. Usually a given cider farm will have a mixture of all these apples, and they will blend them together in the pressing to get the juice they want. If you have apple varieties, see where you can put them when you taste them on this triangle. Anyway, move on. Hang on, just take a bit of it. Sorry, all this talking. There are two processes involved. Now, in a minute I've got videos. I hope the videos work. My apologies if they don't. My apologies if the videos don't work. But there are two processes. First of all, you crush the apples to make a porridge-like pulp. If you just press apples as they are, you don't get much juice. You have to open up the apples to let the juice be able to flow out. Traditionally, this is from Wikipedia. This is a picture of an apple crusher in Normandy. You'll often see these in old cider farms. They don't tend to be used much, but they're very much symbolic. The millwheel going round with a horse crushing. What should come out of this is like a porridge of mashed-up apples. Now, a lot of more commercial people use a rotary-scratter. It's like a massive industrial grater. My scratter, my dad made it for me. It's a spinning stainless steel blade. It's more of a chopper, but it does the same thing. Pressing, as you might guess, just squeezes the stuff out of the apples. The one in the picture is a... just a straightforward up-and-down press where the apple pulp is put in so-called cheeses. It's wrapped in muslin and has boards between them. A whole load of them are stacked on top of the other. The idea is the boards allow channels for the apple juice to come out.  You'll see it on a video if the video works. Either way, you just squeeze the apple pulp and out comes the juice. Anyway, let's see if the video works. First of all, we'll be scratching. I did it in the dark, as you can see. My apologies. It seems the video isn't working in PowerPoint.  Similarly, pressing the pulp. Yes, again, it doesn't work. A picture of my press, me going round and round and round and lots of brown apple juice coming out of the bottom into a stainless steel bowl. OK? What do you do when you've got a load of juice? You've got a load of juice. It's straight out the orchard. I'm afraid apples in the orchard get all sorts of dirt on them and stuff. You've got animals and all sorts. I wash my apples. I run them through a big tin bath, but even so, if you drink the apple juice that comes straight out of the press, you will get a runny tummy. Don't ask me how I know this. OK? I and most commercial cider makers will add a bit of sulphite. It's sodium metamide sulphite. It reacts with, I believe, the acid to make sulph dioxide. Now, the sulphid oxide kills bacteria. Just harmful bugs. It's driven off in the fermentation. So you make a bit of SO2, then something comes along and blasts loads of CO2 through the cider and the SO2 is gone. If you pick up a bottle of cider and it says may contain sulphites, if it's been properly fermented, it won't contain any sulphites. They're long gone because the CO2 has blasted it off. They have to say it because they added them. It's not much. That's what they may contain sulphites mean. Now, in my case, you can use just the natural yeast on the apples. It's a bit variable. I cheat slightly. I use a cultured yeast. I think the yeast I use is actually a champagne yeast. Because you get a more uniform result. If you use the natural yeast on the apples, sometimes you get an amazing cider. Sometimes you get an awful cider. I like amazing cider. I also add a nutrient. Now, that's basically a fertilizer. The reason for that is my parents planted our orchards in the 1970s and I've tried to put manure on the trees, but the fact is the trees are a little deficient in nutrients. Now, this comes through in the juice. So the juice hasn't got much nutrients. The yeast is a bit starved and it starts looking wherever it can. Now, wherever it can means, believe it or not, it picks up sulphurous compounds from the DNA of the apple juice cell, the cells from the apples, and it makes it smell of bad eggs. When you've thrown away a batch of cider because it stinks of bad eggs, you use yeast nutrient next time. So, yes, I cheat slightly with a culture and nutrient. Then, you basically stop nasties getting in.  Commercial cider makers wouldn't use an airlock. Too much CO2. They just use a filter to stop particles getting in. There's enough CO2 coming off that it's not going to allow any bugs back in. And they leave it over winter. I leave it in a cold room and it just ferments. I tell you what I use to ferment in. I use big plastic gerry cans like caravaners use for water. In this small to medium size farm cider making industry, they use, I think they're called IBCs, industrial bulk carriers. Great big plastic drums, usually with a metal sort of cage around them. And we come back to what I said earlier about racking. Taking the cider off the dead yeast. Transfer into sterilised bottles. You certainly wash your bottles properly. Sterilise them with camden tablets if you can. That kills off the bacteria. You don't want to go through all that hard work. Only find the bacteria, take your cider away from you or you make vinegar. Vinegar is great but you don't want vinegar when you really want cider. So, sterilise your bottles. Now, in terms of alcohol by volume you get between five and seven percent and that really comes into how much sugar was in the apples. You can add sugar. You can get above five or seven percent if you want. You can use a yeast that will take more alcohol but if you want a real cider, natural cider, you just go with what sugar is in the apples. In my case it's usually five to six percent because summers in Oxford shouldn't make that much sugar but that's good enough for me. So anyway, what I've just described is how you make a full juice real cider. Now, I'm going to talk about the stuff you buy in the supermarket. Now, there's a whole load of different ciders in the supermarket and they're all pretending to be the real McCoy, the authentic stuff and, you know, marketing redolent of farmers and brewery. I'm a soda drinker and all that kind of stuff and the trouble is you don't know what you're getting. I mean, on this page, you've got a whole load of different brands. You've got Stellaratra, Cedra, you've got Bulmers, you've got Recorderlig, Strongbone, Magnus, Dry Blackforn, Hinnies, Weston's, Gwyntodraig and who knows what you got, you know? And you've also got the word scrumpy. Now, scrumpy is a great word. For the Oxford dictionaries, for quite a few years, here's another thing with scrumpy on it, right? Scrumpy comes from a West Country dialect word scrump with an apple and it's become a bit of a shorthand for, oh, this be the real stuff, oh, I've gone into pirate there, yar. And as a result, you'll find all sorts of things sold as scrumpy and it doesn't mean anything.  So, I look for real cider. I look for the kind of things that I would look if I were looking for a fine wine. You want a cider that is enjoyable and lovely to drink. You don't want something that's challenging or sour or a bit off. And if somebody said, oh, that have had rats in it, no mistake, then walk away. There's a lot of marketing rubbish about cider. The only one on this page that is actually being absolutely truthful is Stella Archway in the bottom right hand corner. Because they're dead right, it's not cider. I mean, actually on this page there are some ciders that I would consider to be real ciders. Hennies, for instance. OK, they're a mass-market cider now, but they stayed with their roots as far as cider. Westerns, it's made from what's the word, concentrated juice. But it is a proper made from juice cider. Gwynethraig Os Pobolshaira Cymraigmar Anybody speak Welsh here? That's a coolest name for a cider ever. It's Dragon's Breath. Gwynethraig, it's a fantastic cider. If you can get Gwynethraig, the double D is the in Welsh, if you can get Gwynethraig try it, it's a really good cider. So anyway, we're going to talk about how this, the sort of nasty end of the commercial market is made. So we're talking the sort of strong bows, white lightnings, dry black thorns, and dare I say it the Bulmer's Magners and Stella Archway. And many more regrettable ciders. I mean, come on, look at Magners. Nothing, nothing that luminous shade of orange is natural. Okay, sorry, I've probably gone into already covered some of this. There are various different types of mass markets, strong bow, woodpecker, white lightning. So-called premium ciders that have exploded onto the market in the last decade. They're basically the same as the mass market ciders, but in a fancier bottle. So Magners Boulders Recorder Lig, Stella Archway, blah, blah, blah. Real ciders, and yet again you see I've named a few, Westerns Orchard Pig, Hennies, Hogan's, Gwynta Thryg. There are a whole load more appearing now. They tend to be more sort of smaller bottling made from juice. Tend to be a bit more expensive. And then you get the speciality ciders. Small producer exemption. There's a tax exemption that you can produce cider in this company in this country without having to pay tax to the revenue. But you have to register with them and you have to register under 70 hectiliters. That's 7 cubic metres of cider a year. There are a lot of small producer exemption cider makers. Some of them are godawful, we sell scrummy to the Tars coin of paces. And others are some of the most amazing ciders you will ever drink. Seek them out if you're in the West Country. They are worth it. I've mentioned Normandy ciders here. The Normandy ciders makers have a wonderful process called keving where they kill off the pectin to mean that it stops fermentation before all the sugar is used. So you make a naturally sparkling cider that is also naturally sweet. All those other ciders, if they're sweet, they've had sweetener added. So anyway, you want to break into the commercial side of business. You want to make magners or white lightning or something like that. You start with imported apple juice. I put China there. China produces vast amounts of imported apple juice. You want a million litres of imported apple juice? No problem. Loads and loads of container tanks will come on our ship. Job done. You need some sugar because there isn't enough sugar in the concentrated apple juice. Hydrolyzed wheat starch, yet again bulk carrier from China. You take a yeast culture. You don't take the same yeast culture I use. No, you use a yeast culture that's been engineered to ferment up to 20% or 30% alcohol. You want something really strong. And you put it into a fermentation plant. That's a factory. And you end up with a cider. It's over 20% alcohol. You wouldn't drink it. You want to sell it at 4% or 5%. So you dilute it with water. But it isn't sweet enough. So, and it needs to be fizzy because the customers expect fizziness. And also it probably comes out looking a little dull. So make it nice and glowing orange. So you have lots of chemicals. So you'll add something like CO2 to make it fizzy. Colour probably ammonia caramel. That's burnt hydrocarbons, not burnt sugar. And sweeteners. That's probably sucralose nowadays because it tastes a bit like sugar. And you end up with a bottle of 5% alcohol sweet sparkling cider. That is actually less than 30% apple juice. Welcome to Magnus Country. I hope I've given you a good impression of the kind of things to look out for insider and to find good-siders. We are inside a country here. I suggest you, if you're interested, have a Google look for local cider farms or local cider mills. You're about the time of year when cider farms are starting to sell their stuff. I'm afraid I should have done some research. I don't quite know the local ones in this part of the world. They will be there. It'll be interesting to have a look and take a while during the camp and drive and find some. They will be there. They will sell you it there and then on the farm. More information. I will point you at Andrew Lee. Andrew Lee is retired now. He is a cider scientist. He used to work at, when the government had a cider industry research laboratory, he was one of their scientists. What he doesn't know outsider isn't worth knowing. He's published a book. Get his book. His book is great. I've got his book. It taught me a lot about cider and I've already made cider for quite a few years when I got it. Sider workshops. Sider workshops an online mailing list. You will find cider makers like me who do it. You'll find professional cider makers. They're all enthusiastic and knowledgeable about cider and they will help anybody at any level. Anyway, that's cider. Enjoy your cider. I should say wassail. Enjoy your cider. It's good stuff. Thank you very much. Do we have time for questions or not? It's Dominic here. I can take questions as he's setting up. Does anybody have any questions? How do you make a naturally sweet cider and stop it from minting dry and strong? We're touching on the keving, the technique the Normandy cider makers use. They traditionally used a bacterial culture to which would precipitate out the pectin. Now pectin is the stuff that makes jam into jelly. They would precipitate out the pectin and the pectin was the food the yeast needs to ferment. So with no pectin to live off the yeast would then stop fermenting and would leave some sugar behind. Nowadays you can actually buy the enzyme that the bacteria makes as a powder and just add it. Keving is notoriously difficult. I have never done it. I know plenty of people who've tried and failed horribly. I know one or two people who've keyed beautiful ciders. I've drunk beautiful keyed Normandy ciders which is why I keep saying if you go to Normandy have some of the local cider it's amazing. Anyway, anyone like any others? Is there anything useful you can do such as forms of cooking with the pulp once you've got the juice out of it? Bloody good question. You probably could make apple pie particularly if your pressing isn't very good. I mean to be honest my press isn't very efficient. So yes you probably could. I have to say I compost it. So I'm probably not the person to ask. Now I reckon we've got one more. Was there one down it? Oh god there's several. We'll try and get a couple lady over there too. So can I taste your cider? I've spat in this point. Find me on the Hackaday village. I've got some more. Okay. Not all of you. I haven't got that much. Is there any good here on EMF camp? Any good cider in the bar? Yes there is. I haven't seen what it is. Always look on a bar. Not for a pump or a fizzy like gas pump. Look for a bag in box. It's basically literally a plastic bag in a box full of cider. That's normally from a local producer or similar. Because it doesn't keep that well. It's normally got a 30 day shelf life. So you've seen one of those at EMF in there for long. Awesums. This man has a list of local ciders. So I did notice some bagging boxes on the bar. So go and try them. I don't know what they are because I haven't had time. At food hacking base today at 10 o'clock in the evening it's next to the hardware hacking area of Mitch Altman and the others Belgium village. There will be a cider tasting. So there are still some spots on. So if you check the cider tasting 10 o'clock today, 10 o'clock also tomorrow so you can come and taste the event is scheduled. So you can check. Food hacking base. Awesums. Okay, well thank you very much everybody. I better hand the microphone over.


My wife and I are both professionals. I've got my law degree, she's in a graduate program. In terms of finding an early education opportunity for a daughter, it was difficult. We looked all over. We don't qualify for one of these CYFD subsidies, so our cost is out of pocket. And to find the most appropriate place, it would have been impossible. Why? Well, the cost would have been more than our mortgage, which is crazy. But also, we couldn't find a place that we felt comfortable with in terms of the racial, cultural, linguistic, and class dynamics. We didn't want our daughter to go to an exclusive early-ed center where it's one type of kid and one type of kid only. Unfortunately, we've had to sacrifice quality for that diversity. And to me, that's unacceptable. We should never have to do that. We have to work extra hard at home with our daughter because we know she's not getting the highest quality instruction. However, she's growing up in two languages, which is great. We believe that it's actually expanding her horizons from a very young age. Now, having said that, again, we should never have to sacrifice diversity for quality of instruction.


Welcome to Digital Asset News, the top stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets, and bring them down to bite-sized pieces. Today, there's so many things going on in this space. It is amazing. So first up, over 90% of Ethereum's supply is now in profit. And I gotta tell you, this is just one of the reasons why I believe Ethereum's a $10,000 coin also. Ethereum's final testnet goes live, just went live today, August 4th, and this marks the three months until ETH 2.0 launch, and when that happens, watch out. On top of that, we're gonna talk about yield farming and DeFi is fun, but don't forget about Uncle Sam, and that part is not as fun as far as taxes go. But I will just reiterate, this is one of the reasons why Ethereum is a $10,000 coin. Also, we're gonna quickly look at Uniswap and why I think it's just fantastic, and why I actually added it to the exchange and wallet fees, Google spreadsheet, because it's just so good. And lastly, we'll go over a question today, which is all about trading and other such things. But let's take a look at what's going on in the market today. So today, it is August 4th, there's about 130 Texas time, and I gotta tell you, these are exciting times.  It wasn't like Bitcoin went to $12,000 and then went to $6,000, or went up to $11,000 and then dropped down to $8,000. And it was a pretty respectable pullback, nothing too amazing or too frightening, which is good for this space.  Now, having said that, I will tell you this, 10% drop does not affect me. 20% drop doesn't affect me. 50% drop kind of gets to me a little bit nowadays, I'll just be honest with you. But try doing a 10% or 20% drop in traditional markets. People would lose their minds. But that's the difference between us and them. That's just how it is. And yeah, so Ethereum is down a little bit, but up 20% for the week hovering around that $400 mark of 3 to 7. XRP, 29 cents, watch out, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Cardano. Ooh, Cardano's in the sixth spot, that's good. And Bitcoin SV moves down. Again, don't know why Bitcoin SV is in the top 10. I have no idea. If you know why Bitcoin SV is in the top 10, and tell me why it's awesome in the description because I just can't figure it out. Litecoin is still there. Good for that. It's just down a little bit, but up 8% for the week. And Chainlink, just coming up massively strong at almost 12% for the day, 33%. I can tell you right now, it's over 9%. I know that is, that is its all-time high. It has never hit 9 before, and over the last 24 hours, it just hit that and exceeded it. And this is on top of the Zeus Capital LLP FUD article, where it said, you know, Chainlink is going to zero. Now, there could be a lot of like 3D chess going on there. I don't know. I don't really care. I just know that the price is up, and it's good.  But it looks like it's doing pretty well. It's a project that works. I don't think anybody can deny that. So I'm looking pretty happy about that. Binancecoin and 10, crypto.com taking a tumble after that MCO to CRO swap. If you want to learn about that, we did that yesterday. And a lot of ticked off people about that. And I can understand why, especially trying to get those jade cards, which is what everybody told me. So yeah, and then Tazel's up 7, and pretty good. So overall and all, this is an exciting time. This is the time to be into cryptocurrency assets when there are big moves coming up on the upswing. And we're not just seeing huge tumbles and tumbles and tumbles, or which is even worse, in my opinion, is when we just trade sideways. That is so boring. But right now, exciting times. Love it. Let's jump into day stories. So first up, over 9% of e-supply is now in profit. And the first sentence is going to get you. It says here, more than 90% of ETH's circulating supply is now in profit. The last time this level was observed was in early 2018, when the price of crypto was 925. So let that sink in. Right now it's below 400. Yet 90% of people are in profit. Well, how's that happening? Because it would make sense to me like, well, it's 925, it's higher than everybody's in profit, or 90%, sure enough. So it's quite simply, my friend. It's called DCA, dollar cost averaging. It's the thing that I do. I don't trade. I'm not into trading. I've got other things going on. I just don't have the time and patience or stomach for it right now. So when I talk about dollar cost averaging, remember this, and think about this. I got in in late 2017 and I bought on the upswing and I bought at some of the highs. I remember buying a theory about like $1,100. Yeah, me. And I learned a lot of lessons and I'm happy that I did because that's what made me who I am today and how I actually invest and do things with cryptocurrency. See, I don't just wait for everything to start running up and then do it again or all these different crazy things. I just say, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to dollar cost average and every week or every day or every three days or because I do dollar cost averaging different for different coins, different projects at different times. And Ethereum is one of those projects where I've gone and dollar cost averaged every day or sometimes every three days or every week I changed up. So even though I bought $1,100, I've also bought at like 298. So as I start to dollar cost average and buy things at a lower level, my average cost for Ethereum goes down when I buy the dips. And that's why like, if I just let it just go, oh, poor me, Jesus, should have done that. And I'm like, well, I'm like, you know, in the negative, no, what I'm going to do is I believe in the projects I believe in the tech like those memes always talk about. So I, I'm just going to keep buying and I buy at a lower price and it brings my overall price down and that is what is happening here. So 90% of people are in profit and you can't beat that. That is fantastic. There's two more pieces of this and then we'll finish up. The Spartan groups co founder Kelvin co commented, the strong move in Ethereum has to do with the upcoming ETH 2.0 launch, which is a major catalyst. Could not agree more. Every phase of ETH 2.0 over the next two to three years brings Ethereum closer to its final state and will be the catalyst for ETH to really jump to the moon. So real quick, let's take a look at what they're talking about here. Before we go live with Ethereum 2.0, there has to be these test nets and the third one just went live today and it marks three months until ETH 2.0 actually comes into and becomes fruition. So when there was actually talk, Vitalik Buterin was saying, you know what, man, I happen, uh, or no, no, it wasn't Vitalik Buterin. It was one of the lead programs that said, Hey, it might have happened this year. Vitalik's like, no, it's going to happen. And I got to tell you, I appreciate, I tip my hat to somebody who says, or the CEO or the leader who says, look, we're doing it this way, it's going to happen. We can't start to keep screwing around. Let's get this done. And nothing promotes that type of atmosphere like competition. And I'll just say Cardano is pushing everybody. They're pushing everybody. So is Tezos. So all the other projects. So these are exciting times because everybody's in the fray.  Things are actually happening. I like to see this. And when you have this much competition, people like, Hey, I'm going to make things happen. So for the test net real quick, Ethereum developers have launched the Medela test net, which is the last test net prior to Ethereum 2.0 main net launch. The test net went live on August 4th, 2020 at 1pm. So today, the Medela test net matters because it includes many of Ethereum 2.0's key features in a real working environment. But the test net does not handle any real value or real ETH. And it doesn't allow validators to earn profit. So basically everything's just going through the paces just to make sure that things don't break. And that's the big thing. So they're going to go through all these things, make sure it works. That's great. And then they can launch everything just like what Cardano did with their main net, just like what everybody does. I mean, they do their due diligence. So again, tip my hat to these guys. Hopefully it all works out because if this does, which I've been very critical of the Ethereum team and the Cardano team for hitting their milestones. Well, guess what? Cardano hit their milestone. They did what they said they were going to do. And that is huge. So when you have that type of thing happening, what does Ethereum look back? Oh, wow. There's people that are heels. We better pick up the pace. That's what's great about competition. Free market. All right, let's jump back to the main article. So there's just one more sentence to go over. And it says, furthermore, news.bitcoin.com is where we pulled the article from. Recently reported the total value locked within the decentralized finance or DeFi ecosystem has surpassed over 4 billion, which is amazing. And that's DeFi. DeFi is another catalyst. I mean, it's just, this is why I'm always talking about Ethereum. This is why I think Ethereum is a 10k coin. Everything's built on Ethereum. Everything's going on Ethereum. DeFi is just one of those, those rocket fuels that are going to bring it into the forefront. So if we have a new Ethereum 2.0 with sharding, with proof of stake, with all the decentralized finance, which I believe is going to be big, not for retail investors, but for small businesses, I'm going to get into that a second. There is no stopping it if it can just hit its goals or its milestones. Just do that and they'll be successful. So what I want to do is just kind of break down DeFi real quick and just go over some basics and some advanced stuff and what's going on in the space right now. This is an article from crypto briefing. Real big fans of these guys, they do solid work and I like all their articles that they have. So they're just talking about farming DeFi, yield farming. And it talks about when you're doing these types of things, you have to worry about taxation. So this is the boring part, but it's an important part and I'll get into the other good stuff in a bit. But depending on circumstances, crypto either treat it as property or as income, depending where you're at. In America, it's property. Cryptocurrency is property. In Russia, it's property. Other places, it could be income, sure. When you sell or exchange crypto, you report capital gains and losses similar to selling stocks or property. And this is one of those things where it doesn't matter how much you make, it's how much you keep. And I can tell you like with my Amazon business, I thought I was making a ton of money. And then I started to look at, whoa, hey, wait, I got these fees. I got all these storage fees. I got these transaction fees. I got all the things for advertising. I got for shipping costs. And I look at everything. I'm like, whoa, I'm not making that much. So it's not about how much you make. It's how much you keep. And you have to keep an eye on these types of things. Because if not, what are you doing this all for? So anyhow, continue on. It says when you lend out your crypto, the interest accrued is taxed as income. Let me say that again. When you lend your crypto, the interest that you get is going to be taxed. Everything's going to be taxed. Everything's not everything's a taxable event. But when you sell crypto, when you exchange crypto like Bitcoin for Ethereum or Ethereum for Tomato Coin or Tomato Coin for Potato Foot Coin or whatever, it doesn't matter. All these things are taxable events and you have to keep control of it. Because guess who's looking at you? Big Brother Taxes. So capital gains can be short or long term. In the case with DeFi, your profits fall into the short term category, which means you'll be holding assets for less than 12 months. So real quick, any less than 12 months is short term capital gains. 12 months and a day is long term capital gains. And there is a huge difference in the short term. I can just tell you like this. This just falls into how much you make. Let's just say you're a person who makes $65,000. And let's say you're married and filing jointly.  So you're only going to be because taxed 12%. Not so bad. Let's say that you're married and filing separately. Well, that right there, if you're at $65,000, you're going to pay 22%. Essentially, one fourth of everything that you made is going to the government. Same thing with head of household. And I got to tell you, it's that plus the state taxes. So don't forget about those. Now in Texas, we have zero state taxes, Nevada, Wyoming, some of the different states, but other places here, you're on the hook for more money. So just be aware of all that nonsense. So, okay. So before we go on, we need to really take a look at what is decentralized finance just as a refresher. I know some of you are like, you know, super experts, so just stick with me. What is yield farming? What's DeFi? All that good stuff, right? So this was an old article. This was in July 6th, 2020. So roughly about a month ago. And it says here, according to DeFi Pulse, there's 1.9 billion in crypto assets. And what did we just see in the other article? It went from 1.9 to 4.22. So it has doubled in a month. That is amazing. And if you want to take a look at DeFi Pulse, I'll link in the description. You can just see exactly how much is locked up for each different project. So maker 1.3 billion, compound 810 million.  It's a lot of money. So real quick, there's two types of tokens. It's just a regular token, like the basic attention token, any kind of token you can think of, right? That just represents money. And so there's a second type of token called a governance token. And that enables users to vote on the future of decentralized protocols and presents a fresh ways for DeFi founders to entice assets onto their platform. So compound does this, right? They give away governance tokens and you can pretty much vote on like, well, how much do you want the interest rate? How much do you want to give away? How much do you want? So everything right there, there's two types of actions for the tokens that you get. So let's just move down. So the way I was talking about, so on the platform that proved DeFi could fly maker, Dow holders of its governance token maker, MKR, vote almost every week on small changes to parameters that govern how much it costs to borrow and how much savers earn and so on. So all these governance tokens that are given out, those are the people with like the real voting power or the voice of what's going to happen and how things are going to move forward. So it's pretty interesting how DeFi does all that. But the thing they all have in common, whether just a regular token or a governance token is that they're all tradable and they have a price and that is the big thing. They are all worth something.  And that is why I'm going to tell you, this is why DeFi is going to be so big for small businesses. Now I've said this before and I'm going to reiterate that in a little bit. But for retail investors, sure, it's great to get a loan. It's great to earn interest on the things that you save. But I'm going to tell you right now, when small business realizes how easy it is to get a loan and have liquidity and you don't have to jump through all the hoops that the banks make you do, believe me, I do it, they're going to explode. So again, Ethereum, 10k coin, moving down. So here's the example for DeFi that they give. They say go to MakerDAO, create $5 worth of DAI, which is a stable coin, usually worth a dollar, somewhere, $0.99 to whatever, out of the digital ether, then go to Compound and you can borrow $10 in USDC. So right there, you've gone to Exchange, you've bought a stable coin, you've taken that stable coin, and you've borrowed against it, and you have $10. So that essentially is pretty much what the banks do, just a heck of a lot easier and a lot less hassle. So this next sentence says it all, immature and experimental, though it might be, the technology's implications are staggering. And again, DeFi is made for the small business. The best way to explain this is like this, small businesses run on liquidity. You have to have cash flow. If you don't have cash flow and you're cash strapped, you can't get inventory, you can't pay for overhead, you can't do a lot of things that a small business needs to do to thrive. So here's the thing, if you're a small business owner, I'm just talking to you, if you are, or if not, just kind of think of the concept, imagine if you could borrow against the money that you have right now. You don't have to move the money. You can just borrow against that money. So let's say that you could, I don't know, borrow against your SEP IRA or your 401K, or you could borrow against the type of money that you have just kind of stashed away as collateral. And you could get to that for like a super low interest rate, not like, you know, three and a half percent or four and a half or five percent, but like sometimes like less than 1%.  I'm telling you right now, the only thing that hinders me as a business owner is my lack of capital or the inability to access capital. If I am looking to sell product on Amazon, if I had $500,000 and I can get the right products based on distributors or the manufacturers and I contact them and said, I have this, I'm going to give it to you. They're going to give me an invoice. If I have the money, then I can turn 500,000 into, I don't know, 625,000. And it would only take, I mean, however long it takes.  It's not. It's a real pain. But if you have money already there, then you can borrow against it and it works out pretty well. Because here's the thing in business. It's always better to use someone else's money than your money. But the big thing is, and if we just take a step back and look at cryptocurrency, let's say you had $50,000 in cryptocurrency and you know it's going to go up. I mean, we all know it's going to go up. That's just the way it is. And I don't want to have to, or you may not want to have to sell your cryptocurrency and you could have 10,000 or 500,000. It doesn't really matter. But you don't want to sell any of your cryptocurrency right now. So what if you could borrow against it and you can get capital and then you can buy products or any kind of overhead that you have and you can let your cryptocurrency just sit there and then the money that you make from selling your products, you just put back in the loan. It makes sense. And again, when small business figure that out, it's going to be game on. So moving on, it says, note that you can swap all these things back as soon as you've taken them out. Open the loan and close it 10 minutes later. It's fine. Fair warning. It might cost you a tiny bit in fees and the cost of Ethereum is pretty high right now. So you just have to watch out. But I mean, you could do that. The terms for banks are a lot more stringent. And sometimes they have these things called prepayment penalties, or if you pay it back too early because they like to charge interest, that's what they make all the money.  Like what the heck? I'm paying you money back. That's just how it goes. So here's where it gets good. So it doesn't running a bank or DeFi take a lot of money. It does. And in DeFi, money is largely provided by strangers like yourself. That's why the startups behind these apps come up with the clever ways to attract hodlers with ideal assets. That's why the interest rates are so high right now because they need that liquidity. And it states again, liquidity is the chief concern of all these different products. That is, how much money do they have locked in their smart contracts? So they need your cryptocurrency so they can loan things out and do all these different types of things. That's why you are a hot commodity. That's why they're trying to get you to take your cryptocurrency and put it on their platform. And that's why I am so stringent on the different things that I talk about because I don't trust anybody. It's very hard to go through this because I've lived the times of BitConnect. Maybe you have as well and all the different ICO scam crazes and whatnot. So when I add anything to my exchange list and wallet fees and the different things I talk about, it's because I vetted them and I trust them. And not only that, I use them. So that's the big thing. So moving on, it says, let's take Uniswap as an example. Uniswap is an automated market maker or AMM. This means Uniswap is a robot on the internet that's always willing to buy and it's always willing to sell any crypto for which it has a market. On Uniswap, there's at least one market pair for any token on Ethereum. Behind the scenes, this means Uniswap can make it look like it's making a direct trade for any two tokens, which makes it very easy for users, but it's all built around pools of two tokens. And all these market pairs work better with bigger pools. So just real quick, I just found Uniswap through this article and I gotta tell you, it is awesome. If you have the Brave browser, you can connect your MetaMask or you can put your own Ethereum wallet on there and it's just so simple. You just do that and that's always right there for you. You don't have to open up anything or do whatever. It's just right there. Now I'm not gonna, I'm gonna tell you right now, don't keep a lot of money on here because you never know, right? So I've just got a whopping 80, 90 bucks, right? So I'm okay if I lose 90 bucks.  But for like little small transactions, sure, I can do these types of things all day long. And everything's good. And what was awesome about this is that I was looking for sell or Celsius because I really believe in that project. I believe in Alex Moshinsky. I believe in the network. And I was like, where do I find Celsius? Well, guess what? I just took my Ethereum that I have in my MetaMask wallet through, that's hosted on Brave, a Web 3 app. And then I just put it in there. And then I said I wanted sell. And then I boom, I just did it. And that was it. And it took like 10 seconds. It was awesome because I couldn't find Celsius anywhere. And now look what I got Celsius right there. And if I want to transfer this, I'm just going to click on that. I'm going to click send. And I'm going to send it to any address for the Celsius network. And then I'm done. So I could keep it here. I could transfer over there. Or maybe I just transferred to the Celsius wallet. Just saying. Because guess what?  And that leads me to my next point. So if you look in the description of every one of my videos, there's going to be a link. It's going to look like this. And it's going to link you to, it says exchange fees, but really it's all the Coinbase alternatives, all the wallet alternatives and everything that I have ever used and reviewed and my honest opinion on them. And then all the different things that you need to know about it, like the fee charts. That's why I don't recommend Coinbase unless you're super new. Don't know what's going on. Use Coinbase is super simple.  So then Coinbase Pro, Gemini, Gemini Pro, Abra, Uphold, SimpleSwap, Uniswap. And there it is. So Uniswap, I'll just give you the link right there. And I just tell you what I did. And the fees are you don't pay for, it's because it's a decentralized exchange. So what you're paying for is not like it's like, you know, 10 or 3.5% and whatever else. You just pay for the gas, the Ethereum gas, which is, you know, it's a little bit higher today, but it'll go down at some point, but it's not too much. And it's super fast, super easy. And I like that. And I go over CashApp, eToro, do not recommend eToro. Sorry, I just don't. And then my little recent write up for Crypto.com. And right now I'll just say this, that my one two punch right now is Voyager and Celsius. I love them both. Voyager is super simple. There is it's commission free. I was corrected by somebody and they were correct. It's commission free, meaning that they don't charge you anything to make those, those buys for any of your cryptocurrency. What they do, they're like a brokerage. Think of like, if you want to rent a hotel, when you travel to a city, right, would you go to Marriott and say, hey, Marriott, what's the rate? Oh, what's $168?  Okay, here's $168. Or would you go to some like Travago.com or hotels.com, where they aggregate all these different information sites that pulls the best data so you can get the best room. Well, that's kind of what, what Voyager does and the way that they make money is from the spread. So I don't see the spread. They make money from it. I don't have to pay anything. So I'm happy.  So I like that. And then from there, from Voyager, I'll just transfer to Celsius, not all of it because I don't want to keep everything on a hot wallet. I put a lot in my nano, but I wanted an interest. I hear it all is. So with that Celsius, if I scroll in here, so for the Celsius, I'm going to get 5.12%, not too bad. And it's not locked up and I can take it anytime. So I like that. That's pretty cool. And at the very top are the affiliate links. And listen, you can go right to Celsius or right to Gemini or right to Voyager or right to whatever. And you can sign up yourself. It's fine. Or if you want to use the affiliate link, you can and you'll get 10, 20, 25, whatever it is. So it's up to you. So it states, how much money do people make by putting money in these products? So it's very lucrative. That's much more than a bank.  They get like, you know, 0.0002%, I think. I'm just kidding. It's very low. But it's tick like compound as an illustration. As of this writing, a person who put USDC in a compound and earned 2.72 percent on it. Remember, this is, this was back in ways. This was in July. You get a lot more now for USDC. So, but there's a reason the interest rates are so much juicier. DeFi is a far riskier place to park your money. There's no FDIC to protect your funds. And if someone puts a, puts a run on compound, then you can't withdraw anything. Has it happened? Not yet. Will it happen? I have no idea. Plus the interest is quite variable. You don't know what you'll learn over the course of a year. USD rates are high. However, somewhere in the 1% range, it's much higher now. Will it stay high? Can't stay high. What goes up must come down. So what's yield farming? Yield farming is any effort to put crypto assets to work. The simplest level, yield farm might move assets around with compound, constantly chasing whichever pool is offering the best APY from week to week. This might move into risk your pools, but we're used to risk. So if you want to do that, go right ahead. In a simple example, yield farm might put 100,000 USDT into compound. That's a lot of money. They will get a token back for that state called CUSDT. Let's say you get 100,000 CUSDT, which right now is, I think, like two cents. CUSDT. Now USDT is tethered. So if you got 100,000 laying around, knock yourself out. And then to finish up, it says they can then take the USDT, the CUSDT, and put it into a liquidity pool that takes USDT, CUSDT on a balancer, and they can earn a small amount in transaction fees. So the more you have, the more you're going to earn, but you got to have a lot of money in this sense.  So they really want your stable coins because they need the liquidity. So why is yield farming so hard because of liquidity mining? Liquidity mining on a yield farmer gets a new token, as well as the usual return. Essentially, you are double dipping. So that's why it's so great. And that's why everybody's looking for the best rates. And that's it a nutshell, really. So I know that was long, but it's going to pay dividends in a little bit. So the tax part, because remember, it's not how much you make, it's how much you keep. So for instance, compound C tokens, a crew interest by becoming more expensive. So the interest is received when converting C tokens back to other assets. Hence interest rates on C tokens are taxed as capital gains rather than as income.  Major complication, of course, is reporting USD value of E transaction within the DeFi ecosystem. For active yield farmers, this can become incredibly tedious. Imagine every transaction that you had to do, because that's what it is. You're selling, you're getting interest. You have to record that and report that to the government. If you don't, the different places that if here's the thing, when you sign up for anything, did you put in your ID? Did you put in your social security? Did you put in your address? Because all those different things are going to big brother. So on some places you can get away with it. I don't know where those are. I don't want to talk about those because I don't want to deal with that. But if you've done any kind of AML, anti-money laundering or KYC, know your customers, the government knows and you got to watch out because we got to play by the rules. Now there's ways to minimize that and I'm not going to talk about that here. But there's a lot of different ways to do it. So to finish up, many transactions on Uniswap, for instance, involve multi-step conversion and every step should be reported in USD. Finally, if you end up lending your crypto along the way and the interest is paid each block, you will need to report each instance of receiving interest. So all the other things that you do is going to lead to you gaining some type of crypto. Now if you cash out into US dollars, if that's your thing, then you'll have to report that as taxes and I'm not going to go down here because the rest is just more depressing stuff. So I'm just going to make this super simple. Just use crypto trader dot tax. So back in June, I did a couple of videos for them and I still believe in their project. It's great. I personally use that for my taxes and you got to understand if I use it for my taxes, I trust it. I send it to my CPA. She did everything super simple, saved me a lot of time at Hardik and money. So if you're looking for that in the description of my videos, there's going to be a link going to look like this. And you still get a discount just for putting in that code or clicking on the link. So definitely use that. And for all the things that we just talked about, this is why I believe Ethereum is a 10K minimum coin. Everything's built on it. ERC 20 tokens, the new main net or Ethereum 2.0 is coming out with sharding and proof of stake and it's going to be super fast, hopefully on top of that plus DeFi. So I just don't see how this project can fail. The only way it can be is if you've got the people on the back coming up on their heels, you got Cardano, you got Tezos, you got, well, maybe Yeos, I don't know. And all the different other players out there that can do these types of things. But it remains to be seen. I just think it's going to be a big thing. Let me know which thing in the comment section. And that's going to lead me to the question of the day. So let's jump into my office. All right, everybody, and welcome to my indoor office. This is a little bit different than the actual pool office because I'm actually inside because it's like way too hot today. You'd like to be out there because it's just simple. So today's question and actually before I start with that, I'm going to explain to you after this why I don't record in this room too much to answer these questions. I've only done it outside because to me it only made sense. So anyhow, the question today comes from Fox, Fox Trot. Okay. And he or she says, Hi, just want to thank you for educating me on crypto. You're welcome. I don't think I've done that much, but thanks. So I like your analysis and learn from you a lot. I want to ask you a few questions. Please reply if possible. One, I want to start professional crypto trading, but I don't know anything about trading. I can't even understand basic terms. Though I invest in biggies like ETH, Bitcoin, Cardano, Link, I want to have basic knowledge so I can trade also. So to answer that first question is I am the antithesis. I am the wrong person to ask about anything about trading. I am not a trader. I don't do anything with it. And if you want to know anything about trading, you're going to have to go someplace else because I'm just not into it. And it doesn't, if you want to trade, that's all up to you. Great. I'm just not big into trading because I have other things to do and I don't have the patience to actually learn about it. I just dealt a cost average. I just go in and every week or every day I add in a certain amount and over time everything seems to work itself out. Now, there are times like in 2017 when you're going to have to hold some bags for a while, but in the long run. And that is a big thing. What are you here for?  If you're to make some money quick, there's some trading things out there you can try. You can be that 5% that makes it. I don't know. But for me, to answer your question, I cannot help you with this. And I will tell you what I know and I'll tell you what I don't know. And I don't know anything about trading. So that's that. Sorry. For the second one, it says I want to learn about decentralized finance also. Can you please guide me on where to start from the basics? And that is one of the reasons why we went so in detail with the DeFi, with the yield farming, and the basics, and going to some more advanced stuff. So I need to go over all those things just to help Foxtrot and hopefully to help some of you as far as like to centralize finance. And that's the big thing. So I hope that answered your question. Again, for the first one, sorry. I can't help you. I don't know. So that is the first part. The second part is I don't record in this room too much because or at all because the lighting is horrible. I have the lights back here.  So to get your lights up here, I had to get one of these things called a ring light. And it helps a lot. I'm going to show you the difference here.  It looks like I'm in some kind of weird place. Skin's a little bit off. And look, we're all vain. What are you going to do? So with this type of thing, if you are into making YouTube videos or making Instagram videos or Facebook or just want to look good, I definitely recommend getting one of these lights because it helps a whole heck of a lot, especially just to keep things in front of you. And it's pretty cool because it's just right there. It's very mobile. It's very light and it lasts so far. So if you know that, I'll put a link in the description. I don't get any money for that. It's not an affiliate link. It's just to link to, you know, where I got it. And that's it. Okay. And that's it. So thanks for watching. Really appreciate it. Before we go, just so you know that there is a join button. I don't, it's, you don't get anything special.  But for everybody that does that, I just want to say thanks so much. So for the new ones, Frank Weinham, I don't know why you're up here, but you're a love of one. Patrick May, Victor Von Ravenswood. That's a good name. Victor Van Ravenswood. Ricky Taylor, Fulja, I like that. Jimmy J, Dan Haggerty, True Blue One, and Neil. That's pretty good. So thanks for joining. Really appreciate it. If you like those videos, too much is going to pop up on your left and right. Don't know. I have no controller with that. Just like the ads that you see. I don't know what if they're scams or not. I don't have control over that. YouTube does. So if you like these types of videos, too much is going to pop up. Check those out. See you on the next one.


A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Have you ever heard that saying a bird in the hand is worth Two in the bush. What does that mean? And how does it relate to PayPal? well Buffett says this and he says that It's actually a finance equation and the way to think about it is Treasuries let me see if I can get treasuries This is the yield on treasuries treasuries is the bird in the hand historically If you want a risk-free rate you want the safest return you're going to look at treasuries and they're going to pay Historically seven percent five six seven eight percent Sometimes it pays a lot more and sometimes it pays a lot less. So this is a bird in the hand Why would you ever give up the bird in the hand? Well, because you think you'll you'll make more somewhere else Maybe twice as much or three times as much but something more for the risk so the bird in the hand is treasuries and The two in the bush is something that'll pay out more Okay, so if we look at PayPal This might be the two in the bush And Warren Buffett likes to buy companies When the earnings yield, which is the earnings the company is making for the price It's higher when that number is higher than treasuries Let me just pull up treasuries one more time right now. Treasuries are three point six nine So less than four percent. You can actually get one-year treasuries closer to Foreign change so this isn't You know the rock solid number you want to look at but four to five percent we can say and then we jump back to PayPal and We pull up the earnings yield and it says three point six nine two But this is backwards looking the earnings yield forward is expected to be higher and The way we can pull that up is If we go to seeking alpha and we look at all the Different earnings expected for this year the forward PE is about 12.9 and when I did the math it was almost eight percent So by the end of the year we will look back and most likely say that right now The earnings yield for twenty twenty three will be somewhere around eight percent Okay, so that's a lot more than Treasuries if you look at treasuries, that's three percent almost twice four versus eight and Does that mean the stock's gonna go up? No, not necessarily May not go up may actually go lower right, so I have made previous videos and Technical analysis is showing that hey people are selling we are making lower lows this thing could could go to 40 40 something who knows But fundamentally and I've shown this before as well. It might go higher if you take the earnings From seeking alpha or or any wherever you get your analyst information And you plug those in forward and you give them evaluation You're gonna get some numbers and my math shows that If if PayPal grows over time and gets higher earnings PayPal stock should be worth more. That's all it is. That's all that's all we can do So if it goes lower Okay, we'll have to see why But the business has has a future at least that's what I know what you're saying. Oh Let's look at meta because meta was in the similar scenario At one point when it was getting sold off And I'll just hide this a little bit at one point Meta had a really juicy earnings yield as high as 11 Investors were selling it. They didn't trust the metaverse. There was a lot of issues ads were coming down from a high valuation to a low valuation And if you bought it just because it was cheap and paying more than treasuries Well, this thing almost tripled from 87 to around 270 that's almost a triple Excuse me, so now the earnings yields around 3% isn't that amazing? so it went from low valuation to a Optimistic valuation that happened to PayPal one day That's the question investors are gonna be wondering Is this a stock you just buy and you put away and you wait for a higher valuation sometime in the future? I don't know but no one else can know either. So I guess we'll find out. I Like it for the future Fundamentally, I'm doing as much research as I can to figure out the best that I can but Buying companies that are profitable making money free cash flow positive and waiting For conditions to change That's how you do the bird in the hand versus two in the bush Cheers


Greetings, I'm Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister, and really happy to be here virtually in the Morals and Machines event to talk about Taiwan's digital transformation. The first question is, why do I think Taiwan has been so successful in managing digital transformation? Well, indeed, Taiwan is selected as one of the top four super innovators according to the World Economic Forum, and the reason I think is that we have broadband is human rights. Whereas in other countries, you may have internet as a human right, but in Taiwan, anywhere you have 10 megabits per second, if you don't, it's my fault. And we make sure that the 4G unlimited data plan is just around 15 euros per month. Combined, it makes that any new government services reaches the maximum amount of people. And we also make sure that in indigenous places, in the rural places and so on, that are the places that we look first when we're deploying 5G connectivity. And so the geography of Taiwan, of course, also help from the northmost to the southmost of Taiwan, it's just one hour and a half by high speed rails. So because of that, I think we can be maximally inclusive when we're rolling out new digital services, along with a constitutionally protected education budget that makes sure that design thinking and creative thinking can be empowering all the students regardless of where they are in the Taiwan Island. The second question is, for a country to be equipped for the digital future, its inhabitants must be equipped for it. How should the education system be designed so that the citizens are equipped to live and work in the digital future and so that their fears are removed? So I think it's very important to have people's fear, uncertainty and doubt, to be answered through practice as early as possible. I often take the metaphor of fire. Fire is, of course, the origin of civilization, but it's also very dangerous. It has the potential to destroy cities. But people worked with fire by not limiting it to a series of ritualistic priests or shamans or paramedic, right? People teach each other cooking, even young child cooking as early as possible. So people understand the dangers, but as well as the safety concerns of fire. So it's the same as with machine learning as a one, because we have broadens the human right from this year onward. We are introducing a new curriculum that have media literacy and ICT critical thinking skills, not as one particular class, but integrating it into all the different classes and different fields of education. And so through this way, people learn from a very early age to become data stewards, to become responsible data holders so that they can measure, for example, their air quality is very easily from their schools at their packed balcony and so on, so that the abstract concepts, such as accountability, data stewardship and so on, make sense in a very early age. And we'll also give all the primary school children free access to our Taiwanese supercomputer, which is top 20 supercomputer cluster that has equipped with in place open data storage of all the atmospheric data and meteorological data and so on, so they can freely do experiments on it. The third question concerns the digital transformation about the democracy, which focus our mindset more on political decision making and participation through digital media and processes. So what would be the core elements of democracy? 4.0, I think the core element, as with other democracy revisions, is trust and legitimacy. In social media nowadays, people tend to have polarized views because the government doesn't give a context of the why of policymaking, but just the what of policymaking. So personally, I practice radical transparency. Every single meeting that I chair, every meeting with journalists and lobbies and so on, we publish the full transcript after 10 days of co-editing into the internet for a future reference. And through this way, people cannot really argue from a private benefit in lobbying, they have to argue based on public benefits. And by radical transparency, people can also sit virtually in my office and feel what it's like to be in the daily life of a digital minister. And so through this way, the accountability is provided well before the policy is introduced and that I think builds the foundation of trust because then people can understand why and the context of policymaking. The fourth question concerns, do we need new ethical rules in the digital world? Of course, the digital world will have different rules of engagement. You tend to engage with parts of people rather than the entirety of people. You tend to engage with people's synthetic image of themselves instead of a spontaneous image of themselves. And all this change a rule of engagement drastically. This year, we're witnessing artificial intelligence that is capable of synthesizing what looks like coherent speech. If you go to talktotransformer.com, they can generate essays that on the surface looks very convincing, but it's actually synthetic. And the same goes to so-called deep fake technologies for facial expressions and things like that. And so we need new ethical rules in making sure that people can attribute the text, the image, the authorship into a accountable fashion that people can understand when algorithm make judgments based on the profiles that they get collected. They need to understand the data is the beginning of a relationship that imbues the fiduciary duty of the data operators. And if the data operator uses it instead to generate synthetic images that falsely represent the person donating their personal likeness and so on, that would be a violation of trust. And all this were not possible or at least were very expensive for the current generation of machine learning algorithms. So I think the society needs to have a public, not just demonstration, but rather a public conversation around it and to establish new ethical norms. The fifth question is, what is being radically transparent as I explained mean to me and how has it changed myself? Well, as a open source developer and engaged in a free software movement, radical transparency is just a norm, right?  The internet society, the RFC process, the IETF has no army, has no navy, has no air force. So the only way that they can compel people to adopt radically new protocols is just to radical transparency and by radical transparency also radical participation. And by radical, I mean at a root, meaning that from the inception of the idea into the deployment and iteration of feedback, everything needs to be kept in a way that makes the full accountability like every line of code, every line of change, every documentation change, every test change need to attribute it to somebody and that somebody need to be held into account to explain why exactly is they doing this commit message or pull requests or things like that. And so I'm at a moment just putting this into a political realm so that we can deal with code, not just the code of algorithm but also code of law. With this question concerns, how can we achieve more diverse representation in the field of developers who are sharing our future? I like this question very much. I think diverse representation stems from diverse backgrounds of living. So in Taiwan, actually in the east side of Taiwan, about half of our territory is around 15 or 16 indigenous nations. And each of them bring a diverse culture that is very different from the western part of Taiwan which is considerably more western. So I think what really makes sense is not one side or the other dominating the discussion but rather making sure that all our public decisions if they concern for example a precinct or a township that has more than half population in one particular indigenous nation then it need to be done bilingually or even in the language of that nation. And when we choose the language this way we also use machine learning like we partner with the Mozilla Common Voice to make sure that the indigenous people people with more lower resources when it comes to convincing the multinational to adopt their languages won't shrink from the introduction of voice technology and other machine learning technologies but rather can introduce their language in a way that is effortless as possible. We have specific acts such as the National Languages Act the Indigenous Languages Act and things like that to ensure the equal representation and also re-presentation of their culture into our K-12 curriculum.  The seventh question concerns what would I have done in my life? I haven't taken a job as a digital minister but actually this is exactly the same thing as I've always been doing. Regardless of whether I wear the hat as a digital minister or as a civic hacker or a hacktivist I'm always doing the same thing namely making online channels that can collect the collective intelligence and demodulate and modulate the various different positions so that we can find common values out of the potential diverse, divisive landscapes and perspectives. And the internet is very powerful because it lets people find their tribe people who think like you but also it lets you find people who don't think like you but nevertheless can converse with the same value as you even from a different position or perspective. So for one particular policy matter you may have people who specifically understand the domain or people understand the emerging technologies that can bring better solutions or people who are working in the public service or the regulatory sector that can realize this for maximization of social impact and my work is just to create spaces such as a Taiwan presidential hackathon to put those trialing words together and give them binding power namely by giving the president's award a trophy that when awarded to five teams every year the trophy is a projector they will turn it on that projects the image of the president handing the trophy to you and it signals the presidential promise that whatever you prototype during the three months of hackathon we will actually take it to the public service and maintain it indefinitely but actually a large charity a large NPO a large international NGO a large multinational a large for-profit company with good CSR strategy can all do this, right? It doesn't have to be a public sector or the president it can be realized in any of the different fashions as long as they work toward the common goals that is the UN sustainable development goals at the moment and so I'm very happy to work across sectors by using exactly some methodology and toward exactly some aim that is partnership for the global goals and finally the last question well we'll have changed the Taiwanese society in a way people interact with the digital world in five years time well we have the digital transformation plan that says in the next five years time we will have digital twins of each other that is to say we will be very easily interacting with the virtual avatars through 5G technology so that in a classroom there may be actually from six different classrooms that will weave them together into a virtual classroom and people can interact with other people in real time as if they're actually there and interact in a way that maximizes the teaching's impact toward people in rural or indigenous places and things like that so you can see that Taiwan values by far the equality and social justice of digital transformation we want to empower the people who are currently blocked by geography blocked by cultural differences blocked by a minority status in the community and so on but bring them into this new digital world that is maximally inclusive by automatically presenting their positions their sentiments, their feelings in a way that can build empathy between people of different cultures and let people build a policy which we call holopolis it is like a holographic polis of people and let people understand that we have the common future and we can deliberate the common future not just by voting which is like providing three bits of information uploading every four years but rather through radical participation in the budget level, in the presidential hackathon level in regulatory co-creation level through sandboxes as well as just by mobilizing social resources so that we can realize the social benefits and environmental benefits with a good business model as well so this is called triple bottom line so I think the digital technologies is just to make sure that people trust each other's numbers more through distributed ledgers and so on to foster effective partnership as I mentioned about trial and goal teams as well as open innovation so that people don't have to fail they can just try and find out what doesn't work what does work but maximizing whatever that they learned into a digital world in the commons so thank you for listening and this is my contribution to the Morris and the machines event thank you so much


Wow, Stacey's like being on proper telly, isn't it? I know I'm excitable, everybody, but I am beyond excited to introduce Stacey Salt, who is from the FE sector in England, which is my love and my playground, community college, Oldham College, which is a community college in the north of England. Stacey's an advanced practitioner, and what that means is that she has responsibility for professional learning within the organisation, and she's doing some amazing stuff. And I've had the pleasure of working with her on a couple of projects. In fact, I think our working lives are so entwined now without actually working in the same organisation. So my heart is bursting.  Over to you, Stacey. Thank you, Lou. Hello, everyone. So as Lou said, I'm Stacey Salt, and I'm here to tell a story about cultural change in the last 12 months due to the pandemic. So my title is cultural paradigm shift in the FE sector, and it certainly has been a shift over the last 12 months and a bit more. We've gone from one place to a completely different place, and there's lots of things that have happened in between for us to move into a new direction within the FE sector. So what is my why? So why am I here? And I don't just mean here today. I mean, why do I work in FE? So my background really is I worked in the energy industry for many years. I got made redundant, went through a hellish time trying to find my place, trying to find my purpose. And I couldn't. And anything that I wanted to do, I couldn't because I didn't have the qualifications. So as an adult at 28, I went back into education. I did my degree in business management. And then I thought I really, really want to help other people. I really want to help people in my position, people who are not sure where they want to be or what purpose they've got, and be a guide for them for their future. So I decided to do my PGCE and I was successful in completing that and gained a job in FE in Great Manchester pretty much straight away after I'd finished it. I've not been teaching long five years is how long I've been a teacher and I've been an advanced practitioner for 18 months. As an advanced practitioner, I get the opportunity to work with staff. It's really, really exciting. I get to help to develop them, conduct CPD, do training with them. And it's been just an amazing opportunity. And I've got more details about that as we go along. As a business tutor, a lot of the topics I teach do focus around organisational culture, organisational change. It's something I'm really, really passionate about. It intrigues me. I always want to know more about it. I'm really interested in what are those cogs that turn within the organisation to help it function on a day-to-day basis. And what happens when something like a pandemic can change all of that? For me working in FE, yes, I'm an educator. I'm an educator for students. I'm an educator for staff. But I also consider myself to be someone who is constantly, continuously being educated in this environment. I always seek to look for development opportunities. And I like to take those back into the organisation to share with students and staff. So why have I chosen culture? Basically, culture in organisations has been flipped upside down on its head over the last 12 months. And as I go through my slides, I will be talking about and applying a change model to do with culture. But I will also be sharing some of my story as we move along. So as a business tutor and I teach organisational culture, this is a quote that I use quite a lot with students. And it focuses around organisational culture as being components within the organisation that help it to operate on a day-to-day basis. And those components can be found in the norm. So things that you might do in a daily basis, the symbols, artifacts, mission statements, values, and even just the day-to-day practices, all of these functions together like heartbeats. And without them, or if something fractures slightly, it can impact the rest of the organisation. These components are embedded deep in the organisation. And if something changes that is huge like a pandemic, what happens then and what experiences have I found? So the norm. So this is just something I've doodled. I didn't want to use just an image off the internet. I wanted to doodle something. It's kind of what's in my head. The norm before the pandemic, very much top-down approaches. It's kind of like something that you used to happen in every day. It was almost robotic. What I found before the pandemic was that I wasn't aware of anything outside of the organisation in terms of how things could be done. I kind of operated on a day-to-day basis within the confinement of it, very much an internalised culture. And it was very much of the way things are done around it. This is what we do. Some examples that I've got on here are CPD. It was very much within the organisation. Teaching, learning and assessment, very confined within the organisation. Not a lot of innovation or creativity. Now what happens when something like a pandemic approaches? The way I've drawn this diagram is that the values are embedded in the centre of the organisation and things are built around that. At the moment before the pandemic, everything was connected. It was functioning really well within the organisation. Things were beaten. I've symbolised these as hearts as heartbeats because all of these have to be to the same tune kind of a thing for it to function and operate in a good way. And I will say it for those targets to be met. It's got to function. Everything's got to be beaten in time with each other. So just before I go into the next stage of my presentation, I just wanted to share that I'm going to be using a change model which is Bridges transition model and it's a three-step process. It talks about ending losing, having to let go, the neutral zone and the new beginning. I will go into more depth as we go on, but you will see this image in the corner of my next slides. So what happened when the pandemic arrived? It was something like we'd never known before. Everybody was completely out of their comfort zone. This was the moment when things were ending. Things were getting lost and we had to let go of the day-to-day things that we would do, the day-to-day routines. There was a need for change and everything was changing. The way we thought in the classroom was changing. We wasn't in the classroom. We couldn't be in the classroom. Something very interesting about this is that the change had to happen. We had no choice. It was external of the organisation. It was in the macro environment and as an organisation, as organisations across the country, we had to adapt to that. We had to find ways of still ensuring these heartbeats were still functioning. Initially, when the pandemic first came, I remember one day I was in the classroom and by the end of that day I was told pack your bags. We've got to get out of there. Basically, that was it and then woke up the next morning with a laptop and lots of students on the screen, so completely different. As an advanced practitioner, I kind of have the responsibility to support staff in that. But I didn't really know how. I never done blended learning before. I never taught online before. So I had to find ways of finding out how that could happen. This picture, what it's symbolising is the values of the organisation remain the same. But we started to see fractures in different areas. These are just a few examples. The teaching learning assessment, the fracture was, we had to completely change how we did things. Working closely with staff, it was apparent that they weren't comfortable with using technology. Something else which is quite sad and shouldn't happen is that we had students who might not have had the insight. They didn't have laptops at home or they were sharing laptops with the siblings. It was a really sad time. The way we conducted CPD, it was completely out of the norm. Instead of just the normal way we would do it and the normal topics we talk about in CPD, it was now all digital. How do you do this on a screen? How do you do that on a screen? And there was an urgency. There was disruption. It was a challenge. And the only thing we could really be certain about was that there was lots of uncertainty at that time. There was emotions all over the place and the beats in the organisation slowed down. And when that happens, when those beats aren't beating as fast as they are, there's lots of elements within the organisation, those components, those rituals that Hofsteed refers to, those symbols that he refers to. They change, they become unstuck, but for an organisation we can't lose those. So what happened? How did we do this? How did I do it? So we saw a shift, we saw a complete shift. And this is what I'm referring to on the change model as the neutral zone. So within this neutral zone what I found and through reading different articles, we've very much gone from this culture that was very routine, it was very rigid. It was the same every day, quite robotic. It flipped on its edge when the pandemic happened. We went from people at the top saying we need this doing, we need that doing, to people at the bottom saying actually we're in this situation now. What can we do about it? Student voices were so important, so, so important, and the voices of staff, teachers, support staff, IT staff, everyone, every staff member. What I've seen is that we've gone from that typical culture to a more enterprise culture. And what I mean by that is people at the bottom have kind of taken control of it. We've had opportunities to be innovative, we've had opportunities to be creative. For me as an advanced practitioner, I remember feeling what am I going to do? How am I going to help other people to be able to do what needs to be done? And for me it was coming out of my comfort zone. It was going to those other places, which I found through Twitter. It was sharing ideas with people and joining communities of practice, which I could then take back into the organisation, and also share what I've been doing with people up and down the country. What this picture is symbolising is it's my first picture of where things are connected within the internal culture. But through the pandemic and embracing it and rethinking about how we do processes, how we do teaching, learning and assessment, the culture is expanding. There's lots of external elements being invited in to help this heartbeat more effectively. And then we get to the new beginning. The new beginning is so exciting for me. I've had opportunities to work with people across the country on different projects. I've got some examples there of what I've done, and it's all based around collective environments, collaboration, care, to get those hearts beating again. We needed to care for each other, and that got imparted onto the organisation. On this particular picture, I've got dancers and there's 12 of them, and I'm sure Lou will know exactly what I'm referring to, but I've got the opportunity to dance, and I've been dancing ever since for the last 12 months. I've had the opportunity to work with a group of colleges where we have shared good practice, we have shared what is working, why it's working, and being able to build a website from that so we can share those resources. I've also been dancing round with AP Connect. AP Connect has enabled me to amplify the work that I've been doing with Greater Manchester Colleges. It's helped me to learn new things to do with technology. I've met the most amazing people from being able to do that, but more importantly, I can take that energy back into the organisation and share that. By being part of AP Connect, I now have a podcast series with a colleague that we co-produce together. It's called Let's Get Digital, and this is where we interview staff, and we share that across the sector. And JoyFE, something which has just been a lifesaver through the whole pandemic. Everything that we see here is things that I don't just keep to myself. I share them, I share them with my organisation. It informs the way that I do my teaching, it informs the way I deliver CPD, and it informs the way I support staff, the heart to beating fast again. And I can see a much more positive and brighter future. JoyFE, as well, has helped me to see different ways of communicating with people. So, for example, the thinking environment, it's completely changed how meetings are done, and my mission now is to take those sort of practices back into the organisation. Through the pandemic happening and having that complete culture change from one to another, I've been able to build networks, I've embraced them, I've accepted them, and I've transformed the way I do things on a day-to-day basis. And what I've really, really learned in the last year through exposure to all of these communities is that FE does not just exist within your organisation, and it shouldn't just exist within one organisation. It's everywhere. It's all around us. We just need to go out and find it. Thank you. Thank you. I've been in tears for most of that. I'm sorry. Because what you have done so amazingly there is told your story of such a bigger movement of March the 23rd last year and what FE did through advanced practitioners with a little bit of a space to dance, to do new things, and you have encapsulated that so beautiful. And Joe, my fellow co-chair, was in the chat and he said, there's so much of an opportunity for open educational resources here. So, for example, part of the reason why people still think we're Cinderella rather than the Dancing Princesses is we're shut off from the resources that universities have. When we are studying many of us on high level programmes, we can't get access to books and articles. There's so much more that we have so much to offer, and at the same time, maybe we trade some of our energy to universities for some of their books. I agree. There's so much more to do and there's so much more to give. I'm a bit lost for words because I don't know. I feel a little bit emotional now, but it's just been a fantastic experience. I did talk about my story, but I'm sure I speak on behalf of many other people within the FE sector who have experienced much of the same, and it will be good, well, I think it will stay now, it will stay 100%, but we can do even more, and we've got those platforms to be able to do that. We have, and it's by moving into spaces like this, that we actually bring what we are, the amazingness as well, and we start to just batter down those silos. So, one of Anna's saying, Anna from the OU saying, sounds like a good trade, FE and HE need to build closer connections. And Mark, over in California, Stace, if you can believe, 2020, the year teachers pretended they haven't been resisting digital technology for decades, and you just pushed through all of that. Fantastic. It's been great and thank you. Thank you for having me. I have absolutely loved it. I was so nervous as well. Brilliant. You need to go and have a look at the chat on YouTube because people just loving it. Francis absolutely loving their heartbeat analogy, and Sammy quite right with a plug for her workshop at 11.30. That little corner that was Joy FE, which is all of us, which is our movement, she's going to be presenting about that. Mark, you can only hope, but what we want is that we want to be able to call ourselves community colleges like you are as well. Oh my God, we're out of time. Stace. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you so much for being a Joy. Thank you so much everyone. Lots of love. Bye bye. Lots of love, bye bye.