Morning guys. It's great to be here at India's only independently curated Vintag conference. I've gotten to know some of the Haskeek folks and glad to be talking about ICOs. Before we start, let me get a sense of who's here actually. So how many people are developers who have, how many of you have heard of ICOs? Everybody's heard of ICOs. How many of you may want to do an ICO at some point in the future? Alright, about half the audience. How many of you have invested in ICOs? Okay, good number. How many of you haven't but would like to invest in ICOs or the rest of the crowd? And just in terms of what you guys are doing, how many of you are developers? Product people? Product focus people? Any business focus people? Got it. Thank you. That gives me a good sense. So clearly everyone in this room is here because you've heard of this thing called initial coin offerings, right? And before I start, let me give you a little bit of a background about myself. I am currently spending most of my time in the blockchain and the crypto world but I actually don't, I'm not an early investor in crypto. I wish I wasn't a miner. I wish I was but I actually come from the traditional world of startups and venture capital. I was a VC in Silicon Valley. I came and helped set up a fund in India in 2013. I was based in Bombay, a fund called Lightbox. So traditional venture capital looking at early stage startups. How many people have worked in startups or are working in startups right now? Okay, got it. So you guys are very familiar with that world, right? And so there is a certain way of doing things, right? And you know, we see we always believe that we are in the business of investing in disruptive companies, right? But I think a lot of people would say that venture capital hasn't disrupted itself, right? If you think about that user experience, right? Think of the VC funding as a UX. It's pretty bad in a lot of ways, right? And so this thing comes along and starts to boom last year and it's really very new, right? So things are changing every day. And so I got really excited about this world of blockchain, right? So we have three things happening in the world of blockchain that the way I see it, right? There is blockchain itself or rather starting with distribution of ledger technologies and then consensus mechanisms. And of course we know that that is changing every sector. Then there is the world of cryptocurrencies, which is really decentralized money, right? And changing the notion of where you store your wealth or how you transfer value from one party to another. And the third thing that I look at is ICOs, which is applying that blockchain concept that distributed ledger concept to the idea of fundraising, right? And so clearly this has been a phenomenon in the last 12 months especially. As you can see what has been going on in the world, different colors represent different countries. It started in 2014. The first ICO was for a project called Mastercoin. Then of course later on Ethereum itself was one of the first real ICOs that raised money and look at the value that Ethereum has created in terms of a community. So I think it's probably the best validation of an ICO that actually led to a community, a developer ecosystem, right? And then something, there was a quiet time for a couple of years and then boom, last year and this is only until November if you actually extrapolate it to now, the numbers have somewhere between 7 or 8 billion dollars has been raised. And to give you a contrast that is more than blockchain funding that's going from VCs in the traditional startup. So ICOs are already more money is being raised in the ICO world than in the startup world for blockchain projects. More money is raised in the ICO world than seed stage financing for the entire universe of seed stage financing, right? So clearly this has become a massive thing and more than that what's crazy is this stuff, right? How quickly some things have happened. So some of these projects look at the fact that they've raised 200 million, 35 million and the more interesting thing is how quickly, look at this one, 35 million in 30 seconds. So on so forth, right? So if you're a developer or somebody who's doing a startup, it's very tempting to ask yourself, how can I get in on this? And if you're used to stories from your friends or your own experience of how long it takes to raise money and I'm just not stereotyping but I'm assuming that most of you in this room will agree that if you're an engineer, a real core, hardcore developer, product person, you don't like that experience of going and selling and raising money that way, right? It doesn't really add any value. Now if you could focus on your project and actually raise you the capital really quickly, of course it's tempting. So what's going on and how did this happen, right? I would argue that just to give you background why I think this has happened is a convergence of two trends or two big things that have happened in the last five or ten years. One is the world of crowdfunding. That already existed. Existed for physical products from Kickstarter. Existed for independent movies and other projects on Indiegogo. Existed for social causes of GoFundMe. Those kinds of things have already existed. So that's not new, right? The thing is that that was never being utilized for startup funding and specifically and why it wasn't being used is I would argue because there was no digital economy, right? So you actually now look at the next part, which is the blockchain world, which came about and created a digital asset economy. So what does that mean, right? So I think blockchain what it introduced to the world and why made ICOs possible is, you know, three things essentially, right? Because you can trust a distributed ledger. You can now think of any digital good as an asset, right? Which means you can also tokenize it so you can now split it. You can trade it. You can always have an immutable, auditable rack of who has owned that asset at what time. So you can create a token that can be exchanged and that can be trusted without having a central party. Right? So that's tokenization. Crypto economics. I just did a great talk, I'm sure, and you've learned a lot about crypto economics. But essentially now you have a new type of economics, right? You don't just have the normal supply demand curves, but you also have this notion of, you know, here is going to be a supply for which I already defined the supply curve. This is how much Bitcoin will exist at any time, right? And depending on certain actions, more will be created or this is how it will be consumed. And essentially this idea of, you know, how does that change economics, right? It is something that you already learned about. And finally, I think smart contracts. Now because of smart contracts, primarily on Ethereum to begin with because that's the largest ecosystem, you could now trust a system in which you could send money to a stranger and know that you will get the tokens in return. You will get something of value in return and all of this is publicly available. So there's these three things that blockchain brought in with made possible the concept of ICOs. And what ICO is, as most of you know, is a fundraising tool where you sell a new digital currency that you create and or a token and I'll come to the difference between all coins and tokens in a bit. And it's an exchange for cryptocurrencies or fiat currency, US dollar or Bitcoin ether, which have immediate liquid value because those things are established, right? And the idea is that whatever you created, this will have a purpose in some ecosystem and we'll appreciate in value over time, which is the reason to perhaps get into it. Or if you're really passionate about some project, get in early as a participant in that developer ecosystem. The token does not, why it's different from what traditional startup equities, right? Remember the token that you buy in ICO almost always, it's called what's called a utility token. It does not confer ownership. So you actually don't own anything of any part of that company. You own a token that's issued by the company. You own the currency that's issued by the company. And so why, let's understand from the entrepreneur's perspective, I think this will be relevant to as many of you who raise your hands and then also understand from the investor perspective. And when I say investor, it means the average person, okay? I'm not talking about venture funds or hedge funds. So why, okay? Well, first of all, like I said, compared to the UX of venture capital, right? Long cycles, decision-making and obviously you have a lot of peers in venture capital, but I'd be the first to say that we don't make life easy for the entrepreneur, right? The system's not set up the right way. VCs aren't always the smartest people, right? VCs don't always know the right answer or have the best judgment. And so there is a lot of time that's wasted, I think, in that process, which doesn't really add value to the project or the company, right? So doing this is cheaper. It's faster, certainly in the sense of the opportunity cost of the time, because you can do some of these ideas in a couple of months and versus the entire process of fundraising, which usually takes place after you've created something, after you've shown, you know, what usually you keep getting feedback is, okay, go prove to me that you have more users, and you go back and you get users. Okay, great, prove to me that they are paying. All right, go, you go and get some revenues. Okay, now prove to me that you'll also be profitable, right? See, the cycle keeps repeating and the bar keeps getting higher. But I think in this way, you can actually raise this money before you create something, right? And you don't give up equity. So in the venture world, in the startup world, when you're raising money through venture capital, giving up equity in your company, that's not happening here. It's also unregulated right now, so you don't have the paperwork. Now, that is good and bad, and I'll come to that in a little bit. So essentially, if you think about it, right, the person who's giving money to a project and the business itself, you know, earlier you had many people in the middle, you had a broker of some sort, a banker sometimes, and what you do now is you can trust a smart token, because it's written on the Ethereum public blockchain, and so you can trust that this can happen without the need for other parties in the process. But I think what I like more than anything that I've mentioned so far is this idea that this changes the creation of network effects. So all of you, I'm sure, are familiar with what network effect is, right?  You will not leave because everybody else is on Facebook. All your data is on Facebook. The more people joining that platform, the value of that platform to any given user keeps increasing. That's the idea of a network effect. Now, a lot of businesses when you're trying to create, that's your struggle. If you're trying to find buyers and sellers, let's say if you're doing a marketplace of some sort, right? Or you're trying to find content and users, right?  That's really hard to do, which is why so few companies are real platforms, but if you can crack that, you are worth a lot, right? You change the world. And because it's so hard to do, interestingly now, the idea of ICOs, which I like a lot, is that it changes the equation.  And that's the problem, is that it's very hard to get to this point because it takes a long time. Sometimes it takes capital and it's just really hard to crack. What ICOs do is that they provide a second utility, okay?  In that time frame, you can add a financial utility. You can actually provide them something which has which has some value, right? So what you do is, I want all of you guys on my platform. What if I issue you tokens? What if you believe in my project?  It doesn't have to be large sums. I give you these tokens and you buy into my vision. Now, you want that token to increase in value. What will you do? You'll go talk to other people. You'll bring other people in the system. You might bring other developers into the ecosystem. So essentially what you're doing is by adding another type of utility, you are solving the bootstrapping problem, right? So you're allowing an entrepreneur from day one to actually provide some sort of a network effect. So that's why some of these ICOs before they've even created something are worth a lot because a lot of people have bought into their idea, right? Now, it also is interesting because if you think about it currently, if you were to go out and raise money from an angel investor, then you'll create something, then you'll go find your users, right? So many of you are product people, you do A, B testing. You're trying to find who is actually the user that who likes your product the most. And that takes time and it wastes money. So a lot of the marketing money that you spend is wasted because you don't know what's usually called the product market fit, right? You don't know who's actually interested in your offering. Now, what if you could reverse this whole thing? What if you could say, let me first find the people who will like, who will be my users just like in crowdfunding, right? And then I go raise from them and more importantly I create a community and I create this thing that I'm creating in an open source environment where I'm getting their inputs. So that's what ICOs have also enabled, right? Is that you can actually now raise money first and build accordingly. Sure. Oh, yeah. Great question. Great question. Hold on to that thought. I'll come to it. Okay. And now some of you are not going to be interested in being a developer for an ICO project or starting an ICO yourself, but you want to, you're someone who watches great new platforms and new frameworks emerging and so you, you know, think about like React coming out of Facebook or think of anything that has come out of Google, right? You may not have had the opportunity to participate in them, right? But now, conceptually what ICOs can provide is that as an investor, you can access these opportunities. So for the first time in history, the average person who's interested in technology can actually get involved in things very early, right? It's global democratized access. So until now, large companies, most of that value went to the founders, the team, the early employees, the early investors, venture capitalists and the rest of us were just creating the value for them, right? So Facebook, who creates the content? We do. Who consumes the content? We do. Who gets the value? Facebook, right? Have you ever, has anybody ever been paid for their user usage of Facebook? Okay, great. So it's really democratizing the value creation, right? So whatever value is being created in the project can now be distributed among many, many more people. It's also diversification in the sense that let's say you are someone who is into cryptocurrencies, you have Bitcoin and at some point, you have, let's say, gained a fair amount of wealth in Bitcoin, right? Now you're looking for what's next. What are the other things that can be, that are so early right now that it can be 100x or 200x in the next two or three years? So that's why some of these things could be very interesting to someone in the crypto world, or someone who missed the bus, right? You say, next Bitcoin. This is liquid and tradable. So if you invest in a startup in the traditional way, some of you may have, your money is usually locked up for seven, eight years, right? That's because you don't get anything back until the startup is sold or does an IPO or something like that. Now, in the concept of an ICO, you are getting these tokens which are accessing the protocols in this project and the idea is that people will have demand for this. So you will be able to buy and sell this thing at any point. So you're always liquid and this is tradable. And like I said, for the first time, the average person can access really early stage opportunities which they may feel is the next Facebook at a global scale. So another thing is that if you're sitting in India, if you want to invest in startups, you're typically only irrestricted to opportunities in India. The world of crypto and ICOs is global from day one. Now, there are a lot of nuances, regulatory and all which I'll get into, but conceptually this is amazing. And what about the developer specifically? So if you think about it, you know, you guys are more familiar with the blockchain application stack than I am. But the key thing is that the idea is that there is this is a fat protocol, right? Where you have data will be part of the protocol and you have a lot of functionality provided there itself. So the apps sitting on top are just using all of that underlying code. This is very interesting thought that if you compare this to the way the web developed, it's very different. People would argue that in the 90s, 95s, SMTP, HTTP, etc. were being developed, rolled out and what was happening was that there were some researchers, there were some early developers, these were open source communities and they contributed and then what happened? They actually never got any value out of it. And protocol development kind of went dormant. The parties that actually created much more on top are the Google's and Facebook's and Microsoft's and they captured a ton of value. So, you know, the idea is just if you simply think about it, the applications layer is where most of the value got created. That's where all the developers went. Why? Because those companies pay well because those companies had the resources to bring the best talent and provide that environment where people want to work. Now, arguably, blockchain can change this. Some people have argued and this is a debate that's being had that blockchain will look different. The protocol layer will actually capture much more of the value. So, as a rough proxy if you look at today, this is a little dated so I know the market is crashed so this is all different now but Bitcoin, Ethereum have bulk of the value that's there right now and the other projects are a small sliver versus the protocols in the traditional web market are very small part of the value. So, you know, for the first time as a developer, if you are excited about an ICO and they have a currency that's being used if you are contributing to the code, you are actually a big participant in the open source environment you could keep earning these tokens and that's not been possible before. So, I think these ideas that I'm sharing are personally the more exciting things that's not the scenario today. Right now it's all very murky and there's a lot of noise but this is why I like the concept of ICOs. Okay, so really quickly some key terms. So people use altcoins tokens interchangeably. The way I like to think about it is cryptocurrencies can be of two types, say altcoins tokens. The main difference is that altcoins are considered alternative to Bitcoin. So all of them have been initially created to say that Bitcoin is lacking in some way, whether it's privacy whether it's speed, whether it's transaction cost and just scalability and so you have many of them and some of them derive their blockchains from Bitcoins who's a fork and others have their own native blockchains and tokens are usually what I what people refer to when they say tokens are being referred to as things issued on top of an existing blockchain. So ERC20, the Ethereum standard you're issuing these tokens on top of Ethereum. So as a developer you're not coming to this blockchain and having you can leverage the existing network of nodes in that blockchain you can leverage the programming language and anything else that it provides. So rough analogy would be the Apple releasing the developer tools for the App Store several years back and how quickly so many developers came in because it became very easy to create these apps. Ethereum has done the same become very easy to create new distributed apps or issue these tokens and raise money as well in a really quick way. Another distinction that I want to highlight much of what I'm talking about is utility tokens where these tokens have some value within a network but they're also security tokens. Now excuse me the key distinction is that utility tokens the idea is that this is something that's valuable within a platform it's not something that is an investment and that's what the people issuing these tokens are saying. So they say this is the only utility token and the reason it will be valuable is because people will want to use it in the future and that might be the reason that it might rise in value. On the other hand a security token is very clearly defined as an investment right so it's linked to owning something or having a claim on dividends etc that the project might. So if I'm doing a fund let's say I say all of you give me money for a fund and I will take this money and invest in other projects and when I get some return I'll pay them pay something back to you right that's a classic security token. Now the reason this becomes interesting is because a lot of the I told you one of the big reasons that I use have have flourished is because there's been no regulation and what's going to happen most likely is that all of these including the utility security tokens might be considered security tokens because there is this thing called the how we test in the US and essentially the idea is that the US law says very clearly if you are doing something which is for an investment of money in a common enterprise expectation of profits from the efforts of others right it is a security token. Now most of what I just described and that goes back to your question most of what is happening right now is people are buying these tokens but they are not going to be the actual users they don't sometimes don't even know what this project is about right so currently all of this is happening with the expectation of profits people are not actually buying them for using this token right so that's why the SEC and many other countries including India, China etc might just look at this and say okay you can do this but you have to follow rules and for example the security tokens a lot of paperwork you have to go through a process and you have you can only be listed on an exchange which is you know endorsed by the government or allowed by the regulatory authority in that like an SEC approved exchange in the US so if that happens it will become much harder to do ICOs but it may not be a bad thing because I think these things should be regulated to some extent so is this allowed currently in India no regulations but you have to be aware of all types of scams that are happening and I'll come to that in a little bit other countries like I said the US has issued some guidelines on what they think will be considered security tokens and I think in the future you will see many countries tracking down on this idea and saying you can do this but you have to follow rules currently most of the ICOs are coming out of places like Singapore and some other destinations like Estonia, Gibraltar, British Virgin Islands etc so if you're someone who's thinking of an ICO that's not something I will cover in this talk because that's a longer discussion you can find me later but essentially the idea is you can be in India but you have to structure it usually from a jurisdiction that is allowing ICOs and so you are if you're in India you're operating as a subsidiary of something that's based outside of India okay quickly what is the process for doing it again not a whole lot of detail I'm going to go into but essentially what happens is you start with a white paper you describe what you want to create you should answer why does decentralization help how are you using blockchain ideally right and you go into topics like what is this token going to actually do why is it needed versus just using ether if you're building on Ethereum let's say and you describe your roadmap it's usually anywhere from 5 pages to 30 pages you talk about your team advisors if you have a product you talk about your prototypes products but it's not even necessary to be at that stage after you've done that you start to do what's called a presale you go and find some investors who are believing in your project initially and you give them a discount so usually how these things work is if I come in early I get a certain discount that could be 20% that could be 50% so if a normal person will pay $1 for this token I might get it at 50 cents right and that is to get some initial momentum so that you can then go and give other people confidence that hey somebody's already come in now I go to the crowd sales there's a presale and then there's the crowd sale in the crowd sale you go out to the general public and you also come up with what's called a smart contract which is essentially going to describe how the ICO will work when money is wired into a certain wallet how the tokens will be dispersed in return and what the various things like how what will be the amount of tokens the soft cap which is the minimum that is needed for the ICO to be successful the hard cap which is the maximum that the project owner says they will raise and they would say that won't want to raise anything more than that so on so forth and then you actually go out and you know there's a lot of PR so that's why the big part of doing this is actually digital marketing and some of these things initially had crazy conversion rates some of these things were were getting 5% to 10% conversion which is crazy if you think about if you are from the digital advertising world and Facebook and a lot of other channels were being used because people had wealth in crypto and they just wanted to diversify so they were just blindly getting into new ICOs and people are still doing that you also have telegram Slack being used in a big way because that's where you try to create the community so you try to explain what your project is and people ask questions and in the ideal scenario you have some high quality discussions and then you have a timeline for doing the crowd sale and people like we discussed wire there or send their bitcoin or ether whatever you have described sometimes even US dollars and at the same time as soon as a smart contract is executed they get their ERC-20 compatible tokens in their wallet so that's essentially how you have them and usually they're readable after a certain time so you can even go and sell them on exchange and that's what a lot of people have been doing is just making some quick money now let me give you an example of an ICO which I liked and which would give you a flavor for what kind of project that at least from my perspective is very interesting so like we discussed Facebook is a good example right we create the content we consume the content we get no value so from a user's perspective plus your data is being used in ways you don't know and their algorithms are manipulating your behavior all the time you don't know that I'm actually not against Facebook I think it's a great company I'm just pointing out the case for why something else could also exist now also from the advertiser perspective today you have to be on you know if you're an advertiser and you need to reach audiences digitally all of the growth is Facebook and Google for the last few years so you have to be on Facebook but they even they are not sometimes happy because they see some conversion but they have no idea how people are engaging right because Facebook is not giving them that all visibility so there comes along a project called rave browser basic attention token how many of you heard of it okay a few and it says okay what about you decentralize this whole thing and make it peer to peer so there's a user there's a publisher and advertiser what if we could make their interactions peer to peer okay which means that and they started with the product itself so it's a new browser which is decentralized so it comes with a wallet and essentially tracks your behavior but the data is never passed without your permission at least that's the concept and so now if you are someone that reads a lot of NDTV or click info both sites could actually reward you for your loyalty in terms of some tokens okay if you are an advertiser that needs to reach a specific type of audience you could reach them directly with their permission so I could just say I watch no ads but if I am open to watching some ads for payment and I could say I'm open to watching ads from I don't know fashion sites but I get tokens from them okay you could now pay for specific pieces of content micro payments directly through this browser so instead of a subscription to the whole magazine or site I can buy certain articles blogs etc so essentially you think of direct peer to peer interactions rather than a central party which existed before like a Microsoft or a Google or a Facebook so that's a really interesting idea in my opinion because if it works it could change the entire game and this is a good ICO because you had a good team the founders were the same people who created Mozilla this was they talked about in their white paper they laid out what I just described to you and then they also designed a token economy right so you have to actually describe the value flow from advertiser to publisher and you know you actually I'm going to go into details on this but essentially you are metering every piece of attention so on the user side you have thresholds or based on attention time spent on something you keep increasing, you keep rewarding the user with some tokens and then you also define how that token flow will go from advertiser to a publisher and user and so they came up with the math behind it and had a successful ICO that is 35 million in 30 seconds right so this is an example which I think meets the criteria of use blockchain, decentralization is better they argue has a product has users and fleshed out a token economy in a very comprehensive way what about if you just want to invest so many of you raise your hands so my suggestions are the following right if you are looking at an ICO first of all look at the fundamentals is this solving a problem does the world need this token right because I would argue that most of these things are completely useless right now because people have just gone crazy and issued new ICOs without actually and nobody is actually going into the details of why it's needed will the user find utility can you imagine large numbers of people in this token economy holding this token using this token day to day right will decentralization make something better what is broken right now that will be better with peer to peer decentralization and why do you need a specific token is it is it complex enough that you need a separate token which has its own economy versus just saying hey just use ether and so to your question earlier ideally what you want is that the people who are buying your tokens are the same people who will use your tokens and then they will want to hold the tokens for the long term because they are long term users is this the reality today not at all this is there's very little overlap most people have just bought these tokens because they are investing money they don't understand what they're investing in but they think it will rise in value and many many projects have no token users because they haven't even launched so right now it's just very very early going back to what else should you look at people first of all check that they exist you'll be surprised there have been ICOs when you know it's been fictitious team you go back to people haven't you go on LinkedIn and see yet people don't even exist so just check that they exist their background should be relevant they should ideally have some people with blockchain experience this is not rocket science I think any smart person can figure out do they have some experience which is relevant to this have they run a business before have they built a product before even if it's fine not to have run a business before have they managed enough responsibility because if they're going to now be in charge of 5-10 million dollars can you trust them with confidence team versus advisors a lot of the times you'll see that the teams actually are outnumbered by advisors I feel like those teams just need a lot of advice and that's usually a bad sign and sometimes these advisors are just not even participating in anything they're just taking some money and putting their name on it so you have to be cautious about these kinds of things so that you don't lose money next look at their progress do they have a prototype do they have something in testnet that will go to mainnet have they specified a timeline some of all of you I'm sure are capable of going into github checking commits what is the frequency of updates right what you're really sensing is is this an actual live project which is an open source project where people are contributing is that increasing over time so is there an actual traction people are really good developers believing in this project do they have a prior existing business or customers now sometimes most of the times the people who are doing the ICOs are just launching from scratch sometimes you may also have projects where we had something else but now they are bolting on blockchain now that can be terrible sometimes because they may just be bad businesses and they're like okay you know this ICO thing let's go raise some money there and we'll figure out life after that but sometimes it may be that hey this presents a new way of doing things so we can actually change our current product or introduce a new product and we are raising money for this new product right so you have to just really understand their history and their progress the community what is the quality of discussions so if you go to telegram which is usually where these discussions are had most of the time you'll find that people enter and say hi what is this and I'm like how did you even land here right and it turns out that they just clicked some random links there are these bounty programs you know people just get paid for coming to a group or posting something on facebook and sometimes they're just trying to get all these random tokens they don't even understand now it's like facebook likes you know you can buy them you can have lots of them it may make you feel good about life for some time but they're in the end they're not worth much right so you have to understand are these people who are going to be serious buyers again going to that Venn diagram right are these at least some people believe in this project long term or not are the founders participating themselves it's usually a good idea when you see a founder themselves at least for some time every day coming and engaging with the community on telegram and then let's look at the token sale right so how much money are they raising ah one nice thing about this is you may tell me hey you told me that this is better than we see in many cases so in we see I usually go I raise 1 million then I raise 3 million then I raise 7 million then I raise 15 million it goes on now here people would sometimes argue that you're doing a one time I'm like I need this money and then I will build my platform I will get my community and life will be good so I need 50 million dollars now that's fine in some cases you know if there is a big project like let's say Ethereum today something like that came about and said we will create a platform to distributed apps we need to grow this globally we need to have a developer community all of that we need to have this massive thing globally we need 50 million dollars and the team is excellent maybe that makes sense because a lot of that money those tokens could be given to incentivize new users right but then if somebody who's not run something before has a weak project comes and says I need 10 million or 15 million it's like red flag for me because the point is anything about 5 or 10 million big problem almost no business should get that money before you prove something right so it's I think the better issues of the ones which are usually like those 5 million or smaller range where the founders are good and they're like we need some money to reach a point when we have a token economy working once that starts working we will have a self-sustaining model anyway so we will not need much more money than that we will find a way to you know monetize those transactions that will happen so we just need money to get there and for almost every project that some does not have to be larger than 5 10 million okay a few things I'll speed up a little bit so softcap hardcap softcap is the minimum that they believe it they need to raise to make the project viable hardcap is the maximum they will raise economics of the team just like in startups if you see teams where a large chunk is held by them big red flag vesting versus and lock-in so if you are in a startup your equity vests over time similarly there should be no reason why core teams of these projects don't have their tokens vests over time because if they're all vested on day one what stops them from running away with your money just telling dumping these tokens in some exchange and running away with the cash inflation versus burning on sold so because this is something where it's a token economy what you want is you want the early investor to believe that they will not keep getting diluted again and again right so if you have a project which says I will I have the right to issue X tokens at any point you just don't know if they'll keep issuing tokens and will I create more wealth for them but it will not create wealth for you because your stake will keep getting diluted usually good idea to burn the so tokens that are not sold so if you said I'll sell 1 billion tokens but only 100 billion got sold usually what the good projects do is they burn the unsold tokens so that the people who invested don't get diluted in the future listing on exchanges if you have something which is listed on exchange at least you know that you can trade like I mentioned the point about being liquid so that's important and good projects usually have one or two really good exchanges but if you see too many exchanges might be a red flag because maybe all they want is trading to happen not people to actually hold this token for the long term lots of scams everywhere lots of jokes these are real things there is a coin called Putin coin which has something to do with Vladimir Putin obviously it's a joke but there are many many such things so be aware there is one called Coinier for Kanye West there's one called Whopper coin from Burger King lots of random things came about and then and you have to be careful with hacks as well a lot of the ICO projects have gotten hacked so another thing you should try to do is make sure their smart contract has a security audit which means that somebody has verified that they've gone through their smart contract and it doesn't have massive security loopholes because you don't want the project to say hey we lost all your money because you don't know who took it maybe they took it in some other way also exchanges themselves can be hacked as you know so to finish it's still early days but the concept is great in my opinion and I hope it survives if you think about the web you had the development of TCPIP SMTP so we were in the protocol layer and at that point whether maybe 1993-95 maybe about 1 million people could understand these things or use these things maybe not even that then what happened over the next few years is you've got fibers were laid everywhere across oceans you had ISPs in every country and the infrastructure for the internet got created and then suddenly you could have 10 million people use it right then finally you know Microsoft was not the first first GUI but first successful browser came about and suddenly you had a way where the average person did not need to understand the complexity of the protocols behind right they could just interact with something which was simple that suddenly made it possible for 100 million people and then of course over time you had social and mobile because you had web 2.0 you had decentralized I'm sorry you had web 2.0 appear and we know that it went to a billion people and now maybe two or three billion people in the world of blockchain I think we are right now at the protocol in an infrastructure stages we don't even have enough infrastructure in terms of secure storage exchanges these things are happening very quickly but it's still going to take some time we barely have crack the you know some protocols and until we have some you know I think the killer thing will be when somebody introduces a really neat decentralized browser or a wallet that is the average person's gateway that will actually take it to the next level and then you could see that this will be relevant to a billion people so to finish powerful concept suddenly creates democratization of whatever value new digital economy new crypto economics right and it separates money from advice so you can raise money from the community and you can get advice from some VC or whoever but you don't have to raise money from the same people right now the problem is that you have to raise money from those people but currently it's low quality projects this year will be very very key to follow because I think sometime in the middle of this year I think a lot of these projects will get killed because it will be one year mark the raise money they haven't done anything and hopefully this will lead to a period of like really a turmoil but after that maybe we'll get this ICO as a concept that works very well alright thanks guys went a little bit over time


So you to team keep it clean what's going on is engraving here with another video on another episode of NFL questions from subs The series where you can ask me any NFL question you want to and we answer it in a video Just like this if you want to be part of it You can send me an email to team keep it clean at gmail.com or for the patrons You can send it directly on patreon if you would like to become a team keep it clean patron You can go to patreon.com slash engraving vids But either way whether you want to or not whether you do or not. It's all good, man. I appreciate y'all I love y'all on today's episode. We got a very very special guest Let me let him introduce himself to you keep it clean on this episode of NFL questions from subs I'm joined by Harrington from flock block and how just to jump straight into it How did you get started doing YouTube and what made you want to do YouTube? Well for me what inspired me was just my love for for the Ravens You know, I have a lot of friends and we talked football a lot and you know Kind of joke with me and tell me hey, you know, you talked to us about the Ravens way too much And you know, they got tired of hearing me ran about the Ravens all the time So, you know, they just suggested that I start a YouTube channel and also watching other youtubers like like you and Ttb and other really good youtubers You know had YouTube channels. I thought, you know, why not give it a try So I just always like voicing my opinions about the Ravens and and giving my insight as far as what I know So, you know, it's just something that's been a hobby of mine and I've really enjoyed it so far Cool and what's been your favorite part about it? My favorite part about it is just, you know interacting with the fans and you know, just seeing what what the fans are into From you know, what's going on now and also what happened in the past as far as you know The Ravens you know past Ravens games, you know, you know all the good parts and all the bad parts And I think that one of the things I really enjoy is that just being around people that think like me as far as, you know a fan experience and a lot of times when you are a fan of a team and you're around other people that might not Like the same team as you it's like you're in your own world. So, you know, it's like I really enjoy being around other people And talking to them and and you know seeing that they think just like me as far as how highly we view our team All right, cool, man. And where can everybody find you at as far as Twitter Instagram YouTube let everybody know where they can find you Yeah, so right now. I'm on Twitter. Um, so you just at the flop flop on Twitter and You guys can always DM me or email me questions as well anytime you guys want to find out information about the channel and also ask questions on the channel and You know, we'll go through it on each and every episode So right now just mostly on Twitter just trying to stay interactive on YouTube and Twitter for the long Okay, all right now leave links to all of that stuff down below in the description So without further ado, we got some good questions like we always do. So let's do it first question Came from a boy. Will he say we're back, baby So I was high on the Ravens taking a safety early in the draft. They didn't they love what they got in Elliot and Clark I really hope I'm wrong about Ellie and the clock and that they both show out this year and one of them If not both can get to that pro bow level or all pro level a man can dream But man, can we get a few interceptions from the safety position this year? Geno stone. He had more interceptions in one preseason game You probably talked about this on another video, but it would not be surprised me at all If Brandon Stevens is getting starter reps this year and is a starter next year He's not the project people are saying he is and I got a hot take Stevens start splitting reps with Elliot. Oh, I would say Clark But Clark is calling the plays with the dot must I remind you of that play against the Steelers when Clark was in great position Clearly, I care way too much about the safety position when the problem is and has been forever The wide receiver position get healthy Bateman in Hollywood and hashtag team keep it clean all love to you and your fan I appreciate it. Will so Um Man the safety's the Sean Elliott Chuck Clark and he said he wouldn't even be surprised at Brandon Steven gets starting reps this year Just to get into it. I wouldn't be surprised either, but I think they would put him in on some packages I don't think he's gonna take away reps from the Sean Elliott I don't think he's gonna take away from Chuck Clark I think that they would have him in some form some fashion on the field Just like they did in the preseason game But this time it would be more with with with other starters out there on defense too. What about you? How you feel about the safety is going into this year? Well, yeah, I think the safety is going to this year We're in a good position What I when they drafted Brandon steams SMU I did anticipate that being part of the plan Maybe not right now, but at some point in the future or later on, you know In the next few seasons because of his speed and his athleticism what he can do So, you know, we talked about long-term plans for Chuck Clark and the Sean Elliott They're both very good safeties and we do like to see him We want to see him get turnovers as well and you know us Ravens fans We've been used to seeing Ed Reed in the past and sometimes even Eric What will get their fair share of interceptions so to not see it from the safety position is kind of weird But hopefully we can work towards that. But some of these younger guys, you know Like Brandon Steve Brandon Stevens We can get him in there and rotate in safety and get some snaps in there Obviously not too many snaps, but you know, I think that that's definitely a possibility you have to explore Especially when the Sean Elliott Chuck Clark We start looking at when these other guys get paid, you know What's that honestly might be one of the biggest decisions is what safeties are we're gonna be able to keep? You know, we'll keep the Sean Elliott. What's gonna be long-term plan for Chuck Clark? Can we work something out and try to fit some of these younger guys into the safety rotation? So I really think that this is a it's a really really good question because you know We want to see what's know what the young guys have to offer and like I said, you know stone This is the guy that really came in last year got draft out. I wore It's caught off the team and they get rocket back onto the team. He's really making a name for himself So hopefully he can you know show, you know, how useful he can be as the preseason and the regular season approaches Right and you made a real good point about the um about the pay the Chuck Clark is he's on his second contract right now But the Sean Elliott, he's on the last year of his deal So this could be what I mean It is a make or break season for the Sean Elliott as far as cashing in whether he prices himself out of the Ravens Well, whatever they will want to give him if they want to give him something or If he plays reasonably this year and they can still keep his contract Not to a minimum or whatnot, but it isn't some crazy crazy deal. Yeah And also with Chuck Clark With what will mentioned about him having a green dot I really do think that this is gonna be Chuck Clark's last season with the green dot Not because he does a bad job at it because he obviously doesn't but I think they're gonna want to transition that green dot to Patrick Queen and I think they not that they would have done it last year I think maybe even possibly this year They may have done it if last year was a regular year, but of course last year with the pandemic and everything The rookies didn't have a regular offseason. So that kind of slowed up the progress of all of the rookies and really the entire team But I think that Chuck Clark's days with the green dot their number and again not in a bad way against Chuck Clark But more so a positive for Patrick Queen. Yeah, that makes sense because you know last year We didn't have a lot training camp and a lot of the typical practice that we did This year and in any other normal year We didn't have that last year for the rookies and we didn't really get to see them take that developmental step Chuck Clark his football acumen his football IQ obviously really good But you know, I wouldn't be surprised if Patrick Queen did get that green dot because in the 2019 season We didn't really have a you know a strong strong linebacker and a young linebacker like he is that was able to control the Feel like that since you know, we had CJ and mostly obviously mostly price himself out of Baltimore So if we can get somebody in the middle of that defense to where the green dot and com patrol the rest of the defense That'd be good. So hopefully Patrick Queen can be that guy next question came from my guy Dylan J Today engraving my name is Dylan and I'm the first time a question asked love the videos though Appreciate it. Anyways, haven't heard a ton on the Ben Mason front. This idea could have been tossed around before But what do you think about Ben Mason assuming the fullback roll 100% in order to give record more snaps at defensive tackle and defensive in I don't think Ben Mason is safe on the practice squad I'll let you start with this one. So how how you feel about Ben Mason? What you think he's gonna do if that's a viable option having him as a fullback 1000% of the time and record taking snaps on defense Oh, well, I know John Harbaugh loves his Michigan guys. So, um, he's gonna try to get Ben Mason in there Um, uh, for me, I think kind of go with the same routine try to get him to do so many different things on this team special teams Having get some rotations on defense if you can and then you know try to fit him in a position where he can You know be of use if it's tight end and maybe tie it in if it's fullback. It's fullback I feel like right now He's the type of player that in my opinion can be playing positionless football And what I mean by that is is that he can you know with his athleticism and his you know His toughness we always hear about how tough he is how scrappy he is and how rough and physical he is You know, if he can come in there and play positionless football and just you know provide a service to whatever Um, red roman needs him or don martin dill or or or or john hallborn needs him On no matter where he is on the team if he can just be uh useful on the team And not have a set position You know, we might figure out what is the right fit for him because we didn't know what the right fit for patrick rickard Was going to be early in his career, but now he seems outstanding fullback one of the best fullbacks We have maybe the best fullback we have and he had I fell with him and you know, kaw use check in san francisco So I think um, you know right now just try to see what he can provide to the team You know, he seems like a very good football player I have to go back and look at some of the other things he does well from miss michigan state But he's a very very good football player and you know, he puts a lot of effort and you know, he um Very physical. So that's one thing I like about ben mason is that he seems like he does feel like a raven And that's important that he does that but I don't think he's going to be playing like a raven this year I think that he is actually going to be a stashed player I think that they're going to end up putting him on injury reserve I don't think they would put him on a practice squad, but I think they'll put him on injury reserve So they can hold him down Until next year because next year We are we find ourselves back in this position again back in this situation again So where our fullback who we love who we appreciate Um is in the final year of his contract. That's your record. His deal is coming up Remember last time this happened with juice We love juice love cow use check Yeah, man, but then ravens were like, hey, thank you, but we we're gonna go in a different direction and One thing that I think about especially uh with the additions of sammy walkins and them double dipping With rashaah bateman and tylen wireless um They the ravens seem to be going to more of a passing office not that they're gonna get rid of the run Because I don't expect them to get rid of run at all But they seem to really be taking a turn to be doing a lot more passing And while ricard he does have um He has reliable hands He doesn't get many passes thrown his way But when the when passes are thrown his way he catches the ball Great block of very physical and yet he can play on defense as well Almost think that ravens with the ben mason pick. It was a move for the future To where they have a guy in place who they feel could be their next fullback And he will be a lot cheaper than patrick ricard Because this would if they whatever patrick ricard gets next from whoever it is It'll be his third contract. So a rookie. What was ben mason? Oh, was he a fifth rounder? I forgot what round he got picked in I think he was in the fifth round Yeah, I think I think it was but yeah, I don't I don't remember either but um Regardless, whatever round he was picked in I know it was fifth or lower But his contract is a lot cheaper Then what patrick ricard's third contract would be and then On top of that I anticipate that even this year patrick ricard not necessarily will be phased out of the offense But he'll be used Less than he was and then he has been Over the past two years, especially with them transitioning to doing a lot more passing Yeah, yeah, and this is all goes down to football and how to build, you know, the best team for the long run Obviously when you know, we hadn't seen these contracts with lamar and And mark angius and some of these other guys and we start to build the rest of our team and pour money into different assets Some players are going to outpress, you know and and move on to other teams and air decossing You know seems like the gm that doesn't want to overpay for certain positions that he feels like may be expendable and But the bottom line in the nfl, you know, because the full back position It's it's it's even more expendable than the running back position So we saw what happened with the running backs of mark angry a great year in 2019 and boom just like that 2020 now he's on the on the team Um, and you know, we're you know, we're trying to get younger running back and also trying to get younger at full Back so we can make sure to you know, have enough money to put in places where we need it in the long run So I do like that perspective. Um, so you know As far as van mason trying to you stashed away for this year and then having been used as an asset at full back For seasons to come so see and um, and you brought up a really good point that I didn't even think of and wasn't even thinking about But yeah, it makes even more sense why it may be a little bit harder to retain Of a patrick rickard especially going into what will be his third contract And that would be uh, the fact that you are getting ready to pay lamar jackson.  Are we really getting ready to pay a full back On his third contract or we really getting ready to pay him that money when we got this guy that we drafted who can play full back as well So appreciate you bringing them points up about the contracts coming up Or definitely next question came from my boy. Wyatt p today engraving My name is white and i'm a huge fan of your youtube channel and conceded consider you to be the best ravens youtube I don't know about all that part, but i appreciated me because i don't know you probably get a ton of questions It may value uh patreons more, but i really want to know your thoughts on this after watching the pre season It is evident that we really need a true Back-up quarterback. Huntley is good, but will not get us to the playoffs I was looking at qb free agency next year and sergeant coby brissette and marquis mariota are available How would you feel about bringing in one of those guys or possibly someone else? well, um When you well at least for me in my opinion when you think about a backup quarterback And in our situation lamar jackson is obviously the starter. That's the guy Yeah, when you think of a backup quarterback and you think about the offense that the ravens run Uh in your backup quarterback, you want somebody that can run that same type of offense and you want it to be a minimal drop off Uh when that backup quarterback comes in obviously you don't want the backup quarterback in unless it's a blowout game But you want there to be a minimal drop off if he has to come in And when you think about tyler huntley versus jacoby brissette versus marquis mariota Who would fit that offense the best? My opinion would be tyler huntley, uh because he has the arm and yeah, he's young super young last year He was an undrafted rookie free agent. So this is his second year in the nfl Those guys obviously have experience over him But he's in the perfect system for him because he is like From the hair to both being from down here To just the even the way that like his charisma on the field It's just so many similarities with him and lamar jackson. It's crazy when you watch it Like if he were to put on a number eight jersey Yeah, you'll probably think it's more Lamar jackson. Yeah They do um, their release is a little bit different now when they throw the ball and lamar's obviously Faster than tyler huntley and got a little more twitch to him But still tyler huntley is the closest thing to lamar and definitely closer than marquis mariota and a jacoby brissette so I um I honestly think like again Hopefully we don't have to get to that but I think tyler huntley would do fine if If we had to roll with him for a certain amount of time. Is he lamar? No He's not lamar, but can we expect him to be lamar? No, but all these other guys lamar jacoby brissette and marquis mariota. No like and and I know you said that um Huntley is good, but he will not get us to the playoffs when you look at these guys when they were starters They didn't get their team to the playoffs if you look at jacoby brissette what he did with the coats He got kicked out of the coats for a reason and then you look at marquis mariota Still was a number two Overall, yeah for the titans and look where he's at now fighting for a backup spot where I think the raiders So no, I would roll roll with huntley for this one. What about you? Yeah, I'm not particularly a big fan of of going to free agency to get a backup quarterback I just like what we have a chase mix to other when I went to the game on Saturday He didn't look all that impressive. Um, you know in his uh in his snaps I did like what I see. I like what I saw from um from tyler huntley Like you say he looks like an exact, you know, he looks like lamar jackson from the air You know from the air and from everything he's doing. Um, I think I don't know maybe run like a 444 540 Coming out of utah, um, you know, he's very fast Obviously not the throw of lamar jackson is but you know if he can just become more comfortable throwing the ball This is my you might have a really good backup quarterback in our hands And I think that he's a really good guy that we could have that knows the offense knows the system And just has that continuity in relationship with the rest of the players on the team So, you know, we just need him to continue to learn grow and build and he's got the speed and If we're ever in games and hopefully like you said, we don't get in that position If we're ever in games where, um, you know We need to come in and run the offense We can do something primarily run based and that would definitely be beneficial to us because he knows He knows the system and you know, I don't think marcus mario will be a good fit because he doesn't really have the speed And also what is he like as a thrower? Um, and like I said also with jacobo brisette, we know he doesn't have the speed and um, you know, he Might be a little bit better of a thrower than mario and maybe even huntly But like I said, I'd rather have somebody that knows our team knows our system knows our players and understands You know, um what it means to win for this team So I want to stick with huntly and and you know chase mix early He may not be able to prove himself for the rest of the pre-season, but you know, you can always use a quarterback through just for depth purposes


One which I'd like to talk about, you mentioned in the article, I can't remember exactly the context actually, but you mentioned, because I see this all the time, even among objectives talking about this, and this is the idea that there's some conspiracy of cultural Marxist who are on the left, who are taking over and they're these really, and of course Jordan Peterson feeds this and a lot of the critics, the good critics, some of them are good, the nihilistic left, are using this term cultural Marxism as if it's a thing, as if it's some group out there that's actually doing it, and of course it's linked to the Frankfurt School and everything, which is real, the Frankfurt School is actually a real school of ideas, really bad ones, but so talk a little bit about how you see cultural Marxism in the context of conspiracy theories. I mean, so I haven't studied this as much as I'd like to, and I want to look more into it, I read the Frankfurt School Marxists way back in grad school and I haven't done it since then, they're definitely a version of Marxism, they're a more New Left version, so if you look at this here with Herbert Marcuse, there was an article about him in an old issue of The Objectivist, and he was one of their members, and it's significant that there's a change between the old left and the new left, is no longer looking to focus on how can we nationalize industry and have technology and progress, they're instead, they're cultural in the sense that they're looking to the existing forms of culture that they think are oppressive like the media and entertainment, and so there's a bridge between that and the various forms of postmodernism, but, and again, I should stop talking because it's not something I've looked at closely enough, I do think that that School of Philosophy has had a lot of cultural influence, but the idea that the real players behind the scenes are any kind of Marxist these days is the part that I take the biggest exception to, I mean, you could loosely call the Marxists in that, in that sense, they're not the real players behind the scenes, they're not the real players behind the scenes, I mean, you could loosely call the Marxists in that they're on the left in some sense, but really to call the politicians and the activists, Marxist is to give them too much credit because Marxism is a sophisticated intellectual construct, and this is something that Rand would have said, she would have said that it gives you a conceptual understanding of the world as a whole, and the Marxists, they're looking for international proletarian revolution where workers from all over the world... They want people to be happy, supposedly, right? It's integrated towards a purpose, it has an actual purpose. Whereas today... Yeah, I mean, I think what we have today, the activists on the left who are pushing for the policies that people are criticizing rightly, they're not following any kind of ideological program. I think that the obsession with various forms of identity politics, which may well have been encouraged by the New Left Marxism of the 60s, they're not working with any ideological agenda that tries to find common bonds of humanity among people, they're fracturing into these pressure groups based on ethnicity and sex and name whichever intersectional category you want. There's no worldview there, there's no ideological... It's a default on ideology. It's a complete disintegration of knowledge and of ideology, there's nothing integrating, there's nothing uniting, it's all differentiating. And I should mention a plug here for we're doing this conference, this student conference in November in Atlanta on tribalism, and what I and Rand had to say about it, and there's a lot that she had to say about it, but the idea that people are fragmenting into these groups on the basis of very superficial characteristics, perceptual level characteristics that pack them into groups, she sees as an inevitable outcome of collectivism where people no longer have confidence in the power of their own mind, their power to make choices as individuals, they're going to bond with people, they're going to get together into groups for safety, especially in a mixed economy where they're pitted against each other into different economic pressure groups. And when reason loses its efficacy in their minds, they'll bond on the basis of the most superficial traits like race and sex and ethnicity and so forth. And I should mention something else I want to do some work on in the near future is I think there's a strong connection between tribalism and conspiracism. I think that... And there are even hints about this in Ayn Rand's own work, especially if you take a look at her essay Selfishness Without a Self, where she's talking about the tribal lone wolf, which is the person in effect who wants to be in a tribe, but has been kicked out by all the all the major tribes. And so he sees himself alone against the world and he sees that the world is a conspiracy against him. I think that that tribal lone wolf mentality, which is a particular kind of anti-conceptual mentality of the tribalist, that's part of the reason why we see a lot of the conspiracism around us today and part of the reason why we see it on both sides of the political spectrum. Yeah, there's an interesting book that Daniel Pipes wrote years and years ago, before 9-11 even, and it was about conspiracy theories in the Muslim world. Yeah, I've heard of this. And of course, the Muslim world is right with conspiracy theories. Everything has to be explained by some, in a sense, mystical force because you know the Jews or something, because they've abandoned reason. So everything is fake. So everything has to be some external element that's happening. So everything has to be somebody else's fault. I mean, I think a lot of Donald Trump's rhetoric about the Mexicans and about the Chinese is conspiracy-like, because it's this idea that, no, no, your actions didn't do anything wrong. Somebody is doing it to you. Somebody is causing America to be less great, not any decision Americans made that could be. And it's similar to the Middle East mentality of, we can't think these through. There has to be just a simple explanation that comes from outside. It's all emotionalism. This is possibly an opportunity for a segue, because something else I want to write on someday is how the most complex conspiracy theory of all time is religion.  And it uses all the same kinds of arguments, too. I mean, there's things people don't understand about how the way the world works. And so it must be some consciousness that's manipulating things to be that way. Yeah, no, it serves exactly the same purpose. It serves to explain the inexplicable to people. It's motivated by fear, fear of their known, fear of not understanding, fear of things they don't get.


My username on Drupal.org is VGardner. I've been working with Drupal for about 10 years. I'm originally from Brazil. I've worked with several projects from companies like Cancer Research, The Economist, Time Inc, Kings College, Oakley Red Bull. I've been to DrupalCon. I didn't go last year, but I went to the New Orleans one. The Drupal camps. I think the one in London is definitely the feeling of a Drupal con. I think Drupal camp sometimes doesn't. The Drupal camps I've been to don't usually have that many sessions. And this one just has a whole ton of tracks. And it's definitely got that Drupal con feel to it, which I found fairly. But I guess that depends on the size of the year of the Drupal camp. I'm, for example, one of the Drupal camps I went to in Brazil, for example. It was pretty much two tracks. There are times where there's only one track, so it's definitely much bigger here and much more sort of diversity in terms of what kind of sessions you can go to. It's a large, well-organized and diverse, I guess, in terms of the kind of sessions that there are.


Do you really need energy drinks at all ever? And if so, which ones are the best? Hey there, njroot22.com here with another vlog. And today's topic is about energy drinks. I guess we're fitting this into our low carb Sundays, I believe, because I think that it fits into that category. But in our opinion, just from the top here, is that I don't think anybody needs energy drinks. If you have the proper diet, that should give you all the energy you ever need. You should never need an energy pick me up. But some people do work really hard or have a bad night's sleep and they are a little bit, I guess you could say sluggish. And in those situations, I think just regular black coffee or a cup of hot tea, black tea would work really well if you put some cream in it. No sugar ever, because that just spikes you up and brings you down.  I think we did a little story about it recently about how like the entire wall of at any convenience store is filled with energy drinks. Like dozens of different energy drinks, all filled with chemicals and bad, too much sugar, bad sugar or just, it's just bad. I looked at one of the drinks that I think it was five hour energy, had like 1% of this vitamin. You could just take a pill and you'd be better off with it. But you know, other than coffee and tea, there are some energy drinks that sort of meet the, I guess, quota of not being bad. And I don't recommend any of those little five hour energy things. Those are the worst. They're probably addictive, too. I think I've tried them in the past and they just made me all jittery and stuff. But I found two, and the rule of thumb when finding is find things that with zero carbs, if possible, zero. And I found one here. It's called the clean energy drinks, called Runa Zero. And I'll put a picture up here if I can find one online. But this one has 150 milligrams of caffeine, zero calories, zero sugar. Although this does have one gram of carbs per can, which is really, that is not enough. And they have all their buzz words. I'm not gonna read the buzz phrases to feel good energies. I mean, they have all the organic logos and it's clean, the word clean.  But this was Guaya, I can't even pronounce it, water. And then there was some pear juice in it and natural flavor, of course, which is probably has some MSG in it. Watermelon and so on. This wasn't bad. I think I remember putting it in a mixed drink, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the other energy drinks out there. And I found something like this at Ocean State Jala, which means it's probably gonna go out of business. This one is a lightly caffeinated. It's called Limitless Sparkling Water. Limitless sparkling water, this is a lightly caffeinated cucumber pear drink. And this has 35 milligrams of caffeine, which is about a fifth quarter of the other thing there, which has a lot more caffeine. This has zero carbs, zero sugars. It's just basically reverse osmosis water, natural flavors again, which they can squeak MSG in and caffeine derived from fresh, not stale coffee beans. But these things, I guess, if you want a little flavor variety, these things aren't so bad. But I still recommend, you know, just get a good night's sleep, drink plenty of water, have a nice low carb diet, and you will have all the energy you ever need. You won't feel tired or lethargic. Just don't eat the junk food and you'll be all right. But you know, I guess there are some energy drinks out there that aren't so bad. If you liked the video, please hit the like and subscribe. It would help us out a lot and I'll see you next time.