My name is Marlene McCohen and this is Cody, my African gray. Cody, do you want to do anything special? Like maybe jump on my head for this video? Oh, okay. Go ahead and do that. Today, my Sniffers is the video you guys have been waiting for. Now although I'd love to welcome you to Storytime Sunday, I'm pretty sure today is going to be Tuesday while this video comes out. But today is actually Monday the 28th and I'm going to get to why that's very important for you guys in one second. I just want to say that in light of Hurricane Harvey, a lot of you who are on my parent station page on Facebook, you know that I wasn't able to get a video out because my family lives in Houston. So today's Storytime Sunday is going to replace Parent Tip Tuesday until I can get back on schedule. If you guys have been watching consistently, you know that this week is the big secret story of Cody. I want you all to sit back, relax, pause this video, grab a cup of tea or a cup of coffee because I know this video is going to be a long one. It's going to be a mystical one and a little bit unbelievable. So like I said last week, this is a story for believers only. So welcome to the very big secret story of Cody, my African gray. Now although today is not Sunday, it's a very important day. As I mentioned, it's August 28th, August 28th is the day that my African gray George died three years ago today. Actually, in the background here, I have this big blanket with George's photo on it. So what better day to tell you this story than the anniversary of his death? Guys, I don't even know really, did you just bunt my head and laugh? I swear, I think he's here just to give me some comedic relief because although I love telling this story, I feel like today it's going to be particularly hard to tell. I'm kind of happy that he's hanging out on my head. It feels so weird to be telling this story on YouTube.  Now keep in mind, there are going to be parts that are kind of unbelievable and may or may not pertain to you and that's okay. This is just a story. You can believe some parts and not believe others. You can find meaning in some parts like I did and no meaning in other parts that's completely okay. I just want to tell you the way I tell everyone else. So here it goes. About three years and a few months ago, my sister and I started having some dreams. Now if you guys know my father, he's been a guest star on this channel before. You know that I'm obsessed with him and so is pretty much everyone else in my family. We really, really love my dad. I should tell you that I have a history of being an extremely psychic child. I've always been like that. Everyone in my family comes to me for guidance and readings and predictions and things like that. So sometimes when I have certain dreams, they do come true and other times when I have certain dreams, they may just be based out of the fear. But either way it's scary for me because I'm always scared that things are going to come true. Now I do believe of course that if you sit and analyze your dreams, you'll find out that a lot of it is accumulation of what happened during the day or things you thought about or TV shows. So I do sit and analyze it and know which dreams kind of are going to come true and mean something and which dreams don't. Anyway, my sister in particular, she doesn't really have a history of dreams coming true, but she's still young. So you know, you just don't know. My sister and I both started having dreams that my father was going to die. This made us extremely paranoid, extremely worried. I kid you not, once a week we would call my mom and get her all worried because my mom's also very obsessed with my dad. And just like it would create like a whole worry throughout the entire house. And we would sit and analyze what does it mean? Did it come from anything during the day? Did we watch something? And this would happen over and over and over again. And it was just extremely disturbing to us. Now in terms of the big picture of life, we didn't really think so much of it.  And you know, mom would put me on with dad. She'd be like, he's fine, he's doing really great here, speak to him for yourself. And I'd be like, dad, what are you eating? Make sure you're eating all vegan, all healthy. Dad, I could tell that you ate that cookie today. What are you doing? You know, dad would go, bye, bye, I'm okay. Everything is very good. Don't you be worrying. Fast forward to I'm going to New York City. And before I leave, I do this whole thing with my bird, George, where I tell him how many days I'm going to be gone for. If you guys watch my time for technique, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. But Cody, let me borrow you for a second. I left him on the side because he can get very distracting. So before I would leave, because he understands what time for means, I would say one time for bed, two time for bed, three time for bed, and I would count them all out just to make sure that the bird would understand how long I'm going to be gone for. At the end of the amount of time for beds, I would say mommy's home. My logic in this was that the bird knows what time for bed means. He understands counting because George understood counting and he understood mommy's home. These were all things I would say. So I've been gone for much longer periods before and everything was really fine. And George was a very emotionally stable African gray. Like I just knew that about him. He was extremely healthy, extremely emotionally stable. He was just an amazing, really, really brilliant bird. I go to New York and I'm there for the first event and the second event. And then one day I get this real feeling about my bird and I'm really excited about him and I post something on Facebook, how lucky I am in life to have a pet like this and I post this video of George, which I will post for you guys tonight. And you know, sometimes I have this superstition that if you're really proud of something, maybe you don't post it, maybe you don't share it with the world because there's jealousies and superstitions and maybe you should keep the good things for yourself. But really like we're talking about my Facebook friends and my bird and I was just really excited. The next day I get a call and by the way, I've been FaceTiming my bird every single day and he loved it. He would totally come on the phone and you would see him talking to me and we'd be FaceTiming. And the next day I was told that George was very quiet and I said put him on FaceTime with me. They're like, he hasn't really talked all day and they're like, but I think he's fine. I'm like, no, no, no, that's not a good sign at all. And then I'm like, he looks like he's eating and drinking really slow. Please like take care of him like, and I gave specific instructions, which we really won't go into. And the bird looked like he was doing so much better. I got like this picture of him. Like you could tell he was like sick, but his eyes were full of life. And I probably told you guys this in the story about grief. So I don't need to go into so many details. But long story short, he got really sick and after this one vet visit where I don't think they did right by my bird, he had a seizure right after. And I'm telling you like the picture before he went into the vet, like he had hope in life in his eyes and the picture after just he did not really look so good at all. And I just knew. So I did this whole thing that day before he went to the vet where I sometimes get in touch with some magical stuff and lit these candles to find out what was going to happen and like to send positive energy. As soon as I lit the candle, I felt like my bird was going to die because what I read from it was that he was going to the heavens. Anyway, the night before when I knew he was sick and I was really, really worried about it, I had seen something in the room of my aunt's house that I had only seen one time before in my life and I knew it wasn't a good sign. It was like a square, a black square, like floating in the room. I didn't know what it was. But the last time I had seen it, it wasn't that disaster happened. It was that there was a warning. And let me tell you the story about the last time I saw it. One day I was sleeping in my apartment about eight years ago. I'm one of those serious Leo sleepers. My phone is on silent mode. It doesn't matter what is about to happen. I can't sleep with my phone on and the beeping and whatever and emergencies. And like my phone is on silent mode every single time I wake up late. I'm just one of those people in the middle of the night. I woke up because I kept having nightmares that someone was trying to get into the apartment. I woke up, George, and I said, you like need to get up and figure out who's trying to get into the apartment. There's a burglar outside. Something is out there. He walks to the hallway and all the lights are on and he basically says something which indicates that I'm probably just worried because the lights are on. It's not a big place. So you could tell right there that nobody's in the house. Like it's pretty obvious. But when he was gone, that black thing appeared. You laughing that black thing appeared between the bed and the door. And I'm sitting on the bed and I see this black thing and I'm looking at it and it's waving and it's not like shaped like anything tangible. It's not like a ghost. It's not like just like black air and it's like like a square really. And my thought process was there's no way he can cross the door to the bed because that thing is in the way.  So you probably can't get in. I think quickly and I say, go check the back door.    I'm gonna die and what happened was I had this young kid staying with me 17 years old came out to LA to want to be an actor. Very like, would misplace things all the time loose things like had no thought process. This kid essentially lost the keys to the place or forgot them and tried to get in the back door, but he was sleeping. He had already been sleeping on the balcony for a few hours, proven by the texts that I had got from him a few hours prior saying, are you awake? Can you come to the back door? So when George went to the back, he saw his feet on the ground lying there. This is important because this is evidence that I wasn't hearing him right then and there that woke me up. It had already been hours since he was trying. He was out there freezing and the entity wouldn't let George cross back to me until we figured out that he was outside. So those kind of things have happened to me since I was a kid. That specifically only that time. When I was praying for George and trying to heal him from afar, that thing appeared to me and I kind of knew that it was probably there to let me know that I don't know how these things work, that it was gonna take George or I don't know. Sometimes I believe with me specifically, although I'm very hyper sensitive and by the way, I believe everybody can do this. I just believe that I'm in tune because I'm extremely sensitive to animals, two things I'm looking at Cody is like two pink lips on his feathers now. So I don't know exactly what everything was for but I knew something was gonna happen to my bird and I was very upset about it. When I found out I was in the middle of New York City, I was just devastated. I think I told you guys before, it felt like the whole city around me stopped. You watching me? Fast forward to a few days later, I can't go home. It's the wedding now or it's the bar mitzvah and now I know my entire family is going to be coming from all over like my California family's coming, my Texas family is coming, we're all gonna be there now in New York City, New Jersey for this wedding but before that, I felt like if I could just ask my dad why this happened, it didn't make sense to me. Like George was only eight years old, it made no sense. So I felt like just like my dad had the answer. I don't know why, like obviously it's not like my dad could say this is why it happened but I knew that if I would ask him, he had the answer, something didn't make sense, especially since I've always been a hypersensitive kid, especially since I've had this bird since he was a baby. So it just felt like it made no sense. I've had pets die before, this was different. This made no sense to me at all. I had to find out why. Now this is where it gets kind of interesting.  And he's like, well, you know, he could have eaten something and he's getting very logical and very practical about it. And I'm like, no dad, please tell me why. He stops and he realizes this is all over the phone. I think he realizes that I want like more of a mystical answer because it's not making sense. So then he says, well, you know, first of all, you shouldn't have named Tim George because you know, you're not supposed to name pets and the living after the living. Now this is a Jewish religion belief. We don't have juniors and stuff like that. You don't name people after the living because it has something to do with like the soul and like the soul being taken. I don't want to give you wrong information. Now before I get all religious on you, this really has nothing to do with religion.  So for me, all religions are important. All religions are correct. It doesn't mean anything except for the fact that the cues I'm getting from this are helping me get answers. So if this would have happened to somebody of any other religion and they felt like some of these dates or correlations correlated to anything of their religion, I would believe that too. So I just want to let you guys know that so nobody writes anything like weird and religious or whatever. This is really just a story and how I was able to piece things together for myself to feel better about it. So my dad said, you're not supposed to name birds and things after people that are alive. For those of you don't know what I'm talking about, my dad's name is George, my bird's name was George. I would never have done that actually, except I told you guys before, it was always my dream to have a bird named George because they're comedians and they're geniuses and from the British magazine, I'd always read about birds named George and I bought my bird with a roommate. She had a crush on a guy and he suggested the name George. So I was fine by that. Yeah, anyhow, that wasn't enough reason for me. That was just like, okay, dad, I get it. I did it too late. Now what? He got really serious and he said, well, you know, you never know. You could have made a deal with God.  When he said that, I remembered something that is so interesting because he was the one that has evidence of it. So it wasn't something I didn't say out loud. It was something I told him a few weeks prior before I got on the plane to go to New York. I had had this crazy dream the night before and while I was waiting for my plane, I called my dad. I'll never forget in the gift shop to tell him about it. I said, dad, because remember, we were having those dreams about him dying and I remembered one specifically that I had but thank God for evidence, I had called him and told him about it in the airport on my way to New York. I said, dad, I had this dream that you died and in the dream, I was so devastated that I wanted to change it. Now something else about me and like something else that the family believes about me is I'm an excellent manifestor. Like I could never have any money in my life but could have every single thing that I want. I've always just been that kind of person. Like really, really strong beliefs that I can do things and then they do come to fruition. It was like in my dream, I understood that about myself and I went up to a heaven in my dream. I didn't see anything when I was up there. It's like I knew that I went up to anything. Whatever you believe in, I went up there and I came down. The next part I remember is when I'm down and I said, I made a deal with God and my dad is going to live his life longer now because of the sacrifice that I made. And I remembered that.  And he goes, you never know, could be. Maybe you did go up and make a deal. And you know, sometimes he said, when the angel of death comes, he said an animal that loves you so much can make a sacrifice and that is of no religion. That is just something that he believed from his deep readings. And I've read some really amazing Christian books and New Age books and Kabbalistic books that all have that same theory. It was really interesting because I'm like, wow. And then he took the bird with the same name. You know, it's a possibility. And it made me think about the whole thing in a very different way.  I know George wasn't just a bird. You guys know how it feels to lose a bird or any pet. It feels like you're losing a child, especially with a bird that speaks to you and communicates with you as we've discussed before. But if a human was to die, like my dad or any of my family members, that would have been just devastating. So suddenly I was able to look at it from a better point of view, but I was still, of course, extremely devastated. So I started to think if he did make a sacrifice is something wrong with my dad. So I said, dad, you need to go right now to this natural healer that I had found in Houston, Texas.  I was like, dad, you have to go to this guy. And my dad's like, okay, I will. I felt like something was kind of solved in terms of maybe I did really go up and make some sort of deal that I wasn't able to see because I would have been traumatized by it. That was what I thought maybe happened and maybe the bird decided himself it was time for him to do that for me. I don't know. Because my dreams have always been so psychic, I was really hoping that George would come to me in my dreams. And so that's one thing I was waiting for. In the meantime, my family came to New York for the wedding and we were staying at my uncle's house. This is only like literally a few days later after George died. I'm still extremely distraught. Everything makes me upset. And this is my first time seeing Jenna and everyone after the incident. So it was really, really sad for the whole family. While we're at my uncle's house, this guy is outside talking to my father. He's about my father's age. And I go outside, my uncle had invited him over and I say, hey dad, what's going on? You know, and my dad goes, Marlene, come here. I want to introduce you. You'll never believe it. This guy was my roommate in college. Not only was this guy my dad's roommate in college, they had both moved from Iran to college in England and they were roommates. They had something in common. They're both kind of like Iranians that are new to England. So not only were they roommates, but now it's what, 30 years later, my uncle in New Jersey ran into this guy's brother. They became friends after talking. They discovered that both their brothers, my uncle's brother, which is my dad, and this guy's brother, which is the guy that was there, they discovered that they were roommates in college. So they start saying small world. Not long after that, do those two discover that they are cousins, first cousins. So the whole time my dad was in college with this guy and they were best friends, they were also cousins and never knew a thing about it. This guy proceeds to have dinner with us. Now keep in mind, it's only a few days later and it's that day that we met him and I'm very upset about my bird. And the guy goes, I have an African gray, a gray bird. I don't know, I think it's an African gray and me and my brother and like my sister are like really? Where? He's like in my warehouse. For me, I'm away. I haven't like gotten to see a bird in a while. I really need to see a bird. But also the way he told it, like I don't know anything about the bird. The bird doesn't really hang out. The bird's not really friendly. I said, can we go see him? Now imagine what logic is this that he says okay and at eight o'clock at night, he takes an entire family that he hasn't seen in 30 years to his warehouse to see this bird. He wants us to see this bird and really we wanted to go there to show him how to interact with the bird, how to take care of the bird, but it's only been like four days since George died.  How did you do that? And I educate him on what food and this and that. I got wins, but nobody really discussed it with me that my dad was like, do you want that bird? I will get him for you. I'm like, okay, look, how are you just gonna get this guy's bird? But my dad's thought process, as you guys probably know from the Duffy story, is that he wants to fix my pain and get me a bird. But also he doesn't really like the conditions that that bird is living in without somebody knowing how to be with them, pet him, hold him, anything. So my dad wants to take that bird. The whole time in the car, George in general were like, you know, if you want that bird, we can bring him home. Like, you know, he needs a better home and I'm just like throwing tantrum. I don't want like a replacement bird right now. I guess I texted the guy and said, give me updates in case you need any help with your bird. And that was the end of that. I didn't have many dreams about George like I wanted to. I had one dream about George and I saw him and I was holding him and I said, oh my God, you're the most genius bird in the world. You figured out how to come back to me. I can't believe it. So I thought, George is gonna come back to me in another bird, like he's a genius. This is what's going to happen. But at the same time, I was really devastated, couldn't get over it and I started kind of being reclusive. So I went to somebody who does body talk. Body talk is kind of like, you know, kind of like the kinetic energy they talk to your body and they try to heal you and like readjust you or whatever. She doesn't know anything about birds and she goes into my body apparently tells her and she says, there's a dead bird like on your chest. Like it's hard for you to function and she doesn't know anything about birds. And she goes, your bird was a genius.  She also said, he knew that you were away and she goes, I don't know if you told him that you're going or how long you're going for but he knew and he wanted to give you the gift of dying when you weren't around. And I'm like, wow, because I keep saying the time for bed, time for beds for him. That particular day when I said time for bed, I remember I got interrupted and I remember my sister saying, let her finish the time for beds with George. And I always felt guilty, like maybe he didn't know the exact day from what I was saying and he expected me on a day and he got depressed. So I always felt guilty about that. But she said he knew and he wanted to die when I wasn't there. And I said, do you believe in anything like an animal giving a sacrifice or like sacrificing for people? And she said, oh yes, I've seen that many times and that can happen. And I said, my bird hasn't come to me in any dreams. And she said, it's like he's not there. She goes, I don't know what it is, but you know, he's not in that afterlife anymore. And so I kind of got upset, but I was about to get on another plane. I forgot where I was going. And the night before, I remember it was like October 10th, I had this dream that George came back to me again and I said, oh my God, you're such a genius, you came back to me. And I had this epiphany somewhere before that when George does come back to me, I'm going to name him Garfield. That was my name for him. And I called my mother and I said, mom, I had the dream again that George came back to me. Whenever I fly, I need to have the reader's digest. I always fly on the plane with a reader's digest. So I get the reader's digest and I'm just like flipping through it on the phone with my mom. And I go, do you think that means that he will come back to me? And he will be Garfield. And she's like, yeah, possibly remember this date. And I flip open, like I just bought this book and my thumb lands on a page and it's highlighted and it says Garfield. Like, mom, oh my God, you'll never believe it. I just opened this book and it says Garfield.  And reader's digest was doing something where they interview old cartoons to see where are they now and how they feel about things. So that was something very weird that they were doing and my thumb landed on Garfield as if to give me a sense of maybe it is true. This is what's gonna happen. I had a really hard year missing my bird. I had a very hard time getting over it and I always felt like a spot was missing. The other birds were always my loves too but none of them were George. They just didn't give me that excitement to get up in the morning. I mean, of course they do, but it just was different. Like something was severely missing. So since I started believing in the reincarnation of my bird, George, I began to look for the reincarnation. I was convinced that I was going to find George's reincarnation. George was a special bird. He had white toes. The reincarnation of George would obviously have white toes. So since I was convinced that George would have white toes in his reincarnation Garfield, I would go to the bird store that I am close to and I would talk to the guy and see if when the babies are born he would have any white-toed birds.  If he's born and sometimes you just know that that's the soul of your old bird. And I was like, great, he's on board. So we're all looking for the white-toed bird. I swear every parrot store within like 40 miles of this place, bird conventions, everything, everyone knew I was looking for a white-toed bird. One day Jenna comes to me and she says, I had a dream about George. Jenna had multiple dreams about George. George didn't come to me in my dreams and it would make me really upset cause I was like, is he mad at me? Why isn't he coming to let me know? So she said, I had a dream that we had a bird and he did not have white-toes but he had a red feather on his head. George had a red feather on his tummy. And she said, I looked out the window and I saw you with both the birds and you were with George and the other bird except that bird had a red feather on his head and George was like, not real, but he was there. It was like his soul was in this other bird. So now I'm like, what do I look for a bird with a red feather on his head? And then finally I was like, you gotta let go and let God handle it, like chill out. Like I can't control what kind of bird is gonna come to me. If I control it, it's probably not the way it's going to be. So they told me at the bird store that one in every hundred birds may have white toes. It is of course very special, but specifically year after year and I'm talking about like two years, they never came across one. He's like, man, this is so rare. Usually I get one, but he didn't get any. In the meantime, my dad had gone to the doctor. He went to that natural doctor that we were talking about and they had found a scar on his heart and they put him on like this raw vegan diet and basically his blood pressure and cholesterol and everything leveled out as soon as he went on this raw vegan diet. And for me it was just like a weird sign because it was like right after I found out that George died, he did listen and he went to this doctor and there was in fact a scar on his heart which indicates that he had a heart attack at some point, a minor one. And now he's completely healing and he's completely fine. So that was very interesting. And then a month later or maybe a few weeks later my mom told me, you know, August 28th, the day that your bird died was on that year on the Jewish day of sacrifice, which was so weird because it all came together for me. Again, I say this, but it's not about religion. It could have been a different cue of any religion for anybody else. It was just very interesting for me to piece all of the story together. So I thought, wow, that's very interesting. My grandmother is a really big psychic in Israel. Like she just has a gift. This is a grandmother I didn't grow up with. I didn't know about because my father was taken away from her when he was very young. And sure enough, when they came back together they're very much alike and she's very, very psychic. And when I was in Israel visiting her this past November and I got a chance to be alone with her I said, can you please tell me about my bird? Like I know that it's not like the biggest deal in the world in terms of like life problems but I really want to know about my bird. And she said, the character of your bird, like the soul has gone into another bird that you will have. I said, really? That's so weird. Cause these were kind of my dreams. Like, and then we're trying to guess and George is like, it's rocky. I'm like, it's not rocky. He's like, rocky has white toes. I'm like, it's not rocky. Like she goes, no, you'll know. And it went into the soul of another bird and that's why you don't dream about it. I was like, okay. And I was like at peace with that. When I came home to Los Angeles, California a few days later, I said out loud, I am ready for my African gray nail. Was I really ready in terms of like accepting the situation? Yes. In terms of, do I need another bird? No, I don't need another bird. We all know I don't need another bird. But for some reason, like only an African gray could fill that void. And in my family, they were like, okay. Like just what you need. And I said, I don't know why I'm just ready for my African gray. I'm ready for the reincarnation of George. Like, I don't think I was ready before, but I'm ready. The next day, I get a call from a number. I have a droid. So it tells me like the last text that I've texted the person while it's ringing in case you don't have their name in. So I see that I texted this person. Oh, well, keep me updated on your bird. And I'm like, I don't know who this is. Like who did I try to help with their bird? I listened to the message and he's like, hi, Marlene.  I need help with my bird. Like help with your bird, of course. Like I'm gonna call you back. I call him back. He goes, I need to tell you something. I moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles. By the way, the same town I live in, okay. And I brought my bird. And I wanna know if you wanna take him. I'm like, no, cause you know, I have five birds that's crazy. Like, you know, if you can find a good home, like it would be a better home than mine cause I have so many birds. He's like, yeah, well, he's not allowed in the house. He's outside freezing. I'm like, I'll be right there. Cut to the video you guys saw about me rescuing Cody. The bird that I saw three years ago, two and a half years ago in New Jersey was Cody. Cody? Cody was the bird that I saw four days after George died. Four days after George died. In New Jersey, when a random guy that I didn't really know that we randomly said, can we go to your warehouse and meet this bird? That this bird didn't really come out for anybody in his family. He didn't even know that birds can be so tame. Came to me and my family. We have a picture of us and Cody, like three years ago, my dad and Cody. My dad couldn't believe it because my dad said, you know what's so funny about this? The fact that not just that this bird now has followed me all the way from New Jersey to California, to the town that I live in, this bird, the bird that I saw four years ago, okay? Not only that, but my dad told me something interesting. He said, you know, that guy that owns the bird, when we were in college, he came into a situation and needed money and I gave him some money to borrow. He never gave it back. My dad doesn't care. My dad is like whatever someone needs. But he said, imagine that, like he brought you the bird. You want it like karma, like 30 years later. So that's why I think that Cody is secretly George because when Cody came to me, he took to me right away and he kissed me right away. He kisses me all day. He's super attached, like as if I'm going to leave. And he says words that George said, like he's going through all of the same stages that I went through with George since he was a baby. Now, if you do believe in that kind of stuff and you do believe that souls are able to go into other souls because we do have that in our religion. Well, deep, deep in the studies that if someone is trying to finish something and they die, part of their soul can go into another body and figure it out. If you do believe in that, then this is George, except what always bothered me is that Cody didn't have a red feather on his head like my sister did, say about her dream.  And as I went over his feathers, like you have to really bend all those small ones back, one of the small feathers is red and I couldn't believe it. I'm like, how did I even find that out in time to tell you guys that part of the story I can't believe it. And by the way, let me tell you what happened with my dad. My dad had been growing out a beard and my mom came to the conclusion. She said, I think you're scaring the children with the beard and you need to shave it because she thought all our dreams were really because he has this beard and he looks older and wiser and it's freaking us out. So my dad ended up shaving his beloved beard of that season and that is pretty much the story of Cody. Whether you're a believer or not, I hope you found this story interesting and I'm going to leave it at that. Thank you so much for joining into Storytime Sunday. Today is the anniversary of George's death. So thank you guys so much for watching. Please subscribe for more lovely bird videos. Follow me on Instagram at Marlene McCohen and have a wonderful, miraculous day. Bye.


Hi, good afternoon. Welcome to the Future of Democracy, a show about the trends, ideas, and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. I'm your host Sam Gill, and for those of you who have listened to this show or tuning in just for the first time, what we kind of try to do here is give you the op-ed page of our democracy. We try to break down some of the most contentious, challenging, fractious issues that are happening and explore what they are, what they mean, whether they're real, where they're leading us. And we're sticking today with an ongoing discussion we've been having over the whole summer, really, about the role of social media in our democracy. Almost daily, during the final sprint of the election, the major social media platforms are adjusting their policies to address a seeming tsunami of election-related misinformation, demagoguery, and conspiracy. Our guest today saw earlier than most that technology, for all its promise, held the potential for great democratic peril as well. Zeynep Tufekchi is a professor at the University of North Carolina, a columnist at The Atlantic, and the author of Twitter and Tear Gas, the ecstatic, fragile politics of networked protests in the 21st century. Please welcome to the show Zeynep. Hey, how are you? Hi. Thanks for coming. Thanks for inviting me. So we're starting with your Victory Lab. So you were very early to point out what the dystopian implications of globally networked technology could be, especially some of the things we're really seeing right now. So the use of microtargeting and what that does to preference formation and the way in which technology can accelerate extremism. So do you feel vindicated or horrified? Well, I feel both horrified and mad. I keep feeling like saying it's not all terrible. There are lots of good things. There's a lot of reasons for optimism. It's just important to pay attention to these difficulties of a transition so that we can do it in a healthier way. So I feel almost like a slight contrarian urge saying that it's not hopeless. It's not something to despair but think deeply about how to do it better. So what are some of the folks in technology often talk about the affordances, the things that technology allows us to do? What are the elements of these tools, particularly social media, that you believe are both capable of enabling good, but are also the instruments of some of what is concerning us right now? So the way I think about it is that this changes the fabric of society because it changes how we can connect to one another, what's visible, what's not visible, what's archived, what's permanent, what's ephemeral. So it goes to the heart of everything. It's changing how time and space are experienced. This is a profound shift and it's way beyond, this is just a tool, we can do good with it, with bad with it. What you're doing is changing how everything is organized. So to sort of, when you look at it that broadly, no wonder we're struggling with this. And what you're talking about in terms of my earlier work, when I was talking about some of the dangers, it's still sort of similar topics. One of the key differences, for example, is that with social media, we have things that are at the same time mass but not public, right? In traditional broadcasts, the things you have that are mass are also public. You still have gossip, you still have socialization, you still have people talking to one another, but it's not fast and mass at the same time. So you might have like a rumor going around in one town, but it can't just sort of all of a sudden, you know, unwrap the whole country, perhaps, but also without being visible as some form of broadcast. So that's one big difference. The other major change is that when you have sort of socialization, where people are just talking to each other, whatever they think they're talking about, it's not mediated by a platform like we do right now, whose business model is to capture our attention and to sell our attention to advertisers by profiling us, right? So this is a huge difference because things that capture our attention are things that are novel, interesting, exciting, things that bring us together, things that bring us together against another group. Those are things that feed polarization. So we have an ecology on social media by business model, it facilitates polarization because that's engaging and polarization is the flip side of bringing people together.  It changes, you know, I'm going to go on and on, it changes ephemerality in that lots of things that we just would have said and would have kind of disappeared into time are now archived permanently. And it changes who can be targeted on something like Facebook, you can upload, you know, 1000 emails and say, find me, you know, machine learning that Facebook has developed millions more like these people. And Facebook doesn't even have to understand what on earth you're looking for. So if you upload, you know, 1000 people who are prone to conspiracy theories, Facebook's ad engine will nicely and dutifully give you a million more who might be prone to conspiracy theories. And then you can micro target them in a way that's mass and public. So it changes everything about the way our fabric of information and socialization occurs. So let's talk about this question of intermediation because I think, you know, so the certainly, you know, newspapers and broadcast television, we're also selling attention to advertisers that they were aggregating. And, you know, there are two things that you've brought up that some people point to. So one is that that they to your point of mass, the masses, the public that they certainly saw themselves as serving the whole of the market, as opposed to just the conspiracy theorists. And, and that so that's one thing that's gone wrong is the sort of fractious nature, the vulcanization of audience. But the other argument that people make is sort of an ethical one that that these these gatekeepers, these intermediaries of the newspaper and broadcast era had ethical standards about what would count as authoritative information. And an algorithm may or may not have ethical standards, or it may have unethical standards that are much more focused on attention and engagement. What do you what do you? So I guess my question is, what is that? Is this the right comparison? First of all, like, should we be comparing intermediaries of the past to intermediaries of the present? And if we should, what are the what are the what are the helpful versus distracting points of comparison? So those are very good points. So it's not, it's useful to some degree to compare, but there are big differences. So we had conspiracy peddling newspapers as well, right? National Inquirer with the frequent UFO landings and whatever else you want to say. But one of the differences was, one of the key differences is that it's still broadcast. Like if there is a National Inquirer right at the checkout line, it cannot flip a different front page to every person coming by depending on what it thinks is going to be sort of that person will be susceptible to based on surveillance of their habits, right? So there's a big difference between having one big broad thing that's static compared with something that is different to each person, you know, screen by screen. So that's one thing. The second thing that is different is that in a advertiser sported model where the output is static, you only have one front page, which is a 20th century model, right? Before you had different kinds of newspapers as well. You, the way to get the broadest advertisers is in some sense to remain centralizing, like you sort of try to get a broad audience, which had pluses and minuses, whatever you thought about it, it was a thing that didn't, couldn't divide because wanted mass audiences. You couldn't just have two billion people, which is mass, but also showed them, you know, have them splintered into publics. So you have to have like a merger of public and your business model kind of worked with each other. And also it was gate kept, right? There were journalists who were gatekeepers. And while not perfect, I mean, I can give you 30 significant criticisms, you know, papers with criticisms of traditional mass media gatekeeping, but they did have, as you know, ethical standards that they failed from often, but they failed from them. They had standards that were normative and they failed from, and which were, you know, sometimes some things got censored, there was misinformation, there were other things, but it was still like things that we tried to go by. And importantly, a lot of those standards and that understanding of journalism with the, you know, the code of conduct or ethics that you think about were developed in the post-World War II period when the world was horrified by rise of fascism and propaganda, the role of propaganda in the rise of fascism. So they were also reaction to the age of propaganda, which, or the fear of propaganda that in both Europe and the US scholars established and journalists kind of went with this new program where they saw themselves as public watchdogs for the broad public. Whereas, of course, the algorithm doesn't have to have any such, but it can't because one, it's an algorithm that's trying to optimize for engagement. The second thing is once again, if something is visible and math and trying to gather a large audience, which is the newspapers of 20th century, it's a very different setup than, I can have my two billion people without giving them all the same message. New York Times cannot do that. Facebook can do that. That changes what their incentives are. So one of the sort of thinking about kind of gatekeepers for kind of most of the history, particularly social media, and this is still true, the philosophical argument has been advanced around being a gatekeeper that we don't want to be arbiters of speech, has been a part of the argument. And a part of the argument has been that it's net beneficial to democratize discourse, all of these critiques of newspapers, that everything that gets limited in a world where a few people are making decisions is tended to carry the day. And it's still an argument, for example, I think Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook will make very, very, very vocally. This year has seen a real change in the orientation, at least the public orientation, particularly with regard to health information and election information. And as I sort of said at the outset, you're starting to see some of these companies make policy changes that I would have said 12 months ago they would have been allergic to, even considering. And I'd love to know, what do you make of some of the policy changes? What seems on the right track to you? You know, we've seen some, we're getting rid of this kind of content, we're blocking that, we're giving a notification, Twitter is introducing a little bit of friction in the system versus what do feels like it's on the wrong track or missing the problem. So, one step back, I will say that there's a question different than arbiters of truth, is that they're arbiters of attention. And that's really important because that's a big debate we should be having because even when they are or not blocking a particular speech or group, they are abiding attention, our attention by elevating certain kinds of things by design, by algorithm, by what they promote, how the retweet button works, whether you have like or dislike, whether you have a hate emoticon after everything, they are arbiters of attention and mood and context, which is super important. So, there's a discussion way beyond speech because speech is kind of misleading. They think as a cause, I mean, we had similar discussions before with mass media too. If you didn't get on television, you didn't necessarily have restriction to your speech, you got restricted into the attention, mass attention you could get. Well, that's what I want to say is that that's more important. The second thing, which is what you just said, is that they're stepping into the space and there too, I have a much bigger concern than what they're doing, which is that they get to unilaterally decide this. I'll tell you what I honestly think they're doing. I think Facebook and Twitter have concluded that President Trump and the Republicans are going to lose this election and they know that the other side of the aisle has been really mad at them for their lack of action in this space since 2016 and I think they're just doing a very calculated attempt to appease a constituency that includes their own workforce, which has been upset with these platforms because of what they think the election result will be. And I think this is very similar to what they did in 2016 in which they decided, along with most rest of the population, I guess, that Hillary Clinton was going to win and decided to leave the misinformation space alone because they thought, you know what? We don't want to really upset the Republicans right now. We're just going to deal with it after the election, after Hillary Clinton wins. So in both cases, when they act in a way they don't act, because they think it's in their political interest, in their interest for saving off regulation, in appeasing constituencies they care about, like their own workforce or, you know, the other side of the aisle, it bothers me equally because the problem isn't whether they're doing something that I personally like, but the problem is who died and made Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey the king of our public sphere. I do not want them making these decisions on these calculations, which to me is about their self-interest as far as any sort of, when you follow it that's what it looks like. And rather, I would like a world in which where we as a society get our politics together, get our act together, and we decide where those lines of attention speech, hate speech, the harms, misinformation are, and we tell these platforms what to do rather than this game of playing the referees, which everybody's doing. The Trump's tweeting about 230, why? He's just trying to pressure them. And when it looks like he's going to lose the election, they're putting labels on his, all of a sudden, you know, they, they're putting labels on his tweets. That's not the way it should be. So what, so how do you create effective public accountability for, for the reality that these have become public institutions in a sense, whether or not they're privately, privately operated and publicly traded, traded companies? Their argument, of course, is always, oh, well, if the users didn't like it, we're all users, by the way, we're not people anymore, we're just users. If the users didn't like it, they would just walk away. Clearly, that's not the case. So what, what are, what are some of the things you've thought about as more effective approaches to public accountability? So the first thing is the longer this goes on, the harder it is to fix, because they also break our politics, right? The way our media ecology works right now, from mass media to digital media, the whole thing, it breaks the politics, the very tool we're supposed to use to fix all this gets further broken, the longer we wait to fix this, this would have been easier to fix in 2012, when, which is what you're referring to, I was trying to say, you know, let's get to this before the next election, right after the Obama, President Obama was elected for the second term, I was trying to say, you know what, this is an opening, let's try to fix this rather than to celebrate Obama won using big tech rather than let's think, how do we do this? So that's a problem, it's hard. But there's no other way, there's no other way to try to deal with our societal problems than through political processes that regulate and inform how the public sphere operates. And as you say, there's a lot of things that are wrapped into this, there's the antitrust argument that we're seeing already, there is sort of competition, there is all these very important questions, but also what is hate speech? What is the business model limits? What kind of data collection are they allowed? What kind of micro targeting should be doable? What rights do we have as a public beyond like I click yes or no? And there's all these questions that we have to address as political questions through the political process. And there I have a little of sympathy for the platforms because like everybody's sort of trying to press them to do this or that in their power. And like what are they supposed to do? Like what will their right answer look like? They shouldn't be trying to like sit around the table and figure out what the right answer is for drawing the line for hate speech. We should be developing those things the way we have FDA, right? We don't sort of say to every food company, oh, you decide what's seen a poisonous or you decide what's dangerous, we tell them this many parts per million or you don't get to sell that, right? We tell them what food safety looks like and expect them to go buy that. That wasn't always the case. So this isn't something like that. We do that with cars. We say this is how much emission you can do. We don't let every car company say, why don't you have your CEO decide what's good for the planet? So that's the model we have plus we have because of network effects and all these other things, a few big companies that are, you know, cause our monopolies in a new way, right? They don't really fit the traditional definitions completely. Maybe Manas Alpani would be better. But yeah, that's what we got to deal with. Sorry. So I think FDA and auto safety are two really, two really good examples of what though how hard it is to build an administrative state that can take these questions on, right? Like this isn't just an issue of, you know, Lindsey Graham and Amy Klobuchar putting aside the posturing and talking about hate speech, right? FDA, you know, proto FDA happens in the late 19th, early 20th century in response to meatpacking industry and in response to sawdust instead of aspirin is the thing that you're sold at a low, low price. And of course, auto safety regime comes out of mid and I think people don't realize how many people per capita used to die in, in, in collisions in the United States in the, in the 30s and 40s comes out of recognizing that if we don't have some common understanding of, of the way that the, that, that not only the harm happens, but the safety features need to be designed, we won't get there. But, but both of those agencies right rely on an army of experts who, who have comparable knowledge to the private sector entities about the way these systems work. It strikes me the, there is a huge asymmetry. And there's maybe a couple of staffers, you know, who understand this technology. I think Congress has come a long way, but I don't see a lot, you know, I don't see a lot of, a lot of the administrative state having anything close to the kind of engineering knowledge that you find inside. Don't even mention Google and Facebook that you'd find inside that startup you've never heard of that that's coming up with the next tool. So how do you, how do we ameliorate this challenge? So I completely agree that as things stand, we are not up to the task, right? There's no question. I mean, I keep going back to that moment when like a senator literally asked Facebook, how do you make money? Yeah, I mean, and he, I mean, again, I'm a critic of these platforms, but you could just sort of see him stunned. Are you really asking me this and trying very hard to be respectful to a question that absurd because that senator's supposed to be questioning this platform and doesn't understand the most basic thing driving the business model. So we're not up to it. That's like, I'll be the first to concede, but that's again, no excuse because that's how everything starts. The companies, the businesses, they of course have more expertise, plus they have all the lobbyists, plus they have the technical knowledge because that's where the money is. But you, we as a society, our job is to counter that by fixing our end of it. And I'm an academic. So for me, a big part of it is like strengthening the research side, the independent research side. Like when I do research, I don't care to sort of make money from the company. I just work on the public interest. So that's very important. So you have to strengthen the watchdog ecosystem, right? You have to strengthen, we have tons of media watchdogs over, you know, the sort of 20th century, exactly because of this reason, you have to absolutely strengthen the technical knowledge among staff in Congress, in Senate.  We have to be able to compete with the best because if everybody's like, if, you know, Facebook and Google are offering, you know, high six level salaries and it's, you have to compete at whatever level they're competing at. Of course, people will, a lot of people will take a pay cut as academics do to work in the self, work in the public interest rather than just, you know, be a slightly better advertising delivery machine. So I think we would recruit, but you still have to be in some reasonable space to give people a chance to come to this side. So we have to do all of those things. Now, why isn't any of this doable? It's absolutely doable because even the numbers we're talking about aren't huge, and the stakes are so high, the stakes of, if you don't fix this, it's kind of like, as you say, not having the FDA operate all of a sudden, we're just telling customers, oh, everybody, you better have a lab in your basement, buy or be aware, that's current information ecologists buy or be aware. And that's not, that's really costly, you know, prevention and healthy standards and a way of doing business that is not against the public interest this much is much cheaper, I think, than trying to balance the administrative state side of the problem. One of the questions we've gotten from the audience is what you think of, in addition to the regulatory, the regulatory option, what do you think of the potential for independent bodies? The definition of independence is obviously an important factor here, but what do you think of sort of non-governmental forms of oversight in this space? Absolutely. I mean, I think all of it, like we definitely have more of the administrative state. I would like to see the industry do explicit self-regulation through their own watchdogs or industry associations, because why not? Like, lots of industries do it, but you can't just leave it to that because that's not, because then they'll, and there's value in intra-industry coordination so that they're not afraid of doing the right thing and having their lunch eaten by their competitor, right? If they say we're all going to do the right thing at the same time, so there's value to that. There's absolutely value to NGOs and independent watchdogs that are neither government nor the industry, because I'm from the Middle East. Whenever the government steps into the information ecology space, I'm afraid of what the government's going to do there, right? I'm afraid of what the political power is going to do. So it's not like I want the government to be the only sort of political body to be that powerful either. You have to sort of have a civil service that is not just short-term political appointees, which is important. You have to have political intervention because times change. You have to have the independent watchdogs that are also trying to check not just the industry, but the government and speak as public actors in that space. You have to have citizen involvement so that people kind of say, you know what? This is our society, our public sphere, and hold politicians to account that they should have platforms. They should have policies. It's just as important to tell. I mean, I'm not going to compare, which is more important, but like if healthcare is a question you get asked, this should be a question you get asked by constituents. And industry, you know, ideally you would have the workers, the very privileged workers in the space, actually unionize and try to hold, because they hold a lot of power. They just don't seem to ever bother exercising, to be honest, besides complaining on their internal forums, the message boards. Like they could try to become sort of another constituency with a powerful one within those companies. So there's all these things and that's how we do everything else. Like everything else that we've kind of managed to grapple with a little better, none of them is perfect. It's never perfect. In fact, in a lot of areas we're seeing sort of losses of that kind of, you know, it's not just in this area, but that's how we do it. Throw everything at it and it helps balance it out as well. Did you say something kind of a last question on the topic that you just left us on, which is this question of our, basically our cultural tolerance and expectations for what this technology should do and be. Do you see that shifting? I mean, there certainly was a period where we were, you know, at worst naive, but at best really excited about what this kind of technology was enabling. We're in a kind of moment of condensed anxiety. A lot of that anxiety is leading anxiety. Do you think there is a broader cultural shift underway about what people want out of this technology? I'm still excited. We have a pandemic and we're able to sort of go on with a lot of things partly because we have digital technologies. It's not a bad thing at all. It's just a major transition to the fabric of our society. So I think what has happened is I think a more appropriate recognition of what a major transition this is. This is not a small scale transition.  And it's hard to compare, which is big or small because there's no meaningful way to measure, but it's a major transition.  I've never been for, let's not use these technologies. I'm more like one that's not going to happen, but there's no reason that we have to have all of this operate under terms dictated by a few powerful companies that are to a large degree run by the individuals who founded them because that's how the stock is structured. So this is a really ridiculous moment to have one person basically in the case of Facebook have like this, see, he decides this, that's what happens. He decides that that's what happens. This is not how it should operate. And Mark Zuckerberg is on the record basically saying, well, do tell us what to do like he's written an op-ed. Now, I don't think he would like us to tell him what to do on everything, but I think we should take it in the broader sense and say, yeah, like it is our place to tell you what to do on these important things of public interest. And we should do it and not let this transition be dictated by a few people. But if it is, if it must be dictated by one person, some of our viewers will nominate you. So for those of you, you can follow Zayn up on Twitter and Zayn up again, the most recent book is Twitter and tear gas, the ecstatic fragile politics of network protests in the 21st century. We didn't talk about a really critical topic you've been a commentator on, which is the ongoing pandemic. And those of you have not been catching Zayn up's columns in the Atlantic. They've been absolutely defining an essential reading. So we'll be sure to send those out after the show. But Zayn up. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, folks, we're changing the schedule a bit. So keep an eye out on kf.org or at the Sam Gill on Twitter for info on new episodes. And as a reminder, this episode will be up on the website later. You can see this episode in any episode on demand at kf.org slash fdshow. You can subscribe to the future of democracy podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at fdshow at kf.org. Or if you have questions for me, just send me a note on Twitter. Again, that's at the Sam Gill. Stay for just a minute, take a two-question survey. And as always, we will end the show to the sounds of Miami singer songwriter Nick County. You can check out his music and follow him on Spotify. Until next week, thank you for joining us and stay safe.


Hey everybody, this is Brian and welcome to the 28th tutorial with LAMP. Today we're going to be discussing sessions. So what is a session? Well, a session is like a cookie in the sense that you can store data about your user. But instead of storing it on the user's computer, you're storing it on the server itself in memory. Now the thing about a session is it's not persistent, meaning when the user logs off your website, the session goes with it. So let's dig right in here. The first thing you should know is we need to start the session. So we'll say session start. And notice where I'm putting this. I'm putting it right above before we do anything. Before we write anything to the browser, we want to do session start. And every single page that you want to use a session, you need that. Now the premise of this tutorial is I'm going to write the session information on tutorial 28.php and actually read it back on session.php just so you can see that the session will last multiple pages. So let's just dig right in here and we'll say, oops, session. Notice how there is a global variable called session. And as you might have guessed, it's an array. So we're just going to add an element here and we're just going to add our name. And then we're just going to add our age. So what's going on here is we're calling session start. And then we use the global session variable to actually add elements. And I've got a hyperlink here that when we click, we'll just go to the session.php page. So I'm going to save this. And when I save it in Komodo ID, it automatically refreshes the browser. So that did write to the session. Notice in session.php, the page, we're going to read it back. We have to use session start. And then we're just going to echo these back out. Having a bad typing day. It's been one of those days, you know. Bad day at the office. Glad to be home. And we'll save that. We're going to click there to go to the session and you see how it says this is page two. Because this is our session page. And we're just reading back the age, or I'm sorry, the name. Now you can unset and check for set. Now how do you do that? And what am I talking about? Well let's say you want to check to see if a user is logged in. For example, you have a session variable and we'll call it user ID. But we don't know if it's actually been set or not. So you'll say if is set. And the is set function will just return a bull indicating whether or not this has actually been set in memory. If it hasn't, returns false. So we're just going to say, let's see here. Just going to say user is logged in. Wow, I must accidentally hit tab by mistake there. Now some of you are chuckling at my typing. This virtual machine is actually a little bit slow so I get some lag. So what we're going to do here is we're just going to say if is set and then we're checking the value of user ID in the session. If it is set, we're just going to say this user is logged in. If it's not set, the user is not logged in. Now how did we get this user ID you're asking? Well this would be our authentication method. We would just simply set a session variable. So if you were at your main login page and they logged in successfully, you would simply set the session variable. Then when they hit your landing page, you check to see if they are logged in. If not, you spin them back to the login page. If they are, you do whatever logic you want to do. So let's actually refresh this. User is not logged in. Because we've never set the user ID. Let's actually set it. Let's go back to Tut28 here and let's actually set this. That was bad typing. Wow. And I'm just going to use the word yes as a user ID. I don't know why, but it sounded good. So we're going to save this and then when we go back to our session, user is logged in because the user ID is set. Now to unset a variable, like let's say the user logged out, you can actually just do unset. Unset will, well you guessed it, unset that value so it no longer exists in the session. Now there is another command, session destroy.  This is done automatically when the user closes their last browser to your website. So really there's no need to call session destroy. I've seen some people where they will do session start, set some session variables and then do session destroy thinking that from a C++ perspective they need to destroy it from memory. Now when you do that, you're erasing the entire session so don't do session destroy unless you absolutely want to log the user out or get rid of all your settings. That's all for this tutorial. I hope you found this educational and entertaining and thank you for watching.


What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today we're going to talk about how you can become a data analyst in 2022. Now that feels really weird to say 2022 because I feel like it's still like six months away, but it's already here. And so a lot of people are going to be creating new year's resolutions. They're going to be creating goals for themselves. And for a lot of people who are trying to get into data analytics, the goal for this year is to get a new job to transition or to get that first job as a data analyst. And that's what this video is all about. So I'm going to walk you through these steps that I would take if I was starting over today on exactly what things I would be focusing on and then I'll give you some rough estimates and time frames about how long you should be spending on each step so that you don't get stuck too long on one step. You can kind of push yourself to get to that next step so they can keep progressing throughout the year. Now before we jump into it, I want to give a huge shout out to the sponsor of this video and that is Coursera. Coursera is having a huge sale on their Coursera Plus and so you can get $100 off up until January 13th. And so if you plan on spending a lot of time learning those data analyst skills that we will talk about in this video, you can just get a discount on that.  Without further ado, let's jump into it. And I have five points that we're going to talk about and number one is learning the right skills. Honestly, there are a lot of different things that you need to know to become a data analyst, but the hard skills, the actual skills you're going to be using to do the data analysis are super important. You kind of can't get a job as a data analyst without them. And so that's kind of the first building block which is learning the correct skills. If for whatever reason I forgot every single thing that I knew about data analysis, the number one skill that I would start learning again is SQL. SQL is such a powerful skill to have and honestly, you'll see it on just about every job description for a data analyst. If they're using some type of relational database, you know, they may not be using SQL server or my SQL, but they'd be using something else that they use SQL with. And honestly, it's just a super useful skill. You can query the data that sits in a database and you can extract it and look at it and do all sorts of things with it. And so that is the number one thing that I would look at before. If you want to dip your toes in the water before you actually go and purchase a subscription or a course to learn SQL, you can take my beginner to advanced series here on YouTube. You can just go to my page and find it. It has about 20 videos or so that takes you all the way from the very basics all the way to a little bit more of the advanced things. And you know, I just feel like it's a pretty good place to start if you've never seen SQL. The next thing that I would learn is a visualization tool like Tableau or Power BI. And honestly, that combined with SQL is kind of an unstoppable force. You can probably apply for most jobs out there with just knowing those two skills if you know them well. And so I highly recommend picking up one of those if you had to choose, you know, if you're really a Microsoft guy or girl and you really, really like that, I would go with Power BI. If you want something that I think is a little bit more universally used, I think Tableau is the way to go. I think more companies use it than Power BI or I know that more companies use it than Power BI. And so if you are looking to do one of those, I highly recommend picking up two of those. There's so many other options, but those are the main two that I would choose. Again, another self plug. I have a tutorial series for beginners. So if you want to just get a feel for it, you can go ahead and watch that as well. The third skill that I'd be focusing on is Excel. And honestly, Excel is just everywhere. It's in every domain and every job and almost everybody uses it in some way in the tech space, at least. And so I wouldn't skip out on that. If you've never used Excel before, that's absolutely critical that you know how to do that. It's not even listed on a lot of job descriptions anymore, because it's just, it's just expected that you know how to use it. So I would absolutely be focusing on that. I'm going through a tutorial series on Excel right now, but I haven't completed it. So, you know, look up on YouTube, just basics of Excel for data analysts, and you'll find lots of videos on that stuff. The very last skill that I would be focusing on is Python. I recommend that last because it is quite a bit more technical. It's definitely program heavy. And so if you've never done that before, it can be very daunting. That's why I kind of recommended starting with SQL and things like Tableau Power BI Excel. I would start with those ones first, because they're much easier to learn and understand and get the basics down. Python to me was super challenging at first and just took me a long time to get used to, but it's extremely useful for data analysts, especially if you want to visualize data or put it into data frames or run calculations or all these things on your data. And so I do recommend learning it, although I do recommend learning it last. Now, where are you going to go to learn these skills? The first place that I would start with is YouTube. There are so many amazing free courses that you can take on YouTube.  After that, I would head over to Coursera, and I'm not just saying that because they are the sponsor of this video. I'm saying that because I've been using Coursera for years, two courses that I would recommend on Coursera are the IBM Data Analyst Professional Certificate and the Google Data Analyst Professional Certificate. The IBM Data Analyst Certificate is going to have all the skills that I just mentioned. And at the end, you have a certificate that you can put on your LinkedIn or on your resume, which we'll get to in a little bit. If you are a true beginner and if you really are just getting into this field and you don't know any of those skills yet, that one might be a little bit too difficult. And I've taken it myself. I've also taken the Data Science or IBM Data Science certificate as well. They can be challenging at times.  And again, at the end of it, you get a certificate that you can use to kind of show that you've learned these skills. And hopefully that will help you get a job in the future. Now, after you learn all of those skills, you need to be able to show hiring managers or recruiters that you actually know those skills. And how are you going to do that? You need to create a portfolio. A portfolio is where you can create projects and actually show off these skills and then put them all in kind of one place on a website. And then somebody can go and look at these and say, wow, this guy actually knows how to use SQL or Python or Tableau. And then they feel a lot more confident hiring you. This is honestly one of the biggest things that you can do to help yourself get noticed and get a job and show employers that you know these skills. But it's one of the biggest things that people don't do because it's kind of challenging. It can take a long time to think about a good project, do it well, put it somewhere. And it can be really difficult to just do in general. And so that's why I created the Data Analyst Portfolio Project Series, where I walk through five projects and you can do all of them and walk through all of them and create a portfolio website at the end, which I show you how to do. That's a huge plug for me. But honestly, it's a huge plug for you because I'm showing you how to do these projects. And then at the end, you have an entire portfolio project. And at the end, you have my complete permission to use it as your own portfolio, because you were the one who walked through it and put in the work and put in the ever to actually create it. And so share that with people and put that on your resume because that will genuinely help you get a job. The very next thing that you need to do is to create a resume. And it's pretty self-explanatory. You kind of need a resume to get a job these days, maybe in the future, we won't need resumes anymore. But in 2022, you definitely need a resume. So put all of those skills that you learned, put those certificates, put those portfolio projects, all of those things that we just talked about, if you do them, will create a resume for you. You may have absolutely no experience before this. You may have a completely different job or you're right out of college. But if you do all those things that we just talked about you, how all the skills and you'll have the projects, and you'll be able to create a resume from scratch. I have several videos talking about how you can create a data analyst resume with all my recommendations and things to do. I will leave a link in the description with that video. Now, the next thing that you should do is update your LinkedIn. Now, a lot of people and not everybody, but a lot of people will check somebody's LinkedIn after they get their resume. They're really interested in somebody they go and they start searching for them or they check out their LinkedIn. I know that when I was on the hiring team for my last team, and me as a manager now, I do that. I'm going to check your LinkedIn. And so if your LinkedIn basically has nothing, it doesn't really help me that much or it could hurt you. But if you have a really good LinkedIn with all of your projects and your skills, and you know you've created posts and you're engaged in the community, that's just a really good sign. Now, after you have done every single thing on this list so far, the very last thing that I would do is start working with a recruiter to find a job. Now, not everybody has a recruiter in their area, but a lot of the places that are hiring data analysts are going to be in main metropolitan areas that do have recruiters. And so if you're kind of out in the middle of nowhere, you can find, you know, recruiters for remote jobs, or you can find recruiters in main areas that hire for remote jobs. A lot of places in like the middle of Idaho or like Utah, it's not going to be a lot of data analyst jobs if you're out in the middle of nowhere. That's just the honest truth. And so if you're looking for a remote job, you know, maybe you've tried to find a recruiter in some metropolitan area or help you find an in-person job that you're willing to relocate for. And one of the best places to reach out to recruiters is on LinkedIn. You know, recruiters are everywhere on LinkedIn. And if you haven't been on here for a long time, you'll probably be getting messages from recruiters asking if you want a job in this or that. And so you can find recruiters here on LinkedIn. And I have an entire video dedicated to show you how to do that. So I highly recommend looking at that and seeing how I would do that if I were in your shoes. Now, at the beginning, I promised you timeframes for all of these steps. And I want to do that. I didn't want to do it throughout the video because I felt like it would just kind of confusing. But I'm going to give it to you all right now. So the very first step was learning the right skills. And to be upfront, this one is going to take the longest by far. It's just that initial investment to learn those skills. I would be investing around two to three months, at least an hour or two a day, if you can swing it to be learning all these skills. In those two to three months, you should absolutely learn the basics of all these skills, if not learning the intermediate level of concepts of all of these skills. For step number two, which is creating a portfolio and a portfolio website, I would be spending about one month doing this. Now, I say one month, but it could take shorter or it could take longer. It could be a lot shorter if you use my series and that's all you do. But if you want to do more and more difficult projects and come up with those on your own, those can take a while.  So right now, we're sitting at around three to four month range. The very next thing is creating a resume. And honestly, with the first two steps taking about two to three months and then a month, this one is crazy short. This one should take you about a week. If you just create a simple resume that highlights all the things that we just talked about, you know, it can get you a long way. So it doesn't have to be crazy fancy.   And it honestly shouldn't take that long. The next step was updating your LinkedIn and I would give yourself a week for this. You should just be able to get on LinkedIn, update all this stuff and make it look good. Honestly, it should take you a day, but I'm going to give you a week as just kind of like push yourself to get it done within a week and not procrastinate it longer.  And so I'm actually going to kind of break that into two steps because the first one is just working with a recruiter and you can get in touch with a recruiter and start working with them in about two to three weeks, you know, reaching out, doing cold emails, cold messages on LinkedIn, all that good stuff. You can do that within a couple of weeks. So I would give yourself three weeks to do that. Defining the job piece can vary greatly. It can take somebody a month to find a job. It can take somebody six months or even up to a year to find a job if, you know, they're in just a not a great area for jobs or, you know, they're an absolute beginner and they don't have a fantastic resume or portfolio. It can take some people a lot longer just for various reasons. And so that one is going to vary extremely widely. So if you were falling along with the timeframe, it was two to three months to actually learn the skills. It was another month to create the portfolio website. Then you had a week for a resume, a week for LinkedIn. So that's four and a half months. And then you have two to three weeks to work with the recruiter and then a lot longer to find a job. So you're looking at roughly around five months to do all of those things. Now that gets you all set up to actually find a job. And then, you know, it can take a while to find a job. So it can take somebody one month or it can take somebody six months or even longer. And it just varies on all those things that we just talked about. And so you're looking at six months to a year to completely make that transition from scratch. I hope that in 2022, you absolutely crush it and work super hard to become a data analyst. Thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you liked this video, be sure to like and subscribe below and I'll see you next week.


So do your homework, understand what the range of options are in terms of investment, understand the profile of the different investors, which of those potential investors is most likely to provide funds for your business type, for your market, for your geography. Then I also can't highlight enough the importance of networking and mentoring, again another major topic of GES. Find people, surround yourself with people, get honest feedback from people who really have the knowledge and experience that you're seeking and ask very specific questions for concrete benefits when you engage with them. I also think that it's important for entrepreneurs to know the different types of funding opportunities, which Susan kind of alluded to. You know, what's an angel investor? What's a private equity firm? What's your venture capitalist firm? Are there other models of getting access to funding outside of equity, you know, and is crowdfunding more appropriate for you at your current business size and in terms of your growth? And the last thing is that people give money to people. You cannot underestimate the power of cultivating and creating the right relationships to get to the funding that you need. And so I would really encourage entrepreneurs, before you go for a funding round, actually create like an advisory group of individuals who will help you with that process. You know, you really need to have in place advice around the accounting, advice around the legal ramifications. And so create an advisory board specifically to help you with fundraising because you're not going to know all the different things. And it's one of those things where you want to make sure you have the right people around you who can guide that process and, you know, don't do it alone.


Today guys I have something special for you, a tactic in which you can literally kill Grave Ward or any other boss in the game within a single second without having any skill class build set up. Yes, that is right.  Also guys I'm giving away copies of Borderlands every week to win one for yourself or a friend, simply subscribe and make sure you have notifications turned on, drop a like on this video and leave a comment down below. Okay so watch this guys, no specific modifiers which help me here and I don't have any skill class build set up at all, but watch how quick this dude dies. So what you just witnessed was the result of literally a few things coming into effect which allows you to do this every single time without fail and it requires no skill tree build at all. Setting up a build around this will only make this even stronger and the fact I am doing this on Zayn as well makes it a ton better, but you can do this on any build it does not matter, doesn't matter what Vault Hunter you use. So what you need for this exact tactic I use in this video which I will state you can change which we'll talk about in a second. So what you need is any weapon which sets you on fire, my chosen weapon is a rain firestorm grenade mod, works great, but any weapon which sets you alight will work perfectly fine. You then need a cutsman which deals solar damage for my specific setup, these are world drops and you've probably got one somewhere lying around. You then need the trick on forgiven pistol, this is very important and then you need this artifact right here, the elemental projector launch pad. These four items will see you destroy any boss in the game within seconds unless obviously they have stages to their health and shield bars. So how does this work? Well the artifact gives you a damage boost of plus 183% when you are suffering from the same elemental effect, this is where this setting yourself on fire comes into play. For instance I throw my firestorm, stand under them, set myself on fire. The cutsman then being a beast of a weapon in general, I use this to do damage to the boss. So I unload a clip aiming for his crit spot. As soon as the bullets or projectiles are just about to hit the boss, I then switch to my trick on forgiven, which has a plus 432% critical hit bonus damage. This whole tactic uses an old method called trick weapon swapping I believe, where it tricks the game, in this instance, into thinking because I swapped through that trick on forgiven that it's the weapon that's doing the damage and supplying that plus 423% damage buff. But that's basically it guys, no need for any particular build at all, building around the setup will see you killing bosses even quicker, that's for sure. Now this will work with radiation weapons, trial weapons etc etc. Just use the same methods I do within this video in suffering a said elemental effect then doing damage while under them same effects. The trick on forgiven is obviously needed with the artifact, but I'm sure other weapons can take the place of the cutsman, and you can use whatever you can find to actually set yourself on fire or freeze yourself or poison yourself or whatever, that's up to you. So a quick rundown of how this works. The elemental projector launch pad gives you a damage boost of plus 183% while suffering the same elemental effect. So if you're suffering fire, your fire weapons will have that damage boost. If you're suffering radiation poison, your radiation weapons will have that damage boost. Same with cryo and same with any other elemental burn.  So while you are on fire, shooting with the cutsman will obviously have a massive damage buff, but then as the bullets are about to hit said boss, you then switch to the trick on forgiven, and it tricks the game and gives every one of those cutsman shots a plus 432 critical hit damage buff which is just absolutely ridiculous. And like I said, this will work with any elemental burn, and this is without any class build setup which is just ridiculous.  Also shout out to Taste Rainbow Sleepy Boy for reminding me of the old school trick weapon swapping tactic, and also helping me out in getting this trick on forgiven. Now if you guys need any particular weapon, artifact, class mod, shield, grenade, whatever, within my discord which is linked within the video description I have dedicated trading sections for every platform, so do check it out if you are in need of something. But on that note we have come to the end of the video, if you guys enjoyed it leaving a like really helps out, if you are new around to enjoy daily borderlands videos be sure to subscribe and if you never want to miss a video I upload you can turn notifications on by hitting that bell button. But guys thanks as always for stopping by hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I'll see you on that next one.