For those who ask, why do we wear black on the days we mourn Ahlul Bayt alayhum salam? Black is often seen as an aggressive or negative color, but it is the traditional color in many cultures of mourning, the dead or the deceased, therefore we wear black in Muharram and Safar and on other days of mourning to show our grief and sympathy towards the martyrdom dates of the Ahlul Bayt alayhum salam in respect to their tragedies. Some members from other schools of thought have come forward and said that this is problematic, it's problematic that the shay'ah wear black because it is supposedly Makroh or even Haram. The reason they give for this is because black is supposedly the dress of the people of Hellfire, however the Ahlul Bayt alayhum salam have told us that wearing black is permissible and in the case of mourning it is mustahab, recommended. For example when a student of Imam Sadiq alayhi salam saw him wearing a black cloak and inquired about it, the Imam answered, would I wear it knowing that it is the dress of the people of Hell? For the shay'ah the death of the grandson of the Holy Prophet peace be upon him and his family is just as grievous as losing a family member or a close friend, so we wear black as a form of sensitivity towards the Holy Prophet peace be upon him and his family. And his family as the massacre of Karbala was something that really pained their hearts. We do this as a form of respect as it says in the Holy Qur'an and whoever respects the signs of Allah, this surely is the outcome of the piety of the hearts. In addition Ayatullah Sayyid Hassan al-Shirazi has written that wearing black reminds the mourners that they not only yearn for Imam Hussain alayhi salam but also for the principles and goals which he represented and to revolt not only against Yazid al-Anatullah alayh but against the principles and goals which he represented. It was the custom of the Ahlul Bayt alayhum salam to wear black for mourning. As Omar the son of Imam Zayn al-Abideen alayhi salam narrates after the day of Ashura, the woman of Bani Hashim wore black dresses for a long period of time. May Allah include us among those that soothe the heart of his messenger Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sallam and his pure family alayhi salam.


All right, so you've heard from no you've heard just from some of our researchers about about some of the work that we've done I'm not going to talk too much about that and I'm going to talk through the economic report that we're Launching today, it's available on our website and I'll talk through some of the other types of things that we're able to do with an insight so So this is a small number of the the kind of numbers that you can see So this is an independent economic report that we commissioned Which took our own numbers and our own outputs and compared them to see it to CSO norms And what you can see is over the ten years We have taken in more than 200 million in direct investment through exchequer non-exchequer and also industry funding And when you look at this what that gives us is The investment or the multiplier effect if you like is 5.54 which equates to every euro that comes into insight brings in 554 into the Irish economy which gives us this 1.1 billion euro impact to the Irish economy Over the past ten years. So we're looking forward to seeing how that grows over the next five to ten years In addition to that, you know, we people ask well, where is the research where where is it going? What can I see about your research? So in that time frame we've spun out 14 companies that use our research and they are actually hiring or there They have employment of a hundred and seventy workers in the Irish workforce And they have brought in an additional investment over four hundred million euros to the Irish economy So as you can see what what we've been doing over the past ten years is impacting on a social and also an economic benefit to Ireland and again We look forward to seeing how we can continue to contribute positively to Ireland in the Irish economy But at the you know what we've heard from today is we do great research But it's really all about the people and it's not just the researchers But it's also the the backroom people. So it's the operations team of which I'm proud of and also the research administration teams in our Universities and the institutions that were part of and they are the ones that help really remove the barriers They overcome the legal the economic challenges that we have so we can continue to do first of its kind research And we continue to move the barriers of what's possible and some examples of things that we've done over the past number of years include in 2017 Insight connect and Liro came together to create the first multi-centre spoke through the SFI spokes program Enable was a project that brought together the Irish community of researchers working on internet of things and smart cities to share ideas experience and drive collaboration at a national level And this type of spoke had never been done before there was no template and But by bringing together the right people who had the commitment the openness and the creativity We were able to get it done and today then insight we move forward with these things as you know We're a data analytics center data is important to us but something that hasn't been done before and is Getting data sets from one company and being able to move them across institutions so that more and more researchers can get Involved in figuring out impactful ways to use that data and to bring it into their research So we're proud to to kind of talk about the fact that we've now Put together a contract with DPD where we are able to move data sets across six institutions We have 13 research academics and their teams involved now in a large project That will be worth over a million euros and across the timeline of the project in terms of the data set worth to us and the projects that vary from Stress testing sensors for air quality monitoring to identifying air quality trends in urban environments and there we Anticipate many more applications coming out of those projects over the over the next number of years And much of the success really for insight and continuing to have long and lasting Relationships with all of our collaborators is because over the years We've continued to build capacity in new areas while trying while staying true to our commitment to advance the fundamentals of data science It is this ability to be flexible and evolve beyond what is expected of a traditional data analytics center and continue to push the Boundaries of the AI revolution that has given us some of our most diverse and unexpected Projects and brought as new collaborators in in in in areas such as nutrition the arts and the social sciences Our multidisciplinary also facilitates a new and compelling approach to education and public engagement some of you may have seen some of the work out on the put out on the televisions earlier today and But some of the work that we've been involved in include the miasma play Which was an interdisciplinary project that used drama and debates to provide historical and contemporary Perspective on the scientific conflict surrounding cholera in the 1850s and the parallels that we had with the COVID-19 pandemic Over the past four years insight has engaged three artists and residents to work with our researchers to develop standalone art installations immersive video projects and other artworks related to topics as diverse as Exploration of the neurological impacts of self-drive vehicles to the relationship between humans and the natural environment and how we can reduce our negative impact on it It is this diversity that also attracts researchers to us insight has always been a supporter of career progression and Identifying new opportunities for our research community and we have contributed 238 new PhDs and 216 postdoctoral researchers into the research ecosystem Our academics are also strongly involved in four of the six SFI centres for research training programs, which will graduate 700 PhD students by 2026 We also collaborate with the future Neuros Centre on a Marie Curie co-fund called Neuro Insight Which will bring 33 postdoctoral researchers who we will develop and train as the next generation of AI enabled Neuroscientists these are some of the things that we could never envision at the first or the second iteration of our research Program over the last ten years, but we were happy to support and inform as the needs of the country and other areas of research changed The ability to step up at times when we are needed to support a national priority and apply our expertise is something that insight does time and again Some of our national bodies currently have difficulty in keeping pace with the AI revolution And we are happy to have strategic partnerships with various national bodies Which include the GAA the Marine Institute and the HSE and we have been able to work partner with them on their Digitalization journey by embedding some of our researchers with these organizations This allows our researchers to learn how to apply their academic knowledge in real-world context We get to share with the teams on the ground what the current state of the art looks like and we're able to work with Them and give them the best what best workarounds for them given their specific contexts and also their specific limitations Working with new initiatives and organizations and sharing what we know Gives insight a unique perspective into the types of challenges that exist in data science and AI and need further exploration Over the past number of years insight has used some of our own core funding to back ourselves on our research Answer our own research questions and invest to integrate the wider Irish community and shortly Yvonne Smith will Talk to you about some of the projects that we've recently funded But you've heard enough from me So let's hear from some of our national and international collaborators and in their own words You'll hear how working with insight has helped them to progress their own strategy and help solve their own challenges. Thank you


He's the author of many articles and monographs, co-author with Bob Shootinger of 40 Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, and also his latest work, Hayek, his contribution to the political and economic thought of our time, which Dr Butler will be pleased to sign at the back if you'd like to hurry along after the talk. He's due to speak to us upon the subject of, let's get it right here, are we still on the road to Surfton, Dr Raymond Butler? Christine has just informed me of the various delights that are available to people who didn't want to come to the boring talk after lunch. These, I note, include a visit to Hampson Court, and I must say I'm outraged if there was anywhere that is more of a symbol of the outrageous intoxication of power of British monarch and the demise of the rules of law and the building up of vast empires of personal gain, it is Hampson Court. So you're far more edifying to be here, I think. If it had been written by a lesser man, Hayek's Road to Surfton, I think, would have been dismissed simply as another war book. Fortunately, it turned out instead to be a classic piece of historic explanation, historical explanation, which alerted the people of the nations who were actually fighting Nazi Germany that they were by no means immune from the same virus that had caused such awful horrors in that country. Since he was fluent in the culture of Britain and Germany, fluent in both languages, Hayek was particularly well placed to look at these trends. And he told the British in his book in 1944 that there was nothing congenitally vicious about the Germans that made them go into this peculiarly wicked way. In fact, the prevailing wartime assumption that some deep ethical division existed between the Germans and other nations served only to disguise the fact that the same things could happen in other countries. And Hayek's great contribution, of course, is to remind us that we are all potentially susceptible to travel down that road to Surfton. Well, the book itself constitutes a clear, logical, linear argument of how totalitarianism can develop without needing a revolutionary episode to bring it about. And that was something new at the moment in time. The tragedy of this, of course, is always those with the highest ideals, the democratic socialists, the people who want to see equality without undermining democratic institutions. These are the very people who regrettably pipe us down those first few steps along the road to Surfton. Before they realized that the achievement of their ideals actually is only possible if they resort to more and more coercive methods that the idealists themselves would be the first to reject. But, of course, by the time one is on this road it's too late. The surging traffic is all one way and it's very difficult to backtrack. Well, Hayek's belief was that the same processes under which, rather, some men stand a little taller than others, Hayek's belief was that the same processes under which high-minded men, leaders into considerable horrors that were no part of their original intention were becoming plain in the very countries that were actually trying to defeat Nazi Germany. And his pinpointing of the symptoms caused widespread shock. Many socialist intellectuals like Lord Keynes, you'll remember, said that he was not only in agreement with what Hayek had written, but in deeply moved agreement. And other people like George Orwell, who actually reviewed the road to Surfton in the Observer newspaper, went on from there to write Animal Farm in 1984. And to criticize the same trend in his own way. Well, are we still on the road to Surfton? To find out, I think it's useful, if you'll indulge me, just to go very quickly through the argument of the road to Surfton so that we can see whether we're in fact on that road and how many milestones we have passed. Of course, Surfton could come from many routes and it may be that we will find ourselves on another route which Hayek didn't chart. But Hayek has given a fairly clear logical argument, I think, of how it's possible to slowly slip into a totalitarian regime. And so I think it's a very useful guide. The first point that Hayek makes is that there were special circumstances in the case of Germany. Special circumstances, in other words, could make the dissent into totalitarianism more or less likely. In Germany he talks about the last 70 years, meaning presumably the period since 1878, in which you've had, of course, the decline of imperial Germany, you've had massive unprecedented rates of inflation, you've had various other circumstances, an electoral system that gave disproportionate say to minorities and so on, all of these things are obviously important factors in the case of Germany. The second thing is that Hayek thinks that the intellectual confusion between power and freedom is a crucial one and is one which is at the roots of totalitarian ideas. A world in which power is concentrated in a few hands is one that is ripe to be plucked by totalitarians. It's easy to convince the masses that who have little to spend and scant hope of making very much political contribution or many political decisions, it's easy to convince them that they are being denied freedom when what they're actually short of is power, they're short of purchasing power, they're short of political power. And so it's easy to make this point, even fairly liberal intellectuals have made the same confusion between power and freedom and so changes that have nothing to do with the advancement of liberty and everything to do with the concentration of power and political might in new hands, these come to be given a high moral justification that they do not, in fact, deserve. Well, all this is preparation for the road to serfdom. The third thing is really the first step downwards. Hayek says that this comes when we've come to believe in the inevitability of economic planning. One source of that is the presumption that our prodigious power over the physical world can be translated into a similar control over social and economic fears. The idea that the market can generally be improved if the aimlessness of the free market is replaced by the crisp, clear, straight turnpike of a planned economy. Well, another is the reason, of course, is the theory that capitalism tends to become increasingly concentrated, that industries become larger and larger until they eventually grow into monopolies. This is basic to Marx's analysis, of course. And so it seems quite reasonable to say that if industry is bound to become more monopolistic as time goes on, it would be very wise if we had that power wielded by some representative body of the public rather than a few capitalists who happen to be particularly lucky. Well, the fourth stage, I think, is that once we've decided that we can improve this market and that we can wield these massive globules of power in the public interest, we then face the knotty problem of exactly what the public interest is. And, again, Hayek says that it's rather as if we set off on a journey. There are several of us on the journey. We've all agreed that this is something that we ought to undertake. But when we start on the journey, we find that nobody's actually agreed as to where we are actually going to. So we've all bought a ticket, but none of us has any idea as to where we want to go. And we end up going nowhere that any of us really wanted to start in the first place. So since there's no agreement on the precise ends of our brave new planning regime, and far less, I think, on the choice of means that should be employed to achieve any particular aim, the legislature degenerates into a talking shop. It never gets anything done. And that means, of course, that there's always a discomfort among the public who want to see a stronger government, and they urge that government to become more strong. But the more important thing, perhaps, is the fact that the legislature, because it is so overworked trying to run the affairs of a complete nation, the legislature is bound to have to delegate some of its authority, some of its powers to administrators. And this, the fifth stage, is where Hayek says the rule of law really starts to break down. The decisions of the new army of administrators, arbitrary though they are, these are the things that now control our lives. And secondly, of course, the old laws must be discarded anyway if we're to marshal the resources of a nation towards a particular end. If we're aiming at a particular end, then the old rules of morality can't stand up. We must scrap them if they stand in the way. And so we discover that the property, the liberty, and even the life of nobody can be spared if it is needed to help build that brave new world. But then Beatrice Webb said of the murders of the white Russians during the revolution, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Control of the economy, of course, says Hayek, this is the next step, means that you have control over all aspects of an individual's life, because money is simply a medium, it's simply a tool by which you achieve the things that you want to achieve. If you earn money, you can spend it in taking holidays, any of the things that are going to arts, theatre, any of the non-monetary things. So the decision to work or to enjoy more leisure, to have a necessary operation rather than take a holiday, to buy a new car or move to a bigger house, all of these things can be controlled by someone who controls the earning and spending of money. And so it's possible for a government thereby to control every aspect of human life, including the aesthetic aspects and so on, and that takes us a step nearer to the road to serfdom. The next stage, I think, is that inequality now becomes a major government problem. If the government is controlling everything, or seem to be in control of everything, then those who think that they're not getting a good deal will naturally complain. If, on the other hand, things are left to the market, people realise that by working harder they tend to get paid more, that the government doesn't control wages or prices, then they can't really blame the government if they're badly off. They're more inclined to blame themselves or dismiss it as being simply bad luck or poor circumstances. But if the government is consciously in power, consciously controlling everything, then plainly people are going to attack the government and try to get out of it what they can. And one thing which we in Britain know is that one thing that people do like to get out of a government that apparently controls the entire labour market is security. Instead of the prospect of losing their job, they would much prefer the government to guarantee them a job. And so you've got all the problems about incentives. If you pay incentives, surely you have the same inequalities that this great revolution is supposed to end. If you don't have incentives, why should anyone work at all? And in the end what you get is a static, ossified labour market, an ossified economy really. Well, if you're going to try to work this ossified economy, this static economy, you've really got to have something of a military-style operation to do it. You've got to have some strongmen who can stand up and can cut through the sticky glue that surrounds the economy and make it work. And it's at this point, of course, which you'll be familiar with, that the dictator tends to emerge.  High-ex-chapter heading is why the worst to get on top. Well, the answer is simple. You have to be ruthless in such a state in order to get ahead. You have to have a clear-sighted goal as to where you're aiming for in order to convince people that they too should channel their resources and energies and efforts to that goal. Somebody who's mealy-married about it, somebody who thinks that the old rules of morality really ought to stand up, these people are very unlikely to get into positions of power, simply because of the contradiction between the old rules of law and the new marshalling of resources to a particular end. Of course, good dictators know that they have to get all of the residents of a large and populist nation working together in order to achieve their single objective. And if so, it's not sufficient to control their values alone. The facts too must be controlled if those who are capable of making their own decisions are not to come to the wrong conclusion. And so a mighty propaganda machine has to be brought into being to provide official reports on every subject. And while the resources of the nation are being directed to the new goals, sources of doubt or discontent can't possibly be allowed to continue. If you're aiming at a particular goal, particular economic plan, you're certainly not going to allow people to express doubts and maybe slow that plan down or maybe force people into rethinking and abandoning a whole project. So these sources of doubt or discontent must, of course, be silenced. However, a dictator usually doesn't have very much... Well, he certainly has the stomach to do that and quite frequently has the predilection to do that as well. Anyway, this, then, is the ultimate destination of high ex-view of the road to serfdom when all activity is directed towards a single end where the rule of law is perverted to that end and where even those of independent mind can't be sure what is true and what is false, assuming that they survive at all. So without the whim of the dictator, there is no art, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, a continual fear and danger of violent death and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Well, how many of these milestones I hear you cry have we asked, have we passed, and how many are still in sight? Or have we in fact stepped off, as I believe the road to serfdom, as Hayek himself believed would be possible if we abandoned the original mistakes that got us on in the first place? Well, let's go through the points again. Firstly, turning to the special circumstances that do encourage us onto the road, it's clear that the liberal democracies have proved themselves remarkably resilient. Where totalitarian regimes have grown up, essentially been as a byproduct of a more general war, as in Eastern Europe, through conquest, by totalitarian powers, as in South Vietnam, or by the sudden granting of imperial power almost to nations who have no history or tradition of wielding it, as in, let's say, Zimbabwe. It remains an open question, of course, whether the liberal democracies will possess a sufficient reserve to avoid the road to serfdom, but we will see. I think there is considerable optimism justified on that particular point. The special circumstances of the present era have produced a widespread inclination, I think, away from the idea of the planned economy, rather than towards it. It's completely different from wartime Germany. The failure of planned economies to deliver their promised land of plenty, their universal tendency to foster oligarchy or dictatorship, their unpleasant habit of dealing with dissidents by dumping them at best in psychiatric hospitals and at worst in mass burial pits, these things have actually been noticed by the ordinary man in the street, and they do stand as a warning sign alongside the road to serfdom. Even modest attempts to control an economy have been such a complete mess that people have begun to... well, they've been inclined to argue that they should be ended rather than extended. It's completely the opposite to what it was in the Germany that Hayek was talking about. So, in summary, I would say, on that first point that Hayek makes, that the circumstances of the last 70 years through most of the globe here has left our minds disposed against the dangerous ideals of collectivism rather than in favour. Well, what about this confusion of power and freedom that I mentioned? Certainly, I think that there has been a continual error. However, the power of the argument that what you're really short of is freedom give me the power and I will make sure you have the freedom. The falsity of that argument has been opened up by many things. Firstly, opportunities have extended very much more widely to the ordinary man in the street. Education has opened up prospects that our parents could hardly have dreamed of. Well, no, that they wouldn't dare hope for and that our grandparents could, in fact, never have dreamed of. Women, minorities, self-made men, all of these people are in much more social esteem now than they were, say, 40 years ago when Hayek wrote. So what I'm saying there is that ordinary individuals today have far greater freedom to better themselves and with it they acquire more power to acquire what it is that they really seek, whatever that might be. And therefore they have more power, they're less susceptible to that argument. Secondly, I think greater economic equality and the devolution of economic power progressively into the hands of ordinary individuals. And away from a limited class of capitalists has reduced the obvious divide in society. Those who do best in market economy are the poor people and I think that they're beginning to realize that. The market economy gives them things, again, that they could never have dreamed of a few years ago, more quickly, more cheaply. And that tendency of the market to raise the well-being of those at the bottom produces, necessarily, an important counterbalance to the discontent that Marx thought was inevitable in a capitalist economy. Well, for all these, well, there's another reason as well, of course, which is that the freedom promised by revolutionaries has turned out to be a nightmare of power and that we've all read Animal Farm and we all recognize that what was advertised as an expansion of freedom simply turned out to be a transfer of power from one set of hands into another. A slightly less liberal set of hands, too. Anyway, on the third point that Hayek makes, I would say then that the heyday of the planned economy ideal is actually passed. It's an old idea. It was a product of the 19th century where the world did seem to be coalescing into large industrial megaliths and the economies of scale that were possible in all of the old 19th century industries seemed to have no limit. But those things are very rapidly changing. I suppose if you regard economic planning as an art form, I imagine it's heyday must have been in the 1920s where you had Le Corbusier planning these vast machines for living in, in neat rows connected to the industrial centres by rapid, publicly owned, of course, mass transit systems. Well, when that was actually tried, as it was after the devastation of the war, we saw that for the nightmare rather than the dream that it really was. So I think that the planning ideal has lost some of its enchantment and it is in fact failing with increased speed. It's failing partly because of Hayek himself and economic theorists like him. It's failing also because the structure of industry and I think this is the crucial point, the structure of industry in the developed world is changing remarkably rapidly and has changed in the last few decades. In 1944 it seemed as if the big, huge industries coalescing into monopolies and therefore requiring state control that these things would continue forever. But look at the industries today. They're smaller, they're lighter and they're in the hands of a much more widespread group of people. The heavy industry that produces large enterprises is on the decline and with it the threat of monopolistic power and therefore the need to take those jobs into public ownership. We've actually exported in the developed world a lot of the old dirty jobs, the big heavy manufacturing jobs, we've exported those into the third world and probably it's there that the next steps onto the road to serfdom are likely to occur. The future in the developed world is in smaller industries. It's in cold storage, packaging, distribution, consultancy, scientific research, finance, publishing, banking, theme park, discos, gardening, garden centers. All of these things, many of them service industries, these are the things that are growing most rapidly in the developed world. And by their nature, those industries lack any large economies of scale. So industries are actually becoming less concentrated. There's much less need to take it into public ownership. And that again I think is being understood. There's another important trend as well, almost equally important, absolutely important, and that is the rapid advance in communication and data processing and so on. What that means is that things that could formally be done only by huge, great bureaucracies, which meant that firms had to be of a large size to sustain them, these things can now be done on desktop computers. What would have taken a room of clerks this big, writing letters, copying letters and so on. Well, we don't do that anymore, everybody has a Xerox. Or writing letters by hand. You don't need a dozen clerks to do that. You can type it yourself on a typewriter. Or doing the accounts and so on. Well, that can be done in every branch on an ordinary, very cheap computer. It doesn't need a big central overhead. And so again, there's this great tendency for industry to fragment much more than it used to be. Well, let's move on, I think, to Hayek's next point. The post-war growth of government functions on their piecemeal and haphazard path has led to more decisions being placed in the hands of bureaucracy. I actually write that has happened. The opportunity for administrative fiat by government servants, particularly environmental planners, is universally known. But it's also universally hated. And the dangers of the administrative octopus are being resisted. As the administrators have made more embarrassing mistakes, as the inspectors have compounded the obvious and evident injustices, and as the planners have inflicted even more hideous monstrosities upon the landscape, the days of these officials are actually numbered. Television and radio and a much more active press are all developments which has brought home to us very clearly the dangers of the worst results of this administrative despotism. And so today I would say that the new political capital is to be made by ending this despotism and not by extending it and putting more power in the hands of officials. Well, even so, I think that the attack on bureaucracy is one of the most difficult parts of the state to roll back. It requires politicians to deal effectively with people who are themselves very efficient political organisers. Civil servants are past masters at resisting change, particularly when it involves removing them from their jobs. Marx was absolutely right. They follow their class interests. I've got great sympathy for Marx. He was right on many things. He just didn't go far enough. But the self-interest of the government classes is one thing which he hadn't anticipated. Anyway, to overcome these great intransigences means that the government propaganda has got to be pretty good, that the propaganda of the organisational classes has to be overcome, their arguments and their organisational power, very important, has to be defeated. And to be credible, I think you have to have a fairly well thought out program as to how you're going to replace these services that look necessary, these services that require so many administrators before you can actually start. So it's a very long job. So I don't think that we should be over-optimistic about the abilities or desire of politicians to pursue that too rapidly. But the assault on the bureaucracy has begun. Well, Marx's next point that economic planning invariably means control over political and moral life in every field of human aspiration has, of course, become a commonplace. But again, people, I think, are very much more aware of it today than they are when Hayek wrote. We've got world travel, which is cheap and quick. When we see British trade unions becoming an equal partner with the government, when we see them deciding whether patients should be admitted to hospital or not, when we see them leaving the dead unburied, these things, people can travel to Britain, they can see in the radio and TV what is happening, and the effect is noticed. Or again, when a repressive regime builds a wall around itself or decides to persecute its Jewish population, we can go there, we can actually, in that case, go through the wall and talk to the people on the other side fairly cheaply, very much more opportunity for that kind of relationship between different people than existed before. So what I'm saying is that improved communication, improved travel, which is going to increase as we get more leisure and cheaper travel, all of this brings home the message of how repressive some of these regimes are. And of course, the spread of wealth to ordinary people has had its effect. Ordinary people today have very much more of a stake in their own economic life. They don't want to see it nationalised. I would say also that the ossification of the labour market is something which people have woken up to. They've seen the effects of a complete guarantee, government guarantee on employment, for example. They see the awful aura of self-interest in which appeals for job security or government subsidies are always ramped, and that again, I think, has its effect. Now, you'll remember that the highest next point is that because the economic planning rapidly gets you into such a mess, there's a great popular belief that we really need strong government. Well, I think that is true today, but the strong government that people are seeking today, this strong government is going to cut through this nonsense rather than to extend it even further. People don't want to get deeper into this quagmire. They want someone who's going to take us out. So again, I think that that motive is extremely strong. And Hayek, of course, was right when he said that in a dictatorship one has to control the very facts themselves. You've got to control information. And I feel very optimistic on this particular score, I must say, because information today, fortunately, is almost impossible to control. There's so much of it. It circulates cheaply, efficiently, and indeed instantaneously in so many forms that it's beyond the power of one government to control at all. The Soviet Union, for example, you might have read in the papers, is presently debating whether it should allow in ordinary home microcomputers. Why is the problem with that? I hear you cry, but it's simple.  Now, when you can do that, when you've got that, or push another button and you can communicate it automatically to somebody down the road, now, when you've got that kind of information power, there's very little that the central authorities can do to resist it. And so the authorities in the Soviet Union correctly see that as a great threat to the Soviet system and they're very worried, what do they do? Do they stop computers coming in? Do they have them all plugged into a central bureaucracy that monitors everything that's put on them? I hope they do that, that's going to be brilliant. Or, you know, do they restrict the supply of home computers to those who really need them? Well, they've got real problems and I can see what's going to happen is the information gap between them and the West is going to increase at a great rate. And of course, another thing which worries the repressive powers is the tremendous increases in communication via satellite. Once you can get a satellite, putting out ordinary British or American, you know, Dallas TV shows into the heart of the Soviet Union, a satellite with a big enough footprint so that anybody in the Soviet Union can put a small bit of chicken wire on his roof and pull down those programs and see what life in the West is really like. That's really going to shake them. And of course, one or two stations creeping over from the West you can dismiss as being simple propaganda. When you've got hundreds of competing systems all over the United States and Western Europe, all of which are accessible to people behind the Iron Curtain, I think that's a very different thing. So I think I'll wind up by concluding that I'm very optimistic because the nature of society is changing. Marx again was right to some extent. The social relations are to some extent dependent upon the means of production and the means of production are allowing us to insulate ourselves in the state much more. We're becoming very much more small scale in our operations and we're able to insulate ourselves by doing for ourselves what would formally require the massive coercive empire of a large business or state enterprise. And so my conclusion from all this is that the past has shown us the follies of state control. The present is making it possible for ordinary people to escape that state control and the future will leave the state even more impotent. Looking at the past, attempts to produce planned economies in the past have not yielded the promised harvest. The mild attempts have just produced confusion while the most stringent have produced the most unacceptable horrors. And this experience dogs every footstep of those who would wish to take us down the road to service. Looking to the present, the benefits of a diverse and competitive economy are being appreciated. People have greater wealth to acquire those benefits and they're more reluctant to give up their stake in it. They're demanding alternatives to state services and they have the means and the technology to escape state services and control. In the future, economic units will I think continue to get smaller and smaller. Self-employment will replace the factory proletariat and with it will go the last vestige of Marxist theory. Communication will continually improve making it ever more possible to do at the level of the individual what once required the kind of centralization that is prey to collectivism. New service industries with few economies of scale and little inclination towards monopoly will emerge as the old industrial jobs are exported to other countries. Well, David Hume who is quoted by Hayek on the title page of the road to service said that it is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. I think it's perhaps even more rare to find liberty restored all at once. It happened about once in recent years that I can think of. But the point is that having stepped off the road to serve them it would be a mistake to suppose that our way back would be at all easy or at all quick. It will be many decades before the attitudes that brought us so far will actually be completely overcome. But fortunately past experience and future technology will keep us traveling in the right direction. And Mr Chairman in my judgment the first few and perhaps faltering steps back have already been made. Thank you.


Hey guys, it's Friday July 24th. You hear me say it once you hear me say it a thousand times your job as a trader is Risk management that is your job all the time every time you enter a trade the first thing you should have in mind is where is your risk? And how are you gonna protect yourself and protect your capital? So stick with me? This is gonna be fast and furious I apologize for not getting the video out to you sooner. It's been a crazy two weeks for me last week I got wrapped up in work and blah blah blah and yesterday I got called in and blah blah blah you get it Right. So anyway enough with that. Let's go ahead and get into this recap and show you some of the trades I took today and maybe they'll give you some ideas as the things that you can use in your trading All right, so keep it simple stick with me fast and furious. Here we go Okay, guys, so here we go. Let's dive into this thing. So Yesterday I posted this chart on this ticker MIS T in the room It was a long trade I took because the only trade I got off before I got yanked out I had to go to the office yesterday but I posted this out there and I'm bringing this up because you know, we talk about process We talk about looking for patterns in the market. We look we talk about looking for things that are repeatable Keeping your trading simple and looking for the repeatable trades that you can take that are a high probability that you can get into time and time again, right? So This is a trade I took yesterday And you know the picture here kind of explains it all already, right? So we had a nice move up. We had this nice little resistance area here that got turned into support on its way back down That's where I was looking to get the trade on As it was coming down. I just didn't like it, right? I didn't like the way it was acting here But it came down respected the support level moves back up above he walked we come down You can see the level holding here, right? So you can see the price action sellers were exhausting They just weren't able to get it down in here. I got my trade out there It got triggered it hit me in my stop was back below this support line here initially and then boom We take off and I love to take profit at the congestion area above I'm either taking full profit or I'm taking partial profit and even a run, right? So because of the way that some of these things are running We don't know if it's going to keep on going you never know, right? You never know where the markets going to end up at the end of the day So the best you can do is plan your risk appropriately Put your stop out there put your trade out there and then trade your plan and This just worked out exactly the plan just so happy to turn them to a nice profitable trade And it worked out for me, right? So it was a great trade. They won off exactly the way I expected it to I didn't get any unexpected funny business going in there. I and so it was a great trade now I bring this up because I took a trade today that is very similar in structure to this So keep a picture of this in your mind, and I'm going to flip over to the other chart here Ntsi Ntsi is a ticker that we I traded this morning. I got a pre-market trade off right out of the gate And again, it's just a very very similar structure to what we just saw, right? Very similar structure move up now We didn't have we didn't have a support area that got created is the one thing that we did not really have to lead on To come back into right so I didn't have that now You take that aside. You see the move up. We come back down We clearly there's some support down here. There's some buying support in this area So the market rejects comes back off and then that's where I get my trade on is in that same area Draw a lot right we're gonna draw a lot because we draw our lines and what do we get when we draw a lot? We get areas to take trades from Okay, so give me a sec here you zoom out you draw this line straight for you Right about there right so That's where this thing was rejecting from I don't like wicks a lot. Honestly. I usually look for body I look for for meat Candles is where I like to pay most of my attention to so the trade gets on right, I had a stop back here behind VWAP and It barely moved into profit for me, right? I mean it literally barely moved and I was looking to take profit up necessarily for your life So the market moves a couple pennies in my direction Okay, give it a chance and then what does it do it just starts to fall it falls back through VWAP and I respect my stop This is what you do you plan your trade you respect your stop You know one job is a risk manager. You've got a manager risk to protect your capital at all costs So I start the day out red right but I don't care You know, I don't care. I don't care because it worked out according to plan if it did You know, obviously not what I wanted it to do right We always want to have a profitable trade the expectation is that we're gonna have a profitable trade But we have a protection plan in place the event that it doesn't work out and so big deal I get stopped out and I walk on and I move on and I look for my next trade set up And I wait for my lines to come into play So NTZ that was the only trade I took in this guy and I left it alone And again, it's similar structure to what we saw with the MIS T trade from yesterday You know it comes up comes back down creates a support level and sometimes we'll get that bounce off and push back up into the highs And then it'll either just keep on pressing like we had some runners that ran earlier this week That was just absolutely nuts And then other times it'll just die off kind of like NTZ did today Okay, so it goes up does this thing and it's just rolls off right and and for me this that was enough for me for this one today It just didn't have a lot of Structure that that I like to see in my trades right so And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. I didn't I didn't like the way this guy was was moving after the open I didn't like the lines Was it tradable absolutely 100% there are tradable opportunities in here As a matter of fact one of my tags Kevin my man took a trade in here today and and got off a nice little trade so It's okay. I it just didn't work out for me. Maybe it worked out for you now Let me move on to another ticker here ENT ENT was another ticker that I traded this morning and found some really nice opportunities so ENT pre-market Same thing right MIST from yesterday, I'll put up again business. It's just an example. It runs up creates a level Pulls back to that level bounces off that level right repeatable patterns This is what we're looking for and that's all looking for in here now. Unfortunately, I Took a I took a FOMO entry initially right so I saw the stall happening up in here Thinking that it's not going to make it back down into this Prior prior resistance level turning into support. So again, I'm going to draw a line and I draw these lines So that you guys can see how I drop them in here They're already on my charts when I'm drop when I'm trading but I Clear some stuff out so that I can put these markers on here So you guys can kind of see be in the mind or you know see the mindset as things are unfolding kind of a thing So we get to pop up through resistance. It comes back I put a FOMO trade on small size super small size, right?  So Super safe. I'm not concerned. I'm not worried. It rolls back into where oh, yeah my line, right? And then I get on a little extra size And I take the bounce so I follow the bounce up and I see the rejection and it pushes back up So I take prop where at the congestion area, right? So that's where I'm taking my problem. I Get out of the trade and I wait and see what happens next because what do we have now? We have yet another area That gets generated here. Yeah, I did it again. Here we go. I'm not gonna Correct, okay, this happened all the time because I got back fingers Let me just scroll over blah blah blah blah Let me take my line. It's strong way over the sky. I'm ready if I don't we're supposed to be okay, so We have a resistance level that gets generated here, right? What happens? We crack that resistance nice momentum back up into the current pre-market highs and what do we do? We see it pushing back down into That level so that's where I get my trade on boom I get on I get out where in congestion up here near the highs of the days because we don't know how far it's gonna Go it could chug and run for days or it could just fail and fall over and leave you hanging, right? so and One last long trade Same exact set up right and for this trade here. Where was my stop back here behind? The previous higher low I keep my trading sub right my stop areas are well-defined. I know where they're going. I have a Really keen idea of what the distance is between my level because I know where the support was or where the support is going To be where I expect it to be. I know where my stop level is going to be so I already have my range for What my risk is and then I can place my trade size according to my risk That allows me to get the trade on safely and I can manage my risk capital along the way So the last trade I hear for the long I get in boom and off we go Where I take profit at congestion because I see it's struggling right I see it's struggling to get up in there So I just take the trade off and I'm out quick scout easy trade Now we push up and then what happens we get a nice stuff look at the volume in this candle, right? Right out of the open.  We break the highs New market high for the day and then we roll right back down So I take the trade short at the line, right? It just turns out that the open is that line I'm gonna draw the line on here so that we have it Because we can say we did right there we go and That line comes into play multiple times even later in the day, right? Now this is pretty close to zombie time So, you know, I walked away basically after these last couple trade sequences here So I took this trade to the short side got a little size on add a little bit to my winter And then where did I take profit nail and bail at the wall? This is technically still front side. This is a front side move because the stock is not yet broken Frontside shorts require front side covers nail and bail man Don't sit around and look for the all-day fader because you don't know that it's coming You don't know if it's coming. It may never come so short trade here We had to spike up right back down. That's a bit of a stuff move there Big volume couldn't hold those highs. We roll back up in that area take the short boom boom and I cover What happens next the market bounces off a view up pushes up cannot make a new high of day Now why is that important? It's important because look at the volume that occurred in that bar, right? the largest volume candle of the day thus far and it can't make a new high and Immediately rolls right back over and stuffs, right? This is the kind of move that we're looking for We always look for this momentum stuff move and then trade the pop back up into an area and then take the short Now that's exactly what I did However, what you can't see in this two-minute candle two-minute time frame is The retrace back up right here. It looks like I chased the move But let me zip into a one-minute chart chart here for you And zoom into that area and you can see the one-minute stuff boom What do we do we retrace back up into the line? We hit the wall boom boom trade area and I took the first profit target here now. I'm safe, right? So here's a tip for you guys, right? I'm taking this trade here. Where's my stop my stop is back here, but buy these highs. I let me draw a little trend line here and This is something that you can use. It's a piece of information that you may not have come across previously but if my stop is back here and Let's just say hypothetically I've got 200 shares on at this location if I take off 50% of my shares and We're just gonna use some quick numbers here. We're gonna call this at six I got in at six even and let's say I got out down here at 580. That's a 20 cent move if I take a 20 cent move and take 50% of my profit. I can move my stop Back here to minus 10 cents So at 610 because if six is my entry 610 is a stop if I move my stop back here And I get stopped down. I still technically took 10 cents off of 100 shares, right? or I can move my stop right down in here to break even and I'm gonna get still I get stopped out, but I protected my profit. I move my stops When I'm when I'm trading I'm very defensive. You guys hear me say it's all time. I'm a defensive trader Market moves in my direction Once it moves in my direction And I've got some some profit in the game. I'm not letting a winner turn into a loser I don't it's not worth it, right? I could take the trade off and then reattack it if the things if things work out You can always get back in but if you're in and this thing starts to move against you and keeps on going It could climb and climb and climb and come back and stop you out for max stop on that one trade When really once it moves into profit now you can move your stop down even if I didn't take profit here I could still reduce my risk Behind be well at that point, right? So just some ideas of things that you guys might be able to use and in your own trade Okay, so this trade gets on boom the stuff boo get it on the pop get back out right and I took the rest off down over here and It's no coincidence that I'm taking these trades off here at prior lines, right? These are prior support areas that I expect the market to stall that and that's where I ended up taking that last piece of that trade off so You'll also notice if you go back in the main room. I posted a chart that was talking about this guy It was kind of directionless in the oh, I don't know See about 1115 time frame Is when that post went on so I'm gonna zoom out here a little bit and scroll over So we can get that area in there and if it this thing was just in a kind of a Directionless zigzag area, right? Now if I zoom out a bit more and I just move these lines To be in coordination with what we see forming in the chart. We've got a little there I'm gonna give this other line be there for that one and take this one And throw it right in here, right? So if even if eliminate this high here You can see the channel. This thing is just like it's directionless. This is where You see battle trade these channels. It's really good at it, man He's really good at just trading these channels and taking these these extreme Sides of the channel on the short side That's his thing and that's that's one of the things he's really good at. I'm not as good at it I'm practicing it I'm trying to get better at it and have something to add to my trading toolbox But for now I stick to my bread and butter trades. I stick to the things I know I stick to the repeatable patterns.  If you'd have gotten it up here and expected this thing to fade all day, it sat in this range almost all Morning mid-afternoon right at the reversal times now once you get this big old stuff candle down here And then it didn't really crack support right just kind of bounced around there And then boom then it tanks and takes out the support level so then you can look at this support levels being resistant to the upside And take a possible short from there and you know, there could have been an opportunity there for you So so there you go guys Fast and furious at least I think it was fast Quick recap I hope this guy this this gives you guys a little bit information some things you can add another toolbox I hope it lets you see a little bit into my mind and the things that I look for when I'm trading and how I manage things If you have questions shoot them over have to answer them other than that have a great weekend Enjoy yourselves. Enjoy the weather. Enjoy your families and we will get back to it next week. See you guys


Hi everyone this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson I'm going to walk you through pretty much all the stuff we do on the piano and the goal is to try and encapsulate all of that into one lesson and all the things we work on on the piano involve well some things in common like chord playing, hand independence where you try to get a pattern in the left along with something in the melody and you try to move your hand you try to work out different combinations, different beats, different sub beats and so on and so forth. So for that I have just come up with a simple motif of just four notes and the four notes throughout this lesson are going to be that's it right. So just to inform you it's not too tough this lesson it's a lot easier than some of the other stuff on our channel but anyway so these are your four notes which you're going to play melodically in the right hand in a couple of ways that is F, G, Ab, C. So you might argue that we are in the key of F minor F minor is derived from the Ab major scale and the chords which will go around this the first thing you can try and do is play this in a sequence okay and I'm going to talk about a few mechanical things to improve as you go along and yeah let's do it step by step and I encourage you to get your keyboards out get a notebook out and stuff like that to kind of play and learn along with me as the lesson moves forward and before we get really cracking it'll be great if you can consider getting yourself a copy of our notes on Patreon link in the description and if you haven't subscribed to our channel please consider hitting that subscribe button and the bell button for regular notifications whenever we drop a video it'll be available and known to you and we do release lessons and videos and riffs which you have on our channel on a daily basis so do consider doing all those things give the video a like leave us a comment so on and so forth and now let's start hope you got your pianos ready if not also it's fine you can still watch the piano will help okay so first play this in your right and you want a nice circular motion I I like a nice circular motion with my wrist which can move like this you don't have to overdo it in in other words don't move your elbow while you create your circles I highly I don't like moving the elbow and if you start a circular path what happens is it just kind of keeps going right now you could even do this with a pedal on and off if you have a pedal this is with the pedal on with the pedal off no problem but try to get a nice legato out of your performance you don't want to go very forceful staccato and also while you do this try to do a couple of things one is try to stay in time so if you consider these as 16th notes which is dividing the pulse by four then I would encourage your head to move once and these four notes would just go with the head movement two e and a three e and a four e right one e and a two e and a three and a four e and so four notes in the right hand for every head movement stay in time then try to build on your dynamics try to play a bit louder softer and gradually get louder softer we've done a lot of videos on dynamics just type the word dynamics on our channel and you'll get a nice set of videos how to use the pedal how to control this volume and so on and so forth okay that's pretty much the melody and I have like a variation of the melody like a more intermediate or advanced way of playing it where I've added some rests in between which will go you might want to check out the notation if you want to count a lot of the ease and the earth so that's your variation now to practice both of these melodies I would encourage us to first start off with a single f following our head movement as a pulse so just a simple f going with the head one two three four one two slower slightly slower let's do the uh the advanced melody more interest because the notes have their own space different gap between the notes right with a lot of rest so your a is actually the start of the bar not really it's still at the off beat before the one but there we go try to see the notation one two three four or go back to the simple one and if you're getting bored with f you can say okay I'm in the key of f minor what are the notes I'm playing one two three flat and the pinky is playing the five so you can then go to c do the same thing on c maybe maybe on d you have different scales maybe g and b I'm just going to come back to f for now anyway so how can we grow this obviously some chords would be nice so the chords which I've nominated for this lesson again I've written that down in the notes you can go f minor for the first bar or however long you prefer maybe a whole bar one e changing e flat major d flat major d flat or you could change every two beats which I think will be nicer two three four one two stay on b flat for two extra beats assuming each chord is for two counts and two change for d flat two three four one two three the second bar I'm doing f minor a flat b flat major third bar same as the first bar third cycle same as the cycle one and now the last one b flat minor c minor d flat major e flat major come back to f minor so again let's revise the chords and how I'm planning it is line one you play basically pianissimo which is super soft here we go I'm not a very soft touch player so it's good for me as well when I practice and at the end of the bar a challenge for you at the d flat do a little crescendo but don't go insanely loud because the first bar will be pp or pianissimo second cycle will be p or piano softly third cycle will be mf or mezzo forte which is moderately loud and the last cycle is going to be fortissimo or forte however loud you want to play let's do that again super soft going to soft super soft e flat d flat little crescendo and now we go to the next volume level which is soft slightly louder crescendoing to mf mezzo forte opening out the piano even more louder forte and still forte fortissimo if you back to pianissimo and I'd encourage you to do this with a metronome or do it by moving your head so you don't lose timing or you can do it with a drum backing track or something you know softly whenever you have to do and whenever you have to build so what we tend to do is when we play loudly we tend to you know go faster at least most of us do and whenever we go soft we are we tend to go slower so that's a weird human problem I guess so this this should hopefully help you work on on these things so like I said at the beginning of the lesson it's tough to put a name for this lesson it's basically an all-in-one all the things you need to work on on the piano I've tried to put into one tutorial okay so let's do that again f minor super soft e flat major d flat major slight crescendo to soft f minor a flat major plate lower if you wish slight crescendo back to f minor going to mezzo forte building forte forte cmo basically super loud very soft almost like you're whispering on the piano there we and you try it with the other tune as well super soft soft maintain the pulse in your left hand don't forget mezzo going to loud super loud I guess be careful don't break your piano or something and now if you're having a problem doing I'm at least I am having a problem playing that and talking to you in the lesson but you don't have to do that obviously so try to work on the advanced one if you're not getting it don't worry come back to it still gives you a great great workout okay there we go great so now that that particular activity is done I'd like to combine the roots of the chords with the chord in the left hand and try to introduce a simple striding technique if possible but before we do the stride apart from being able to play the chords you need to also be able to play the chord roots as octave so maybe I should have done that first and the chord second but you'll get the idea nevertheless so F E flat D flat stay on D flat and play the pulse A flat D flat second second cycle and F E flat D flat on the pulse remember pulse is the human head movement D flat other men now remember what we learned earlier we learned the chords and what did we learn now the root and the octave right chord what if we combine it we can do something like this will train your use of your pedal because you have to to hold the pedal stride your left hand into the triad and make sure you're doing this very very slowly so now you could even do right you can take your time to jump whenever you're in place play the chord bass chord and slowly get a bit faster at the process and then the other chords call this striding actually it's called striding and in some cases when you stride up after having played the root in the left hand you could also access some inversions comfortably to play the chord see I prefer to play D flat like this instead of that way it's a bit congested that way right so E flat D flat remember pedal and lift pedal lift pedal lift pedal stay on B flat pedal E flat D flat B flat B flat minor C minor D flat major D flat major and close fine so we've you basically use the roots of the chord and we've used the actual chord which you could also play in an inversion then we've combined it together using this amazing striding technique now the striding technique well you can now see what other options you can do with your chords what are the other chord techniques you might have under under your belt so to speak on the piano but before we do chords it's nice to just activate the pinky and the thumb to just do root and octave combos so let me now in this segment of our lesson let's do a few of the commonly used root octave combos and I've introduced them in order of increasing difficulty if you will so first off we have the toggle pulse so what I do with the toggle pulse is root octave root octave almost like you're moving your head sideways at least I get that feeling so pinky thumb pinky that's the toggle pulse you could even do do it very later little quicker with the chord roots of course okay that's your toggle pulse then we can look at something called which I like to call we will rock you because it's named after the song so okay so you may want to just slow that down feel the we will rock you so we started with toggle pulse to do just with one note for a start and then do the others right or rock you coming up then another pattern for you would be the thresio very sals so one and two and four and one and two and three or one and and depending on how you're counting it so one and two and three and four and one and one and two okay so you can also modify the thresio by doing like one bar of normal thresio so normal thresio you can also do another really nice salsa rhythm called the song clave I'm sure I'm gonna I'm gonna be doing an entire series on Latin and salsa rhythms so stay tuned to the channel a lot of you have requested it is coming I'm just working on something interesting so to speak so the song clave will be it's notated for you very groovy right thresio only modified and song clave and of course the challenge is also going to be to do it with that other tune I mean the other rhythmically modified tune with res the same notes toggle pulse rock you thresio right so you can do all these things to challenge yourself which even I'm doing right now you know so it's a good workout to just practice single root and octave with the pinky and the thumb and then what you can do is you can convert these rhythms into chords you can try and use them as cause for example if you want to we will rock you instead of that way you can do break up your chord and do we will rock you on the broken chord right it's still rock you thresio you see where this can go root and octave can so quickly become a chord right guys so that's pretty much it for the lesson what I had to share but you could go on you know you could see what other patterns you are familiar with in your left hand and try to play the same chords over those chord patterns otherwise I can go on and on with chord patterns of which there are quite a few already discussed on our youtube channel so for now let's recap we have a set of four notes F G A flat C then we have our chords there's an entire nice chord progression which is laid out for you we played it with roots then we did it with blocks remember there's a modified tune as well and so on and so forth so we had to tune modified tune chords single root and octave then we can combine it in a striding technique then we looked at a variety of left hand rhythm patterns toggling the pulse rock you thresio modified thresio all this with the melody now just to conclude I wanted to mention that you could head over to our website nathanielschool.com and we have a section laid out called free tutorials it's free you don't even have to make an account it's just there nathanielschool.com click on free tutorials what we've ended up doing is all of our youtube content we have patiently or diligently cataloged it something which youtube can't do so we took it up on ourselves to do it on our website so you'll find all of our lessons archived very well for easy learning you have stuff for beginners you have you can filter things like hand independence left hand base arpeggios which is a common topic on our channel certain genres like blues and jazz and whatnot so I encourage you to head over there and if you want something more you know sort of regular or structured step by step lesson by lesson as a lot of you have been asking you might want to consider our video courses plan on the nathaniel school website wherein it's a one-time payment and you will get access to a variety of videos which we keep putting out and it's an ever-growing library and you have that for life you have an entire subscription you get my books you get three of my books and if none of these are your cups of tea you can then you can otherwise consider a normal in-person live virtual course with me or the rest of our nathaniel faculty you just have to fill up a form a course advisor will reach you plan it over a probably a zoom call or something and then figure out a module which serves you best right guys thanks for watching the video hope you found the lesson useful hope it improves your playing do let me know what you think about it in the comments give the video a like hit that subscribe without fail if you haven't already hit the bell icon for notifications get yourself a copy of our notes on patreon and i will see you in the next video cheers and stay cool


Long check on the audio in the first glass and then spill it there. Troy, Birchits, T-R-O-Y, B-U-R-C-H-E-T-T. Good deal. I could spill it, L-A-S-T. Troy, talk to me a little bit about, you know, I know we have sat down like this a couple of times, actually. But talk to me a little bit about what you've been up to lately. Well, I got to go and do a national TV show called Virginia Dreams. It's in Abington, down toward Abington, or below Abington, Virginia. Had a chance to be on that. And one of my songs was the top-rated song that they'd ever had on their social media. I got to write that song. I was very blessed, I feel honored for that. Also, I get to sing and play a lot with Jason Goble, a good friend of mine. I respect him a lot. He's a songwriter musician. And the song that I just did for you is actually on the Songwriters Scene CD that you can pick up at the local restaurants and the Mac and things like that. Besides that, I travel to a lot of churches. And I work a lot with Teach Yoga classes at the first United Methodist Church here in Prestonburg. So I'm doing quite a bit. I really enjoy music, though. It's where my heart is. And I like to write songs. I'm a storyteller. So I write about what I feel, what I've lived, lost. I think that makes the best songs if you can move somebody. And a guy told me one time that if you can sing a song and that person can live it, then that song is worth something. Tell me a little bit more about that song. Tell me the name of it and give me a little background on it, maybe what it's about. Well, I actually wrote it about my girlfriend. It's called Live to Love You. And I'm very honored to. It's a story that me and her share. So it's kind of a personal thing. But I'm honored I got to write it for her and get to do it for her. I write songs that move me in some way or that I've lived, in other words. So the story in that song is a message. And if you listen really close, hopefully it'll relate to something in your life as well. Talk to me about some of the obstacles that you have faced growing up and of course how it's either affected you positively or negatively as far as playing music. Well, I was born illegally blind. And so a lot of that stuff affected me in my education, schooling, things like that. But I did finally make it to college and I was lucky enough to get to meet some people, Clayton Case and Laura Ford Hall and Timothy Cooley. They had a singing group in the college and I got to be picked for one of the big Sandy singers. And that just really actually helped me to get through the schooling and graduate. So it was a big thing to me to be a part of that group and I'm honored. I learned so much from those people and I respect them greatly. But lately it actually, I play a small part in a internet web series called Fifth Holler. Jan Lewis is one of the producers of that. And I play this guy that got blinded in a coal mine accident and I work in the police station. Now he's a little shades of gray and we filmed the whole first season and I get to do all my own stunts and fight scenes and I'm very pleased for a guy that grew up legally blind and nobody really thought I would achieve much. To me, I believe that all things are possible. It's whatever you work toward. You can achieve anything if you don't take no for an answer. So we're getting ready to start filming the second season of that and I'm just honored to be a part of it and wherever it goes, I feel blessed. We were talking before we started filming here and we talked a little bit about you taking a trip down to Nashville at one point and how you really prefer to play music here and be here at home in the mountains. How do you play that? Well, when I was a young guy, like most guys, I wanted to... Well, I did. I went to Nashville for some time when I was a young man. I wanted to be the next superstar and had all these dreams. So I actually had been singing with the Big Cindy singers for a while and I went down there on a hiatus. Stayed for a little bit, tried out for some TV shows, got to perform some, but to be truthful, I really didn't like Nashville that much. I would prefer to be here. I love Eastern Kentucky. I'm honored to be able to sing in the restaurants and the churches and meet people around here that are so nice and that's where my heart is and I hope that I can continue singing here locally and branch out some too, but my heart is really here. Anything else you want to add? Just said I'm grateful to be here and I'm looking forward to hopefully to get to singing to more and more people. Thank you. Thank you, sir.