Senator Bernie Sanders is planning to meet with Amazon workers in Alabama who are currently fighting to form a union and The actual CEO of Amazon himself Dave Clark decided to take to Twitter to publicly denounce the upcoming meeting This actually is a thing that happened. He actually thought that this would be a good idea this guy Yeah, so he writes I welcome senator Sanders to Birmingham and appreciate his push for a progressive workplace I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers But that's not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace for our constituents He went there a $15 an hour minimum wage health care from day one career progression and a safe and inclusive work environment So if you want to hear about $15 an hour in health care Senator Sanders will be speaking downtown, but if you would like to make at least $15 an hour and have good health care Amazon is hiring. Oh great. That sounds wonderful based on what all of your employees are telling us now he literally attacked Bernie Sanders and Implied that you're not effective, but we are you talk about progressive policies. We actually enact them Yes, because we all know that Amazon is a beacon of Progressivism and I love how he's bragging about the fact that they pay their workers $15 an hour while not actually Acknowledging who it was that pressured them to adopt that policy Ro Khanna took the Twitter to remind them saying how ironic to now brag about paying $15 an hour When we know Amazon did that in direct response to Bernie Sanders and my stop Bezos act as Bezos himself Suggested in a tweet. Not sure what's more incompetent your treatment of Alabama workers or your PR. Damn so Ro Khanna is bringing the fire and He was one of many of the thousands of folks who decided to dog pile on the Amazon CEO For being shameless enough to put out that tweet But another representative Mark Pokan also decided to weigh in saying paying workers $15 an hour doesn't make you a progressive workplace when you union bust and make workers urinate in water bottles And he is referring to the widely stated fact that Amazon workers are so overworked That they're pressured to pee in water bottles Because if they don't then they're not saving time and they could be written up or possibly terminated now Amazon decided to make matters exponentially worse for themselves By responding to Mark Pokan's tweet about their employees peeing in water bottles They actually sent their PR team to address this and needless to say it did not go too well for them They wrote you don't really believe the peeing in bottles thing Do you if that were true? Nobody would work for us the truth is that we have over a million incredible employees around the world who are proud of what they do and Have great wages and health care from day one We hope you can enact policies that get other employers to offer what we already do So first of all they use the fact that they pay their workers $15 an hour to thwart off Attempts to unionize they know that if their employees had unions That they would be getting paid a lot more than $15 an hour given how much value they produce for the company Second of all to address a member of Congress by saying oh come on man You don't believe that do you you must be stupid to believe that our employees are so overworked that they piss in bottles?  I'm assuming start offering a piss colored version of their blueberry pomegranate flavor I'm just wondering because it looks to me as if this is actual human urine from your employees And actually this was confirmed by Vice News that uh, yeah this is from an Amazon employee and They explained why they have to do things like this quote were pressured to get these routes done before night time and having to find A restroom would mean driving an extra 10 minutes off path to find one an Amazon delivery driver told motherboard 10 to 15 minutes to find a bathroom can add up meaning 20 to 30 minutes there and back all together Obviously we drink a lot of water throughout the day, so this is happening a lot through the drive They continued I can tell you that if I drove to find a restroom that I would be bringing back packages every night And that would eventually mean I would get infractions which would lead to termination I usually do it in a bottle in the back of the van away from the packages and clean my hands with sanitizer because I understand How gross it is they continued I just park off to the side and close the front sliding door all the guys do it another Amazon driver in Florida Who peas in coffee cups told motherboard the best drivers get overtime So there's incentive to cut corners the most productive drivers get rewarded the most hours Racky, I wouldn't piss in jugs.    So I hope that the workers in amazon uh in besamer Uh actually can unionize because I want this to create a domino effect all amazon workers Should be unionized because nobody's a robot. No human being should be treated like this


I give you my word, okay?    Everything in technology tomorrow is literally in the middle of the range. The only way we'll get value in technology, if so. Welcome to Access to Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey guys, good evening everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Access to Trader.com Nightly Wrap Up Show. Hope everybody is doing well. So let's talk about kind of what we are faced with tomorrow. So if you kind of rewind back yesterday's video, we were looking for kind of a day two, right? A day two move very, very aggressively. We were looking at that possibility and we were really hoping for a red open or a flat open because again, there was a lot of value day two. And when you look at the Twitter feed today, it looks so good, right? It looks absolutely so good. NVIDIA 506 needs to build. The damn thing went to 520, right? It looks great. I'll tell you the, what happened, okay? And why it's not a good thing. NVIDIA looked great, Alibaba looked great, Netflix looked great, Tesla looked great pre-market. Everything looked great. Like everything was ready to go. Everything looked great. And the problem was they started talking about the stimulus bill, the stimulus bill, the stimulus bill, and then everything exploded. Like literally everything exploded today pre-market. And if you traded beta, you literally got shut out because every stock, although it looks great on paper, right? And the video goes from 506 to 520, right? It looks absolutely great on paper. The problem is you had no shot of trading this thing. No shot because it started going, printing 506, 509, 512, 517, absolutely all pre-market. And when you look at the whole group and I was looking at a really good potential, really good high probability trade today into supply, the whole average true range of the day literally got put in within the first 10, literally from about nine o'clock in the morning pre-market till about the open. So everything was gone. Like literally everything was gone. Stocks were putting in $20, $30 moves, even Tesla, right? Like I love the Tesla setup here pre-market. I go, hey, look, watch that first push. 695, 693, it went to like 720 in seconds. Like there's no way, unless you were literally sitting there and pressing buttons as this news has come out, there was absolutely no way you could have gotten these pivots or at least if you did, congratulations. But we got completely shut out. And the worst part of it is, what I expect that to happen for the whole day today from my plan for the whole section, it happened in 10 minutes. So we got shut out really, at least I did. I got shut out very, very quickly, not even at the open. And I was really, really toward these were perturbed, right? You know, thank God for Zendian, right? I was taking deep breaths. So literally the window closed on beta very, very quickly. And to kind of make things worse for a lot of traders, they'd even realize where they were buying stocks at that open at those levels, because they literally opened right at the 10-day supply and they got pulled right away. I mean, if you look at the polls today on Tesla, I mean, they all look the same, but you can see it. They all got rejected. They all opened that supply and you had moves like this, right? You had moves like this, just destruction. You had moves like Amazon opened up that supply, got destroyed. And NVIDIA opened up that supply, got destroyed. Netflix that so close to breaking out, right? Went from 519 to 500, destroyed. So it's so important, guys. We always talk about levels every single day, especially on the nightly video. When you're putting on trades or you're going into the next day, there shouldn't be any surprises, right? If you're looking to buy stocks, you have to understand where your macro grenade launchers are pointing at you. If you don't, I mean, look, just ask anybody literally who bought stock today, pre-market or literally out the open, what happened? They just got absolutely destroyed. Here's the good news, bad news, right? Market continues to be very, very strong. The Dow, again, just busting out all over the place. Names like Boeing had a huge move, continued to have a huge move, had some news today after the close. Names like Triple M, names like Caterpillar, right? They all look good. They all look great. I don't care about Caterpillar. I don't care about Triple M. I'm not trading McDonald's tomorrow, right? I'm not trading McDonald's tomorrow, okay? So that's the bad news. When you look at rejections on every single level today on the NASDAQ 100, the good news, bad news is very simple, right? We got rejected at supply, which is not horrible, but the good news is we held 90% of yesterday's gains. That's the good news, right? So structurally, if you believe that today was a resting, that's exactly what we potentially could have happened without that big run into the open. That's a good thing, right? There's nothing structurally wrong in the market. And if you are going into tomorrow's session, you have to turn around and say, well, we did get rejected. That's not good, right? We're still below the 50-day moving average. That's not a good thing. We've talked about it yesterday, even though what they had went one of the biggest rallies we saw yesterday in technology, we knew we're not out of the woods. We get that part, right? The good news is we did hold the 10-day moving average. Got rejected here, but held the 10-day. So that's good. Here's the problem. When you look at every single chart going into tomorrow's session, you'll wind up looking at the same thing. Apple is in the middle of the range. Tesla is in the middle of its range. Netflix, right? Netflix, American. Netflix got rejected, right? It's not at the top of the range, not the bottom range, guess where it is, right? It's at the middle of the range. Apple, you could go literally through every single stock in the NASDAQ 100 and you'll see exactly the same thing. So that's the problem, okay? Our issue tomorrow is technology. If you're trading technology, I give you my word, okay?    Everything in technology tomorrow is literally in the middle of the range. The only way we'll get value in technology if stocks start breaking down below their bottom ranges and if they do start breaking down below their bottom ranges, then that's probably gonna happen in the afternoon. Because remember, everybody's still on that whole euphoric cycle from yesterday to the day before that they remember everything right up 100 points, right? They get that part. So there will be early dip buying. So the idea that you could turn around and say, I'm gonna assume the market's gonna roll over and we're gonna go back to the lows, that's very premature and it's a very, very dangerous way to navigating the market. Don't guess, right? We say this all the time, don't guess. So we have that good news, bad news scenario. We know technology for the most part probably is going to be off the table for tomorrow's session. So we have to do kind of what we did today. We kind of have to manufacture runs. The PLTRs of the world, the RKTs of the world, right? All my traits today were bounce points. Like literally they were all bounce plays. I let them all take out highs. They came back into the 60 minute channel and they bounced. Even a name like GNUS of all things, right? A stock like this had all this order flow came in today. They came for the three, the 350, the $4 short term expiration, we caught the dip, we sold some of the 30s, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think tomorrow we're gonna have to be very, very creative and just again, to borrow terminology from the baseball world, yeah, you're gonna have to manufacture runs tomorrow. You're gonna have to figure out how to put steaks in the freezer because I give you my word. You're not gonna get that majestic move in Amazon. Only way you get it, if it starts taking down bottom channels, you're not gonna get that big move one way or another tomorrow on Tesla because again, everything's in the middle of the ranges. So if you are especially a new trader tomorrow, again, these are not cryptic codes to go all in tomorrow.  So tomorrow you're gonna have to be really, really patient. I think the value tomorrow is gonna be names that I probably wouldn't trade on a normal, maybe on a normal day, but look at like a trade like a stock like BIIB, right? It's held this bottom range here three times. Maybe if it starts breaking down tomorrow, who knows, maybe there's a trade there. Maybe a Taiwan semiconductor, right? A name that again, I probably wouldn't trade ever, okay? But again, going into tomorrow's session, beggars can't be choosers. If it's, you know, it held three times this bottom range, if it starts breaking down, hey, who knows, maybe we can catch lightning in a bottle there. Even a name like MAC to the long side, right? It's gotten rejected three times off the upper channel here. You saw some short-term out-of-the-money calls coming in, the 15s, the 16th, the 17th. You know, if this thing maybe starts getting above this channel here, maybe it starts waking up, maybe it starts going higher. Again, we don't know. So I definitely do not have any expectations for tomorrow. I will 100% give you my word. I'm not trading triple M. I'm not trading Procter and Gamble. I'm not trading McDonald's or anything in between. You know, these are investment vehicles. I don't care how good they look. I'm not gonna sit there and fight for a triple M for 40 cents for six hours.  So I think tomorrow your aggression level should definitely be tempered, 100%. Your tier side 100% should be tempered tomorrow. If we get something that pops out of nowhere that we had an alert set for over two, three weeks ago and it starts, you know, really triggering, hey, of course, God, you know, Godspeed. But going into tomorrow's session, look at it more as a digestion day. Maybe the market really needs maybe another day to kind of go sideways and that side reaction is structural. Because remember, if they can't take down the market tomorrow again, they try it, right? But if they can't take down the market again tomorrow, that means it's just one more day that the sellers are comfortable at these levels. So eventually if we can get into Friday's session and they don't give back any gains, right? They literally don't give back any gains and they hold above the 10 day moving average for a second day. Now we're starting to look at this upper channel here at that 17 level where it got rejected this morning at the open and now that 50 day moving average going into the next day or going into the next week will become a viable now, right? A viable target that the bulls can reclaim and start seizing bullish control back to the upside. So be very, very careful tomorrow's session. You know, don't let that FOMO bug continue to bite you. It's, remember guys, it's all about longevity. You don't need to trade every single day, right? If we get something tomorrow, we get something tomorrow. If there's any surprise, that's great, but I have no expectations for tomorrow. If you go through your charts and I really, really encourage everybody to go through your charts, go through the NASAC 100, go through charts, I see what kind of a mess it is and if you find some good value, hey, hold on to it like grim debt. So just to remind you guys, Thursday nights, I usually take off, I usually don't record a video Thursday nights, that's kind of like my maintenance day for the week, because again, I speak for seven hours a day, trading all day, answering all that good stuff. So by the time Thursday night rolls around, my head is fried. I have like literally zero battery power left. So I'd rather be fresh for Friday session than to be completely wiped out into the morning session. So that's it guys. We're kind of set up for tomorrow in a stagnant situation. I expect the ranges to contract. If we get a surprise both upside or downside tomorrow, I'm ready for both sides. Again, who knows? Maybe we could get pleasantly surprised and get some good value. Guys, have a great night everybody. God bless and we'll see you all tomorrow.


Welcome to this visualization to relax the mind for deep sleep. Sleep is a powerful experience that we all have no matter who you are. And sleep allows our bodies to heal and our minds to sort through any problems so that we can create our future. We can live and find our purpose. Meditation is a wonderful way to access a slower brain frequency state that is similar to that when we're sleeping. This allows for the creative brain to become active and begin the process of manifesting our desires. So are you ready to go into a very relaxing state to allow yourself the deep sleep every night that you deserve? I want you to get comfortable. I want you to lay down on your bed and I want you just to take a few moments just to check in with yourself just to take a few deep breaths just breathing in, holding it and breathing out. This is all happening with your eyes open and what I'd like you to do as you're laying on the bed is just find a small spot to gaze at maybe it's on the ceiling as you look up and focus on that spot. Don't let your eyes turn away and as you look here I'm going to ask you just to blink your eyes with every number that I count starting with the number 10. So 10, blink your eyes. 9, blink. 8, blink. 7, blink. 6, blink. And then slow it down, slow the blinks down. 5, blink. 4, blink. 3, blink. 2, blink. 1 and 0, blink. And your eyes now are ready to gently close. Allow them to close in the slowest way possible focusing on your spot allowing them to slowly and gently close.  And as you do you notice there's a gentle wave of relaxation it sweeps over you completely. We know that getting a well rested night's sleep is important for you. It's extremely important. Sleep is our rest state and awake is the active state. So we must have a good flow going between resting and activating. Rest and activate. Rest. And we can achieve any goal when we go forward in this pattern.  And these stairs lead you to the knowledge of a restful and rejuvenating sleep. So when I count down from 10 you're going to start to walk down these stairs feeling more and more relaxed with each step you take. 10. Begin your journey of insight into sleep. 9. 8. Feeling so relaxed with each step. 7. 6. More and more calm. 4. More and more relaxed. 3.  It's so soft and warm under your feet you feel the sensations you have on your feet on the sand.  You can hear the ocean. Walk towards the sound of the ocean. And as you're walking you can feel the sun on your skin. Perhaps you can feel a light breeze. You notice the beautiful smell of the salty air.  You're walking towards the ocean now and you notice the sand under your feet gets firmer because it's saturated with seagwater. And you get to the shore where the ocean meets the sand and you see little waves coming up and down up and down.  And as you see a little piece of driftwood that's the perfect size for writing in the sand.  Notice in the sound it makes as you scratch it through the sand. And when you're finished just take a step back and look at your name.  And you notice the tide coming in the waves are coming closer. And as the waves catch its part of your name and it washes it away and it goes back into the ocean. And then another wave comes and washes away even more. And another. And another. Until all you can see is the ripples in the sand where your name used to be. And we continue then to walk along the beach noticing your surroundings. What kind of sounds do you hear? Can you hear the seabirds flying over or the wind gently blowing? Can you feel the warm sun on your skin? How does the sand feel in your feet again? It's nice right? Maybe you can even smell the smells of the ocean. And as you're walking you find yourself a fresh piece of fruit hanging on a tree. It's ready to eat. You pick it off and you bite into it and you notice how delicious it is. It's amazing just to be at your beach today eating this wonderful fruit. And as you've walked you've learned a lot about how beautiful this beach is and now you're ready for a little rest. You look around and notice there's a perfect spot for you to lay down. It's time to take a gentle nap and these life-giving sun rays. So go ahead, rider and before you close your eyes to rest just look out into the ocean. Watch the horizon and see how the ocean meets the sky. And this is one of the most beautiful scenes you've ever witnessed. And as you gaze along the big blue and allowing yourself just to fall asleep naturally you listen very closely to what I have to tell you because it's very important to your overall well-being. Sleeping is natural for everyone. The only thing keeping you from getting this beautiful sleep this instinctual sleep that you deserve are your thoughts. Or many times you may have allowed your mind just to push you around making you relentless when you get into bed. Or thoughts keep coming louder and louder they repeat themselves over and over.  From now on you can find this beautiful peaceful state and when any thoughts arise you accept it, you acknowledge it and you just say enough now stop I'm gonna get some restful sleep and if another one comes arises you can say accept it, acknowledge it and just say enough it's about learning from the mistakes testing boundaries your mind will listen to you so let me say this again to be perfectly clear when a negative or unwanted thought comes into your mind no matter how many times it repeats itself accept it, acknowledge it come back to your restful state and say enough and when a lovely relaxing thought comes in it goes into this visual as if it's a dream just like your nap now on this beautiful beach float and drift float and drift into a restful and rejuvenate your night's sleep when you rise you will feel completely refreshed you will feel a new ready to take on the next challenge the gifts that we have for the very next day enjoy just float and drift


Welcome to New America online event. I'm Peter Bergen, the Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows. We're delighted to be hosting David McCloskey and his new book, Damascus Station, which is a novel somewhat based on his own career at the CIA. The novels receive great reviews, including from General David Petrez, the best spy novel I have ever read. Not a man who usually gives a lot of great inflation. Publishes weekly a star review. And David had joined the agency in 2006. So that's in 2014 spent much of his career either working in the Middle East or on the Middle East. And he's going to spend a few minutes discussing or laying out kind of the themes of his new book. And also discuss a little bit how that intersects with his own career, and maybe make some general observations about the state of play in the Middle East right now. He and I will then have a discussion and will then open it up to Q&A. And I will be servicing questions from you the audience. As you go so please don't hesitate if you do have a question. Drop it into the Q&A function or the chat function. So tell us a little bit about, let me let me start with, you know, how did you come to write the book, why did you decide to write a novel, rather than a nonfiction book. Yeah, so, I mean, first off Peter, thanks for being in discussion with me about this today. This is really exciting. I'm still a, I'm an alumnus of two fairly secretive organizations, the CIA and Mackenzie so it still is a bit surreal to be out. I haven't been a while talking about a book that I've actually published but it's great to be with you today and thanks to New America for hosting this. I, so, you know, the novel really came out of my experiences at the CIA, and I joined pretty young. I was, I took my first polygraph I think when I was 19 years old I was an undergrad intern which I think is not so well known. Little feeder program into the agency, and, and joined my first summer was the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006. The second summer was the run up to the Israeli strike on Al Qubar, the Syrian nuclear reactor. And I was pretty hooked, obviously after those two experiences so when I joined full time. I mostly did work on Syria, I spent a little bit of time in our counter terrorism center working on a topic that at that point was pretty hot button issue in the region which was the flow of foreign fighters from Syria into Iraq. And when we had, you know, much greater numbers of troops there, and I had a front row seat for the Arab Spring and the start of unrest and protests in Syria in early 2011. So that experience of watching kind of the first few years of the war, a really of the, you know, protests, devolving into war, I think was a very formative experience for me not just as an analyst but as a, as a person, and, you know, kind of watch the hope and the optimism and the sense that, you know, something could be different in Syria which characterized a lot of the early months in particular of that. And that movement shift completely over time into, you know, Civil War and really the fragmentation of the state. You know, in the, in the intervening period they're half a million Syrians that are dead, the UN stopped counting five years ago so that number is almost certainly too low. So, the state is broken apart and watching that was a very emotional and kind of formative experience for me and it was one that when I finally got around to actually being able to sit down and kind of write. A lot of the book came out of a desire to tell some of those stories through fictional characters through, you know, to punch windows and all sides of the conflict which is exceedingly complex and we'll talk more about. And I felt like fiction for me was a way to. I think to work through a lot of those feelings and emotions that just wasn't possible, if I had sat down to write a book that was, you know, history or some kind of nonfiction, you know, memoir of working on the war just wouldn't have let me deal with that in the same way which is why I went down this route. Yeah, and, you know, the one of the big problems if you have as a former agency employee is the pre publication, which often, I mean, the native ACOS who wrote the target or she took years for her to get her book published she of course was the main target and I'm not sure how far that case went in quotes but I know that she had a lawyer and it was a messy experience or difficult experience and that's she's not alone in that. So I'm wondering how your experience was given the fact that you were writing a novel. Yeah. My experience was a lot cleaner than than that is that's for sure. Because the CIA, the PRB, the publication review board tends for very good reasons to look differently on on fiction and on nonfiction accounts. And, you know, so I had that going for me. I also was, I think, fairly judicious in what I knew I shouldn't include or couldn't include or would be irresponsible to include. And then to, you know, I think when I submitted the manuscript, I must have had closer to 250 to 300 footnotes in there to show where I'd gotten particular pieces of information, you know, not from WikiLeaks not from unnamed senior US officials right but very much from stuff that's out there in the open and academia and field research and. I like to think I was somewhat smart about how I went about it. They read the first manuscript I think in four or five days and got it done. I like to think that was because it was so compelling but Well, I think that sounds I mean that's a miracle that they read it so quickly. They went quickly and you know the, the, the edits they had I thought were reasonable they were not major structural kind of things they didn't black out a whole chapter. It's easy to do I do think my favorite little tidbit about working with the PRP is that they will return the manuscript to you with black highlighter through the stuff that you can't say so it's got this kind of wonderful cold war vintage kind of thing going on that's always fun to see something that you wrote on your laptop come back with redacted, you know black highlighter over top of it but overall it was a pretty straightforward experience for me. So you. So when did you, you did the undergraduate internship when did you formally join as a as an employee. So I would have formally joined in the summer of 2008 that right after I right after I graduated. So, obviously the uprising against Assad and sort of its failure and we recently hosted in New America some of the Syrian opposition leaders and the meeting was, you know, Chatham House rules, but I won't get into who said what but I mean it was pretty and I don't have any expertise on Syria at all it was a meeting led by Joel Rayburn, who's also a new marker who was a Syria and boy under the Trump administration that you know they feel that the whole world is sort of decided the Assad's there to stay, and that they, you know, they, you know, obviously they're not happy about it and the Caesar Act sanctions aren't being enforced, and then secondarily Ben Hubbard in the New York Times had a piece of six or seven days ago, making some of the same points but also, you know, reporting it in such a way that it was very clear that a lot of the Arab states have essentially acquiesce in the idea that Assad is going to just be around for for the foreseeable future so do you do you think that is the case be should that be the case and see if not what should be done about it. Well I think, you know, I, I guess at this point I've been watching Syria long enough to see a couple of these rotations of this one obviously is far more extreme but there was similar dynamics at play when the Bush administration tried to isolate the Syrians around, you know, they're meddling in Lebanon and and their sort of problematic stance vis a vis us in Iraq and, you know, eventually, sort of everyone got tired by that or thought that it was feudal and came back around to re engaging the Syrians we're kind of seeing I think some seeds of that beginning again I mean you know the Jordanians have opened what appears to be some kind of not normal but some kind of dialogue with the Syrians the Emirates have done the same thing. You rightly note that, you know, we're likely to all signs seem to be pointing to us sort of waving a lot of the Caesar Act provisions to allow for the export of Egyptian natural gas through Syria Lebanon. So, you know, I think that what we're seeing is probably the region acknowledging that the Syrian government is the strongest militia, if you I think it's actually just kind of easier to think about it as they are the largest and most powerful militia in the country. In certain cases it will make sense to deal with them. And they're likely not going anywhere, which I think are all just, you know, realities of the conflict today now, where it gets hard for folks like me have been watching this for a long time and certainly for those in the Syrian people who have, you know, extensive experience on the ground in Syria is that, you know, you really wish this weren't the case. This is a deeply corrupt thuggish awful government slash militia. And yet, there aren't practical things right now that I think we can do to change to significantly change behavior to push for some kind of reasonable political settlement. You know, I think that the, the era when that was possible, maybe earlier in the uprising, it sort of passed us. And at this point in time, you know, I don't see a particular need right now for the, there's no need for the US to normalize relations with Assad or to engage with him, you know, maybe in any meaningful at the same time, I'm not sure exactly what we get by, you know, preventing Eric partners from doing that and certainly at this point we've abandoned all practical energies behind actually achieving some kind of political transition in Syria so I think what we're seeing is a lot of our Eric partners sort of acknowledging that, you know, that time has passed. And the kind of implosion of Lebanon kind of strengthens his hand is that what you're suggesting a little bit. And in, in, you know, in the specific case of the gas pipeline it does, you know, there's a, the Syrians have drawn typically their sort of regional influence from the geographic proximity that they have to other potentially more important or problematic issues. So Lebanon here is one of them just by virtue of being a neighboring state. You know, we're sort of in a position where do you want to punish the Lebanese for some, you know, to maintain the provisions against the Syrians you sort of get into a self defeating position there pretty quickly so I think you know it absolutely strengthens their hand here just by virtue of being you know sitting in Damascus and still, you know, still being in power. And do you think that there was a, you know, as you know there was a drone strike against us forces in Syria in the last three, I guess, 48 hours or so. Yeah. I mean that is almost certainly by an Iranian backed militia or and what's the point of that strike. I think, you know, obviously neither the Syrians nor the Iranians want us there. You know, we're, we're effectively one of the major, you know impediments to them retaking or having the potential to retake parts of the country that they consider to be theirs. So I can't I don't know this any of the specific kind of tactical thinking behind this type of attack but certainly, you know, both the Syrians and their Iranian backers have an interest in over time. You know making it more difficult for our presence to exist there and for sort of uprooting us pushing us out, reaching some kind of political settlement that that gets us out they would prefer to slowly unwind the fact that the country is effectively you know the Turks control part of the north along with their allies we are occupying part of the northeast with our allies there's a part of Northwestern Syria and it live that's effectively governed by, you know, some offshoots so it's, you know, that are part of the Syrian opposition so I think for them is as a part of a kind of longer term program and by long term I mean like generational to retake slowly the parts of the country that are outside of their their control right now. So I think that the Russian al-Qaeda, which is obviously gone through a lot of different main iterations but let's just for the sake of argument for al-Qaeda in Syria. Yeah. I mean how do you score their relative strengths and weaknesses today and are they simply focused on the local issues. You know, the Khorasan group back, you know, many years ago which did seem to have an interest in attacking the West and as far as I can understand it the Khorasan group essentially got whacked by the United States as more of a business so. And, you know, and in addition is the al-Qaeda and Syria affiliate. I mean they seem by sticking to these local grievances maybe that's a better long term approach but, you know, might that change. Are they stronger weaker than they were several years ago. What's the state of play. Yeah. This is kind of the evergreen debate of Syria CT analysts I mean this was probably no secret I mean this is something that we would always we were thinking about, you know, for years at Langley with respect to these groups in Syria where, you know, it is, I guess I'd probably break it into into the kind of two conversations when we talk about Syria that one is that they're continued to be small fairly battered but obviously still problematic. You know, Islamic State cells in the center of the country in the desert, largely in unpopulated areas they've been pushed there by the, you know, the SDF so that that is a, you know, I think our continued sort of presence and and the support for the SDF and the Kurdish militias that make up its backbone have fairly effectively kind of driven them out of most of the populated areas but, you know, those groups maintain a much more sort of, I would say global perspective about their target list in general, and are a little bit different from the ones in the in the Northwest. I think that, you know, hiats are all sham HTS the sort of, you know, for lack of a better word I'll kind of, you know, sort of inspired group there I mean, I honestly don't, I don't know the answer to the question right around, the balance between focusing locally versus having a cell or capability that could do, you know, or conduct transnational attacks I think, you know, a lot of really good thinking and research has been done on this group. You know, in recent, in recent years and I think there does seem to be a general feeling that they're focused locally in terms of how they govern and, and, you know, extract resources from the part of idlib that they control. I do think that it's not, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that there could be the development of, or at least the sort of tacit acceptance of, you know, a much more transnationally focused operational capability and obviously they control the territory. You know, it, that kind of development becomes, you know, potentially more likely so I think well, I haven't seen anything at least in the open sources that would suggest that that's, you know, sort of entrenched today there. You know, it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility. And do they control the areas of around the al-Qaeda in Syria controls or manages. Do they do that with kind of a consent of the governed or is it kind of more or less by fiat or some combination of I mean are they, are they seen as pretty legitimate. Yeah, I mean, I think it's some combination of, you know, sort of the carrot and the stick what I will say is that when a lot of these groups started to sort of develop governance and service provision capabilities in some of the early phase earlier phases of the war. You know, they were viewed in some areas by the locals as fairly legitimate actors that were able to, you know, actually deliver services the regime in many of these places had stopped doing that.  You know, you ask any particular person about this in any particular place and get one answer and then you'll, you know, go 10 blocks down and you get a different one so I think it's pretty very depending on the piece of territory we're talking about. So the regime still delivering salaries to government employees in these areas controlled by the rebels. I mean, I don't, I don't think so. So that that was a that was a feature of the conflict that was quite interesting in some of its earlier phases where they were continuing to like places that were controlled by the rebels there would still be sort of government employees they would still get paid that were granted, because of the collapsing value of the pound that sort of made on a matter as much but you know I tend to think it's not as common today, just given how can't nice, it's become but it wouldn't surprise me if it were still happening in some places. And then with ISIS, what's your take on where they are right now and obviously we have the whole camp, which I think 70,000 people many of them women and children think have been 70 murders there by seems by women sort of enforcing Isaac dictated dictating in some cases so you know is there a scenario where ISIS can come back in Iraq or Syria, or are they mostly done. Well, I mean I would tend to take the Syrian side of it. I would tend to think that that probably depends to a large degree on on the sort of continued robustness of our partners on the ground in in northeastern Syria.  I mean didn't we sort of, to what extent, I mean we famously sort of abandoned them to the Turks did. In the end of the Trump administration was that a real thing or was that overblown I mean to a why they still cooperating with us if we kind of pulled the plug on them. I think it was one of those sort of kind of classic Trumpian foreign policy pronouncements where you sort of pulled the plug and then you sort of don't. You know, so I mean we have a US military presence there that in its, you know, it's not large. I think it's about 900 or so. I think it functions in many respects similar to the way that are relatively small presence in Afghanistan function which was providing, you know, the prospect of close air support providing sort of, you know, capability building providing a sense that there's a larger force at play here that's bucking me up that has a psychological impact. And I think that's all very continues to be very important in the, in the sort of counter ISIS fight in Syria but I mean, I think the bottom line answer to your question around their tape ISIS continued capabilities inside Syria. It's not zero but it's gone underground, I think in a similar manner to the way that, you know, the former AQ I did in Iraq, when they were beaten back toward the sort of end of the end of the surge where it became much more like a much less like a conventional military force and much more like a clandestine terrorist network that is capable of conducting attacks but not fully gone but you know, not able to control a lot of territory. But that's a very interesting answer because obviously AQ I did come back because it took advantage of this. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the right set of circumstances but but also the right now the circumstances don't really apply right because society is more or less in control as much as Syria, and in Iraq, I guess the Iraqi election was sufficiently not a disaster so it's not like the country's going to collapse more if there was an Iraqi civil war that would be good for these groups but right now we don't have one right now. Right. Yeah, exactly exactly so that would feed off of, you know, the collapse of Kurdish control in northeastern Syria or at least its fragmentation they would feed off of, you know, military sort of setbacks for the Syrian regime that would reduce its ability to control some of the more populated areas, you know. But I think, you know, right now I'd put them more in ISIS more in the category of, you know, sort of underground terrorist network capable of conducting attacks inside the country but without a really clean operational safe haven like they had for much of the past, you know, seven eight years. I want to want to return to the your novel to master station. Talk, talk us through kind of what the process was for writing the book and give us a sense of kind of the the key plot points to the book without like, you know, giving too much away without being too much away. Yeah, so I am. I think I, in terms of the process I. Well actually let me let me maybe just explain a little bit about I'll tell you a little bit about what it's about first and then explain kind of why why and how I wrote it. So it's a it's a spy novel. Obviously it is set in the early years of the Syrian civil war so you could kind of think 2011 to 2013 sort of as you go from, you know, protests on one end to sort of full scale conflict on the other. So it is about a CI case officer Sam and his Syrian recruit, Maryam, who breaks sort of the cardinal rule of espionage or one of them and fall into a forbidden relationship. They, they go into the mascus to hunt down the killer of another CI case officer, and really kind of come face to face with a lot of the conflict and attention and the passion their own relationship, as well as come face to face with a pretty brutal and interesting pair of Syrian brothers, who are in the military and the security services and who are guarding a very kind of dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime. So it's really it's obviously it's a spy novel it's about espionage, but it's also about love it's also about what it means to be, or at least I hope readers take away that you know it's about what it means to be human in the middle of a very in human And I really wrote it like I said earlier to get I wanted to get Syria right I wanted to show the conflict through many different lenses and bring it to life through the eyes of the characters so that you don't feel I hope like you're reading a book that's not a history book or nonfiction or anything like that but that you're sort of propelled through the narrative through the eyes of these, you know Syrian characters. I also wanted to show, I think the like brutality and inhumanity of the conflict but at the other end of the spectrum to show a lot of the heroism the self sacrifice and the bravery that's characterized. So many people's response to it. And then I think, you know, to is I wanted to get the CIA right I mean. Peter there's so much spy fiction out there that's wonderful and fun and, you know, the protagonist would be arrested by the third page for, you know, doing all kinds of illegal things I kind of wanted this book to. You know it's fiction, but to render authentically the work of the CIA and in particular its case officers and to get a little bit closer I think to the sort of guts of the place to leave readers with the feeling that they understand the work of the agency and its moral code a little bit better after having read the book. It isn't part of the moral codes, you know, essentially stealing secrets and disembling and lying. I mean it's interesting. I mean I'm not I'm not attacking the agency I'm just saying it's an interesting. I mean you're, you're obliged to do things that would not be part of the moral code of the FBI, for instance. For sure. No and I think it's it's one of the very interesting paradoxes about the agency and I think it's one of the. It's a reason why the place is so misunderstood in a lot of respects publicly is because, you know, you're exactly right there is this very widely held perception that, you know, see officers or liars and the places, you know, sort of corrupt it's highly secretive you know, it's highly bungling and I don't say any of what I'm about to say to paper over many of the very real issues with the CIA and with the work of intelligence but what I do think is that when you look at the work of a case officer when you look at the work of an analyst. You know you're effectively engaged in the search for truth, really. And the, you know, case officers just to take an example because as you know Sam, the protagonist of my book as a case officer and he talks about this with his fictional chief of station in the you know, they have to be people who are of extreme integrity who are trustworthy who Langley can trust to send out and recruit and meet with assets and come back and report accurately on that meeting. And to give those officers such wide berth, they have to be extremely honest. And I think that that that paradox of sort of the search for truth and honesty being at the heart of the work, but the place being cloaked in secrecy is kind of an important concept when you're talking about the work of the CIA. And it's what I wanted to get across in the book. And what are other other writers that you feel like kind of get the agency correct. Even if it's, I mean, on a fictional level. Yeah. I mean on a fictional level that the, the two guys that I really, really love, love reading who I think get the agency. I think does a wonderful job in his books of really portraying the work accurately. I mean I still think to this day that agents of innocence which was, I think his first novel is probably the closest thing out there. Other than my book of course to the actual work of a CIA case officer. You know, it's a wonderful book it's very realistic. I also love, there's slightly more dramatic and fictionalized but you know Jason Matthews has a one, you know, since sadly deceased has a wonderful trilogy called the Red Sparrow trilogy which I think does a similar, you know, similarly he's he's capturing the life of a case officer in the work and what it's like to be at the CIA. Those two guys I think do a wonderful job of really bringing to life the actual CIA. And in terms of TV, you know, my wife and I were enjoying the bureau. Which obviously is about French, but it seemed to have the ring of truth or maybe it's any other other TV or film that you think also kind of. There's obviously been a whole raft of zero dark 30s and homeland and, you know, and then also founder and the bureau which respectively treat the Israeli and French services. Other is other other portrayals of intelligent intelligence services getting better or worse. What is there anything on TV. I mean obviously TV is probably even more exaggerated in terms of than say a novel but right. Is there anything that kind of rings true for you. I so the bureau is great. But you're right. It is about the French. I think, you know, I, I think there are pieces of different series or movies that get parts of it. Right. So I think like the Americans, right. There's a lot of stuff in that in that series that's crazy. But a lot of the street trade craft, particularly from a Cold War standpoint was was pretty good.  I mean Joe Weisberg is ex agency right so there was there's some technical expertise that he brought to that. So I think that the spy the Netflix limited series that had Sasha Baron Cohen as you like, as Ellie Cohen, did a very good job of kind of portraying the, you know, some of the psychology of being, you know, under this kind of very elaborate cover in a pretty historical place. And then I do think, you know, the, the, and it's personally my favorite spy novel is John looker a little drummer girl. Yeah, is a great job with the psychology that the intimacy the manipulation that goes into, you know, asset recruitment, and really kind of slow burn in the rehearsal around a big operation so I think a lot of other things in that book that are, you know, completely unrealistic but he gets the core of that I think quite right. So how was your process for writing the book. And when did you start and when did you finish and you write in the morning, the evening. Yeah, how does that work you got three kids I think. I do have three kids, and they tend to discourage extended blocks of time where I can sit right and concentrate. And there was also COVID in the middle of this I presume and COVID that's right I to the sort of germ of the novel goes back to the summer when I left the agency so back in 2014 I didn't have any kids at the time. And I had a whole summer where I was just sort of in between agency and my consulting job and so I sat down every day and I started writing and really found that I enjoyed just be you know, sitting there for seven eight hours putting words on paper. And I thought I think like a lot of first time writers probably do at least I did. When I looked at it I was like oh this is pretty good you know maybe someone will be interested in this. And I put the manuscript aside. When I started consulting and then I had an opportunity. I think about it a few years ago to kind of come back and spend more time writing and I dusted it off and looked at it. And, you know, I thought well this is really terrible like this is really awful I mean this is no one no one is going to want to read this buy it. Take a look at it. And I, but you know it was all Syria focused and I still wanted to write the book and so I got much more serious at that point about writing something that I wanted to write and read. And then on the other hand, you know, other people would want to read it want to buy it and those two things don't always go together when you're when you're writing so my process was every day I sat down for eight hours from about 830 to 430. And I would just write and, you know, some days, some days you get a lot down on paper and you know you feel like the creativity is really flowing and you're moving and then other days it's you know you're banging your head against the wall of the screen and doesn't really I found that it was basically impossible to predict based on the feeling that you get when you sit down at the keyboard, if it's going to be a good day or bad day that had no bearing on whether it actually was a good day or bad day so you just had to write. And so I just did I just kind of wrote every day. And my part of my process is I get up early and start writing and I because I sort of feel like, I think your unconscious mind when you're sleeping does a lot of writing for you, at least sorting out of problems and I feel like, often when you hit the keyboard. It's at the beginning of the day that's because you could you have been working on it subconsciously is that do you find that to be the case. I do, I do and, you know, it's sort of like a trite thing to say but I do think that a lot of the aha moments come immediately after like when you've gotten some space from actually sitting there in front of the keyboard and you're doing something else but your to your point your brain is still working through a problem whether it's a plot problem or a character problem or whatever it might be. And I found that I would sit down every day and the first thing I would do is just long hand I'd write like three or four pages down in a journal and it would just be what's what's going on in my head it could be about the book it could be about other you know family stuff whatever it might be. But that really, I think did some work to kind of churn out of my brain, some of the problem solving that it happened overnight to help facilitate getting it on paper as I wrote later that day. I have written a number of nonfiction books I've never written a fiction book and I, I admire you for writing a fiction book because I think. I mean there's advantages and disadvantages I think we're writing fiction, the advantage of course is you can make it up disadvantages you have to make it up to I mean so. So, in the case in your case you wrote the entire manuscript and then found an agent and then a publisher or what was the process for that. Well, so I was.  You have to get into the commercial process sooner by having a few chapters in an outline. I think that's probably true. I was fortunate enough that through some connections my wife had I was in conversation pretty early on with an agent about, you know, here's kind of the concept for the book here's a couple chapters. In a way he would provide help and encouragement to just kind of, you know, steer the process a bit which is exactly what he should be doing. But it's still I still had to finish the manuscript. You know, and go through a bunch of revisions with a small group of readers that I had before getting it to the agent to then read it and said okay I want to rep this and then eventually taking it to publishers so I the whole thing was. And then there was another rewrite after we, after we submitted and and the editor that we were working with had some feedback that I thought was reasonable and then we kind of did another rewrite so you know you get to a point multiple points along the way and you think oh I'm done and you know that's tends to be a delusion. Writing is about rewriting. That's right. It really is I mean that that first draft you know there's the classic and Lamont line about shitty first drafts and then there's, you know, I kind of intended to view it as it you're like getting all the ingredients down on the counter to figure out what it is you're going to cook you haven't actually started yet so you think you have the whole story done you actually don't you just have like, you know, I'm cooking Italian food but it could be 10 different things and you have to work through the passes or the drafts to kind of get the cook appropriately. That's a good metaphor. So do you have another one in the in the all thing. So I do I have. I have a follow on to Damascus station outline that continues the story at least for the characters that survive but I haven't been working on that what I've actually been spending my time on is a another one focused on Russia that has a totally different subset of characters it's in kind of the same universe but it's, it's present day, it's, it's focusing on really the kind of next phase of the US Russia spy war and trying to answer the question of what would it look like if the CIA got really serious about sticking it to Vladimir Putin, which has been a fun topic to explore so I'm most of the way through the first draft on that one. And excited about where it's going. You know, I mean you mentioned you wrote to Mackenzie. Are you still there were you. No writer or what I am a full time writer right now. So I left Mackenzie earlier this year to focus full time on getting the second book done and making sure that I could you know, give Damascus station a good shot once it got out in the book. I've been, it's, it's been, it's been a lot of fun to just focus on the writing. So on your, on your Putin book that is not what you focus on. So what's what's the process in terms of homework. Yeah. A lot more a lot more homework, I would say, I think I probably underestimated how much of the serious stuff I just had in my head as I was writing that one so you know I've. I've read just dozens and dozens and dozens of Russia books. You know I'm finding, you know, former agency folks with experience on Russia who can help talk through some of the stuff with me.  Basically cyber crime against a bank and cryptocurrency and so I'm having a lot of technical conversations about that so the number of topics that you have to do research on as you write one of these things they just quickly proliferate so it's been a much more extensive. I've had to do a lot more homework to make this one I think feel as as real as an authentic and as authentic hopefully as domestic station feels. I'm just going to remind people if they have a question to drop it in the q amp a document. And so the domestic station was published, it came out. What was it October, what was a pub day. October 5. October 5. And have any of your colleagues read it. Yes, a number of a number of them have a number of them read it, you know, before it before it came out. And I would say the reaction has been very good. You know, both to getting the serious stuff, you know, right and I did, I did, you know, I wasn't a case officer I was an analyst, but I like to think that I have observed them in their natural habitat for a long period of time. And I had a number of them who were advisors on the book who read early versions of the book and who have read it since it came out and I think the feedback on kind of capturing the trade craft and the experience has been has been positive so far. And you mentioned you were tracking the foreign fighters do you see.  Is it possible.  When I see what's going on in Afghanistan but you know, history doesn't repeat itself and sometimes rhyme. And, and of course Afghanistan is in Syria and Afghanistan is a lot further from United States and Europe and, you know, you can drive from Damascus to Syria would be pretty hard to drive from. You can't drive from Damascus to Paris, you can't drive from Kabul to Paris, you could but it would be. Yeah, it's a lot harder. So you wouldn't probably go through Iran so I guess my question is, you know what. What, what do you think the likely outcome is obviously we've got this new Taliban government. The first round of appointments were kind of Taliban 1.0 was not a 2.0. They were, you know, one of them is actually Sirat al-Kharni as you know is UN described as being on the leadership council of al-Qaeda. And so, you know, what, what, what could develop there and I'm not talking about, you know, a month from now for like two or three years down the road when everybody's had time to kind of dig into whatever position they're going to dig into. How do you see it kind of playing out. Yeah. Well, I, you know, it seems unlike it seems unlikely to me that in the near term, the Taliban controls the whole place. So you are just as a starting point there you kind of have some of the grist or fodder for a variety of different actors, some of whom that they may sort of tassel the Taliban may tassel except some of them they may not, but they don't have the capacity or the willingness to go after them to sort of, you know, take to kind of take root there right and I think that's a, that's a sort of real concern. And I also think from a, you know, CT perspective, you know, we hear a lot of the buzzword over the horizon, but the reality of it is that when you don't have a footprint locally, and when you don't have basing rights to my understanding with any current state, you're sort of in a, you know, nasty position of, in order to deliver in order to disrupt a, you know, any group from from planning or conducting an attack there your intelligence actually has to be better, because you have a longer period of time from, you know, you have longer to go to deliver a military capability so, you know, I think that what we will still and furthermore, I think there's an open question around whether, you know, future presidents will have sort of the willingness to strike as well, given that the, you know, the potential civilian casualties could be higher because intelligence is good. The more is refined so I, you know, it seems to me I would agree with the Taliban 1.0 assessment I haven't seen anything to suggest that there's a, you know, new and better sort of crew in town. And I think we have to acknowledge the fact that our CT capabilities will be degraded by virtue of geography. So it feels to me like with both of those recipes and the fact that no one entity will control the country and we will not have troops there feels to me like you're right it's not, you know, you can't drive to Paris but at the same time, you're probably going to have a festering sort of ungoverned, you know, safe haven for prospective jihadis for, you know, the foreseeable future. Here's an interesting question from audience member anonymous. How do you deal with things you know are still classified but are also publicly published. And how do you approach such issues. Yeah, so I think the answer there is very awkwardly is how that's managed I mean. So from a PRB standpoint, like, and I made this sort of offended comment about not citing with the leaks but it's true. I mean if something is officially classified but is out in the open. I as a former CIA officer and not allowed to use that. You know, as sort of the proof that hey it's already out there so can you let me write about this no, you know, that's not an acceptable answer even though everyone else has access to that information. So if you're talking about something that's widely known but so classified, you know, it just you kind of, it tends to be a little bit weird and there's really no way around it. There's a number of, which I won't mention a number of things related to Syria that I'm sure everyone can use their imagination on that are very publicly well known and have been cited in official memoirs on the part of Hillary Clinton and former Defense Secretary and DCI Panetta that I also cannot comment on and no one, you know, the agency can comment on but that are pretty well known and out in, you know, for public consumption. It's a little bit weird. Yeah. And another question we often hear about the impenetrability of Islamist groups or Western intelligence agencies. Can you comment on that in the Syrian context.  Nothing is really impenetrable I mean, it's so I probably but yeah, there must be degrees right I mean we know. I mean, we know by name a number of Westerners who penetrated jihadi groups and but it's obviously a hard target story. I remember interviewing a CIA official long before 911 and he was he said, look, you know, in the old days I could go and have a beer with a Palestinian terrorist, you know, guy, but I can't do that with these I mean he he was saying it was was harder but so but you're saying it's far from impossible it's not like penetrating King John Goons, you know, I presume. No, absolutely and I think what you what you find when you start looking really at any group of humans anywhere, whether they are, you know, North Koreans, or, or Russians or members of the battle in Syria, like you, you realize that there are vulnerabilities from a human standpoint there are there are members of the group who are less ideologically committed there are members of the group who owe people money and don't like other people in the group there, you know, it's the sort of realities of human nature. You have more people. It's a hard target precisely because in those inner sanctums of the actual operational commanders and folks who are making the decisions. They are very ideologically committed and very tight knit communities but at the same time, they are humans and so you have the practical vulnerabilities that all humans have. When you start to look closely at those groups and so I think from an intelligence standpoint, you know, the agency, they're harder for sure but but it doesn't mean that there aren't handholds or vulnerabilities that can be exposed and exploit it. We're close to the end of a lot of time. Is there anything that you'd like to say just in wrapping up. Well, what I will say is I, you know, everyone should take a look at the book. I'll put that shameless plug out there. I do think that the book, you know, will appeal to people who to a pretty wide range of people I think if you like spy novels and just having fun reading. It hopefully does that. And on the other hand, you know, I think that if you're looking for, you know, some insider knowledge on Syria and on the agency, and how that works, you know, you can you get that too.  But no, I think, you know, this is, this has been really wonderful Peter to be in conversation with you and I hope that folks, you know, do come away from this with some understanding of, you know, the complexities and in Syria, and, and an appreciation. I hope that the conflict there is a lot more than a, you know, sort of bad guys versus good guys thing although it does have that for sure. It's a lot. The shades of gray or are, you know, much more common than, than the black and white. David, thank you for. Again the book is the master station. It's received stellar reviews. Good luck with the book tour, and we'll sign off and thank you everybody who tuned in to listen to this. Thank you. Thank you.


When the world first got a good look at Splatoon, longtime Nintendo fans were thrilled. Here, for the first time in years, was a brand new game idea, with all new, fresh and original characters that fitted perfectly with Nintendo's existing world. The Inklings, kids who were also squids, were full of vibrant, fun energy in a game that was brimming with personality and originality. For Nintendo, a games company that relies primarily on nostalgia and existing brand appeal, creating the world of Splatoon was no easy feat. It was only thanks to a talented team of creators, led by company veteran Hisashi Nogami, that this game ever became something worth paying attention to. This is the story of Splatoon, and how tofu, rabbits and extreme sports all combined to create one of the most culturally relevant new Nintendo games of the last decade. Hisashi Nogami joined Nintendo all the way back in 1994 as part of the inaugural class for a new education program called the Nintendo Detsu Game Seminar. After being put through his paces and taught the ins and outs of working for Nintendo, Hisashi was assigned to work on Super Mario World 2, Yoshi's Island. By this point, the team had decided on a cute, hand-drawn art style for the game, and Hisashi's first assignment was figuring out exactly what this should look like and how it could be implemented. Hisashi grabbed a box of marker pens, drew a vague mountain inspired by Mount Fuji, scanned it into the computer and spent the next two weeks trying to get it to look good within Super Nintendo hardware. When Hisashi's bosses saw his work, they instantly decided that he was along the right track and they agreed to push forward with this marker pen inspired look for the game. Then, something horrible happened. At least, it felt horrible to Hisashi at the time. With the Nintendo 64 in development, the team working on Yoshi's Island was dramatically restructured. A lot of the game's senior creative team were reassigned to work on the brand new console, leaving Hisashi, along with just two other game designers, in charge of the whole project. The trio did have programming help from another division within Nintendo, but all of the creative and artistic decisions within Yoshi's Island needed to be made, and Hisashi found himself trying out a lot of different roles within the project. He drew art, created level designs and backgrounds, and worked on enemies and boss fights. In a short space of time, Hisashi gained a lot of experience of doing pretty much all aspects of game design. When Yoshi's Island was released, the game quickly proved a hit, in large part due to the innovative art style that Hisashi had created. Over the next few years, Hisashi was given responsibility over a lot of other key Nintendo games, most notably the Animal Crossing series, which he worked on as a director. For his first role as a producer, Hisashi was given the responsibility of coming up with a completely new video game style. After a long period of relying on existing franchises, Nintendo had decided that they needed a brand new action game that didn't tie in with anything that already existed, and it was Hisashi's job to make this happen. He and his team pondered what to do, before coming up with the idea of characters both shooting and swimming through ink, in a contest to cover the most ground with their own colour. The first prototype for the game was relatively simple, with big rectangle blocks used in place of characters, as at this stage, Hisashi and his team were more interested in coming up with a working gameplay idea than in creating characters. These blocks weren't even given any colour, one team was black, while the other was white, in order to make them easy to tell apart. For this reason, Hisashi and his designers began referring to these characters as tofu. Even with this simple demo, it was clear that the core mechanic for the game was worth exploring further, and so, Hisashi and his team began coming up with ideas for characters that could be used in this world. The team briefly entertained the possibility of making Yoshi or Mario the centre of the action, before dismissing this entirely. The point of this game was to create something fresh and original, and that meant putting aside the traditional Mario roster of characters. After writing out a list of possible character ideas, which included squids, astronauts, and regular human beings, finally they settled on rabbits. Work commenced as the designers created a series of rabbit characters, giving them water pistols filled with ink and sending them out into battle. But something wasn't quite right. As Hisashi looked at what his team was building, he couldn't help but feel like there was a disconnect between the game's characters and its core mechanic. Why were rabbits swimming through seas of ink? This didn't make any sense. The team needed to reconsider what they were building. Looking over their original ideas again, the designers took another stab at squids. This seemed to fit perfectly. Squids shoot ink, and they swim, so the game's mode of play made much more sense. Hisashi and his team decided that they were going to do more than simply create a bunch of octopus characters. These squids were also kids. They could transform as hybrid characters that were both aquatic and familiar to human beings. And so, Hisashi and his fellow creators began working to build the world of Inkopolis and its bold, unique design aesthetic. In building up Splatoon, Hisashi's team adhered to the traditional Nintendo container method for creating an original game idea. First, they built the framework that underpinned the entire experience, making a game that was fun to play and which offered something unique and enjoyable. Then, they'd come up with the basic premise of the game and create the broad strokes of characters that would make the title feel distinct from anything else that Nintendo had made before. With their game structure, or container in place, it was time to fill it up with all the little pieces of world building that would make Splatoon feel like a fresh, original experience. The team wanted to give the game a sense of teenage rebellion and edgy, youthful energy. In doing so, they naturally turned to their own childhoods for inspiration. These now middle-aged developers therefore looked back on 90s urban culture to hip-hop and extreme sports to create something that reflected the time of their lives when they themselves were young and rebellious. Hisashi wanted the world of Splatoon, the buildings and environments to feel realistic and tangible. The Inklings weren't painting a fancy world like the Mushroom Kingdom. Instead, they were leaving their mark on an approximation of the real world, albeit one with a lot more squid puns. When the game was released, there wasn't a lot of content at first, with just a few different levels and a relatively small selection of weapons and abilities. This was a deliberate move to try to keep the game interesting for a long time. With an online multiplayer game, it would be no fun if, six months down the line, nobody was playing Splatoon anymore. Nintendo wanted to create a lasting player base, the kind of title that players would keep coming back to over months and years. By arbitrarily limiting the amount of content that was available, Hisashi hoped that players could be convinced to keep coming back regularly to enjoy new types of gameplay. All of this work paid off. Splatoon and its colourful inklings became a huge hit with Nintendo purists and newcomers alike. Not only did the innovative gameplay feel like a refreshing change from all the generic team shooters of recent years, but the characters in the world that Hisashi had put so much work into all really resonated with fans. Hisashi was particularly pleased with a huge event where the Squid Sisters, a fictional band within the game, handed a gig to an enthusiastic real-life audience thanks to the wonders of modern hologram technology. Hisashi had taken his youth, distilled its essence, and created his very own superstars. It was an exhilarating feeling. Splatoon's drip-feed of content kept players coming back week after week, making sure that the game was always fun to play. With the growing player base for the Nintendo Switch, it was clear that Splatoon was going to stay popular for a long time to come. The moral of the story is that sometimes it's important to think outside the box. Before Splatoon, Nintendo had been doing just fine reusing the same game characters and mechanics over and over. They were making good games, but they weren't innovating. Hisashi Nogami and his team of designers pushed to do something original and inventive. They chose not to take the easy way out by falling back on classic Nintendo tropes and instead did their best to create something that crackled with unique personality. When things didn't seem to be going the right way, they changed their plans, throwing away their work on rabbit characters when it was clear that they needed to try something different. Finally, by pushing themselves creatively, they were able to design new characters and a new game world that resonated with their audience. Whatever you're working on, try to bring this level of creativity to your personal projects. Look beyond the obvious, easy ideas and try your best to innovate and discover new solutions to old problems. Don't worry if things don't click into place first time, experiment, explore and allow yourself to make mistakes. As you keep working hard, you'll gain satisfaction from achieving your goals.


What is this?  Are we gonna get knocked? Can you stab this guy quickly? I can't, I'm bad. Just land a poly on him. Yeah. We go bro, I expect a poly. Yeah, I would do it. Yeah, I can, ready?  I think we go. We can go rogue, we can go rogue. Instalcyce on druid, instalcyce on druid. He's gonna kill me now and then. I see this, I see this. I see this, okay? We go rogue now. Yeah, I see this.  Yeah, the deep wasn't good on there. I bug vanish, bug vanish. Am I okay? Yeah, I should be. But I can't really help you. It's okay, I'm completely fine. They popped a lot there. That's rogue, that's rogue. He destroyed me, this is good. Fuck, this is really bad now. You need to vanish off. No, no, no. I'm completely fine. He's dead. I think it is. I'm blind, full blind.  I hope so. No, I don't kill him. I'll keep the door.  Nice, I can vanish your name. Just go. Fuck, my vanish broke. I'm coming back. I'm coming back. I'm just going to play safe. Priest is fit. I'm going to play safe. Keepro, keepro. I'll drink, I'll drink, I'll drink. I'm waiting for my dance. Just keep rogue, I'll drink. I'll keep rogue. Actually I'm going to get it. Rogue is fine.  You have no buffs, don't die there. Come back if you can. You can block, you can block. Yeah, you can open. I'll go rogue. I'm going to get feared. I can see, I can see. Nice, good. There's snakes now. I'm pushing as well. I'm going to drop. I'm going to drop. Nice. I think it's not feeling well. Yeah, I'm going to push. Nice. There's my second buff. Skattar penna. Yeah, I'm seeing where it. Nice, he blocked it. Nice. Oh no, he finds him.  Actually this fair is not doing that much. How's that in range? Worst opening, but not the best either. I think we're going to stop on 2-9-1-4 for now. We had a really good run. Look at this. That's a run.  That's like 3K in my mind, eh? Ish, probably. Yeah, so this is arena analytics. This is a, basically we slash I originally wanted this add on because arena stats is super buggy when you leave games and just not reliable at all and it doesn't show you as much stuff as it could.  And so we've basically been making this throughout TBC for I tell you like season 4 of TBC and just kind of adding in small features and stuff like that as I think of them and I've been testing it and he's been fixing the bugs that I find. We've got a couple more ideas in the works but like here you can you can pick by a bracket, you can pick by and you can see this changes at the bottom when you change what you're looking at. But you can also filter by map rates. You can filter this by 2, you see one nagrand by ruins, by blades. Blades actually 1% higher win rate for us. Everything else is 56 overall and then we've got the session here as well. You can see how many games you've played obviously as well. All about within reason to be 25%. Can you import data from arena stats? That would be a cool feature. Let me see how hard that would be to do. That might be tricky to do but I'll ask, it could be fun. Anyway, so you can filter by map as well obviously but then you can also filter by comp. Even more, right? So let's say we're playing Priest Hunter right now. So that filters it down even more to just the Priest Hunter games. Can you see average game duration or would you have to calculate it manually? So you can also export all your data. This is not currently working but you should be able to export everything into obviously a CSV then you can chuck that in Excel and then you can do more calculations with that data if you want Kevin. You can get obviously like duration and then just average it like instantly in this spreadsheet. We're also working on a website where you can import the data and that will show you even more stuff. We're thinking of also putting in in addition to your comp there's also going to be enemy comp. So then you can filter by exact matchups essentially. So the add-on is currently not available to download. However once we fix the bugs and add the last couple of features then it will be up on Cursed Forge. So in the next few weeks probably sadly Lingo is currently at home with family for Christmas. I'd say sadly he's probably having the time of his life but he's basically can't work on the add-on at the moment so he's got a few weeks off while he's at home. When he gets back he will get a public release ready. His words not mine. But yeah that's arena analytics so yeah it should be hype.


If you've ever struggled with the gathering of materials for engineering your ship in Elite Dangerous then it looks like that situation may be about to improve and there's an opportunity for you to influence how this side of the game could change. To make sure you don't miss any of our videos hit like and subscribe, remember to click the bell icon and select all notifications and to help directly support this channel you can also join our Patreon via the link in the video description. In a surprise move the Frontier Elite Dangerous Community Team reached out to the player base in an extensive forum post and posited 7 possible ideas to improve the material gathering and engineering experience in ships. The ship based engineering system and in particular the gathering of materials to affect those engineering upgrades has often been the subject of extensive and vociferous complaints from the community with words like grind being thrown around fairly liberally. It's long been such a cause for complaint that the system has become the poster child for everything detractors of the game feel is wrong with it. When asked commanders talking about what they don't like about Elite Dangerous will almost always default to talking about what they feel is the grindy nature of gathering materials for the often necessary upgrades. If you're fairly new to the game then you may not be aware that the system present in the game at the moment is actually considered to be a significant improvement on what the engineering system originally shipped with. Gathering one material these days will yield 3 of that material by the time it reaches your material storage. Originally one gathered meant one stored and tales of how those using the precious oh so rare materials on a module would yield random results in any direction meaning you could end up actually making the engineered module perform worse yes really will likely trigger just about any commanders of the old guard. These days whilst the engineering system has undoubtedly improved given the sheer weight of the public opinion on its issues over such a long period you'd be hard pushed to argue that there wasn't room for more improvement to be made and that those improvements are perhaps long overdue. Frontier started revisiting some of its core horizons level gameplay systems some significant time before Odyssey launched looking at and improving the payouts from systems like combat bonds and anti-xeno operations to name but 2 and now it's finally time for engineering to get a look in. The post on the forums from senior community manager Bruce Garrido pictures several ideas and asks the community to feed back on those ideas though primarily focused on the area of material gathering itself although there is one suggestion from Frontier regarding the engineering process. So what changes are being proposed? The first suggestion focuses on improving the availability and rate at which materials of grade 1 to 3 are gathered suggesting that both the rate and availability should be increased to decrease the amount of higher grade mats that are traded in to gather these lesser materials. A suggestion is also made around the number of higher grade materials gathered in a given instance with the question being asked should that number be increased. Frontier are also asking what materials specifically tied to the rarer BGS states commanders are finding harder to locate and asking what materials the player base feels should be made more readily discoverable. And they're also asking the slightly harder to quantify estimates of how long it takes to earn a given engineering module. The post then moves into some of its more intriguing and dare I say exciting suggestions. Frontier is pitching for feedback on the idea of unique repeatable missions offered by the engineers themselves that would reward the materials needed for that given engineers upgrades. But wait it gets better and this is far and away my favourite suggestion. Frontier are kicking around the idea of allowing materials to be exchanged for items that are not obtainable via the games commodity markets. The specific examples given being exploration data, bounty vouchers, void opals and thargoid hearts. Enabling such a system would in theory allow all commanders to earn the materials they need for an upgrade they desire via a gameplay mechanic that suits their particular playstyle. Reading that suggestion in particular out loud in the burpit homestead produced an audible gasp of approval from all those gathered. The final suggestion on the post is the only one that doesn't concern itself with material gathering specifically, Frontier clearly feeling that matte gathering itself is predominantly where most of the issues lie. The devs are postulating the idea of changing the amount of materials for any given tier of upgrade to be a specific cost rather than the current system of there always being an improvement but sometimes only very small incremental improvement with it, somewhat at the whim of the deities of RNG. If the material gathering was made significantly more accessible then I don't personally see this last problem being one that desperately needs a resolution as it would in theory at least be much more common for players to have mats going spare. With that said personally I'd prefer a definite goal to hit with a number on it rather than a range with the required mats landing somewhere in that range. Those last few pixels sometimes left at the top of an upgrade when you run out of mats and time are in my opinion an unnecessary annoyance, better to just have a number to aim for and be done with it. I'm not personally one of the great engineers in the game, the sheer time sink involved for me personally involved in obtaining mats has meant that whilst I've engineered a couple of ships fully and tinkered here and there with a couple of others I've never really been able to fully experiment with the system and get heavily into building specific ships for specific jobs and that's always been a regret for me. As a result my own admittedly biased opinion about everything FDV is proposing is basically yes all of it please with whistles on. I struggle to imagine a scenario where anyone who has played Elite Dangerous and messed with the engineering system on any level wouldn't agree to making the material gathering more accessible but I'm acutely aware that I'm not every man and of course opinions vary. The opportunity that is being presented to us here as a community is a huge one. As I've mentioned the engineering system and in particular the gathering of the necessary materials is one of the biggest single complaints that is directed at Elite Dangerous and justifiably so. Frontier have often been accused in the past of not listening to their player base again justifiably so but given the changes that we've seen to Horizon's level content based off of these feedback requests in recent times I would suggest now that they are listening to their community's feedback and there has therefore never been a better opportunity for you to get your voice heard and being as it's currently entirely ship focused these proposed changes are relevant to all commanders no matter what version of the game you are playing be it Elite Dangerous Odyssey or Elite Dangerous Horizons. Frontier have said that they've heard the feedback about engineering and material gathering for Elite Dangerous Odyssey specifically but as with the previous rebalance feedback requests they've done they are handling them one subject at a time. I've linked to the forum post below do check it out. So does the fact that Frontier are even talking about these changes give you hope that the engineering system will become more accessible to more commanders do you even engage with engineering yourself let us know in the comments below that's it for now thanks very much for watching if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing to the channel and maybe take a look at one of our other videos linked on screen right now.


Outside Africa, prosecutors have axed for a 30-year prison sentence for the murderer of George Floyd. Former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for the killing in April and is due to be sentenced on the 25th of June. On Wednesday, the prosecution said the killing had shocked the conscience of the nation and demanded a long sentence, but the defense described the killing as an error made in good faith based on Derek Chauvin's training. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.