We will be kicking off Brian's talk on aligning open source community and business goals in two minutes So hopefully everyone's on the edge of their seats and ready to listen I hope everyone listening here has gotten as much out of devconf us as I have over the last couple days It's been an excellent event and probably the best virtual conference that I've been part of so I very much enjoyed it It's definitely not the first either Good day, my name is Brian profit manager with the open source program office And I'm pleased to have you viewing this session of devconf us 2020 Where we'll be talking about the alignment of community project and business goals and how we bridge that gap to make those goals Align, this is something that we do a lot in the open source program office Where we get we help upstream projects that Red Hat Stewards You know figure out how to get their goals to align with the business needs of Red Hat as a whole This is something that's pretty common within any kind of open source project that's interfacing with a corporate environment We certainly see this on a daily basis But it's also a difficult task because as you might expect The the alignment of community goal and a business goal, which is mostly going to be for profit On the surface doesn't sound like it's going to actually, you know fly very well But in reality it kind of does You just have to take the time to work it out and get those goals set and aligned Now setting goals is not something that's super fun But it does need to be done and you if you do it in a realistic way You'll find that setting goals isn't that arduous of a task and that those goals can be, you know Realistically created and probably met 2020 notwithstanding So let's start on the business side of things and we're just going to talk about what businesses do what they're all about and you Know if you have been to business school, sorry, we're breaking this down for you in just a few minutes So sorry you put in all that money, but this is what what it's going to be about At least from the perspective of this presentation today so businesses are all about creating goods or services and They optimize the marketplace for receptiveness to buy those goods and services. So euphemistically what we call marketing And then they distribute those goods and services And then finally hopefully they generate a profit from the sale of those goods and services And repeat so there you go all your business school knowledge in one easy to follow slide But beyond that, you know, that seems pretty straightforward And we're not going to break new ground here talking about what a business might be doing but we do need to understand what a community's needs are and How they might align because when you first think about a community, you're going to be thinking about wow They're just about creating things and free flow and it's very organic And and how would that ever mesh with the rigorous demands of a you know For-profit business and a capitalist framework. Well, let's give it a see and find out if that's certainly the case So in a community, you're also creating goods It may be software. It may be hardware. It may be documentation It could be a lots of different things. There are many open-source projects out there now for this presentation You may find me slipping into the lazy person's way of saying it and just say we're talking about software Expand that a little bit when you hear me say software specifically because 99 times out of 100 I'm going to be talking about software hardware Content everything else around that could be done in an open-source way But let's back to this we're going to be talking about okay communities are going to be creating goods whatever those goods might be They're going to the project's going to try to optimize the user and developer audience To be receptive to those goods So it may not be formal marketing although certainly some larger open-source projects do do formal marketing But it's marketing ish in the sense that we're talking about, you know Giving the users and the developers an idea of what the project is making why it's making it and what good is the thing that's being made Will be for the end consumer or you know developers who might want to contribute to the project. So again, possibly not formal marketing, but certainly in marketing ish In the way that the community gets the word out They will distribute those finished goods with the source of the whatever is being created. So software, it's going to be source code. If it's hardware, it's going to be the specs and so forth and so on. And those will be distributed however way the license dictates those the source is distributed with those goods. They're going to generate users and contributions and more use. So they're looking for, you know, getting, you know, the project more and more used and then ideally more and more contributions to the project. So this is where it varies a little bit from the actual sale because, you know, after you Sell something in a commercial sense, you're not really looking for contributions. You're really just looking for users and or, you know, currency. In this case, you're looking for users and ideally more people to contribute to your project. So it grows in a healthy and sustainable way. And of course you repeat all this. You repeat this with new iterations of whatever you're creating or if you're very successful, you will have some projects that will build off the main project and off you go to just start it all over again. So as you can see, if you look at businesses and communities in this way and what they're doing and what they're trying to accomplish, there are a lot of differences in their end goals. They're still both trying to make something. They're still both trying to get as many people to use it as possible.  And a community is going to be looking for more of a collaborative exchange where you can have ideas and new input coming in in the form of contributions.  That is not the big marker for a healthy community, but, you know, it's nice to be liked. And certainly a community is going to be part of that as well. So when we talk about the alignment of business goals and community goals, it's really important that we understand the concept of open first. And this is something that anyone who works for Red Hat will certainly understand. And anybody who's familiar with, you know, how Red Hat and other open source companies work will feel that this is a very familiar topic, but it is not a universally applied topic with organizations who do use open source. So we want to go kind of through it real quick and emphasize that this is the framework in which all of this is coming from. Open first is when the core values of the business are aligned with the community. And it's very important that we do the wording in that order because it is not the other way around. The community should not be aligning itself with the needs of the business. And that's really key to understand because in a lot of situations, a business will start a community and want to make sure that the community is always in lockstep with the business goals. That is not a way to a sustainable and healthy community. It is the way certainly to building a software or hardware project that the business really likes and the business can sell in, you know, in a way that's better for the business. But the community itself will suffer very quickly because if you just have people in the business who are dictating the way that project is going to go. No one from outside of the business is going to really feel empowered or incentivized to jump in and contribute. So therefore you have what is known as a universally stagnant community in terms of diversity of organizations that are involved in it. And that's really something that's not good to see. So it's important to remember that the community values should go first. So when you're developing in a community, everything starts in the community to build documentation, everything should start in the community and so forth and so on. For every aspect of that, it has to start in the community first. Now, it is important to clarify and we'll touch on this a little bit later, that we're not saying that the community should completely ignore the needs of the business. Or businesses, poor all that might be involved in the project. They should be willing to compromise and, you know, make allowances for each other. But it's, but the priority should always be with the community. And that's what we're trying to get out here in this presentation today. In the open source way, there are five key elements of that philosophy that should show up when we're talking about how a business should be operating within an open source framework. So it definitely should have transparency where everybody involved in the project should have access to the information and materials necessary to do the best work they could possibly do. And collaboration. If everybody's free to participate and collaborate and you don't have this massive hierarchy of, you know, only certain people can put in new ideas. You're going to have a much healthier community in terms of open source project management. One and the good one, the release early and release, release often mantra that is certainly very healthy or an open source community to do the more that you release the faster you can find new discoveries and possibly old bugs that will show up. So it's good to have that going for any open source community. So and for the second part of that too, it is also key because it just keeps people interested if you wait years to release the next version of the software.  So there's a, there's a more of a sneaky way about release early release often beyond the philanthropic idealism of making sure that everybody can collaborate as much as possible. So either way you cut it release early and release often is a key part of the open source way. Meritocracy touched on this a little bit when we were talking about collaboration but certainly any healthy community is going to have good meritocracy where it doesn't matter where the idea comes from. It matters what is the best idea and where that you know, and how that idea can be applied. Good governance is important to keeping the good meritocracy in place because governance that allows, you know, a clear and accurate decision making process if they're conflicting ideas being brought to the table, and how those conflicting ideas are resolved. And that is a key part of keeping, you know, a community healthy and also keeping meritocracy straight you don't see favoritism creeping in, if you have good governance. And then finally the community itself. When the community is given a common purpose and when it is given common goals, and they can take their goals and, you know, build on them and work with their shared values to guide your decision making. And that will also be the mark of a really healthy community. So those are the five things that, you know, really are key to the open source way, and certainly a big part of what it means to be open first. Okay, so we've done the high level theory, we talked about how we're going to be, you know, doing everything in the open and this is great because we, I'm sure a lot of us have seen this before. How do we tactically apply this grand strategy? Well, in the Red Hat open source program office, we have two different tools that we use to help figure out how healthy a community is, and then also how that community can be aligned with the goals of Red Hat. Now, you can apply the, you can use these methodologies in one way or another in your own organization, if you so choose. But here's what Red Hat is going to be doing and has been doing for at least a few years now. The first tool that we have are called audits. And audits examine community projects on a regular basis, usually annually, from an outsider's point of view, in order to determine how that community is perceived, and how they can be joined by any contributor or user. That is a big, long, fancy way of basically saying, we look at a community as if we were coming in from the outside, and how easy is it to join the community? How hard is it to get involved with the community? And from there, we build statistics and dashboards to sort of quantify if we indicate the community's health. And if you have a community that is very difficult to be involved in, that is not really a good thing. It's certainly not going to be healthy for the community, and it's certainly not going to, you know, get you access to new contributions and new ideas. Remember, ideas and contributions are the currency here and the community environment, not necessarily, you know, actual paper currency. So audits are the one tool that we use. The second tool we use that are very related to audits are called stakeholder reviews. Again, these are also regular, probably annual examinations, although in some cases they are done more often than annually, from the business's point of view, not an outsider's point of view. These stakeholder reports also determine the efficiency and the health of the project, and it also helps figure out how the project is aligned with the business goals. So they will go in, determine the health of the project, determine the project's goals, which are, again, the priority here. And then they will work to see how they can match the business goals to, you know, match those of the project goals. And so we have audits and stakeholder reviews. They sound similar in many ways there. They are similar, and we use that to our advantage, but we'll talk about audits first. So an audit is going to be examining several different elements of the community to kind of ensure that, you know, things are going to be set up well for onboarding, which is the process of getting new community members in. The only aspect that we talk about with an audit, but that is certainly the emphasis on the audit, because how an outsider perceives a community is a really good indicator of what things the community should be fixing to get things to work better. So the first thing are going to be, you know, the easy things, the public facing access assets rather, sorry, the websites, the mailing list, the chat channels, whether it's IRC or Slack, anything that you use to communicate that the community sees first. We euphemistically call that infrastructure that is probably not the right way to use that word, but that's the name that we've kind of assigned to it. We look at these assets to see how well they're designed, how clear they are, how well worded they are. It may come as a shock, but there's so many free and open source projects out there that don't really have a clear website. And something as basic as what is the project about? What does it do and how do I get it? There are complicated and convoluted websites all over the place in the open source ecosystem, and they really need to get, you know, themselves fixed. So this is something we try really hard to avoid in the Red Hat ecosystem. In case management, how often does a project come out?  Is it clear? Is it done on a regular cadence? Again, these are all markers of a healthy community. Documentation. This is another key element of onboarding in a community where you've said what the project is, you may have clearly said how to get the project. But if you don't explain how to use the project or what the project is good for and what use cases, again, you've created a barrier. So documentation is always going to be a key part of a healthy community. Contributions. Now, we'll talk about this a little bit later. This is actually the one part of the audit that we might not be looking at from purely an outsider's point of view. In that most outsiders, when they first look at a project, are not going to be looking at the contribution levels of a given project to see if it's healthy or not. They should, but most of us are not going to be doing that. So this is the one part of it that we might be getting a little more insider baseball with. We'll talk about that a little bit later. But certainly contributions to a project, whether they are increasing or decreasing, and what part of the life cycle that project is in is certainly an element of a healthy project. Outreach. What is the project doing to let itself be heard? Are there blogs? Do they have an active social media account? Are they present in a lot of events? Do they host their own events, whether they're online virtual meetups that we do now in the time of COVID? Or were they doing regular meetups at local organizations around the world prior to COVID? These are all things that we look at when we're looking at an audit. The license, this is probably by far the least worrisome part of an audit, because all the projects that Red Hat works with have some kind of OSI approved open source license. But if we are looking at a project that we're not directly stewarding, certainly we're going to be looking at the license to make sure that it's got an actual open source license and is applying it correctly. So let's look at each one of those quickly. Infrastructure. And again, we're talking about website, communications channels. How easy is it to access the product? So how easy is it to download the software? And then how easy is it to actually find the documentation? You can have documentation, but if you don't actually put it in and make it easy to access, it's going to be difficult to use. Release management. What kind of releases are coming out? Is it done VA? Is it done VA RPMs or some kind of source tour ball? How is it released? Because that can make it easier or harder to implement. How are the release announcements done? Are there QA processes built into the system? Are there continuous integration and continuous deployment process built into the release management? This is not always a given. It seems like this is fairly straightforward, but there are a lot of projects that don't have all these elements in place, and they probably should. Documentation. When you talk about it, is there a quick start guide? That's an easy to use. How do I get this thing going and how do I start using a guide? That is something that's missing from a lot of projects. Is there a change log? Are there use cases? Some projects are complicated and not always easy to understand why you would use them. Talking about how another user implements something in a use case can be very helpful. Is there a guide to installing it from source? Usually that's buried somewhere and it can't have repository. That's fine, but maybe make sure it's highlighted somewhere and say, hey, if you want to run this from source, here's where to go to find that piece of information. Contributions. Again, this is the one where we kind of kick the uphill a little bit and see what's going on inside. We're deviating from the insider's perspective a little bit because we do see the level of contributions and how fast issues are closed and how contributions are growing. We see a lot of this as a marker of health. Now, anybody can actually take the time and find this. We're not deviating too far from the insider's perspective, but we also recognize that most people are not going to be doing this. We are looking at things like pull request contributors and issue contributors and contributions itself and how many contributors are coming from a certain organization. The average time to close an issue and the average time to first attention that an issue gets. These are things that we are going to be looking at and making part of the audit. Outreach. As I said earlier, we're talking about blogs. We're talking about social media. We're talking about events, whether in real life or virtual. We're talking about meetups. Not every project has to have a blog. For instance, if you're very small and you just have a few contributors working on your project, then no, you're probably not going to want to take a lot of time to generate blog content. You're busy working on the project, but you might want to try to set up some kind of social media account, whether it's something on Instagram or Twitter, something that you can kind of get the news out quickly about what's going on in your project and generate interest in it. Not only using it, but then contributing to it. The license itself, most of the time, it's pretty straightforward. There's got to be an OSI approved license. We need to make sure there aren't any incompatibilities within the project. It's not going to be rare anymore, but that does crop up occasionally. Is there good governance for the project? And also, is there a privacy policy in place? Certainly things like the European Union's GDPR policy makes it important that all participants in a project understand what their privacy options are when they're participating within the project. Okay, so that's basically what an audit is. I do these audits for the open source program office. They don't take exceptionally long. We use a spreadsheet. We sort of fill these out and most of the time it takes about two or three hours to conduct an audit. The longest part of doing the audit is writing up the general report afterwards because that will take probably another hour or two just to kind of get that set up and word it in the correct way. Stakeholder reviews are very similar to audits. In fact, you're going to see a lot of overlap between the two. And again, as I hinted earlier, we actually use that to our advantage. So what are we looking at when we talk about stakeholder reviews? Well, here we're looking at the goals of the project. And we're also looking at the project health. And we're also looking at the goals of the community. And I sort of said that backwards. So the first goals we were looking at were looking at what the business goals are now. We're looking at the project health. And then we're looking at the community goals. And remember, the community goals have priority. So even though we're, you know, they're listed last year that actually doesn't mean anything. They are certainly the priority. So when we talk about goals, we're looking at the project schools as documented by the business unit. So what we mean there is if a business unit within Red Hat or any organization is working intimately with that project, we want to know what that business unit schools are for the project. We're also going to be looking at the organization's goals from the company itself. So what does the company want to be doing inside the software? Usually that's going to overlap with the actual business unit that's interfacing with the project, but there might be some deviation. So we're going to be looking at what those goals are. Project health. Well, most of the time this is basically what we're covering in an audit.  And also how, you know, the general ecosystem is. So what other projects are out there that are doing about the same thing. But other than that, a lot of things are going to be looking a lot like what we do in a community audit. So nothing really new there. And then finally, we look at the community goals so we can orient the direction of the project. And, you know, from there, we're looking at what the project goals are from the business unit, the overall organization, we're taking the health, we're rolling and all that. And then we're also talking to other members within the community. This is very, very important. If we, especially if we're working in a project that actually has multiple organizations working for it. We are going to be talking with all those different players within the community to figure out what their goals are for the project. And we're going to work with them to make sure that our goals align with those of the project itself. We're also going to be looking at any kind of metrics that might, you know, help us determine the project health. Any dependencies that the projects work on that need to be addressed and identify any challenges moving forward, whether it's the next quarter or the next year. Those are things that are going to be coming out of the community goals part of the stakeholder review. How we do it at Red Hat specifically. So remember how I've been saying that, you know, there's a lot of overlap with the audits and the sticker holder reviews, especially in the terms of project health. Well, guess what? We're going to be doing the audits first. So typically I work with the community architect that is assigned to a given project and determine, okay, when are you going to be actually doing your stakeholder reviews? And if they are doing it annually, then it's basically a question of me setting up a time to do their audit about, you know, anywhere from two to three weeks before they actually do their stakeholder review. The goal there is very simple. I can basically give them most, if not all, of the project health data that they were going to be including in their stakeholder review. And if I do it in a timely enough fashion, they don't have to do it over again. So we save a lot of work there by merging that part of the process together. The audits will be, you know, basically there is a spreadsheet where I will go through and step-by-step look for key elements of the project that are going to be in place. So things like, is there a website? Are there subdomains for the website? Do those subdomains have the same navigation? A lot of times if you set up wiki.project.org, the wiki's navigation is going to be possibly not the same as the main website. That's an unfortunate, you know, byproduct of using a subdomain. And then you have to give that information to the project people and say, hey, this might look confusing to newcomers. Is that something you want to spend a lot of time? Those are the kind of questions that are going to be asked on the audit questionnaire. We also look at that contributor data. We use a tool called Cauldron. This is an open source tool that is fostered by Baturgia. If you're not familiar with Baturgia, they're a company out of Spain that does a lot of work in community metrics. We take all of that and put that together and then we generate a multi-page report that includes all of the information that we gathered and any suggestions that we might have for the project. We then present that report to the community leaders of the given project with the option of, you know, telling them that, you know, they don't have to fix all this.  We always give them the option to decline or accept any suggestions we might make. We also, as part of our work within the open source program office, give them the option that we will help them. So if they need a website, you know, tune up as one example, we have the skill set and the resources available to help them with that if they don't. Or they can take that information and do it themselves at a time that they deem, you know, they can fit it into their schedule. So either way, you know, audits are never compulsory. They are never done negatively.  We're trying to be positive here and trying to point out, hey, we see you need some help here. We've got some people that are willing to help you with that if you need it. And we're, you know, we work together to try to make the community better. The stakeholder reviews, as I said, those are done next. The data from the re-audit or the data from the auditor is reused. And that helps make the stakeholder process go a lot faster. Somebody's already done the legwork on the project help. The business unit coordinates with the community architect to get the goals and everything else identified. And then they work together and align those goals and finally generate a final stakeholder report. Stakeholder reviews at Red Hat are sort of treated like annual reports for a business. And they are very important and they're key to the operation of a project that we work with. And with that, that is how we put audits and stakeholder reviews together. Thank you very much for your attention today. We certainly do appreciate it. We look forward to getting your questions and comments in the rest of the presentation. Thank you very much, Brian. That was a very good presentation. And it's complex subject how a for-profit company deals well with communities that have very different names. So it was very well done and I appreciate that. Great. Thank you very much. So do we have any questions for Brian? We have a lot of people here watching so we should have some comments or anything like that. Brian, do you want, would you like to add something or do you like to make any comments yourself? You know, not really. I mean, I think that, you know, for us, the process continues to evolve. We're always looking for suggestions and ways to improve how we can, you know, more closely align community goals with business goals. It's, you know, it's never going to be a perfect system. It always varies from project to project, but it's certainly something that we are continuing to look at. So beyond questions, suggestions and comments would also be welcome. Do you have links or contact information where you'd like to do that? I'm Sue. Let's see. Well, one of the things that I noticed during the presentation was I mentioned this tool called RIN, which I did not put into, I'll put it into the chat. Oh, thank you, Brian. And then we actually have a question from Jen Krieger who asks, any advice on when open source project goals do not align with business goals? Yeah. So historically, and this, this, this has even happened a few times historically at Red Hat. So you, again, giving a lot more weight to the open source project versus the business goals. But then there's also that immediacy of getting the business goal out. You're trying to satisfy some customer need or some market need. So it really becomes a really true collaboration and both sides are going to have to sit down and try to figure out how to, you know, how to get the project in the direction that each one wants to go. This doesn't happen very often because usually, unless it's a drastic technology dependency change, most of the time the goals are going to not be too disparate. But the advice would be to set up, you know, teams that are going to be representing all, you know, anybody who's got a major stake in the project.  It is really important that all players have a stake in deciding how the project is going to go. And if the business has a persuasive argument, then that should do it. Oh, excellent. Well, well, thank you very much, Brian. So we have one more question here. We have a question from Carson Wade who asks, how do you see the evolution of meritocracy as a core concept going forward. To understand the correct question correctly. I think that, you know, meritocracy as a as a thing seems to be kind of evolving because in the past meritocracy was very much key to the individuals within a given project. So a certain person had, you know, awesome skills became a maintainer became the lead maintainer. And that's how it seems to have happened. Now, because a lot of us are working on open source projects. Full time we have that luxury and that's a whole different conversation about, you know, the privilege of being getting paid versus volunteering, which is something we should all be discussing too. But let's just say in the current framework, the way things are going, there's much more corporate environment. I don't see that. I've heard a lot of people talk about how meritocracy is getting dulled because of that because now, you know, some cynics would say now it's becoming more of a pay to play kind of situation. I do agree that meritocracy at the individual level has been dulled slightly by the the influx of corporate participation. But I think it's just been dulled it's not being eliminated because individuals at the end of the day, they're the ones responsible for getting the code in there responsible for making sure the code works and works well. And when somebody comes along and makes it work better. So as long as it's people who are actually still doing the work, no matter where they're coming from, I think, you know meritocracy is still going to be a prevalent driver for projects moving forward. Excellent. Excellent commentary. I'm going to ask a follow on based on that is, do you see meritocracy and diversity is diverging as divergent topics, you know, some people will bring up and say, if you go exclusively on meritocracy using one person's view of merits or small groups view version of merits. I'm going to. So I'm going to ask a quick clarification, like when you're talking about diversity or talking about any diversity or we talk to any diversity. Yeah. The broadest sense of the term. So for me personally, the more diversity project is the better off it is. And that's I, I, I strongly believe that because different cultures and different, you know, different gender outlooks and different, you know, different levels of ability. You know, and and corporations and and and and that you're bringing in so much more talent and perspectives, my, my best conversations come when I am talking to people that think completely differently from me because I'm bringing what I bring to the table. You know, and you bring your stuff and you know, but the more different we are the more diverse the background or history. There is the more, you know, you know, it's challenging but it's also awesome because you just have this. You know, these new perspectives that you just never would have seen before. I don't understand why this is so hard to figure out for me or diversity. I don't want to work with a bunch of people who look and think like me. I want to work with people who are going to bring more than the table and and give us give the project rather better and more innovative ideas. So diversity really drives meritocracy then. So I believe so I think, I think it drives. Yeah, it drives creativity meritocracy. It drives so much. Okay, now I tend to agree. Karsten has an interesting comment he says there's historically a correlation between people with merit and open source project in the life of those folks have. Yep. And I would agree. I would agree with that strongly. And that is something that we all need to work on both, you know, certainly at an individual level within projects, definitely at the corporate level. It is not easy. And it but it's still something that we have to try to do, because, again, I'm coming at this from two ways I'm coming at this like I'm trying to be a better person. Right. But let's just say I'm not let's just say I'm being very selfish and non altruistic from even that point of view, even if I were being the most cynical person ever. I'm not, but diversity is an advantage. It is an advantage for the project so I do not understand why this is so hard for people to figure out. You know, Well, I think it's about change. I think change is tough. I think that's really what it is is that any sort of change if you're used to saying one thing if you're used to working with a group that's just like you, even if there's a major advantage to change, it is a hard thing to accept. So, that's what it is and I think pointing out the things you just said about how so drives creativity and projects to have diversity and to give the diversity of opinions and things like that and the viewpoints. I think that's one way to counteract that. Yes. Well, excellent, excellent talk Brian I really enjoyed it. Thank you and I think this conversation is giving me an idea for my next talk so we'll see what happens there. Excellent. Well, and then that talk for for the Brian has given me a great segue our next talk starts in six minutes and Brian will be remaining, as well as some of the other folks that are in this room already so please stay and we're going to have a panel discussion with the experts on open source and process starting at 10 after the hour.


Hey everyone welcome back to Undead World Hero Survival so we have our first event of the season which is Slay Ride as you can see here.  Okay so very depressing so I didn't show you guys how I did it but again let's go over again the rules of Slay Ride. So zombies as you can see down there in the road there are a lot of zombies so just go through the path. Special zombies are usually highlighted in either red or yellow so bump into them they are 500 points. Buyer crashes they are they are red lights with a line going to them don't go to them because it's going to be a minus 10 on points and that's already very very big. Fuel, runtime, fever mode, collect three fever items to activate two times points for five seconds this is actually great because you're going to double your points here hitting hitting multiple targets within a second grants combo points as well so if you're in a state of combo please do that and crashing into a barrier resets the combo multiplier so as much it's really hard not to it's really hard not to miss or it's really hard that you will be missing a barrier definitely you're not you're not going to do a perfect round for this game it's very very hard because again especially if you're playing with an emulator there's a bit of a lag when when you drag your your buggy left and right so this guy here so I'm just sad that I can't demo this with you guys I'm sorry ranking so far I'm at 72 so there are people who've ranked high already in just one day they're they're very good okay but in terms of the exchange what the things that you I think must must try to aim for I'm going to start at the top so you're going to start with either the heroes here so this is actually one copy of each year you get two you can get four copies of each hero so the ones that are of value here are of course rock and tanya so for these two for jones and for caddy nevermind don't get them please and at 5000 coins or slay coins you will need to average at least 250 just to get one every day so and that's for 23 days so again it's better that you go above as you can see my total points for the day is at 316 so um I'm actually kind of hesitant if I'm going just going to get 300 I might go down lower in terms of prices but again if you want to get the 5000 you have to average at least 250 between 250 to 300 just to get one copy and that's it okay so the ones that um if you if you're gonna go with the epic santa zombie icon you know if for the christmas season be my guest guys it's it's actually going to be fun and the ones that are also valuable which I'm right now considering is going to be this one the recruitment ticket because this is going to be 15 copies and there are seven available that's actually around 105 recruitment for free if you're gonna if you're gonna avail as much as possible so again try to try to aim for either a copy of this here upstairs or this but come to think of it guys I think these are more valuable at this point because some of you guys might not want a copy of rock or tanya so go for these um these are going to be good these are faction recruit tickets which you if you want to recruit for a specific faction and these are 70 recruits this is 105 definitely go for them if you want them if you've exhausted these might as well go for this one the epic recruiting pamphlet which is actually good this is already 60 and 15 available so you'll be recruiting around 15 heroes for this one as well then the others this one I don't think I'd recommend this this is your rare pamphlet could be if you if you plan to level up some of your heroes you can actually do this this one is is actually quite quite scarce the signature equipment manual box so try to get these if you're leveling up your you know your signature equipment these do not get because these are available in your caravan this one if you want to change your faction for your equipment but I would suggest that you don't get this these you could easily get equipment from a specific faction and below are the lower point items that we have so we have here a wreath we have here another border the one that actually is of value here I think is going to be this one the energy drink box because we need energy drinks to level up a certain level because there are certain skills that will be available already so this is going to be good as well so try to max this out as soon as you maxed out the others here upstairs what a day what a day I tried to rush into recording this and I end up not recording this oh my god anyway um what can I show you guys here because this cannot run anymore I'm out of tickets but anyway um hope you guys have fun in this event um I had fun playing this even though I didn't have the chance to record it but again go for always look towards this area when you're playing this game always look around this area so that you could anticipate what's coming your direction this area here the one the one that I'm clicking on because you could anticipate what is coming your way and you could do combos you could you could anticipate getting the large zombies the combos um other things anything that is gold go for it anything that is red uh don't go for it except if it's a zombie especially if if it's a large one okay so I hope that helps even without the graphic so again enjoy guys so you have 20 23 days to play this and again I'll I hope I will see you soon guys in future videos hopefully they could put out other events for Christmas and before the new year um comes around okay guys so thank you very much for staying this far so hope you were able to at least get get something out of this sleigh ride video um guys um for those who haven't subscribed please do subscribe because this helps my channel a lot and also don't forget to click that bell icon so that you don't miss any of my future videos on undead world hero survival also don't forget to put a like to this video thank you guys stay safe take care this is the warden and I'm out of here


With the inevitable amazing success of the Super Mario Bros. movie, Nintendo and Illumination, they have a golden ticket on their hand, one that they are surely not going to squander, so today I present five movies that I want to see next in this Nintendo cinematic universe, the NCU if you will. Introductions out of the way, let's begin. We're going to make this a numbered list out of five because that's just what you do on YouTube. So in the five slot, I have Star Fox. Not because I want it or need it, because it just has to happen. We have to build out the roster. I'm not totally craving a Star Fox film, although if these are all in my mind presented by Illumination, they all follow a similar art style, then I want this to be the first one out of the gates that says, okay, we're going a different direction than Mario. We're taking to the sky. We got talking animals. It's crazy. It fits though. We already have a talking ape with Donkey Kong, so we're slowly leading into the animal critter stuff. It might get sloppy with a pick I have down the road, but we'll address that later. For now, I want to see Skippy.  I got to have Fox behind the pilot chair, doing his thing, barrel rolling out of danger, blowing stuff up, taking to the skies, taking to the water, taking to the land. I want transforming vehicles. I want some amazing action set pieces in this thing. I want Nintendo to do what they Nintendo don't do for the Star Fox property and make something good again. Remember, do you remember the good old days when Star Fox was awesome way back on the Nintendo 64? Sure, you can say that that weird spin-off RPG style game was good. It originally was Dino Planet or something. It wasn't even a Star Fox game. It did give us crystal. It did give the furries what they needed in their community, but I need more. I need high octane adventure, and Nintendo and Illumination can do it. In the number four spot, we got Samus Aaron. We got Metroid. This is going to be a darker, sinister film, taking place in the cold reaches of outer space, traversing different planets. Samus Aaron, naturally voiced by the beautiful, sultry, silky, smooth voice of Scarlett Johansson. It has to happen. It has to happen. I also wouldn't mind if they modeled the character off of her either, but that's for another video altogether. In this, I want to see Samus alien style going around icy terrain, going through a volcanic area, taking on some of her greatest foes. You know Ridley's in the mix, but he's not going to show himself right away. He's going to skulk in the distance, ominously in the shadows, in the distance, waiting to strike. This is going to be a character that's going to get teased several times before the big reveal towards the final fight, which is going to be with Mother Brain, so she's going to have two opponents to take out at once. Her blaster is going to keep getting upgrades as this thing goes from a little pea shooter to a transforming behemoth. It's going to be epic! And the last and final thing that we are all craving, more than anything else in Hollywood, is a good old fashioned straw!   Samus Aaron, weathered, disheveled, half her armor is gone, zero suit, teasing underneath, again in that Samus figure. What is wrong with me today? Melt down, blood dripping, illumination, art style, so a little cutesy, still like gas, but we can try to adult it a little bit more. Volcano on the horizon, blowing its load. Audiences blowing their load too, because this is where the film is going to hit its final crescendo. She starts to rise up, ash sprinkling from the heavens above, singeing her armor. Hair half out of the helmet, she sees Ridley. Come down, looks over this way, baby metroids coming towards her. She starts to load the shooter. Music is epic, it's sick, it's app sick.  It's Metroid, it's the film I want, it has to be made. Music has some opera style stuff going on. I need it now, inject it right into my veins, Nintendo, in the number three spot. We're talking Zelda. We're talking Zelda, and I'm going to get a little controversial here. I'm actually going to pick a lane. I am going to pinpoint the game I want. Some of you are going to drop the mouth, a gap, a gassed. Zelda Wind Waker, Zelda Wind Waker, baby. Give it to me yesterday. I want to be traveling the high seas with Link, with the wind wand, opening chests, hovering on a leaf, the art style fits perfectly with illumination. It could even do a little bit of the cell shading if it wants to. It has one of the most interesting stories, a princess in disguise, a Hyrule underwater lost to the ages, and one of the most epic final duels with Ganon, aka Ganondorf, aka one of the coolest villains in video game history, where Link grabs the sword, runs up the fucker, and implants the thing into his head, right into the skull. As Zelda helps out from the sidelines, reflecting light off a shield, it's amazing. It truly is a game for the ages, and it's a game I want to see brought to the big screen. Listen, I know Link's a kid throughout the whole thing, but that just lets it grow, right? That gives us the opportunity to see him grow up as a character, become a teen, become a man. But we have to start at the ground one. We got to start at Wind Waker. Illumination can have fun with this too, of course. We'll see him go into houses, just break in, start shattering vases, grabbing rupees, it's taking everything and just looting the place, ransacking and getting the hell out of there. We'll have dungeon sections, we will have combat with the master sword. Can you imagine, can you imagine him going into the woods? Kills Tingle naturally, decaps that guy, can't stand Tingle. That's a personal thing, we can't put that in the kids movie, I understand. Axe Tingle, I don't want him in there. Toss him a thunder. We're gonna have giant octopus boss battles in the film, he's gonna take out an octopus while he's on the seas. Okay, little pirates of the Caribbean mixed in with my link adventure, I'm fine with it. Giant birds, bad guys, we have to use a hook shot, he grabs new weapons as the film progresses, it's a perfect, perfect experience for the whole family, keep it easy, keep it breezy, hour 30, hour 45 in and out. We have a picture here. I want to be the very best that no one ever was. Pokemon movie, it has to happen.  It's trash.  Mid at best. I said it, I stand by it, and I saw some of them in theaters, day fun. What I want is an illumination Pokemon movie.  No, I don't want juvenile humor, okay? But I want the Squirtle Squad. I want cute Charmander. I want an amazing relationship with two best friends traveling the countryside, Ash Ketchum and Pikachu. Yeah, I know they retired Ash Ketchum, I'm taking him out of retirement already, Dustin off the cap.  Yeah, of course. Has he not grown really at all over the course of 20 or so seasons? Absolutely. We're taking him back to square one, we're going to rebuild this character the right way because the pieces are all there. Young kid, rebellious, wants to make a life of zone at the age of like 10 or 11. The time that you leave home, of course, gets his first Pokemon, has this amazing bond with Pikachu. I mean, really the movie should be the rise of Ketchum and Pikachu as they start their journey and head to the master league. Do we end with the master league? I don't even know if we go there. I think it's premature. If we're building a franchise, let's build it properly. Master league, that's to be all end all right? Becoming an elite four? That's the end game. We don't start at the end game, we stop there. So we start with just a simple buddy road trip adventure between these two heroes. Yeah, we bring Misty in, of course, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. We bring in Brock. Seriously, Misty's voiced by like Anakendrix or something. We keep it familiar and annoying enough to work. Anakendrix fine, but she can play that role. Brock, we got to go with like John Cena or someone. Brock is the man, so we get a man to play him. Nurse Joy is obviously in the film. Officer Jenny is obviously in the film. Got a formula, we got to stick with what works. Team Rocket? You better believe Team Rocket's there. We have all the pieces, people. This is a slam dunk of a film. Ash Ketchum and Pikachu on their journey. He runs into the Squirtle Squad. He gets a Charmander, maybe sees an epic Pokemon. I don't want Mewtwo in this thing. Okay, I'm going to say that right now. Mewtwo's out. He's overplayed. He's not that interesting. And all he does is monologue to no end. I want him out of the thing, okay? You save him maybe later down the road when we get to the Smash Brothers universe. And I guess I blew my load early because we're going to the number one. And that's a Smash Brothers movie. We all knew it was going to be here, right? We all knew this was going to be the end game. We've established some key characters already. We have Mario. We have Donkey Kong from the Mario movie. He's a piggyback character, Ola Hulk.  It's part of it, but is it? Is it? We have two established characters, Donkey Kong. We got Diddy Kong in the mix. You can easily bring in more of these guys. So we have two key ingredients right out of the gates. We have a Metroid film. So we got Samus in there. We got a whole slew of Pokemon with Ash, Ketchum, Brock, and Misty all coming together for this one. A nice family reunion. And we got Link. National treasure. Link himself. So we have a picture here, folks. I don't want Master Hand as the villain. We're walking away from Master Hand. The whole child play toy thing that they initially conjured up in the first Smash Brothers for the 64. It works. Nobody cares. We're making a movie now, though.  That's not threatening, no matter how they play it out in the games. No matter what they wrap those gloves in, they're still Mickey. No, not happening. The villain's probably a combination of Bowser and Ganon coming together.  Okay, we don't need to figure that out right now. We're just trying to get through this first phase. We got Ganon. We got Bowser coming together, teaming up. It's gonna be the bedlam. It's gonna be crazy. Dead's rising.  And you know what else? We're gonna introduce Kirby. Kirby's gonna fly in on a star. He's gonna smash down from another planet. He's gonna help these guys out. He doesn't talk because we gotta keep him cute. He's borderline a Pokemon already, so we're not really, it's not a bridge that far away from here. We gotta put some cameos in here, too. Not gonna be big ones. They're just gonna be little throwaway shots. Maybe while disaster is happening, we see how it's affecting others around the globe. Maybe around... I don't think we take this universe levels. This is just an earth problem, or I guess whatever, you know, mushroom kingdom is an earth. So yeah, it's an earth problem. We maybe see the ice climbers on their way up a mountain peak when some rumblings happen thanks to whatever shenanigans is going on. So they're like, and that's it, that's it. One shot of the ice climber is done.   I'd love to see that, that smug prick. Sorry, that's a personal hang up. We got Star Fox and the crew. We already established that very early on. They're gonna be in the mix. It's just such an easy win here. Nintendo really is the Disney of video games. I've said this, many people have said this. It's not hard to see why. Now they already have a theme park at Universal. It's all happening finally. What we saw back in the NES, SNES, 64 days, it's finally coming to fruition. I'm happy to be here. And those are my picks. There's a lot more we can go with. There's Earthbound, there's Pikmin, there's I guess more modern stuff would be whatever that squid game is that people like. Not Squidbillies, that was a show. Squid Kids is nothing. Maybe those Splatoon octopus things come into the later movies. It doesn't matter at that point. We're already making money. We're already having a good time. Those are my picks though. I think we need to start with a nice foundation. This provides us. This provides us with a lot. And most of it takes place in this fictitious earth that we've created with pallet towns and orange islands and mushroom kingdoms. So it's all kind of enclosed there with an occasional space ranger flying in and out in the mix. I want to hear from you though. You like this play? You like this setup? Let me know in the comments. Like this video if you had a good time. Please subscribe if you haven't. I post tons of movie reviews each and every week. Love to have you stick around. And with that I prepare my next Nintendo list for Phase 2, 3, and beyond. Take care.


What's going on everybody got Kyle here relating sports cards, and we are ripping some personal today got um three boxes crown worry out This one is for Jim. Hope everyone's having a good day Let me change. I got Saturday night here one second already. Good luck Jim three boxes crown hobby Thank you. Thank you, sir And guys got a short cue at the moment if anybody wants to get something going you Kelsey Day and Rico I I need a I need a I Need mark I feel you man. I feel you. I don't have much on the the backup tight end position Alrighty good luck Jim in this one's for Jim D Get us started today Interested for tonight too, man. We got a Sean and Forrest coming in tonight, and they are They are a house divided on on the game tonight. We got Forrest with the of the Pats fan and Sean the the Dolphin fan Gonna be interested entertaining tonight for that one for sure. Shea Gilgis This one is coat of arms on the jersey. It's gonna be France Franz Wagner and the coat of arms jersey for the magic Got a auto this one's number to 75. It's gonna be Bryce McGowan's Bryce McGowan's Hornets there Blue auto We've got Yanis on the cracked ice not numbered Yanis action and on the back. We have Luca Donchich on the snow globe die cut to 99 Sweet looking die cut on the Luca All right, there's one box got three for you here Jim Good luck. Good luck sir Get guys still plenty of room and they want to get something going. I'm gonna go for you this morning base KD You don't say Murray AJ Griffin rookie and out of bio this one is a heirs to the throne jersey Patrick Baldwin for the Warriors here's to the throne and Auto go nulls to 35. We got Scotty Barnes. Hey, what's up? Mamba chill a man? How you doing? 35 on the Scotty go nulls We've got a red cracked ice to 49 Lamello The mellow ball and we've got snow globe die cut this one is Jason Tatum 75 on the Sparkle Snow globe and one more for you sir. Good luck Jim appreciate you game guys at this. I got Keith on Got Jeffrey Oren Andrew. That is the whole queue right now Excited for some football today Mamba No, I am base Blake Wesley on the rookie Clay Thompson Yanis and Hemi Butler Got Zach Levine on the coat of arms jersey for the Bulls That's a bucket And we've got auto it's gonna be France in 99 the Frans Jersey and the auto there for the magic Frans Got Paul George on the bronze ice there for clips And last card of the break we got a handcrafted this one said 99 LeBron James for the calves there the Larry O'Brien Braun on the back Alrighty, Mr. Jim that will do it for your three boxes of crown Royale basketball. Thank you so much my friend We will get that right out to you sir Hey, I appreciate that Mamba


Not as strong. Illusion of Gaia is a pretty weird game, but I'll start with the positives here. Its strengths lie in the dungeon design, it successfully takes advantage of the top-down Zelda-like battle system, and creates some clever puzzles that can be challenging. The Skygarden in particular is one of my favorite dungeons in any game ever. Mu and the Great Wall of China are also really well done. The game has you switch forms between Will, who's a kid, and Friedan, this Fabio-looking guy who's a knight of some kind, and then a third form you can obtain later on. You'll be able to reach areas that Friedan is not, and vice versa, and the game does a nice job taking advantage of that by creating some decent puzzles centered around that dynamic. Another positive of Illusion of Gaia is that it's not a walk in the park, it's a little challenging. For instance, you're given a finite number of health replenishments, so you've got to pick your spots and use them wisely. Many of the puzzles are cleverly designed and take some thought, and some of the bosses, like the vampires here, are pretty tough, and it took me a few tries to finally beat. What I like about the combat is how simple everything is. You enter the area, and a new path opens up. The hit detection is quality, and the sound of defeating an enemy is addicting. So the game does a nice job of building momentum. The game takes a while to really get going at the beginning, so don't let the very slow start deter you. Unfortunately, Illusion of Gaia must insist on attempting to tell a big, sweeping story, and let me tell you, it is one of the weirdest, most bizarre stories ever, even for a video game. It goes like this, or as far as I can tell anyway. Will, our hero, is on a quest to find these mystic statues, because his dead dad told him to by communicating through a possessed flute.  Also, this game is a sequel to Soul Blazer, but that's news to this game. In fact, there are so many weird ideas haphazardly thrown together that I don't think I can adequately explain things. There's a comet headed towards Earth, there's ancient civilizations, there's vampires. At one point, Will and his friends are taken captive by a tribe of cannibals, but his girlfriend's pet pig sacrifices himself to keep anyone from getting eaten by jumping into a campfire so he can be eaten instead.  Even the game's sense of humor is bizarre. You gotta love this random villager you just walk up to out of nowhere, he says, no one can put a show on like I can, and then he sets his hair on fire. Yeah, I gotta agree with you there, buddy. I'm pouring it out in a little harsh, and I don't want to undersell the qualities this game has, because it is a good game. The good outweighs the bad, the problem is that the story can't be ignored because there are so many unskippable cutscenes, and half of them barely make any sense. And I mean, beyond any kind of like translation issue, some stuff just makes you say, what the fuck?  The story tries hard to hit some emotional notes, and it is effective at some times. The story hits a nice note with the character Cara, who is a spoiled princess who accompanies Will on his journey, and she actually gains some perspective for the first time in her life. But aside from the story, Illusion of Gaia is a very good game, and the gameplay will remind you a lot of Link to the Past or Lufia 2 in the best possible ways. There's some nice action and stimulating dungeon design, so it is worth playing nowadays, I would say.


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There's been big indie news going on lately, like the industry is being shaken up, right? We got Kanye going indie officially and going number one. Usher announced that he was indie, right? And, you know, we know that these people are different types of indie, however, which we can have another conversation. But these people are starting to use indie as a part of their narrative. Somebody told me that French Montana was talking some indie talk relatively recently, right? Yeah. So here's there's some good and bad to a lot of this stuff. But we're going to start with the good because James Blake has also basically started talking that indie talk, that direct to consumer talk. If you all haven't seen, he partnered with a platform that newly launched, which probably means he has a little piece in the platform as well called Vault, which is basically a platform for artists specifically that that allows them to create subscription programs. He launched his own subscription program for five dollars a month for his fans. As a matter of fact, I go to the page real quick just to kind of read or James's page real quick to read what the offer was to his fans. So right now, what his offer is is straight up. Unlock unreleased music from my vault. There's five songs. And then the other thing is chat with me about the music straightforward. All right. Now there's a lot to unpack here, a lot to unpack here in this episode. But let's start first with one. This is yet another step of the indie culture being pushed forward. The idea of indie being pushed forward and direct to consumer more empowerment for the artist, because it's yet another platform. There's so many of these platforms at this point for all types of creators. And then now there's more popping up for artists specifically. And that just means you're seeing more people invest in that direction. Now, this also goes back to our country conversation. When you start seeing it become a big trend and it becoming a heavy, heavy conversation, we've been talking direct to consumer for years. We've been talking like having your own website or hey, you should monetize online, do digital events. We've been trying to push people on that heavy and we try to go even harder during the pandemic and people still didn't move. However, people are moving heavily now on this. You know what that means? That means there's investment being put in this. You see that there's big artists behind this. You see that these big artists are involved in a lot of these plays. So it's just something to be aware of that I'll touch on. But there is something that I do like about the James Blake vault situation that I don't see in other platforms. It's really just the nothingness of it. The minimalistic of it. I'm dead serious, right? Maybe it's because it's new and it might become, you know, really robust. But right now, all right. Unlock five unreleased tracks and chat with me about the music. That's specific about the music. Hey, don't be chatting with me about your baby mama or you like basketball or these side subjects, right? We're not here to be a friend or a community. I'm here about my music. It's in line with that message. Now, that might just be James's fault. I don't know, or that might be a philosophy of the actual platform. It's too early to tell. But I do like the idea for people who say they're really about the music and monetizing the music. This seems so far to be about monetizing the music, not doing all the other bells and whistles that a lot of artists say they don't necessarily want to do in the first place. Right. So, bam, do you want my music? Here's my music. You want to talk to me? Well, let's talk about my music. Too simple to start, too simple, but impactful starting points. Yeah, yeah. And it prevents you having to actually do the work that it requires in a lot of these other types of monetization routes, right? Where it's a lot more work to, like, really run a community. It's a lot more work to, like, have a pop and discord, like, et cetera, but here's here's some of the interesting side of this James Blake situation, right? The interesting side of the James Blake situation is the tweets that he had leading up to this, right? So anybody who knows James Blake, maybe some of y'all don't know. He's he's an artist that Kanye has described as like his favorite artist multiple times throughout the years, has a lot of dope stuff. But he's he's on that mystique. I'm only about the artist.  That's how I think about him, right? Like really dope at music. Don't be out there for the sake of it. I'm just saying, you know what I mean? Not all music, but from a brand positioning. And I give it to the artist. You know what I mean? I hope they give it to him, but I give it to him. I hope they do. I hope they do. But he said this, right? Something I keep saying they I keep seeing is if you're lucky enough to go viral, just use the exposure to generate income some other way. Musicians should be able to generate income via their music. Yes, they should. All right. I mean, James, you've already gotten quite a good amount of money direct off the music, I'm sure. But do you want good music or do you want what you paid for? I like that question. I like that question because he's implying well, if I only pay twelve ninety nine a month or I'm limited by the songs, it's going to force the music to be bad. That's what it sounds like, right? Or artists having to do other things is going to create worse music, right? Now, I think this does favor his type of artists more than anything. But let's continue this. And then he had a post that got reposted by Kanye.  But he said if we want quality music, someone is going to have to pay for it. Streaming services don't pay properly.  Tick tock doesn't pay properly. And touring is getting prohibitively expensive for most artists. All pretty fair, fair, fair complaints, right? I think that's all fair. But here goes the issue. Here goes the issue. James, don't be talking, bro. Don't James don't. James does not tweet often. I don't really even remember a James Blake tweet like that. Being pushed into culture at large, right? So when I saw that, when you saw that, with many people who know James Blake, you already saw that we registered it as, OK, this is truth. There's a general artist complaints. But why are you saying that? Why? Yeah, I didn't get to why, honestly. I was just like, oh, that's interesting. Like even James Blake is saying something that's kind of random because James don't talk. But then once the platform launch happens, oh, this is a rollout. Yep. Of course. You got me. What in what in what in music is not a rollout? What do artists do? What successful artists moves and does anything that's not a part of a rollout? It doesn't exist. I agree. It does not exist. Every single artist. And I'm talking about your favorite indie artist that's successful. Any artist that you consider successful as an indie artist. They do not move if they are not selling something. There's always a purpose. Every piece of content they put like I from what I've seen when I've been a part of the conversations, everybody is they have to be just as mindful as you think about my brand. Right. Where am I committed to? All of these things, the strategies that we have to build, they all have domino effects and people decide, oh, if I'm going to do something, it has to build into something.  Oh, they might have got emotional and just posted on something like that's not their thing. Yeah. Every even social media post is meticulous. Yeah, I want people to understand too. Like it's not always selling a product. Sometimes a lot of times it is selling a product, but most of the times it's selling an idea. An idea is selling a lifestyle, a movement. Yep. It's selling you on themselves. Like there's always an end goal to with Smars, right? There's always an end result or end goal that we like to have. I was very ready just doing things just to just to do stuff. They didn't get to where they they are, like not doing that. Yeah. Now, what I would have been like, hey, man, so we need a slew of tweets and like activity just off some some basic random stuff going ahead of this. We got to create a precedent that this is just what you do. You are now, for whatever reason, posting, but it's only post before this have led to the to the launch of this platform. So then it becomes OK, you're really just kind of like building up attention to launch your program. And, you know, now you have a nice PR moment for for your platform. Which respect, like I'm sure is working, but that goes back to, you know, some of the ideas I've been talking about in terms of just calling the question what you see because the artists that complain about the labels today as we transition into this new trend, right? Like this, the the Indies having more power, the individuals having more power. I foresee five years, maybe maybe it's 10 years. But artists will be coming at artists the same way they come at labels. Yeah, 100 percent. Like I'm telling you, man, 100 percent. It's going to be a real interesting space. It's a real interesting space because y'all forget that artists have signed artists before. And artists have already had these issues of other artists. Artists have taken over the labels. Y'all forget. Or maybe most of you haven't done the math. Most of these executives started off as artists. Or at least had a stint. A little stint, a little stint, man. Now, a lot of these executives, like, especially if you go back to the old days, right? A lot of them started off as artists or engineers or producers. So don't think it's the label. Like it's like the people are the people, bro. Like, I think I forgot who said it recently. But I forgot who. Oh, no, it's our interview. We haven't released our interview yet. But Boogers, you know, Boogers, Russ, the diamond label man. He was like, like, hey, man. I'm not going to turn down a good deal. A good deal is a good deal, no matter where it's coming from. I can get a good deal or a bad deal from my neighbor or a label. Right? Like somebody can screw you over at no matter what job you're at or no matter what level you're working on. So that's something to consider. But overall, the idea of another one of these types of companies like the vault being pushed and more artists in general, right? Pushing for these ideas is it's a good thing. Right? I do think it's a good thing, right? But again, if we go back to the intentionality, Kanye moving the way he moves, talking to what Kanye will when you say selling an idea. Artists know, especially the top artists and especially when you get to a Kanye, they know the idea is the thing that we sell before we sell the thing. Yeah, facts. Yeah. I sell you that that these people are trying to screw me over and not create an enemy before I try to sell you this other thing, right? Or I sell you that. Hey, yeah, I'm independent now. All right. Before I try to sell you this other thing, like they get the stories out for a reason and it's something you should learn from. I'm not even saying it all like in a skeptical or negative way. I'm saying this is something that you are going to have to understand as an artist in general, right? Like that's just that's just how this works. But it also something is something you should be mindful of because you are being marketed to by other artists or even if they are marketing to you directly, because you might not be the customer like, all right, I'm trying to sell the vault or something like that. Like, yes, and you are somewhere in the direct line of sales. But sometimes you're just looking at ideas that an artist is trying to sell to their audience, but it sounds so good. You're getting swept into it and you're starting to move off of that. You don't even know, man. I had a marketing funnel going on for these guys over here. Like it's a whole nother thing going on. But you just think that it's the idea is pure to the idea itself. Well, I wish I had a direct example I wanted to give right now, but I want to make sure we don't spend too much time on that because we I got to read Sam's post. Let me take a quick second to say if you're looking for a music distributor that cares about educating their artists so they can get in a better position, you should check out Two Loss because every single Monday, they have office hours where they bring on dope people in the industry to hop on calls, give artists insights on the future of the music industry and answer some of the questions they have going on in their personal careers. So if you aren't a user of Two Loss or just want to have a little bit more information about them, go to Two Loss on Instagram. That's T-O-O-L-O-S-T Two Lost on Instagram. And it'll take you to everything you need to see and for me about the sessions and more back to this episode. So if you all don't know Sam, you know, go and watch his. Don't be. Don't go ahead and watch his interview. No labels necessary. I think we caught. Did we call him just down? I don't go Sam Levine. We probably get Sam Levine. We probably called him Sam Levine in the title. But he has a post and I think it was pretty interesting when he came to a response to this James Blake. Grant, I'll call it. James Blake in the importance of hard work as an artist. It's a lot to consider and wait. He said over the last few weeks, James Blake began a discourse on social media. His idea is simple. Artists shouldn't be expected to learn how to market themselves and instead should be free to create art and make an equitable living from that without expending time and energy on social media promotion. OK, that's what Sam said. He verily he very quickly followed up his viral sentiment with the announcement of a product launch for a music coded Patreon derivative called Vault, which, according to James Blake, will encourage artists to create their favorite most integral music, not just the big 15 second TikTok moment in another recent quote from him, which appears to be the foundational thing to his viewpoint.  He says in a real because most musicians are not extroverts who are social media and branding genius. All right, I want you all to soak all that in, right? Take a second, Paul, soak that in and then Sam's continues. Both of those thoughts stood out to me and it's those ideas that I want to talk about. I would love all of y'all's response to what Sam is saying here. The first is the fundamentally old headed conception of so-called TikTok music, quote unquote, as being somehow separate from and inherently less artistically valuable than other forms of music. TikTok is music is worse than other music. That's basically what he's saying. He's saying it's offensive to artists pushing new boundaries and having unique breakthroughs on the platform to imply that they're not releasing their best work, that they're instead chasing an ultimately inconsequential garbage heap of content masquerading as music. And I know a lot of artists feel this way. Problem is, there's a lot of artists that aren't winning at all, that are that are feeling this way as well. Right. And like, so, and I don't say that even as a shot. I say that as like, you got to find, but you can't be mad at somebody for finding a way. And some of these things are personality differences, right? There's some artists that are going to win in certain errors. And we're talking about performance back in the old days where people were literally building their audience off of performance, especially the further back you go, that was like the way that was how you're going to build. We didn't have this crazy media. We didn't even have TV going in like that. Well, it's a lot of your artists that would suffer. Right. And then imagine somebody going, well, I mean, that's just dancing to the music just because this man could do a couple of moves. He could do all this little, this foot. Got a wardrobe budget. Yeah. He got a wardrobe budget and a cape and some, and some rhinestones. He, he can, like he doesn't have real music. Like, imagine that conversation. Somebody was probably having that conversation. That's a distraction from just recording the music. All right. We all like rewrite history in our own era. TikTok has created, this is back to Sam, a new paradigm of marketing media and fan connection where before visual media and world building was a one way street. True. Presented by the artist teams and then consumed by the fans is now turned into a world of reciprocal action and interactivity. I don't know, Sam. You know, I made that one up or maybe I just got to catch up, but I'm out of. There is no creative limitation on what will work on TikTok and the fact that anyone can tap into the vast audience reach of TikTok from their phone has opened up more doors to an artist than ever before. All right. So he does say, oh, this is good. This is good. I'd like to briefly note that here, that my belief that TikTok itself is a monolithic monopolistic nightmare, which has entirely too much control. All right. I'll let y'all go to Sam. We'll put a link to this on Sam's face. So y'all can read all that. Yeah, blow his comments up, all that good stuff. But he does not like love TikTok. He's not a, that's not what he's saying or defending a TikTok or anything like that. But I think it is a big idea. And it's something I've actually responded to here. I said, you know, good stuff, like legit to me, because this is a constant thing that I've always did not like that I saw in the art scene. Like as a child, you know, I always had my like entire way of seeing things, right? My own viewpoint.  But then I observe anti-establishment, then I have an anti-anti-establishment. I'm somewhere in between. OK, all right. That's kind of how I saw myself develop. So it's a lot of times it's hard for people to see where I don't understand where I'm at because I see fuckery on all sides. Right. So it's like, I can't rock with anybody all the way. So this is the context to what I wrote. If people study enough history, they realize that many times artists, ironically, end up being the ones who resist art moving forward. When artists become a purist or believes that their personal distaste equates to a lack of artistic credibility, they're projecting what they supposedly hate straight up.  Like art is art. It cannot be defined. It cannot be put in a box, right? And the thing that you hate, somebody else will love. The thing that you love, somebody thinks it's pure garbage, like not even close to art. And I think people lose respect, perspective on that as a whole. And I never try to get beyond that from an ego standpoint, but that's a lot of the grounding for this conversation and how James Blake presented it.   Y'all don't know, man. Sam actually cares about this. I could go real deep into this. Let me read a little bit more on what he said. Let me see. Just so y'all can have a context of who he is for those who are going to are going to be too lazy to go to his page. Myself and the people I admire most are driven by an urgent sense of competitive purpose. We want to be the best in the world and want to facilitate greatness for those we work with. I am driven by the belief that art and the expression are the most important things in the small microcosm of the universe occupied by human consciousness. And it is my goal to participate in and help build up great art. All right. That's that Sam in a nutshell. All right. So know that it's not coming from all like who cares about art. I think we we we don't have real discussions around this music stuff and approach to it and we get caught in these silos and purists thought processes because people always like to just say, oh, you either hate art or love art. Right.  And it's like, no, you can still like both love art, both be super indie minded and still not think about going about this the same way. Right. Or disagree upon some ideas. And I think as this evolves, we'll probably see more nuance because I don't think people see or the space for this nuance. Right. Because right now it just feels like, oh, it's institution versus indie. So if you say anything that critiques the proper way of doing indie or how you should go about it, it feels like you're just institution because indie hasn't been invested in enough and it's not as many people involved in it just yet or it's not the still not the number one thing where then people could say, OK, yeah, you're splitting the hairs of indie versus, you know, going to direct other direction completely. I think that's probably part of what we're going to do right now. Yeah. I mean, the thing about it, too, is I don't think I don't think these artists realize they're building the same elitist system that they claim to be against. Right. Because it's a couple of things I was thinking about. Just listen to that. Right. One, you said something really early on that stuck with me and is the indie music space is the fastest growing section of the music space, right? Right. It's projected to make a lot of money over the next couple of years or just in perpetuity, I guess, if it keeps growing. Now, what people are assuming is that that means that it's going to make more money because the artists within the space are going to spend more money, which I do think we are slowly starting to see become true. But I don't think people think about is that the space is one of the fastest growing spaces is because a lot of people have realized that, oh, this group is finally ready to start spending money. So we see no more services. We see more products and things popping up. We've been in any space for a long time. I can't even think of a time where a year where I would see even like I would see a new platform come out and see even more than three of that same one kind of come up in that same year. You will find like a music platform and it'd be like maybe one other competitor at the time. Now, bro, you get one platform out. It seems like a semi-good idea. It's like 10 more about it. You send a platform like these tech platforms. Yeah, a lot of tech platforms. And to that same point, and this isn't like an ad or anything for these companies, but Bandcamp has existed for a long time. Bandzooogle has existed. You're talking about like 20 years in the game. Yeah, Patreon and all that. Yeah, like you and Patreon is like 10 years deep now, right? So it's not like people haven't had these tools, right? Like it's not like, and if people haven't been using these types of tools already and then to start selling the idea of it, then it makes me question a little bit.   And now you're trying to just go about it a better way with your experience as maybe an artist specifically to build it better for an artist specifically. You know what I mean? That, okay, that's a lot more genuine, but then like, I don't know, like the James Blake rollout was a little interesting. And this isn't even to call out any particular names or anything like that, but I just go off of feedback and things when I talk to artists like that and they're confused, right? Like, yo, bro, I'm about to drop my first song and which distributor should I use and then which one of these like monetization routes should I use? It's like, bro, you haven't dropped your first song. Like, stop thinking about that. It's a lot. You know what I mean, right? So it's like, that's more of why I say this than anything is like just people are getting confused a little bit in terms of like even the process of going about it. And if you do end up using one of these routes, like look at the, look at the path that still works, right? Path number one, get some fans, right? Like, period. We're all starts. Like this is where it all starts. So like at the end of the day, man, like again, I think this is gonna be a good thing. It's interesting that they're having so many people that are large become quote unquote independent, right? And I only wanna put the quotes on it, but like yes, because some of these have these massive big joint ventures and it's just skews the idea of what we see as independent. And, but on the other side, the thing that people should realize is, I don't know how to say this. Independent on paper is not what people perceive it to be. So when you see independent growing, that doesn't just include Johnny who's sitting in his bedroom. That includes independent labels, right? And that also includes the massive artists. Kanye is gonna be a part of that market share now. When they say independent is growing X, Y, and Z. So now the game is all muddied up. And you don't even know what's for you anymore as a indie, indie. I even think about that's a good point. Like when the indie stats come out, I'm just gonna be crazy padded. The stats are padded, bro. The stats are padded. Like it's a completely different game now. So it's gonna be hard for y'all who are like, really indie and still on the come up to know what's for you exactly. How are y'all doing as a bunch? Exactly, cause not too many people are going to like really show you the detailed breakdown of that cause it doesn't really benefit, you know, certain people. You know what I mean? It just is what it is. Yeah, but that's why I mean, we've never gotten any like hard stats on this, but I've estimated for years that any artist with a fan base, at least 30% of your fan base is other music artists. And I think that as artists who are fans of other music artists, which is probably majority of you, you have to get really good at discerning between when this artist is selling to you as a music fan and when they are selling to you as a fellow music artist, you know what I'm saying? Whether they respect you in the same light as wherever they are necessarily, there are two different business models, so I can sell to you as a fan by my t-shirt, you know what I'm saying? By my vinyl, I sell to you as a music artist.   And you get it, cause you there, you know what I'm saying?  Like I ain't making bread. We need to stick together. And that's not how they're looking at it. That's not how they're looking at it. Another guy, some funnel guy behind me, like, hey bro, you know what I'm making? This, this, this, you know, cost-back position go crazy, bro. Sprinkle a little bit of that. Sprinkle a little bit of narrative on it, bro. Get the people out of it. Yeah, there's, there's the marketers behind them, right? And, or they are the marketers themselves. There are artists who are, who are that? Like, bro, like there's gonna be so many artists that are coming from like just professional backgrounds outside of the industry. That's the new thing, right? We have so many artists who have legitimate professional careers that move into music. They know how this stuff works. They understand the strategies. So they are the corporate. Yeah. It's just, it's just individual or a small team instead of a big building over-invested in overextending themselves. So, like, just know that this is the new industry, all right? And it's only gonna continue in this direction. There's a lot of great stuff coming, but, you know, keep your head on the swivel. Yeah, man. You know, like Sean said, man, we didn't do this to be negative. Like, overall the discourse about it, regardless of who it's coming from, is a good thing because it moves it forward. It's making people who wouldn't otherwise have had attention be a little bit more aware of it. Right? It's starting some conversations. We just want you guys to, you know, remember to, that, you know, sometimes you gotta go check the wisdom of ours and look behind the curtain, though, like. See you, what's up? See you, what's up? And with that said, this is yet another episode of No Labels Necessary. I'm Brandon Manchin. And I'm Cory. And we out. Peace.