This is Startup to Storefront. Odds are high that over the past year, the word NFT has been entered into your personal vocabulary. Whether you use the word NFT while describing how many you own, or if you use the word pejoratively while describing how you feel about them, NFTs have become mainstream. The Startup to Storefront team has been taking a deep dive into that world over the past few months, and as such, we are sharing our findings with you so that you may become better informed. Our guest today is Mike Sapinski, a part of the team behind the Moments in History NFT. This particular NFT community has a goal of uniting both history novices and buffs, reflecting on moments throughout our global history that have shaped our lives today. So listen in as we cover everything from the pros and cons of designing an NFT by committee, how to teach a new audience to use Discord, and how a coma changed his career path. Now on to the episode. After the idea was born. So they had a previous collection that they were going to do, and it was actually focused on some weird history with serial killers was kind of the original idea. That's what the artist's art was going to be. There was a bit of an interest in that, but it was too niche, which they found in that didn't allow the community to grow the way that we wanted it to, and then we kind of pulled the community and decided to go in a different direction, which are these new 12 historical characters. So just so I'm clear at the time, so you already had the Discord. Okay, so the Discord is live, and you guys are like, all right, we might go serial killer route, and then litmus test not working out, and then you pivoted, but same Discord channel, same group of, same community. Yep, same one, same community. So yeah, we've got some people who have been with us since that original idea was around. When was that? Oh gosh, I think the Discord has been alive for almost nine to 12 months now. So it's been hanging around for a bit. And then once you guys decide to, I guess, on the concept, was it always to bring sort of a metaverse feel? Like was it always to, was the concept in terms of like, let's bring a museum to the metaverse? Was that directionally where you guys always wanted to go? Yeah, I think Eric had a huge passion for wanting to be the first to do something in this space, and he, you know, he did his due diligence on research and didn't find, like he's a big history buff, so, you know, he's always been interested in museums and learning about history and culture. And when he went into his research, he just didn't see anyone doing anything like this. He didn't see anyone putting up a museum. And what better marketing opportunity is there to like say, hey, we're going to be the first of something in this space? Like, I don't know if you guys have been in the NFT space for a long time, but the first of anything does quite well, you know, if you can be that. So I think that's, that was the idea there. And for people listening, Eric is, so he created, I think, EarthPix and then History Photographed are a couple Instagram accounts that he grew from zero to millions of followers. And so even if people aren't familiar with Momentan History NFT project, they're definitely familiar with a few key Instagram accounts that he built from nothing to a pretty amazing place, which is, which, at least when I'm doing my research as someone purchasing or investing or, you know, trying to learn more about a project. Having someone who's familiar in the social media game is pretty helpful because at the end of the day, that's where a lot of people find out about these projects, whether it's Twitter or Instagram. And then from there, you know, the funnel goes, let me, let me join the discord and see what's up. Yeah. Having that audience is key. Yeah. I think the cool thing that we have with Eric's social media gathering that he's been able to acquire over his, his career is that they believe in him. And like almost blindly and, you know, that's very rare to find in the NFT space because everyone just is looking for the next quick flip. So, you know, we've just had our snapshot of people who minted and held for the first month. And I was anticipating like, you know, a thousand wallets who minted and are still holding their NFTs and it was actually 2,500 and almost over half of our collection was still people who minted and are holding onto their NFTs. And that put my mind at ease knowing that impatience is something that's very common in this space and people are being patient and letting us grow and do our work, which is really cool. So let's talk about this. So the midday comes and then there's a bit of an issue right on the back end. And so they mint, they get revealed. And again, this is just so people who are trying to maybe get into this space. And by the way, there hasn't been a single project that I've invested in where mint day has gone flawlessly. So I think also, if you're not in the NFT game and you're interested in joining, please be aware that Reveal Day or Minting Day will have problems and I would call that normal and don't freak out. For this one, it's funny. So I went from having a Cleopatra during the reveal to then it moving to an Alexander degree and my wife was like, oh, I got a Cleopatra. And then it turns out it wasn't. And then I had to go buy a Cleopatra for her because she was so hyped. So that's how I ended up with three. What are some of the technical details that happened behind the scenes that most people don't know about? So what ended up happening was that there was a glitch, mainly with it was the Cleopatra character that ended up having most of the double ups and from a layering perspective, the art. So there was, you know, a bunch of them got minted and then to check 8,888 different renderings of the NFTs is not the easiest thing to filter from a tech perspective. We ran two or three trial runs and reviewed them and they seemed to be okay. We didn't see duplicate issues, but you know, that could have just been human error. You know, reviewing them and making sure that that dupes didn't happen is a difficult thing to do on that large of a scale. We used a scraping tool as well. The tech team did to try to mitigate any type of duplication concerns. But there was just an error with the Cleopatra character and one of the traits that kind of sent things down the wrong direction and created duplicates down that character. And that's why we saw a lot of the people who had Cleopatras ended up refreshing their metadata and didn't have Cleopatras anymore. And I've actually taken upon myself to go into OpenSea and I've reviewed every single character and made sure that all of them are now accurate and refreshed appropriately because we've had a lot of people who invested and haven't checked again. They bought their one NFT, kept it in their wallet and haven't done anything with it. So I wanted to make sure that when they come back, it's the one that they wanted and if it's not then they can do something about it. Yeah, so just like diving more into the metaverse, I know a lot of people are starting to get parcels of land. Like one person is getting into Decentraland and another project is getting into Sandbox. So why did you specifically choose Sandbox for that route? So I've kind of been the lead in the metaverse journey just because I'm a nerd and I think it's awesome. And so I did my own research and I've gotten to know a few people just through some lucky breaks that I've had throughout my NFT investing career and I was found a bit disheartened by Decentraland's flexibility within what we can do within their metaverse. Most of the land is pretty well sold and owned by large groups of people or it's being a bit more controlled than Sandbox and Sandbox has a lot more open space. So we wanted to have a place where we can buy our property, be as flexible as we want because Eric shoots for the stars and if he's told that he can't do something, that's not going to be okay. And we ended up having a really great connection with a lead ambassador for Sandbox and they've connected us with Land Vault, which is the number one builder on that platform. I think they've created like 10 times more property than the next closest builders. So I think the stars just aligned for Sandbox to be kind of that first direction that we go to and then I think the important thing to think about with the metaverse too is it's its own brand just because we're just in Sandbox right now doesn't mean we can't go here and can't go there and can't explore further options moving forward. As a real estate developer in real life, does the metaverse, when you say you're using Land Vault and one of the best builders in the game, do they give you a series of options?  Is it basically a front end? And then you're looking at different options, different layouts and then you just decide on one. How does like literally the building of that work? So our last meeting with Land Vault, they told us that well they have 26 people on their team that do different things throughout the building process and for the most part the engineers and the architects will kind of come to us with coming up of a plan of what we want this thing to look like and then so there's that group that just kind of sets the structure up about how big everything's going to be and what the size and the scope is and then once we get down into the detail they have a group of people who do customizable type builds which kind of costs a bit more but we think we need to do that to get it done right. So it's almost like a three-step process. We need to understand how much land is going to cost and then we need to understand how much the building itself is going to cost and then we need to figure out how much we want to customize from there and it's all different people from gaming developers, architectural people from real life who do physical type work have moved into the metaverse space and it's hard for me to even wrap my head around all the work that goes on behind the scenes to be honest. And then like so then the obvious question is how do you decide right? So do you let this go to the community vote or like if people hate the museum are they like god damn it Mike and if they love it or like oh Mike you get all the credit like what is that because it's almost like you don't want to give as a developer myself we'll hear input but I'm going to make the decision right and so I would imagine you just have to make the decision because that by committee is way too hard. I think some of the decisions that we have to make by ourselves is like the size like how big we want this thing to be. We want it to be like multiple floors and figuring out which floor will have specific things being shown and displayed but I think the thing that the community can maybe help us with is like you know specific things like should we make this available to everyone within the first month or should we have it exclusive for just our holders for the first month or do we want to have our NFTs displayed on the first floor or the third floor? You know something like that where they can feel like they're part of the process but I think as us being the development team we're probably going to take the lead and take the advice a lot from who we're going to be working with as well and making this thing look cool because that's what they're best at. I know you do a really good job engaging the community with AMAs on Twitter or Spaces and then obviously all over Discord you crush. I mean I think when people are asking about NFTs like literally this happens pretty often and they're like I can just take pictures of myself and put them on OpenSea and I'm like yeah you can do that if you want to waste your time and I think a big thing is like how people build community and I think this becomes sort of the X factor with all projects. What have been some challenges that because you guys are you're tackling a big monster right it's like literally moments in history and here you are bringing history into the future and you sound like an alien just came down from 2080 and so when it comes to your perspective what is it like managing this community in particular and what are the challenges or surprises that you've personally dealt with? There's been a few projects that I've worked with and attempted to get up off the ground and this project specifically has a challenge in that the large audience is Instagram focused and a large audience is their this is their first NFTs and most of them have never engaged with Discord before so getting them to answering the simple questions that I thought were obvious I guess is probably the thing that kind of I found a bit difficult at first because you know most people didn't even know how to change their avatar on Discord or update their username or make sure to verify appropriately so that they can have access to all the channels like a lot of people were joining our Discord and then thinking that it was broken because they didn't know that they had to click the verify button and just things like that to get the project up and running but I also think getting us marketing across all of our social media platforms and getting people onto Discord has been a significant challenge too like they bought the NFT because they believe in Eric they didn't buy the NFT because they believe in NFTs so they don't feel like they need to adapt into that world really they're just gonna tuck it away in their wallet and see if it's worth a lot of money in a few years so we're still almost proving it to them as well that this space is much larger than us and that it's worthwhile investments and things like that so that's probably my biggest challenge that in like I'm a people pleaser like I don't like it when one person's unhappy with me so being okay with people being unhappy with me is a new skill that I'm constantly trying to work on Do you by chance know the demographics of your like the community so is this stemming from like just people being older or is it stemming from like this is their first NFT project so that's a really good question the most that we have from a demographic standpoint is that Eric mentioned that the majority of his social media followers are between the ages of 25 and 34 and we've also found out that I think it was I don't want to misquote him but I'm pretty sure it was really close to this number about 65 to 70% of the followers are female and 35 to 30 are male which is like the exact opposite of the NFT space which I find really cool and really positive and something that Eric's really passionate about too so that's the demographics I think from our NFT holders demographics we haven't, we're planning on sending out a Google Doc to get some more information on this but I would probably say that the people who have adopted into the Discord aren't of the older generation but I could see a lot of people who follow him on Instagram could be of that older generation as well so I think more research definitely needs to be done for us from a marketing perspective there I was going to ask about that as well because I do the social media for the podcast anybody didn't know that but yeah, one of the things you could do is even run a poll on Twitter, I didn't know if Twitter was used a lot for moments in history as well it sounds like Instagram like you said which makes sense with your demographic so you could definitely run a poll or something like that just to kind of gain a sense of what people's age is and things like that yeah, that's a good idea my focus has been trying to grow our Twitter platform a little bit, that's why I've been hosting spaces I'm going to be hosting a couple of guest speakers on Twitter Spaces moving forward to just try to get people's eye on us in that space because we all know that's where the big money is and NFTs is is on Twitter unfortunately well not unfortunately, but it just is what it is so we're kind of like this sleeping project that no one has heard of yet but I feel as soon as we start to get some big names following us so we're excited to see what that can do to our value of our NFTs at least and I know you guys are doing an amazing giveaway where you're doing two like blue chip NFTs which is pretty crazy and so I wanted to ask you how do you think about the giveaways because they're kind of like pros and cons there are some groups that just do giveaways every week and that's cool, the community loves them but at the same time it sort of does detract from the bigger picture but you give the people what they want so it's kind of nice but how do you because you strike me as more of I want to build an honest community and I want everyone here for the marathon and so a giveaway kind of takes away from that like what's the strategy in terms of giveaways on how you look at it so as far as the big royalties giveaway that was something that Eric was really passionate about and he wanted to give back to holders and I don't think we ever thought that we'd have 80 ETH to spend on this first giveaway like our success was we thought we would be successful and sell out and everything but we didn't think that we'd have 800 ETH of secondary sales in that first month so this first giveaway this first giveaway has turned into this amazing opportunity to change a couple people's lives with some blue chip NFTs and get some physical things into people's homes as a reminder of our project and things and just make them feel a bit more attached and then as far as my thoughts on giveaways in the discord is if I feel that the discord community needs a little bit of a spark or something to be excited about I'll pump out a giveaway and that's pretty much just a feel thing like I think luckily for us right now our NFTs are a price that are affordable so giving them away is an easy way for us to just kind of give them a thank you for believing in us and I try to do one or two a month I'm not going to go crazy and go all over twitter and give away one to every influencer but I'll thank the community within our discord and give them some every now and then specifically if they've like leveled up in the discord or our holders or something like that seems logical to me I'll say this much from my perspective because I'm in so many discord it could be like a full time job you know just like paying it out so from your perspective is this a full time job for you or are you working on a series of things like what is it like from your perspective where you're literally charged with sparking the community all the time I actually quit my IRL job and I'm doing this full time now so this is a full time job for me I'm not just a discord community manager I also am the head of partnerships and and focus on the metaverse stuff as well but the discord is probably 70% of my work and it takes that much I think to keep things going and yeah so it's full time and it's a thrilling thing and it's a 24-7 thing like you just need to always be switched on and ready for something to happen and it's exciting and exhausting all in the best sort of ways Can you tell us about that moment though when you quit because that's a big leap you know you're going especially in this day and age it's still on the cutting edge so I mean what was your thoughts about like jumping head first into something like this full time was it something that you just knew that you had to do because of the time required was it because you you just felt the pull of everything like leading in that direction and what was the thoughts of everyone around you so my decision is is quite a deep one I had a health scare actually about 12 months ago that landed me I was in a coma for like four or five days and ever since then I've kind of prior to this career change I've done the same thing for about 12 years but after I came out of that health scare and you know fully recovered and everything I kind of decided that I wanted to do something that made me you know genuinely happy and excited me and was that I was passionate about and I was into NFTs for quite some time even before I got sick so I was the one thing that I was up all night doing you know like looking at NFTs minting at three in the morning because I live in Australia and like you know doing whatever it takes to try to make it happen and you know while I was working my regular job I was thinking about NFTs so I'm like what am I doing here like I decided you know I worked on a few projects before this hoping that I could make a change but then this one ended up being the one that you know I felt most secure with and safe with and assured that it's going to you know be something that's going to be around for a period of time and you know I had the support of my amazing wife she was very happy for me to make the change and my daughter likes the pictures so that was like a plus right so I just everything just kind of felt right and I thought to myself I'd regretted if I didn't at least try and luckily for me as well my other job is a security blanket you know if I need to ever go back there's not going to be an issue there as well so I just had a lot of things to support that decision. Was it like a car accident or what led you to be in a coma? Yeah it's a long story but I went to bed one night and I woke up the next morning and I couldn't feel the entire right side of my body I couldn't talk I didn't know who my wife was who my daughter was and it ended up being an auto immune viral infection within my brain in my brainstem and it took them a solid month or two to figure out that diagnosis they thought it was a stroke at first then a possible brain tumor and then they ruled both of them out thank goodness and then they just didn't know what was wrong with me it's a pretty rare thing that happened to me and it typically actually happens in females so that's why they didn't pick up on it right away but I think it was like one out of a hundred thousand males get it and I was just one of them unfortunately. That's crazy I don't even know how do they is it surgery like what do they begin to so like what are the things that they get to get the brain flowing again? It was a mixture of the antibiotics and then just kind of flushing out my it's IVIF it's called it was like $7,000 a day worth of medication that would just flush my body out to kind of reset my immune system and once they figured it out five or six days of that and I was good to go. Is this something that you have to worry about ever relapsing or is this like a remission period like that that's just kind of permanent at this point? Yeah no it's it's something that was just absolutely a freak accident and or not an accident a freak thing that happened and it's it's I'm not likely to ever have it happen to me again. I know we're getting personal but like at least on our podcast we have listeners that are like afraid to take that first step in entrepreneurship and so what was the moment for you? Was it when you were in the hospital bed and you're like everything's changing or did you have to gradually come to the realization of like everything was different and I'm in control now like what was that moment like? So physically I'm perfectly fine like I healed relatively quickly luckily because I'm younger and you know I try to keep in shape and all that stuff but my mental health was struggling for quite some time after it and it took a gradual process because my brain like I was like okay I'm healthy I'm just going to jump right back into work and I did that way too quick so I jumped back into my job but like the back of my head was like you're not enjoying yourself you know you're not here passionately working hard you're not you know your your whole heart isn't into it and I was constantly asking myself like why am I doing this and I never used to ask that before and I would say it took probably two or three months before I decided I need to actually take I took vacation time so I I jumped right off of being sick I got out of the hospital and like two weeks later I was working full-time and then I just ran myself down mentally and physically again and then I took two weeks off and then during that two weeks off is when everything kind of hit me I was like I'm very very happy like because that's all I did during my two weeks off was NFT stuff right and like enjoying time with my family and working from home doing some side projects for some NFT community members and I was like I'm really happy here this is where my priorities are now and I think that I can I can be successful in this so I ended up going back to work and you know putting a plan together and just giving it my all and my free time outside of my regular job and yeah so it was that time off that I took from my real job that allowed me to get that space and an ability to overcome that mental health stuff I appreciate you sharing that on a lighter note tell me what it's like to tell your parents that you're moving into the metaverse and NFT land and what on earth are they thinking well first I told my parents and my mom's like well what's discord and so I she didn't even know how to download the app to her her phone so I was like well here it is so she's in our community she keeps an eye on what we're doing and and checks things out she doesn't have a clue what NFTs are but she just thinks it's cool that my name's in yellow in the discord and she's supporting you yeah yeah for sure and then I had to tell my grandparents that was a no go I just said I'm doing a different job now grandma so it's all good yeah I did have a question actually you talked about your daughter so a lot of people are actually gifting NFTs to their kids is that something that you're kind of exploring and wanting to get into later on like what are your thoughts behind that like if someone did that with one of your NFTs yeah so there was probably a period of time where I was like minting new stuff a lot like when I didn't have these other responsibilities I was constantly minting NFTs buying NFTs and every Sunday morning I have like my daughter father time and I would show her the NFTs I bought that week and she would usually come to me after a while and say what pictures do you have today and I said they're not pictures NFTs and then I realized I was arguing with a three year old but no she'd pick which one she liked and then I would I'm keeping them and she can look at them whenever she wants to and some of them are worth some money and some of them aren't worth any money but as long as she likes them that's kind of my game plan at the moment my focus is just continuing to build my own portfolio so I can do other things for her in the future rather than just own some NFTs Can you share with us just a couple of your favorite projects that you really like at the moment? My favorite project of all times since I've been in the NFTs space is On Chain Monkey outside of moments in history of course they are fully doxed team that are very charitable and conscientious of you know environmental concerns and things like that they were a random free mint in the middle of the night and a friend of mine in the NFTs space said well I'm going to mint like 50 of these because he's a whale and was like just minting everything and gas didn't mean anything to him and so I minted 5 and ever since then I've been kind of watching how they handle their discord community and how they've been growing and just proving that they're meeting all their goals their floor right now is all the way from a free mint is at 1.7 ETH I just sold one of theirs for 9 ETH a couple days ago from a free mint so I respect them because they had so much confidence in themselves that they just chucked their NFT out on a free mint basis and have just been working so hard ever since then and so I've got a lot of respect for them. I know one thing that's like changing the landscape right now is like obviously Solana has their own NFT network, Cardano CNFTs and so you know for people that are today and this is just free advice to anyone who's listening and thinking about an NFT project how do you view that like because it makes it difficult right so on one hand you have lower gas fees but on the other hand there's not many people in that world just yet and so when you think about making that decision on where to mint or where to set up your project you know what are some of the things that you look for or do you go you know all these things are going to grow rapidly and so it's kind of just pick one and move forward actually I'm not not due to the fact that I don't believe in the other platforms but I've just really been ETH focused I've probably minted a couple Solana projects and they didn't end up doing much for me and that was probably because I didn't do my full research and stuff like that but you know there's no doubt that there's good projects on every platform but I just don't I don't feel as confident in the sustainability of all of them as I do with like the Ethereum platform seeing Ethereum as the secondary cryptocurrency under Bitcoin is about as far as I'd like to go from a comfort level of investing my own money and stuff like that I totally support all platforms in it whatever works for anyone is great and I love the free gas like that was sweet I was really happy to mint the projects I did and not pay gas so as we wrap what can you tell us about what's on the roadmap for moments in history yeah man really really excited about some announcements that we're going to have with this partnership with Land Vault that we're going to land here there's an opportunity for a multi faceted approach within Sandbox and a building perspective we've gotten lucky to reach out to the right type of people and they're providing us with a bit of a significant offer that they're not offering a lot of other projects because they love what we're doing and think that we are you know different and that's what they're looking for so that's really cool I'm really excited about the charitable collections that we have coming up Eric is a good friend of Tom from MySpace so they're going to be doing an NFT collection drop that's going to be 100% for a charity that I am unsure of what they've picked at this point and the NFT is going to just be the famous picture of Tom so that's going to probably be the NFT collection picture there and I think they're going to do I can't remember what the mint count on that one was but it's going to be a significant size and then all the money is just going to go straight to charity and then Eric has been able to foster a friendship with the president of El Salvador President Bukel so they've been able to agree to a charitable NFT for El Salvador that displays their culture and how they got from where they first started to being this ambassador for cryptocurrency used by a government and things like that so One thing I want to ask you about is the floor so leading up to the drop how did you handle all the haters saying this project was going to be worth this and after the mint how do you handle all the criticism of the floor is dropping or there's no confidence in the project how do you respond to that when you get into the game and you quit your job and you're all in so I have this really weird experience with that because as an investor selfishly I do look at the floor I'm not going to sit here and act like if I have invested into a project I'm not looking at the floor price right so I'm trying to balance this understanding of working on a team and then handling investors experience and overall happiness with how their investments and from studying on chain monkey I think that's why my favorite project is where I've learned the most is you have to let people just kind of vent and if they're unhappy then that is what it is and if they want to sell I'm totally fine with that like that's great like go ahead and sell maybe someone else will come in who isn't so concerned about that floor price and will stick around long term in the meantime I'm just going to keep working and keep delivering and those who are happy with the price that they got their NFT at and happy with that progress will stick around with us I don't think there's really anything else you can really do because if you get caught up in all of that you're going to do something like artificially try and bump that floor price up and I just don't believe in that like that just doesn't seem right on brand with what we're trying to accomplish here like we could have swept the floor like five times right and we could have a .5 e-th floor and then give away all those NFTs but bump out a lot of people and I think it would upset a lot of people who maybe got in early right and then they see they got their .07 mint they see it go to .14 and then they sell and then we sweep the floor up to .5 and then they can't get back in like I kind of like that gradual you know growth and then dips every now and then for those people who want to get back in and stuff like that not just like this meteorical rise where everything goes up to three e-th floor and then it drops back down to one and then it's lost even more money so I think if you get caught up in that that can be so bad for you as a project yeah nothing great is built overnight and like there's always the people with paper hands or people just quick flippers trying to make an extra buck so I agree with you it's crazy to think like it's only been five weeks since our public midday I feel like I've had to handle like some serious expectations from some community members and I'm like man we're only five weeks in like we'd still be hiring people like we'd still be like trying to figure out what the next step is after making like you know almost two million dollars on mint today right like let us figure out you know just take a deep breath NFT world like everything's going to be okay Mike listen where can everyone find the project Twitter it sounds like we have to grow the Twitter we do we do we're at at history in NFTs on Twitter and we're on momentsinhistory.io website and then we're obviously in I think we got moments in history on Instagram but couldn't get it on Twitter yet so it's moments at moments in history on Instagram our discord links in the Twitter and the Instagram bio so please come in and hang out with me and don't talk about the floor too much thanks Mike I appreciate you joining the podcast pleasure having you on Mike no no it was really good and probably four or five of your guys's podcasts on my flight from Australia over to here and I love the vibes that you guys have and I hope you guys keep getting some awesome guests on and can grow yourselves in this NFT space this was part of our continuing series exploring NFTs we've got a few more that will be sprinkling into our schedule from time to time I think it's safe to assume that they've made it this far you've enjoyed the show so consider subscribing if you're not already or better yet leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify we are at Startup Store Front on every social media platform except for Twitter where you can find us at STS Podcast LA the Startup Store Front team consists of Diego Torres Palma, Natalia Cappellini, Lexie Jamison, Owen Cappellini and me, Nick Conrad music by DoubleTouch thank you all for listening we'll see you next time


All right Mark C3 here the compound college combine here at you know church boys here Calvary Chapel goes to Mesa California what do you think of the event so far you bring your son here yeah he's got some good scraps in by the way I think so but what are you getting out of this event and what were you expecting coming into this event in the C3 this event is a great event I think it's moving wrestling in the right direction with getting our elite level kids the looks from college coaches because we don't have we don't have pro wrestling where where there's just amateur wrestling on the pro level right pro wrestling a lot of people know pro wrestling as jumping from the top rope and elbowing somebody you know that's that's not wrestling you know so the wrestling that we do is is real real wrestling to where I mean it's live you're not faking anything you're not acting anything so there's no pro level wrestling you know there's there's nothing for that so so in order for you to make a living you got to be an Olympian or a world champ but there's only seven way classes and there's hundreds of thousands of wrestlers you know so the funnel effect is so big that people that love wrestling aren't gonna want to stay in the wrestling because the possibilities of them becoming an Olympian or world world world team member is very very small all right rather than in the NFL you know there's 32 teams 32 teams there's hundreds of athletes you know of course there's a there's a lot more football players but you know I think I think with only seven spots that you can be an Olympian or world champ it really drastically really funnels down everything so so it's just it's harder you know to be to make a living with wrestling so what do you think of the event you know like you what your expectations were is it's to promote wrestling and get your kid recruited yeah what do you what do you thought think of the event so far here at C3 yeah the event is awesome you know the the things that that that cliff fret well and compound is is doing now here is is unbelievable with the skills testing and and you know for for coaches to be able to identify kid and they got their shirts different colors what grades there are if they're you know it's it's a great accomplishment they're on there too it's it's neat man yes so they have a they have a bio they have a bio page about what they've accomplished and what they've done in their in their career thus far and it's great you know it's developing and it's it's it's gonna get better every year so like I said it's it's stepping in the right direction it's great for our wrestlers and it's only gonna make wrestling better


here tonight to recognize and remember Marines past and present who distinguished themselves on the battlefields around us, symbolizing the passing of wisdom as well as trust and confidence in those who will carry on our Marine Corps traditions. Ladies and gentlemen, will please rise for the retirement of the colors. Last year to strengthen our alliance, expand our teams that we are an elite organization that Marines are tough, smart, elite warriors, but if you want to see proof positive of that just take a look at our spouses and date and look around and see how great everybody looks tonight. You all look terrific and it's great to have you all here. It's also my honor


Hey, everyone. Happy Thursday, July 8th here with your day trading recap. Small green day today, plus 268. Just kept my position super small and staying disciplined on the back of some losses yesterday and some kind of mismanaged trades. I'm just putting myself a little bit in the penalty box until I get back on track. So that's what we're doing for now for the rest of this week, today and tomorrow. So let's go over these trades. I'll show you what we're doing. Square, small winner plus 70, Boeing plus 170. Those are two mighty 90s. No pair of trades today. And then three runners, one at AMC for minus 336, space for 328, and piton little scratch for 36. So let's go over these. I'll show you what we did. Obviously a massive down move overnight. And then the market's been pretty strong all day. Most stocks have been anyway. So let's go to square, the first mighty 90. So had this pushed down, had a spike in volume here. It pushed down a little bit. So I got in right here. It pushed more against me. I was going to add if it pushed much lower. Never got there. Did bounce.  Boeing for plus 170. And Boeing had this push up. Kept pushing, kept getting higher volume. And so I got in right in this area here. Just this little pullback. I got out of half my position for a nice profit. And then it popped back up. I was looking, excuse me, I was looking for a bigger push. I was going to add to it. But it never did. It just kind of popped up, pulled back, popped up, pulled back. And so when I started chopping around, I just cut out of my last piece and booked a profit of 170. And then on to the runners. We had AMC. So this was my one loser of the day was AMC. And this thing, my position size was small, which is good. But this thing just kind of ripped my face off. Started off weak. On this bounce here, I got short looking for a continuation lower. And that did not happen. It just ripped up. And so I just went ahead and just cut out quick and took a loss on that one. And then space. Space was a nice winner. Could have gotten more out of it. But I ended up just closing out and being done at that point. So I had this initial push up on this pullback got long right here and got this move all the way up here. I held on to just a piece. I think it was just one contract, looking for another push higher. Just kind of chopped around. And I finally just cut out of it and took a $328 winner net-net on that one. And then lastly, Peton. So Peton, this is my last trade of the day. Peton was just kind of chopped around. All of a sudden, it made a huge push, massive volume spike. So when it pulled back here, I got long looking for another push. Just kind of chopped around, chopped around. And finally when it bounced here, the market at this point was closed it out right here. The market at this point was just absolutely ripping. Talking about the S&P, NASDAQ, just continuing to climb. And Peton did not have any follow through to the episode. It was just chopping around. So I didn't like that price action.  So that is my trading day. We'll be streaming live tomorrow. We'll be streaming live every day next week. Look forward to seeing you in the room. Talk to you then.


All right. Well, I'd like to call this meeting of the town of Arlington redevelopment board to order. This is the April 24th meeting and we are in the town hall annex. And we will adjourn early this evening. So we're looking forward to getting through our agenda items. And then we will adjourn no later than 750 to town meeting. So we think that walk for being with us here this evening from the Chamber of Commerce. Let's go ahead and jump right into our first meeting after excuse me our first agenda item after we do a brief introduction for the record. I'm Rachel Jenberry chair of the development board. Can allow. Eugene Benson. And we are joined by our members of the department of planning and community development director and assistant director Kelly. All right. So let's move into the first agenda item, which is the ARB rules and regulations, and I will hand it over to Claire. Sure. Great. Thank you. And thank you, Jean for, you know, your comments and edits and edits today. So Kelly has been working on this document has been looking to include updated languages as it relates to zoning by law amendments and comments by the AG's office from 2022. So Kelly, if you'd like to review those that would be awesome. So we just in the front we just mentioned which rules have been proposed to be amended. And then let's see here. Some of these are minor, minor amendments just to reflect changes in title. So here we have changing, changing, changing, sorry, change administrative assistant to office manager because it's a new title. So there, let me stand down here. One of the sections that the board wanted to review was the fees for appearing before the redevelopment board, there have been times in the past when the board has indicated that they would like a little bit more of a delay for waiving fees and so we've added in the statement here on the rules. Jean as amended it. Thank you Jean, to reflect maybe a few conditions under which the rules could be there wonder where to the fee could be changed instead of having it just be wide open. And then the other school down here. We also added in a rule regarding the solar energy system assessment. This was again based on a prior discussion and I believe the end of middle of last year. And then I updated for decisions here to reflect housing choice legislation since that has not been fixed. I'm sure that was it. Yes, that was it. Great. Thank you. No good. If you wouldn't mind just for the record explaining the difference in the boarding thresholds for the zoning and that's related to the housing choice. Sure. So under most conditions the board has to have a super majority or four out of five members have to vote to approve a project. If a project involves a certain it involves multi family housing. Things regarding a permit uses like per parking that with that weighs in on the ability of someone to produce multi family housing. There's a there's a couple of conditions that are laid out in section nine of mass general law chapter 40 a. So under those conditions if a project meets those requirements then it just needs to have it can be approved by a simple majority vote instead of a super majority. Great. Thank you very much. So Jean I know that you had a couple of clarifications and I believe one question for the board so if you would like to start off that would be great. Yes, can you put the page piece Kelly with the waiver. So the draft just said that we, in our discretion can waiver reduce any administrative fee but it was open ended in our sort of felt like it wasn't appropriate for us to have no standards whatsoever. So, thinking through what we've done in the past, I put two in based on the applicants limited or inability to pay or upon a grossly disproportionate disparity between the fees and the capital and income of the applicant. So, that is my suggestion about how we still have discretion but more narrow than everything because I'm always afraid when rules and regulations, but agency do anything at once, with no limits to great. I just have one question for Eugene, given the way that you have the second part written there, or upon disparity between the fees and the capital and income of the applicant do we need the first piece limited inability to pay because I feel like that covers when you're talking about the income of the applicant. It's slightly different right because one is the inability to pay. And the other is disproportionate between the fees let's say the fees are some incredible amount of money. But they have neither income or capital to do it so I think they're very slightly different. Okay. Okay, great. Thanks. Can your thoughts on the proposed changes. I agree with you. I think what you're trying to say right now is the same. Someone put in a public family. Long come housing, and they need some sort of approval, the fee for that can get up to like, I don't know. I think it's about $12,000 now through she didn't really have that time. And we can wait that will reduce it reduce it to make that go away so that it gives them ability, they may have it later on wants to get the project up and running but we're getting started with the project. This is the hard part. Yeah, I agree with that. Steve, any comments. Looks fine to me. Okay, great. I believe that we will vote at our next meeting, correct. Because it was advertised. Okay, perfect. Is there a, is there any other discussion. Just, just if you go back to our first page. Yes. When we do this, you do have to change the first one. Was was voted. Yes, yes. Okay, so is there a motion to approve the ARB rules and regulations as amended. Second, we'll take a vote starting with Steve. Yes, Jean. Yes, Kim. Yes. Those have been approved. Thank you so much. So that closes agenda item number one, and we'll now move to agenda item number two. And again, thank that block for coming to meet with us today. We had discussed when I went to a chamber event and I think even before that an opportunity for the redevelopment board to have a conversation with back as a representative of the chamber of commerce as the executive director. We discussed many of the proposals. The warrant articles that we are looking forward to putting forth in the fall, and just in general how we can support the businesses who are looking to, whether it's to improve their property, locate within Arlington, and ensure that we are in alignment with, again, the needs of the community and the, and the businesses. Before we get started, I'll turn it over to Claire, because I know that the department has prepared a memo related to the discussion here and economic development recommendations. Sure. And I will. I will reference a memo from Kelly from earlier, or last week while I was out on vacations. I think it basically references where we have our economic development. The items and the various plans are some culture plan, the Alton Heights neighborhood action plan and we do have some related business zoning recommendations that we're looking to implement the next at a future town meeting in the fall, along with some other zoning amendments that were not going to be considered at tonight's meeting at this current town meeting. And also, economic development master plan section, and then looks like we have a report more than a decade related to related to development, etc. We are currently without an economic development coordinator. I have reached out to HR to see who who has applied and how and how many. And hopefully, you know, we can get that person on board to continue the work of the DJ Beauregard who was here for a short time but managed to make quite a splash and body impact. So thank you guys for coming. My pleasure. So what I'd love to do, maybe is open this up by seeing if if you have any initial thoughts that you would like to share with the board things that that you've heard from the businesses in town we'd love to, you know, share with you some of the items that we're looking at in terms of whether they're individual business districts, or, you know, within the town in general that will hopefully allow businesses and developers to put together projects that prioritize businesses, especially along our major quarters such as NASA, Broadway, and section to summer streets. So I don't have anything particular prepared because this was a little bit short notice and I wasn't sure exactly what we were going to be talking about that's okay. But I'm very happy to be invited here and I think it's really important to have these conversations and hopefully this is this will be the first of many. I mean, once we could talk about I guess my biggest concern with any sort of projects that might be under review right now and up for, you know, approval now would be that there not be a net loss of retail, or, you know, first floor level retail space. We, although we hear about vacant space in Arlington. It's more that we have. I don't think the vacancy rate is anywhere near as high as people think it is for one thing, statistically, and secondly, one of the I think we probably all know that many of the spaces that we have that are available for these are not appealing to tenants current day types of tenants. So, I think some of the property owners out there may be having a hard time renting some of these spaces that they have but that's not it's not because people aren't looking at Arlington, in fact, people, a lot of people are working at Arlington. And I think, what are they looking at Arlington for what are they thinking of bringing here. I would say there's always there always people looking for restaurant bar type space, but significant good size places.  That would have reached up a lot quicker but hadn't been for the pandemic. And we don't have many options like that. I know several tenants that are looking right now to do a deal for a pub type space, and they are able to either find the right size space. Or when they try to get creative. They don't always, you know, it's, they don't have. Well, I don't really want to go there. But it's the quality of the space that we have is not the main. Yes, so I mean that's my number one thing is that I'd love to see any projects that you're looking at going forward that, if anything, we gain some. Some, some appealing, and I wouldn't be able to tell you right now what the right. The sweet spot is for square footage but I'm sure we could, you know, get that information by talking to some commercial real estate agents and that kind of thing about who's looking. And, and then the other major issue that I would love to see I don't know if it's within the scope of this board at all, but I'd really love to see some effort put into. I guess I might be coming from the inspectional services but the, the maintenance of signage signage maintenance of signage quality of signage. Everything to do with signage signage that is on a building that no one has been in the space for five years that sign shouldn't still be up and, and I know it's, you know, the rules say it shouldn't be the rules say right and it's an area that, you know, it's a, it's a big problem, and then quality of signage as well so. And certainly quality of building maintenance, you know that that's something that I think we all know we'd like to see but it's hard to. I don't know how that can be achieved within the rules of the town but we certainly have a building, a stock of older, older, older and buildings that could stand some love. Yeah, so those are my main issues but I mean, I love to hear everything that you're working on how we might be able to, you know, help inform that as well. Sure. Please go ahead Ken. Well, yeah I was wondering how we work together on. I'm going to go there where you don't want to go. There's probably going to be a handful. We have done so owners along mess up and they own the profits outright. And it's less riskier for them to do nothing and still make money than to invest in their own property to make, make something out of it. And I'm just wondering is there a way where we can work together on somehow getting something so that we would encourage the owners to look into developing their redeveloping lands to do that. I'll give you a couple examples. Okay, yeah. One was, you know, that it started with me maybe six years ago maybe. What else. Okay, that was a that was a hole in the wall house that had drug addicts and everybody else that's in there okay, and everybody was telling me. You can't do anything about it the owners of away and we've been doing this and that. So we finally put a little wedge in there, saying that it may be excessive but you know CVS want to increase their change their signage and branding a little bit. And that is part of their permit and they had to come up and do something about it. They still haven't done anything. They've done everything but do anything about it. Okay, CVS on the property. No, I don't. The person owns the house owns the CDS. And they shifted the house over the we gave a special permit to build that CVS there next to the high school. So that's still under our preview, right. Yes. We sort of forced them because they want to change the signage and we modify that special permit that they had to address that it's come to a complete stop right now I don't know what's going on over there now it's it's an historic right. Yes, I believe they were waiting for demolition delay demolition delay expires in June of this year, but they had it before. As soon as you applied the time stocks then, but they were just kicking the can down the road kicking can down the road and what they want to do is to want to tear down which is a shame but still move forward, and they were going to build two floors of office space, and it was going to incubate a space for start up companies. And I thought that was good. Now, upstairs would be some houses to balance the thing out okay, but stuff like that. Yeah, we need to find stuff like that to encourage the owners to do something like that. And you said earlier, a lot of these bacon stores. They just put up paper or nothing at all over the storefronts and leave it alone. I thought we had passed some sort of bacon storefront bacon storefront they had to make sure that it's clean that they had dressed it up and all that kind of stuff. And if they don't do that we would find them. So right now I'm not finding right now any where we have some important power when you say well that's where I that that definitely goes in line with my comment about signage I mean it's, it's enforcement of the existing rules and regulations I guess that that would have been a better way for me to worry but I was thinking because I totally agree with you that that's signage is just one part of it empty storefront taking care of your space is another trying to lease it you know, showing that you're trying to lease it and registering with the town on that is another I don't personally think that the I think it's great that we have a bacon store bylaw I don't think it's that demanding. I know I don't I don't think it's like it's not. It's fairly minimal to find yeah right yeah. Yes, but we're going to think of something like that. And then encouragement right now the billing officials right now, they haven't increased the size. And I'm assuming, if we're serious about that we should, you know, talk to the select board and say look let's fund some money, and put, and put the money what we want to do and say hey, let's have encouragement, and maybe have it. Doesn't a person a part time person or whatever. And work on that 100%. But we elected that together, not. Yes, yeah, yeah, not just from the board here. Yeah, but your board, right and of course right I say I supported I have to take it to my board pretty likely that they would support it. I encourage owners of existing properties, instead of just leaving it. Yeah, derelict. They say hey, they will work with us. Let's go out reach out to them talk to them say hey, let's what we can do about encouraging them to develop their properties. I totally agree I mean if there are ways that I'm not familiar with like what what is appropriate and not of legal is the right word or what what we can truly ask of a building owner but if there are ways that we can come up with and to work together to do that, I would love to do that. I would like to provide two examples to that so when Ali Carter was still here in the economic development coordinator position together with the Arlington Heights, the neighborhood action plan group and inspector champa. They, that those three groups together actually put together a plan for reaching out to the Arlington Heights district owners regarding signage. Unfortunately, you know when she left that that that effort has languished a bit. But in addition to that. One of the four corners of the park have and mess have intersection. One owner had elected to re paint and clean up the entire facade of their building. Yeah, which was much. Right so using that as a as an opportunity to have a discussion with the other three owners to say, look what this has done in this area, can you imagine what would happen if all four owners, together at the same time invested in their property and it was successful and convincing several of those owners to repaint to repair some of their their store. Did you, did you bring them to the tape like who, yes, so there were that Arlington Heights neighborhood group together with inspector champa and Ali Carter got together and figured out who had relationships right that we could leverage and and talk about the benefits to their tenants and to to them as business owners in terms of the, the, the curb appeal. Yeah, and the, the, the, the increase in foot traffic that would be expected. I didn't realize so we have one of our board members is on that committee. Yeah, so we met in a, in a while, I know that but it was doing some good work right and I knew, I mean I definitely was aware at the time of what was happening but I didn't know there were direct direct contacts to landlords that's fantastic. Yeah, and I've done some of that in the center. Yes. And I have very good relationships with some of the landlords in center. But it, it, there's more than a handful there are a handful that own multiple properties, but some of the ones that we know we'd like to see. I mean there are. There are a lot of different property owners I think more than, more than a handful, but I mean, yeah, I don't know what the approach would be what the incentives would be, you know, it's hard for me to offer incentives but if we if the town could come up with some potential incentives and we go together, you know and I represent the business community and yeah. So if I could suggest something a lot of this came out of a walking tour that that Arlington Heights group put together with Inspector Champa and with Ali representing the Department of Planning and Community Development to walk just the Arlington Heights business district to to talk about what were the priorities what were the highest priorities, who knew whom, and what could we, what could we put together to, to affect change and those were the two priorities that were, and there were many on the list of those, those, you know, were potential quick wins. Yeah, that were identified and I'm wondering if, you know, some subset of this group and represented from the planning department and yourself. And maybe another member of the Chamber, we were to identify, again, sections of town. Yeah, we did that kind of a walking tour and just identified opportunities to, to create some sort of an impact again starting with putting together a list of priorities and which buildings we wanted to target first and that kind of thing. Yeah. And I had one more. One more group. Common public works should be part of that. I think like madam marker did join this walking tour. Having the fact that town's willing to step up and take care of the sidewalks curb cuts. Any plantings out there street lighting any of that kind of stuff to help encourage. Absolutely. Activate the street lights there. I'm excited about that because now they're investment in their zone is a couple of what's going on there. Yeah. So if you take an holistic approach, I think. Yeah, I wish I had just reminded me. On Friday I was in Wellesley and I noticed a sign on a couple signs on an empty storefront and went and looked at it. I took pictures I meant to look it up, but there was a, they were advertising a meeting for streetscape. You know, and come and come and give your opinion on these two or three potential new streetscape plans. And it said it was from the equivalent of this board in Wellesley. And that would be, I mean, I could see that could maybe be like a long term goal that could come out of meeting walking tours like that and that kind of thing.  I don't know who, you know, exactly what's involved in that I think quite a bit but I would I would love to see something like that. I think, and again before I, for it out to some of the other board members for their thoughts one of the other things that could be an interesting part of that kind of a walking tour discussion are is a discussion of some of the proposed bylaws that we are planning on putting forth for fall, a special town meeting in the fall related to zoning with regard to things like the height modifications, and that we are proposing again to increase the opportunity for for greater business. Yeah, stays where it makes use, you know, where there's quite a bit of underutilized one story. Yeah, so just creating the opportunity, right, right, or people. Yeah. Kim, did you have anything. I had a question. This is sort of a long arc of history time a question. You know if you go back half a century or so. Well, just slightly over half a century, our business districts were a lot bigger.  And, you know, back in the 70s or so we sort of the town, or we wrote our bylaws the two things that were part of that which I think affected the business district where one was removing the substantial part of the map. So areas that were, I'm sorry, moving apart. Yeah. So there's back in, not having an old map handy if you could think pull it up. I looked at them so you I may remember. So the business districts used to stretch, like about 150 feet in, you know from Mass Ave going 150 feet in one side and 150 feet in the other side. The entire length of the town. And I'm not sure. So without the breaks for residential. Right so we see today have a lot a lot of residential commercial was knocked down to build residential. Well no wasn't so much. So the black areas are residential, the dark colored areas along like Mass Ave. Business districts have always allowed apartments. But what ended up happening in the 70s was was areas like, you know, you think of this section and he started like that. Any place that was in the business district that didn't have a business got turned into residential. So you kind of didn't have a business. But which the way our bylaw works you, it's next to impossible to change that back. The other thing, the other sort of, you know, main consequence of this, you know, redoing the map was there were two business districts in effect. So there was one in our Lincoln Center, and, you know, everything else, and by two districts I mean like basically two sets of rules, where the current map we've just kind of chopped everything up into like this is an automotive district. This is, you know, we've chopped it up into six districts, and all of them have their own, like little variations and what you can do and what you can't do. And I mean, even you can have a block where, you know, you can put a hotel here but you can't put a hotel here, even though it's right next to order it. And like one of the sort of the two questions I have are, are the business districts districts we have now big enough, you know, should we have more land devoted to business districts and, you know, from a practical standpoint how difficult are the sort of like, you know, the very the parcel the parcel variations of the, the different the way that the rules change so so frequently. And that is something I can't answer because I don't, I'm not knowledgeable enough about the zoning and that I don't hear enough about that in my work to be able to answer that. And the other question, I guess, that's a hard one for me to, I think, if the business, the business districts themselves if they had the right kind of spaces. The size seems okay but they don't. So for that reason, I guess I would, I could envision expansion. Okay. Because I think we do lose many potential tenants to other towns, because we don't have, we don't have space that is appealing to what they're need, what they need, and that would, you know, I'm kind of thinking at the retail level but it's also true. We don't attract startup space we don't attract any kind of small high tech and that kind of thing we just don't have this space. So, we, yeah, certainly would be great for the retail and restaurants if we had more people coming working in Arlington and office type jobs. And that, you know, I can't speak to the zoning. It makes total sense if we could simplify the zoning we can, we could do more. Yeah, basically I was wondering if you ever ran into a case it's maybe someone business owners trying looking and looking at wants to start a business in town may have identified a couple of spot, a potential spot or two talks to the Chamber of Commerce and then, you know, they go back and do some more to find out oh what the thing we wanted to do in that space while we can't actually do it. Right. I don't, I know I think somebody from, you know, the in the economic development coordinator position would tend to hear more of that kind of thing. Not all of my work is involved and you know people who are looking at town a lot of stories are most of my work is people who are already here. But I hear a lot about people looking anecdotally from landlords and that kind of thing and and other businesses so I'm not, I'm not totally involved in in that. I was just wondering what you might have heard. Yeah, yeah. Good question. Because we could, we could guess but it's, it's, it's better to ask someone who, you know, who's does it does it every day. Well, again, I would think that, you know, there are some. We could look at talking to some commercial real estate agents who there's one in particular I know has works with a member of my board who owns a couple of buildings and this this landlord almost never has vacancy. She owns two good size retail buildings in town, and they both are. She has turnover, but when she has space, she always fills them. And she so I mean right there. That'll tell you that people are looking and for that for that reason I've asked her about, you know what types of businesses are looking at your spaces who do you work with how do you bring them in and I mean she's, she would be a great person to tell you in terms of what her experiences in term that I found it very valuable and have learned a lot from her and I know she's interested herself in seeing things improve in this regard in town. Yes, I don't like our master plans economic development summary I think it's actually that might be listed as an appendix, but the coffee board talks about this as well but they, you know they're they're leakage reports. You know, we're, you know we're sending a lot of business out of town. And it would, I would, I would hope that we could do something about that. Yeah. Yeah. One of is what I want to talk about is, I mean when I first moved this town a while back, just was a try town. Yeah, you know that well. Yeah. This is only recently become quite. But the owner that was going to take over, but wanted to look at the tango. Okay, very. Yes. Yeah, they were, they're all set to go. And they found that the regulations that we had for consumption of alcohol. It was a hidden so they moved the town over. All right. Really. That was the reason. The regulations that we had for the consumption so in other words the amount of alcohol without food to drink. Yeah, we've heard that from multiple drinks sources food you know and that, and that just doesn't work for them. So, we have to look at it and say hey, this is one thing that's holding back. We have a new model that brewery, you know, that those types of breweries haven't been around for very long where tap rooms and that kind of thing that I'm sure you're right about that. Yeah. And that could have been. I mean, I was excited for that. Yeah. But it's a shame that when the next time over like Steve said, yep, we're driving away because of our rules. Yep. Okay, so I hadn't heard that one but that makes a big difference with many other rules right. I mean, the 50 seat minimum for a all for a whole bar is also a problem with 50 seats. I didn't hear that one I just heard that one there. The first substantive article that town meeting will take up is, you know, is is another example. I think we're so this involves self service gas stations. You know, there is a station on Broadway where the owners wanted to do a lot of self service. We don't allow them down. They brought a, you know, proposed a bylaw change last year.  They have the trying again. And we'll see how this goes but there's sometimes I think this isn't this is another sort of another some sometimes yeah I think our rules are aren't really as friendly as we can, they could be, and I think there's also a real hesitancy towards changing them in some cases. I don't know what the answer to this is but it's, it's just something on. It's a challenge working together with, you know, the chamber, and, and the business owners to understand from the owner's perspective, as well, the impact. We have not reached out as much as we perhaps could have in the past so being able to do that more in the future, as we work to help explain what the potential impact is and ask for feedback so that before things are finalized we can make changes to address any either concerns or good ideas that come from the people who are already operating businesses in this town in terms of things that are challenging for them. Yeah. Yeah, I have to do some thinking on what the best way I mean the walking tours one, you know, some sort of a survey. We have all of the businesses in town as chamber members. Sure. That's another thing like something like the gas station like that had they been a chamber member, and had they reached out to us, we might have tried to help support that doesn't mean we would have necessarily been successful, but it maybe it would have helped their cause to have some to show chamber support when they presented to. I mean, I know we're starting to get a lot of time so I do want to make sure that Jean has an opportunity to share his thoughts as well. A couple questions. I wondered if your members talk about traffic parking, public transportation at all, or is that just not really on the way to parking is probably the only one that I hear about, and not lately I haven't heard a lot about you know I think you know coming out of coven and traffic in general, being lighter and business being lighter fewer restaurants, until we get some some of these. Maybe it's changing. Don't feel it and that kind of thing. But I mean it's just sort of anecdotal stories it's it's nothing bad. I don't in fact the business that's looking right now. I'm surprised that they haven't talked more about parking. They seem bothered by it. They have locations in downtown Boston, you know, they don't have a parking lot next to them, and they, they are used to being in a location where there's people have to go park and walk. So, I don't hear about it as much as I used to, but the other things I don't hear much at all about public transportation, which doesn't mean no one's thinking about it but I just don't hear about it. What was the other one parking traffic traffic. No, I don't hear about traffic. Because I talked to a couple of restaurant owners, but traffic. Yeah, no, I do, I do, I would say I do hear a little more about foot traffic. That's the thing that everybody asked me about, right. When they when they look into for restaurant is in Arlington, right, this is lack of traffic and then the nine encouraged by it. And they say there's not enough density along our, our districts, business districts to increase the courage for traffic. Certainly for lunchtime business. Yeah, I mean, the, again, the only particular current this current tenant that I'm thinking of he, he is aware of the fact that there is some residential going up over the Papageno space he's excited about that he knows that there's possibility that there may be more buildings in the center that go multi use and he is very hot on Arlington. I mean a lot of these businesses are hot on Arlington they think Arlington is a hot place. They don't, they're not they don't seem to be a more destination oriented. But I, but I don't disagree with you. I mean, walking traffic does. Jean, did you have another question. Yeah. So, I know that we're kind of at time, because we need to just quickly move to new business and then adjourn to town meeting. But that I'd love to, you know, maybe see if we could find a time once town meeting is over to schedule some sort of a walking tour perhaps whether it. You know, one of the potential articles that we're looking at for the fall is to look at a business, a new business district that covers all of Arlington Heights. So, to Steve's point of Arlington Heights, Heights, okay, so that so rather than six different, or five different districts I think which are just represented just within the Heights, right, which makes it hard to put together. Exactly. Which is why we're looking at potentially, you know, updating the zoning so that that's a single business district. Yeah. You know that could be one place we look or we could look, you know, at Arlington Center or East Arlington but I think chatting more about that would be something that I think we'd all be really interested in and then also once we get further into the planning process making that we coordinate with you and the and the chamber for some feedback and to see if there are our areas where the chamber would would be supportive based on what the potential outcomes might be. We'd love to chat with you. Yeah, absolutely. And if any or all of you ever wanted to attend one of our board meetings, we'd be happy to do that Kelly attended last week and gave a great presentation and we're going to be bringing on some new board members in the in the near future and so I want to get them right up to speed and working on good, you know, projects like this for sure. I'd be interested in what the chamber thinks about this MBTA communities I'm guessing that's sure. No, actually, we finding on the bike way. No, I didn't. Yeah, actually come back. Yeah, come back because the businesses had expressed a lot of interest in MBTA communities. Yeah, and had generally expressed interest in increased residential density. We're somewhat concerned about a loss of potential loss. Okay, so I think that's going to be one of the tension. Some people want to put more housing where the business districts are now and, you know, so I think that's when I think that's where you see like how Lexington responded to that issue. It is interesting. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me and nice to meet you all. Good to see you and thank you for setting another date. Absolutely. Thank you. All right, so that closes agenda item number two. Our next item is new business. I know we're running late so Claire, did you have anything that you wanted to bring forth for new business. Not particularly. I know we have talked a little bit about, you know, our three zoning articles that are up for discretion. Yes, town meeting. We did ask that those items be put on the consent agenda. It's like there has been a hold on those. I know that the board also weighed in on potentially article 14. There's also, which is the strategic plan and strategic working group for new growth that is this board recommend the select board actually recommended no action.  I'm not sure, you know, if there's any further response needed from the board, I think we've made certainly are your outlook on that clear. But generally, I think that's what to expect this evening. It also appears that the affordable housing everywhere. And this board recommended no action on that pursuant to much other action later. Okay. Quick, sorry, go ahead. If there is a substitute motion provided for that or amendments posed. I think it would be worthwhile to sort of tailor our schedule so that you could formally discuss them as a group and perhaps provide town meeting with an assessment. Sure. So I believe that we have a meeting scheduled for next Monday with nothing on the agenda. It does come from I'd say also article 14, which is that I'm planning whatever it's called. Yeah, because when diggins is going to put in a substitute motion. Yes, yes. Yeah, so I think if it doesn't come up before next Monday, we will have the substitute motion. And should be able to look at it and see if you want to take a position. And then the only other item is to see whether or not there has been any movement on the MOU related to the transfer of properties I know that Doug was working on that however also working on everything for town meeting. Yeah, I spoke with them time this afternoon. I have to get that to you. So, okay, continue to still in process right Doug. Okay, to get us that document. Okay, great. Anything else. All right, is there a motion to adjourn to town meeting. So we'll come. Second. Okay. We'll take a vote. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.


The other continuous integration tools, they're all open source software, which is great, but that sort of comes with some of the responsibilities of you need to really dig to figure out how to manage it correctly, how to set things up. So that was probably the biggest disadvantage of, you know, it's a collection of open source tools that didn't have the proper documentation that we needed to move forward. So once we started looking at you guys in GitLab, it really enabled us to consolidate those things, all the documentations in one place, the services that were available. It was really easy to figure out what we needed to do, and your guys support has been a big help as well, and later than us to, you know, rapidly deliver and stand up these environments. Our collective vision within LinkedIn and working with you guys and all these other companies is how do we automate and take out human error from the equation. So our goal is the moment code is checked in and has been reviewed, the testing life cycle, the deployment life cycle, the security vulnerability scanning life cycle should all be automated. So it's more of humans reviewing reports at the end versus people tapping to do the inspection of themselves, validate, you know, parts of the development life cycle, where we really vision that these tools can do a much better job than humans can. They should be used to aggregate these results and let humans make decisions. And, you know, take people out of that equation, you know, we're not trying to take you, you know, replace human jobs, but how can we repurpose people to do what people do best versus, you know, laborious efforts like pen testing mobile applications or pen testing web applications. A lot of that stuff can be automated through scripting tools like Amazon Device Farm, all which GitLab can automate and push out. So we're going to see what tools can we bring in to automate that process, tie them in to GitLab and, you know, automate everything, virtually everything. This was a good opportunity for us to go in and sort of do and all of this, what are our gaps in our development pipeline where we need to fill in of, you know, is it code scanning, fortify, or additional code scanning you guys might be able to offer to some of the tools that are embedded in your guys' product. But it's giving us, you know, we had a time on to migrating over simply because it was a good opportunity to improve processes while we're going through that migration. So it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just, you know, we're looking at it as it's an opportunity to improve the outcome at the end. And looking at it as it's not only learning opportunity for our customers, but it's learning opportunity for us to what are the best practices that we can, you know, collectively share.  It's, I look at it as an experience for all of us to improve processes, security, compliance and everything that goes along with that.


If you feel lonely, I want to remind you that the Holy Spirit is with you. I also want to pray with you right now that you might be comforted by the sense of his beautiful presence. Let's pray. Precious Lord, I lift that one to you now who feels distant from you, who feels excluded by others, misunderstood. And I pray, precious Holy Spirit, that you would cause a manifestation of your presence and power to be with them even now. Let them sense your nearness, give them peace and life and hope and joy. Help them to focus on you and remind them that you've never left them, that you're right beside them, that you're within them. We thank you for your presence, Lord. In the mighty name of Jesus, we pray. I want you to say it because you believe it. I want you to say, amen.


Hey guys, it's Nate AK, the photo accountant. Welcome back to the channel. Today is Sunday, so you can know what that means. We are asking the question, will we see upgrade packs for ultimate team of the season today? And will we see more SBC players? And will the content this week transition upwards from where we've been in a lull of content with the end of Serie A into the league one last week? Is EA going to flip the switch like they did with Bundesliga and LaLiga earlier this team in the season? Or are they going to keep it kind of low key? We're going to talk about that today and the upgrade packs that we might see. Now, there's a lot of options for upgrade packs, right? Because we have an ultimate tot squad with tons of different players in it from all different leagues, from the top five leagues rereleased. So that could be very interesting for upgrade packs today. And as well, I want to talk about this market as well and that content 91 man of the match because I think that's honestly a bit, a huge L from EA sports with that card and not, and not getting something else in this game. But the first thing is first, I want to talk about these guys that are in ultimate team in season. Now last year, I was looking back at what happened last year, kind of during the weekend league sell off, ultimate tot last year was not very exciting at all. And we are not off to a good start with the cards that are impacts. No Neymar, we have DeVry instead of Varan. We have got Harry Kane that is in the team. I know EA has to include some cards that are, you know, not, not the most rare because they have to make it packable, right? But only 15 players in the squad is an L. So I think we're just not very, and these cards are also incredibly, incredibly hard to pack. Like I know that the rest of the world and the MLS Tots cards go out of packs tomorrow on Monday, but I really don't even want to think about how hard it's going to be to pack a team this season because some of these cards have barely dropped in price. And that just tells me that there's not that much new supply coming on the market for guys like Mbappe, Messi, and Ronaldo. Messi is 2.86. He's up a couple hundred K from where he was, right? And Mbappe is around the same price. Lewandowski is down a hundred K and Ronaldo is down a little bit as well. Bruno hasn't moved in price as well. So again, it's crazy to see some of these cards and how they have not dropped in price. Now I do think that could mean price dropped today because last year on Sunday of ultimate team in season was actually the lowest for a lot of these Tots cards. So if you see drop offs today on a guy like Messi, Lewandowski, Mbappe, Ronaldo, those types of players, I think it might, if you want to buy those cards for a longer term hold into the summer to buy for your end game team, it could be honestly at play because we'll look at some card graphs from last year and show you and happen with the icon moments as well. This Sunday sell-off, if this week is not very high for content, then we might see some of that stuff actually rebound back in the next couple of weeks, especially with ultimate Tots rewards coming. And yes, some supply coming to the market for these cards, but also again, more and more coins coming to the elite tier level market and people that want to use those coins to buy these types of cards. So we're going to take a look back at last year, right? This is TFA's video last year from ultimate team in the season Monday. And these are the upgrades that we had an 82 plus double and 82 to 88 and an 83 plus double upgrade. Now the issue was this 82 plus double upgrade, it was like the upgrades that they released were just so dead, right? We were used to the premium upgrade packs. We were used to the player picks that they were putting out last year too. And then they released this for ultimate team of the season, which was a huge, huge, huge letdown. Now today, right? What we've seen for the past couple weeks have been league specific premium packs. And I think the best way for esports to do it today would be for them to drop league specific premium packs for every single league. So the packs, the premium upgrade and the regular upgrade that they dropped earlier this season, right? During team of the season for every single league, I think the best thing they could do today is drop all of that and also drop the 81 plus player pick because then you would have the opportunity to pick and choose your league that you would go after, right? Let's say you really, really, really want to pack messy, then you would obviously go for the league one premium upgrades. You'd have a chance of packing messy oblox. And I think those are the only two cards from La Liga to be in the team, right? Let's say you wanted to pack Bruno, you'd be able to pack Salah, Cancelo, Bruno, De Bruyne and Kane from the Premier League upgrade packs, right? So I think that would be something that would be very nice to have today as well. But also that 81 plus player pick, of course, being able to pack any of these cards and the fodder being very nice as well. I think that if that SBC comes out today, then it's a W, right? Then we can craft the 81 plus upgrade, still pack MLS and rest the World Tots for one day. And then that'll help with just crafting SBCs throughout the rest of this week. But if the content is like it was last year with just those very low tier and not grindable upgrade packs, then in my opinion, that's going to set the tone for the rest of this week. Now, we've had the Usman, then Bailey and the Javi Martinez SBCs released this card, in my opinion, is pretty cool. Low-medium work rate, so it's not very good. But again, this is like the best Javi Martinez item I think we've almost ever had in FIFA. He's a very sentimental kind of value card. A lot of Bayern fans love this dude, or you know, you know, this is a very sentimental FIFA card just for the players Javi Martinez is. But of course, that this SBC and the Usman are pretty solid, right? Pretty good value SBCs, a lot of hype around them, especially Usman.  So two weeks before that, we had Chucky Lozano, and we had nine goaling, and then it fell off. So today is really the day where we see, is Ultimate Tots going to have good content? Or is it going to be another dead week? And is EA going to spice the content up after this for the Euros? So that's the biggest question that I think we're going to be able to actually answer today, is if the upgrade pack content is good, if we get another player SBC, and if we get some sort of upgrade pack, like non-repeatable as well, like an 85 times five, or an 83 times 10, 84 plus player pick. If something like that comes today, then I'm feeling Bundesliga or LaLiga vibes, and not one of the dead weeks like, like Prem, or League One. So also, if we have like icon player SBCs as well, EA sports, we have DDA Drogba, Sol Campbell and Pirlo all expiring today, we need more icons to be released. So this is your chance again, EA, that moments, eto moments, Mateus that have been talked about for forever, just drop them, right? Today is the day we need more icon SBCs as well. But again, that's the biggest part of the day today is the content because that's again going to set the tone in my opinion for the rest of this week. And if we don't get good content today, again, this is what I'm mentioning. Some of your icons, this is last year's 95 Ronaldo card. Look at the absolute lowest that he hit during League One and during Ultimate Tots 7.0, whereas it was 7.079 million coins on the Xbox and 5.6 low or sorry, 7 million coins on the PlayStation, about 5.6 on the Xbox and look where they were literally at the end of June, three weeks later, 8.7 and 6.7. So big rises on some of your elite tier meta icon moments that probably aren't getting an SBC. So guys like Eusebio, guys like Pelé, these types of items that are very rare, people are going to have a lot of coins, again with Ultimate Tots rewards. So if you see these guys dropping a lot today, if you see undercuts, if you see multiple listings on these types of cards, even like a moment's push guys is a card that could get an SBC. But if he doesn't get one, if you see a lot of panic selling today, we might be sort of in a low point for a lot of those cards. And again, the same thing with the Ultimate Team in the season items. If you see a lot of panic selling today on these guys, like big drops, like I'm talking messy like back to 2.5, whereas his absolute lowest has been, then I would say, hey, we might have to get involved. There might be a situation here and we might have something where if you want to buy one of these cards for your team, it's going to be a great opportunity to do that and possibly make some money. Of course, we can't predict what's going to happen during the Euro's content and we don't know what's going to happen with that kind of thing. But if we do see some huge price drops today, then to be honest, if it's a very meta card that a lot of people want to buy and it's also a very expensive card, I would have no problem with you pulling the trigger if the content does not look that good. Because we'll also get Lightning Grounds today, which is going to supply the market more of the market with SBC fodder cards, which again, SBC fodder continues to drop. Now, I released a little TikTok video yesterday talking about buying into fodder and this in my opinion is one of your last chances in the next couple of weeks. Again, unless EA run some sort of 2 for 1 packs promo like foot player days, they randomly dropped that on us, then I think that this fodder is going to be at its lowest because again, last year during Ultimate Tots, fodder got very, very low and then it rebounded very extremely in the couple of weeks after that with big time icon SBCs being released and the summer heat content being an SBC driven promo last year happened right after Ultimate Team season. So with that being said, 100% keep an eye out if you don't have any fodder, which myself, I'm like 100% liquid right now with a couple fodder cards in the club, 3 million coins, I might be putting 500,000 coins into a club stock with 84s, 85s and 86s and even some of the higher tier stuff because again, if you have time and you're not looking for a quick flip, a lot of this stuff is going to rise over time and you're going to see huge profits because there's going to be more and more SBC content that is released in this game over the summer. I really believe there is no question that that's going to be the case just because of the fact where this game is headed and all of the icon moments packs that we have in the code. Again, I've been mentioning this for the last week or so. I think there's literally zero chance that EA does not release those SBCs. I think they are going to release them as SBCs and they're going to try to suck some coins off this game using some of those icon moments packs, which a lot of people would be interested in regardless because those packs look sick, right? 92 plus icon moments, insane. Anyways, that's kind of my thoughts on that. Now also yesterday, a part of the content that was not good yesterday is what I'm on this little sidebar right below my face camera here with this 91 rated Angolo Conte. I think this is honestly a joke because last year, we had this incredibly boosted 96 rated Tiago. Now I understand that last year with COVID, this card came out in August. And of course, you could argue that, hey, right now, with the current state of the game, it's only June. I mean, it's the end of the game anyway. EA sports, I'm disappointed in this man. He already has a 91 what if card that is basically better than this man of the match item and it's 500K.  Whether it's put into packs or whether it's an SBC, I really think EA, I think they messed up today, man. I really do think that they did. Now we also got a really made of the match card, of course, for the penalty shootout that you guys remember for the Manchester United Europa League final game, which again, I think that's just, that's just bad for me as sports. They need to do more with that one today. But the Javi Martinez was kind of cool for sentimental reasons. But also, I feel like a lot of people, if we maybe go inside of the active challenges section here, it's got a lot of thumbs up at how many people are actually doing it. 41% of people are actually doing this SBC. Usman Dabilis price has dropped down a lot as fodder has continued to go down. So again, today is going to be a big day with upgrade packs. And it's really going to give us a vibe for what the rest of this week is going to look like content wise, and if it's going to be hype or not. Now, of course, we can excel off on a lot of stuff. Stuff is going to drop down low. Again, if the content's not good, it might bounce back later on this week. Focus on your really rare cards, you know, like this Pele. 2.7 already. I mean, dude, this card could really be in the two sixes, maybe the two fives with a couple undercuts later today. And your cards that did not get into ultimate team this season, like this D'Young, 1-3-9, he was in the 1-4 highs. Goretzka was like 2.4. He's now back down to 2.1. Keep an eye on this stuff, really, for real. Keep an eye on this stuff. Now, I'm sure he might have gotten, I don't know if Javi Martinez would have affected his price today, but I would want 100% and keep an eye on some of these top cards that did not get in like Sun. The very hype ones, like the D'Young, Veran, those types of players, if they're sell off on those types of items today, then you could potentially get involved with those. Like this Veran is just so rare, 2.369. Incredibly, incredibly rare card. I'm going to add one of the transfer targets because I want to keep an eye on this dude because he's going to be great to trade since he's so rare. So, watch the sell off on those today. And if the content looks like it's going to be bad throughout this rest this week, then the sooner you buy some of that stuff, when people are selling cards, probably the better. Now, of course, we don't know what's coming at the end of this week. Summer heat, Euro's content, that's a huge question mark. But of course, we'll be covering that if we get any information later on this week as well. That's like the only big question mark that we have, and we're not sure about at this time. So, that's the video for today, boys. I really hope we get good upgrade SBCs, a good player SBC, icon player SBCs. It needs to be a Sunday like it was during Bundesliga or La Liga team in the season to carry this game through the weekend, in my opinion, today on FIFA. So, if you enjoyed this video, smash a thumbs up on it, comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe if you're new. It's been Nathan for the count. I will catch you guys later. Peace, out.