with good intentions, something you're probably familiar with, but it's on her new album. And the reason this is on her new album is because the album has been a while in the making. The album is just out. It's called Matters of the Heart. In fact, I think it's officially released today. And no better woman to tell us more is Maria herself. Good afternoon, John Breslin. Thanks for having me. No problem. Thanks for coming in and taking some time out. She's busy at home. It's a busy house, busy house. Two small kids. Yes. Ages. Almost nine weeks and 20 months old. And then we have the teenagers then. So it could be more bother with them. Yeah, absolutely. But in theory, they should be able to listen and understand whatever the two small ones. So you have your hands full. Aye, but all good. As I say, full of love and cuddles. It's wonderful. Great. And a new album now to get behind and to promote and move forward with. And as I said, it's been a while in the making. It's sort of conceived during COVID. It was, well, I actually created the fund it for it. The crowd fund me in early of 2020. And I had, I think maybe about February or January. And it was next thing, COVID hit. And like coming to the end of it didn't reach the target of the fund it when the COVID hit. So there was a panic station on and we kind of, a couple of us gathered a lock of pound together to make up the end of it. And then she went into lockdown. So originally what the album was gonna have on it had changed then through the course of this last three years because of different things happening. But yeah, we did record initially a couple of tracks when kind of things opened up a little. And then, you know, things would close down again. And then I fell in love and I had babies. What going on? What going on.  My mum sadly passed away last November. So different things, a lot. So the album has completely kind of changed because there's song, there's a song about mum. There's a song about dad. There's a song about falling in love. And all those things hadn't happened at the beginning. So yeah, it's. So in a way an album reflects where an artist is at any given time or where their head is. Definitely for me, this one is understandable how things changed over those few years. Yeah, yeah. And you said you were in and out of the studio. So the studio in question down in Remelton with Billy Robinson and you've gathered up a collection of really fine musicians. Yeah, Billy has the best people to work with. Like obviously he is just outstanding himself as a bass player and a producer and everything else that he can do. But yeah, Mick McCarney played a big role in this album like Frankincense. That track he did the arrangements for that. But he played guitar on most of the tracks. Now he does remind me that I played some guitar on Lucy's Lullaby, which you can probably tell that it's me and not Mick. But then, yeah, we have Patter Call from Fintown playing fiddle into my eyes. And I just, oh, Patter just blows my mind. Romick Parrell and Lawrence Doherty on drums. But he also made a contact with Matt Benson who I wasn't familiar with his name. He's from Ross Trevor. He's a trombone player. And Billy, as Billy does, just knows these people. He's like, hi, he's George Ezra's trombone player. And I was like, what?  So then I started looking at it. I was like, yeah, the map has been playing with George from the beginning and still touring with him. So I, like he can imagine what I was like on this. But it's great to be able to pull in these talented musicians and not just talented musicians, but also, you know, different instruments to bring. And Billy, I suppose, as a producer, is able to take a more detached for you and go, you know what I think might work on this. Well, that's, and I leave everything really to Billy because like there's nobody has better ears or, you know, ideas than him. And like, you know, sometimes I might say something and then I'll know the look I'll get from Billy. And I go, now, do you know what, Billy? You just decide. So like, he knew, yeah, that like for that song that the trombone is on, it's like, he says, I can hear, you know, I think that there's going to be fantastic. And he was right. Like it's just perfect. And then we've Sean McCarron on saxophone on how sweet it is. Actually, there's supposed to be a big part of that. Their band, Quarterdeck is the band that's playing, you know, on this album now, which is pretty wonderful. And then not forgetting, Pat Crowley on piano, Laura McFadden on cello and my backing vocalist, Rachel, Jonathan and Jack Smeaton. I really am just so, so thankful to all of them, you know, for, for, for playing and being fabulous. We were chatting there about Billy and Mick and speaking of talented guitarists, the week that's in it, it would be remiss to me and you really, not to mention, now the late Ted Ponsonby. Yeah. It was a shock, it was a big shock. It was a shock.  But when I was 16, I worked in the Downtown. This is all a true story. And on a Wednesday night, Ted Ponsonby and other musicians would be playing on a Wednesday night. Like I was in awe, you know, because I knew who Ted Ponsonby was and then there wouldn't be a Wednesday night that would go by that Ted wouldn't ask me up to sing. And I sure I thought I was flicking unreal because like Ted played with the best and he gave me so much confidence. And on top of that, he took his time out and he taped a song for me to learn that he would accompany me with then every Wednesday night. So I couldn't wait till I would get the nod from Ted Ponsonby. So I have a lot to thank him for... A superbly talented musician who stayed local and played local and, you know, and as a result, we were able to enjoy so many of his performances. Yeah, like Shemi Quinn shared a couple of videos there late last night of him playing with Sarah Cullen, Rory Freel, and Tommy Callahan and Blake's. And I have to say, I watched it this morning and it was one of... There was nothing compares to you and someone, or Al McCabe in a comment, nothing compared to Ted Ponsonby. And I think that was a really, really great comment. And like it's so sad and like the condolences to Marilyn and Sarah and Dawn and all the family, like we're just... I can't imagine how they feel. We're all heartbroken.  And sometimes the case of you going in and doing your bits and then having to wait to hear what comes back. Aye, it's funny, you know, the one of the tracks found on Cannibal's. I wrote that song actually on New Year's Eve of 2020. I remember it was, I was staying, I was looking after mum. And like when we recorded it initially back at the first opening up when we could, do you know what, I came away from it. Like, I don't know, I don't know if that's the sound that I was looking for with that track or not, you know. And it's actually one of my favourite on the album now. Being really, I just adore it. So exactly what you say, you record things, you come away from it, you don't know, oh, is it? But also a skill that I think Billy has is like where he pits the tracks in order on an album as well. It's a very, very important thing, you know, and how they jail in with one another. And especially when they're different styles as they are on this album. That's a hand-in that he has with me. You know, that I don't, like, everything is, can I jump from genre to genre, but... OK, brother in the guitar, we've played one well-known song from the album. The best-known song, kind of from the album. So what other song are you going to play? Do you want me to do one from the album? That would be great. Well, yeah. That's cool. Do you know what I might do? I wasn't going to do this, but I have to give a really massive shout out to one of the co-writers of one of the songs is Jennifer McGee, Jennifer's from Flocara. Right. And Jennifer asked me would I write a song with her, and it's called Queen of the Town. And I know herself and her mum and dad are listening in today. So I just want to thank Jennifer so much. I actually named the album Matters of the Heart from a lyric of her song as well. So, and I hope that Jennifer will join me at the album launch and all that crack to sing it with me, but I hear. Let me get the guitar. Absolutely. What do I do with the capo? We'll go with it this way to be grand. OK, this is Queen of the Town. Totally not the album version, it's just that. But anyway, be grand. The acoustic version. The acoustic version. Stop, you need to listen. I've got feelings the same as you. You might see me as different, but I fall just as hard as true. Well, maybe if you stood in my shoes, you were quick to run, took some time to consider my heart before your friends on me, out of yours, adding too much to ask for. Especially for Jennifer. Thank you. Brilliant. And a great example, I suppose, of in some way the style. I know that I mentioned earlier that there's different styles on the album, but if something represented the album, then I think that's a great track. Excellent. And it's out now. It matters of the heart. When will the official launch be? Well, we're going to do an official night in December. We're just to kind of close in on a date. I've been in touch with Jeremy and the regional culture centre this time. I wanted to support the regional culture centre because they did so much for artists in lockdown. So I give Jeremy the shout, and he said yes. So that'll be good. So as far as you mean Spotify and iTunes and all that, it's up there. Well, it was going up there shortly. It's going up shortly. I put it up in Bandcamp. Right. First of all, I emailed it to all the fund funders during the week, because that was the promise that they would get it before anybody else. And then I emailed all you good guys then. And thank you so much. So next are the streaming platforms. Yeah, we're just holding off them. Did you ever hear, do you know the wee tiny pocket you get at the top of your jeans pocket there? Do you have jeans on you? For, no, but for change? Yeah, no, it's the money you get from Spotify. Ah! It's a Spotify copy. It needs to be smaller than the regular pocket. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we'll just hold off on them once. OK. Well, listen, it's brilliant that it's turned out the way it is. And I know it's it's been a while in the making, but it's out now and it's called Matters of the Heart. Maria McCormick, thank you very much. Thank you so much.


Let's start off with a little bit of a review from last time. So just as a quick reminder, when you go into the course content on Blackboard and you go into the folder, which our last one was the Introduction to Vectors on August 29th, it starts off with the textbook sections and the videos. And if there's anything that wasn't clear, you may want to go ahead and go through those things and re-watch any videos that you need to. Now I'm going to jump down here to where we had our grid vectors. I've got this one set up so that you can see the key for the problem we did last time. So again, it's got our additional pre-lecture stuff, but after lecture I actually put the keys to the problems that you did. I'm bringing up this one just because it's going to really show us some of the stuff that we want to do here. And I'm going to go ahead and make this a little bit bigger so it's easier to see on the video. So we have these grids and we have our vectors as arrows on these. This is how you graphically show a vector. And then we talked about how you would represent that in this sort of IJ notation. You're counting the boxes. So A had 1, 2, 3 boxes to the right and 1, 2, 3 boxes upward. B had 4 boxes to the left and 2 boxes upwards. Well, your right and left is going to be your I part. And if you go to the right, it's a plus I. Or like on B where you went to the left, it's a minus I and you put how many boxes. So here I went 1, 2, 3, 4 boxes to the left so it's minus 4 I hat. Same thing happens with up and down but that gives us our J hat component. So A went 1, 2, 3 boxes up. B went 2 boxes up. And if we look down here at D, it went 1, 2, 3 boxes down and 2 to the right. So it was plus 2 I hat for the 2 to the right and minus 3 J hat for the 3 went down. And remember if you've got something horizontal, that means there's no up and down and the J is going to be 0. And if you have something going vertically, that means there's no left or right and so the I would be equal to 0. So last time we did these ones where if I give you an arrow on a grid, you can figure out what the equations is. Then on the bottom part of the worksheet from last time, just again as a reminder, if I give you an equation, you should be able to draw it on a grid. So in this case we had 3 I hat plus 2 J hat. That means it should have gone 3 boxes to the right, 1, 2, 3 and 2 boxes up, 1, 2. So this one is shown with 3 I and 2 J. And on this case for B I went 1, 2 to the left and 1, 2, 3 down and etc. So this was what we did from last time. We're going to do something similar to this as sort of a first step on our problems today. And just to make things a little bit easier both for you and for me, if you look at the worksheet you got and again that should be in your pre-lecture folder for today's lecture, I also handed it out in recitation. You'll notice that we actually start with these same four vectors but then we're going to do some vector math on them. So looking back at the key for the 29th may help you out as you're trying to understand what's going on. This is also a good time to remind you that if you're in that course content for the particular day and you scroll down underneath that key, you always want to click the mark reviewed button and then that will tell me that you're actually going through and doing everything. And it's the same thing for your textbook sections, you want to go ahead and mark those off as reviewed.


Today we're going to talk about open source log analytics or crowning logs with ELK. For those that don't know, ELK is an Elasticsearch log session combiner and we'll go into what each of those are as we go through the talk. I'm the support engineer for Australia and New Zealand. I've been using ELK for around about two years. Previously I was a Linux engineer and I handled the ELK stack and just general Linux infrastructure. I work for an email service provider in Australia. So Elasticsearch, you may not have heard about them. We do have some local customers like Xero and Seek. If you've used GitHub, the code search and the repo search, that's all powered by Elasticsearch. The company was formed in 2012. We're big in the EU and US. We're still making our move into the Australian market. So for this talk, what is a log? Well, really it's just a timestamp with a string. So when you think about it in that basic term, you've got server logs, you've got Twitter streams, you've even got metrics.  You get format frustration dealing with different timestamps, dealing with different logs, dealing with things that don't have timestamps. It's really very, very annoying. So why do we ever want to collect and centralize the logs? Because giving uneducated people access to your systems can be dangerous, because you don't want to have 100 different shell scripts to deal with 100 different log formats. Because you want to be able to do stuff like watch an email, hit your gateway server, then move through and then watch the user actually pick it up.  Because really you want to democratize your data, democratize your logs. And apparently because Docker and Mesos logging really sucks, so this is a really, really good way to do it. So, and how do we do that? Well, with the help, obviously. So this is a quick rundown of Elasticsearch. It scales to hundreds of nodes, terabytes of data. It's pretty simple. Zero config means that the defaults that we ship, they're saying up until a size, reasonable size, maybe about 10 nodes or so. After that you want to start looking at changing things. So a few basic terms. An index is essentially a database for Elasticsearch. It's broken into shards, which are then spread across all of your different nodes in the cluster. And then you can replicate the indexes as well, which provide scalability and some redundancy. So when you've got a cluster in Elasticsearch, you have a single master at any point in time. It handles your cluster state when nodes join and leave, index creation, that sort of thing. So when you do want to create a cluster, you can have multicast or unicast discovery. You do need to configure this. By default it's multicast.  So the best bet to do if you're in production or even just playing around is to set your cluster name so that you create your own specific cluster. If you want to use unicast, you just listen to IPs. And you definitely want to keep your master eligible node, count uneven, just helps with split brain. This is an interesting question. So the answer to this is pretty much always, it depends, and it depends on all this stuff here. So the best way to actually figure out how big your node needs to be for your dataset is just to get a node, it can be a VM or something, a physical machine, something that's indicative of what you're looking at using. Create a single index with a single shard and no replicas, just throw data at it. Once it falls over, you've got a bit of a limit there. You know what you're going to work with. And because this is Java based, you want to keep your heap under 32 gigs, so 31 is good, because basically once you hit 32 gig, your Java pointers are not compressed and you start losing some inefficiencies. It's a pretty big ecosystem around elastic search. There's a whole bunch of plugins for languages, for monitoring. There's one for attachments as well, so you can use basically index attachments on emails, that sort of thing. There's a whole bunch of clients. I just realized that .NET is wrong. It should be, we actually have a Nest client for .NET. We've got Hadoop integration. And there's also the EOK stack as well, which you can kind of think of as being part of the ecosystem. So super quick, this is, if you want to do something in development, if you want to have a play around, you can do this on your laptop. It's really that simple. This is, we can check if it's alive. If you get a 200 response, elastic search is ready to receive an index data and also do searching on the data. And it's near real time. So some cool tools. Elastic search is full of APIs, but most things are, everything's returned as a JSON, but JSON's kind of sucky to read. You can use the question mark pretty on the end of a request and it'll line feed, format stuff, which makes it a bit easier. But, and this is an example, right? So we're asking for the cluster state. We're getting cluster state. And if you look at the top here, you've got master node, and that's an ID that elastic search generates. If you can tell it's the bottom one, right? That's not very easy to read. Now it's super easy to read. So the CAD API has a whole bunch of endpoints here. Really handy for doing quick CLI checks or if you want to build things around Nagios plugins, that sort of thing. Very, very handy. Around monitoring, there are some community plugins. We also offer a Marvel plugin, which is free for dev use. It also comes included with support contract. So when you want to scale out a single node for elastic search, it's pretty simple. You just follow these steps. The cool thing about it is once a node joins a cluster, the shards that you've got will automatically balance across the new nodes. You can query and survey any node while things are being rebalanced as well. And as long as you've got replica set, you can survive the loss of a node. The bottom tip, all writes in elastic search are done sequentially, even an update to a document. So if you use an up-schedule, you find yourself, you'll get better performance, especially with SSDs. So super quick summary of LogStash. You can kind of think of it like an army knife or a multi-tool for... Well, it's primarily logs, but you can pass any sort of data into it. This is the general architecture.  So here's a couple of inputs. Monitoring ones from different data stores. So you can pull stuff out of Redis. You can pull things out of an email account, for example. You can listen on a TCP socket. Different filters. And this is where you kind of manipulate your data and really add value to it. So some interesting ones are the GOIP, which is where you actually take an IP and then using an in-built database within LogStash, you can get a latitude and longitude. So you can use that later on. The date's really cool because you can actually set a standard date format or if you really want, you can change it. If anyone here is familiar with LogStash, there's Grock. If you're not familiar with LogStash, you will get to know Grock pretty familiarly. It's very powerful pattern matching.  And again, we've got monitoring. We can send it out again to a different protocol. We can send it to Elasticsearch. You can send it to SendItOut. So there's about 150 inputs, filters and outputs built into LogStash. There's another contrary package from the community with another 100. Very simple to build your own and include those as well. Again, really quick to get up and running. You do need a config. You do need Java 7 or Java 8, same with Elasticsearch. That one's kind of boring. We'll have a look at this one. So here we're passing. We're just telling to listen on standard in and then whatever gets sent in consists of these three parts of a message. And then when you pass in, that string, you can see here it's actually broken stuff out. That's really simple, but it gives you an idea. So this is a post-fix example. We've got a bit more of a complex grok filter. We've also standardized. We're matching it. We're doing a date filter. And then, again, we're spinning it back out. And this is what you get. And this is kind of where you can start to see things. You're getting more value out of your logs.  You're getting the original message at the top as well. This is CLF. So patch your engine. Most people will probably know it as. This is kind of really, really cool because you can actually see here we've got the get verb broken out. We've got the response broken out. We've got the bytes broken out. And what you can actually do is once you get it to this point and put it into Elasticsearch, you can start going, well, give me all the non-200 responses. Or a date range. Or you can say, give me all the 200 responses and tell me how many bytes they used. And then you can graph all of this. And it's rather than having to do a grep and then count and add all those up, you can actually do it graphically. So one thing we haven't done here is we haven't broken out the client IP and G located it. The agent down the bottom, we actually have a user agent pattern where it'll actually break these all down so you can do further queries between this time and that sort of thing. And then to get it to Elasticsearch it's just as simple as putting the Elasticsearch protocol in the output there. And then you can see here the match message of combined Apache log. So this is actually that pattern and these are patterns that are broken. They're actually included in LogSash. There's a whole bunch of them. And again you can build your own and include those. So you want to deploy. This is essentially what a general pipeline will look like. Your ship is going to be something like a syslog or a LogSash instance. It can be something that spits out logs on TCP or UDP for example. It's pretty like it's good, it'll work. There's nothing wrong with it.  And the most common brokers we see are things like Redis or Kafka or Rabbit or ZeroMQ. And then you scale that out. And then you scale that out. And then you scale that out. And then you scale that out. And you can get to thousands of nodes with, or thousands of shippers. We've got customers with tens of thousands. We have Elasticsearch clusters with hundreds of nodes with petabytes sort of counts, trillions of documents. A document being essentially a line or an event. We haven't touched on Kibana. Kibana is Kibana 3 at the moment, which is the current general availability version. It's just JSS and CSS. You can put it under whatever you want. There's some sample configs on GitHub under the Kibana repo that you can use for Apache and Nginx. Version 4 is on the way. It's a complete rewrite. It's currently in beta. If you're using Kibana 3 and you haven't tried it yet, just check it out. It's really, really cool. Kibana 4 will only work with Elasticsearch 1.4, though, so be aware of that. So we've taken all of our Apache logs and our Nginx logs and whatever else you want. And this is actually how you can graphically portray it. So this is an Apache log. And we've got things at the top here. We have separate queries that are broken out into just the different file types. And this is a looks like a 24-hour time range. So you can see the use cycle. You can tell where you peak hours. You've got a breakdown of your requests as well. And then down the bottom there is actually a table with a list of all the events that relate to this time range. So you can update this dynamically and it'll update all the graphs dynamically as well. Similar sort of thing here. A couple of different graphs. You've got a terms panel over the side of the balance. This is just a dark theme and the previous one was a light theme. This one's pretty cool because it actually shows the use of the Twitter-importing log stash and they've pooled in tweets and then they've broken them down that's kind of a bit of a bad picture but they've actually broken them down into languages. So you can see the different languages in the line graph over there. And then they've geolocated them onto the map as well. And then down the bottom is a little trend a little trend bar.  So some useful helpers. We've got Curator which manages your indexes in Elasticsearch. It's just a Python app. It's really handy. You can use relative timeframes. You can use relative sizes. So you know, delete or indexes older than X or keep only enough indexes so that I am only using one terabyte or 500 gig or whatever you want. There's Puppet and Chef modules. The log stash folder is written in Go so you can compile wherever you want. It's low overhead so if you don't want to install Java anywhere if you've got a small system with not many resources it's really good. Grock Debugger is a community app. It's really cool for pattern matching so once you start playing around with Grock you can just plug a log line into this and you'll get a pattern out from it. You can play around and build your own panels. So all of our codes up on GitHub for everything. All of our docs are up on our site. We have a really strong community. We've got Google Groups for Elasticsearch and Longstash. We've got a whole bunch of IRC channels as well. I hang out there a fair bit and because I'm currently the only one in this time zone you'll see me talking a lot and I'm happy to answer questions. We're always hiring as well so if you're interested come and have a chat to me I'm happy to answer technical questions. I've got a bunch of stickers and what not as well. Our community manager, Leslie Hawthorne is also giving a talk tomorrow. She's up the back there so please do come and see us and ask questions. Have more than happy to have a chat to anyone. Thank you. Okay we've got enough time for some questions. This nominal five minute break between this and the next talk so make a run for it. This one over there on the right. Does your system handle large documents at all? Is it possible to store binary blogs? For example, crash dump files associated with log entries? Is that just not appropriate? Yeah you can. Depends how big you're talking though. But yeah, it depends. This one down the front. We've got some about 300 gigs of logs a day. So to process something like that I guess it wouldn't want to process all of them but process some of them. What for a blade with eight cores with a pipeline with eight core blades with 24 gigs of RAM sort of thing. How many gigs of logs do we process per second? We have customers doing tens of thousands a second so it's not a problem. It's just a matter of elastic search is built to scale horizontally so you really only want to go certain height vertically for a node size. So you just keep throwing more nodes at it. Same with log stash. It's just a single process but you can if you use a broker like Redis or Kafka you can have multiple log stashes reading off and it'll pull the logs in. You'd have to test that but I'm happy to chat to you about that. So have you dealt with issues of data corruption between your nodes and identifying and correcting that? Does it automatically fix itself when it detects it? That's a bit of a complicated question. There's been a whole bunch of changes done in the later elastic search to add some better checks something around index and shards. I'm not sure if there's maybe we should have a chat afterwards but there has been work done to that. Historically the biggest problem I've found using elastic search is that usually I'll be asked to put it into place for someone and they either don't want to spend the time tuning it or refuse to appropriately resize up or don't want a second node or all these kind of unusual edge cases that seem like something that perhaps would be fixed if it was self-tuning the way some of the higher end SQL databases are. Even as a paid sort of option through the support channel is there anything that is like that even if it's like a community script or something that tunes elastic search as configs for where it is based on limits? No, because it depends on your document. What you're doing, your query is you're doing the node you're on the elastic search version you're on. So best option there would be to hit up the community you know say post your config let us know your details your problems and then there will be someone that can help maybe probably me for a second The usual answer was more nodes or bigger node That is a point where that becomes pretty much the only answer it was built to scale and that's kind of what you're going to do How do you get data out of it like if you only want to hold data for say 12 months or you know you have certain streams that you want to hold for 3 months certain streams for 6 Curator can manage that so you can say only keep these indexes if you use a prefix like a name on your index you give it a name so you say keep these ones for 3 months delete them afterwards you can export them you can do there's a snapshot and restore API to do backup so you can save them off to S3 for example you can actually pull them out with LogSash and then put them somewhere else there's a whole bunch of options Okay, thank you Thanks


Welcome back to our final video of our five videos in the miniseries and in this video We're going to be talking through how I like to develop match play skills in our younger junior players in particular eight and under So let's see how I get the little ones playing matches Just like the ability to rally children playing competitions gives them hours of fun Not only does it give them fun on a tennis court? It also gives them the opportunity to learn how to win and how to lose both equally as important as each other Now competition doesn't have to be serious. It doesn't have to be scored in the traditional way There are lots of different ways that you can do it and we'll be starting right now on my first progression The learning how to play matches is quite difficult for adults So when teaching children how to play matches, there's a lot to it First of all, they need to understand the boundaries of the court and what is in and what is out The next step is learning how to score. So before using rackets and before even using a tennis net We're simply going to play what I call a catch match in this tiny little square at the back of the court So I've got my brother Wilson Wilson if you come over So some of you would have seen my other brother buddy in my last video I've actually got four brothers, so I'm going to work my way through them But this is Wilson. He's the third in line now Wilson I'm going to throw the ball up. It's going to bounce somewhere in the square You're going to catch it and throw it back as soon as the ball leaves the boundaries of the square Whoever misses it. The other player has to shout out. So here we go Okay, so I made the first mistake. Wilson wins the point So Wilson's score is one my score is zero. So Wilson's going to start the next one Good at this game. Okay. So again, I missed the box Wilson scored a point. The score is two zero So as you can see it's quite a basic way for children to understand the boundaries of a certain area What is in and what is out and how to score points in tennis the next stage after our initial catch match Is to start to introduce the net. So we're going to play exactly the same game But this time we've got to try and throw the ball over the net into our opponent's Square so we as you can see we've got quite a small area so the children can find success straight away So they're going to stand behind their square and they're going to be ready to catch Throwing and catching over the net Trying to keep going until our opponent misses the boundary of the court Okay, so Now there's another way to win the point If the ball goes into the net your opponent wins the point. Wilson's doing pretty well here. So one love to Wilson There is another way and we're also going to introduce the double bounce this time So if a player sees the ball bounce twice before it's caught they're going to call double bounce It was a double bounce. So again Wilson wins the point. It's pretty good isn't it? This next step is quite a jump So there may be ways in between the last progression and this progression to try to marry them together But we're now going to introduce a racket. We're also going to introduce the serve so We're going to use the first progression of serves from the first video, which is the scoop serve I'm going to stand behind the line. I'm going to scoop ball over to my partner or my opponent Wilson We're going to play a point Trying to keep it within the bounds of the court I'm going to beat him for once before we're going to go. As you can see I'm just using the simple first progressions of Bounce and tap my forehand bounce and tap on my back Yeah, I haven't done the volley. Maybe that's for another video. As that progression is quite a big jump It might be worth on the previous progression without using a racket starting the point with an overarm throw to replicate the serve So in your catch match You can start with an overarm throw and then get into the rally Another way you can break things up in between the catch match and the hit match is to have one player hitting and one player catching So Wilson, you're going to use your racket. I'm going to be the person that's throwing and catching So I will start with an over arm throw Wilson will hit it over the net and I'll catch it. We're playing a point now with one hitter And one catcher The same as before you win the same way And then you can swap so I was just the racket That's a nice way to break things up in between those two progressions as you can see there matches don't have to be formal They don't have to have huge courts and proper scoring systems We've got a tiny little tennis court and we'll be using very basic progressions But you can see how a younger junior player can find success quite early on Now I hope you enjoyed those progressions if you did make sure you like and if you've got any questions about it Or if you've got any other ways that you like to work on match play skills Let me know in the comments below but make sure you subscribe and I hope to see you next time. Take care


Online businesses usually come down to fundamentals.  It comes down to this, we have traffic that's getting our offer in front of people, how many people are coming to our websites, to our landing pages, to our opt-ins, to our order forms. Then we have conversion. What happens when we get that traffic? Can we actually convert that attention into a sale? And then we have delivery and operations on the backend. So how do we fulfill the promise that we made to get that money into our bank account? So we always want to be focused on those three things. And when we look at AI, we're not looking for some magic wand, we're looking for pieces of technology that fulfill those three core functions in our business.


about the five things you should know before starting to buy your form or deciding to buy your form. And before I go into those five things, I just want to encourage you to really ask questions, pick my brain, challenge me in anything that I say. And most importantly, this podcast is for you to get the answers that you need. So feel free to ask any questions. And just to remind you that all these podcasts lives would be posted on the private property social media pages on Facebook, as well as YouTube post the live. So you could watch the videos at any time after the live. And yes, please. And also just continue to comment and we'll answer any questions that you have. But I want to start on today's topic. The five things you should know before starting to buy your form. And just the first point that I would definitely suggest is that you need to know your why. Why is it that you want to buy a form? Why is it that you want to do? Yeah, start farming or be in the agricultural sector. And also what is driving, what is the driving force behind the decision? And if it's a farm that you've inherited, you know, it's all about deciding, do you want to pursue this journey or not? Do you want to sell it? Do you want to give it off to someone else that could take better advantage of this asset? But if you're buying a farm, I think you should know your why simply because that why, whatever that reason is, is what is going to get you through your farming journey because farming is quite a difficult industry. It's very unique and also very complex as well. However, it has high rewards. So you need to know your why you need to know your goal, you need to know your purpose. In addition to that, that is the reason that this knowing your why is going to help you be a good leader for not only yourself, but for your team members, service your client's vector. And it also gives a direction in terms of are you on the right path with achieving your goals, the strategy that you had before, are you aligned, are there any things that you should consider or change or modify to adapt to reaching your goals? So know your why. I know that sometimes a lot of people look at farming and look at farmers and look at the beautiful pictures of crops, cattle, whatever it may be, and people may admire that were inspired to become a farmer one day. But as I always say, farming is a business. And then behind the scenes, certain things are different. And I suppose as farmers, sometimes you don't really always communicate these things. So you need to know your why and it needs to be a passion. It needs to be something that you really want to do and that you cannot imagine yourself without doing it. So know your why because that will get you ahead of the difficult times and also can be very rewarding if you're able to achieve those dreams. My other one is to the other factor that I strongly believe that you should know before buying a farm is that you need to be mentally fit. The reason why I say you need to be mentally fit is because a lot of farmers I meet are very resilient individuals and they've built strong and tough characters over the years. If you know that you're a person that easily gives up, that easily does not rise up to the challenge, then I don't think farming is for you. Then I definitely would suggest do not go and invest in buying a farm. And the reason why I say that is because so many things can happen in your farm business every single day, even if you've planned for it, even if you've planned for the risks, even if you've planned for those opportunities, a lot of things can go wrong. And that requires for you to take strong and active decisive decisions that will help you move over to the next step or solve that problem or rise up to the occasion. A simple example could be you might be in the peak of your production period cultivating certain crops and then your most important resource asset, let's say a tractor in this example breaks down. How are you going to rise up to the challenge? Do you have a mechanic in-house you could fix that? Where are you going to source an alternative tractor within that point in time? This could might cause a disruption in your ability to supply to your clients on time as well. And so you need to think on your feet and make quick decisions. Another example that I could bring in is that you could leave your plants well irrigated, well planted at the end of the day, you know, you coil it a day with yourself and your workers and everybody goes home. And then at night, sorry, and then in the next morning at dawn, frost comes and really destroys all your crops. You could find yourself in a financial backlog or in a financial distress business simply because all of your crops, all of that investment has really been hit by frost or hail storm or whatever the challenge might have been. And you find yourself in a very difficult financial position. How do you pick yourself up from there? If you're an individual that easily gives up, then really within that specific problem, you won't do well. You won't solve that situation very well. And so this is where the resilience comes in. The tough character comes in. So definitely before buying a farm, you need to know that can I stand this? Can I stand the challenges? Read up about the challenges that farmers face. One other example I know which is dear to my heart and we just recently spoke about it with Woodcladding, which is a farmer that we had on this podcast about a few days ago. And she mentioned that, you know, she's a farmer that forms high value crops. And part of her crop selection was herbs that she had planted. And little did she know that in a few months time or in the following year, we would be hit by a global pandemic. And what she found or experienced on her farm is that during this global pandemic, nobody wanted to buy herbs, her basil, her rocket, her wild rocket. Nobody really wanted to buy her herbs. And everybody was focused on buying the essential needs, essential food, essential crops to sustain their livelihoods. And she found herself in a very difficult situation. Again, she lost some money because she couldn't sell those crops. But her business model had to adapt and change within that time and go into planting crops that really would require a lot of demand or sorry, the plant crops that the market needs a lot of demand from at that point in time. And so had she not been a resilient farmer, a farmer that can think on her feet and, you know, apply some business model or business thinking into her problem, she wouldn't have gotten far and she wouldn't be where she is today. And so I think you definitely need to know that you have to be a mainly fit individual. You have to be, you have to know yourself well enough to know that with any crises or any challenge, I can rise up to their occasion and really make it work because if you can't do that, you will suffer great losses, not only from a financial point of view, but from a personal point of view. And that could be detrimental in your business. The third topic that I want to touch on is definitely being hands-on. I have written blogs about this, I've spoken about it quite extensively and I really feel that as a farmer, you need to be hands-on. I've had people come up to me and say or write me emails or messages and say, I want to farm, but I'm kindly pursuing my corporate job. I love what I'm doing. It is my passion, but I also have a passion for farming. How do I start? Where do I start? And I always, it's quite a difficult thing to tell people, but I definitely think it's important for you to be hands-on.  You really want to make sure that this money or rent or cents or a couple of thousand rents that you're putting into this business can yield some sort of return and investment. So if you're not hands-on, if you're not able to be there and look after those operations, clients will take advantage of you, employees will take advantage of you, people in the neighboring communities will take advantage of you because they will know that this farmer or the business owner is really not serious about his or her business. And therefore, I think we could get away with doing a lot without being held accountable for it. A number of farmers have felt this pinching. To give you a small reality is that my neighbor, very close to my farm, has been farming on this particular land for six years. This farm particularly is not his primary business. He has another business, but today he's selling that farm. And the reasons for him selling that farm is because he says that over the past five, six years, he's really not made a good return on investment. He's lost significant amount of money. All the parts that he had planted and sold to the market, the money that was coming in was really paying operational costs and employees. And he really didn't get anything out of that investment at the end of the day. But he's been spending time and effort having to drive to the farm on weekends at times where he could have spent with his family just to look at operations. And sometimes he would find that when he got to the farm on the weekends, he would see great disappointment in the crops. The reading wasn't done, the fertilizing wasn't done. There were a couple of infrastructural damages on his farm. And so because he's not there every day, obviously things would go wrong. I think as a business person, you have to set the standard. And most importantly, do this for yourself. Be hands-on for yourself because you need to know the ins and outs of your business. If you're just leaving the responsibility to other individuals, how are you going to performance manage them? How are you going to know at the end of the day what you're producing, when and how much money you're getting for it? So definitely be hands-on not only for your business, for your employees, but for yourself. You need to know the strategic decisions for your farming in the next season or in these next coming years. So definitely, I really would recommend you to definitely be hands-on. The fourth topic I want to go through is that it takes time to realize your return on investment. You know, some businesses are quite simple in the sense that you can develop the product and go sell it to your clients and then get paid within, you know, a couple of weeks or days. And the time, the lead time it takes into developing that product can be four days, can be a week, etc. With farming, you know, based on specific crops, it could take three weeks, four weeks or six weeks for them to mature, even going to three months, for example. From a fruit tree and super fruit perspective of fruit farming, it definitely takes time to grow citrus, grapes, for example, apples, for example. And so it takes time and that time could be a matter of years, three years, four years, whatever the case might be. And you need to understand that during that time, you still need to keep your business afloat. You still need to pay employees that come onto the farm and prune those trees and prune those trees and spray those trees and water those trees. There's a lot really that goes into play whilst prior to you harvesting any crop of some sort, going to livestock as well. The same goes with cattle, you know. Some breeds only, for example, studs or breeds only produce cars once a year. And only one, you know, with sheep is a different thing, goats is a different thing. But even then, it takes a couple of months before, you know, your cows can produce any babies. And so you still need to sustain your business prior to you making that sale. And so yeah, it really does take time to realize your return and investment. And vegetable production is very intense and it's quick. So even then, there's a lot of infrastructure that would go into having to improve and develop your farm further so that you could stay ahead of the curve when selling your products to your market. So, you know, some may think that, oh, you know, spinach only takes like, say, four weeks to grow and recover two or three weeks to grow. And therefore, within three weeks, I've got my money back, even though the money comes within the business, there's still certain improvements that you have to make onto the farm. There's expenses that you have to pay some budgeted for some unexpected that you still need to have to pay and put priority on so that your business can sustain itself and can thrive at the end of the day. So sometimes, you know, it depends on you as a business person and obviously speaking to your content, it takes time to realize those profits. So make sure that you're making the right investments. And before buying the farm, make sure that this farm is in line with my growth strategy. Don't go buy a farm of a two-hectare plot, for example, whereas your dream and your vision is to aspire to grow maize in one day be a commercial maize farmer, you know, you can't really make a good ROI with two hectares of maize. So therefore, speak to experts. As I said in the previous video, speak to experts that could guide you prior to making that investment. Is this investment worthwhile? Is it aligned? Is it aligned towards my growth strategy, et cetera? And so these are the things that you have to take into account. So it definitely takes time to realize your return in investment because sometimes the revenue and the income that you receive from the business needs to go towards other expenses. And so typically I know the conversation in the farming community that when you go into farming, you really don't make a profit within three years. After three years, then we can talk. And there's some farmers that could tell you that, you know, in the first year of farming, I made a profit or doubled my profits in farming my tomatoes, for example. And in the second season, I lost all that money simply because there's so much uncertainty around farming as well. You know, today, we're going good next year, we're faced by a global pandemic, which can completely destroy your business model and really make your crop not wanted by the consumers because it's not really a crop of choice. It's not a priority or demand for consumers at that particular time. So even though you might make money in the first season, the second season might be a different case. And so yeah, I think definitely prior to making that investment, do as much research as possible, know that you in it for the long run, this is a marathon and not a sprint, and that you need to be patient. And if you make the right decisions there, then, you know, you are really setting yourself up towards great profit and success in your farming journey. The other, the final and last tip that I'm going to make about this particular topic that we're discussing today is that farming is not cheap. You know, a lot of our imports from an infrastructure point of view are imported. It's another point that I mentioned, so relating to the previous video is that, you know, the Rand-Dole exchange is currently affecting the industry as a whole. And a lot of the things are not produced locally simply because sometimes some of the things are expensive to produce locally. So you find yourselves as a farmer having to import a lot of products or deal with suppliers that can provide you a product that is at an imported price, not necessarily cheap at some times. And so farming is not cheap. There's things that you constantly have to put into your farming business to help keep your business alive, to sustain your business. Right now, with the scheduled power cuts that we're experiencing in the country, these are, you know, pose a major threat or an increase in our operational costs as farmers because we constantly rely on energy or power supply to maintain our businesses, especially if you're in a very intensive production, you know, to keep the pack house running, your cold room running, to keep products at the right temperature so that your clients or your market can receive it in good quality.  And even though you want to maybe change from an electrical connection to a solar power connection, that investment is quite steep as well. So you need to plan and budget ahead. And if you find yourself in a position about who do you talk to, where do you go to for such information, speak to other farmers, give them different scenarios because they have definitely would have walked a path before you, especially if it's farmers that have been farming for many more years, speak to your agri specialists in the banks, the different professionals within your input supply companies that you buy from, collect all that information. And these are the right individuals that could really help you in terms of how to forecast in the following seasons, what are the right investments to make right now so that you don't lose out and lose a lot of money. And so when I say farming isn't cheap, you really need to plan ahead and make sure that is this production right for me before going out and building a farm that has greenhouse tunnels or before investing in silos, for example, figure out is this going to work for me? Is this infrastructure going to bring in money for me? You know, you might speak to farmers that will say you need a cold room, but really does your current operations need a cold room right now? So these are the things that you need to really ask yourself as an individual, as a business person, as a farmer, in terms of will it really bring money into my business or not? And therefore, prior to making that investment, interrogate those decisions. Draw off the small business plan for yourself, a risk management plan for yourself that you could always bounce back to and make sure that with whatever you're investing on your farm, it's going to yield great return on investments for you instead of making unnecessary purchases. So just to sum that up for again for you is that the things that you should know before buying a farm or investing in a farm, what is starting to go into farming in that case is that you need to know your why. Why is it that you're doing this? Is this a passion? Is this a hobby? Is this something that a lot of friends are doing that maybe you also just want to do? You need to know your why and you need to know your purpose. Secondly, you need to be mentally fit. You need to be a resilient individual. If you're one person that really gives up and really doesn't rise up to occasion or challenges, then I don't think this industry is for you. It is a business at the end of the day. So sometimes you really have to be a professional and a leader, not only for yourself, your employees, but for your clients as well and make good strong business decisions that could benefit all parties along the value chain and within your operations at the end of the day. You need to know that being a farmer requires a lot of time and patience and really requires you to be hands-on. You need to know what happens into your business before you could set out responsibilities and give other people tasks. Most importantly, you need to know how to manage them. So if you don't know what duties that are required on a day-to-day on your farm, how you're going to expect people to manage or execute certain tasks that you've set out for them. So you definitely need to be hands-on. Also, the fourth one is that you need to know that it really does take time to realize profits. There's a lot of investment that needs to go into your farming operations in the beginning, a lot of capital outlay. So therefore, budgeting and planning for those resources is imperative. The last one is that the last one on the five topics that you need to know is that farming is not cheap, you know, but then again, a lot of people might say, you know, expensive is relative or cheap is relative. So when I say farming is not cheap is that you need to make be sure that what you're investing in in the first years within your business can take you in your business journey for quite some time and then it can sustain your farm. So don't make unnecessary investments and these could cost you a great deal if you do make unnecessary investments or listen to too many advices and too many people that really make your decision-making process unsure at the end of the day that makes you doubt if what you're doing is the right thing. So definitely know that farming is not cheap. It can cost you a lot, especially if you make mistakes. And yeah, so thank you so much for your time today. Feel free to ask more questions again. I really encourage that. It's nice to stay connected and engage with you guys and I'm happy to answer any questions that you have. Nonetheless, thank you for watching and I will be joining you next week Tuesday with a guest and be sure to look out on our social media for what our next topic would be and who our guest will be. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.


Hello, everyone. Thank you for tuning in to the Straight Talk for Macho. I'm Bruce Wilson, Executive Director of Service Render Incorporated. And Straight Talk for Macho is one of our many programs that we have. Before we get started, talk to our wonderful guests. I want to make some announcements about our programs. So our programs are what we're doing now. We're having a reopening of our art gallery called Art So Wonderful, located at the University Mall. And it's April 29th. We're going to have orders and live entertainment. Some incredible people are going to be speaking about how important it is to have these type of outlets of art galleries and live entertainment through our Vermont local art music program. And so I'm very excited. And then April 29th, we're also going to have an event in the Center Court at the University Mall. It's to celebrate and thank youth for being on boards. We created youth home boards in 2003. And they sit on the police commission, planning commission, and school boards. So we just revised our resolution with the City of Burlington. And so these events that we're doing, one is tonight. You'll probably get to see it. It's going to be at the City Hall, Cantos Auditorium. And youth is going to be performing. And we have some dignitaries to speak about how important it is to be on these city boards. And so we're very excited. And so let's get right to our show. And so our guest today is Elaine. Yes. Hi, Bruce. From Emerge Vermont. Elaine Haney from Emerge Vermont. That's right. Help me out here. And so how are you today? I'm doing great. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on. Thank you for coming. That's my pleasure. Absolutely. And our co-host is Jenna Walker. Hello, Jenna. Hi. Student at St. Michael's College. And we love St. Michael's College and all our colleges around the state. But St. Michael College is very important to us in liberal arts college. We've done a lot of things there. We've got to go to Elliott Hall and the real jabs, the 300s field, and working with students in all kinds of ways. So thank you. So Elaine, so many professional people that's entering into some type of election has went through your program. Yeah. Emerge Vermont trains Democratic women to run for office. So we offer instruction on all the different aspects of campaigning from field work to fundraising, messaging and budgeting and campaign finance and all that kind of information that you need to run a successful campaign to get elected. And so we've had in the past, we started in 2013. We were founded by Governor Madeline Cunan and a collection of amazing Vermont women. And we have currently, by the end of this session that we're training right now, we'll have 176 alumni. Wow, that's a lot. Boy, I love Madeline Cunan. She's so distinguished. She is, and she is just an absolute role model for any woman who wants to get involved in local government. She started at the most basic level in her town and moved her way up and broke a lot of barriers for women in government. And unfortunately, Vermont has not seen as much advancement in that area as we'd like to see. There's only been 14 women who serve in statewide office in our history. And Madeline is two of them. She served as lieutenant governor and as governor. So we are really hopeful that the graduates from our program are going to continue breaking those barriers and entering offices where women haven't been traditionally represented before. And so what's the application process? How do women get involved in the program? So we have a training that is about 70 plus hours. And at the moment it goes from January to April. So it has moved around in the past. But the current session is January to April and this coming August we will open the application again for the class of 2023. And it will go from January to April of 2023. And how many people? Generally, our current class has 24 women in it. Generally, we try to go no higher than 25 people. We also offer smaller trainings occasionally, not on a regular basis. Sometimes like a weekend boot camp or some evening webinars as well. But those are sort of more spontaneous. The signature training that we do happens every year. So out of 70 hours, that's a lot. That's a lot of time. And so are the classes like the weekends or evenings or mornings? Both actually. So with COVID, we learned that we have to do a lot of this online. And in fact, I'm a graduate of the 2021 class. And that was done entirely online because of COVID. So we met for very long Zoom sessions on weekends. But this year we're doing a hybrid version.  And the last couple of Saturdays have been in person. And the evenings online are three hour sessions. And so we have had five Saturdays. And I believe we've had, I've lost count of the days, it was a total of 13 different sessions. And the last session is actually next Saturday where we'll finish things up. And then we're going to celebrate the graduation of our class, as well as the classes of 21 and 20, because they didn't get a graduation party because of COVID. So we're going to have a big celebration on Saturday, May 14th in Barrie. Oh wow, Barrie. I love Barrie. We're going to do the event at the Old Labor Hall, which is a wonderful historic building and a great exhibit on the Barrie Union formations over the century. So how do you grade it? We don't grade. It's not like that. You don't graduate with a transcript or anything. You do get a diploma. But it's more the experience. And the women who sign up to take our class are not all going to run for office. They are also women who are exploring. Like, I think I want to do public service, but I'm not sure what that means. And they want to learn how much effort it takes to run for office as part of that education for themselves. Many women take the training because they want to be campaign managers or campaign comms directors. And then there's the women who plan to be candidates. And some of them come in and they say, I'm running this year. And others will say, I have a goal of five years from now. I'm going to run for this office. So it's a wide spectrum and everybody learns the same thing together. But we don't have like a grading system or anything like that. That's not the point. No, that's not the point. So I just wanted to know. So once they do the 70 hours, they should be ready. They're ready to run. Absolutely. Our class this year has, it's possible that we will have up to eight women on August primary this year, which is incredibly exciting. And four of the women in our class are now on their select boards, which those elections take place in March. So that's already happened for them. And it's really exciting to see the different offices that these folks are choosing to run for. So Mike, if somebody was interested in running for school board, is your program something that they might want to be a part of? Absolutely. School board and select board races are smaller because the districts are small, but the skills are the same. And you might not have to raise a ton of money. Maybe even $500 is more than enough. But understanding the importance of going door to door, meeting your neighbors where they are, getting your message honed and saying, getting your point across quickly and accurately and concisely so that voters know what to think about you and they can start forming their opinions as to who's going to vote, who they're going to vote for. Those skills are super important no matter what race you're running for. If I could just say one more thing about that. We'll keep talking about it. The importance of this training also is not just if you're running for office or want to be in politics. If you're somebody who runs for or who is running a nonprofit, or you are somebody who in your community wants to make a change, knowing how to convince the public how to vote for something is a really important skill. Maybe you want to institute a program in your community and your select board is wanting to know what the public thinks and you need to explain to them why it's important and you have to talk to them over a period of time and perhaps raise money. These skills are super important outside of politics as well. Those skills are so important. When you're talking about what are some of the main strengths you need to run? Is it the marketing? Like you said, getting a point out there. How do you reach these people? What's some of your trainings on reaching these individuals? The marketing aspect of reaching them? Your platform? Yeah. How important are the platforms? Well, I'll tell you, it's an important question you're asking. I'm going to get an answer that I don't think you're expecting. We focus from the very start on your personal values. Why are you running? Why is it really important to you that you get into this office and what change are you hoping to make? You need to be really clear on that because as you go through the campaign process, things are going to come out of left field.  You're going to be criticized. You're going to be questioned. You need to know why am I doing this? That's the most important thing. That authenticity comes through when you are working on your messaging, when you're trying to convince a voter to vote for you, or when a voter comes to you and says, I'm not buying anything you're selling right now. You can say, okay, I accept that, but that's what's my core belief. That's the most important part. Then when you talk about messaging, you want to talk about how to say that in the shortest amount of words possible while getting your point across. How to have presence on camera, how to work with the media, how to write a press release, all those kinds of things are super important. Knowing your core mission, your core values deeply and accurately helps you share that message that much more clearly. What do you say in a press release? What do you say when you're running for some office? Press releases are actually kind of formulaic. You want to say who, what, where, when, and why. Jane Smith is running for the office of state legislature for District X, and she's announcing her candidacy today. These are the things she hopes to accomplish, and then some information about the district, and then you're done. Press releases are more for getting information out for a specific purpose, whereas talking to interviewers, writing letters to the editor or something on front porch forum, those are places where you can be a little bit more expansive and talk about your vision or your values. Press releases are really handy tools to get the media to pay attention to what you're trying to do in actual events or announcements. So how many people graduate? Is it a graduation? Okay, so how many people graduate? Well, we're graduating 24 on April 14th. Excuse me, May 14th. And total we will have at the end of May 176 alumni. Wow. We're really proud of that. That's so awesome. Does that number include the weekend workshops as well? Yes, the boot camp people, absolutely. It includes everyone who's gone through a boot camp training or our signature training. It also includes people who have taken training at the national level. So Emerge is actually a national organization with affiliates in 27 states, and they also offer training. And so we, for example, last summer ran a national boot camp that had 38 women in it from across the country, and some of them were from Vermont, and so those count towards our alumni as well. Awesome. You want something else? I noticed on your website that it is a national company or a project, but you have Emerge for Women and you have Emerge for Men. Is there possibly in the future Emerge for LGBTQ people or just non-binary representation that we could see coming forward? That's an awesome question, Jenna. Thank you for asking that. Men for Emerge for Mon is actually a group of supporters. So they are not part of our training system, but we look to them for their support and to support our candidates and to help us with training other people to how to work with women and to how to improve representation of women. Emerge as a national organization is having discussions right now about how to incorporate non-binary individuals into our training because we are very focused on electing more people from the new American majority, which is LGBTQ people, single women, childless women, women of color, LGBTQ people. We want to make sure that that majority, which is going to be between the next 20 and 30 years, those are the folks who are going to be in the majority of the United States. They need to be represented. So we are training them now so that they can be in office as soon as they possibly can and improve representation for that. So non-binary inclusion is something that is very high on our minds right now and we are working on how to do that. Yes. I'm really proud to be affiliated with an organization that's working on that. No doubt about it. So I don't know how many people of African-Americans have been through the training? Not as many as we'd like. And I became director almost a year ago and one of my goals was to increase the diversity of our leadership and of our alumni. And so we expanded our cabinet in the past year to include, we now have four women of color on our cabinet and then we've actively recruited women of color to take the training. So this year we have five women of color in the training. So that's about 16%, I believe. No, I'm wrong, 20% of the class, which is the highest percentage we've had of people of color in the class. And my goal is to just keep increasing that. Yeah, that's a decent number with 24 women graduating this year. Right. And so that's the kind of ratio at least I would like to see going forward for sure. No, but my being one of the widest state in America it's kind of hard to get people who might look like me or Jenna to be a part of your program. And so are you actually out there recruiting, trying to find them or looking for them? And you know, these type of people and to do that you would have to, they would want to run for some office too though, right? Well, as I said, a lot of the women who take the training don't necessarily have an office in mind to get started. But yes, we are actively recruiting women of color and folks to take the training all the time. So we have four cabinet members now who are women of color and so they are working with me to expand my network so that I can reach out to those people and offer the training to them and they are connecting me to people as well as the women who are in the class now. You know, they have friends. So the more that we train, the more the word gets out. But I'm also, I've reached out to various organizations. I've spoken to the folks who are organizing the Bright Leadership Institute to say, you know, please send your class members to us and we can send our class members to you. I've talked to Rights and Democracy Vermont. Mia Schultz, who is the Catalyst Leadership Program Director is on our cabinet. And so Mia has taught in our classes and I've taken classes through them. I'm really hoping that we can expand that partnership and raise the awareness of Emerge to communities of color so that they know that this is an option for them. No doubt about it. Yeah. And so, Ray, you got... Gerifano.  Yes. You know, and she talked about going to your training or maybe still going through it. Yeah, she is in our current class and she has the unusual position of she was planning to run for school board but then the state representative from her district stepped down and Ray was appointed to take her place by the governor. So now she's going to run for re-election or it'll be her first election. Yeah. But she's already in the seat, so that's kind of cool. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, we're really proud of her. She came in, we met, we met, she came to my, one of my places in Margarine, we met and talked about ways we can work together. She also just got inducted Wednesday to the SS Rotarian. I'm an SS Rotarian and it was nice that, and I was like, Ray, sit on the same committee with me, you know, like I'm on the Equity, Indiversity and Inclusion Committee and she said to me, no doubt about it. And she's doing this other program called View and so that she knew. Yeah, you know, the really amazing thing about a lot of the women who go through Emerge is they're involved in everything. Like you, they're on multiple boards and they're in multiple community settings making a difference and running for office is a piece of that. A lot of people will run for office, they'll serve a couple of terms and then they'll go on and do other things and that's really important. Some folks stay in the legislature for a long time, but others, you know, they have a broad expanse of experience and they try to bring their skills to those audiences in a variety of different ways and being elected is just one of those ways you can make a difference. So Jenna is a sophomore at St. Michael's College and I guess that'll put you over 18 and so what's the age limit? 18 is definitely the minimum and I would love to talk to you about taking the training. In fact, we have an intern at Emerge Vermont who is also a St. Michael's student. She's a freshman and it's a great training for young people who are exploring. Our current class has two high school seniors in it and I think it's really valuable because both of those women they've got their whole future in front of them, they're not sure what they're going to want to do and so having this training means that if they decide to run for office in the future, they'll have the tools right there and the other thing about Emerge that is really, it separates Emerge from other organizations that train people is we have a network, it's our sisterhood and so when you're a graduate of Emerge, you are an Emerge sister forever and these women support each other on the campaign trail in the legislature on the select board. We support each other in friendly ways as well and so it's a group of people who are extremely dedicated to each other and also to making sure that representation of women continues to improve in Vermont and that's the overall goal, that's the whole point of this is to have better representation of women in government. No doubt about it. And so, I don't, you know, it seemed like this is, this state, it seemed more democratic and Republican or it gets democratic and progressive probably than more than Republican. So, so what's the, how's that work when, I guess it doesn't matter what tool you're affiliated with but are there Republicans within your organization? You might be one. Emerge Vermont trains Democratic women. Okay. That is the only requirement that we have. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. And so, so was she's good. Now, how many women, it seemed like a, it seemed like, I don't know, I don't have the answers but it seemed like there's a lot of women that sits in the house and legislative and more than men. Yeah. Vermont is among the top 10 of state legislatures that have women in office. We used to be number one but other states have caught up with us and we're somewhere between seven and nine right now at 42%, which is great. It's not 50%. It's not reflective of the actual demographics of our state. So, we want to see 50% or better in the state house and we're really fortunate because we have, in the state house, the leaders, the chairs of the committees are mostly women which is amazing and then we have a a woman, Senate pro tem, we have a woman, we have a woman lieutenant governor, we have a woman state treasurer and that's outstanding and in fact, the three legislative leaders, the speaker, the pro tem and the lieutenant governor, they're all Emerge women. They all graduate from Emerge. It's like beginning in Harvard. We're incredibly proud of that and there's about, there's 24 women in the state house who are Emerge grads and then there's one woman who is a secretary, Secretary Julie Moore of agency national resources, is an Emerge grad. The three of the four women who are running for Congress right now for the house are, so Senator Keisha Rom-Hinsdale is a co-founder of Emerge Vermont. Senator Ballant is a graduate and Lieutenant Governor Gray is a graduate. In addition, there is an Emerge grad, Dr. Nikki Tron, who is running against Congressman Welch for the Senate seat. She is also an Emerge grad. Wow. So we're everywhere. So important. So why do you think, I mean everybody, I just use Harvard, but I should use my school Northwestern, but I use Harvard. Why do you think people want to go, want to come to Emerge Vermont? Why do you think they want to need those 70 hours to say, well, and then so they can put on, I mean, I know they put on that resume and they put, I heard from Ray, I heard from Daisy, another one of your students, they were talking about Emerge Vermont. They just came out and said it, you know what I'm saying. And so why do you think, did they say? Because it works. Women get elected. So we, in either the 2020 or the 2018 cycle, we had an 83% win rate. That's enormous. So that means 83% of the Emerge women who ran for office won. A lot of them are still in the state house and the training is super effective. So it's, there's no secret sauce. It's just the hard work of understanding how to do field work, how to fundraise, how to get your message out clearly. It's effective training and we do it in a way that brings women together and the network is the other piece of it. People tell you about Emerge without you even asking, because it's really special and people really enjoy having that camaraderie, that sisterhood and knowing that they can call on each other to support themselves when they need it that even extends to fundraising. Like I know that if I ever decide to run for office I can call my Emerge sisters and they'll help me out with that and I will do the same for them. I think that's the whole package. It's the effective training and the sisterhood that really make it a compelling thing for folks to do if they want to run for office. And plus to them, I think you just can't take this away is what you said about them having that character, the characteristics why do I want to run for this and why? And I think that's important to be able to present that well, right? About why? Well, and I think also we have an innate understanding that women do things kind of differently. When women have passed legislation, there's been studies done at the congressional level that legislation introduced by women has a higher success rate and it has a higher number of co-sponsors signing on. And so that shows success because women are more collaborative in the way they do their work. They build alliances. They work together to pass legislation. And on top of that women tend to focus on the more traditional women topics like child care, mental health services, families, food, health care. Those are the topics that are really important to women because they are generally more associated with the family and you know the needs of women come more to the center when women are at the table. So you will see legislation about domestic abuse or sexual harassment improved into the criminal justice system because we are looking to solve problems and we know how to do that in a collaborative way. And it's a new way to do business if you're formerly a legislature that has been predominantly men. They just do things a little differently. Priorities might be a little different. I think that Vermont has benefited tremendously from the presence of all the women that are in the state house and in particular with the leadership that there is now. We have an outstanding treasurer. We have an outstanding Lieutenant Governor. Our state legislative leadership is really tops. They've managed to get Prop 5 and Prop 2 on the ballot. They succeeded in getting a pension plan going through although we'll see if our governor will not veto that. But there's been a huge amount of progress made by these women and they're a great thing to do effectively. So you have Becca, you've got Molly and you've got Keisha. And they all run it for Congresswoman for the house. So how do you support candidates? I'm sure you do, right? Do you support them somehow? Well, not necessarily because the congressional race is a great example. There are three extremely talented Emerge Women running. We do not endorse candidates. We do not endorse endorsements of any kind. We do not contribute to candidates. We do not do any campaigning for them on their behalf. What we do do is after primaries when the individual Democratic candidate if it's an Emerge candidate will say go. Like we'll support them in that way. We support them with things like social media. But nothing significant in the terms of campaign support or organization. Sure. Yeah. I get it. But it kind of seemed like that you could though. You could if you wanted to. I don't know if it's part of your bylaws. Because I think we'll have supported one of the candidates. So people are completely at freedom to contribute to whoever they wish. Being a congressman, I don't think so. If I was running for congress, everyone would support me. Well, congressman Welch has been very generous to Emerge Vermont. He has been a sponsor of some of our events in the past for many years. Contributing to Emerge Vermont is contributing to the education of any woman who is a Democrat who wants to get that training. It's not contributing to any of our individual graduates as candidates. Yeah. I'm a new service provider. I work with the coalitions around the state of Vermont. So one year we was going to Washington to visit our senators and congressmen. And we did. And so we go to Welch's office. It's a little smaller than the rest of the senators office. So it's hard to find the seat. So he's like, Bruce, Bruce, come sit over here. It's sitting at his desk. And so I sit at the congressman's desk. And then one year I was at the Kitsafe Collaborative Awards. We got four of them. He was speaking. And he's like, and there goes Bruce Wilson who took over my office. I'm like, oh no. Peter, you didn't say that. So it's funny. He's a humorous guy. He's great. He's cool. I like him anyways. I like him anyways for that event. I think all the candidates are really, you know, it's unique, are unique. And based on who they are and what they do, it's like they're definitely different. They believe a lot about the same, some of the platforms are the same.   And so it's going to be very interesting. I know, you know, I think my friend, you know, she's, she's, um, um, very important to, uh, as a lieutenant governor. And, um, the rest of them is doing the positions that they are in. And hopefully that's some female might step into their spot whoever wins. Hopefully, yeah. Yeah. The lieutenant governor's race has quite a few candidates in it. Oh, I know. I know, um, he's going to run for it. He's like, ah, that's all right. I'm glad he is, you know what I mean, because no, he stayed, I think he was lieutenant governor for some, well, no, a couple of terms. Yes. You know, he did well. And I like some of his philosophy. A lot of things he, um, wanted to do and, uh, and did, you know what I mean. Well, uh, former representative Kitty Toll and current representative Charlie Kimball and then, um, Patricia Preston, who's the director of the World Council on World Affairs. So they're all highly qualified people. So it'll be a very interesting primary. Let me ask you a question. What is a lieutenant governor's job? Because it's like vice president, you know, of like the United States because you're like, are you going to do lieutenant governor both preside over the Senate? Right. So, um, lieutenant governor Gray starts the day at the Senate each day that she's there. Um, she's the tie breaking vote if there's a tie. And then other than that, the lieutenant governor's office is, um, I don't want to say largely ceremonial, ceremonial, but it's, it's an opportunity to get out and, and either, you know, work in partnership with the governor and help advance the initiatives of the administration. So, what do you think that, um, except, um, Dean, that there's been a Republican, um, governor's? Why do you think how that happened? The Monters are funny. How did that happen? Right? We split the ticket all the time. Um, I think Vermonters love their incumbents, first of all. And so, if you get in, you're in. Vermonters generally have definite blue pockets in Vermont, like Burlington, Brattleboro, a little bit of Washington County, but there's a lot of rural voters as well and they tend to vote more conservatively. And so, they have been voting for Republican governors for many, many years. Um, but as you know, they've also voted for Democratic governors. Yeah. Um, and right now the legislature is Democratic, that could change. Dean did some good, how many times he do? Is it four years? What is it for? We have two year terms for governor. That's right. And most of them tend to serve, you know, six to eight years. Yeah. Like Dean did. And we'll find out soon whether governor Scott's planning to run for reelection, but I think it will be his fifth term if he does that. I don't know what else he would do unless he, you know, wasn't governor. I think he'd retire and be very happy. Like, go back to race car driving. So COVID. So now on CDC, I said that we can take our mask off. Is there some dispute around that? Right. And what do you think? Well, I'm certainly not an expert on any of that, but for me personally, you know, it's a human being that says a person. I think it's, I think it's unfortunately very confusing right now. And I think that the new variant is just running rampant through our school system. And I think there's been a lack of management on the school system side to provide consistent guidance to prevent illness. But it's very difficult with people who are really anxious to get on with, without having to change their lives anymore because of COVID. And I think it's very difficult to be in the position of the Department of Health and the CDC after all this time trying to control the population with has so many vast opinions on it. And COVID is not impacting everybody but everybody's not experiencing the same impact. So some people know folks that have had COVID and it's been mild and others know people who have been very, very sick. But I don't, I don't envy the CDC at all. It's a very difficult job with their data. It is a very difficult job.  Yeah, fourth booster. I know. And I'm thinking, there you go, man.   You know? Definitely. And I'm just going to say a lot of people didn't take no shots. And because they, I don't know what, they all had different reasons and theories. You know, but I know you couldn't even go when I was a kid. You could even go to school without taking no shots. They couldn't bring a class to the auditorium. All those nurses and doctors were there to get you those unmeasel shots. And you know, and everybody did it. You know, it was like three or four different shots, you know, at different times that we all had to take them. And some immunity shots. And nobody complained. They just did it. Yeah, they're in different times now. Yeah, I know. It's very true. Yeah, I know. So anyway, so that was part of it. So then I want to talk about a little bit about Ukraine. And let's jump in anytime. Okay. This, you know, because I think the plight of the world, right?  I think it's more economics. I think that Russia is very concerned about the natural resources in Ukraine and they want access to them. And I think they are doing what they can to maintain their power over that region for that particular reason. Yeah. What do you think, Jenna? What do you think about Ukraine? What do you think about, you know, why, you know, what's going on there and why it's happening and still continuing to seem like the point that's been made on, I guess, I don't know. Obviously not. That's a very difficult question as a college student to consider, but I personally, as a sociology major, I look at it and I actually was just learning about this the other day from my wonderful professor, but she was telling us about how colonization can really have an effect even now, even if it was centuries ago and how Russia may want this power over Ukraine, even though they're not entitled to it, they still feel like they are and so they're going to keep making these people feel like they owe it to Russia to give them these resources and I think that it's a really toxic habit that we've created in the world of making some people feel inferior or less than just because of selfishness or greed or arrogance and I think that it's something that we would really have to consciously work as a community, as a global community to get over and I don't think people are ready to do that unfortunately. I don't think many people are making the mature choice to look at it impartially and from an unbiased viewpoint and I think it's really unfortunate that we've gotten to this point. I think you're right, I think a power dynamic is a big piece of this. Yeah, no doubt about it.  And this is all the work I do is about humanitarian. It's all about working with people in communities and it's just to have to go through this. All these poor little kids and families and infrastructure and historical buildings and religious buildings and foundations and it's like... Culture and history. Culture and history, yeah. It's like, it's crazy. It's so bad. And the trauma they've created. Trauma, yes. Yeah, Elaine. Absolutely. Well, you got any last any parting words, Elaine? Well, I'm really grateful to you for having me on, Bruce. This has been really nice and I'm excited to know that your viewers will hear about Emerge Vermont and I hope that lots of folks are interested in learning about how they can train to run for office. You can visit our website EmergeVT.org and as I said, our application process will open in August and I'm looking forward to meeting a whole new cohort of amazing Vermont women who want to change the world. Well, I want to thank Elaine Haney, the executive director of Emerge Vermont for coming on our show as I guess. Thank you. I learned a lot, I'm happy I did. That's one thing I like about our shows, we learn a lot from people.  Well, I'd be happy to talk with you offline about that. We'll see. Senator, come on, you got that. Go ahead, give the senator a look. You can see it, you can be it. Give the senator a look. Go ahead. All right, thank you very much and thank you all just for tuning in and I'll see you soon.


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