Thanks for coming today, I hope you've enjoyed the conference so far, I know I have, it's been a rich variety of talks, something for everybody. So I hope you'll increase the diversity today with this talk, probably not what you expect. My name is Phil Smith, I'm an amateur scientist, I do this stuff for a hobby and I use the Python framework to do the work. The thing I'm interested in is recombination, does anybody not know, everyone knows what recombination is, I have some idea, okay I'll just go over it very simply, we have two chromosomes which in your body you have two sets of genes, one from each parent and when you make eggs or sperm, this process of recombination goes on, so we generate basically a sequence of DNA is produced that has taken bits of DNA from each of your parents, so it started on one, oh everyone done, okay, I think I've touched something, maybe it's too skewed to touch there now. So it's basically going along from one chromosome, jumps over the other, takes some DNA from that, jumps back, takes some more DNA at some rate, which is called recombination rate, okay. This is, goes on inside your cells that are going to produce your eggs and sperm, okay. This is called, the other thing that can happen is you've got 23 pairs of chromosomes in humans and when those chromosomes line up during meiosis then they can independently go to either direction so you end up a mixture of chromosomes in each door to cell, so that's separate to recombination but it's kind of the same thing, it's recombination with a rate of 50%, okay, should check this is not working, here we go. Oh, I haven't turned it on, that's fine, okay, so just to bore you even more, how many of you guys did biology at school? So I used to hate this stuff, I learned it time and time again and forgot it just as often but these are the stages that the cells go through when they're producing gametes which is either eggs or sperm and the one we're mainly interested in is packaging up there, you'll forget this but don't worry, this is the stage here and so what's happening is the DNA starts to condense the chromosomes that are homologous pairs line up and they start to do this crossing over here, sopping DNA and as they pull apart you'll see these bridges form between the two chromosomes, this is also where independent segregation occurs and you end up with two new genomes which are different to the two parents because we've had this recombination occur but they contain genes from each parents but they're different combinations of those genes, okay, so as you can see this is kind of complicated dance presumably it does something, okay so the question is what does it do, why is it not doing it, right and that's part of what I'll be talking about today. Part of the problem with, so what we're talking about is sex, why is there sex and the evolution of sex, there's an old problem in biology, it goes back quite a long time but it was really kind of formulated in the 1970s and one of the big problems is called the two-fold cost of sex, having two sexes is very wasteful, if we just had one sex and it was reproduced asexually you'd produce more offspring because if you have males and females only the females can have offspring, right therefore if you had only females you'd produce twice as many offspring, so this is the cost of sex idea, it's quite expensive, what's it for, okay you have recombinational load, so you might have a really great combination of good genes here and you've got, you know, one of your parents is just okay, one of the parents was really good and we recombine them and we don't get good, we get good and okay, right, so that has some kind of cost, okay and we have the cost of courtship, it's really expensive, you can have things like all these kind of useless but pretty appendages that increase your chances of mating, so again, you know, you can see from a biological point of view we're going to an awful lot of trouble, okay, why, what's it for, and I won't go into all the theories about why this occurs but just to say it's an ongoing argument probably always will be, so yeah, sex is complicated and it's expensive, that's kind of two things I want you to take home from that if you didn't know that already, there's a Python audience they might not know, right, so the next thing is a complete unrelated subject and this is a wolf from hierarchy of machines, okay, so probably hopefully you feel a bit more at home with this, who's, anyone heard of the game of life, anyone not heard of the game of life, feel free to Google it during the talk, it's an amazing thing, anyone who looks at the game of life I think becomes intoxicated by it at some stage of their life, they just think all they want to do is do this now, he came up, John Conway came up with this in 1970s, late 60s or 70s and he was basically extending on the work of John von Neumann back in the 1940s, tried to think okay if I have a machine that makes itself what's the minimum amount of work I can do that in, right, what's the easiest way of doing it, so he came up with these two-dimensional cell automata which do all kinds of crazy things and Stephen Wolfram back in the 80s came up and thought that's too complicated, let's just one-dimension, right, so he said let's just do a one-dimensional cell automata and he came up with these which are equally intriguing and after looking at them he thought there's actually only four kinds and to me I think this is one of the most insightful things I know about is that all machines are any four kinds of machines if that's true, right, and if you accept that that's an amazing statement, right, so class one lead to a modular state so basically do nothing I'll click the next side, basically class two they go to limit cycle and just oscillate, class three are chaotic go to random, so basically random number generators and class four have complex structures that persist for some time basically some of them are like this, so class ones do nothing, class two oscillate, class three are random number generators and class four, class four machines can in theory simulate all the other machines, okay, so that's the big difference I always used to get hung up and thought the class three, class four should have been around the other way because it's like in between class two and class three and I thought they were idiots for doing it that way but actually they're right, surprisingly these guys are smart, they got it right, so yeah class four can simulate all the other machines, okay, everybody happy with that, any questions, okay, so the Wolfram say the automata, this is example, this is rule one team which is one of the probably the most interesting rule, okay, and I'll just go through how it works, we have this top line up here, the first line which are range from zero, zero, zero, white, white, white to black, black, black and we have all the possible combinations, so there's only three bits, so there's two to two to the three possible rules, okay, and so this rule we says if it's three whites then we put a white down underneath on the first light, our first block, second rule if the right hand side is black then we make it white and so on up to three black dots and we can, the rules are enumerated this way, so it's two to the one equals two, two to the two is four and we just sum that up and it gives us a number that's a rule and there's 256 rules, okay, so we have a complete set of rules of all possible set of automata that we can have with just those three bits, okay, so any problems with that? So there's 256 rules and some rules are left, right, homologous of each other, so going back, there's rule 136, I think it's 136, where that just goes the other way, okay, so this is biased that way, 136 is biased the other way, so there's lots of just really look at rule zero for example at the top here, it does nothing, because rule zero, everything is zero, okay, nothing works, okay, rule 256, everything is black, everything works, so those are class one machines, okay, they don't do anything at all really, and so this is a thing called the Wolfram Atlas, you can go online and you can have a look at the properties of all the different rules, here we have time, oh I should start, here we have time, okay, this is rule 110, so what they've done here is they've started with a random number at the top and it wraps around, so the last bit on this side calculates its state from one bit on the other side over here and vice versa, so it's a wrap, you can see the gliders will go off one side and on the other, and what you can see is that the gliders have a bias in one direction, but the gliders collide, you can get new gliders forming, okay, so these are persistent structures going down here, they're gliding down through time and through space, and we're interfering with other gliders sometimes catastrophically, and you can also see this repeating pattern here where it's just like a mat that's sometimes called the ether, okay, so that's what things propagate through, so these gliders can't propagate unless there's an ether formed to propagate through, so that's an important thing that we'll cover later on. Rule 30 is a pseudo-random number generator, okay, so you put in a random or any input here, and it basically just makes a pattern like this, and the thing that you can pull out here is there are kind of glider-like structures, but they don't persist for very long, okay, they're quite fragile, they hit another glider and they disintegrate, okay, and rule 30 is a glider at 30 bits and above, or 27 bits and above, if you go below that bit rate, it stops being a random number generator, so that's, there are phase changes from one type to another in some cases, okay, so I wanted to play with these, and what I wanted to do was basically generate genomes, I want to have a genome or a bit string and I can say is this viable or non-viable, and so what I did is I got this Wolfram system, and I didn't wrap around, so it just truncates, okay, so eventually it goes down to one bit, and that is my sort of indicator bit, it'll tell me whether the string is viable or not, so I get a bit string, it has to be an odd number, I apply my rule to it, and I keep applying it until I get one bit, and if that bit is a one, then it's viable, if it's a zero, it's not, and so I can do it to the arbitrary bit string, as long as it's an odd number, and I can apply an arbitrary rule, and I can mutate it, all right, so I've taken this right-hand bit and I've flipped it to a white bit, it was zero, and see if it affects it, and it doesn't propagate down, right, because it's going zero, zero, zero, one, zero, zero, that's zero, two, one, zero, one, zero, one, zero, that's one, so it hasn't changed it, so that's what we call a neutral mutation, it has no effect, all right, or I can switch this bit here, make that a one, and this propagates down and sets the indicator bit to zero, and so that's a lethal mutation, it's just killed it, okay, so now I can have an arbitrary rule and an arbitrary genome, and I can see if it's alive or dead, and so I can do for small bits, five and bits of nine, I can do all the genomes and all the rules, and I can have a look at whether they're viable or not, and you can see, for example, rule 256 goes out on their edge, everything dies, rule zero, everything lives, in the middle, it gets more interesting, okay, and what I can do is I can connect all the viable genomes to their one-bit neighbors, so one-having distance neighbors, so that's, if two strings are viable and they differ by one bit, then I connect them up, and I can make a pretty little network like this, and you can see different rules have different networks, some of them are very simple, just regular graphs like these, some are regular graphs of different size, some have these dense regions joined up together somehow, you can't reach that one, it's different size ones, down to rule 26, which has this kind of really weird graph shape, unfortunately, once you get to interesting bit lengths, it's not practical to draw it, so now I've got my network, I've got my nodes, and I can mutate them, okay, so if a, should have nine neighbors, if a genome has like a bit string of nine, it's got nine possible neighbors, I can flip nine bits, how many of those are viable, right, so it might be say 37% of them are viable, or 12%, sorry, five out of eight might be viable, or seven out of eight are viable, that's the load, okay, so if I randomly choose a bit and flick it, how many times does it kill it, okay, that's what we call mutational load, okay, so if you have lots of neighbors, you have low load, if all my neighbors are viable, then every mutation survives, so I'll talk about density and load, basically load is one minus density, okay, the more dense part of that network, the more neighbors you have, so it's quite an important thing, and I can do a recombination, I can take two genomes, swap the bits, choose one of the offspring and say is it viable or not, and I can say how often it dies, okay, so here we have response, so this is asexual reproduction up on the left up here with the white circles, dark circles is sexual reproduction and back, so this is generations long here, so I can switch sex on and off with different recombination rates, and this is rule 30, right, with recombination, so random number generator, recombination does nothing, okay, just randomizes it some more, whereas rule 110, initially the population moves into the dense, starts to move towards the dense regions of the network where there's less load, okay, so population moves in there, down here, starts to move down, I introduce recombination or hell breaks loose because I smashed up all those combinations of genes, but I'm selecting those individuals that have the lowest recombination load, right, they're surviving more, and it drops down to some equilibrium point, and then if I turn recombination off, I've got less mutational load, this has gone into denser region of genome space, then I get my mutational load, okay, so I can kind of tell the difference between these two types of machines, the class three machine and the class four machine, okay, class four machines respond, well, appear to respond to recombination, now you might just say, okay, just check all the class four machines, unfortunately nobody knows what they are because it's undecidable whether something's class three or class four, except by looking at it and thinking it looks like one, so I have no way of knowing if I'm doing this better than anything else because nothing else doesn't, but it looks good, so we'll stick with that, okay, alright, so yeah, any problems with that, any questions? Okay, so how's that working, well recombination seems to be selecting for gliders, so we take this rule 61 which is quite a nice little rule, we do this stuff, and what we do is we get all those little diagrams I drew before with the little triangles for every one in the population and we superimpose them on top of each other and take a heat map of that, okay, so that's what this down here is, it's a heat map of the population at that time, everybody get that, alright, and that shows us which pixels are popping out, right, which pixels everybody has, so this is saying if it's black everybody has that pixels black, if it's white everybody has that pixels white, if it's gray it's pretty much random, and so we generate with a random starting population and it's pretty much gray, okay, we run asexually and we get a bit of pattern to merge, when we do recombination, recombination brings that pattern out, we're making them more similar, they're going into that well and geom space and we're getting selection for this dense connected region, okay, we take it off and it expands back out and we get back this pattern which is the same as what we had at the end of the asexual run, so how's it discriminating? Well, what it's doing is because it can make gliders, we don't need so much of the genome, we just have that little part that makes the glider that's going to slide down and hit the indicator bit, so the rest of the genome is pretty much neutral, right, and because we've got these small gliders we can have redundancy, we can send two gliders down, as long as they can sort out the conflict here, that's fine, so we can have redundant systems, right, the other thing is any bits that may interfere outside of that, they can be kicked off by another glider, we could have a glider that just blocks them, right, so these gliders allow us to make things really robust, okay, now, if this is working and I'm having trouble with this part, so if it doesn't make a lot of sense, or it doesn't look really good, it's because it's not that good, okay, it's still trying to make it, it's hard to prove it, right, we're trying to make something that's convincing. We should be able to calculate recombinational load for both class three and class four machines, and we should have an equation that works one for one, well, for one but not for the other, all right, we've only got really three variables we can play with, we've got the hamming distance, that's the distance between the two parents, right, we've got recombination rate, so how often we're jumping between chromosomes as we generate the next chromosome, and mutational load of each parent, so we're about some genome space each parent is, we can get these two quite accurately, mutational load is quite hard to get, we can get, it doesn't tell us everything, it just tells us that point, and actually it's the topology of that point that we really need to know, it's not a bad approximation. So we can have a, try to come up with an equation for recombinational load, so we have the, whereabouts, so this is your load, we can have negative load, may sound counterintuitive but redundancy gives us negative load, negative load means you have to have at least two mutations for it to be broken, okay, so we can go down this way to basically the length of the genome, so we can have N minus whatever the length is, we can measure these two things, we can measure the hamming distance, we can set the recombination rate and we can play the game, and mutation will drive the population down into these wells, but we know it doesn't do it completely, but it does it reasonably well, recombination, we grab two points from DNA space, we recombine them, okay, now we're doing recombination, we get a whole lot of offspring, and those offspring get scattered around the place, right, but this load is one month's density, so the areas that have high load have low density, okay, so the offspring of, that are closely related to a poorly connected parent are most likely to die, right, so this will preferentially kill offspring that land in the less dense regions, and that basically drags everything down into the well, okay, because if you're well connected, your recombinant offspring are likely to be close to you and are therefore more likely to survive, so we can come up, this is my second attempt at an equation to explain this, the hamming distance is a relative hamming distance, so it's how many distances divide by the genome length, the loads of two parents so it's a negative power, and this doesn't, so this shouldn't work for the classroom machines, classroom machines are on this jagged surface, they can fall down a little bit, but when they have recombination it just throws them back out into the top again, okay, because that seems to be how they work, so let's try that, we've got rule 22, which is a peer-to-peer classroom machine, it seems that it will, under mutation load, improve a little bit, but you can have recombination as long as you like and nothing happens, okay, so this is with our calculated load here, this kind of gets the figures in the right ballpark, not quite though, doesn't seem to be any real pattern, we can compare that with the, sorry, that's the, we take this population this time, calculate the theoretical load and what we actually measure and try and see if they match up and they don't match up very well, here we do it for, this is moved down here, so this actually is, they're deeper into the well, but it's not really making any difference to the calculated load or to the recombinational load, okay, rule 110, we can try it and what we get is we start with that same population here, we get some improvement, so this moves slightly to the left and the load moves slightly down and then when we're at equilibrium, it drops down into this well, okay, so down here, we're down in the well and so we have an equation in some ways, it's not great but it can discriminate between the two, okay, so now that we can identify class three and class four machines by using recombination, we can use that to look at some more interesting problems and one of those is arms race, okay, so arms races are well established in biology and probably a whole lot of other things, if you take, you know, the original throwing a stone at somebody and now we have tanks and armor and anti-tank weapons and the whole tank, anti-tank arms race that's still going on, this is a common theme and so what I wanted to do is play with this, so we could have a host genome on the right hand side here and a pathogen genome and we can put them together and the gliders can fight it out and then if the host wins, it goes back into the host population, if the pathogen wins it gets dumped back into the pathogen population and we can just keep doing that, right, and we keep fixed population sizes and we can write it out like this, we have zero and one for the length of the host and zero and one for the length of the pathogen, if the host wins, if it's a one the host wins, if it's zero the pathogen wins, the thing you want to understand about this is that when the pathogen won, it's winning with a genome from the host that was previously winning in the previous generation so it won before it's losing now, okay, and it's saying for the pathogen, right, okay, so I'll play this again, here we have the host on one side and the pathogen on one side and the host on the other and the gliders are fighting it out and this is how well it's doing, so on the small graph you'll see this is the pathogenic load, so how many of the hosts are dying, okay, and these are of equal genome length, well, near enough, there's one bit difference because it's an odd number, and so that's the host genome and it's the pathogen genome and you'll see these gliders are forming but then there's a counted glider which wipes it out and then a new glider forms and it's just going in this kind of chaotic cyclic pattern, right, so this is that equilibrium, it meanders up and down a bit but no real pattern emerges. We can change the ratio of hosts to pathogen genome and this, I actually thought it was quite interesting because I don't think from a disease point of view, no one's actually really considered genome length. When you think about genome length it's important because whoever can recruit the most genes into the fight's going to win, all right, so if you've got a very small genome, you've got very little genetic material to play with, so with a new genome you can recruit more genes. So obviously if you've got all the genome you're going to win, if you've got none of the genome you're going to lose, okay, and equilibrium points are around about 50%. Rule 110 forms gliders better one way than the other, so it's slightly to the right of that. So that's with 75-bit genomes. Let's introduce recombination. The theory says recombination should help if you're going to have these new wonderful combinations of genes, they're going to win, win, win, and they'll get sick of winning and it'll just spread through the population and that just does not happen, okay. There we've got our pathogenicity along here and we're introducing host sex, sorry, yeah, host sex, right, so the host is doing recombination and it's a disaster, all right, the load goes right back up to where it was when we began and it drops down under asexual reproduction here. So then we try it in the pathogen and the same thing happens but it's the opposite sign that's going the opposite direction, right, and the same thing happens, it goes back to equilibrium there, right. So in both cases sex made it worse. So what's going on? Well, we can look at the length of the genome and say, okay, if your genome, the pathogen genome is longer, bigger, it's going to have more material that can draw on, it's going to drag the equilibrium this way and it's going to have a well somewhere in genome space that it can use, okay. But the population will be dragged the other way by the small pathogen and so you'll get, it's basically going to be in the equilibrium point, which will mean for the pathogen it's a random number generator, if the pathogen genome is small, if the host genome is big, it can kind of just deal with the host with part of its genome and the rest we're just making sure it hits the indicator bit. And vice versa for the pathogen, for the host, it's a host genome's long, it can just isolate the pathogen and say, okay, you just stay over there and don't interfere with my genes and I'll just deal with the rest of my stuff and so it can go into a well, but the pathogen genome is completely bound up in the fight, okay. It can't, it can't, it has no redundancy left, there can't be any redundancy, okay, because every gene has been recruited into the fight. So the kind of thing of it is the octopus fight, okay. If you've got two octopuses fighting, they recruit legs into the fight until all the legs are occupied and there's equilibrium state. If one limb now gets better or worse, you're going to win or lose just by that, okay, because once one leg's gone and the other legs can then gang up until you've won the fight. So this is kind of like an octopus fight. The more legs you have, the more likely you are to win. Right, so we can run this. One of the things I wanted to do, I'll just let this run through and you'll see, you'll see something weird going on and I'll explain why I did it, okay. But this is running, it's a fight between two genomes, of each of equal lengths, host on the right, pathogen on the left. You'll notice pathogenicity is slowly dropping and it's all going along and bam, that happens, right.  I thought, okay, let's drop the mutation right down so that all the pathogen genomes are basically the same and it can then adapt to that. And that didn't work at all. In fact, sex still didn't work. But what you get here is a highly structured defense, okay. These are all pretty much fixed. It creates a zone of death here. The pathogen cannot propagate over that ether. There's no ether for them to come over. So these, the pathogen genome is just bouncing off here and just becomes randomized because nothing works, right. And you get this solution. So if you want to watch again, you watch this graph and that graph, I'll just repeat it for you, okay. See what's happening with the pathogenicity. It's gradually dropping until this highly structured structure, highly organized structure evolves. And it has to evolve slowly because it's such a big structure. If the mutation rate was high, it would keep breaking, okay. So eventually it comes along and it just cleans up. Bam, it wins. Okay. Now part of the reason why it doesn't happen on, sorry, on the host side is because these gliders are, there's not that many gliders going that direction that rule 110 can select from, okay. Okay. Any questions on that? Bamboozle, unconvinced. So, weekend conclusion, right. The surface in these armor races is spiky, okay. It's not a smooth surface. It's a very jagged surface. So, if you have mutation, you're going to get thrown out of that spiky little well. You can't, you can't stay there. You can't survive there. You can get thrown back onto the surface. Recombination is going to do the same thing. So recombination disrupts these multi-gene structures, right. Mutation breaks them as well. So you have to have a very low change rate.  It just doesn't work. And class three machines are spiky surfaces. Class four machines have smooth subs. I have to mention Python at least once. That was it. I used MPI for Pi to run over several processes. Took a bit to figure it out, but eventually it worked. Scython to try and speed things up. So just recompile some of the functions in Scython. I'm going to work Matplotlib to draw things. And I'm paid to talk with MPI and Jupyter notebook to analyze the data. And just a few acknowledgements. Thanks to all from Python group who've been really good. My friend Lawrence Deliveroy, who was Deliveroy, who's my guy ring up when I don't know what to do. And he really suggested using Python for this stuff. It was a great idea because there's just such a great tool chain for analyzing data and doing things. And there's so many people using it. Basically everything you want to do, someone's already had that problem and it's got an answer. Some of my long suffering science friends at University of Auckland and Massey. Mark Kucinoff at Auckland who was instrumental in getting us started when we had a few discussions. This is Stuart Kaufman who is... He wrote this book Origin of Order. It's a really good book to read if you're interested in biology and complexity. He was one of the guys who set up the Santa Fe Institute. And I had the pleasure of meeting him early this year and having a chat with him. It's a great book and it's quite old now but still a really good book. I think that's it. Thank you. That's a good question. Bigger, longer, more is one thing. There are possibly other phase transitions out there. We saw some in Rule 30. There could be phase transitions in some of the other rules. And one of the things I want to look at is is there anything I can use this practically for? Hardly unlikely but you never know. Any other questions? Yep. In ecology or biology, some mutations can have favourable results in terms of longevity and some negative. Does this differentiate between those two potential pathways? Yeah. This is based on basically looking at the role of recombination in longevity. So there's a theory of aging called the reliability theory which just basically says you have so much reliability and you consume it with time. Different people have different amounts of reliability and eventually you run out of spare part or spare capacity. I wrote a paper on this saying that recombination selects for reliability because of the glider formation and redundancy. So it's the except for redundancy. Because basically what you're doing is you're... If we go way back... Excuse me, sorry to be a pain. Okay, the thing that these are about is you have these logical statements that say as things are true or false. And everything in the real world is conditional. There's conditional truths or contextual truths. And so this might be true but if we introduce some other change it might change it to false at some distance. And so these... I originally designed a kind of nested rule system so the truth of a statement depending on the truth of something else somewhere far away. Okay, and what this does it tries to make recombination keeps changing the context of those truths and so it selects for truths that are context-robust but not context-universal truths. Do you understand that? Okay. Any other questions? You just look at all them. Okay. Basically originally what I did was generate all the rules and go through them and there is information on the rules. So there's articles about rules and there's an atlas of rules and you play with them and see what happens. You don't have to look at all them because some of them are identical. There are black, white equivalents and left, right equivalents. And so you quickly narrow down the rules that are of interest. But you just... In the end I wrote programs that just looked at all them and just looked at the output and all that one looks interesting. Yeah. What do you mind going over one more time with 64 possible rules? Because I see... Okay, sure. Where is it? So you've got three bits here, right? So there's two to the eight possible... Sorry, two to the three possible blocks you can have. So you can have... That could be 0, 0, 0, 0 along there. So there's two to the eight possible rules you can have. Okay. But there's only... I think there's about 140 actually unique rules that take all the black and white homologs and left, right homologs. Because this rule, you can see it's biased one way. That equivalent... So black, black, white is not there. And if I had black, black, white was black and then white, white, black...  So it's like symmetric. It's symmetric, yeah. If you go on the Atlas, go and look at the wolf from DCA, Elemental City Automata. Atlas has all the properties of the rules and their homologs or related rules. And the logic... There's logical versions of this rather than just going that's a two, that's a three. But that's how I do it, I just go... That's one, that's two, that's three. If I find a two or a three in those bits as I scan along then it's viable. Yep. Any other questions? Well, thank you very much.


What's up, everyone? It's time to geek out again. All right, this is for the web designers and developers who are like me and like to geek out on just awesome tools and resources, things that improve our productivity, but also are fun to go ahead and use and try out today. I got three tools that I want to share with you and all three of them are tools that use on a daily basis are super helpful with my workflow. And we're just going to have fun with this. Now, my feature tool is going to be at the end. The third one is always going to be like my number one feature tool. So make sure to check that out. And if you want to continue geeking out and finding new tools and resources, drop them aside, the comments, hit that like button and subscribe. You know, all that good YouTube stuff really does help out. All right, let's go ahead and get started now with tool number one. And that is going to be snippets lab. Now, this one is only for the Mac users out there. Unfortunately, it's not on PC. But if you do have a Mac, you should definitely check this one out. Now, this one right here is not a normal text editor. In fact, it's not really a text editor or to be used as something that'll replace your text editor like sublime text, VS code, and so on. What this is, it allows us to build libraries of our code snippets. So let me show you here is how it looks and how it works. And this is also how I use it inside my workflow. Now, I've been using this for the last month, and it has really been fun to use but has made things a whole lot easier. So I do a lot of elemental tutorials and a lot of them that I do, I have little bits of code snippets to copy and paste. That way, you don't have to use plugins because you guys know me, I don't like to use plugins if I don't need to. So what I've been doing lately is anytime I have a function I want to add something like hide and show a sticky header on scroll. What I do is I go ahead and just put it here into my library so I could use it again later and it's easy to find. And then same thing with PHP functions across WordPress in general, I use a lot of these special little functions that usually we would use a plugin for something like fixing an aspect ratio on Gutenberg because images by default for videos don't come out right. This fixes it. Or something like adding a CSS class for logged in users, so on. I got a lot of these right here. And before I used to put these in a file on my computer with all it was hard to organize and then I would use GitHub, but I wouldn't be on GitHub as much because sometimes I just get lazy and don't want to go to another website. But this has made everything so much easier and it's kind of fun. The interface is great. There's all kinds of settings you could do in there and really customize it change the look and feel as you like. But the one thing I like is it's clean and easy to manage. It's fun to use to and it syncs across devices. So I usually work on my desktop but I go out a lot to coffee shops to work on my laptop. So all the code syncs in the cloud. It's right there. Now you can find snippets lab inside the app store. I think I paid around $5 or $6 for it. It was really cheap. It's only a few bucks and definitely worth a few dollars. This made it so much easier for me to just maintain and manage the code snippets and make sure I don't lose them. That way I could also use them again later. Tool number two is going to be pitch. Now what this is, it's a software that allows us to easily make very creative slide decks. These are decks that could be used for presentations, for proposals, for brand guides, for capability decks. There's all kinds of ways we could use this. Here's my account right here and if we go here you can see I've been using it for a whole lot of different situations. I've been using it for courses, for workshops, even project proposals. I've been using it to send out sales pages, something like this. Client wants to ask about our SEO plans. I have this set up really easy, modern, clean. It's fun and this right here took me about 10 minutes to put together. No kidding. What's all the content is there of course, but let me show you how this works. So let's say you got a new project coming up.  Go ahead, click on new presentation, but we'll go to the template library to get started. We have this large library of pre-built templates and I've been using pitch quite a bit these last six months and since I've been using it, I see templates are continuously being added. Now these templates, if you look in, you got some that are like sales decks. You got some that are like strategic planning. You got some like right here that are brand guidelines, all kinds of different situations that us as creatives can use. Now let's say for an example, we have a proposal we want to make for a client. So we could go and use the search filter right here and you could take a look at find a style that works for you. Let's say we like this style right here, agency pitch. Let's click on that right here. And you could get a good idea of what this is going to look like, take a look at your slides. Let's say, okay, this one looks great right here. We like the style, everything in it looks cool. And we can use this as our proposal. You can go ahead and select now use a template and then start editing it yourself. So let's say we want to create our first page. So I'll go ahead and click on this one, then we could edit this. No, our brand name. And then adding new slides are super easy, we just click on new slide, we find out what do we want to go next, maybe want to put a table of contacts next, then we could go through and kind of just create the whole thing right from here. Let's put something about our team, a little bit about us, a little bit more about us. Now let's go to the project right here, we could find something for the prices. I probably actually we could change this like our prices.  And then put in something here. Well, you see where I'm getting at everything is styled up is super easy to use. Now this is a part I really like. So say like I really don't like this font, it doesn't match our brand style, and these colors don't match our brand style either. Well, we could go here to our slide style, we could click on new style. And then we could customize everything. Let's go ahead and give it a name, our brand. And let's change it up. Now I'm going to change this font, I'm going to change it to Boson. It's a font that we've been using. Now you can see all our styles have changed over funds have changed. Let's say instead of this blue right here, we want no I don't use green. So let's say we want to change this and we use blue. Now we can save it. And when we go over to our slide style, we could now select on our brand. And everything is going to change to our brand. What I like about this tool is it makes it really fast and easy to create this creative, well designed decks out because send out and stand out. Definitely, we're going to stand out more than our competition, especially without having to spend so much time trying to design a proposal. Also, this opens up other possibilities for us to stand out and create items like brand guides for our clients. We could create something like a capabilities deck, like do you ever have a client, a potential client that asks, Hey, what do you guys do? What are you good at? Well, if you have a capabilities deck made, this shows exactly what we do. You can send that out to clients as well. So this right here, there is a free plan. And the free plan is pretty good, just free. Only thing is there is a watermark or the logo a pitch inside the PDF download. But there's also the pro plan, which unlocks a whole bunch of stuff as well. And it's pretty cheap. It's like eight to $10 a month. All right, now this brings us to tool number three. And this is this videos highlighted and featured tool that is going to be studio cart. I saved studio car for the end because this is a powerful tool. Like this is something that I've been using for the last nine months on my own personal site. And I have just been blown away by how good this is and the power in it. It's incredible. And the growth that I've seen in these last nine months, that the developers and team behind studio cart have been making with it. Studio cart, this is a tool that allows us to sell things on a WordPress website. And it's kind of like a funnel builder as well. It's not like WooCommerce at all, where WooCommerce is more just e commerce with e commerce functionality. This is geared more towards like creators who are creating courses, coaching or just singular items. It has funnel builders like upsells, order bumps, two step checkouts, things like that. It focuses on the conversion rates. And it's also lightweight. See, when I was putting out my course last year, I went through that research stage and trying to find out what is the best way to sell my course. I did not want to use WooCommerce because it's chunky, it's heavy, and it doesn't really have that good checkout experience without adding a bunch of customizations or other plugins to it. And I was leaning more towards thrive cart. Thrive cart is a third party integration tool, but it's like a funnel builder, something you can integrate into your WordPress website. It's, it's a carts, you know, that's what it is. It's a cart functionality, but it has the funnel building parts of it as well. It has the order bumps, the upsells, the coupons, all the things that you would like to see inside of a checkout process, a payment process, that is geared towards conversion rate optimizations. So I was about to get this and I almost bought it. And if we look at the price of this, it would have been, you got to get the pro version. It would have been 690 bucks. And I was really close to paying for it. Then I got super lucky and I found this on AppSumo. And I'm an AppSumo junkie. I'm always buying things on AppSumo. But every now and then buying things on AppSumo, I find a golden nugget. And this was one of the biggest golden nuggets I ever found on AppSumo because I had no idea how good it was going to be and that how good it was going to get. And let me show you really quickly how I have this set up on my own website. So here, say we're going to go to courses and check out one of our courses right here. Well, everything is done with Studio Cart, like I built this out with Elementor right here, we could go ahead and purchase the course. And this is all Studio Cart right here. Everything is fast. It's not chunky. It's really quick. It's snappy. It doesn't harm the overall performance of the site. Another thing I really like about this is we could go to my account. And we could create an account dashboard, which is right here. And this is for our customers, anybody who were to make a purchase, they can manage their subscription. If they wanted to cancel their subscription, they could cancel it right in here. So it's really easy. I really like that everything could be managed back here by the customer. If you wanted to get an invoice, the invoices are right in here as well. And all this right here is built within Studio Cart. I haven't had to add any third party plugins to add any of this functionality to it. We could also add in subscriptions. So we got our Academy right here, which is a subscription. We could go here and it's really simple to set up. Now we got a subscription, I could even add a free trial. There's so many possibilities we could do. Now, if we go back here, there is a free and paid plan. So you got the free plan. And the free plan, you can get enough to get started. So say you do just got a couple products, your client has a couple products or you do, and you want to sell them without adding WooCommerce to it, you could go ahead and sell them using this on the free plan. And then if you want to get really creative and optimize the conversion rates on it and be able to like add things where you can sell more, well, there's a lot of different other features right here inside the pro plan. Now, one of the most useful features that I found with this is going to be right here, the Zapier. There is so much we've been able to do with Zapier, so many integrations I've been able to do with it. It is crazy and there are just more being added. In fact, let me see here. We can go to the change log, they're very open with it. They also have, let me see if I could find it a roadmap. So they got a roadmap here as well. And you can see just how active they are. They're constantly releasing new integrations, new features, and the development team behind this is solid. I'm a fan of studio cars. There's no doubt. I feel this is one of the top plugins right now for selling on websites if you are going to be selling courses or subscriptions or anything like that. One thing is the pricing. I have to let you know it's not cheap. It's nothing to sneeze at. But I do understand this price point. I understand it after using it because this tool, this set is powerful. It really is. You have the account dashboard, you have invoicing in there, you have your payment gateways, you have your upsells, your funnel builder, everything Thrive Cart could do right here as a third party tool you could do on your own WordPress website. It's lightweight, it's fast, and you have incredible support. Like the support hands down is a 10. They got a 10 from me. Now, I do got some tutorials in the works with Studio Car because I've been doing a lot with it and I do believe that this is a tool that WordPress developers should be looking at to use for selling singular items, subscriptions, courses, coachings, things like that. Well, I hope this video helps out. And if you like geeking out on stuff like this, finding new tools for web design and development and things that are just fun to use and help you out your productivity and your overall workflow, then don't forget to like and subscribe because I got more of these videos coming out. This is just the start of a new series of tools and resources for web designers and developers.  All right. Thank you. See you soon.


Mike everybody here all accounted for yeah Buster screen informed us that he was gonna retire So, you know respect that decision really Respect Buster as a person as a player But but he made a decision which he felt like was best for him and his family and you know We respect that and support him however we can Yes What have you seen since then? He's made good progress. I mean he's put together a couple good days here with the with the rookies and some of the injured guys and You know, hopefully you can build on that as we as we get back out there tomorrow with everybody As of now, I mean, we'll just then every day is a new day, but Every day is you know something different with each guy So, you know, we'll approach those and handle those how we can but I don't for see anything But things can always come up Place on that first full team meeting and how much do you much thought do you put into what you're gonna say at that? Well, I mean I always try, you know, man, I never you know as coaches you never want to waste anybody's time You know, we're here a lot and then I know how important Every coach's information that they can get to the player and their ability to teach whether that's the special teams meeting individual unit meetings Squad so I'm always conscious of what I say in there that you know, I don't want to just meet just to meet But it's an important meeting, you know to have the the full squad together You know, there's a lot of introductions for example, you know Joey will talk on behalf of the equipment staff and the things that we expect explain The guardian caps that you guys will see and probably have seen around the league That was a decision that that we all came to agreement on that said I think the science and the data is to a point now where That's that's best for the player for their health and safety When you talk about impact, you know the the force and the amount of impact it can reduce it, you know Up to 20% if two players are wearing that that's pretty significant. So, you know, everybody will wear those Can we this is like so that's and that's that's a change that technology Has changed it wasn't that significant In the past couple years, but but I think with their technology and what they've designed I think it's become those are pretty significant numbers I don't know what you know, I mean I define that is just making sure that you're doing the little things that you Understand where to go as we continue to add installation. There's a lot of information that we give them That you can come out and compete The biggest thing for training camp is is earning the trust of teammates and coaches not only, you know developing And and trying to improve and on all the things that we're gonna need throughout the season But it's also, you know about trust and being where you're supposed to be for the quarterback and Doing those things day in and day out with a with some consistency Big picture from the end of the last two seasons. Is there something organizationally you guys have learned or want to strive to do differently then? Get you get you closer to where you want to go? Well, I mean every year every day we come to work We're gonna try to figure out ways to to win championships, but I don't think we're we're there Necessarily, I don't think I'm gonna start at the back and move forward and work backwards I'm gonna start with today, which was a conditioning test and look fantastic And they understand and our players understand how we have to play and in the condition in which we have to be in to play that style of football You know through the course of a long season, you know, we know that you know, you have to be at your best In those games, there's no You know, there's no do-overs. There's no Makeups or hey, we get to play them again in three weeks So, you know, that's when you have to be at your best and all those keys and and the game plan and in our performances Coaching and playing have to be at our best No, we didn't play very well, you know, we didn't coach very well. I don't you know, that's That the plan will be different. I mean there'll be differences in the practice schedule You know just trying to be conscious of you know The workload and the third day and just using the data that we get from our staff and from the you know, the players association and NFL Doctors and bio core and and all those things just trying to to make sure that we're doing right by our players and that That we're giving them exactly what they need to feel confident when the season comes We've talked about this before everybody's gonna have a plan and I Try to I mean I do explain that to the team, you know, where where a player like does Fitzpatrick is compared to You know Robert Woods or you know, Jeff Simmons and Kevin Byer did you know these there's a lot of guys that have played a Lot of football for us and that doesn't mean that they're not going to be working But I don't know, you know, everybody's plan is going to be different each and every day And there's a balance to that to making sure that guys are getting what they need But also, you know being conscious of how much they're going to play for us How do you feel about the way trail and attacked his help this summer and is he in a position to get through camp every day? Well, I mean, he's put together two good days.  I won't do that. You know, we're focusing on you know, just daily improvement with with each and every player and You know, we're we're excited to keep working with them and But that's gonna be the same for everybody. It's just trying to focus on On today and how we approach and how we attack today We'll have a lot of meetings today and then we'll be out there, you know, bright and early tomorrow The corner back room was already young. You lose buster Do you feel like you need to get some at least an experienced voice in there for another experience voice? Well, john and I, you know, we haven't had a whole lot of time to discuss and we'll we'll see who's out there We'll need to replace the the body, you know, those are things that You know, we've looked at over the course of a couple years Or how many guys you needed each position and and working and making sure that, you know guys are staying You know that you can get through practice and and function, but also somebody that can that can help contribute. So You know, nothing I would say is is imminent right now as far as replacing him From who? Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't hear what you said. Um We talk about, you know, I mean just the the presence in the huddle first and foremost is being able to Command the huddle You know getting guys lined up the operation I think is something that's critical as this installation Starts to mount can can you handle and and fix mistakes and see guys where the alignments are and put guys You know, that's when I know that everybody knows what they're doing is when a quarterback or safety or linebacker can tell another position Hey, you know, you're supposed to be off or you're supposed to be over here Those are things that I would look for Made made a made a lot of correct decisions in the spring Uh, but but timing probably wasn't where it needed to be and therefore accuracy starts to go down so Try to explain all that is the decision making was was really good For for a rookie quarterback But the timing has to improve and we're hopeful that you know When the timing improves that that the accuracy improves as well Well, you know, that's that's where you're gonna have to You know where we're not where we stay away from the quarterback You know, we're our guys do a great job of practicing against each other Taking care of each other where we we work hard. We rush whatever we're doing But we're staying away from the quarterback and until you're out there in this league and taking some hits which Toughness is not is not a concern. It's just those are going to be important that that you're out there and standing in the pocket Stepping up in the pocket Uh and and throwing and passes and finding throwing throwing lanes Mike, how do you feel like the plan you created with uh, jeff simmonds went along? During mandatory mini camp and you expect him to practice when you guys open up practice tomorrow Yeah, I mean, I expect jeff to practice and you know, we'll See how he feels and see how you know, it looks and figure out what's best for him, you know, he'd be one of those guys that You know would have a somewhat different plan maybe potentially, but um, I would imagine everybody that that's healthy will will be out there ready to go tomorrow That they're doing some things I would say that they're probably Participating in 90% of the the stuff that we did the first couple days. There's some things that that we're holding them out of But the nice thing is is they've been able to when we're doing those drills To go over there and find ways to to work for a few minutes, which each other Which kind of makes it nice. They're both going through the same process And they're mirrored positions. So um You know, for example during the open field tackle drill, right? We we don't want them doing that right now, but they can go over and they can work releases or they'll work something else And we've asked them to to kind of come to us with a plan of things that they would like that We've given them a couple things and then also, you know, ask them to kind of think of some things that they can do to Work with each other during those Five or six minutes Oh, he's he's 100% apparently but coming back from injury does I didn't even hear you. You said Jaron to start for Derek for Derek Right with him, you know, good to go coming back from the injury Do you change like your approach or how you work him during camp and in preseason games? Or is that something that you know, it's gonna be status quo? Uh, no, I mean, they'll be, you know, he'll have some involvement, you know And then I think that there'll come a time where we'll You know do some different things with them And then, you know, I wouldn't anticipate seeing Derek in in the preseason games What kind of mentality you're looking for from Dylan? You've talked before about kind of The guys who say they're aggressive but say in a meek voice and you don't buy it He hasn't talked in a way that's like I have to seize the position. Well, well, I think that I'm hoping that the momentum from the spring Carries over to training camp Um, excited to see him work Fantastic, uh, condition I think his techniques improved. I think he's he's more comfortable in what we're doing and what we're asking him to do and with his techniques and so You know, we'll just we'll base it on each day and and he's excited to go into position Yeah, I mean, I think until somebody absolutely solidifies that what you know means your Marco and brew will work Dylan and nick and you know, every all the other tackles that we have but You know, we're gonna have to line up with five guys tomorrow and in the first group and You know, see what that looks like after after the first practice and then and then give everybody an opportunity to compete You really expect those the offensive line to sort itself out during the group sessions with the Cardinals Well, we're gonna practice against Tampa first and then the Cardinals Those are great opportunities for for guys. We ask offensive linemen You know, you have to know the guy you're rushing against right? What's the skill set? Is this a speed guy? Is this a quick guy? Is this a big guy? And when you go against our guys, they have a plan because they have an idea that they see them every single day And so, you know, Tampa is going to bring in a new set of guys that are going to be fantastic That are going to allow our guys something different and and so will Arizona So those reps are valuable to be able to see a bunch of different Skill sets body types Change from one day to the next. Okay, this first day Maybe wasn't very good. How can I adjust and fix and correct some of those things? No different than the receivers Whether it's a big receiver or it's a quicker receipt. You know, I mean, are you talking about Rondell more you're talking about more you're talking about evans, you know from from different guys around the league We do that each and every week, you know, that's what the game plan is and then you try to practice and You know have somebody on the show team, you know, recreate that person talked about being great around Ryan Clarified kind of what you meant about that at the combine but With with aj gone and the personnel ships that you have do you feel like the personnel around Ryan is better? Well, I don't want to rely on on talent. I don't want to be a coach that relies on talent. I want to be Um, I want to coach fundamentals Technique I want to teach. I want to make sure that they play with great effort and and I know that we're talented. So Um My job is to not try to rely on talent. I want to try to coach You know, there's a certain way that we want to play the game and when we do Um, you know, we're we're a good football team and when we turn it over And we we don't protect the guy with the football Whether that's a quarterback or running back or receiver You know, we're not very good, you know, we can't we can't operate like that You know, I don't know if anybody right now, you know, we haven't played any game. So Um, you know, there's no stats for this year every year is a new year and we're going to expect Your best players have to play Good in this league to win if that's what you mean Well, he he was just an example there's going to be numerous guys, you know, whether it's Danico Autry, whether it's Ben Jones, Taylor LaWan They won't look any different tomorrow, but You know in in a few Few days in a few weeks, you know, maybe maybe it is different. You know, it's not not just jeff. I used as an example We have a handful of guys That have played a lot of snaps for us And just trying to make sure that they're ready for the football See I want jeffrey to play as many snaps In the manner in which he plays them, which is physical And and violent and fast as he possibly can and so I have to try to with our training staff and our strength staff try to find out What that best plan for that is Well, once we're off social media, how hard do you think it'll be for him to live up to that valve? No, he's in there shaking and he's holding his phone and Um, I think we all Kind of sometimes get caught up in what's going on out there much different than when you and I you know, we're In high school or in college You know that a lot of social media is is fantasy land It's everybody's best moments shiny moments, but we all deal with You know, we all deal with adversity. We all deal with days where we don't quite feel so great and Probably getting off social media wouldn't wouldn't be a bad thing for all of us How important is it to make sure that ryan gets the reps?  The timing that we talked about the trust, you know, all those things Um, our reasons why you practice so, you know, hopefully You know, we can we can manage it You know through through certain ways Mike with the Challenge of being the number one seed last year How do you approach coming into this new season kind of drawing the line? That was then this is now when you have so much continuity on staff on the roster And overall with this franchise I mean, you've been in an NFL for a long time. That doesn't mean anything, you know, that's That's not going to carry over one week doesn't carry over to the next You know, if you don't play well in this league, you're going to lose And if you play good, you have a chance to win, you know, those guys, you know, we all know that so Um We've moved on just like everybody else has Yeah, I mean, I just think that, you know, it's always good just to check in on guys check in on coaches Um, I think our staff does a great job of that I try to do it as well. Just just to check in with guys some guys are here That you see them in the building some guys some guys aren't most of them are, you know, I mean that that's We understand that but the ones that are here. I see Over the summer And by all accounts, I mean from what I watched the conditioning test, you know, there was a lot of conversations going on So if guys can talk why they're they're running 20 60 striders, then then it probably was pretty easy Because you have so many new receivers and tight ends on the team this year Will will be a point of emphasis to try and get Ryan acclimated with all those guys throughout this camp Well, he's only gonna be able to you know, there's only one football and so You know, we'll try to work the rotation and in such. I mean, we we kind of have an idea You know Whether you know austin hooper and that relationship that they they formed over minicamp. I'm sure they'll Hopefully pick up where they left off and you know, we'll add robert to the mix and Trailing and and des and all the rest of the receivers and try to rotate through and and give them all an opportunity to compete and see see who Can build a role for themselves for this football team You have mentioned not relying on talent So from a coaching perspective with tim kelly coming in, how is that going to work as far as Him working with Todd downing and even culture harrow and everyone else that's involved and putting passing plays together Yeah And really we've always had You know, we've always had somebody in place here You know matt, you know had had arthur and arthur had todd and The fit was right, you know, haven't haven't had experience with tim Everything that i've witnessed the conversations That that they're having when i when i see it or i'm in on those meetings um You know, it's about support and it's about You know, it's always nice to have an extra set of eyes maybe from 30 000 feet Maybe that that you miss something you're staring at something so long that you kind of miss it You know, I think tim by not having a specific position You know, we'll be able to to help us and assist us that way Yeah, that's what this national football league is and i i just I i don't want to just roll the ball out there and say well, let's hope if we have better players, you know, um That that's why we come to work is to try to find ways to To develop guys to give them one more thing I got it, you know, I mean if you can find one way to make kevin buyard play better than he did last year Or jeff simmonds or derrick henry Right, I mean every single player that that's our job as coaches. So You know, I just that's uh, I just don't want to have a cop out and say well You know, they're better. I don't buy that. You know, I mean, it's the world every every team is talented and so We want to teach them. We want to give them the the knowledge to be able to go out there and do their job And and most especially give them the confidence to go out there and do their job How much you talk to the guys maybe younger guys about the highs and lows of camp and not get to Yeah, you know, I mean kaleb farley had two interceptions yesterday and I'm like that's great You know, I mean, we're then we're gonna practice in another couple days. I'm glad you found the football and it's exciting Uh, those small victories, but it's just one day and in a long process and and knowing that there's going to be Uh adversity, uh, which we're all going to have to face. There's going to be something and can we can we still be at our best? um When it's not going our way have a different approach to these practices in terms of what you do and what you're looking at specifically or Like has that evolved much over the years? Um, I mean, I'm looking for For fundamentals. I try to watch and make sure that the drills that we're doing Uh translate to the team and then it's really cool to be able to show the player the drill we just did This is the same action that you had but it's 11 on 11 This is why it's so critical that you make the corrections or that you continue to do it right in the individual period Uh, I look at that, you know, I think that that's always a cool message to serve the players Like are you guys over here about doing this drill? This is the exact same thing that you did 20 minutes later 30 minutes later in a team period. It helped you helped you do your job. Um You know making sure that the the guys are are moving around running that were we're running on and off the field You know that the operation is clean that we you know, we've got you know That we're efficient and that that we we have some urgency when we're out there practicing that that's my job I don't remember. I just I don't remember they they were good plays and You know They were they were I don't think they realized how long he was. I don't think I did either.  So when his arm when he when he stretches out his arms and Jumps it covers some ground Not quite yet not quite yet. We need a little bit more heat and a little bit more water And uh, it'll be fantastic. So we'll be working on one and two Until that thing is is ready to go, but it's going to be it'll be great once we once we get it done Yeah, looking forward to having fans looking forward to having families You know, I mean, I miss that I miss when when the boys would come to training camp I miss when the kids would come to training camp and then You know, I love seeing the kids run around with their with their dads After practice. So I'm excited. I'm excited to get that back Before I get started here with questions two things I wanted to offer our condolences to the family of mark howard Um, you know tragic loss there. I know many of you were friends with him I didn't have many interactions with him, but I know that Every time that I was on with him He was extremely respectful and always professional. So Thoughts and prayers go out to to the family and and friends of his and Thanks to our staff And the time that was put in, you know prepping the facilities here for training camp Our ops team our equipment staff Grounds team. There's a lot of man hours that went in to get in the field and stuff ready here for us to Rock and roll. So with that, we'll open up for questions. We've got ryan calton here Vice president of player personnel, so Fire away Come up with some solutions. You know, I guess physically medically whatever you want to say for trailing berks since since mini camp and do you expect him to be You know ready to roll. Yeah, I mean, I think that you know, he did a nice job in the in the conditioning tasks He's been out here for a couple of days and has been running around Running around well and made a couple plays. So Um, certainly excited with the trajectory that that he's on and you know, we'll take it day by day and Bumps and bruises happen during training camp hopefully we don't have too many Mike said that he expects jeffrey to be out there tomorrow Is there anything going on contract wise? Um, no, I mean, I talked to agents with uh, a lot of our a lot of our players I've talked with his representation and we've got an understanding of where we Where we're at and um, you know, he's excited to be back and and ready to rock and roll You are anywhere close to a new deal or you're proceeding under the current term Yeah, we don't really talk about contracts and you know, I've said that before I think that's uh That's a matter between the club and and the agent the player and um, that's how that's how we'll keep it here Yeah, philosophy uh philosophy wise again, I don't want to dive too much into into contracts and all that kind of stuff But you know, everything is a case by case basis. Um Um, but you know, I would say that you know, again, we're not going to talk about where we're at from a contract standpoint Was the when the guy like buster screen decides at the last minute here to retire You sort of expect that each year or is that is that a bit of a shock to the system? And and cause you to regroup somewhere. No, you know, you never really really know david it's it was I was so proud. He was a part of our team last year after every game and we signed in midseason He came in and contributed for us that you know, as a guy that I think he's got 11 years in the league and The smile on his face and he gave me the biggest hug after every win and it was like, thank you so much for the opportunity Um, but you never know where where guys are at, you know, health wise and where they're at, you know, but the game and Wish him nothing but the best and he was he was a great teammate. He worked hard You know, it's kind of an old soul that, you know, showed up every single day and was was productive for us So I wish him nothing but the best moving forward as far as for the spot You know, we're you know, ryan and I have met with personnel staff personnel staff this morning kind of talking through some things and Um, I'm sure we'll have some guys, you know here in the next You know a couple days that that'll be on the workout circuit with us Do you do you say we need to get another cornerback or do you look and say we've got an opportunity to get this guy Who's a good player at this position? Uh, I think it's probably more the the first, you know Just from a standpoint of numbers, you know, you know, Mike and I have a A number that we like to have at each position every time we go into training camp. So Um, I think it's probably more db than than the latter Are there lessons john that you learned from the one and done over the last two years organizationally That can be applied now going forward that can help you avoid that Yeah, I think every situation is is unique, you know, I think that you you you evaluate the player You get as much information as you can and um, you know, sometimes they they work out well and and sometimes they You know that they don't um, and we claimed zack cunningham at the end of the season last year Who wasn't playing a whole lot for houston? Um, but had had really productive games and played a lot, you know, obviously we played against him And he came in and was great for us and we're excited that zack's back So I think every situation is unique and every situation is different But you know, you certainly look at the things that when it does work out, okay, well Why did that work out? You try to ask yourself and you know, why did It not work out And you obviously try to not go back down the road where it didn't work out and focus more on the on the times that it did Can you speak broadly to that theme of the ending of the last two years and maybe what the organization learns what you learn well, I mean, I think the process for us is is Player act was issuing is such a broad scope right whether that comes from the college They're the pros the street from other teams from waivers trades Um, and I think what we went through last year Was a testament not only to the the process that we put in place from the personnel side But it's a collaboration because we may identify a player that that fits characteristics or traits that we believe fit our program But it's a collaborative effort from the coaches to get that player ready that week From the trainers to add a new person to find out what that's about. Um, the wait staff equipment. It's such a big process to get all those guys in and and I think for us It's just trying to find each and every one of those guys that that fit both on the field in the locker room as best they can John you guys Have been saying about wanting to be great around ryan Now mike says he doesn't want to be a coach that relies on talent, but as somebody whose job is to Get the talent and make a great roster. Where would you say you feel like your roster is comparatively to last year around ryan? Yeah, I mean, I don't know what all of the the video game rankings have us, you know, that have been posted over the last two weeks I don't know where we stack up on that ranking, but Um, I like the camaraderie of the group. I like the trajectory of the group. You know, I thought we made some strides Uh, certainly in the spring in the ota's and it looks like we were off to a pretty good start here You know the last couple days with these young players, so Sessions of the positions maybe that are that are still kind of open maybe some some question marks might talk about You know the two spots in the old line I guess how long ideally do you take a look at those guys, you know, you hope that the starters are here But you know, how long do you give that before saying they either are or we need to still look around Well, I mean, it's got to be a couple weeks, you know We've got to get pads on and I mean these linemen haven't had pads on since You know a year went over the college guys finished. Um, so you got to see those guys, you know actually put football pads on and run football plays so Um, you you've got to be a little conscious of that The new players with the terminology, you know, offensively Defensive we've got a lot of players back on defense. So that carry over terminology wise and staff consistency certainly helps Um But at some point they're going to have to be able to do their job or not be able to do their job and If they can't then we've got a you know With somebody on our team on our current roster that can do the job And if not then then ryan and I got to go to work and try to find somebody out there that can His head coach sam pitman that said that he wasn't aware of the asthma issue But that the work conditioning issues Initially that he worked out. Is that something that you guys got to talk to him about? Is the asthma a new thing that you didn't know was on the surface before?  He felt like he needed to be better at and Um, you know, I would say that he's attacked Um The time that he's been here And gotten himself ready to go out and perform Um, and and it certainly showed the work that he's put in over the last You know two days that he's been here early That he's ready to roll When you and ryan you and mike all of you together during camp is a couple of times a day Looking at and do you talk about certain players certain positions? How does that kind of transpire all that ryan go First it's pretty much all day like, you know, especially for john and I now a lot of times with with coaches responsibilities It's hard to talk to every little department.  I should say Where john and coach can get together and then he can Get with me and my staff and we can work through the things that we need to get that But in terms of john on the personnel side, I mean, it's it's multiple times throughout the day I mean the offices are 10 feet apart. Um, there's always going to be something that comes up Um, whether it's little big whatever or just thinking forward, um, whether that's planning scouts Planning preseason scouting, you know changes in processes. So that's it. That's a constant communications. Yeah Was I guess last year when you when you guys kind of build that ready list Play with 91 guys and to see some of those guys have the success that they had sure obviously you wouldn't That wouldn't be the ideal situation, right? But as I stated earlier Yeah, you might say how'd you find this guy or what how what did you see in this player that made you think he'd be successful in your program? That's just one part of it But but the collaboration from the coaches being willing to get that guy ready on short notice The trainers like I said having how do I get this guy? What's his health background? What's what works best for him? And then really the player the player has a huge responsibility upon himself to be ready to help the football team So we are we are a part of it in terms of identifying and hoping to bring in the right guys that That fit the fabric of the players we want to bring in but then once they're here It's so much about the rest of the organization the other parts and the player himself taking that opportunity and running with it John you see the you see the these rookies out here And you've gone through you guys and your staff gone through the evaluation process of seeing what they can do and can potentially be As a general how soon do you know when a guy is? Ready to make that move versus a guy like say dylan radens last year that was going to need some time to develop and work through Yeah, that's a great question terry. I think it's it's really different for for every player um You know dylan was a player who came from a smaller school Who was affected by the covet year really only played one game and then he played in the senior bowls so He hadn't played. I mean he had played football, but you know the recent history certainly wasn't extensive and He worked at it last year and worked at it last year and I thought he made some really good strides in in this offseason So I think it's different for for different players, you know just kind of how quickly they Um, simulate themselves to our program and how quickly they can go out and perform Yeah, sometimes and it's it's different because sometimes it's it's instant and then Other times we'll be sitting in there watching tape and we're talking and it's like all right He's coming on, you know or vice versa. It's you know, it's like, uh, he's not quite there yet, you know Um, it's different I'm going out there to win this job. No matter what kind of guy Um, when he puts his hand at grass do everything he can to try to block his guy Like that's his most important job. There's a lot that goes into that Um But he dylan is a guy that's that's in here early. He's one of the first guys in the building every day Uh, I know he's extremely it's extremely important to him. Um, you know, I don't maybe his personality isn't that One to be outgoing and you know, I'm gonna go chew through rebarb But it's extremely important to it and you can see that In the time that he puts in in this building You seen, uh, Malik acclimate to this program, uh, since he arrived in in the spring and knowing that ryan is your guy this season What what kind of strides what would you like to see him kind of make up behind the scenes and as we get into preseason games Yeah, I mean he's coming in. He's learning a totally new offense. He's throwing to new players. Um From a timing and decision-making standpoint call him to play in the huddle Taking command of the huddle when he's in there. Whoever, you know, whoever's in the huddle with him Showing that leadership which he's shown Um, you know, I thought that he he he put the ball where it was supposed to be most of the times during the spring There were some timing things that you know, he's got to continue to try to improve on but Another guy that's really worked Worked hard in the off season. Certainly when they were here and um, you know He's had a good couple days here from a long-term standpoint. How do you balance? Derek Henry's uniqueness to the reality of What happens to running backs with high workloads as they approach the age of 30? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's uh, um He's Derek's been been awesome for us.  He wants the ball. That's his that's his mindset. Um and um, he likes it. He likes it when we give it to him and uh You know, that's a balance that you have to you know from a coaching standpoint with trainers with strength coaches Um, just figure out what's best for the football team and that goes with any position.  Um If and or when you have a chance to get him out of the game Um, do you do that? You know, because the most important thing is availability of the player a lot of times more So than than the ability of the player How long can you do that for with Derek? Oh, I I have no idea from a timeline standpoint everybody's you know built different some guys play till they're you know 30 something Guy in Tampa is still 40 something and still throwing it. So Everybody's different come back to what mike said earlier about he doesn't want to rely on talent And we've seen him coach guys up to to play well beyond maybe what expectations were Does that put more onus on you to maybe say I know you can get this out of this guy But we still need somebody better Than that guy. I think that we're you know, Ryan and the personnel staff We're always trying to get obviously the the most talented players Uh in here as as possible and we've got talented guys in here um But we we tell the team it's it's and we'll say it again tonight It's about the right 53 guys At the end of the day, it's about the right 53 guys being on your team And sometimes that may not be the most talented 53 guys because there's a lot that goes into a football team It's the makeup of the person. It's you know, how hard does he work? How healthy is he? What is the skill level like? Yeah, they're all of that weighs into You know the overall profile of the player and how they fit in with our football team I guess there were two days a lot more work in the practice field now Not as much when Jim like way back I guess way back when you had a bigger much bigger sample size to judge these guys I can remember uh, it was one of my early training camps. It was must have been we just drafted wilfork in in new england and He had obviously played at miami and been a great player and vince is a good friend and I can we had these stairs that went up to the field and we did three days uh Before there were rules in place And he was coming down the stairs and he looked at me and he said So Rob, this is the hardest thing I've ever been through and talking about a guy that had played at the u with all of those dudes in that heat and It's different now, you know, and and we have to be mindful of the players And I think our strength and conditioning staff and Todd and his group do a great job with cold tubs with The dorm attacks trying to get their bodies right so that they can go out and perform in the windows And we take advantage of the walkthroughs Where you can get the mental reps of the play But take a little bit of less, you know, take some load off the actual, you know Bones Yeah, he um If you looked at his snap breakdown the majority of his snaps were outside But he had exposure playing inside Whether it's a traditional nick or a little bit just inside in the box inside the core a little bit Um But roger wherever you put him He didn't see a real difference in his play style both from a Confidence of where he lined up to his level of competitiveness. It didn't really you didn't see a difference Some guys might look a little timid to thinking in there and moving But in terms of what alvern asked him to do he played a little bit of both Majority of those being outside, but certainly the competitive the competitiveness level and his production level didn't seem to differentiate Right for you for you as an evaluator when you have a guy like Mcquarrie like the big thing the short arms But he's still balling. How do you go about matching up traits to what you see? Uh to what they've already done and then projecting that sure like we all want the perfect prototype at every position right the give me the height the length the speed and everything but Um, it's not how it goes. We don't get everything and I think when you look at when you look at guys You know john alluded to a little bit earlier coach alluded to it about you know Wanting guys that may not always have the most talent not to say roger isn't super talented But if you say the short arms things that followed him around Well, how many people caught the ball line? How many times is that a factor? How many times was he in phase at the top of the break to mirror the footwork of the receiver? So there is no window to pass the football How good is the technique of stabbing through the pocket? You know to to really be perfect in a technique to allow him to overcome something that may be deemed as a deficiency when in fact It's maybe not so one of my favorite How intrigued were they interested were they in in the process you guys went through that allowed you to be successful with 91 players? That did come up, you know, I was first of all I was fortunate enough to be included in those processes and in honor to be included and and I think um It was something that that came up a couple times And there's no magic elixir like there's not some magic formula We we try to stick to the principles that we we've talked about through our pro department our college department And however many times it's been said as much as we can it's so much about the right Fit versus maybe the most talented fit if that makes sense not to not to repeat that But that's that's a real thing about this program has been since we've been here Um, so that that did come up and I think that was some questions And it was it was just trying to believe in your processes On those straight through to my rhyme with roger With kaleb if he can get through everything how close is he to being that? You know on paper he has a lot of those right? That's what we talked about the link I think coach alluded to it earlier about his length is unique um You know, it's just we'll see if you if you said on paper draw big long fast and athletic Sure, but then it's about what do you do out there? You know, so I don't know that's really answers your question But sure you would pick that if you're going to pick one out of head if you're playing pick up on it You know outside I'll take him and we'll see where it goes one of my favorite questions with these Guys in the spring at the senior bowl Or at the combine The the corners I'll say what do you think is the most important traits? To be successful in the national football league and they're like Well, it's my pedal. It's my transition. It's my speed. It's my this they'll rattle off. I don't know 14 different characteristics And I said I'll look at them and I'll say nope You got two jobs one don't let your guy catch the ball And two tackle a guy that's got it and then they look at me like You mean it's that's well all of the stuff that you talked about is hopefully going to help you do those things so Sorry add lib into your question, joe Is his injury significant enough that you think you'll have to bring in somebody else for competition or is he You know, maybe gonna be able to get out there and compete himself. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. He's he's doing he's doing okay Which is partly he obviously had struggled with injuries last year. Um, but coming back this year, Mike said he's at 90% right now How does he get to 100 and how does he live up to those first round expectations? Uh, well the expectations would be go out and play his position and and help the team win that would be the expectation Um, you know just continue to continue to work. Um, like most rookies, you know, they have this I think perception of what the nfl is and then when you get here and you get in our program it's it's there's a little bit of woe and You know, Caleb's battle through that. He's matured a ton Just the way he carries himself around the building. It's he's got some confidence to him and I'm excited for him. He's had a great off season and he's off to a great start here in the first two days Or is that an unfair trailing has got to get open catch and block Like he's going to line up at receiver and and get open catch and block and And when we throw it to him try to run with it and as far as he can run till somebody tackles him No, I don't I don't know what you I don't know what you you change, you know between um I've looked at it nine million times and and the list of players that we had on the team when we started and then You know where we were mid season and where we were kind of at the end and Just kind of the way things the way things fail. I mean we got a bit pretty hard by it, but We were over we were able to you know kind of overcome it and continue to push through and and have a winning season Obviously it didn't finish the way we wanted it to Um, but that can be said for you know 31 other teams too. Um But we certainly look at you know the the injuries that we had and um, you know, there are things that we can do different um Have those discussions, but I think a lot of it was just You know, it's it's a violent game played by big fast strongmen and um those things happen Sometimes when you're when you're scouting and what guys do in seemingly unimportant moments Do you like to see your top guys at positions go to the front line and drills and kind of lead from there Say I'm going first. Watch me. I think that maybe that was the case, you know 20 years ago Paul, but I think I think it's just different now. I think guys are just trying to get the reps and um You know do the things that that they need to do to get themselves ready to go out and have good practice And hopefully that translates to a game Guys personalities are different. I think that that was you know When I was an average College player I was Never at the front of the line. Sometimes I would jockey to try to get up there, but In the day I was just trying not to get yelled at by the coach and just try to do a good job According to my position paul, maybe three technique. I'm trying to lose a little weight. Maybe play outside linebacker That's tough. Thanks, Steve You guys uh, Chris Did you if you did you at him have any discussions face-to-face or over the phone with each other just about reconciling all that? With ryan Yeah, I mean it was tough for both of us and I you know we talked and You know at at some point you got you got to move on, you know, it's uh You know, we're we're we're on to this season and it's a it's a new team. Um, he's excited. I'm excited um another opportunity to play in this league, um um greatest sport in the world in my opinion and um You can't let's let it continue to fester at some point. You just you've got to turn the page and and and go on I think I answered that earlier with the madden rating questions, but like it's It's it's different. It's about if they play in unison and so much about timing and there's concepts offensively that you're trying to create and get guys open It's just you know guys get open differently. Um But i'm excited about the position groups and the guys that we have and the work that they've put in To be ready for camp Yeah, you you're saying how like at some point you have to move on in regards to Kind of what happened last year in terms of ryan's mindset. What have you seen? That that suggests to you that that you can and that he's kind of ready to To embrace the challenge of this season juice energy leadership Fired up to be out here Working with the new new players that are on a team about hey when you run this route this way Look for the ball because this is what i'm looking for out of you on this certain route um He's into it and ready to roll When you were hired the idea was to help get this franchise back into winning ways six straight winning seasons Where is this franchise at and what has to be accomplished next? Keep winning theresa keep winning and and try to try to punch a ticket into the um into the tournament and and see See where see where we go with that. Um But the only way to do that is to come out tomorrow and have a good practice. Um, i'm not a really Look down the road at where we need to end It's about because the only way you're going to get there is working hard tomorrow And and trying to have a better day tomorrow than you had today and and carrying that on Um having good practices with the bucks with the cardinals. Uh executing in the pre-season games Um, we've got to cut the roster down. That's always a not so fun day for me is to tell You know guys, they can't be here at least on the short go and then they maybe end back on the practice squad Um, but it's the first game, you know getting ready for the for the giants and All right, you got to win that one and move on to the next one and try to win that one move on to the next one That's the only way you're going to get to you know, where you want to be For the offense, what will it take both of your perspectives for them to make a jump? Like the defense did last year and how can you get that started immediately like right now tomorrow or what happened? Uh, I think continuity, you know getting on the same page I think we saw some of that With the players that were out here in this all season because we had some new faces You know, certainly in that mini camp whether it was austin hooper, whether it was chig You know, robert was coming back trailing was dealing with his stuff But getting on the same I thought ryan developed a really cool You know vibe with with chig and with hoop And certainly sway me through the ball to him a lot last year I thought that that progressed really quickly throughout the spring doing the same thing with those receiver I thought nick westbrook had an outstanding spring. I thought des took some steps in the spring Getting derrick back will be will be you know be great for us But continue to build on that continuity Um and stringing plays together Yeah, nothing dad really. I mean, I think that when guys are out there together is when you get the most work if it's Two guys missing this day four guys, you know, so that's that makes it hard And I think the more confident The you see that confidence come through when guys have put a lot of hours and reps You know the old 10,000 hour rule of if you can get those guys out there Together as a group the more you get them out there the more confidence they're going to have in each other And I think that would translate into some some success