Hello everybody and welcome to Culture Hub at La Mama, it's my great, great honor to be for the first time in my life in this space where the rehearsals are taking place and to be sitting next to Dima Krimov and next to Tatyana, I'm a huge fan of course of Dmitriy's work and I've been exposed to it honestly only since he came to New York. About two years ago. So my name is Yasha Klots, sorry I forgot to say that. I teach at Hunter College, I do happen to teach this semester a course on Russian theater. And I should say that even in the past two years, not just this time around, it has been a totally different experience since Dima has been close by. And the students have seen his work and he has done a few things at Hunter as well and it's just not the same to teach Russian theater next to Dmitriy Krimov in New York. So it is my role as far as I understand to lead the conversation and ask questions on a range of topics that will perhaps inevitably these days touch on questions of freedom of speech, of course Dmitriy's career in this context, but not only. And my first question or topic that I would like to bring up is perhaps too broad for us to cover in less than an hour. But nevertheless, what you do is of course completely unique and I have a living proof of this. All of these students are the best proof of everything that lives the way they react to it. And still, when we talk about, let's call it Russian culture, outside of its home country, we have a context of at least a hundred years, but in this wide context that has lasted for more than a century across so many different historical milestones, we are used to thinking first of all of literature and much less of theater. Maybe because theater requires a physical stage, maybe because of any other reasons, because of just how it works, because it of course requires a life audience. And well, much more, many more technical dimensions right of it. So is there anybody perhaps in this wide context of Russian theater outside Russia in the course of a century that in any way serves you as any point of reference? Because once again, if you ask any writer, if there is one predecessor, of course the names would be dropping down immediately. Russian stage directors or theater makers, let's call them, no, not necessarily to America, to Western Europe, to Paris, to... This is a problem. A problem, definitely. And a really scary problem. Because there are no examples, there are no people that I can meet. And starting this path, not by my will, you know, I wasn't planning to do that. It scares. When we were at the T.L. University, and they decided to do Master Margarita as a workshop, and I can see the books that they worked on, I can see underlined passages, and they're trying to understand, they love the book. And when you tell them, but humans, and they laugh, maybe they don't understand the whole thing, all the dramatic, you know, the drama of this novel, they try to make it funny, you know, they think it's funny. But still, they're trying to read it and understand. With the theater, it's much more difficult. The writer needs to start with his energy, and his pen or his computer, and the paper, and here you go. But in the theater, you need to actually get the people to be energized by you, and people who speak different languages other than your language. For instance, I don't speak English really well, and so I am trying to get my energy flowing to them through somebody else. Well, sometimes Tanya, but something else, rather than the language. But in Prague, I don't have Tanya in Prague, and in Lithuania I don't have Tanya, and in Latvia I don't have Tanya. And every time I have a new troupe of actors, so it's probably easier in one spot, in one place, you probably will learn the language, finally, one language, or Tanya is always going to be here. But somehow you're going to get accustomed to the place, and the people who are here, and the locals will get accustomed to the way you're trying to communicate with them. If it's going to be for a long time, you know, American conditions of theater, it's not expected to be in one theater for a long time. Everything is very friendly, but in practice it's quite difficult to actually create theater here. So I think that's why I think that nobody among some Russians who immigrated, who left Russia, no matter where they wound up, I don't know, they say that there was this director, he was the uncle of a brother, he was related to Commissar Zhevsk as a great Russian actress. He was a director, and of course he worked at the same time when she was acting. She left at the beginning of the 20th century, and as they say, I heard that he was a well-respected director in America. Well, in Russia nobody knows about that, nobody. I never met a person who knew anything like him. Nobody. What did he do for America later? What place did he do? I don't know. You know, I actually tried to research people who were from Russian who were here, and who directed hero acting. I know there were some teachers here. There were people who were teaching Russian theater. But I don't know anything about Commissar Zhevsk. But I heard that he was one of the leading directors. I don't know. So it's a problem. It's a good question, actually. Not a good question, because there's no answer. It's a dangerous question. There aren't any. I have no base. You know, it's much easier to rely on somebody who is poor. You know, Van Gogh painted great paintings. Here you have colors, here you have colors. You know, get some flowers, put them in the pot, and so do something like Van Gogh, yeah? And everything would be clear, whether you are Van Gogh or not. It's very easy to understand how it works. And here in the theater, you know, there are so many converters. There are so many things that you need to overcome to get, you know, the language, the actors. For instance, I have great actors here right now. I'm rehearsing. And all this, you know, we managed to find good actors and will have good actors here. And one of our actors approached me yesterday and he says, and it wasn't a very good run-through yesterday. It was very, I don't know, something. I was trying to do tragedy all of a sudden. I'm watching it and it's total comedy. I don't understand what's happening. And I cannot explain to them that both things should be combined. And this actor is a very funny guy. He says, you know, I'm half Hungarian, half American.  And I remember in my family, when you were telling a joke, my father would laugh because he's Hungarian. And mom didn't understand anything. And he told me, and I will see how many Russians we have here. The boy went to get some bread and he was hit by the tram. And he lost his hand. And he comes back and mama asks him, where's your hand? He says, well, it's under the tram. And he said, well, go back, pick it up, so we can go to the doctor. He goes there, another one got chopped. So I started to laugh immediately. He said, my mom didn't understand it too. So what can you do? I don't know. There are very few, right? Very difficult to ask the next question after a joke like this. Reading Helen Shaw's piece in New Yorker, which I think came out in the spring, she makes a point about what facilitates your work, your theater makes it perhaps more accessible to the English-speaking audience. Namely, she speaks about the local theater of the Arctic, which is largely visual. It's not so heavily based on linguistic, cultural, verbal references, but it helps it. It's a fact that perhaps your career also began instead of an artist and as a set designer. Had yourself kind of some kind of free of that thought once you started working here, has it become more important for you initially, before you started directing? No. If you ask me what makes me believe that people will understand me, what will relate to what I'm doing. It's another good question, yes, because it's complicated. Why do you believe in something? Let's say in God. Do you believe in God? Let's say you believe in God, right? First of all, it's much more difficult without that belief. I just believe that it doesn't matter whether they're going to laugh at that joke about chopped hands or not laughing at that joke. We can come up with something and offer something. Is it visual or not visual? It's going to be humanistic. If we're not going to be afraid of these big words, it's going to be for humanity. We will go through the shell that is, you know, for foreigners, maybe we're foreign to them, but we will break through their shell and reach them. We can probably reach them with visual things, but anyway, I don't have any specific objectives that I'm going to use only visual approach to get my audience here. It's my style. It's my handwriting. It's very hard to describe your hand style. But, you know, yeah, it came out definitely from my roots of being an artist and stage designer, but I stopped painting a while ago. I don't know. I believe that it's possible to break that shell and reach the other audience. If I wouldn't have that belief, I wouldn't be able to do anything. You know, the first audience that I have are my actors who are audience.  I'm going to get them to follow me. Because if they're just obeying me, they need to start believing in me in order to follow me. Because obedience is not enough. You know, I believe that in deep inside, all the people are very, very similar. And that's how you can reach them. Because they're basic things that are very, you know, that are humanistic, you know, that every human has them. Everybody laughs at something. Everybody cries because of something. Everybody is afraid of something. Everybody wants something. So, to be afraid to want and to laugh and to cry, it's almost approximately the same among everybody. So, maybe there is some little thing that makes it more understandable that joke about chopped hands to some people than other. But the main majority of the humankind is very similar. You know, I mean, you have pain, you have people scream because they're in pain and they scream the same in any country if they're in pain. It's exactly the same. And they probably all want love and memories. Memories, we're rehearsing a show. You know, I don't know. I don't know what this actress is going to do, but I don't know her memories.  I understand that she's trying to transform into her own memories in order to be able to do it. But it's amazing. I remember her eyes now. So, those are obvious things that unite everybody and that's how you get to the audience. If we're going to speak seriously, you know, God created a human and then split them into different regions and then created the same. So, you know, God created one thing and then it got split up because he wanted to punish humans. He decided to divide them into different ethnicities and nationalities. There is only one hope that we'll be able to break that shell and to find that similarity in everybody in the world. Because the feelings are pretty much the same if you go deep inside. The other theater is, in a sense, restoring that which God created. And, nevertheless, it is not too excluding the cherry orchard but the Wilma Theater, which I know was too much even for you. As a regular... The next thing that everyone saw here on this stage of Plamama was Anegin. Anegin in our own births, a very idiosyncratic adaptation, of course, of Pushkin's original Novel Inverse, which is not known to be the most, let's say, accessible text of Russian classics, which you nevertheless chose to experiment upon in the way that you did, including glossing, annotating, commenting on such arguably not necessarily universal phenomena as Russian themes. Which is explained as... I'm quoting Dmitri, it's very much like American blues, but no, it's worse because it's Russian. This is what makes it Russian. So, could you talk a little bit more just about how conscious was that choice of this work, of this production, as your first, let's say, entry on to this stage, and entry for, I guess, before the American audience, also with actors from most... Oh, I don't know. Who knows. It's a rather simple show. Four people appear and talk to the audience, you know. No real set. Very simple. I saw that for the first try, you know, we will collect enough money to have four actors on stage. That would be this easy thing. Especially one girl, I knew one girl from Yale, the actress. And I always thought that maybe I'll be able to work with her even when she was a student at Yale, so... And she agreed to do it. The rest was just the question of technique, you know, how you put it all together. But in reality... You know, that's what we do. Four people are trying to explain to American audience. And I was hoping that we will have American audience, not only in the Russians right here. You know, it's silly, you know, it's sort of silly to explain to the Russians about Eugene and Nega. But the whole basis for the show we're trying to explain to Americans in the foreign country how beautiful it used to be in our country. You know, my students at Gideon's, I used... I was touching on some questions about Soviet Union, about some things that used to be in Soviet Union because they were young. My Russian students didn't understand how it was in the Soviet Union. They had no clue. And right now, you know, explaining to Americans about spleen or some other things. You know, it's a despair, you know. We have Pushkin, who is impossible to translate, for some reason nobody can translate. Dostoevsky is well known. Pushkin is not well known. My son once tried to explain to me why. He told me that, you know, every country brings very specific cultural specificity of that country. For instance, tulips are from Holland. There's somewhere else probably that grows. But we know that tulips are from Holland are the best. For many years, everybody saw the ballet from Russia Bolshoi Theatre. Russia needs to bring the darkness into culture. And that's Dostoevsky. Why do you need Pushkin? Pushkin is light. You don't need Pushkin from Russian culture. I even found a phrase recently, even wrote it down. I think it was Pryshvin, Pryshvin the Russian, a Russian writer who has wonderful diaries. Mostly he wrote about nature. And the phrase is like this, the cow is very understandable. The horse is very understandable. Human being, understandable. But what is a squirrel? A squirrel is something extra. So in this, you know, when tulips are from Holland, Pushkin is extra from Russian culture. Because he is a very positive person. Positive Russian is an oxymoron.  You can grow tulips in Australia. But you know, from Australia you need kangaroo, not tulips. You know, Australian tulips doesn't make any sense. How can you explain to Americans that Pushkin is lovely, that he is light.  The only hope is that you can explain it to children who don't know anything. Because if they are interested in something, they will just open their mouths and they will listen and they have no knowledge of what was previously. And so that is the path that we need to find for the children, the explanation. You know, try to explain it if I'm talking about ourselves. We were not only trying to explain Pushkin, we were trying to explain myself. You know, our language, our language. We were trying to present that menu as if it was the children's show that we were showing. What are we going to tell to the adults? Adults are not going to listen to our language. They have Hollywood, they have wonderful actors, everybody lives much better than we used to live. What language can we introduce? But we can talk to your children, you can bring your children and listen to what we are saying. So it was sort of a tricky show because it was for children, but we didn't mind if the adults were present. So, you know, it's very hard to announce that you're going to have children's show, but it will start at 7 p.m. Because here everything is sort of sorted out differently. In Moscow we had Eugene and Nick and many years ago this show. It was a children's show and we were happy if four children were present in the show. So, we'll be absolutely happy and the adults will listen to what we're going to tell the children. We were sort of pretending to be fools. We will talk to your children, but you can be present. But we're just talking to your children. Well, you don't know what to do with them, so you brought them to the theater, we're talking to them. You can be present and maybe, you know, you want to listen to what we have to say. That was not only presentation of Pushkin and Eugene and Nick, but also the language. We were sort of masking, you know, Pushkin and Russian language.  If you like this, we might do something else later on. So, that was a little bit light sort of, but in some ways it was essentially necessary. Because we needed to say hello to the new audience. And that was sort of this. So, Pushkin really helped us. For someone else from about 50 years ago, by now, of Senevsky, who shocked the entire community of his fellow Russian-naming race in the 70s, very consciously, so of course, with his book, Strolls with Pushkin. When it was published, it created an uproar because how dare you Senevsky speak of Pushkin in such a casual, not to say absolutely obnoxious way as if Pushkin runs around on very thin bikes. Instead of standing firmly on the pedestal where he was put, of course, by, yeah, where he was put, probably essentially, and stayed there, thereafter, right? So, Pushkin is, of course, can be very different. Someone whom you enact in Anegin and our own world, whom Senevsky writes about, which is not the same, but also kind of more on that side, and Pushkin the official, for our everything. Was Senevsky's book in any way in your mind, on your mind, when you were choosing Anegin for your first book? You know, I'm happy to say that I was friends with Senevsky. Well, if I can say that, he was older, but he was older. And his wife, Maria Vasilyevna, they treated me and him as family. And we loved them, and we felt that they were, you know, we've been to their house, and they've been to our house, and they lived, when they were in Moscow, they stayed with us, and when I was a student. And, you know, I spent a lot of time reading that book when I was a student. And, of course, it's in my head. You said who I can rely on, I definitely can rely on Senevsky when I was doing this show. Because he created an amazing thing. Because, well, he wrote it when he was in camp. If you don't know about Senevsky, Senevsky, you know. You couldn't write a book when you were in camp. He was writing letters to his wife, and he would say, my dear Masha, I thought about it, and then he would write the whole chapter. And she knew, she would cut off, she would cut off my dear Masha, and she would put it in chapter after chapter in a book. And that's how he wrote the book, while he was still in camp. He was an amazing bullion, as we say. You know, of course, he printed his, you know, Abram Terz was his pseudonym and he was writing. And there were both adventurous people. And Pushkin was exactly like them, you know. If you read a lot of things about Pushkin, he was a real heroine. He was adventurous. He was a dash. You know, he was a real heroine. He was really adventurous. You know, he had this nail that was very, very long. You know, he had pants that were see-through and he didn't wear underpants. He was always shocking people. He was fond of shocking people. And not to mention that the wives of everybody, well, I don't want to talk about that. He was really, he was really very adventurous, to say the least. And somehow Sinyavsky discovered that in him, that there were companions in some way. In his first, in the first edition that Marivaselina published in Syntaxes in Paris, the cover was designed by... What's that called? Graphics. Shemekin. Shemekin did the cover. So there was the... Barbed wire. No, barbed wire. And Sinyavsky is walking with Pushkin. Sinyavsky has a beard and Pushkin has a cylinder and they're walking around and it's barbed wire around them and they are taking a walk. And this amazing spirit of freedom that you can see because the country, when Pushkin was alive, was exactly the same or even worse than it was when Sinyavsky was alive. They just, you know, we couldn't compare. They couldn't compare. But Ivan the Terrible, then Elizabeth, then Paul and everybody was scared one monster after another. And so Pushkin was the first dissident and it was, you know, Sinyavsky was dissident from the 1970s and this was...  When Sinyavsky says... When he... At his hearing, the person, he was criminal, you know, against the Soviet Union, it was during his hearing his last words, he said, my problem with Soviet power, with Soviet Union, is mainly aesthetic. I do not agree with the aesthetics of the Soviet Union. I am ready to cry when I say these words because I understand what he means by that. It means that those Russian bureaucratic faces that look like... I don't want to tell you what they look like, but they do look like. So it's a total different aesthetic. It's still... It's not even the aesthetics. When you keep killing all the best people and you're left with whatever is at the bottom, the worst examples of your country's faces, they change.  Of course, of course, Sinyavsky is... Yes. Brave person and noble person. Highest level of...  Well, at least later, early in my life. But, you know, I approximately knew who he was. I went... When Daniel died, I went to the airport to pick up Sinyavsky. Daniel was his partner, and he was part in crime. They actually got seven or eight years in camps. So I went to pick him up at the airport. This old man comes out. It seems to be nice. I had no relation to him. And so we went to visit them. And then, at one point, unfortunately, to my shame, I opened his book. I don't even remember what book I opened.  He's a wonderful writer. He's an amazing writer. He was sitting next to me. And I'm Andrey Donovich, why don't you have a little bit of wine? I'm sitting to a genius. He's an amazing writer. He's a Russian classical writer. I love the way he writes. So it's a long story. Another thing I want to ask, of course, is how you feel, how it feels to be directing things here in New York, on this continent, and be doing other work in Latvia and Lithuania, in Europe, for the different productions. If you could speak a little bit about, just about how it feels to be sort of between, you see geographically, in the Baltic phase, it's been very used to be, and very often out here in New York. How does this cultural geographically, perhaps it's linguistic and cultural. Difference is in the relationship between the three worlds that you're having. How does it feel? And in the audience, how do they react? Another good question. Another complicated, good question. Because there are some technical things that are not as interesting to me. But we need to consider them when we do this. For instance, I just opened a show in Riga in Latvia, Peter Pan. It's my version of Peter Pan. There are two scenes, Pushkin's duel. It's tragic and comic. Peter Pan explains to a little girl, do you know what the theater is? Oh, I'm going to show you what theater is. And he gives her examples of theater. And very often I used the work of my students and there was one girl who did wonderful creative tragic duel of Pushkin. And then my idea of my old idea comic duel. So we just need to show the girl that everything is possible in the theater. Pushkin is on stage of National Theater of Latvia in Riga. Here it's not even clear. Thank God for that. But this is a criminal offense in Latvia right now. It's criminal. And there are articles that the reviews came out and besides the fact that it's a good show and then we had positive reviews. We don't want to know about this wedding generally. That everybody pushed us to study and to learn about this imperialistic system which was Soviet Union and every Latvian had to learn about Pushkin. We detest that we're independent. We don't want to learn about Russian. And when you start reading in Russian and don't know translation into Latvian totally different, not a good translation probably. We tried to read it in Latvian. It doesn't sound good. Even the actress, I was giving him amazing Russian actress to listen to the way they read the poem and all that. It's just the rhyme. If you're reading Pushkin and the rhyme is so beautiful you don't need to listen during the night. I didn't think that I was creating a revolution. But they have their own problems in their own business. They're in Latvia and here in the United States they have their own problems. And in Czech Republic where I'm going to direct they have their own problems. Here if you say 1968 nobody would react to this and in Prague if you say 1968 everybody would react. Sometimes it's better not to touch the mud all because you won't be, you're going to drown. You will not be able to run away from it. You will drown, you will be sucked into it. And sometimes you feel ashamed. They're not your problems.  And that's not comfortable. And also there's lots of danger that traps everywhere. You need to understand either you're going to I want to get into that trap. But then you need to be ready that it's going to be painful. It's possible to do that. But you need to be prepared for that. I'm curious about the other side of your question. Yeah, really you have the audience. You have interests. You have some people know something and you're trying to understand what is this audience about. You need to feel. My students, I was talking to them we have this image that we usually discuss. We're working in Moscow. It's a Moscow image. Not only Moscow but it's built on Moscow electricity. You know, when you plug in the lamp, yeah? Sometimes you have three and sometimes you have two. And sometimes you have this gadget when you have a lot. Five or seven. It's a very complicated gadget. And you need to find the right position to get them all in. So that's you. We need to... What was... What did you do yesterday in the theater? What's interesting? What's the most... Who was on tour yesterday? Is Czech of... Boring. Is everybody fed up with it or maybe not? So all these seven things that you need to plug in, you need to feel and get it in. And that computer will work. But it depends on you and how you're going to feel it and how many those little things you need to know. How do you feel it? But it's difficult to do it in Moscow. While you're in Moscow, you're native and you know I never thought about what am I going to do next. It was very natural. I was just going to do another show. I don't know. In Israel, for instance. You know, I had a couple of suggestions from Israel. I'm suggesting one thing. And I thought that I was suggesting something very exciting and good. I was trying to do Peter Pan there. And they said, no, they would not understand that that's not for Israel.  How can you tell me this? Not for Israel. Not for our country. If it's a good show, why isn't it for your country? But I'm a guest there. I don't understand what is necessary for that country. What is essential? What would be interesting? It's very difficult to understand.  It's very hard to identify. Sometimes one of my friends very experienced and very close friend of mine he said, why are you doing Russian? Take Greeks. You know, it's a sure thing. It's a sure thing, you know. Take Odysseus.   You know, Sisyphus.  Everything is clear and no confrontation. It happened many years ago. We don't have, you know, not one Greek will be upset with it. It's ancient Greece. They have other problems now. They're not going to get upset. They gave it to the world, the world, you know. They cut the umbilical cord from Greece, you know. The ancient Greece is way back there. Anybody can do it. It's property of the world. It's practically Shakespeare, but ten times more. Because Shakespeare is already, it belongs to the world. But, you know, the Brits, they can get upset, you know. If, you know, you can do sacrilege with the Greeks. Nobody will get upset. I think, I never done it, but I think. But the Brits can still take it. They can get upset. But when you take something that is closer, you start thinking, how is it going to affect? Who is going to take it personally? Who is going to get upset? Why will somebody will get offended? Or maybe you will inspire them and drive them to something. But, for instance, we saw a show about five years ago. Miller's Bridge. Ivo Van Hoola. View from the bridge. Yeah. View from the bridge by Arthur Miller. It was five years ago. Ivo Van Hoola was the director. You know, this is an old place from 1940, I think. He was very smart. He politically is always, you know, right there. It's the squirrel in the eye, as we say. You know, the skin of the squirrel is not destroyed. It's the perfect. He creates the view from the bridge as the Greek tragedy. Everybody is barefoot. There is sand on the floor. Here normal suits. But on the floor is sand. And then you have the rain out of blood. And everybody is like this. And this is the text from 1940s. And it's about the people who are basically, you know, it's a depression. Those people who lived during the era of American depression in 1930s, right? And then he brings them up to basically be Greek characters. He talks to Americans. He says, guys, you have ancient roots. You are related to ancient Greeks. You are not, you know, not those poor people under the bridge. They are philosophers from Greece. And the passions were, like, from Greek tragedies. You know, it's related to Agamemnon and Odysseus and everybody. What was it in Greek? It bullied us. That's what you had under the bridge there. And Americans take it not only as a good theater. He is a good director. But as that message to them, they call the sun and feel that they're proud of themselves. This is us. You know, we are the ancient Greeks and us. We're like this. We belong there. You know, this is the nation that is only 300 years. But we are ancient Greeks. And I felt today that I was an ancient Greek today.  Look, I was absolutely right. Look, he came from Holland and he tells us that we're ancient Greeks. I always felt like an ancient Greek. So this manipulation, it's a good meaning of that word. You need to have manipulation. You're manipulating with the audience. You're manipulating with your feelings and the feelings of the audience. You know, something that the locals feel. But you want to manipulate them and bring them to a level. And it's very scary to make a mistake if you don't know how to do that.   So it's very complicated. I don't remember what you asked, but it's a good question anyway. Whatever the question was, I'm glad we heard it. Thank you. Two more hours and we'll be free to go, right? For like one or two hours. Well, there's a huge difference. You know, at home I was, I wasn't thinking who was going to see it. I was just creating shows at home.  I'm making pelmenyo, cutlets. I know that my family loves it and I know that they'll come home and they'll eat it. So that was absolutely calm. I was absolutely calm when I was directing there and opening the show.  I will repeat myself saying you don't have to pay attention to that and you can do whatever you want. You know, but it's the same as I'm crossing the street and I don't care that the cars are actually passing by. They can hit me. I have the right not to pay attention to the cars that are actually on the street. But they can actually hit me at one point, right? Because I'm not paying attention.  Because that's silly. So you need to decide for yourself. That car is far away. I have enough time to run. And it's raining. I'm going to run. It's a huge difference. Question about New York. Does New York inspire you to create something on stage? I have at least two ideas. You know, here the problem is that I can do one show a year, well, maybe maximum two, and that's practically impossible. You know, here you need to make money somehow and raise the money. You know, theater doesn't make money here, it turns out. And so I have to direct Peter Pan and Riga, so come back and try to do something here. So one show a year. And we just started. I don't have enough time to, like, I'm thinking now we're going to do this show that we're working on. And then I have this thing about New York. I have an idea about New York. You know, I'm sorry, some of you probably know. My son and I were, my son is much more advanced in computer science. And we were talking about AI. And he has, in his phone, there is an AI in his phone. And he said, wait, he pushed the button. And he asked the AI, he says, tell me, do you speak Russian? And some female voice says, yes, I do speak Russian. And so he gives me the phone. Ask her something. And I ask her, please tell me, what show should I direct to New York? So I'll be very successful.  And she says, you know, New York people love when you tell them about them. If you're a foreigner, it will be very interesting to the audience in New York to see you. And she starts to tell me amazing, clever things. I'm looking at my son and saying, this is absolutely correct. And he says, 5% belong to me when you do it. And really, I was thinking it would be great to tell New Yorkers from the point of view of a foreigner. Because I don't know everything about New York. I don't know emotionally about it. But it would be interesting. Because even Brodsky had just read a book about Brodsky. Brodsky was writing in English, and he was very proud of that. And I discovered the memoirs that were written by members about him. And she was so skeptical about his English. And she writes that he would get very upset when people were trying to correct him in English. And he was very upset with all the Americans who were trying. So it's impossible unless you were born, you know, I don't know. Maybe Nabokov who spoke English from the time he was 2 or 3 years old. It's impossible. Of course New Yorkers fire me. Yes.  But I think it's the eyes of the foreigner. You can even dig deeply, but it has to be a foreigner. You know, one of the best books that were written about Russia. It was semi-forbidden in Russia. I remember he was... I didn't read it. He said Russia is a bad country. When you ride from Russia abroad, all the Russians who are traveling with you, they're laughing. When you go back to Russia, all the Russians who are riding back, they're all very sad and don't want to talk to anybody. That's the possibility to do something like this. You know, clear eyes to see something interesting. Another question. Something for the Russian audience to direct something here. What's interesting is possible. It's not that it's not interesting. I don't have that much time or strength. I cannot do everything that is interesting for me. In Riga right now, I'm actually doing a show with Shulpan Hamatov and all the rest of the smoke. And another actor who is Maxim Suhanov, they're wonderful actors. You know, in Moscow, we didn't have time to connect and do something. I would do it not only in Russian. Chinese, they're amazing actors. Yeah, they're amazing artists. And here, I'm very happy when Russian... Russians come to our shows and the Russian audience is great. It's mine, you know, I understand. But I would like... What is the challenge here? You know, to get the connection, to see. I want to see the language that I have and my feelings and my veins and my aesthetics and my understanding what is beautiful, what is not. And the movement that I appreciate on stage. Is it possible to break the shell of people who are in totally different culture? For whom Mark Twain, we love Mark Twain and know about the United States. I was doing the show in, you know, in America. Two stories by Hemingway and Eugene O'Neill. Two scenes from Eugene O'Neill, from Desire under the Elms. There is not... It's an American... it's not American literature. A lot of people don't know who they are and it's not very popular among Americans. I didn't know that. You know, you need to find opportunities. Right now we don't have a suggestion from somebody. Let's do it in Russian and we'll... Yes, let's do it. Let's do it at Lincoln Center. It's going to be in Russian. I would do that because that would be interesting. Lincoln Center would be a great, not only prestige, but Americans would come to see the Russian culture. I would love to do that, but nobody is offering that. They have another program. Well, we will try to do something. What's the difference between theatrical society in the United States and Russia? Are you being welcomed here? Unfortunately, I don't know anything about institutions. I don't know them in Russian. I don't know them here. Actors who are working with me and I've chosen my actors here, they are very interested in our process. Well, some people cannot. I don't know. Some of them... I could never figure out the actors in theatrical society in Russia. I don't want to think about it. I want to have five people who are in the same boat with me and we will row and we are going to a very specific island that we all want to reach and we have... We will have... You know, we have to dig at that island and I believe that the treasures are buried on that island and we have to come back. We have to go to that island and we want to find those treasures on that island and actually take a boat back because on that island you only have treasures, but nothing is there. We need to bring the treasures back. So there are too many problems for me to think about some institutions and societies that are here. I think everything is very similar. I don't think... I think theatrical societies are very similar everywhere.


Hi and welcome to our session. Let us discuss the following question. The question says evaluate the following limits and exercises 1 to 22. Limit z tends to 1 z to the power 1 by 3 minus 1 by z to the power 1 by 6 minus 1. Before solving this question, we should first we will verse with theorem 2 given in your NCEERT book. There are two states that for any positive integer n limit x tends to a x to the power n minus a to the power n upon x minus a is equal to n into a to the power n minus 1. This theorem holds n is a rational number. The knowledge of this theorem is the key idea in this question. Let us now begin with the solution. In this question, we have to evaluate limit z tends to 1 z to the power 1 by 3 minus 1 upon z to the power 1 by 6 minus 1. Now in order to make use of this theorem, we have to multiply and divide this expression by z minus 1. So on multiplying and dividing this expression by z minus 1, we get limit z tends to 1 z to the power 1 by 3 minus 1 upon z minus 1 into z minus 1 upon z to the power 1 by 6 minus 1. We can write this expression as limit z tends to 1 z to the power 1 by 3 minus 1 upon z minus 1 divided by limit z tends to 1 z to the power 1 by 6 minus 1 upon z minus 1. Now this can further be written as limit z tends to 1 z to the power 1 by 3 minus we can write 1 as 1 to the power 1 by 3 upon z minus 1 divided by limit z tends to 1 z to the power 1 by 6 minus we can write 1 as 1 to the power 1 by 6 upon z minus 1. We have learnt that limit x tends to a x to the power n minus a to the power n upon x minus a is equal to n into a to the power n minus 1. Now here in place of x we have z and in place of n we have 1 by 3 and in place of a we have 1. So limit of this expression is equal to n that is 1 by 3 into a that is 1 to the power n minus 1 that is 1 by 3 minus 1 divided by now here in place of n we have 1 by 6 and in place of a we have 1 and in place of x we have z. So limit of this expression is 1 by 6 into 1 to the power 1 by 6 minus 1. This is equal to 1 by 3 divided by 1 by 6 and this is equal to 1 by 3 into 6 and this is equal to 2. Hence our required limit is 2. So this completes the session by intake care.


Again, as we say, there are many things we find incidentally every single day. This list is just a few of them, but we know, for example, 60% of renal cells are incidental findings. PEs, 5% of oncology patients have incidental PEs, pancreatic cystic tumors. We talked about, we mentioned in the last talk, 5% plus of the population, minimum. When you look at Pheos, 70% of Pheos are incidental findings, it's not a patient presenting with hypertension. So, there are lots of important findings. And again, as I mentioned, the ER, people say a third of patients in the ER have incidental findings. It's ERs often challenging because we don't have old films. The single best thing to get rid of a questionable finding is an old film. But many times in the ER you don't have old films, you have minimal clinical history, and the scan protocols are indeed very limited. Now one of the things to me I think that helps avoid incidental findings is really knowing what you're looking for. So let's look at some examples. If you look at this kidney case here, there's a lesion in the left kidney, but it's well defined and it's 86-hounds field units. Yes, I have no contrast study. But if a lesion measures over 70-hounds field units, it's going to be benign, okay? You don't need to do any studies. But take the same patient. What if I only gave you an arterial phase image? The patient was being done to rule out aortic aneurysm. It measures minimally higher, and that's just from being hardening, but you would look at this and say, look, I discovered an incidental renal cell carcinoma, right? Or if I gave you the delayed phase, you would say, look, I discovered an incidental renal cell carcinoma, but knowing if you go back, it was a high-density renal cyst. So what's very important is to understand that. So if you have this patient and the patient's still on the scanner, we have the text go back and get a few scans through the kidney because then you know for sure that it's going to be a high-density cyst. If you don't have the non-contrast scans, bring the patient back. Remember, 25% of patients, even today, who go to surgery for renal cell carcinoma have benign lesions. That's because someone looks at this scan and says, papillary renal cell carcinoma, let's remove it, and the patient gets a partial nephrectomy and the patient gets good news. It's a benign lesion, but the patient needed no surgery at all. So certain rules, above 70 non-contrast, well-defined, 99.9%, it's benign. And again, that makes life very easy. And we also know that when you start looking at numbers under 20-housefield units or containing fat, lesions are also going to be benign if you see them on a non-contrast scan. So in the ER setting, if you find a renal lesion, let's say three centimeters, it measures less than 20, measures over 70. Either of those two, it's a benign lesion and those patients do not need to come back. The average density of a renal cell carcinoma on non-contrast CT is between 35 and 38-housefield units. So if you look at a non-contrast scan and something measures 38, then you have to be worried it's going to be a cancer. So here's that rule, above 70, it's a high-density cyst, below 20, renal cyst simple, 20 to 70 indeterminate, with cancers focused around 37. So in the ER setting, not every patient will need to come back. Now, other issues I have in the ER, you did this patient and this patient was done for neortic aneurysm, again, very similar to the last case. There's a lesion in the left kidney. You say, aha, that lesion is worrisome, looks like a tumor, let's do a partial nephrectomy. You look at it on excretory phase, it's solid as well, probably papillary renal cell carcinoma. But if you brought the patient back, there it is on non-contrast CT, it's high-density, this was a high-density renal cyst. So again, you want to be very careful. In the ER setting, if you notice the lesion, if your texts are really good or you see the lesion, get another sequence. If a lesion is a high-density cyst, it stays exactly the same, from arterial to venous to delayed to non-contrast. So it saves time and not every patient will need to be worked up in the entirety. Obviously, lesions that contain fat, that's an easy leave-alone lesion, it's a myelolipoma. The ones that become trickier are this lesion, but you have to look very carefully because this little dot here is fat. Again, on incidental lomas, incidental renal masses, if you see any fat in the lesion, it's a myelolipoma. You don't need to see like the prior case where everything is fat, just a little bit of fat right there. You could save the patient from going to surgery, you could save the patient from getting an entire workup.


So the Lightning Network is a layer-to-network. That means it is a network that runs as an overlay above Bitcoin. And it's important to understand that just because it has a different name doesn't mean that this is something that is different from Bitcoin. It works differently from Bitcoin, but when you are using the Lightning Network, you are using Bitcoin. You are transacting in Bitcoin. And the Lightning Network, in many ways, has the same security guarantees as Bitcoin, meaning that in order to transact on the Lightning Network, you do not necessarily need to trust anyone else. You can run a wallet in which you control the keys, you don't have to use a custodial system. And the Lightning Network is not, by default, a custodial system, although there are custodial systems within Lightning. That means somebody else controls your money. So the Lightning Network is an overlay network that runs on top of Bitcoin where you transact in Bitcoin. So what is the point of the Lightning Network? The point of the Lightning Network is speed and cost. That's the main focus. So the Lightning Network is fast. What do we mean by fast? It means that if you do a Lightning payment, and we call them payments rather than transactions, they differentiate from what happens on the Bitcoin chain. On the Lightning Network, if you do a payment, it usually completes in less than one second. So if conditions are perfect, then in less than one second, the payment will complete. And this is not something that people who are familiar with Bitcoin are expecting. The speed of the Lightning Network, it's lightning fast, that's where the name comes from, is often a surprise. There's no waiting 10 minutes for confirmations in a block. And when you make a Lightning payment and it completes in one second, that's not just transmitting the payments, that's done. It's settled, confirmed, finalized within less than a second. Now on the certain conditions on the network, if there isn't quite enough capacity, if there isn't a clear route between your wallet and the recipient, then it might take a few seconds to work out and sometimes the payments fail. So you might click and instead of a payment succeeding in a second, it might take five, six, seven seconds. But usually, if it hasn't happened in 10 seconds, it's not happening at all. You'll get an error message saying there is no route for your payments. So first feature of the Lightning Network is speed less than a second. And here's a funny story that illustrates this. If you go to some Bitcoin conferences, one of the things you might see at these Bitcoin conferences is various Lightning-enabled vending machines. And one of the classic ones is the Lightning-enabled beer tap. So this is basically a beer dispensing tap. So it's a keg with a beer tap. And that will dispense beer in return for a Lightning payment. And so the funny thing about this is when you have a system that takes less than a second for the payments to go through, the user interface and user experience design of your system has to be considering that aspect. And the first time I used the beer vending tap for Lightning, what I noticed and then watched happen again and again and again and it was very, very funny was that people were anticipating that there would be some slight delay. So they're fiddling with their phone, right? They're scanning the QR codes and they're hitting send. But their cup is in their hand. They're not ready. And so they hit send and the machine goes, bing, and starts pouring beer. And they have to rush and stick the cup underneath and lose some of the beer to the floor because it kept dispensing before people were ready. And so literally from send to beer starts coming out of the tap less than a second and they had to keep reminding people, put your cup, put your glass under the tap before you hit send on your wallet because it kept getting people surprised. So fast, that's one of the features. The second feature is cheap. So the Lightning network has fees, but these fees are very different from the transaction fees you have on Bitcoin. Because we're not relying on a limited space blockchain because the Lightning network is payments routed through peers on a decentralized network. The fees are actually much, much lower. And when I say much, much lower, I mean three or four orders of magnitude lower. So let's say your average Bitcoin transaction, let's say the fee is 5,000 satoshis. Nowadays, if you look at transaction fees, you're looking at about say 25 or 30 satoshis per byte in order to get into a block. And you're looking, the average transaction is about 200 bytes. So if you do that multiplication, you're looking at 4,000 to 6,000 satoshis in fee. Now 4,000 to 6,000 satoshis is $3 to $5 worth of transaction fee. So to make a transaction on Bitcoin, you're going to pay $3 to $5. If you're really lucky and it's a quiet day and there's not much happening, no chance of that right now because of the markets being on fire. You might get in for a fee under $2, but I wouldn't count on it. Now let's compare that to the Lightning Network. On average, a transaction will cost you anywhere from about 30 satoshis to 150 satoshis. So a Lightning payment will cost you a fraction of the cost. That's 50 times cheaper than the Bitcoin transaction. So you're looking at $5,000. So you're looking at a transaction payment fee that is measured in US cents and sometimes even less than a penny per payment. And that means that you can actually do micro payments. You can do 10 cent payments on the Lightning Network and it actually works, it makes sense because you're not spending all of your money on fees. So those are the two characteristics. Now on Lightning, because we're mostly dealing with smaller amounts, faster, cheaper payments, we usually denominate things in satoshis, SATs. Satoshis being the smallest unit in the Bitcoin blockchain. Everything is denominated in satoshis in the code at a technical level. As the famous saying goes on the Bitcoin blockchain, there is no Bitcoin, there's only satoshis. But if you don't know the conversion, one Bitcoin is 100 million satoshis. So satoshis is a very small unit. All right, so everything is denominated in satoshis, but interestingly enough, the Lightning Network can do smaller units than satoshis. And it does so by effectively rounding up if you want to settle a Lightning channel, because you can only transact satoshis, you can't go smaller than satoshis on the Bitcoin network, but you can on the Lightning Network because essentially the Lightning Network, you're exchanging signed transactions between participants, you can actually go lower. And so on the Lightning Network, one thing you'll see that might appear surprising is you'll see a new unit called MSATs or milli-satoshis. So these are thousands of a satoshi. So you can do a 1,000th of a satoshi payment if you want. Most wallets don't really show you that because that payment would be so small in equivalent fiat value that you wouldn't see that, but you certainly can do that on the Lightning Network. And fees, the payment fees are actually calculated in milli-satoshis, not in satoshis. So the Lightning Network works through a system called payment channels, and payment channels are essentially bilateral smart contracts between two participants. So a participant in the Lightning Network is called a peer. If you're running a Lightning wallet or Lightning node, you are a peer in the Lightning Network, and you connect with payment channels to other nodes or peers in the Lightning Network. And essentially you have a channel to another node, and if you want to send and receive payments, you have to send them through that channel. You may have five, six channels, or maybe only have one or two channels. And in order to send the payment across the Lightning Network, the Lightning Network specifically your client, your node, your wallet, will need to construct a route. And the way it does so is by finding ways to connect from you to the final recipient. So when the Lightning Network is operating normally, all of the different clients, nodes or peers, I'm using those terms interchangeably, all the different Lightning nodes are advertising all the channels they have. So they advertise channels such as, okay, I have a channel from Andreas to Bob. Bob has a channel from Bob to Charlie. Charlie has a channel from Charlie to Diana, et cetera, et cetera. So each node is advertising what channels it has, as well as what payment fee will charge someone to use that channel. Now let's say I, Andreas, want to make a payment to Diana. Diana will send me an invoice or payment request and I want to pay that on the Lightning Network. When I go to pay that, I will not normally, I will not have a direct channel to Diana, but I don't need to have a direct channel to Diana as long as there is a path that connects channels together that can get from me to Diana. And this is a bit like drawing a map or getting directions on Google Maps. And essentially the software is solving a similar problem. If you want to go from Barcelona to Berlin, obviously it would be very easy if there was the Barcelona to Berlin highway that you basically started driving down until you reached Berlin. And you didn't have to turn or change paths at all and there was a single connecting path. And of course, if there is a single directing path, then you just use that. But in real life, usually there isn't. And so what Google Maps has to do to find directions or what the Lightning Network node has to do in order to send a payment from Andreas to Diana is find a path that gets the two connected. And so it will look at this database of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of channels that have been advertised. And it knows what the destination is and it knows what the sender is and now it needs to assemble a path that connects the two. So we'll say, okay, well, we need to get to Diana. Who is Diana connected to? Diana is connected to these five other nodes. Am I connected to any of these other five nodes? No, what about what nodes are they connected to? And what nodes are they connected to? And working backwards all the way to the beginning, eventually my node is going to figure out that because I have a path from Andreas to Bob, that's one channel, that's the only channel I can use. And then also knows, my node also knows that Bob has a channel to Charlie and Charlie has a channel to Diana. My node can figure out that, okay, Andreas to Bob to Charlie to Diana is a route, a path that can be used. And then it will construct the payment along that route and send that payment across the Lightning network. Now, if all goes well, that takes a second. If sometimes the path is long or complicated and it might take a bit longer to calculate that path. A Lightning path can be up to 20 channels long. And interestingly enough, because of a trick of encryption that is used, each participant in that path, so for example, in the Andreas Bob Charlie Diana path, the participants in the middle, Bob and Charlie, have no idea what the total path is and where the payment is going. Bob will only know that they have been given a payment from Andreas and that they must send this payment on their channel to Charlie. But they don't know if Charlie is the end recipient or if Andreas is the original sender. Bob only knows that though it came in one channel and it's going out the other channel. They only see one channel around them. They're immediate neighbors. And so as far as Bob is concerned, Andreas might be the sender or Andreas might just be one more in a long path. In fact, maybe another 10 other nodes might be before Andreas. And Bob doesn't know if Charlie is the final recipient or if maybe there's another 10 nodes after Charlie. And so this gives us a tremendous amount of privacy, which we don't have in the Bitcoin network, another interesting feature of the Lightning network. So this is basically the fundamental working concept behind the Bitcoin Lightning network. Lobster Messiah in the chat says, I always enjoyed the open bar tab that eventually gets settled. It's a decent explanation of the Lightning network. And so that's another great way to describe it. I've used that description myself. And so if you think of each of the channels, each of the channels is set up as a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain. You can think of that as almost like a bar cap, an open line of credit. So when I have a tab between me and Bob, a channel between me and Bob, it's like opening a bar tab where Bob is the bartender. And in a normal bar scenario, you open a bar tab, you basically go and say, I'm gonna have one drink, but don't charge me yet. Here's my credit card or authorize $20 on this credit card and I may have two or three drinks. And at the end of the night, we're going to settle this tab. In many cases around the world, you'll even see scenarios where people keep bar tabs open for days, weeks, months, years even. And they settle periodically by making a partial payment and then keep the tab open the entire time. And you can do that in Lightning too. You can open a channel and you can do transactions back and forth along that channel. And you don't actually have to ever close that channel unless you want to. And as long as you have that channel, you can do transactions across it. What's interesting about the Lightning network is that if you went to a bar run by Bob and Andreas and Charlie were playing darts and they placed a bet on the darts board. And so Andreas now owes Charlie some money because they lost the bet, right? So I lost the bet and I owe Charlie $10. Rather than paying Charlie directly, that's opening a channel with Charlie, I can go to the bartender Bob and I say, hey, Bob, I know I have a $20 tab with you and I know that Charlie also has a drinks tab with you, but since I now owe him some money, can you take $10 off my tab and add it to Charlie's tab? And in a nutshell, that's exactly how the payment channels are connected together. What Bob does says, well, okay, if I take $10 off Andreas's tab and I add $10 to Charlie's tab, my situation hasn't changed at all. Instead, they've effectively moved money to each other without actually moving money to each other just by changing two bilateral agreements, one between Andreas and Bob the bartender and one between Charlie and Bob the bartender. So that's effectively what we're doing on the Lightning network. And it's a very effective mechanism, especially since in this particular case, everyone has a tab with everyone in terms of the channels and you don't get to see if the person you're moving from one channel to another is the final recipient or the original sender. All right, so it's important to realize the Lightning network was first launched as a test network in 2018. It was then launched as a full production network in 2019. I actually have one of the early day pictures where in the test network, there's about a hundred nodes on the Lightning network, mine is one of them, and you can see a picture of the entire Lightning network. You can't do that anymore because the Lightning network is very, very big. And because there are a number of unadvertised channels, so that we can never see the full extent or size of the Lightning network, we only see the part of it that is advertised. And even though it started in 2019, we have to realize that it is still an ongoing experiment, it is still an experimental network and things can and do go wrong. In terms of the feel of the Lightning network, to me it feels very similar to how Bitcoin felt in 2012 and 2013. In fact, Bitcoin was fast and cheap in those days. We would accept unconfirmed transactions because people didn't know how to do double spends effectively. And we would also get away with doing transactions with zero fees. So the Bitcoin network in those days was fast and cheap because not many people were using it. But in other ways, it's also similar to how Bitcoin was in 2012 or 2013 in that things were a bit raw. The user interfaces were not fully developed. There was a lot of new terminology that people didn't understand well. There was a kind of a vagueness about how it worked in the background. People were using it without understanding how it worked. And if you start using the Lightning network today, you will get that same feel. You'll notice that the wallets and user interfaces are not as polished, although they've gotten a lot better in the last few years. The experience can sometimes be frustrating where you try to make a payment and it doesn't go through and you have no idea why it's not going through. Specifically, just before we did this webinar in the last couple of days, I did notice that I had some technical problems in my shop, the Antenot Shop, which has a Lightning payment nodes that accepts payments in Lightning. And for a completely unrelated reason, had nothing to do with Lightning, but in fact, the system it was running on had run out to disk space. And I had to do some cleaning up in order to get that running again. And then of course, when I got it running, it had to spend a few hours syncing the chain because it had fallen behind. And so it took a bit of housekeeping to get it to work. And I have, I will admit from time to time, I've had on my shop, sometimes lots of channels. I used to run a very big node, I don't anymore. I used to have lots of channels with lots of inbound liquidity for my shop. Now I don't as much, it's a much smaller node. I've limited its function for the shop. And so I didn't have enough inbound liquidity and actually getting a payment through was a bit of a pain, but it's now working. It takes a bit more work and it's not always as easy. So who is the Lightning network for? I find that it's for a different type of payment than you might use on Bitcoin. And that's actually expressed in the policies of my shop infrastructure, where if you try to do a payment under $25, it's not going to let you do that on the Bitcoin blockchain. It's not gonna let you do that on chain, as we say, because under $25, the fees are going to be too expensive and it's going to leave you with an unpleasant user experience once you realize either that you have to pay a lot of fee or you don't pay sufficient fee and then your transaction gets stuck. Instead, if you try to make any kind of purchase on my shop under $25, it's going to default to being a Lightning payment and it won't let you do a non-chain payments for that. Conversely, if you want to do a payment over $25, it's gonna default to doing it on the Bitcoin blockchain because doing a large payments on Lightning is actually more difficult than doing small payments. In order to route a payment on the Lightning network, you have to be able to construct a path, as we said before, but the path has to have sufficient capacity at every link of that path, at every link of that chain, in order to get the payments through. And so the bigger the payments you're trying to make, the more difficult it is to route it across the Lightning network. So the Lightning network really works best for small payments. So under $10 is ideal, but anything under $25 is where you're gonna get the sweet spot, right? Where it's too small to make on the Bitcoin blockchain without incurring a large fee and is just right, it's perfect for doing on the Lightning network. All the way down to making payments for microservices or micro payments where you want to do a one penny payment, for example, in order to activate a feature in a website and you can use that for anti-spam reasons, right? Where you want to, or you wanna sell an article or a blog and you wanna do it for one penny per read. So it's a micro payment, something that doesn't really exist in other traditional payment systems other than if you have a fully custodial payment system. So the ability to do micro payments is a whole frontier that's opened up for it. And so finally you might be asking, oh, this all sounds great, but when and how should I try that? And we tried to give you a bit of a preview of that. But if you want to try it, one of the things you can do is use it on my shop to do a very small transaction, one that you wouldn't do on the normal Bitcoin blockchain. And let me give you some specific information about that. So first of all, we have a digital product that is the least expensive digital product is the Blockchain Common Smart Custody book. It's three bucks 50, but that's not inexpensive enough. So in order to go even lower, we've created a discount coupon code that you can use to get a 90% discount which will take the price down to 35 cents. And so the experience of seeing a 35 cent payment go through on the Lightning Network really gives you a feel for the power to do this at low cost, cheap and fast and really experience the sweet spot of where the Lightning Network is. Of course, $3.50 is also perfectly within the sweet spot, but I don't want you to think that I'm setting up this experiment in order to profit from your tests. I think 35 cents gives you enough of an experience without really being a huge fundraising opportunity for us, so you start questioning my motives. So this is a coupon code for patrons only. Please do not share it outside. And that's because I want you to know and use it. And the coupon code is, and if you put that all one word into the shop, you get a 90% discount and then you can do a 35 cents transaction. As the backend for the shop, we use an open source project called BTC Pay Server and BTC Pay Server allows us to accept payments in Bitcoin and Lightning, as well as in my case on my shop, I've also enabled Monero for that, but it's really kind of the pure solution for crypto because it's open source, it's non-custodial and it's a great solution. It's a bit more on the techie side. Setting something up like that will require you knowing how to build a Linux server or run a Docker image. And you can certainly install it on something like a Raspberry Pi or a mini PC. And if you are ever interested in running a shop, that's one thing you might want to look into because it integrates very nicely with platforms like WordPress and others in order to allow you to run a web shop that accepts Bitcoin and Lightning payments. Now you don't need to know anything as the mod is pointing out about BTC Pay Server in order to use it, but if you're wondering, well, how does this work? How is he doing this? That's how I'm doing it. And I'm a sponsor and in the past I've been a contributor of funds, not code. I think I sent in a bug report, but I've been a contributor of funds to the BTC Pay Server project because I think it's a very valuable open source project and I agree with our philosophy and attitude. Hi, I'm Andreas Antonopoulos. If you enjoyed that video, consider that it takes a lot of work to produce open and free content that can be shared with everyone around the world. This isn't sponsored by some company. It's not promoting a product or an altcoin or some kind of investment scheme. My goal is simply to help explain the technology of Bitcoin and open blockchains to as many people as possible in a neutral way that focuses really on the incredible possibilities that this technology brings us. If you'd like to support that mission, subscribe to my channel and go on patreon.com slash aAntonop where you can participate and help me build better content for more people. Thank you.


Hi everyone!  These are some more informal words and expressions that you might hear in the context of work or business English. Are you ready?  Push the envelope means to move beyond the limits of what is normally done to innovate and go into new areas. Maybe you want to cause a paradigm shift in your company or industry. A paradigm shift is a radical change in fundamental beliefs or theory. For example, when people went from believing that the sun revolved around the earth to knowing that the earth revolved around the sun, that was one example of a paradigm shift. Now, your innovative ideas might get some pushback in the company. Pushback is opposition or resistance to an initiative. Some of your co-workers might tell you, don't rock the boat or don't make waves. These expressions both mean don't do anything to disturb the current situation. Unfortunately, your company is having a budget crunch or a budget squeeze. That means there's not enough money to do everything that is planned. So the company needs to streamline its operations. Streamline means to make more efficient usually by simplifying things. The company decides to cut some of its workers and unfortunately you lose your job.  You'll have to do it on a shoestring budget. A shoestring budget means very little money. Maybe you can pitch your idea to investors. To pitch an idea means to try to convince somebody to support it or to invest in it. But nobody's interested in investing, so you'll have to bootstrap. That means do it with your own work and your own resources without outside help. Luckily, you find a business partner who's on the same wavelength. That means you have similar thoughts, opinions, and ideas. You're thinking and moving in the same direction. And together, you manage to put your company on the map. To put something on the map means to make it known to the public or make it famous. You decide to reinvest the lion's share of your profits back into the company. The lion's share is the majority, the largest part. And as a result, your company's products are world-class. World-class means of the highest quality. I hope you've enjoyed this little story and also learned some new vocabulary along the way. If you're interested in improving your skills for using English at work or in a business context, check out my Business English course. It will teach you phrases and vocabulary for meetings, phone calls, emails, presentations, and interacting at work in a professional context. You can see the lesson list at espressoenglish.net slash business-english-course. Go ahead and check it out. Thanks for watching today.


Welcome to the Rich TV Live podcast. I'm your host Richard DeSousa and today we will be speaking to the CEO of Jackpot Digital, Jake Calpacchian. I want to bring your attention to the symbols in Canada, it's JJ in Canada and in America it's JPOTF. I must also remind you if you like these videos please smash the like button, comment down below, share the video everywhere and subscribe. Jake, great to have you on the show from Las Vegas at the gaming conference. Before we get into what you're doing at the conference, you guys announced huge news that the company has finally gotten GLI certification. Can you tell us what it means for the company to finally reach this huge milestone? It's fantastic news Rich. What this means is we'll be able to allow or enable to put our jackpot blitz tables on the casino flows in the regulated casino space and the land based casinos. Up to now our tables were on the cruise ships, which is only a small portion of the market with certification. It allows for the tables to be placed all over North America and elsewhere in Europe, Africa, Australia, basically global reach with the certification and we're very excited about it. Congratulations. It's a huge, huge milestone. And can you tell us what you're doing at the conference and what kind of exposure the company's getting from having its digital poker table showcase for everyone to see? Sure. Well, we annually come and that's the G2E conference, which is a very large industry exhibition. And we're showcasing our table and also taking orders. Many orders from many casinos were waiting for us to get GLI certification. Now with certification, we're able to not only take those orders, but we can start more importantly placing the tables on casino floors on back orders that we had. So we're very excited about the prospects of the future for the company. We believe that not only are we going to get much more business at this conference, but from here on in we expect to be increasing our footprint globally with the product. That's very exciting. And for viewers and investors that are learning about jackpot digital, can you tell us what the revenue model is for the company? We operate on a recurring revenue, a monthly revenue stream. What we do is we license our electronic tables out to the casinos in basic form of a partnership, if you will, and they pay us a percentage of their monthly revenue. So this is a great way for both operators and for both operators and ourselves, because it aligns our interests in trying to make sure our product is up and running at all times and maximizing revenue. The operators like it because they feel that we're always looking at striving to make the product, enhance the product with more improvements, more content, etc. Which of course, which is what we do. Consider this more like a smart table where we're continually evolving the table and adding more content to it. Now that you guys got GLI certification, how long will it take before you start fulfilling all of the backlog of orders you have? Well, we still have to go through certain jurisdictional provinces and states to get licensing at the corporate level, not the product level. But those are already in process. We believe we'll have them from as little as four weeks and no more than eight to 12 weeks for the back order tables that we have, which is approximately near 30 tables, which is quite substantially almost a 50% increase to what we have in the field right now. But more importantly, for the future, we think that we can have a much bigger reach and footprint and we are hoping we're 24 and 20, 24, 25 to have several hundred tables out. That is our expectation. But they should start rolling out in the next four to eight weeks and maybe even sooner. That's great news. Jake, thank you for joining us today. Thank you. Congratulations to Jake Kalpaki and the CEO of Jackpot Digital. Finally, achieving the milestone of GLI certification for their Jackpot Blitz gaming machines. I must remind you that Rich TV Live is strictly for information and education purposes. Please do your due diligence and do your research whenever you're looking at investing in any of the companies that we're featuring. I also want to bring your attention to the company symbols. In Canada, the symbol for Jackpot Digital is JJ and in America, it's JPOTF. And once again, if you're not winning, you're probably not watching because we bring you the winners, breaking news, trending topics, CEO interviews, engaging shows, and we bring them to you first. I'm your host of The Most, your boy, Rich from Rich TV Live saying, have a nice day. We'll see you soon.


I'm Shannon Mustapher, an award-winning mixologist, educator, and author. Like a confession booth, the bar is a place for all walks of life to come in and share their stories. So today, I'll be sitting down with innovative creators to turn their journeys in the classic Grand Marnier cocktails with a unique twist on a tradition. AJ! What's up? This is Scott. Thanks for having me. You're an art curator. Yeah. Tell us what that work entails and why it's important. I like to think of what I do as something that really creates change because I'm not necessarily talking to artists that are already in their most successful or prominent space. I like to work with artists that are emerging. Traditionally, curators are people who have gone to school and studied items and movements around items and are sort of creating, again, the history to what is the art. And I want to give my best to this. I want to be a studious. I want to learn what I can learn, but I also want to add. And I don't want to just leave it as like, okay, you are here because you've learned 900 years of art history. So you're official. What about the next 900 years? Like, how are we going to start moving those people ahead and moving those conversations in? Personally, I always look back at African traditions like griots and things like that. We're showing that we have culture and that we're looking to retain it. I think those things deserve to be in museum spaces and institutions. So basically, you're like a keeper of culture. Is that a fair way to put it? I don't know. No, for sure. That's where I want to take it.  I think people often read the way that I look as like a summation of my experience. And I think that people see me as this young black male curator in question. Why I'm there and like my legitimacy there. And I think that oftentimes like I get shunned with education and opportunities. Like I was asked to learn someone else's history and someone else's culture and someone else's expression before giving space to learn my own. And it was really difficult. Based off of that, how do you push back? How does that maybe fuel or feed into your mission as a curator? Right now, I just want to be accessible. I want to learn. I want to go to art shows and talks and panels. I want to go to other artists openings. I want to support other curators. I just want to be a force in my community by being present in like a database of information for people. We don't have to just be working class people. We don't have to stay outside of these spaces. We don't have to reject creativity. All of these things can be fused into our everyday lives and like these museums and these institutions have to learn about us and our experiences and the way we maintain culture. So it sounds like your approach to curation is part anthropologists, part witness observer. Maybe if you don't realize the kind of hospitality that goes into being a curator, right? That goes into creating an environment. And so we're in a bar environment right now. And I'm curious what kind of mood you like to experience when you're having a drink. I'm laughing because I always like sweet tasting drinks. I guess that's like the southern enemy. I always wanted to feel a little like lemonade or sweet tea or something like that. I always get the martini glass cups for the drinks with the flowers and the whole like decorative things. It seems like you're not one for the regular path. So I'm going to take you off the beaten path. Does that sound okay? I'm excited. Thank you. I would love to taste you on the star of this drink. It's a Grand Marnier Louis Alexandre. This is a blend of 82% cognac and orange liqueur. Great as a gift, great for the holidays. And I think this drink is really going to bring that point home for you. It's really good. It's really great. And I really like drinking it neat. I can get the full taste of it. I think that some people think cognac is, you know, just a one dimensional thing. But what Louis Alexandre did, he's the founder of Grand Marnier, was to mix cognac with orange liqueur. No one had dared to do anything like that before. Interesting. And that was a bit of a grand gesture. Should we get started? Let's do it. I'm excited. So I started off with two dashes of orange bitters picking up on the citrus that comes from the orange liqueur in a Louis Alzonk. Next, I'm going to add a bar spoon of a citrus-infused simple syrup. Next, I'm going to use some vermouth. This is a vermouth Bianco. A little more aromatic. Last of star, the Louis Alzonk. So I put those two together with the bitters. I'm going to chill it down. I like the look already. It looks like a classic martini, but I want to give it a festive edge. I'm going to top it off some champagne to really bring it to the holiday zone and also change the way you think about this style of cocktail, right? So much like you treat your art like, hey, we're going to go to the old school and make it new. I think we can do the same thing here with this cocktail, which I call the keeper of culture. I love that. Let's see what you got. Yeah, I love where you took that. This is amazing. That's what's up.  Cheers.


Hi, I've been told I'm one of the few presenters, if not the only one who doesn't have any slides today Which I like to see as a bit of a personal winning off process, but I don't know might talk to stereotypes about book publishers I'm the associate publisher at Bridget Williams books an independent publisher based in Wellington Our director Bridget Williams has been publishing award-winning complex nonfiction for over 30 years now And our list includes works by Claudia Orange, Judith Binney, Tony Valentine, Jane Kelsey and Lloyd Gearing These books are high-investment works often heavily illustrated, peer-reviewed, intensively edited, with stringent print production values and always produced in close collaboration with authors, editors, proofreaders indexes and the wider book trade As the digital lead at BWB, I'm now responsible for taking these works into a digital space This means a major retro conversion project including titles stretching back to pre-PDF and in design days Along with the creation of an in-house XHTML workflow A recurring issue for me throughout this work has been value the value of e-books for scholarly use The technical value of the industry's processes and standards the commercial value of these works and Ultimately the long-term cultural value of this digital shift I expect for many of you, e-books are today identified with a lack of value Most e-books remain monolithic text dumps exchanged across the web as containers devoid of any connectivity Despite various initiatives, the industry remains beholden to Amazon's Moby format, a format derived from HTML 3.2 So yes, e-book development often appears to exist in a world 15 years behind the web These proprietary technologies are adequate for plain text genre fiction, but are simply unsatisfactory for complex non-fiction works As a result, some non-fiction publishers have been guilty of treating digital as supplementary to print issuing works with redacted images misused formats poor metadata and little or no quality assurance Next generation formats notably EPUB 3 and Amazon's KFA have been rolled out and tethered to elements of HTML 5 and CSS 3 But adoption of these is proving painfully slow In fact, there are growing concerns that EPUB 3 as the open standard might never be fully implemented In this siloed world, publishers are effectively held hostage to the whims of the various reading systems such as iBooks and Adobe digital editions I'm always struck by how discussions of e-book limitations often focus on formats devices or DRM when it's usually the actual reading system where the problems originate A major recent industry initiative in the US designed to kickstart implementation of EPUB 3 saw various components of the standard notably scripting effectively redacted in order to reach a lowest common denominator that will work across a meaningful number of reading systems Against this background you'll understand our excitement in recently developing pop-up footnotes for our forthcoming titles on iBooks Because yes, in e-book development, we still party like it's 1999 Despite these limitations, however, we place substantial value on our digital program at BWB This means a heavy long-term investment running across high quality conversion work building an in-house workflow and content management system archiving and preservation developing digital style guides and then lots of traditional publishing things like recontracting, proofing, quality assurance and permissions and lots and lots of permissions Over time, this investment is allowing us to turn into a hybrid publisher one that is working from a largely non-proprietary XHTML base able to transform our works into one of the many digital and print formats that the world is forcing upon us And we only expect this world to get messier EPUB 3, for example, means we're now nearing a state where we have to develop one file for each major vendor one to upload to Apple, one to upload to Kobo and so on This investment has also allowed us this year to launch a short-formed digital first imprint called BWB text But this heavy investment has come at a time when the commercial value of e-books is declining Amazon in particular both incentivizes and places significant pressure on publishers to price their e-books below US $10 Entering a new work on their system increasingly reminds me of an inverted Ryanair website where every step triggers a pop-up or a trap door designed to price your work at US $2.99 or less Substantial data now illustrates few readers today are willing to pay above US $12 for an e-book irrespective of genre This blindness to genre presents a crucial challenge as captured in a striking recent estimate that non-fiction e-books in the UK will make up 13% of non-fiction unit sales in 2014 but just 6.5% of total value This equation challenges the expectation that all publishing will migrate easily to digital forms especially serious non-fiction works requiring substantial pre-press investment Over time it's an equation that potentially challenges the commercial sustainability not margin's commercial sustainability of some significant high investment publishing outside the world of genre fiction As print sales globally continue their long-term decline across scholarly non-fiction the value in the compensating digital models is not yet there In other words digital today is asymmetric in its effects e-books are not only being devalued commercially the value of publishers is being questioned notably by the rise of open access As many of you will know, open access originated with journal publishing and is the practice of and importantly belief in providing unrestricted access to scholarly works via the internet especially those that have benefited from public funding The rationale for this in relation to journals has some reasonable grounds and is a wholly separate issue but the movement is now on the radar of book publishers or at least it should be because it is showing signs of moving into monographs and full academic book publishing The value of publishers is often lost in these discussions some open access proponents dismiss publishers as gatekeepers rendered irrelevant by the internet and internationally the industry to date has been poor and articulating any response This is a big complex issue but what I would observe in relation to books is that we're all committed to access that is a given it is the factoring in of the means of production especially for complex non-fiction works that alters how that access is framed and the terms under which it can be meaningfully sustained So there is at times a skepticism of the value of the publishing industry itself a sense that the web has atomized publishing that to publish is but to push a button and we can all be publishers now Without doubt there are interesting opportunities for new entrants only just the other week I was reading about a range of collaborations emerging in the US between university presses and libraries but what needs to be kept very clear here is the distinction between having the capacity to publish and the actual craft of publishing a process that is time consuming intensive hard work sometimes tedious often expensive and always risky Holding this distinction in mind one part of the answer to building value into e-books and yes, aiding the sustainability of future non-fiction publishing in this country rests with the institutions many of you work for For example, we're extremely grateful for those libraries, galleries and museums that have accommodated our request for digital licensing especially across our backlist conversions we're particularly grateful because we have carefully framed the terms of our requests to look forward to a new connected world of web e-books from books and browsers through to aggregated digital works that create new pathways to our authors and narratives it allows us as an independent New Zealand publisher to disseminate and present your collections in new ways it aids the sustainability of future non-fiction publishing and for readers it helps build a new sense of value for digital scholarship and reading online granting us permission to include a photograph in a nasty Moby e-book is, we hope, simply the first step towards a richer conversation about how we can deepen the connections between our works and your collections I'm not talking here of augmenting the book necessarily I'm a skeptic of enhanced e-books and of anything that detracts from reading as a cognitive immersive act but instead simple, scalable and sustainable connections things that add meaningfully to the reading and scholarly experience online from identifying shared metadata and permalinking standards through to other ideas from much smarter minds than my own ultimately collaborating with New Zealand publishers sets the scene for the sorts of connectivity and interoperability that e-book world desperately needs because I'm increasingly convinced that New Zealand publishers need to look to our own institutions the galleries, libraries, museums and Wellington's web developers not Apple, Amazon or Adobe if we are to move beyond the text dumps the containers and the closed off colourless worlds we have with e-books today Thank you very much


Morning. Welcome to Rockin' Pea. I'm Jesse Lennox. Today we're gonna work some two-year-olds and I'm just gonna kind of go through everything I like to do with them and and kind of how I start and then where I try to get to by this time of the year. It's early September. I'm gonna start off just pretending that I'm just kind of starting them on cows and I'm just gonna kind of explain that stage. I kind of feel like I have kind of three stages to my two-year-old riding and I'm gonna kind of take you through each stage even though walking slowly to a cow and when his ears prick up and he looks at it I'm gonna pet him a little bit and I'm just gonna kind of keep playing this game until I can drive that cow and I'm just gonna drive at this cow's hip and I'm gonna make this cow run somewhere and then I'm just gonna let my horse stop and so my goal is I'm trying to right now I don't care about the turn I'm just trying to teach my horse to run, rate and stop with a cow. I'll collect them on this angle where I'm still driving the hip. I'm kind of good he's trying to find the turn. Cool. One more. Awesome. And we're gonna quit right there. The most important thing that I would say about riding two-year-olds or any age horse is you want to remember when you