Hey, what's going on guys? Patriot Prime here once again with another episode of the SIT rep. And my guest tonight is Nicknack from Nicknack's Plastic Planet. Nicknack, how are you doing tonight, sir? I am doing great, Patriot Prime. How are you doing, buddy? It's great to have you. I'm doing well. Got another winter storm warning coming in just in time for the weekend, as usual. Oh, yeah, we just got hit. I'm in Denver and Colorado, and we just got hit by a foot of snow last night. So I'm right there with you, man. I'm feeling that pain. We were in the 70s yesterday. I got home from work. I'm in shorts and a t-shirt. And today it dropped to the 50s. And then tonight, snow warning or winter storm warning. Yeah, those are the worst, man. Those are the worst.   Add villain water, baby.  Because I know you're not strictly a Transformers guy. So a lot of my guys probably haven't heard about you before. And just lay it all out. Nicknack has a hilarious channel, guys. You guys, if you like my personality, times 10 with him right here. I don't know about that, but I really appreciate it. And thanks for the love. And once again, Jason, thanks so much for having me on. Most importantly, I really do appreciate it. Yeah, my name is Nicknack. I have a channel called Nicknack's Plastic Planet right here on YouTube. And I kind of run the gamut as far as a collecting channel goes. I do focus a lot on Star Wars. That's sort of my number one focus. But I do have an extensive Transformers collection. I collect DC Comic memorabilia. I collect Star Trek. I collect 80s memorabilia. I collect Arcade One Ups. Those get a lot of views on my YouTube channel. It's crazy. But yeah, and I just try to keep things real light. My channel is less of a review channel and more of a collecting vlog.  And but, you know, I love it and I love this hobby and I love everyone that I've met in this hobby. And it's a great community, whether you're talking Star Wars, whether you're talking Transformers, whether you're talking DC Collectibles or Star Trek or whatever. It's just a great online community overall. And yeah, I just really, it's awesome to be a part of it. I've been doing YouTube for about four years now. And just passed a thousand subscribers. My channel has grown slow, but it grows strong. And so, yeah, I have a good time on my channel. But once again, thanks for having me on though. Oh, you are welcome. I've been watching you for quite some time. And like I said earlier, very entertaining. And you have such a great comedy aspect to your channel. And I told Nick Nakawaga. It reminds me of Mystery Science Theater 3000. After a while, you have to tell everybody about Coppabot. I know Coppabot showed up during the whole cop. Yeah, he's right. He's right back there. If you can see him, there's Coppabot. Awesome. Yeah, he's on the charger station. And yeah, I do. Coppabot is sometimes my co-host on the channel. And he has sort of a bad personality. He's a bit of an a-hole. But yeah, he showed up during the whole Coppa scare that all us collector toy channels had about a year ago here on YouTube. Coppa stands for the Child Online Protection Privacy Act, I think. And we all had this scare that the Federal Trade Commission was going to come and basically find every single one of us, $40,000 for allegedly marketing direct advertising to underage children or something. It was a big scruffle, nothing burger in the end. And Coppabot kind of represents that scare that we all went through. He's sort of a metaphor. We all have that great intro going, my channel is not for kids. Yep, that's where that comes from is the Coppa scare of 2019. So yeah, for sure. And what sucked, I think that's when I had just hit my stride. I'm like, yeah, I'm pulling numbers. Oh, they're going to cancel me. Yeah, I felt the same way. I felt the same way, you know, and I was pretty freaked out for a while too. I actually went and watched a guy who did a Lego channel and he had like a million subs and he was freaking out about the whole Coppa thing at the time.  He's a Lego channel. This guy talked to a lawyer and that's what scared me. And then like three weeks later, he was like, yeah, I kind of overreacted. It was really not a big deal. I'm like, dude. So our buddy Larkin here, he's in the chat. He did a good video. He did a lot of research on it too because there was a lot of us that kind of created our channels at the same time and we all befriended each other and kind of look out for each other and he really dug deep for us and kind of realized we're okay. We know our audience. Yeah, yeah, you know, one site, one site kind of got level headed about it.  I'm sure you know, Shardimus Prime. Yeah, he was pretty level headed about it and he like posted the actual Federal Trade Commission documents and when you start reading into that, like I downloaded it, printed it, read it all. I mean, I'm not a lawyer. I took some media, some lawyer, some law classes in college, but I'm not a lawyer. But I read through it. I'm like, I think I'm okay here. I mean, honestly, how many lawyer videos did you watch during that stuff? Oh, God, it was like a sweepstakes for them because I was like, well, they're just going to keep making videos and tell us like to keep worrying about this because they're just going to get more hits. So I thought I was studying for my bar. I was watching so many lawyer videos. Right, right. It was just like, right, right. But anyway, that's where Copobot came from. But now he's just kind of a fun co-host on my channel. So all right, we'll get started with our questions because I know it's late for me. I don't want to keep you too late.  We are going to do, I've got 10 questions for you and then we'll lead on into the audience if they have anything. First five questions. Well, for those of you that don't know, how the Sitrep works is I have five questions for my guest regarding Transformers and then five questions regarding him as a YouTuber. So with question number one, sir, and you're my age, so this answer is usually always the same, what's the appeal of Transformers for you? The appeal of Transformers, you know what?  And you couldn't have convinced me to get into anything else at that point. But I did have some family, you know, because GoBots and Transformers were becoming really popular in 84. I did have some family that would send me, you know, a GoBot or a Transformer for birthday or Christmas and stuff. So I had a couple, but I really wasn't into it until I saw this guy on the shelf at my KB Toy Store. And that is, of course, Generation 1 Grimlock. And, you know, my mind exploded when I saw this guy.   It's like a dinosaur and a frickin' robot because, you know, I was a Star Wars fan.  So this thing really blew my hair back. So this was my first like blush at the world of the Transformers. What really sold me on it, though, was probably like a lot of people our age was Transformers the movie, the 86 film.  But going to see Transformers the movie blew my hair back. It was like the biggest cinematic experience of my young life, I was probably 10 years old, but it was probably the biggest cinematic experience of my young life since seeing Empire Strikes Back. That's how big it was for me. It just, just the amount of lore and the amount of mythology that kind of went into that film and the fact that they anthropomorphized these robots to the point where they were like people, but they were still robots and it really just blew my hair back. And what I also loved about that movie was the fact that it had such, it had such balls.  And, you know, I didn't have, I wasn't really married to those characters. So it wasn't like, I wasn't like really upset about it. I was just concerned about, you know, old Grimlock getting out of their unscathed and he did. And, you know, so that, that alone just like cemented it for me. I'm like, yeah, this is something that I really want to be into. And so, you know, you know, it took a lot to pull me out of the grips of the Star Wars craze as a kid, but Transformers did it. Well, that's me, I told Nick Neck earlier, my office that everybody sees in all my videos. This was half and half. Half of my room was Star Wars when I started. And now you can see Vader up there on the top shelf and the rest of my Star Wars is in that corner behind the bookshelf and everything else is in storage. It's just the Transformers have totally taken over. Now, I never got to see the movie in the theaters. My first experience with the movie was the Marvel graphic novel. Living in Podunk West Virginia. You know, we did, we had one movie theater. We never got anything. And I never really saw the cartoon that much unless I came. It's funny, the house I'm living in right now is my grandparents' house. I would come visit them here in town and that's why I'd see Transformers on WGN Chicago. You know, every afternoon at like five o'clock or whatever. Yeah. So my G1 fiction was Marvel Comics. But still, I had that same shot course. I think Prime died in the comic adaptation.  Right. Right. He died twice. You know, and I love Optimus Prime a lot, but at least in the, at least in the movie in Transformers, the movie Optimus Prime went out like a warrior, man. In the, in the comic, it was so limp. I mean, he, he basically got like tricked into like destroying himself because he lost a video game or something with Megatron as I remember.  That's so 80s, but yeah. I did not know floppy disk could hold that much information. Apparently they can. Oh, so much stuff in the 80s revolved around floppy disks. I remember so many cartoons as the fate of the world is on this disk. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Love it. Yeah. And that disk couldn't hold, that disk couldn't hold a, you know, a copy of Dig Dug.  All right. Well, question number two. Aside from G1, which is always the number one answer. What's your favorite Transformers fiction? That's tough. Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing is to me, Transformers, there is only G1 is Transformers to me. And you know, I don't, I don't, I don't dally and no disrespect to people who do. I know a lot of, you know, 90s kids and 2000 kids grew up with different renditions of the Transformers. And we all have our preferences based off of when we grew up. But you know, I don't dally in Armada or Energon or robots in disguise or any of those. But I do like different variances of G1. There was a great comic book series in the late, early 2000s by Dreamwave comics. It was G1, you know, but it wasn't, it was G1 inspired more than it was G1. That's where they found the Decepticons buried in the ice in Alaska. Yeah, I think so. Even Earth and they crashed. Yeah, the Dreamwave went out of business and then the comic just stopped abruptly and it was horrible. Because then IDW picked up the license after that. But I really enjoyed those Dreamwave Generation 1 inspired comics. I also really do dig the new Netflix stuff, the War for Cybertron, the War for Cybertron trilogy. Here's my Optimus Prime from that. Look at the box art on that, by the way. Oh, that's the Kingdom one. Yeah. That's a great figure.  Like I reviewed this on my channel and I said, guys, I can't open it. It's just so beautiful. You know? I've got three versions of that mold now. I bet you do. I bet you do. It's a beautiful mold. You know, I'm more of a masterpiece guy. And so this scale, this, this, I just, this feels redundant to me being having, you know, having, you know, the MP10 Optimus Prime.  Look at Prime there. Look at, look at, can I get over there? There he is. Look at Prime there. Oh, it's so beautiful, man. So yeah, I mean, we could just keep doing the whole, we could do the rest of the live show just like this and your viewers wouldn't miss a thing, man. They'd probably rather see that than my ugly mug. I don't have any box. Well, I don't know.  I tell you these, these kingdom figures, brother, they are mini masterpiece figures. They are just amazing. What they can do. Oh, yes. There's my fire tox weapon. Quick shout out to fire tox. That is beautiful. That is beautiful. Yeah, go ahead. This is right now my number one figure for the year. Granted, we're only two months in, but that's my number one for the year right now. That is beautiful. I actually ordered the, speaking of cyclonus, I actually just ordered the, I think the X-Transbot's third party that's coming out in August, I think from TF Source. I love TF Source. Not to plug them or anything on your channel, but that's a great website. I'll plug who you want. Yeah, I mean, I'm such a little YouTuber that they wouldn't know, but I love TF Source. So I've got a lot of stuff pre-order from Big Bad Toy Store, and I think that's where pre-orders go to die. I've got like this list of pre-orders and everything was due in February. Tomorrow is the last day of February. I have nothing. I like Big Bad for their variety and they've got a great selection of just all kinds of IPs in there, but it does, their shipping feels really slow to me.  You know? Now, the last thing I got from, I ordered that Titan's Return Scorponaut, getting that Titan's Return Lord. Shit, what was he called? Earthrise Scorponaut. Yeah. Yeah. I had him in three days. That's great. That's great. I don't, maybe it's just the way, maybe it's just where I live. I think they're out of the Midwest, like Minnesota or something, but I don't, for whatever reason, it's like, I think they put mine on like, you know, they strap mine to the Pony Express and the guy has got to stop every, you know, 10 miles to water the horse. I don't know because it feels like when I order from them, it takes a while, but it's all good. It's all good. Yeah, I did. I got that Scorponaut too. That's a great piece. Oh, he's awesome. I'm waiting on the upgrade kits. That's one of the Big Bad Toy Store preorders I have with the giant gun and all the different weapons and accessories. I watched the review of that piece on your channel, man. That was an event. That was great when you reviewed that. Do you see the bloopers with me and Dylan? I mean, that was a review that took forever. Well, yeah. That's Dylan's favorite video.  That's the best. That's the best. It's good shit, man. All right. Number three, do you have a favorite figure or grail? This is a figure you will never let go of. You got to sell your whole collection, but this one's not going anywhere. Oh man. Probably just from a nostalgic standpoint, it would be this Grimlock.  Yeah. And there's just no other reason outside of just pure nostalgia for this figure. This figure's been all through a lot. I mean, this figure took hard, hard playware. Let me see if I can transform without breaking him.  But I want to show you. This is my original. This is when I was a kid. There are actually, I don't know if we can, you guys, you're going to see some cracking all along the top of this vacuum gold, whatever that's called. That's from when I put him in the microwave and when I was a kid.  And I was so horrified. I almost blew up the microwave, destroyed my Grimlock. So yeah, he's been through a lot. And like I said, yeah, this is my original from when I was a kid. And somebody else asks in the chat, why? Why did we put him in the microwave?  Yeah, it was exactly, exactly.  I don't know how, but if I've ever said this or not, I'm sure I have a woman videos. I traded every G1 figure I had in 1991 for a super Nintendo. We all hit that age, man. And then, you know, then it slowly started coming back, but Grimlock was my first large transformer. My very first transformer was Gears. Oh, okay. And my very first transforming robot was a GoBot screw head. He turned into the drill tank. Oh, okay. Okay. I found him in a comic store. They all five years ago, I was like, I got to get him. I don't care how much he is. That was my first transforming robot. Right. It's a big thing in my channel. I do, I deal, I deal a lot with, we talk a lot about nostalgia on this channel.  I really focus on the story behind the collectible. To me, every single collectible in my collection, and I'm sure a lot of people, you know, watching and you yourself can agree with this, but every single collectible I own has a story. Like I just told about Grimlock here. And, you know, even stuff I bought as an adult, everything has a story, man.  And that's, that's what's so great about collecting. Collecting is this tactile bridge between us and our dreams. And that's what I love so much about collecting. And that's kind of what my channel is about, except I kind of do it in sort of a goofball, self-deprecating way. But... Well, it's funny. This figure right here, I bought him. I just happened to go into Walmart one day. My Walmart that never has anything. And they had had the entire wave one of Kingdom except the leader figures. So I bought everything. And when I got this warpath, he was broke in the package, the little pin that they drive through the turret. Yeah. He would, it would flop around. So of course I'm miffed and I was like, well, I can't take him back because there is another transformer collector in this area. I have no idea who it is, but somebody, we're buying them, those out. And there was no way I could take him back. And one of my subscribers got him, Eddie Brennan, saw my video where I just was reaming Hasbro QC and he sent me this one. So this one's fixed. This was a good one. Yeah. And he's from Wales. He sent this from Wales for me. Oh, that's awesome.  And Eddie, here's your other shout out. Thank you so much. Yeah, no, it is. Every collectible has a story and that's what makes them kind of special. I mean, you know, I'm kind of a, I say this a lot on my channel and maybe this is, this is, this is sort of a bad personality trade on my behalf, but I'm kind of a hoarder.  I had, like I said, I got all my stuff, almost all my stuff for my childhood.  You know what I mean? It's like that in that priority order.  So, I wish I'd done that. Of course, I'd have more in just this room filled up, but it would get, you know, I'd get a new wave coming in. I was like, okay, well, I'm replacing this one with that one, but I don't do it as much anymore. My big thing was when I first started YouTube, I would buy stuff just to review and there'd be like, so I don't even like this. So I started kind of reeling it in a little bit. I was like, I don't have to get everything. Right, right, right, right.   It still has to have intrinsic value to me before I'll buy it.  Like, well, I can review it on the channel. So, yeah, you know, so there is that angle.  Is it really? Yep. No, I got to ask you about that after the show, man, because that's fantastic. All right, we are question number four now.  What is your most wanted figure? One that you're still hunting that you're looking for? For transformers, since we're talking bots tonight, I have a number of white whales, I guess. But for transformers, it would be, and I don't think I'll ever own it. I don't think I'll ever get it because that's what a white whale is. You know, you'll never get it. It's got to be generation one Fort Max, Fortress Maximus. Now, I have the re, the Titan's return Fortress Maximus, which is great, but it's not the same as the generation one. When I was going on 13, no, 12, my 12th birthday, I actually asked for that piece from my parents. And it was over $100 back then, $100. And that's in $1987. So get online, type it into an inflation calculator and figure out how much that thing costs in today's dollars. And I wanted that piece. I wanted Fortress Maximus. I was going on my 12th birthday and my mom was kind of leveled with me. And she's like, well, you know, Ryan, that's my real name, by the way, but you know, Ryan, you're not going to be into these things for much longer. You're not going to want toys for much longer. And if you were eight years old, and this was four years ago, we would get it for you on a heartbeat, but you're not going to be into these things much longer.   I don't need Fortress Maximus. So for that birthday, I got like a, I got like a Walkman and I got like, you know, I think I got it's gone. I think I got Bon Jovi slippery win wet on, on, on, on cassette. Great album. But I think it's gone. But it's, I didn't get Fortress Maximus, but you know what? To this day, I still have all my transformers from when I was a kid and I would still have Fort Max. And so I love my mom, but that's the one time I should have been, I should have been a spoiled brat. The one time that was the last on-core figure that Dakar released was on core Fort Max where they reissued him and I grabbed one. Did you really? I did. I almost did, but I didn't make you sick for a second. Yeah, please get it. I want to see it. Please get it. This is awesome. He was looking around like he was looking for it. This is going to be great. Oh, he's so heavy. Oh, be careful. Oh, look at that. Oh, he's so beautiful. Everybody's seeing my West Virginia pants. You're looking great, man. You were looking great. Did the Dakar version come with that, or the Hasbro version come with that big sword? Or is that just from the Dakar version? That's from the reissue. I think the Japanese version may have the big sword. Okay, okay. So yeah, Larkin's Layers says $100 in 1998 is $220 today. Wow. Oh, you're getting the subs now, my friend. I got two of them tonight. Oh, guys, I appreciate it. Thank you so much.  You know, and sometimes my videos like a really spike and hit and do realm and then sometimes I'll get like 100 views on some of them.  And she's like, no, someone will find them. I said, no, we'll just put them on my YouTube channel. No one will see them. You know, it's funny. My buddy Bert the stormtrooper and I, we were talking the other day about, you know, if we do it right, you got to do those cleavage shots. You in the corner with your figure. Yeah, that's what we all need to do.  We all need to do our own impression of Bella's toy chest. But I'm sure she's a wonderful person. I, I, you know, I just, I don't have the wares to shop like she did. Yeah. You know, what I need to do is get on the bench a little more because I am starting to get some, but not in a good way. You and me both. I hate to admit that up until eight years ago, I was a fitness instructor. You know, I left the military got into fitness and stuff and now I ride a desk. Dude, I, I hear you, man. I, I hear you, dude.  This was a couple of years ago.  Like this guy collects transformers. That is so cool. That's, it was funny when I was in Iraq. I met so many other people that were into this and you know, back then, you know, you kind of hid this hobby, right? Now it's like, you know, I'll wear it on my arm. That is badass, dude. I love it. That's where the channel name came from. That makes sense. Dude, that is gorgeous. That is gorgeous. How many hours did that take in the chair? I've never gotten a tattoo before. That was three settings at about five hours of sitting. But it's gorgeous. Well done. Now it was like our 40th birthday thing. My wife and I decided to go get tattoos for our 40th birthday. So she's getting buzzed. She's like freaking biker chicks. So she's getting zapped. Just sitting there like do do do do do. I'm getting zapped. I'm like. All right. Here's our last transformer question. What's your favorite transformer character? This is not a toy. This is a character from any fiction or any media. Yeah, this is controversial. And until, well, maybe, I don't know, until I, until I was on YouTube a number of years ago and I found another YouTuber who I know you know and that's Rodimus Primal. I didn't know I didn't know there was anyone else in the world that loved Rodimus Prime as much as I did. I love Rodimus Prime and there's no shade. I love Optimus Prime too. It's a, it's a, it's a Captain Kirk, Captain Picard argument for me. For me, like this is, this is my, this is also more show and tell here. This is my original Rodimus Prime from when I was a kid. I got this. I was doing a video last night on my Transformers. I kept saying my ninth birthday. Actually, it was my 11th birthday, but I got this for my 11th birthday and you know, he's still original stickers. He was well-played with. I love this figure. But I mean, to me and Transformers, the movie, I mean, this was the Rodimus Prime was the Luke Skywalker character. You know, and, and you know, he had this Luke Skywalker moment with basically Optimus Prime taking the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi and it was just such an amazing use of the mythos. You know, it was the matrix of leadership in that film was basically, was basically like, it was basically like Excalibur and King Arthur, you know, only Hot Rod could open it. And there's a lot of it that way. You're right. Yeah. It was, it was, it was, it was our Thorian legend kind of moment in Transformers, the movie. And I know a lot of people, you know, a lot of people were really disappointed about what happened to Optimus Prime, but you know, he came back. So you got yours. But I mean, I just really loved that moment in the movie.  They're, they're in the deep in the bowels of Unicron, you know, and, and Hot Rod is just kind of doing this like hit and run tactics on, on Galvatron because Galvatron is so massive and powerful.  And Stan Bush starts playing.   I freaking love that moment, man. That's one of my favorite moments in all the movies. You know, and, and he had such a great coronation and such a great story. And I love the fact that you had a character in a, in a kid's cartoon. And you know, I love, I love, I love all the Transformers, but Hot Rod, Hot Rod was prime in particular. He actually had a story arc. You know, he was, he was, you know, he was someone who wasn't meant to have the burden of leadership cast upon him and yet he did and they did that so well because for the movie, they just threw Hot Rod in her face is like, here's this new character. You're going to follow through this whole film. Yeah, yeah, they did. They developed him so good. And this is another figure I highly recommend. This is an amazing one because in robot mode, you can't tell he's a Transformer. Yeah, he's gorgeous. I have him in box over here too. I pretty much buy anything that's G1 Hot Rod is a must buy for me or Rodimus Prime, but you know, and again, it's not that I don't love Optimus Prime too. I do. But you know, for order to have a great character like Rodimus Prime, you had to have Optimus Prime and vice versa. Paul's my boy, man. Paul's my boy. He's, he's one of my subscribers. Yeah. Yeah, Paul's my boy. But yeah, you know, you without, without Rodimus Prime, you don't without Optimus Prime, you don't have Rodimus Prime and you know, and I just, I just absolutely love that character so much. Again, he has so much, like I said, so much of a Luke Skywalker, King Arthur vibe to him. And you know, in reality, it was, it was so accidental because let's face it, that movie was basically just to discontinue the 84 toy line and bring out the 1986 toy line. That's all it was for. Failure back in the day. It was a giant infomercial, but it turned into a cult classic. You know what I mean? Well, it's funny. Like I said earlier, I never saw the movie. In theaters and our local theaters doing this promo where you can rent the theater for up to 20 people for a hundred bucks and you can bring your own movie. And I'm thinking for the 35th anniversary of Transformers the movie this spring or this summer, I'm going to rent my theater out and just throw it up on Facebook. Hey, 20 for Transformer fans. Let's watch this movie on the big screen. You need to do that, man. You need to do that. That would be epic. Yeah. Again, I haven't seen it in the theater. I think a company did have it out for the 30th anniversary a couple of years ago. Events events. Yes. And it was in Roanoke, Virginia, which is about an hour and a half from me and the night I was going to go was this horrible rainstorm that flooded the roadway that was me heading out.  I even had the tickets bought. Yeah. Yeah. That sucks, man.  I thought about doing it. I should have. I just, you know, I just couldn't get my head. Okay, though. Come up to West Virginia. You're not that far.  It's like you and I are sitting in the same room, but I wait to meet some of these guys face to face again. One right. I've been to one convention. Oh, that's great. That's great. I don't, I don't get out a lot.  Why would I ever leave? And I'm lucky. My wife, this is only half my collection here. This is my arcade slash archive room here. And it's pretty much all all collectibles there. And then upstairs, there's one more floor upstairs. That's my premium Star Wars room. So that's where I, you know, I collect hot toys and Sideshow Star Wars and that's all that's displayed up there. So I'm really lucky in that respect. Well, we've decided we have one extra room in this house that we're using for storage. And now that my son is really getting into collecting things and my wife is in the collect, they do pops and Legos and Imagine X and stuff like that. So we're all, I don't know what we'll do with all the stuff we keep in storage, but we're going to turn that room into a collecting room like this for him. Oh, that's great. That's great. That's great. Yeah. My oldest teenage son, he's really into Batman. So he collects Batman. And so I did, I did a Batman video with his room a couple of years ago. And I got a comment in the, in the comment section from the Guinness Book of World Record Holder, Batman collector, like the guy with the biggest collection in the world. And he just said nice collections. That was really cool. Nice. Yeah. That was really cool. All right. Well, that wraps up our Transformers specific questions. Now let's get on to you as a YouTuber.  You know, it was more of, it was a marriage. Of sorts of my interests. So I've been a collector for years and I've been a, I've been collecting crap since 1996. I first started as an adult collector, collecting like a lot of guys, power of the force to Star Wars figures. And then it just grew and grew and grew. And then, you know, by the early 2000s, I was back collecting Transformers and just everything. And so I've always been in my, almost my entire adult life, I've been a collector. And it was just sort of a marriage of sorts. A couple of years ago, after I turned 40, I just kind of decided I needed to do something more unique with my life. I felt like I'd kind of not done enough and I missed very much. I come from a broadcasting background. I majored in broadcasting in college. I had a radio show at one point. I did, I did drive time radio in Boulder, Colorado for about six months and I did, I did traffic reports in Denver for a while. I did traffic reporting in Denver for a while. And then I, and then in my early 20s, I had to reach a decision in my life where I could continue my broadcasting career or I could move out of my parents' basement. And so I opted to move out of my parents' basement and I kind of, I still work in broadcasting in, but in much more of a behind the scenes kind of way that is a little more, has a little more monitor, a little more equity money to it. It is, it is, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to someday get married and everything.  I grew up watching Bob Eubanks and Chuck Warrie and Pat Sajak and Alex Trebek. Those were my heroes growing up or game show hosts. Oh, Bob Barker especially. Yeah. No, for sure. Oh, Barker, baby said to me so many times when I was sick at the house. Oh, God, yes.  I did, I did a, I did some, I did a little bit of stand-up comedy for about two years, doing the comedy circuit here in town, did a comedy. It's a channel a little bit more.  You got such a great delivery. Well, I don't want to say I'm funny.  I missed doing radio. I missed doing these things where I was out in front of people.  And so that's sort of where I started my channel, except I was like, I'm going to take a different approach to this. I'm going to be a little more self-deprecating in my videos. I'm going to be, you know, I don't want to say, one other YouTuber once described me as sort of a parody of review channels. And I don't know if that's accurate or not. It's not, I don't intend to like be malicious or mean towards other YouTubers or anything like that. I don't, I'm not making fun of anybody, but you know, I don't know.  So Curtis, thank you so much. There's actually something that he wants. He saw today that I'll get him now and I'll say it's from you, buddy. Thank you so much. Aren't those super chats great? Oh, it's awesome. It's just really, it gets to you. It's like, okay, I love it. It's just like you're doing something that really means something to these people that they're willing to, you know, yeah, throw you a few bones behind. Yeah, it's great. It's great. Where were we talking? I'm sorry. I droned on too much, man. I know that's fine. That's I don't matter, man. D rail so bad. No, it's all good. Well, we were just talking about why, why I do YouTube, I guess, or why I do action figures reviews. Well, it's funny. I, for me, starting this channel was a dare more or less before I started doing the job I got now. I was a security officer at a casino at a high class resort. So I got to toss rich people out on her ass, which was cool. But guys I worked with, you know, they're all ex military and ex law enforcement. And when we had the night off, our family's sleeping. So we're wide awake because we work night shifts. So we were all into playing playstations and we got into Rainbow Six. It was big co-op game. And one of my friends was like, Hey, let's do Twitch. Let's do a Twitch channel where we'll play games online live.  I'm just I'd rather play solo player all day long. And he says, well, you can attach a YouTube to your Twitch. Like, what am I going to talk about? Well, you know, the plastic robots talk about them. That's great. That's that idea for months until I finally thought, let's do it. Hell, yeah, man. Hell, yeah. All right.  My subscribers, my subscribers for sure. You know, I, you know, I've got some of some of the most awesome subscribe.  They're the ones that are always there. And you know, I don't know, man. It's, it's, you know, it's not like they pay me or anything, but you know, I don't have, I don't do Patreon or anything like that. So there's no monetary expectations, but I just feel like, I just feel like I owe them content on a weekly basis.  I mean, I try to reply as much as I can on mine. And if I do even don't have a reply, like I do the little heart thing. So at least read it. Yeah. I try to reply to almost every comment that comes across my channel. And in fact, like there's like, there's some days where I'll like, can I kind of let my comments slip a little bit and not respond to them for a few days? And then I actually feel guilty about that. So, you know, it's, it's like a source of guilt for me if I don't respond to everybody because I kind of feel like if they're bothering to watch my channel and they're bothering to comment on it, I owe them my response. Exactly. I never want to be one of those where you're never going to hear a reply from me because like you said, the reason I do this is because of you guys. Right. Exactly. I mean, I can understand some of you, the big, big, big YouTubers that get 800 comments, 3000 comments of video. They can't respond to everybody, but I do understand that. But I mean, I certainly don't, you know, I get, you know, 10, 10 responses, 10, 10 comments of video average, maybe a little less. So, but I, so I definitely do try to keep, keep, keep in front of my subscribers. And the only way to do it, jump in. I mean, it's hard. It's doing a YouTube channel is hard. I mean, a lot of people don't say that. All must be easy. Just put your toy down and you're, you're talking hands in front of it. I was like, no, you got to, for me, you have to be different. You have to stand out and it takes a while to build that base up. I don't think, I think I hit my thousand subs right after my first year and I got a big jump. Thanks to Burke, the stormtrooper. Like I said before, we became friends. He gave me a shout out on his channel and I got like 70 some subs, which put me over the end. Then once you get your groove and find out what people like, of course, once again, you're talking about the comments. Listen to the people that watch you.  Why don't you try this way? Or and that's, that's what keeps you going to like I'll get people that say my intros are too long. But 80% of my subscribers like the story that I have that usually leads into the figure. Hey, I was out toy hunting today, found this hid behind some stuff. Right. I've always stuck with that.  I'm sorry. I offended you two people. Right. But I have that like what I do. Yeah. No, exactly.  So you know this way more than I do. But, uh, you know, in my time on YouTube, I was, that was one thing I was kind of worried about that. I was afraid that I'd go on YouTube and I'd read comment sections on channels and I probably was looking at really big channels because, you know, that's, that's what would show up in, in, in my recommendations back then because I really didn't follow a small channels. But, you know, I was, I was so afraid to do YouTube because I was afraid. Oh my God.  I think in the time in the four years I've done YouTube, I've maybe gotten less than a hand less than I could count on one hand of just really nasty comments. The worst part for me when I got started. Was this portion of my name right here would automatically set people off and I would get the SJW comments just hating on me horribly. And I was like, and I almost quit a couple of times. I'm like, no, damn it. I'm not this. I'm not who they say they, I am. I'm going to keep rolling. And once I got established and they realized, okay, this has nothing to do with Washington. This is military. This is the tattoo on my arm. This is me. It laid off. But man, I used to another to Bert. I would always say, me look at these assholes. What they're, that's tough, man. That's, that's, that's, that's tough. That's tough. No, now I'm reading everything. Well, we kind of went into this question number eight. There are thousands of toy reviewers on YouTube. What makes you different from the rest? Well, I kind of touched on that a little bit. You know, again, I don't know if I really review things more so than I just show them off. Every collectible to me is a story. And to me, it's more of a, you know, they're, you know, in a journalistic school of thought, you have the who, what, when, where, and why and how. And to me, it's, it's more of the, it's more of the why as far as, you know, why I bought this, why I own it, why it's special, why it's going to be in my collection. And that's where I really focus on in my collection, in my videos is the why. Everything kind of has to have, whether it's something that's, you know, something that goes back to my childhood, something that, that, that just, you know, tickled me from a, from some sort of, some sort of standpoint. And that's, that's where, where I really focus on stuff. Also, I'm extremely self-deprecating in my humor. I do make fun of myself a lot on my channel.  I think it was boredom and eBay or something like that. You know, yeah.  I don't not, I do throw things away. I don't sell things a lot.  I don't know. I don't know. I, I just, I take this, I, I think this is a really absurd, absurd, absurd hobby, you know. And not that they're not, not a bad way, but it just is, it's just we're grown men buying toys. And you know, and I think we're the first generation to do that. You know, we're 40, I'm 45. I couldn't imagine my father owning all of this when he was 45. You know what I mean? No, I know this name. My dad looks at this room a lot of guys. No, exactly. No, exactly.  You know, my dad's like, my, my dad said to be at one point in my twenties, like, why do you waste your money on all this plastic crap? Hey, these are always called dolls by my dad. Well, that's old. We play with these dolls. Yeah. So I guess I didn't have it as bad, but of course you can guess where my dad come from. Yeah. Yeah. My dad, my dad wasn't a vet, but he was, he was an old school, old school, Sears retail manager and he, he has some old school philosophies. So I understand that a little bit. So. All right. Where was I? Okay. You kind of touched on this too. What's your thoughts about the transformer social community, YouTube, Facebook, and do you have any special shout outs? Of course, I think you already hit on our community. We got a great community.  I mean, any more, you mentioned Star Wars and it's all the negative, the, the firing of people, the ruining of the trilogy and all that stuff like, yeah, but anytime I think of Star Wars, it's the first three and it's what I grew up on. And yeah. Yeah. You know, yeah, that is the one area right now where transformers is really kind of a safe haven almost because there isn't that, you know, there is Star Wars isn't, it's not a right left ideological battle in Star Wars. I mean, sorry, in transformers versus Star Wars. And so, you know, Decepticons. Boom. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, Star Wars is definitely, it's, it's a victim of its own success is what it is. You know, anything that is just as massively successful on that scale, that sort of thing is going to happen. But the issue Star Wars faced is they threw too much at you at once and just started cramming it down your throat. I mean, it was so awesome when Force Awakens came out to see Star Wars on the shelves again. I was like, oh, this is, you know, haven't seen this since 1999 or I guess it's when the prequels came out. Yeah. Okay. Now they got Star Wars vitamins, Star Wars this and wait, here's a new Star Wars movie that's overlapping this Star Wars movie. Oh, here's a just too much at once. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I've always been, I'm kind of a Lucas purist, although I really have enjoyed the Mandalorian a great deal, but I'm more of a Lucas purist to me. And you know, I loved the Star Wars prequels, but you know, I'm definitely, I was of the generation, obviously of the original trilogy. So that's obviously my first war. But I enjoyed the prequels as a nice backstory to the originals. And then I hated the sequels to me in my head cannon. They don't even count. So, you know, I liked Force Awakens, but then it just went too weird. Well, they ruined Luke Skywalker, man. I want you to know when they ruined Luke Skywalker, I was out. So, you know, you know, it's, it's an old hat. You know, I've had this discussion on a number of my buddies YouTube channels that are more Star Wars exclusive many, many times. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's old hat. But yeah, I'm definitely a episode one through six in Mandalorian Star Wars fan. If you had to, if you had to, you know, nail me down to something, but as far as like transformers and like the Transformers fan community goes, which is a great fan community. You know, I don't, I don't, I'm not really active in that community per se, but I do have my favorite YouTubers. I do watch a lot of Transformers YouTubers, including you. But yes, but I love, I love, I love Rodimus Primal a great deal. I know you know him. I've never met him, but he just seems like a cool dude and he's sort of my spirit animal because both him and I appreciate Rodimus here. So, so I do love Rodimus Primal a lot. I used to call myself jokingly sort of self, self promotion, self promotion wise and jokingly. I used to call myself the funniest action figure reviewer on YouTuber. And then I started watching Fuse Transformer reviews.  I love that dude. I watch, I watch his videos all the time.  I love that a lot. Yeah. A lot of jump cuts, but he makes it work, man.  So yeah, those would definitely be my two try shout outs and and then of course you got it. You got it. I do love the basics. I'm sure you watch the basics all the time. Oh yeah. McFeely, he's got a treating voice when talking about Transformers. Yeah, he is great, man. He is great. So those are like my three Transformers channels outside of yours that I watch. And yeah, just good stuff, man. Just great community. And sometimes, you know, sometimes it is nice because like I said, because because of what's going on with Star Wars and I love Star Wars, I'll always love Star Wars. It is nice to sometimes hide in the Transformer universe a little bit because you know, it's just, it's just nicer. It's just a little nicer over here. I'm just saying. I'm just saying I'm going to give Curtis some that's a area the Clone Wars cartoon. Now I liked the prequels, but when this Clone Wars cartoon came out and I started watching that gave me a whole new appreciation for the prequels, especially when they brought Darth Maul back because I love Darth Maul and I thought he was such a waste of a character. He should have been filling throughout all three. I don't disagree with that sentiment. I, you know, I don't and I love Christopher Lee as an actor.  The man was the man was Dracula for Christ's sake, but, but I don't disagree with that sentiment. Darth Maul. They should have developed Darth Maul further and I love, I love the Clone Wars series as well. I should have mentioned that. I was kind of thinking more live action, but yeah. Anything and everything. Yeah, I do love the Clone Wars a lot. I was a little, I didn't, I wasn't as big of a fan on Rebels and the only reason I didn't love Rebels is just because of the way that they treated the Empire in that series because they kind of treated Stormtroopers and the Empire like Keystone cops too much.  Everyone starts off super kitty-fied. They're like, hey, it's a cartoon. The six to 10 year olds are watching this about episode eight. They're like, no, mom and dad have kicked the kids out there watching this because if you think Rebels was very kitty-fied all of a sudden they're introducing the, what was he? The Inquisitor. Yeah. He was voiced by Jason Isaacs, my favorite bad guy from the Patriot. Yeah. And when he came in with that double-bladed lightsaber and beheaded both those officers, I'm like, okay, this show just went up a notch. I didn't realize the voice actor was the same dude from the Patriot. Now it makes total sense. Like I can hear that voice in my head. Like, yeah, it's the bad dude from the Patriot. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's good stuff. No, you know, the Rebels, Rebels had a few like, I wasn't a fan of the series overall, but, but it had some of the best Star Wars moments in it, like, like the scene where they had, like the episode where they, I think it was called Twin Sons when Ezra goes to Tatooine to seek out Obi-Wan Kenobi. And Obi-Wan and Darth Maul had that fight. They had that fight and it literally like is set up like a Samurai movie. It's a Samurai fight. It's two seconds and done. It's, it's, but it's not anti-climatic. It's just beautifully done. It's just like, I love that scene so much. And you know, what I loved most about that scene, I'm a character guy. I'm a story guy.   So I could talk about that all night. All right. Well, this is our last YouTube question. And then we'll go into the audience. Do you have any channel goals for yourself? And where can our viewers find you? This is your time to plug your channel. Oh, nice, man. Nice. Well, thank you. I think I've already done that a bunch, but you know, like you can find me at, you can find me at Nick Max Plastic Planet right here on YouTube. I also have a Facebook page, but, but we go to the channel first. I really would love the subs. Just subscribe, subscribers, just the like blood of a channel. It just helps the channel just kicks it up in the, in the YouTube algorithm a little bit. And that's what, that's what we all need as YouTubers. You know, I just reached a thousand subs this year. It took me a long time, but that's okay, man. That's okay. I don't, I don't have any specific goals going forward. I just want to keep making good content for people. And I just want to be a destination where people feel like they're hanging out with a friend. And that's really my goal on YouTube is to give people the kind of content where they feel like they're hanging out with a friend and we're talking collectibles overall. And, you know, not everybody, one thing I have learned about YouTube and I was, I've always been very blessed to have a circle of friends who were into collecting that I know, you know, from high school and college and we all hang out together. Haven't hang out much because of COVID, but, you know, in a non-pandemic world, we do hang out together and we go on, we go on action figure runs. We, we've done that for 20 years going back, you know, to the 90s. I'm very blessed that I've had a group of friends like that, but one thing I've learned through YouTube is not everyone has that. And, and so I feel blessed that a lot of people look to me as that friend and, and that I, I can be friends and what's amazing about YouTube and what is so cool about YouTube is I meet people like you in West Virginia. I'm in Colorado, but not, not just that. I've met people from, I've met friends from Australia, from Holland, from, from London, from Canada, all over the world because we just have this common passion for plastic shit. And it's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. See, we need to go to Washington because we do more world relations thanks to plastic crap. Yeah. Anything else? Exactly. It is, it's, it's, it's a glue that bonds us. You know, our, our, we, we all have differences. We're all human beings. We all have differences. We all have different, you know, we all come from different socioeconomic backgrounds. We all have different political differences.  These tactile pieces of plastic, you know, it's just, it's, it's a bridge. It's a bridgeway to our dreams and it's a bridgeway to our friendships and it's a beautiful thing. I'm not kind of waxing poetic a little bit on you. Hey man, that's perfect because you hit the nail on the head and it's also like you're back in school because when you're hopping on YouTube, it's like, hey, look what I found today. Let me tell you about it. Right. It is. It's like we're all back in third grade again.  You know, I don't know if you ever had a Skag's. We had Skag's. It's, it's, it's a weird sounding drug store. It kind of sounds like, it kind of sounds like a bad case of BD, but I had an Eckerd. Eckerd. I've heard of Eckerd. I've heard of Eckerd. Yeah. Skag's to get to Skag's. Yeah. Skag's is out of business, but I always thought that was just a weird sounding name. I said, oh man, my crotch. It just might be a bad case of the Skag's, but I know it was a drug store growing up. So now my, my big one, my, my places of shop around here back in the day was, of course, we had Hex, Roses, Hiddles.  That's where I got my Sunstreaker back there. Oh, nice. I've never heard of those places, man. See, you're, you're in a way different part of the country than I am though. Yeah. You know, I grew up with KB Toys, Toys or Us. Those were, those are the big ones we had, but, but, you know, Skag's and Osco Drug and Kmart.  All right. Well, that's pretty much it for my 10 questions. We're, we've been at this for an hour. So good, good job. Does anybody have anything they want to ask? We'll throw it to the wolves for a bit. Just be nice though. I'm sensitive. Be nice. I'm sensitive.  I like this one. Here we go. Exactly. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.  Yeah. Who doesn't want Warpath, man? You know, it's, it's, it's, it is, it's, it's, it's, it's the bridge that bonds us, man. It's, it's all good stuff. It's all good stuff.  I do. Well, not, not too much. Like, like I do, I do.  You know, I've got only got a thousand subs, so that's, that's a lot, but I don't really like doing them in the fact that it brings in like I'm an action figure guy. I'm not a gamer. I'm not a hardcore gamer, but it'll bring in these gamers and they're just like, and they're, they're always like, they always think they're the smartest guy in the room. They'll always be like, you know, for the price you paid for that Arcade 1UP for $40, you could have bought an emulator and a Raspberry Pi and put 4,000 games on it. So you're kind of stupid, but so I don't mod my games in that respect, but I did like my Pac-Man machine over here. There's my lunchbox. I did put some, uh, that, that is a modded decal on it, that, that front, the kick plate there is, is modded, is a modded decal. And so it's the whole front side of it. So that's, that's something I bought off, uh, of course, my, I went right to the VHS, uh, Dinobots, SOS, Dinobots. Yeah, I forgot to show this on, this was also from my childhood. See, I'm a hoarder. Yeah. SOS Dinobots from FHE. Look at that. This is from my childhood as well. So good stuff.   That is awesome. That is awesome. That is awesome. Little V. What's your favorite one up game that I own? Maybe, you know, it kind of goes back and forth. I am been really enjoying.  I'm about to lose. Rodimus there. I'm really enjoying my super Pac-Man machine that you see right there. It's just got a lot of different games on it. It's got Gallagher, Galaxian. It's got Pac-Land and super Pac-Man and a regular Pac-Man on. I play that one a lot. I also played my final fight one. I've got a final fight cab back there. And that's all Capcom games. It's got Arcade, Ghosts and Goblins. It's got 1944, the Loopmaster on it and it's got, it's got Strider on it. Strider's a little weird, but that's a good cab too. So those would definitely be my two favorites right now. I do have a Space Invaders cab and the only two games it came with was Space Invaders in Color and Space Invaders in Black and White, but it looks awesome. That's why I own it. It just looks cool. I remember the first time I saw Space Invaders was in Myrtle Beach. Way back when, and there was just a line of people playing that thing. You know, I heard that there's the, there's the, the, the urban legends of people in like the country of Japan running out of quarters or their equivalent of a quarter back in 1978 when it came out. I don't know if that's true or not, but there's those stories. Do I have a favorite Seth Rogen movie? Trying to think who that is. No. He's not one of my favorites. I liked him in the interview. That's the, that's the, the one with the apocalypse hit.  I think it's, this is the end. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. That's a good movie. Yeah.   Sorry, but yeah, I didn't see that one. It's a good movie. I think it was on Netflix a while ago. It's a great movie.   They got so worried about North Korea that they pulled it from the theaters, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I don't know what you're talking about now. Yeah. That's, that's right. That's right. Do we have a favorite underrated IP that we wish we had more merch to buy from? Oh, I can answer that. There's a few things. I would really like, I actually talked about this on my own YouTube channel on my own live stream last week on Knack Knack Live with my buddies. I really wish that I could get a 1-6 scale. Again, it's a robot, a 1-6 scale Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. I, there is, I think there's been some custom mods of that, but I would love a real like really nice like hot toys quality, Johnny 5 action figure. Now, these aren't as much action figures, but I wish some company, I know Jada toys make so many of these Hollywood rides. I would love some 1980s road warrior vehicles. That would be cool. Which also I think would be a fantastic transformer. Cross-over. Absolutely. Transformers apocalypse. That would be cool. That would be cool. Yeah, I love I do. One of the other thing I've really been collecting heavy on lately. It's been just 80s 80s kind of 80s toys like I bought some neck of gremlins. I bought some some back to the future. I love the back to the future. NECA stuff's pretty good. I've been buying a ton of Godzilla lately.   Oh, they do they do admit.  All of those are cool. Those are really cool.  Dude, that is beautiful. I was so happy to get this guy. I mean the box was beat up, but I mean that gave me more of an excuse to get to figure out. Right, right. That's in that awesome. Yeah, I had the same experience. I bought this off eBay recently and the box was so thumbed. I actually took the figure out but I picked up this. This is Dukes of Hazard Luke Duke me go figure. Oh my God, I remember those. Yeah, because I just restored this piece right here. I got this off eBay and I spent like 50 bucks for the me go car and you know some people might consider the sacrilege but I cleaned it up. I mean it was covered in dirt. I cleaned it up. I got some repro stickers for it and then of course I had to get bow and loot the me go figures for the for it and yeah, just absolutely gorgeous piece. So that's that's a crown jewel that I've picked up recently. It's definitely an underrated 80s IP that that I would I would love to collect more of. This is a question for you. I'm not sure what he's talking about though. Do you know all three different polled polled trunes polled trunes polled trunes. I don't know what he's referring to. I'm sorry polled trunes. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I'd love to answer that. I'm not sure what he's referring to. Oh yeah, my buddy fire talks here. He has a upgrade set. You can turn the roller drone into Johnny five or an evil Johnny five. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I love that movie. I the second one was stupid, but I love the first one man first short circus of Voltron Voltron Voltron. So what was the question version? Oh, he was talking about pallid drones. I think I do have behind me. I do have all the original Panache Place Voltron pilots from the original Voltron Princess Elora Keith Lance Pidge and Hunk. So I do have I do have there for my childhood. I do have my original Panache Place Voltron pilots or pallid drones. But yeah, no cool stuff. Good stuff. I have one toy up here that survived through my childhood. See if you recall one of these the Flash Gordon Starship. Oh, that's beautiful from is that diecast. Yes. That is beautiful. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I love the little ting ting ting. That's awesome.  But this was one of my favorites as a kid played with this all the time. I was there for my parents last year and I saw it laying downstairs in the basement on a shelf. I'm like yoink. It's coming. That's great. That's great. I have a I think I have a Buck Rogers Starship somewhere to a little tiny diecast Buck Rogers Starship somewhere. Now, I think you reviewed these but when I found this online I about ship myself to because this year robot terrified me as a kid million from the black hole. Yeah, this figure. Yeah, didn't you love it when Disney used to make really edgy shit?  Right. Right. You know, my I actually didn't. I'm just kind of funny, but that was one of those movies that I actually didn't see until I was an adult. But I love the black hole as a kid because I had the reader on the read along record. So I actually never saw the movie as a kid, but I had to read along record. There are so many are talking about neck of figures, Barbarella figures. Barbarella. Did you see where they're going Conan figures from an Arnold movie? I did. Those are also Conan. Those are cool. Those are cool. Jane Fonda and Barbarella. She was at that time in the late 60s. She was the most beautiful woman on earth, man. Geez. Well, let's see. It is 11 o'clock here. So I'm late for you, man. I've got to get myself to bed. This is usually when I start my live stream actually about about now. Well, before we end, once again, thank you so much for hopping on. I appreciate you for having me man. No, no, this was a blast. We clicked. I knew we would click. I messaged you that. I said, I just have a feeling we're going. Oh, wait. Kato. Yeah, I forgot. Kato is a good friend of mine. And he sent me the text where they've released these defenders of the earth figures. They got the new Ming and flash. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. Nekka is awesome toys, but you got to heat them up in some hot water before you can even move them around. Yeah, I know. I just bought an E.T. about six months ago and broke the arms right off of it. I've got all of my terminators. I just need Sarah Connor and all right terminators. You know what I mean? No, I know what you mean. I know what you mean.  It pisses me off. I put it on stands. Everything just falls over. Dude, that's what we need. A Marvel Legends circuit breaker. Do you remember circuit breaker from the course from the Marvel Marvel comics? Yeah, it's hot. She was like was smoking hot. She was all Diana from V.  She like blame the Transformers and shockwave. Yeah, that's right. It was like it was early on in the in the comic series wasn't it was like issue number six. Okay, there you go.  I almost brought them out. I wish I would have because I was like thinking I'd do a little show and tell you maybe if I ever come back on what we'll talk about.  Yeah, I would love to I'd love to be on but no, I've got I've got a big stack of a Marvel Transformer comics the originals from when I was kid. In fact, I was watching one of your videos today and you had the DynoBots vs. Trypticon hung up in your room. I don't know if you still have that hung up in your room over there and my issue number three. Yeah, that's my first experience with the Transformers right there. That is awesome.  That was so out of left field, but I love Marvel so much better than the cartoon as far as story wise because Marvel went everywhere. They went weird places. If it wasn't for Marvel, that's what fleshed out the pretenders. Yeah, I love the pretenders. Yeah, but it's just based on the toys and I didn't have any background to those characters. Right. No, I remember there was a there was one issue of the Marvel comics.  But yeah, it was crazy. Like walking the plank. Yeah, you can capture blaster. Yeah, you remember. Yeah, it's good shit, man.  All right, we're going to start talking again for another hour. I'm sorry. We will do this again for sure. Bring it out. Yeah. All right. Well, once again, thank you so much for hopping on you in the chat. Thank you so much for watching. Check out Nick next planet. Nick next plastic planet. There's a description in the link of this video. I know Kato has hit it up many times in the chat. Very entertaining channel. He covers everything. You never know what you're going to get on the plastic plant. So that's what I want to get. I want to thank you all for watching. This is Patriot Prime signing out. Now we do that odd pause as I end the broadcast.


Russia recruits another 500,000 people into the army. The Kremlin has warned that increasing the supply of U.S. arms to Ukraine would aggravate the devastating 10-month war ignited by Russia's invasion, as Russia's defense minister has called for expanding Moscow's military by at least 500,000 troops. Speaking during a meeting with his top military brass, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would use lessons learned in the conflict to develop our armed forces and strengthen the capability of our troops. He said special emphasis would go to developing nuclear forces, which he described as the main guarantee of Russian sovereignty. President Putin also said the Russian military's new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile would enter service shortly. Defense minister Sergei Shoigo said that the beefed-up Russian military will include 695,000 volunteer contract soldiers, 520,000 of whom would be recruited by the end of 2023. The Russian military had about 400,000 contract soldiers as part of its one million-member military before the fighting in Ukraine began. All Russian men, ages 18 to 27, are obliged to serve in the military for one year, but many use college deferment and health exemptions to avoid the draft. Minister Shoigo said that the draft age range would be changed from 21 to 30 years old, and the recruits would be offered a choice of serving for one year as draftees or signing a contract with the military as volunteers. The Kremlin's plans marked a return to the Soviet-era military structure, which Russia abandoned during recent reforms that saw the creation of smaller units. Some Russian military experts have argued the more compact units intended for use in local conflicts were undermanned and under-equipped for a massive conflict like the action in Ukraine.


So, since everyone's here and I think it's 4.15 without further ado, I'll start the session. So, hi everyone, welcome. I'm Ulfa Maria. I currently work as the head of the Science Unit and Data Analyst for Wildlife Conservation Society in the Nature Program. And so, welcome to the Ecology and Environmental Sciences session. Today we will have Tim Ofei, Sam Sonoff from Faculty of Geography, Lomonasov, Moscow State University, and then we have Liam Daniel Bailey from EZWay Berlin. So for all the audiences here, you're all welcome to interact by leaving messages in the corresponding channel in Slack. If you don't know yet, you can type in the channel and search for hashtag talk, underscore ecology underscore environment, and then just enter and then you can post any question there, so I'll be checking. And you're also welcome to put your question in the Q&A and then vote for the questions as well. And then just as a reminder, each talk will have 20-minute slot with 15-minute speaking and the rest for questions. And so, due to time limitations, we can only take at maximum four questions per speaker. Hello, everyone. First I will put the link to the package into our chat. So here's the link and I would like to begin with some short demonstration of the final output that can be achieved using the package. So GRWAT package is being developed for automatic analysis and separation of river hydrograph. GRWAT stands for Ground Water. It's an old name of the old program that was written for the purpose. And the river hydrograph is one of the most important characteristics. So river discharge. And one of the crucial tasks when analyzing hydrograph is separation of its curve into quick flow and base flow components and revealing the genesis of each quick flow event. Here on the screen we can see the report produced by GRWAT package. It consists of several main areas which first describe the shape of the river hydrograph for different years. It also contains multiple plots that bring the light to the interanimal changes of the main hydrograph characteristics such as anal ground water runoff, soil flow runoff, number of days of thaws, and a month of minimal monthly discharge during the summer. Mainly the package automates the routine operations that raise during the analysis of river hydrograph and provides the specialist with the useful tool to compare the changes in river hydrograph and climatic changes to provide a statistical test that will how significant these changes are. The third area of the report is long term changes which are calculated by subdivision of the anal discharge values into two periods separated by some selected year or calculated by statistical tests. And the final area is the table that provides the summer information about several dozens of characteristics calculated for river discharge and related variables. Here we can see the name of the variable, the change year which is revealed by PT tests and various statistics which indicate if the changes are significant between two periods, one calculated before change year and one calculated after change year. So such report is calculated just from river discharge data and from companion meteorological data. And now I would like to proceed with the underlying functions that are contained in the package to bring some light on its inner functionality. So I will proceed with my presentation, I hope that it will, yes, I see it's here. So I will talk about GerWat package which was developed for automated. My presentation will mainly follow the main vignette content in the package and we have included some testing data inside the package and for this case study I will use some standard packages commonly applied in special data analysis such as SF, MAPU and also TIDiverse for general manipulations and plotting of the data. So the package is loaded just right here. The testing data contained in the package is spazgore gorge on protva river. So we begin with loading this data and we can see that it's just a very simple data frame containing the data of the observation and the value of river discharge on this gorge. GerWat is not sensible to the format of the data so having the date column or having the multiple columns contained in the day, month and year are both perfect for further analysis. One of the common problems is joining the river data and meteorological data which is not always available at the gorge. So if we have to collect the meteorological data such as temperature and precipitation from external sources we have to use special join. For special joining we must have some region be it buffer zone or basin of the gorge. Now for demonstrational purposes we also have basin which is related to this river gorge. Data is also included into the package and can be downloaded from using such operation here. Usually it's quite correct to buffer the initial special data to obtain meteorological variables because some auto correlation exists within some distance. We have the geofunction which can buffer polygonal or point data using some optimal projection. So it behaves pretty similar in polar or equatorial regions. And in our further analysis we will use these red zones to extract real analysis data and join it with hydrological time series. There are multiple modern reanalysis data sets available in the web. One of the latest is Aero5 reanalysis which was recently extended to some earlier years. We have some reanalysis that is included inside the package and it has a daily resolution. So it was resampled from our observations. And it can be downloaded using this link to test the functionality of the package. These files are pretty large so we do not include them into the distribution. It covers the East European territory of Russia but later we hope to extend its coverage and also to add some functions to add Aero5 joining to the data. This is the standard workflow for using the reanalysis. We have some specialized function, a juror redran, which reads the precipitation temperature data sets and then automatically joins it to the hydrological data using the polygonal buffer we created earlier. So the resultant data set looks like here. So there is a date, discharge, temperature and precipitation for each day. Now this is the map of the special configuration. These small dots are the centers of the cells of reanalysis data and these large black dots are those which were selected for joining the hydrological data. So changing the polygon we will obtain different reanalysis data here. The juror word contains some functions to fill the gaps in the data. This can be done using the maximum size of empty data in days or using automatically calculated autocorrelation function. So if we set the smallest possible autocorrelation to 0.7 then we can calculate the number of days during which these autocorrelation is correct. And then juror word will fill the gaps in the data which does not exceed this value using the simple linear interpolation. Next let's proceed to the most interesting part of the package. There are some functions to reveal quick flow and base flow in the data and also to reveal some genetic components. First the function get base flow simply extracts the base flow component which is mapped in red color here. Sorry for acrylic, this is a location automatically localized labels. The standard method is line-holic method and we can simply just plot the results using ggplot graphics. GR base flow can be parameterized here is example of increasing the number of iterations and smoothing parameter. And there are also multiple other methods of calculation, including Bowdoin, Maxwell-Jakeman and other methods. And here we can see that the results of calculations are different and each of those can be parameterized by its own set of parameters. Advanced separation includes revealing their genetic components. Genetic components show the genesis of each quick flow event. And to define if the quick flow was influenced by a rain or snow melting event, we must include some external meteorological data. And that's why we were joining it at earlier stages. GR help params function includes some help to reveal the meaning of multiple parameters used for advanced separation.  And this list is obtained using GR get params function. These parameters are different for plain and mountainous regions. And they can be set using just accessing the list elements. After the separation parameters are set, we can proceed with separation of the hydrograph. This is simply done by GR separate function. And after the hydrograph is separated, it can be summarized in a set of various variables. So the interanial changes of the hydrograph and summarize its behavior during each year of observation, each year of observation. And plot and plot and testing functions are dedicated to graphical and numerical representation of different behavior that can be seen in multi-year changes of hydrograph. And graphical functions are mainly based on ggplot graphics. So this is an example of using the ggplot set function, which is dedicated to automatic plotting of results of separation. On this plot, we can see the four types of discharge. The main is ground and also rain, thaw, and seasonal, which is the main thaw discharge, which usually appears during the spring. Interanial change variables are computed using our summarize function, and their meaning can be explained using GR help verse function. GR test verse performed a statistical testing, which mainly aims at revealing some statistically significant interanial trend changes. Long term changes are calculated using some characteristic year. And these variables can be plotted using dedicated functions, which allow you to visualize them in such way. So every plot contains the initial time series. It contains also the trend line, which is solid when the trend is significant and dashed when the trend is not significant. And also the change year, which is revealed using the PT test. And resulting reports can be generated using the GR report function. That's all of here the last slide. I hope that I need that. I need some update my presentation here. So generally, it's all generally it's all the package is not released on the ground so it's at the stage of active development but we will be very gladful to receive any feedback on its functionality or some problems during it. And I hope that it will be available for hydrologists and all who work with hydrological data and their analysis. Right. Thank you, Timothy. Can we ask, can we take questions now. Yes, yes. Cool. So the first question is from Shimela is a bit digging. The question is what is the buffer distance limitation and why. Generally buffer distance limitation relates to special auto correlation. We don't have some specialized functions to reveal the the most reliable buffer buffer and distance, but generally it can be calculated by using some analysis points and analyzing how the correlation decreases with increasing the distance. So you set some threshold value, for example, 0.8 and see at which distance the actual correlation between real analysis points decrease below this value. So this will be your maximum buffer distance. Thank you. Now there's one from Michael Stortzel. The straight base flow lines look really strange. Have you have any evidence that the amount of stream flow components is correctly calculated. For example, is a top separation. So, okay, can you can you repeat the question. So the question is about trend lines. The straight base flow lines. So the amount. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I understand. So this is one of the approaches which was historically actively used in Russian hydrological school. And we know that it's it is very questionable, questionable. So, in fact, the package will be extended with multiple functions that reveal the trend of the ground flow between different events. And such straight line is not always reliable. And in many cases, some smoothing curve which is closer to base flow separation like in line holic algorithm is better suited to feed the ground flow. Thank you team of a one more question. Do all methodological approach bring the same result. If so, is it possible to be used I assume as verification approach approach. So I need to specify the question. So, is it about different quick flow discharge extraction algorithms, or some other. What are we first to page 18 to page 18. Okay, maybe. So on page 18 we see the internal change variables, which are calculated for each year. So, here the hydrograph is a daily data and internal change and change variables are yearly data. So it's summarized and some aggregated values are calculated for separations based on this data. The main degree of freedom in method in applying different methodological approaches to parameterize the separation to use different algorithms for extraction of ground component. And to, I think that's also concerning to verification. We don't have such data, but we can compare the actual separation with the methodological data, which can be obtained from weather stations. Thank you very much. Have a question, but I think we ran out of time. So, thank you to Moffay for your talk. We will talk later in the channel as well. So we will go now to Liam. So Liam, please have a go. Hi, everyone. My name is Liam Bailey. I'm a postdoc at the Lightness Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin. And today I'm going to be talking to you about agent based modeling in R with a particular focus on the R6 package and object oriented programming. So what is agent based modeling. Agent based modeling is a simulation technique. We simulate the interaction of different agents, or you could say individuals, and from the simulation we're then able to observe more complex emergent properties of the system that we're studying. And these emergent properties are often difficult, if not impossible to simulate individually. So agent based modeling is great for really complicated or complex systems. It's used across a wide range of fields, including to model things like traffic behavior disease outbreaks. And in my area of research to better understand complex animal systems. So, to give a bit more of an example of an agent based model, let's imagine we have a population of animals. Each one of the individuals in our population would be considered an agent and they have some attributes like an agent and a sex. And we then simulate these agents interacting with one another. And the way the agents interact can be informed by our biological knowledge what we've observed in the wild. And then after we run our simulation, we're able to observe some more complex emergent properties, say a change in population size over time. So you might be thinking that agent based modeling is useful for work that you do. And so how would you actually get started on this? Well, if you look at the number of different agent based modeling tools out there, there's really a huge variety. This gift just shows a list of a few of the possibilities that's listed on Wikipedia, but it's by no means exhaustive. And many of the softwares that are available are free and open source. So it really makes the decision quite hard, which one you want to use. Some of the major platforms that are used in the biological sciences at least are NetLogo, Swarm and Repass. All of these are really powerful tools for agent based modeling. But one thing they all have in common is that they don't use R. NetLogo has its own NetLogo language, while Swarm uses Java and Repass can be in both Java and C++. Now, of course, working in a language other than R isn't inherently bad. It's not problematic in itself. But as many of you might know, researchers are often taught R during their bachelor or undergraduate. So this is a language that they're more familiar with. And if they need to do agent based modeling using these type of tools, then we might end up with a workflow that looks something like this. We start out doing some data wrangling, get some data on the animals or the system that you're studying and have to clean it and organize it. And we might use Deeply or a data table. After this, you might want to fit some statistical models to better understand how your agents might interact. And you could do, say, mixed effects models with spam or GAMs using MTCV. And after this point, you then need to move into your agent based modeling tool. So you move out of R into whatever language it is that's appropriate for the tool that you're using. And in this tool, you'll then need to do things like documentation and unit testing. At some point, you would have some results. And at this point, many people who are familiar with R will probably jump back into R and plot their results, visualize their results using something like ggplot. And so this requirement to move from a familiar language into a less familiar one might provide a bit of a hurdle and it may discourage researchers who could benefit from using agent based modeling. And I really think that's a bit of a shame because it's quite a powerful tool. So this is where R6 comes in. R6 is a package available on Cran, which allows us to program using encapsulated object oriented programming in R. And this system in encapsulated object oriented programming is already available in Java, C++ and NetLogo. And that's likely why these are systems that have been used previously for agent based modeling. The package is created by Winston Chang and he actually presented R6 for the first time at the USAR conference in Brussels in 2017. If you're interested in learning a bit more about the package, I would really recommend that you find his talk on YouTube and it gives a really good introduction to the package and how it works. R6 is a real foundational package of the art community. It has over 350 reverse dependencies, including major packages like deep player and shiny. So how would we use this? How does it work and how would we use it in agent based modeling? So within encapsulated object oriented programming, each object that we create has attributes contained within it. So these are characteristics of the object. So this might be things like its sex or its age if we look at this object down the bottom here. And it also contains methods. These are things that the object can do. So in our animal object here it could grow old, its age could increase, or it could have a baby. It could create a new animal. Writing R6 is really simple. It has quite a simple syntax and this was intentional to improve upon the native object oriented system of reference classes that's native within R. For the work that we've done, we found that it's quite fast, at least fast enough for our purposes. And so all of these factors means that it's been quite good for the work that we've wanted to do. Because R6 is an R package, it means that we can use it with other R development tools that you might already be familiar with. So for example, we can build our model within an R Studio project. We can document our model using R oxygen as a version seven, and we can unit test everything using something like test that. So all of these features means that using R6 is both great conceptually and practically for agent based modeling. And we found it to be a really great system for the work that we've been doing. And hopefully that means if people can begin to use R6 for agent based models that we can move from a workflow like this to one that looks more like this where people can stay within a language that they're familiar with through the whole process. So it's all good and well to talk about this in theory, but I also wanted to give you a bit of a practical example of agent based modeling with R6. Before I go into some live coding, I just want to point out that everything that I'm going to present now is available on our public repo on GitHub. And that's abm R6. You can see the link down the bottom of the slide. So if you're interested to learn more, please feel free to check out our repo. So the example I'm going to talk about today is the pep and moth. This is a classic evolutionary example. We're dealing with a species that can occur as a both a white moth here on the right and a black moth here on the left. And in its natural environment, like that in the top of this cartoon here, the pep and moth occurs on trees that have quite light colored bark. And so in these circumstances, you can observe many more white moths than black moths. But during the Industrial Revolution, naturalists began to notice that trees were becoming darker due to all the pollution. And on these dark trees, black moths were becoming much more frequent than white moths. And we now know that this process is driven by natural selection on a white tree, a white moth is better camouflaged. And so it is safe from predators. A predator like this bird is much more likely to see a black moth. And in contrast on a black tree, a white moth will be much more obvious and much more likely to be eaten by bird. So we wanted to build an agent based model that could recreate this natural phenomenon that has been observed. And so to do this, we built a model using our six that followed three simple rules. Firstly, we made it that moths tend to do moths will do better when their color matches that of the tree in which they live. Secondly, we allowed new moths to have a different color to that of their parents based on a given mutation rate that we define in the model. And finally, we made it that the world will change color at a given frequency. So in other words, the trees will change their bark from white to black and back to white again. And this mimics the phenomenon of industrialization and then eventually the removal of many of the pollutants that were causing the darkening of the bark. And hopefully with this model, we can then recreate the patterns of frequency, the change in the frequency of black and white moths within the system. So here is our studio project in which we built our agent based model. We've built this as an our package and we did this intentionally because we think it best demonstrates a lot of the power of working with our six, including things like documentation and unit testing. We have a read me which includes a basic example that you can work through so please feel free to check that out. Now to start off with, we're just going to run a simulation and then I'll show you how the simulation works and what's going on inside. We can open up the documentation here. This is an R6 class that has been fully documented using our oxygen. I'm not going to talk through all of the attributes and methods here, but I'll just move down to the examples and we'll run the first example. So this will be a simulation. We're going to initialize a simulation. We can initialize it using this dollar sign new and this simulation will run for 200 years. It will have, let's say 100 moths just to make it run a bit quicker. And we've defined here the mutation rate. So the probability that a moth will be a different color to its parents and the period. This is the frequency with which the world will change color. So we've now initialized our simulation object. We now want to run it and to show you what's working on the inside. I'm going to pause the simulation after 50 years and then we'll be able to look at the internal workings of the simulation. So we're now inside the simulation objects and we can look at some of the elements within there. Firstly, we can look at the world object, which is within the simulation. And this is itself an R6 class and this has an attribute color, which is whether the tree is black or white, and it has a number of other methods and attributes. Now, of course, we can see this here, but a more convenient way to do this would be to look at the help documentation for our world object. As you can see, it has the color attribute, it has the period attribute, the frequency with which it will change color, and it has a time attribute. This just allows us to progress the simulation over time. I won't go into all the methods, but you can see that each one of the methods of the object has its own section of documentation with its own example. And then if we go down to the very bottom, all of the examples are grouped together here. So that's the world that the moths are living in. And then the next thing we can look at is the moths themselves. We have a population and this population contains a number of individuals. And we see here that it's a list of 100 different moths. We can look then at the help documentation for the moths. Here we go here. And again, we can see that the moths have a number of attributes that are of interest. They have a color, black and white, and a mutation rate. So this is how the model is structured.  So I'll continue running the simulation now. We can get to the end and we can look at the result. We can use the plot method, which is a method for the simulation. And we now have our first result from our agent-based model. So in this plot, we have the frequency of black. I'll just maximize this here. We've got the frequency of black here on the y-axis. So one is black, zero is white. And we have time on the x-axis. The gray line in the back is the color of the world. So the world begins as black. It then becomes white. It changes back to black. And it fluctuates like this over the full-time period of the simulation. And then the blue line shows the frequency of black in our moths, the population of 100 moths that we've simulated. And you'll notice that it follows the pattern that I described earlier, where when the world is black, the frequency of black moths is higher. And when the world is white, the frequency of white moths tends to be higher. And it's important to point out here that we didn't explicitly include any relationship between the moth coloration and the time. So the pattern that we're seeing here is simply a function of these simple rules that I described earlier on when I introduced the simulation. So one great thing about working with an agent-based model is that we can take our simulation and we can run it with slightly different parameters and see how that will affect our emergent properties. So here, let's say, again, we'll just run with 100 moths. And we've now made our mutation rate lower. So the probability that a moth will be a different color to that of its parents has been reduced. If we run this and plot it, you'll see we now get quite a different result where at some point, all of the moths become white and it takes a long time before they move back to having black moths in the population. And this is simply a function of a lower mutation rate. And so you can see the power of agent-based models allows us to tinker with the system and see how it affects the emergent properties. So that's all from me for today. Thank you very much for listening. As I said, this code is available online on our GitHub repo. So please feel free to check it out if you want to learn more. And I'm happy to take some questions. Thank you. Your example is on moths. Is there any examples on big mammals? Yes. So that's actually what I'm working on now for my research. So we work with long-term data on hyenas, a population in Tanzania. And we've built an agent-based model that can recreate the complex social system of that species because it has a very unusual hierarchy with an alpha female and male dispersal and a whole lot of quite unusual elements. So that's in the works at the moment. We're working on a paper with that. So hopefully that will be available for people soon. Cool. One more question. So the variables that you use for the agent-based model, this one is for you use the mutation rate of the moths, for example. How can you adjust for other variables? Like, for example, the hyenas one, you have this complex interaction. How do you include that within the model? Yeah. So I mean, of course, you can continue adding attributes that you can tweak the normal way you would approach this. If you had, say, like here, I showed that we changed the mutation rate and it changes the properties. And then you might have multiple variables that you want to change and see how they change the properties. And the common approach there would do something like a sensitivity analysis where basically you would take each variable, you would vary it by a certain amount, and then you would quantify how that affects the emergent property in the end. And then you can see, well, which of these variables is most important? Which of them is influencing our population the most? And you get some idea of what the system is most sensitive to. And this is actually quite useful because it could, assuming your model is well-designed and well-parameterized, it could give you some idea of how the natural system works. If you understand that, say, fluctuating survival of young has a bigger impact on population size then maybe you would focus more on making sure young's survival in the wild should be increased. So these are the kind of things you can do to look at that when you have multiple variables. One last question. If you are working with a species that has very limited data, population-wise, how do you account for that? Because I think that's the most situation we found in the conservation. Thanks. Yeah, so we're lucky with the hyenas. We work on a population. We have 25, 26 years of data now, and it's very well-observed. So our model that we're working on at the moment is almost all parameterized on things that we've directly observed. If you don't have this, it becomes a bit more tricky. There's a few ways you could approach it. One thing you could do is use what's called a pattern-oriented modeling approach. So basically you have some way that you expect the simulation to look at the end. Say it should have a certain sex ratio or a certain age ratio. And then you could put in some value of reproduction rate, that you think might be applicable for your species. And then you can check to see whether the simulation in the end recreates how things should be in the wild. So that way you may not have these detailed demographic rates, but you do have some idea that there should be an equal sex ratio, say. And then if you use a particular demographic rate and it doesn't reproduce that characteristic, you know, that that's not a good choice. And you could tweak the variables in that way. But it's definitely more complex when you have less data. So we kind of, our example that we are working on now is like the best case scenario. And it becomes more complex when you're dealing with data species where the data is scarce. 20 years of data is rich for... Yeah, and for a large mammal, it's very good. It's one of the best in the world, basically. So we're... But hopefully we can show, you know, best case scenario when people can tweak from there to work out how to deal with their system. Yeah, cool. I'll let my friends know. Thank you very much. If you have further questions and things to discuss, just go to the channel. And I'll see you around in the other talks.


What do you think about the next trend, I think without a doubt the next trend will be chatbots, I mean the capabilities of AI systems to really understand human language and to be able to really substitute customer representatives, customer support representatives or in general human beings. We are already almost there, we are on the brink of being capable to do that but we are not there yet. That will be the next big thing. I think not at all, I think almost you could say the opposite. I mean we are only seeing the top of the iceberg of what we will see in one year, two years, three years because there are now a lot of potential capabilities of artificial intelligence systems that are in a very immature state and we have not yet seen the real applications in the industry, in real companies but we will in the next few years. I'm not objective there because I'm part of the paradigm of the organizers but I really think it's an amazing event because we really can see on one hand the biggest experts, the ones that bring the state of the art sharing space, sharing concerns and discussing things with most of the biggest companies in Spain that are telling to them what the real problems are. So we can have a leveling of the state of the art on one side and the real industry necessities on the other hand and only be that Spain is a space when that can be possible. Thank you.


Nuclear safety experts from all over the world met this month to discuss progress made since the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station accident and ways to further strengthen nuclear safety. Over 10 years ago, a tsunami struck eastern Japan and caused the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. Since the accident, countries that operate nuclear power plants have implemented the IAEA Action Plan on nuclear safety to strengthen nuclear safety in key areas, including increased resistance to earthquakes, higher independence of regulators, and stronger emergency preparedness. Throughout the week, delegates at the IAEA conference shared experiences and achievements and discussed plans for the next 10 years. Returning from the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, the IAEA Director General highlighted the role of nuclear energy in tackling climate change and reiterated that safety must remain the priority. In fact, the basic and most important message that I could have for you today is that nuclear safety always comes and will come first. Representatives from more than 68 countries and organizations came to the IAEA headquarters in Vienna for the conference. I would like to acknowledge and highly appreciate the IAEA's pivotal role in promoting nuclear safety. Nuclear safety is a prerequisite for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and it is encouraging to see the substantial improvement in nuclear safety worldwide in the past 10 years. I've observed the many benefits from international organizations collaborating and working together to assist, understand, learn lessons and take action. This is something that must continue. After a successful week of exchanges and discussions on nuclear safety, the conference president presented a call for actions. The president of the conference has prepared a document with a call for actions in a number of areas which is going to be shared with the membership. So I think it was a good conference, yes.