This is a graph of mortality versus coffee consumption, suggesting coffee drinkers live longer than non-coffee drinkers. This may be because coffee may have beneficial effects on inflammation, lung function, insulin sensitivity, and depression. This may be in part because of a class of polyphenol phytonutrients found in coffee beans called chlorogenic acids, proven to have favorable effects with studies like these, where they just give it a lone in pill form and can show beneficial effects, such as acute blood pressure lowering activity, dropping the top and bottom blood pressure numbers within hours of consumption. OK, so which coffee has the most? We know how to choose the reddest tomato, the deepest orange sweet potato, since many of the plant pigments are the antioxidants themselves. But how do you choose the healthiest coffee? More than 100 coffees were tested, and different coffees had different caffeine levels, and the chlorogenic acid levels varied by more than 30-fold. As a consequence, coffee selection may have a large influence on the potential health potential of coffee intake. So all those studies that show that one cup of coffee does this or that, what does that even mean when coffee can vary so greatly? Interestingly, the major contributor to the wide range was the coffee purchased from Starbucks, which had an extremely low chlorogenic acid content, averaging 10 times lower than the others. Maybe it's because they roast their beans too dark. The more you roast, the less there is. They appear to be partially destroyed by roasting. Caffeine is pretty stable, but a dark roast may wipe out nearly 90% of the chlorogenic acid content of the beans. The difference between a medium light roast and a medium roast were not enough, though, to make a difference in total antioxidant status in people's bloodstream after drinking them, and they both give about the same boost. Other factors such as how you prepare it or decaffeination don't appear to have a major effect. What about adding milk? Long-time fans may remember this ancient video, where the addition of milk was shown to prevent the protective effects of tea on artery function. Drink black tea, and you get a significant improvement in vascular function within hours, whereas an addition of milk completely blunted the effects of the tea. Here's the big boost in artery function you get drinking tea, but drink the same amount of tea with milk, and it's like you never drank the tea at all. They think it's the casein to blame one of the milk proteins binding up the T-photoneutrients. Bottom line, this finding that the tea-induced improvement in vascular function is completely attenuated after addition of milk may have broad implications on the mode of tea preparation and consumption. In other words, maybe we should not add milk to tea, or put cream on our berries. It appears to have the same effect on berry-photoneutrients, or chocolate. Check this out. Eat milk chocolate, and nothing much happens to the antioxidant power of your bloodstream, but eat dark chocolate and get a nice spike within an hour of consumption. Yeah, but is that just because the milk in milk chocolate crowds out some of the antioxidant-rich cocoa? Milk chocolate may only be like 20% cocoa, whereas a good dark chocolate may be like 70% or more cocoa solids. No, it's not just that. Here's how much of this cocoa phytonutrient you get into your bloodstream eating dark chocolate compared to milk chocolate, but eat that same amount of dark chocolate with a glass of milk, and it blocks about half. Okay, that's cocoa beans. What about coffee beans? When milk was added to the coffee in like a test tube, antioxidant activity decreased by more than half with just a splash of milk, and down like 95% in like latte or something with lots of milk. Okay, but what happens in a test tube doesn't necessarily happen in a person. I mean, you don't know until you put it to the test. And indeed, over the course of a day, significantly fewer chlorogenic acids made it into people's bloodstream drinking coffee with milk compared to black, cutting absorption by more than half. What about soy milk? In a test tube, coffee phytonutrients do appear to bind not only the dairy proteins, but also egg and soy proteins. You can see how they did this like computer modeling, showing how these coffee compounds can dock inside the nooks and crannies of dairy, egg white, and soy proteins. But what happens in a test tube or computer simulation doesn't necessarily happen in a person? Eggs haven't been put to the test, so you don't know if having omelettes with your black coffee could impair absorption, and neither has soy milk. Until now. Yeah, either way, soy milk has some inherent benefits over cow's milk, but does it have the same nutrient-blocking effects? And the answer is no. No significant difference in the absorption of coffee phytonutrients drinking coffee black or with soy milk. What seemed to be happening is that the soy proteins do initially bind the coffee compounds up in the small intestine, but then your good bacteria can release them so they can be absorbed down in the lower intestine. So considering the reversible nature of binding, as opposed to the dairy proteins, it seems not to be as relevant as to whether or not you add soy milk.


Hi, I'm Zor. Welcome to Unizor Education. Well, we were considering similarity in three-dimensional space in the previous lecture. So I would like to spend some time solving a couple of problems. Problems are really very simple. We will crack them in no time. And as always, let me remind you that this lecture is part of the course of Advanced Mathematics presented on Unizor.com. And that's the website I suggest you to watch this lecture from. Okay, so the problems. First problem, prove that all cubes are similar to each other. Okay, so if you have a small cube and you have a larger cube, they are similar. All cubes are similar to each other. How can it be proven? Well, let's just think about what is similarity. By definition, two objects are called similar if there is some kind of a scaling which converts one into another which is either another or maybe some other which is congruent to that another. So this is A and this is B. So I have to find such a scaling which is defined by center and the factor that A is converted, is transformed to A' which is congruent to B. This is A and this is B. That's what basically our similarity is defined how. So, to prove the similarity, we have to find the point, the center and the factor of this scaling. Now, the point is any and the factor is if this is A and this is B, then the factor is B over A. Now what happens if I use this factor and any center of scaling, let's say here, X. Well, each point of this cube should be somehow extended if I will be able to draw it properly which obviously this is not proper. My artistic talents are not really that great, something like this. So this is this side, this is this side, something like this. That's this one. So anyway, we are building this cube. It will be something like this. So this would be transformed into this. Now, if this is A, this would be F times A. But since F is equal to B over A, this is B. So now we have this cube which has a side B and every side is B obviously. And this cube and these are obviously congruent to each other. The congruence is usually the ability to transform one into another. So if you have two cubes of the same length of the edge, how can they transform one into another? Well, actually it's very simple. First you pick a particular vertex in one and move it to this one. Then you align the plane where it belongs to, like a base of this cube for instance. If it's a little bit tilted you have to position it. Then the whole base can be aligned by rotating within that plane around this point. And when the base is aligned everything else will be aligned as well. Okay, so that's the simple thing. And the most important is the factor, not the center. Because I could use any center and with another center of scaling I will produce another cube with the size of the edge B. And all of these cubes are congruent to the one which we need. So it's not dependent on the center, it depends only on the factor. The factor should be chosen correctly. And the factor is in this case ratio between the edges, the lengths of the edges. Okay, next, very, very similar. You have to prove that two tetrahedrons are similar to each other. Now tetrahedrons, I'm talking about the regular tetrahedron which is something like this. Where all sides are the same. So every side, and there are four of them, one as a base and three as side faces of this pyramid, every one of them is equilateral triangle. That's what regular tetrahedron is. And now we can take another one which is maybe positioned somehow differently with all edges equal to B. Exactly the same thing. Choose factor equal to ratio of the lengths of the edges. Take any center of scaling and basically scale this tetrahedron into the one which will have A times F, which is equal to B, lengths of each edge. And once you have two regular tetrahedrons with the same size of the edge, they can be transformed one on the top of another. So that means they are congruent. And again the process is very simple. So first we align the vertex, then we adjust the base, the base plane, then we rotate within the base plane to have these triangles coincide and that would be the end of it. Next is again very similar. So I wanted actually to show different shapes which are congruent to each other. So the third one is the sphere. So if you have a small sphere and a big sphere, they are always similar to each other. Now again the way how to do it, how to prove the similarity, if this radius is capital R and this radius is lowercase r, we just have a ratio equals the ratio between the radiuses. You can use center here, although you can use actually any center, but it's easier if I will have it here. And using the scaling with this factor, I will transform every point which is on the radius lowercase r into something which is f times lowercase r, which is R, capital R, and that would be a sphere like this. And these are two spheres of the same radius, even if it doesn't look like that on my drawing, but they are the same radius and obviously two spheres of the same radius are congruent because all you need to do is just to move one center into another and everything else will be in place. So these are three very very simple things where I have proven that certain very regular figures with the same number of edges or the same shape, so we have either cubes where all edges are the same and all angles are the same, we have regular tetrahedrons which have all faces, equilateral triangles and spheres which basically is determined by the radius. So these are all groups of figures which are similar within each group. Okay, now let's use something else, let's talk about volume of similar figures. Here is the problem. Well, let me first give you, it's kind of a homestyle description and then I will abstract it into more mathematical language. So the homestyle is if you have, let's say, an empty glass and you fill it with, let's say, bowls of certain diameter. Now there is certain amount of space within that glass taken by these bowls and there is certain amount of space which is free so you can pour some water and it will be certain amount of water in that glass. Now what if you will replace these bowls within this glass? These are all bowls with the bowls of smaller diameter and then again pour some water. Will it be more water in the glass with smaller bowls actually? Yeah, smaller bowls or more or less. So what's the answer to this question? What kind of scenario leaves more free space, let's say, for the water if you fill it up with big bowls or small bowls. Now let me transfer this particular problem into mathematical language. I would say the following. Now consider you have, let's say, a cube and this cube is filled, well not filled, but we will inscribe into this cube a sphere which will touch every something like this. It's inscribed into each face of this cube. So basically the diameter of the sphere is equal to the edge of the cube. So again, we have certain amount taken by this sphere and certain amount around it which is free. Now instead of this sphere, we will take the one which has, let's say, one-enth of its diameter. And we will take many spheres of this diameter and we will fill it up the same way. Now for instance, n is equal to 2. Then that means that I will have two bowls across each edge and four bowls, it's something like this. And then four bowls on the next level, something like this. So it will be eight bowls, right? Two bowls across each side. Well, they're supposed to touch each other of course. So now the question is we have taken certain amount of space by these bowls and certain amount of space is left free and what's greater amount of free space here or there or any other end, what happens in this case? Well, let's just think about this. If this is your diameter of the bowl, you have n bowls which can fit along this edge, right? If before you had this diameter, which means edge is equal to diameter, now the diameter is one-enth of that. So you will have n bowls here. So on each layer you will have n square bowls, right? How many layers do you have? Well, again, n because it's n here, n here, n here, right? So you have n times n times n. So you have n cube different bowls. So you have n cube bowls. Okay, that's fine. Now, what about the volume of each bowl? Well, if the size is one-enth, remember that the volume is proportional when we are talking about similar objects. The volume is proportional to the third power of the scaling factor. So what's the scaling factor from here to here? Well, obviously, n, right? I said this is one-enth of this radius. I have to multiply the radius or diameter of this by n to get this one. So my scaling factor spheres are always similar to each other. So there is a scaling between this and this. Scaling factor is f equals to 1n. Now, the volume factor, the volume would be equal to the result of the scaling. That's why v2 is equal to factor to the third degree times the original volume. So original volume with this diameter is obviously 1 to the n cube of this volume, right? Since the factor is n. But the number of our bowls is n cube. So each one is 1n to the third power of the volume of this one. But there are n to the third power of these bowls, of these spheres. So as a result, if you multiply these two, we will have exactly the same volume of the original sphere. So no matter how many smaller and smaller bowls you fit into, you accurately fit.  I'm presuming that we are doing it geometrically correctly, layer by layer by layer, n square by n square by n square. So if you do this, then the volume which is occupied by these n to the power of 3n cube of smaller bowls is exactly the same as one big bowl. Which means that the free space will also be the same. So no matter big bowls you put into this glass or small bowls, whatever the amount is left for the water will be the same. Provided this done accurately, etc. Alright, so that was the problem with filling up certain reservoir with smaller or bigger objects. Now let me tell you this. If you will make this problem even more realistic, let's say you have some kind of a box, let's say. You can fill it up with big stones and you can fill it up with, let's say, sand. Now there is some kind of a notion that sand actually fills it up better than stones. But that's not true. I mean, yes, with certain amount of abstraction we can prove that stones are regular obviously. In practical life it cannot be ideal. But if you do it with bowls, with spheres and accurately put it in, then the amount of free space will be exactly the same. But that was something which you might ask a child what exactly is the difference in the amount of free water. Alright, problem number five. Okay, it also can have a practical kind of implementation. Let's say you're in a bar and you're drinking a martini. And this is a martini glass. Now you are with a partner and she is drinking from the same martini glass, but she is asking the barman to fill it up only half height. So that's what she has. And you have full glass of martini. Well, question is how much less she will drink? Well, let's think about it. This cone from this half down is obviously similar to this one. And to prove the similarity is very easy. You just have this as a center and two as the factor. And this cone will grow into this one, right? Because every line on this circle will take the corresponding place on this circle. So the factor is two. Now the volume as we know has the factor of F to the third degree, right? So if this volume is V, and the factor is two from here to here, or reverse factor is one half, if you wish, then the volume of this is one half to the power of three, which is one eighth. So, I mean, it sounds like, well, fill up only half, that it's like half. But no, it's not half, it's really one eighth of martini, which she will take. So that's what's important. You are significantly reducing the amount if this is a cone. Now, if it's not a cone, if it's a glass like this, arithmetic is not working. Because this is a cylinder and half of this, although a cylinder as well, but these two cylinders are not similar to each other. The cones, half of a cone is. Because there is no, if you take a center, for instance, I know where. Here, for instance, and you will, well, stretch it by what factor? Like two, for instance. Well, then this cylinder will be converted into the cylinder of twice as high, which is something like this. And twice as big a circle, not like this. So it will be fat cylinder, right? If you will take this bottom half and use the factor of two in scaling, you will have from here this, not this cylinder. So in this case, half a cone is similar to the full cone, but half of a cylinder is not. So that's a big difference. All right, and the last one, which is kind of related to this counter example with the cylinder which I just made, question is if you have two right rectangular prisms, under what circumstances these are similar to each other? Well, let's just think about it. The right rectangular prism is basically defined by three parameters. Two parameters define the rectangle at the base, and the third parameter defines the height. And they're all different, obviously. Now, in this case, you have different lengths. Now, if we want to scale this into this, and the length of each segment is multiplied by the same factor of scaling f, then c prime is equal to c times f, b prime is equal to b times f, and a prime should be equal to a times f. Only in this case, we can have this particular similarity. Or if you wish, forget about f, but this can be expressed differently. a over a prime is equal to b over b prime is equal to c over c prime. If this is the case, then we can choose factor f equals to this, and then every center of scaling will do, as long as we will use this particular factor of scaling to convert this into this. So that's the answer, basically. This is the criteria for two right rectangular prisms to be similar to each other. And that completes this very small set of problems. I do suggest you to try actually to repeat the whole logic just for yourself in any case. Obviously, the problems are on unizord.com in the comments for this lecture. So thanks very much and good luck.


What's going on my beautiful lovely people? Thank you guys for coming to another top five facts of the day number three Let's get right into it number five When Ed Sheeran's childhood friend Amy Wedge couldn't afford to pay for a mortgage Ed Sheeran let her co-ride thinking out loud So she could get paid for it The song has been streamed more than half a billion times Spotify alone and went three times platinum in the UK number four Jellyfish or jellies as scientists call them are not fish. They have no brain no heart and no bones number three In order for it to be hot enough to cook an egg on the floor. It has to be 158 degrees Fahrenheit or 70 degrees Celsius number two Komodo dragons can devour five pounds of meat in less than a minute any extra fat that the E is stored in their tails number one Two Canadian teams accidentally and illegally crossed the US Canadian border while searching for Pokemon Border patrol detained them while contacting their mother and the kids were released without any charges That is it for today's video. Hopefully you guys did enjoy it Thank you so much for watching if you guys did remember to smack that like button and subscribe if you haven't already Let us know what you guys want to see next. I'll see you guys next time


So many of you know of the recent events that are happening in the world or more in Europe specifically in France. It was a big shock for a lot of people and often times when something catastrophic like this happens, especially since done by people, we start to question whether we can have an influence there, if we can change something and often times we feel like we can. We feel powerless and insignificant, but we tend to forget that that experience that whatever that person did, that it was still done by a human being, it was still done by a human person. If we had been in his shoes, if we had had the same experience, grew up in the same environment, grew up with the same teachings, whatever he experienced, probably we would have made the same decision. We all have our weaknesses, we all have our our difficulties, our challenges, circumstances that mauled us into who we are and luckily most of us probably who are watching this video, we had good parents or good house or good education and even so not everyone, but then we are looking to the bright side of life, but sometimes even ourselves, we have dark sides and dark days. I'm not trying to justify whatever that person did, not at all, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm not saying that we're all good and everything is good, but when we think about ourselves and our ability to make a change in this world, it's a lot connected with realizing that we are all connected and as I said, we're all in the same boat, we all share the same experiences, whatever the person went through, he had probably on a very big level this disillusionment, this disconnection, this separation, but we all have that sense of separation in our lives. We all have that lack of feeling of lack of purpose where we want to where we want to have a purpose and sometimes it's in that moment it's so easy to take a purpose which is bad, which is not real, which is not true, which is a negative purpose and still be happy about it. You know, if it's a suicide mission, if it's presented as a purpose and I have a lack of purpose, it might just feel right for that person in that moment, although it's totally not, but when we look at our own experience again, we also have those emotions. We also have those doubts. Where I feel that our lives as individuals and as a community is very important and very significant is in the fact that since we are all in the same boat, we all have a universal human being experience, those problems that I face in my life, if I don't solve it on a personal level, then I will not be able to help others in that difficulty. If I am not able to solve it on my level and on the level of my community, then other people might get hurt or other people might take wrong decisions, bad decisions. So in my experience, it's just so important that we focus on our own evolution, that we face the dark side of our experience, that we transform it, that we become better, that we inspire not only ourselves, but in that way we inspire others. And I feel that definitely has a chance to change this world. Since everything is so connected, especially in this modern day, we don't really always know what influence we have over other people.  Maybe a person who would become a potential terrorist might hear that and that might be all he needed, or maybe, you know, there's a random conversation in the street, you might have the person who's about to do something really bad, and you can change his life without even knowing. So that the fact that we don't know what specific influence we have over other people, we have to recognize that. We have to recognize that we are important, we are connected.  Others will have an easier time to do that, too. Others will see at least an example. Necessarily have to go to the heart of terrorism, or the darkness, and try to fix it there. If my hands are going to be dirty, and I'm going to try to fix something, I'm just going to make it dirty, too. First of all, it's most important to clean our own hands, and if you're inspired to do something specifically about that, if you have a genuine passion about it, then yes, I would say you have to do something about it, but we're not all meant to solve the biggest problems of the world, but we can solve so much by solving our personal experience, which is actually a universal experience. The more we will evolve, the more we will transform, the better we will become, the more this world people will become better, just as a natural outcome. So if you find yourself feeling desperate, you find yourself feeling insignificant, don't. Just remember that whatever you go through, others are also going through that, and for some people it can have devastating effects if they don't solve it. It's our responsibility, it's our importance to solve that in our own lives, to share it with others, to live a good life. To show a good example, and that can just make so much difference. So I really want to encourage you to do that. As a very quick side note, just since an Aikido instructor and our channel is related to Aikido, to those who are practicing Aikido, I would like to say that remember that Aikido is about that. Osensi really became driven by Aikido after World War II, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he realized that we are going to something really bad, we can destroy ourselves, and we need something new, we need a fresh new perspective, and that's how he presented Aikido. That's why he evolved Aikido into what it's supposed to be. But if we will, as spoken in the previous videos, if we're gonna fight between each other, if we're gonna try to make Aikido in this best ultimate fighter, I kick ass martial art, this is not gonna help this world situation. You have to, we have to grow out of it. And Aikido has that ground for that, and we just have to tap into it and really realize what Aikido is meant to be and live it. And that might actually also help this crapped up situation that sometimes we are facing.  Remember whatever you're going through, others are going through as well, and if you solve it in your life, that might just change so much. Thank you.


Jimmy K. here, Metal Voice. Look at this. The Metal Voice shirts are now on sale. Just go to the video description to find out on how you can purchase one. Metal! Welcome to the Metal Voice. Today on the show, Alan, who do we have? Aldo Nova. Hi there. Hey, incredible. The Life and Times of Annie Gage, the exciting new rock opera by Aldo Nova. Alan, since 2008, can you believe that? Oh. 12 years, I wasn't... And now I'm writing the sort of libretto and stuff like that. And last night, I was working on it, and I added a new character, and that put everything together. So last night, it was finished finally, you know what I mean? So it was really an emotional moment after 12 years. And it wasn't just the music. It's because I'm writing the whole story. So it's just like when I finally hit that last character that I added in, just put everything together. And it was it, and everything fit. It was like actually a real rock opera, so it was great. And again, like, I haven't tased yet to buy a Samus. He has all these different singers he writes for. You're doing all the voices for all the parts. Exactly. Have you heard any of it? Yeah, for sure, yeah. We heard a little bit, yeah. We heard a little bit. I mean, to me, it's like Prague. It's like a Prague album.  And that's what kind of, to me, that's the direction you're heading in, or it's you're in. I mean, it's got super rock songs. It's got like techno songs. It's got a 40-piece orchestra with a voice. It's got a heavy duty rock song, you know? I mean, there's a Haility Diary, which is heavy. There's Krawl, which is almost synth pop. There's a King of the Sea. It's like 40-piece orchestra with just my voice. It's got, when I was saying that, there's the five-song demo that I sent you. It's got, when I was saying, done with super heavy riff. Yeah. There's a, you know, say a little prayer, which has got gospel and rock and rap, so it's a mix of everything. So every song is different, you know? But you know what? Saying that, everything sounds like you. Like, you know, you have a distinct style, goes back right from, right from the very beginning. Oh, there we go. It's like a vinyl, eh? Oh, there we go. A vinyl. There we go. Look at that hats and guy. You know what's amazing? Aldo, I'm just gonna just change here. Look how young you are here. I can't even believe how young you are. Oh, I mean, yeah. Look at this. Yeah, actually haven't changed that much. Look at that. Who's that young guy? Yeah, yeah, you have the reissue because they don't have that in a re-album. I do have the reissue. You're right, I do. Because, and that record sounds like crappy or remastered one.  I mean, the sleeve credits are bad. It's just the Rock Kennedy issue is like, do not buy. Try to get like something on eBay or whatever because something that was original mastering by Bob Lundey who masters all my stuff. I mean, the Bob album, like the first album actually sounded like a ton of bricks, but this Rock Kennedy issue is like, stay away from it. It's like really not good. But I mean, this album, when it came out, it was huge. This was on the radio every day.  You know what I mean? Actually, Ball and Chain. Ball and Chain during my divorce I called it Balls and Pain and then it's over.  Fooling yourself. I mean, there's just one hit after another. This was your debut album. Fooling yourself.  I mean, you know, that album is like not considered like with the Boston albums and all the, like the high fidelity from REOs. It's like, you know, considered like a classic.  No, I mean, you can't go into a club without seeing the cover band playing that song. So then, you know, that's something that lasted. And you know, I got back into, I did, I did all the reboot album on 2.0 Wait a second. Here we are. Here we are. Oh, there it is. There it is. So 2.0, when it was, it was like a reboot. And that was creativity in another sense. It may not have been like original writing, but that to arrange those songs and make them sound new. Again, that was a lot of work. But I knew that 2.0 was just a stepping stone to putting out my engage album. And when I was, when I was just 2.0, I got excited about music again. I got excited about playing guitar. I got excited about composing and doing arranging, mixing and stuff like that. And I hadn't, for a long time, I hadn't picked up a guitar. And I hadn't, you know, I just thought it's complete interest in music. You know, I was learning how to program, learning how to mix, doing all the technical side of it. But I mean, as far as like playing. So when I did 2.0, that actually gave me a heart out playing music again. I mean, to put it in other ways. So that was it. Now, you know, some people always come to me and I'm at the in-laws or something like that. And if I'm on fantasy, like the first album, and I realized from hearing it that that was really revolutionary. And it sounds amazing even today. I mean, it's bombastic. I mean, the sound is incredible. You know what I loved about that song? And I think what, and I'm sure you all know this, it took New Wave and it took Hard Rock and it just came together. And that's why it sounds so great because it's got those, the keyboards of the New Wave era at the time and Hard Rock. It's like April Wine meets, I don't know, men without hats.  Well, you brought it upfront, Hard Rock with upfront keyboards.  That record that, when I did Fantasy before Fantasy, I was doing New Wave, my Gary New Wave because this guy hired me to be like his ghost writer. He was like, had a record deal and didn't know how to sing, didn't know how to play. So he came to me in my club days and he said, do you know how to sing them right? And I said, yeah. So he like gave me studio time and I started to write New Wave, like really New Wave stuff that was popular. And then I had done a demo of that and so people got excited about that. And then I had half a record of New Wave and half the record that had Fantasy ball chain and stuff like that. So I went into a Canadian record label called Solid Gold. I don't know if you're aware of it.  One was great and the other half was just like, so they don't mix. So I went back into the studio and then I started writing the other half of it.  But it's funny that you say New Wave because that's what I was doing for Fantasy. Yeah. You know, also, I just, you know, I don't want to get away from the new album. Okay. The Life and Times of Eddie Gage. So the story, when I'm reading this story, it's like the typical rock and roll story in a way, right? I mean, right? Maybe can you talk about the story without giving away too much? The story is pretty much, well, it's not a biography. You might as well be caught in the Life and Times of Aldo. That's what I thought. I don't want to say it. The story is of this young kid who plays clubs and gets noticed by a big record company exact. But it's also light and dark. I mean, to me and my eyes, the big record company exact is like a demon. He's not like, you know, so...  That's powerful and introduces him to a woman and woman, you know, leads him down the path of drugs.  And it ends with like a sale, which is a song of redemption where he's actually happy and he's like spreading his message of faith, hope and love, which is originally what he wanted to do in the beginning. So it's sort of like, you know, such great for him, but everything that the characters that are in it all have different names like... Andy Christos. Andy Christos, yeah. That's a Greek guy, right? That's a Greek guy? Yeah. There's another one on the side. Andy Christos, if you look at the name, Andy is Andy and Christos is actually Christ in Greek. Yeah. It's like Andy Christ. I'm actually Greek, by the way. I'm actually Greek. So I kind of appreciated that. No, but I mean, it's good. All the guys are Greek. You know, the exact, the record tycoon, record tycoon, the big CEO of the company is also Greek, you know, but it had nothing to do with that. It's just that the name, I had to find an original name and Christos, which seemed like a name was actually Greek for Christ. So it's not to do the characters. You got an idea, right? Rady, I'm assuming that's like a pie zone there. Idea, idea, Rady, is that it? Idea, Rady is actually, it's sooner than for Rady, which is the goddess, an Indian goddess in sex and drugs and sexual pleasure and stuff like that. So they all have their name, you know what I mean? So every character has a name, but it has also a hidden meaning in, you know, in either the Bible or an Indian folklore or stuff like that.  She's the seductress. She's the said God of the lust, God of the goddess of the synapse, in the Indian goddesses.  So, you know, so, but it'll have a booklet that goes along with it that'll really detail the story. The characters will be very, very well-defined, you know, so. How many characters are we talking about here that you're actually portraying? Actually, there's not many characters that come back. So there's actually a new, there's almost a new character to be shot. Some of them do return, but like in other words, in the story, I'll introduce the character of the Anna Foster, which is a child of the sweetheart, and she'll return later in the play, but it's sung by me, but it's as if in the character of Anna Foster. So you have the history of that, and then you'll realize after that why she's singing that song to him. So it's like that, but there's different characters. You know, there's like a, it's 23 songs on the album and you might have maybe 19 characters. And again, this was like, you said it's autobiographical, I mean, we saw the preview. I got cassette here of Blood on the Bricks, you know. So it's like, and then of course, you end up producing.  You were still in the music business, right? I see it in the background right there. Aldo's a Grammy for a producer right there. Pick it up Aldo, bring it. Let's take a look here. Let's take a, let's see. I want to see a real Grammy. There's a real Grammy.   Look at that. Look at that. Producer of the Year for an album of the year, a producer for the album of the year for song down in 1994. That's right. That's right. Look at that. Two Munchie dollars. Yeah, but also, you know, here, look, I'm going through the age, Billy Falcon, Pretty Blue World. You're on that too, you know?  Yeah, that was, that was awesome. He was audience. It was only two guys on Johnny's label. Yeah. Jam Corps Records. And it was me and this guy called Billy Falcon. Billy Falcon was an amazing songwriter. And so I played on that, you know, if there's a producer couldn't play the part, because one time Billy Falcon is a certain style of playing, but he wasn't good enough to play all the records. But I'm capable of maybe leading everything. Somebody, it's phrasing, the picking, the style, everything.  So I played the part and that's basically, you know? Yeah. I did strings and stuff like that. Let me ask you, okay, so you're doing this album for 11 years? 12 years. 12 years. Well, 12 years. You're doing this for 12 years. So you start at point A. And then after five years, you keep changing things, don't you? Don't you have that urge to go back and maybe that vocal's not right? Don't you get into this cycle of I got to keep fixing stuff? What happens? What's the mindset here? Well, when I started in 2008, I wrote these songs. All these songs made it to the final five. They were recorded with drums. I went home and finished them. But the drums didn't sound great. I went to a studio here in Montreal. And I didn't have my studio built because all the gear had come back from Ireland yet. And I hadn't set it up because I was living in Dublin. I lived there for six years. And so I had to go into a studio in Montreal, actual real commercial studio, even though it was the best studio in town. And so I went in and I recorded these eight tracks. And of course, it was only a drummer because that's all I use as drummers. And one thing I can't play is drums.  Anyway, so I hired a drummer and I played everything else and did all the orchestrations. All the songs appeared on the album. King of the Seat was done in 2008. I did the orchestra. Then waited for a while and like I said, like I say in other rooms you use that. In 2008, I made a conscious decision not to work with anybody else but myself. It was a conscious decision. I got tired of it. So I moved the line, I said, forget it. I didn't have to start. I'll start, which I did, but I'll never go back to doing anything else. So in 2008, I actually sat out there. I had a vision. I wanted to buy a rock opera. The title came like that in the late 10s of the gauge. So I wrote eight songs. And then there was a break and then I started writing more songs in 2011. Then there's another, which I demoed.  Well, say a little prayer, which was in 2013. Then I wrote some 2000 pieces some more. And a bulk of the album I wrote at the end of 2019, the album was actually finished, mastered, with 22 songs in September of 2019 by Bob Ludwig. But when I wrote it on May 12th, I wrote, I felt that it was missing one character to actually put it together. And then I wrote one all of a sudden, which is like a part of the song. Yeah, the new single, yeah, exactly.  It can be taken like the God and the devil. It can be taken in my character as a lawyer with a judge, you know, Eddie. So it's everything is like power, you know? So I took a powerful song. And so I called Bob and he mastered it. And I said, well, okay, put it in the album. So to me, since I'm my own record label and my own producer and everything, having 20 conditions on the album, at least people won't be able to say that I jipped them like on two points.  You know what I mean? And all quality and solid top, not sure, best players, best sound. And getting back to Jimmy's saying, yeah, of course. I, you know, I found my drummer, Lee Levin, in the end that I found was just phenomenal. I mean, you send these and I found that really good guitar player called Dan Warner who passed away in the last year. And I was sent, I would do labored demos with machines and I was sending these tracks. And the beauty of it, working with guys at your level is that they say you step back and you go, my God, this is like amazing.  And of course they never, they're never disappointing me. It would just be like a hundred times better than the way I sent them. You know, so like now I'll only work at people at the level of musician or whatever, at the level of record company, I don't have any record company, but I'll say management or a record distributor that understands, you know, so I hate friction. I've had enough of it in my life. I don't like arguing. So just like I didn't like arguing on my first record, like I wanted this kind of effect which I knew was doable. And the engineer said, no, no, you can't do that. So I watched him work for about a week and he was fired a week after. And I didn't have a job. I mean, I was, I was going to start a career. So that's Italian style. I'll take care of it. Don't worry about it. It's all good. Al Pacino style. People used to make that comparison when I was young that I looked like a young Al Pacino. Yeah. Rolling Stones said that. They're blonde Al Pacino. I remember that was the article. I get the Robin Hood girl thing. You know, we just, we just had an interview not too long ago with another Montrealer. You know, Frank Marino had his largest album ever with the Juggernaut leaves the music industry.  And you know, you kind of got to fit up with the music industry too. So that's it. I'm going to do my own thing. I don't need these guys anymore. What is it with the water Montreal guitarist? What's going on, everybody?  It's not Montreal, guys, it's the American guys and all these guys that, you know, it's like, over here I can get a good promo scene. I found a great promo scene in La Shouse and Vicky Bonomo that, you know, they don't tell you that the price is like really reasonable. You know what I mean? It's like, in the States they got a single promoter. They want $50,000 US and not even get guaranteed that you're going to get on the radio. I mean, it's like, where do they get these numbers? Why do you need $50,000? So I said, I'm going to start in Canada slowly and do it this way and do it my way. And of course, work with great people and no friction. Everybody understands, you know what I mean? So I don't like arguing.  But it's not as if it's just, you know, if I'll work with people like a great drummer or a great rhythm guitar player, a great, you know, even in my band, it's just like the top of the top.  So it's just, I was talking a bunch of jokers. I mean, you have no sense of humor. You don't go off with me. So. Well, how would you describe the musical direction of this album? Is it Prague rock? Is it rock opera? Cause I'm listening to all the tracks and like it's kind of like Queen sometimes, the way Queen sort of built their songs just going off in different time changes and different, I guess key changes I would think, how would you describe it? How do I describe this album? The musical direction, yeah. The musical direction of this record is just tells a story that every, every song is written around a certain character. So I wasn't, since I was free to do everything, there's some songs like, you know, that are eight minutes long. I mean, I didn't have anybody to answer to and set myself. So I don't care.  You can't have a song like over four minutes for radio, every song, like every song is, I have songs with six, seven, eight minutes. And they're just like, it could be any style. I don't care. I mean, music is music. And one thing that's common to me in my music is it has to draw an emotion. It can't be stare on. For me, I make music out of emotion. It's gotta, you know, it makes somebody cry. It's gotta make somebody laugh. It's gotta connect with myself first. And I know that if it doesn't connect, then I'll scrap it. But I know that if I write something and connects with me and gives me emotion, that it'll definitely give somebody out of emotion. So to me, the only thing that ties with the record is that every song is brought out with emotion.   And that's because the songs are written in the way that she volunteered Alvin Melvin, which is like their emotional song, you know? The songs that I write out of emotion.  Screw that. I mean, that's not, that's not originality. That's not inspiration. You know, inspiration is inspiration. I'll write a song while I'm driving, which is probably where I'm such a bad vibe right now. I'll write a song while I'm playing, when I'm driving and I'll get the riff in my head and then after that, I'll get it titled and I'll record it on my phone and now I'll get another right there, record that on my phone. So by the time I get home, I have to do a whole song. And now it's just the hardest part for me is trying to figure out what I have in my head. It's like so difficult sometimes when I hear. And so that's it. And I'll sit down and finish the song in a night and the lyrics should be almost written. Like, I'll recommend the car. So that's inspiration, not written by, but there's no, how do I say, formula. There's no formula in there. So the last character, the last song you said was written last night. So how is this going to get rolled out? I'm going to release it. There's either one plan where I release one song every two weeks.  What do you mean by releasing songs? Like, is this like something people can buy or is it just like on YouTube? Yeah, Spotify and the songs and it'll be like a one song every two weeks. And we get to keep people involved and stuff like that. But we're actually working on talks or progress to bring this to a huge stage production, which was my dream all along. That was the whole thing that I started. I mean, I envisioned this as a huge stage production. So now we're talking with the production company. That's actually loves the album and doing that. So for me, it's more important to get that there than to put the record out. The record will make more sense. Like I said, there's no timeframe. The music is timeless. And I don't care. 12 years, I waited 12 years, I waited 12 years. I don't care. I don't know if I could wait another 12 years. That's my problem.  What about Tim Gaines from Striper, X Striper, right?  Tim Gaines player, I'm gonna all of a sudden, so it's funny how I met Tim Gaines. I was looking at somebody's page on Facebook and then I saw this guy that says that you might know, and then I saw Tim Gaines and he had a base in his hand. Hey, I don't know. Something's just attracting me. Yellow and black. No, that's not, he wasn't wearing yellow and black. He looked like a real bass player. Then I contacted him and I talked to him and I said, I sent him the album and then I said, send me some stuff of yours. And he, he sent me an album which was a solo record called Breakfast at Tiffany's or whatever it was called. Not Breakfast, but he says Breakfast at something.  So this guy is not a guitar player. Not even, his instrument is bass. He's a bass player. That's what he does. He loves bass and lives for bass. So, and he was a hell of a nice guy. My drummer Billy Carmasi, I've been playing with him for 40 years, part of the famous Carmasi family of drummers. I mean, he's brother to Denny. He's played with just about everybody. And you see Billy in my fantasy video, so we've been pals and he's hysterical. So, Mike Bruno from Montreal who you probably know from the Vikings. I have Igor Sellerar on there from Montreal also. And that's the band where we're with me and we're five guys. But like I said, they're all, they're all, they're all funny. Good, good, good. That's nice to hear. Alan, Alan, what was, what grade were you in when you first heard fantasy? What was your initial reaction when you saw the video?   I remember the lasers on the guitar. I was probably in grade seven, I think. The great seven or grade eight. The leprosk. The leprosk. The tiger, what was it? The tiger spandex? Leproskid. Leproskid, that was it. I have to understand that. I loved it. Air guitar, air guitar the whole time. That's all my idea. Like nobody knew I was gonna wear the leproskid suit. So imagine I'm 22 years old. I'm 22, 23 years old. I show up, I step out of a helicopter. I come out in a leproskid spandex, skin tight suit. I have a Les Paul and a laser down on the door.  That's right. It had a rotoscopy. I start to draw it on each frame on that. And so, but still they did it.  But that was done by Richard Casey. He used to be a B horror movie producer. I mean, he all he used to do was shot horror movies. But he did a great job with fantasy, you know? So that he did that in the ball and chain. But like that was pretty much. Lock and wait. Yeah. Yeah, so. I'm telling you Matt, air guitar. Everybody I knew was just playing air guitar to the solo of fantasy. Yeah, but it's just like, there's two things now. You have to say I've invented some things that I'm identified with. One is the leopard skin suit.  The other thing is, and two in 1982, I designed a guitar that Gips made for me which was a Les Paul with an explorer head start. So you see that and you say, that's out on a nova's guitar. That's the difference between me and a guy like Bon Jovi or any other band. It's like I was really like somebody where that you can identify music, but you can say, wow, the leopard skin suit, wow, the guitar, that's all custom made, you know, subject, you know, which is like completely, like nobody wants to hear subs, the record company. Like it's like, but I was. Zombie apocalypse. Yeah, but that's because I was lucky because the first record I'd done so well that I did whatever I wanted in a second record, a second record on a subject. I could go, be at work, everything was done. And sort of record is a subject is really people are now just discovering subject. It's a great album. Yeah, exactly. It's different. I mean, it's like, it's got, that's called rock. It's got. Carl Dixon. Carl Dixon who wrote Hey Operator, you do a better version than he does. And that was the whole idea is at a certain point I wanted to produce corny hatch and I wanted to show them what it could be done. They of course refuse. But that said, okay, I'll do it. And I said, this is the way the song is supposed to sound. But it's a great rock song. It's a live song. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. No, you do a great version of it. What about, and just, just sorry. I just want to, is it true? Fantasy is actually dazed and confused that, but sped up. I guess the keyboard part. No, Dacing Confuses the Rift. The Rift. The Rift. The Rift. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people don't know that. I overheard that one day and I go, I'm not sure. I didn't invent anything to say the truth. All I do is, all I did is like take all my influences and make them as a starting out of it. And then, you know, this music came out. Like I took all the background vocals that I heard off of Boston. I took the raw guitars from the sound from Boston. But I took the big, you know, sound of the, I just started doing one guitar. I did two guitars and that gave you like a wall of sound. And then I would do the guitar solos. I would trade off. And then I was fortunate enough that the record company president introduced me to it. We were mixing the album and with an engineer from Montreal and it really didn't have any soul. It didn't have anything. So Lenny Pizzi, you know, when I went to his house, he used to have these big monitors in his house in his living room. And he made me hear a band of his called Balazs. And I said, that's the sound that I want. I want my record to sound like that. So he introduced me to Tony Bon Jovi. And Tony Bon Jovi had built the power station, biggest studio in the world, everyone, which now is Avatar, also the biggest studio, but it's all Tony's design. He designed the big room that makes the drums sound like cannons. So he took my stuff and he made it sound huge.  That's why he says, I don't know that I'm Tony Bon Jovi in the pit. I mean, it really says like, I learned so much from him. But of course, but he learned from me too. I had my own way of thinking, you know? So with that record, that's why that record sounds monobastic because I own a lot of the sound. Otherwise, it would just would have come up as just a regular sounding album. I don't know if it would have had the impact. No, no, it wouldn't have. The production today holds up it.  It holds up well. Yeah. I had guys like Bob Ludwig, you know, who mastered all my records. He's, you know, I had the top of the top the premium of the corrupt. He was doing my stuff. I was 24 years old when it came out.  The head of the A&R, who had his own label, boutique label, the guy who signed Boston, the guy who signed Hart, the guy who signed Cindy Lauper after, comes to Montreal and takes me and signs me to a U.S. record deal. I didn't get signed to a Canadian deal. Wow. I got signed to a U.S. big label that were the guys signed Boston and everybody. So that's, I mean, it was, when I think about it now, it's pretty extraordinary. And I don't know who was bigger back then in Montreal. I don't, like, I mean, okay, Salim came afterwards, right? Corey Hart was after, but I think, Aldo, I think you must have been the first Montrealer to really break into the U.S. Maybe April Wine, I guess we could say. They're kind of Montreal. Yeah, well, yeah, but I don't know. April Wine did break with, like, Robin Roller and she's, she wrote, she's a roller. Yeah, yeah. They're a great fan, by the way. Oh yeah, absolutely. Frank too, Frank Marino, but not as big as Fantasy. I don't think so. No, no, no, like I said, Fantasy is considered a classic.  I have some back here. I also haven't had a V3 back here with a Leslie in case you see. If that's in my living room, I'm in my living room. She's at your living room. It's not my studio. Actually, it's my living room. I actually have a real V3 with a Leslie in my living room. That's how nuts I am. This thing was 500 pounds. I had to get three guys to move it in here. You're also a comic book collector. Are you not? Yeah, I have $75,000. Oh, that's pretty good. That's in the kitchen. Actually, I have an enclosure built just for comics. That's the only reason. Amazing. I wanted to ask you, and I'm going to make this short because I don't want to talk too much about Bon Jovi. I was listening to Eddie Trunk. And I think it was Eddie Trunk. And maybe if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. There was no mention. So this is how the sequence of events came. Runaway, and we've talked about this before, right? I just want to clarify this. Runaway was a single that was released by itself with an all-star cast of musicians and you were part of it. Then, correct? Correct. Did you play rhythm guitar and a little bit of keyboards and additional back vocals on it, right? I did that, but I also did all the background vocals with him and a guy called De Caseros on the whole album. And I played keyboards on a lot more songs than I'm giving credit to. Yeah, and that's what I'm getting at. I'm getting at, I think, there's a lot. You played a bigger role that people talk about when they think of Bon Jovi's first album. Well, you know, it's like he's pretty cheap with credits. Instead of going, well, Aldo Lola did this and that's Aldo, he just said Aldo Lola appears to have carried portrait records. That was it.  So, I mean, you go to the Bon Jovi page or that, you know, you don't even see my name anymore in the Wikipedia page. How long was the Selenity on? You don't see my name anywhere. Every band that I've ever produced, you don't see my name on the page at all. Well, that's why you're on this show. We're gonna make sure we get that out. We're gonna make sure everybody knows what the real deal is.  I don't really don't care.  I'm happy sitting in his own restaurant telling jokes. I mean, you know, it's just one guy. I mean, I'm not a guy, I don't need my ego. It matters to me. It matters to me, Aldo. It just matters to me. That's all good. Rather where credit is due. It bothers me, okay? That's why I wanna clarify this. That's all, that's all. All right, let's get back to the new album. Anything else you wanna tell everybody about the new album? The new album is, like I said, it's a labor of love. I've worked on it hard. I think it's probably, the critics are gonna criticize it, but I think the fans are gonna love it. It's gonna be totally innovative music. And like I said, some things are gonna go, this is not like Aldo Mobile, when all of a sudden done, people are going, but when all of a sudden done, people are going, well, you did take a left turn. You did change direction. You did stay current rather than doing fantasy all over again. When all of a sudden done, it's like three-piece band, no keyboards, no background vocals, just bass drum, guitar. That's it. So it's a three-piece power trio. So, and then one voice, my voice. So it's completely different and radical. We're writing the one after the four. And that's who I am. I evolve. Alan? Hey, keep your ears and eyes out for these songs. If they come out every second week for the next 23 weeks, I guess, yeah. That depends, because like I said, we're working on the Entoch for doing the rock opera. So that might change the whole perspective of everything all together. Is that local? Is that international? So who's these people there? It's people that are international, and they flip on the material. Wow.  The guys that get it. So they've done a lot of things over the world. So it's, again, it's not on a small scale. And when I've actually done, when I've actually achieved that thing, then my dream will happen, too. And then my vision will be complete. That's what I like about you, Aldo.    And that's really cool. That's very cool. Actually, my last question was a blue oyster cull. They just heard a new song by them. And I thought, you know, going back to the day when you actually wrote with them, you know, can you talk about that just a little bit? Well, the way that song, that song, Take Me Away. Take Me Away, that's it. It was a song that was a part of my original demos. And it was called A Cycle Word. A Cycle Word was about a serial killer that escapes from the Cycle Word. And it was out. It was like completely insane. Pause, you have a song called Cycle Word on this album, too, right? Yeah, but that's a Cycle Word on this album is about an ambulance, the guy being put into the ambulance going to the Cycle Word. Ah, okay. It's about the guy in the Cycle Word that escapes and he's a mad serial killer. And so I sat on the shelf for a while and then put it on my album. And then Eric Bloom heard the music because we had the same manager we had Sandy put on it. So Sandy gave him the tape and the music was really, really good.  Eric's a great lyricist. He's like very vis-visual. He's also into like UFOs and things like that. Yeah, yeah. Which I'm into also, space-age, science fiction. So he wrote Take Me Away, which are about extra extraterrestrial to take me away and things like that. So the song works. And I have a lot to do with the overdubs of the production. I mean, I sneak into the studio at night and like we do the guitars. I sneak in everywhere.  The life and times of Eddie Gage. Thank you. I can't wait till it comes out from what I've heard. It sounds like a great, you know, great bunch of great songs. I mean, well-written, well-written song. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Yep. All right. Yeah. Well, he didn't congratulate you. I did. Hi, I'm talking to Aldo Nova. My day is good here. What do you want? I can't leave anybody out of the conversation. How about credit? I'm not just gonna talk to one guy like I'll ignore the other guy. All right, Aldo, we'll talk again when you have more news and more updates. Look forward to talking to you again. Thank you so much. See you guys. Thank you. All right, congratulations.


Thank you and morning everyone. I'm going to be speaking about, well, I'm speaking on conversing with people living in poverty. And before we really get into the talk, I want to kind of bring your attention to some of the words used in the title of the talk. So I really just want to highlight a few things because words are important.  Yeah, if you're trying to do good, you have to be careful not to kind of do bad. We also all come with sort of preconceived ideas and our own sort of cultural baggage. And it's really, there is a notice on us to own that and to accept it and work with it. I mean, it's only human. So conversing, this is really, if you're going to reach out to people living in poverty, did we just lose the mic? Maybe I just need to lean a bit closer. If you're going to be reaching out to people, you really want to make sure you're thinking of it as a conversation. This is not a one way we're educating people. It's not a one way we know what's right and we're telling poor people what to do. We're really learning from them as much as they're learning from us and it really needs to be a dialogue and we'll get to a bit more on that later. The next word I really want to highlight is people. It's very easy to become kind of obsessed with the differences between oneself and the people one is helping and those differences are important. But at the same time, there's, we sort of share a common humanity and it's important not to lose sight of that.  And it's tempting to kind of think as sort of ourselves, as sort of middle class people who are already kind of reaching out as in some sense being better. I mean, certainly we have more money. Usually we're better educated, but I think it would be really a mistake to think of ourselves as better humans. And lastly, just the phrase living in poverty. I try to avoid speaking of people as poor, which makes it sound like being poor is some sort of innate condition. Living in poverty really highlights that poverty is a circumstance that people haven't defined themselves in rather than something that they are. Cool, so just a quick introduction to me and I work for a nonprofit called Precelt. We operate throughout Africa. We also have one employee in India and one in London. There are about 50 of us in total. I'm the lead engineer on Vumi, which is our messaging platform. There are currently three developers and recently we've hired one more, so there are now four. I haven't actually met him yet because his first day was on Monday and I was here. And yeah, so we're not a big team, but we're already trying to make a difference. So Vumi is a text messaging system just so that you kind of know what it is. So it's an engine for moving text messages around. I sometimes like to tell people that we write IRC bots to help people. And I think really we're kind of on the cusp of seeing chat bots become a really major thing. Instant messaging networks have already taken off. If you see someone using their phone, there's a good chance that they're chatting to people over text. And we haven't really seen kind of chat bots taking off yet. Yeah, so Vumi, it's a text messaging system. It's really designed to reach out to those living in poverty and really we're aiming to reach massive scale like whole countries with of people because we really want to have a big impact. I also like to think that kind of we're trying to build infrastructure. So a lot of nonprofits do cool projects but which are in the end kind of really small. And at some point if you're really going to transform society what you're doing has to become a kind of infrastructure. Our Python is our primary language that we write Lumion and we use Twisted for pretty much everything. So this is the UN definition of poverty. So poverty is a lack of basic capacity to participate effectively in society. And I really like this definition because rather than highlighting a lack of money it really highlights people's isolation. It's pretty hard for us today to imagine quite how disconnected people can be both from each other and from the society that they're meant to be a part of. We'll get to that a bit more in a minute. So this is Africa. This is where we do most of our work. The dots are places where we've done projects and where we have connectivity to mobile network operators. So places like Libya, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, where I'm from. So just some things about Africa. It's pretty big. It's 30 million square kilometers physically. That's roughly three times the size of Europe and three quarters of the size of Asia. There's a billion people. So about a third more than they are in Europe. Obviously they're a bit more spread out. But obviously a lot smaller than Asia, which is about four billion. And there's more than a thousand languages. So really if you want to work across Africa and I guess it's the same in Europe you really have to be kind of, you have to take care of localization and internationalization. And even just in South Africa we have 11 official languages. In practice we only have two languages of record. But in theory any citizen can ask the government to interact with them in their home language if it's one of the 11 official ones. So I'd like to kind of go back in time a bit to 1994 which wasn't all that long ago, 20 years. I was just finishing school. So I guess I was already an adult in many ways. In 1994 Nigeria had 100 million people but only 100,000 landlines. So if you think about that, that's one telephone per thousand people. And probably most of those telephones were owned by kind of richer people. So you can imagine just 20 years ago people living in rural Nigeria might never have made a phone call or probably never had made a phone call. And you can probably, if you try, imagine how isolating that is. And if you have, say, a service delivery problem say your water isn't working, who do you tell? You don't have a phone. You probably don't even know, even if you did have a phone you wouldn't necessarily know who to call. The nearest government official might be, say, 500 kilometers away. And it's not like there's great public transport to get you there. So when things are going wrong it's very hard to reach out and tell someone. And this is really, I mean it really drives home. It's the problem is more isolation than lack of money. And the problem goes the other way too. Imagine if you're an elected official in a country where your constituents have no way of getting hold of you and where collecting information is hard. Like how can you serve the people that you've been elected to serve if just finding out anything about them is hard. Yeah, and well, no surprise there was no internet access in Nigeria in 1994. In fact, even in South Africa it was, well, really pretty much unheard of. Let's, well, so one other thing. So 1994 was a very exciting year for one reason. The first mobile phone network launched in Africa. I should say that the most popular phone in 1994 weighed half a kilogram and cost about $2,000. So let's fast forward a bit some 18 years to 2012. So two years ago, suddenly there's 65% mobile penetration on average in Africa. So roughly 65% of people suddenly have a telephone which is quite an improvement from one in 1,000. In places like Uganda we see incredible statistics like there are more mobile phones in Uganda than light bulbs. And they really actually are getting good use out of their mobile phones. UNICEF Uganda ran quite a famous project called UReport which is, it is a citizen kind of sort of liquid democracy program where you can sign up as a member of UReport and you can submit feedback kind of directly to your government and they can ask you questions. And really what we're seeing now in Africa is a kind of mobile generation. So UNI might have laptops that we kind of carry around with us everywhere and that we run our lives on. And probably we also have a smartphone as a second device. The people, young people in Africa really are, their mobile phones are their laptops, they are their offices, they're how they socialize, they're how they do business. And by contrast to 1994, we're now seeing $20 phones which have internet access, they have SMS, they have USSD, they have instant messaging. Also just economically, Africa is growing. The continent's averaging 5% GDP growth which is pretty good going. The population of Africa is still very young, more than 50% of Africans are less than 20. So at that point, Precelt had been mostly a consulting company and the rise of kind of mobile phones was, well really we saw this as an opportunity to reach out to people. So we started doing small projects in the social space and one of the earliest of those was text alert. So text alert is really just a simple system to remind people of their clinic visits. So I'm sure you know about HIV, I'm not sure how many people know about tuberculosis, TB. Well, so typically in Africa, if you, well certainly in South Africa, if you die from HIV, what actually kills you is tuberculosis. And tuberculosis is a kind of a very bad chest infection is how it manifests. And tuberculosis is very curable, you need to take a course of antibiotics. But unfortunately for various reasons, people don't finish their antibiotic courses, forget to take follow up visits. Or if they've been treated with anti-retrovirals for HIV, they've kind of forget to go to the clinics for checkups and things. And text alert was just a system which sent people a reminder kind of a few days before their visits saying, hey, you have an appointment at the clinic, if you can't make it, just reply and let us know. And that dropped the number of people who were missing their clinic visits from about 35% to about 15%. So that was really a big success for us. And made us want to do more. However, it wasn't all plain sailing. And we learned a lot from projects like text alert. And one of the things that we learned was that if you're gonna be doing a lot of projects, it's important to have reusable software because otherwise you're rewriting things every time. And it's easy to accidentally make things not reusable. So with something like text alert, you need to integrate with a mobile network operator or an aggregator who connects you to the cell phone network. And they all have special interfaces which are unique snowflakes. And it's easy to accidentally tie your application to something which is really network specific. So they might give you a unique identifier and you start relying on that. And then you change to a different network operator who doesn't give you this identifier. And suddenly you have to re-architect your application. So we really wanted, we're struggling with reusability. The other issue was scaling. I'm sure those of you who've worked on small systems as they've grown have noticed this. You always get something wrong no matter how good your intentions are. And to really be able to kind of process things quickly you need to try. And if you get something wrong then you have to kind of go and rewrite something. And we didn't want to be kind of trying to scale every single project that we were involved with. And the last thing is tooling. If you write a quick prototype you usually leave out things which become really important later like monitoring, good error reporting, good failure handling. I should maybe say some things about failure. So one of the exciting things about operating in Africa is that failure conditions often aren't the exception. They're often the rule. So for example, we run some projects in Ethiopia. There's one ISP in Ethiopia and state owned. There's no competition. It occasionally goes down for a week and you can't connect to the country. So as you can imagine that makes designing systems to handle that, well designing systems to handle that is can be tricky. So in response to these challenges that we encountered during text alert we created Vumi. And Vumi is a messaging engine which attempts to provide a reusable framework to separate kind of the social applications that we're trying to build from the connectivity to mobile operators and to kind of give us the tooling and kind of production readiness that on all of our projects without having to rewrite it. Vumi is a Swahili word. It means something like distant roar or buzz or hum or roll of thunder. It's a kind of a distant noise. So architecturally this is kind of what Vumi looks like. If you look on the left you can see a cell phone. So you can imagine someone kind of holding a cell phone in their hand. If they send us an SMS that goes to a cell phone tower. Eventually that comes to one of our servers. You can see that labeled transport. So transport is what we refer to. It's a twisted process that sends and receives messages to a network operator or to an instant messaging service. The next column is another set of processes called which we call dispatchers. They're routers. They decide where messages go usually based on the telephone number they're being sent or received from. And then lastly on the right we have really the important part. The left-hand side is mostly plumbing. On the right we have applications. So these are ideas that these are reusable things that can be plugged into different transports and different dispatchers. Yeah. So the way that things are architecturally used and have horizontally scalable workers. So we write workers using twisted the asynchronous kind of event framework. And then if we need to handle more messages we fire up more processes. Yeah. And I really want to say thank you to all of the people who've worked on software like Twisted that we use and Python. Having the infrastructure to build things on really helps. All of our messaging between these horizontally scalable processes happens over a rabbit MQ which is a messaging bus. So it just sends messages backwards and forwards and workers can subscribe to receive messages which they process. If workers fail to process messages they go back onto the queue and get reprocessed later. For data storage we use React which is a distributed key value store. We chose React rather than Postgres because really we do want to reach a massive scale. So at the moment we have kind of say as I said earlier about I think about seven well we have about seven million people who we've interacted with so far and Postgres would probably still have been fine for that. But we really would like to be able to reach the point where as I said we can speak to billions of people. We maintain Reakasaurus which is the Twisted React client. It's pretty much a direct port of Bashos React client. So if anyone wants something fun to work on we'd really appreciate some help maintaining that. So some of the things that we built with Vumi in Kenya we did a project called Ceasing Your Money which was an attempt to curb election violence in Kenya. So in Kenya in not the most recent election but election before there was a lot of violence in townships and there was the impression that this violence was triggered by, well that mobile phones were enabling this violence. So what would happen was someone's house would get burnt down. A few local people would decide that it was say the members of another political party's fault and then they would estimate all that they would be angry obviously someone's house had just been burnt down. I think we'd all be angry. And so then they would SMS their friends and say it was these people's fault. And then more people would be angry and violence would break out. So Ceasing Your Money was an attempt to counteract this by introducing sort of peace officers also with mobile phones. And the job of these peace officers would be that if they received such a message or they had the impression that violence was flaring up they would describe the situation to people at the NGO's head office who would then attempt to carefully craft some sort of response which would also then be disseminated by SMS through the kind of peace officer process well via the peace officers. So as you can imagine you need to respond quickly. I mean you're talking about kind of violence breaking out on a time scale of hours. And ideally you want people to kind of calm down and think a bit about things more on the scale of minutes. So Ceasing Your Money was a system we built to allow kind of that feedback to reach the NGO and for messages to be sent back out again afterwards. And the last Kenyan election had less violence. It's a bit difficult to have a control to measure against but we also do we're part of the Wikipedia Zero project so Wikipedia Zero is zero rated well the main Wikipedia Zero project is zero rated access so that's free access to Wikipedia over internet on mobile phones. We do Wikipedia text which is accessing Wikipedia over SMS and instant messaging and that's to just kind of make things well lower the barrier to entry given further. So speaking of lowering barriers to entry after we had created Vumi there were still some problems and the biggest problem really was just that there were too many projects and setting up and we really hoped initially that Vumi would be a tool that other non-profits could use but it turns out that there are difficulties. So one connecting to network operators is expensive running Amazon EC2 instances is expensive and really just we don't have enough people to solve all of the world problems ourselves. Not a surprise I guess. So this led us to make Vumi Go which is a hosted instance of Vumi and the idea is that by providing Vumi Go we can provide a way for people to help themselves. So we run Amazon EC2 instances we deal with connecting to the network operators and we provide people with a hosted service where they can come along and build their own applications to fulfill their own needs and usually they know better than we do what those needs are. So for example, Vumi Go has a simple survey builder which we call a dialogue application again to remind people that you're not asking a bunch of questions and getting some anonymous feedback. This really we want people to really think about this as a dialogue between themselves and the people that are kind of speaking to them over their mobile phones. And then we also wrote a JavaScript sandbox so that a lot of young Africans can code or very excited about coding are technically savvy and we really wanted to provide a way for an excited young African who's one of the many African innovation hubs to be able to come to Vumi Go, write their application in JavaScript and run it. I'm sorry it's JavaScript, but that's what most people know. I'm hoping to build a Python one when I get a moment. So we're kind of reaching the end of time but just a quick kind of where we are now. So Vumi Go has now interacted in the last year with a total of 7 million people up from 1 million at the start of the year. So it's seven times as many people as we had before in the last six months, which is good. We've sent and received 14 million messages and that's up from 12 million previously. We also registered voters in Libya. We registered 16% of the Libyan population with SMS and USSD to vote. Yeah, so that's 16% of the total population, which I was really proud that we could be involved with that. In South Africa, we ran election monitoring. We, yeah, what is interesting about the South African election monitoring campaign is that we really, it was the first time we were really running a big project over lots and lots of different channels of interaction, so that used SMS, USSD, Twitter and Mixit. For those of you who don't know what Mixit is, it's a big instant messaging network in Southern Africa. I think it has about 50 million users. In Nigeria, we ran an agricultural awareness campaign just making people aware of the importance of agriculture. There people could download a ringtone from a famous Nigerian musician and that reached out to 1 million people. So what next? We're adding lots of APIs. Again, lowering barriers to entry, making the system easier for people to use. Things like, obviously the technology space isn't static, so things are constantly changing. We're really moving to, well, we're seeing instant messaging move to multimedia messaging and if you're using WhatsApp, you can send photos and videos, send voice recordings. We're also actually moving into voice itself. There are many illiterate people in Africa and if you're going to reach out to them, you need to do so by voice. And lastly, we're trying to get better dashboarding and analysis so that we can be sure we're actually having the impact we intended to. We have some bigger plans which we really like help with.  Next, we'd really like to build federated instant messaging protocols. So think WhatsApp, but structured like email so that we aren't all tied into a single provider. Yeah, and just in closing, something that Constance said during her keynote, which really, she was speaking about it in a security context, but I think it applies equally to the kind of social space. Really show that we care, don't accept that things have to be the way they are and work to change them. Thank you.


Hello, I'm back again in front of the green screen and I'm still experimenting on how to make this work Which is actually why my hair is in a ponytail right now. It turns out that when your hair is curly It's even more difficult to key your your outline against a green screen, but you know, whatever That's not the important part. I'm here to talk about the witcher season 2 now a couple of years ago I reviewed season 1 and I said that I just um, I Didn't like it that much now I liked it more than I disliked it, but I didn't think it was a particularly good show Like I had issues with the story mainly being the timeline and I had issues with a lot of the characters being unlikable But after watching season 2 all the way through and thinking it over a little and mulling it over. I I just don't think the witcher's a good show. I think it's pretty crappy. This is the introduction song It's not very good, but it's not too long now. I want to make it clear that My thoughts on this are just on the show. I've never read the books at least not yet, and I have never played any of the games So those are not coloring my opinions at all. Like I'm not looking at this as an adaptation I don't care if they change things. I don't care if people think oh well This was done better in the books. I really don't care I'm looking at the show on its own and the show on its own is not good. It's it's pretty crappy To recap Geralt of Rivia the main character is a monster hunter He's what's known as a witcher and they are these guys that have like magical experiments done on them so they're a little bit more powerful than regular humans and then they go through a bunch of training and stuff so that they can go out and slay monsters and he winds up taking care of this princess by the name of Ciri because Well honestly just because the plot demands it You know that the whole reason that he winds up having to take care of hers because Years ago he helped out her parents and when they said hey you help this out Do you want reward? He just kind of said I want your firstborn child like it wasn't his exact wording but that's basically what he was saying and I Don't know why he said that like it it doesn't even come across as like a joke or anything It just feels like the writers were saying okay We need a reason for him to have to take care of a princess later on so we'll just have him say this very strange thing and Yeah, her her kingdom has been overrun and her family's been killed So he has to take care of her and meanwhile an evil empire called Nilfgaard is invading and taking over a bunch of the northern kingdoms where Geralt and the others live and Plus there's a bunch of racism and stuff against elves mostly Now when this season starts we have Geralt's taking Ciri to This fort where all of the remaining witchers live or at least most of the remaining witchers live and His mage girlfriend Yennefer just has no more powers anymore. She doesn't have magic for whatever reason While at the same time Ciri is discovering she has some strange magic powers that people Don't really understand and so they're trying to work with that and at the same time There's people that are trying to stop Nilfgaard from invading and taking over even though Nilfgaard honestly seems a lot nicer than the People who are currently in charge so first things first I thought that without the timeline issues the story would be better But not really like in the first season if you hadn't seen it What they did was they had flashbacks to a bunch of Different things that had happened in Geralt's past or in Yennefer's past Which kind of tied into their characters and tied into some of the story that was going on now But it was switching back and forth between them without any real indication that that was what was going on and Sometimes it would go back like decades or centuries and because these are characters that either don't age or age very slowly It's difficult to even tell that they're supposed to be older or younger until Someone talks something in the dialogue and it just made it kind of confusing to sit through and I know that that was just difficulty in the adaptation process because apparently Like they had to adapt a bunch of short stories, which was what the Witcher was originally Before the author tried to make it into a longer series but that doesn't change the fact that it is confusing if you're not familiar with it and I Will say that season 2 at least doesn't have that problem But it's still just not that great like you still have multiple storylines that don't have much overlap and that there's some overlap between them sure but not that much and they're not all Equally interesting like when Geralt and Ciri were when we were following them particularly when they're at the Witcher fortress. I thought I Thought it was okay. I guess but everything else whether we're talking about Yennefer or The mages trying to stop Nilfgaard or the elves doing their thing I just didn't really care and I'll get more into that later But I just wasn't that interested in it and it didn't really tie into what was going on with Geralt So the whole time I'm just thinking okay. Can we please get back to Geralt's like this is not important to the story I just want to skip these parts now Yennefer storyline at least at the beginning is mostly her Working against Nilfgaard and also helping out some elves along the way while trying to get her magic back and the thing is she comes across as Kind of selfish and not very heroic here like even though she's doing good things like she does Stop and help like elves and stuff that are in the process of getting pogromed But it doesn't really feel like she's on her way to get her magic back like which is you know kind of a selfish goal It doesn't feel like she's on her way to do that And then she's stopping and sacrificing along the way to help these people because oh these people need help it feels more like she is just Making a brief detour along the way and it doesn't really feel like it's She's sacrificing anything or even that it's incandescing her It feels like she wouldn't be stopping to help these people if it wasn't along the way to her other goal So she doesn't really seem like a hero or like a good person which isn't necessarily a bad thing You know you don't need to have the main characters be good people necessarily and in season one it's not like she was the nicest person ever either, but the show treats her like she's a hero and So that just comes across as very contradictory And it honestly just doesn't work that well and then in Geralt's story. We have him Training Siri in like some witcher stuff and also it turns out that she may hold the ability to make more witchers because Like witchers are dying breed. They don't know how to make more of them at this point or rather they know how but they're just unable to and Then there's also some weird monsters coming along that Geralt has never seen before and then they're investigating what's going on there and like I said this storyline is like It's okay, I guess in a lot of ways it just has a bad climax I think the relationship between Geralt and Siri is good You know, I don't I don't have a lot to add there. I just think that you know, it seems as though they Are both kind of frustrated being in this situation But at the same time neither of them wants the other ones to come to any harm So it does genuinely feel like kind of a fatherly bond just not traditional fatherly bond and The biggest issue with like the story and everything is that I just Could not care less about anything going on and the reason I couldn't care less about anything going on is because Every character in this show is just a miserable asshole Like I really mean it all they do is brood Nobody ever laughs or smiles or talks about anything other than how much the world sucks and how they're all suffering and How the existence is awful like that that's all they ever do It's like they took the population of reddit and made it into a show now I kind of mentioned that before with Yennefer where she is treated as being heroic But she's honestly just being selfish and it doesn't come across as heroic I think Geralt is okay Not because of anything in the writing really but mostly because Henry Cavill Just gives a really good performance and I even mentioned in season one that his performance was one of the standout parts of the entire show like I think he was really good in this role and He has fewer humorous moments in season two than he doesn't season one though so there's there's not much to endear me to him other than he's taken care of Ciri and He's really cool when he slays monsters, which I mean that's fine at all, but it doesn't make me like him all that much and This applies to the world as well the world as a whole feels completely irredeemable Like I want Nilfgaard to win like the the northern kingdoms in this season are actively committing a genocide against the elves and It's portrayed as being as horrible as it is or as horrible as that sounds Whereas Nilfgaard is actually helping out the elves and giving them safe refuge and everything. I was like These are supposed to be the bad guys now. I know what they were probably going for here Was to try and make things morally gray, you know They're trying to make it like oh the good guys do some awful things too, but the bad guys are still the evil Empire So we have to fight against them But the thing is usually when they do that they'll have it so that the hero is trying to Protect whatever the current status quo is like you see that in a lot of spy movies you know like the villain's gonna launch the nukes so we got to stop them from doing that and In often times in like fantasy stories like this It'll be oh the Dark Lord is coming in to destroy everything and the heroes just trying to protect the kingdom You know, they aren't really trying to improve the world necessarily They're just trying to prevent it from being destroyed and in a lot of modern fantasy series They will come out and acknowledge like okay. Yeah, that that's not perfect but in order to fix that they will just make the bad guys so over the top evil that it becomes really clear what's going on and That the heroes have to put a stop to this in this It's almost like they did it the other way around and it doesn't come across as morally gray it comes across as nilfgaard are the good guys and we're just supposed watching the bad guys plot and scheme and we're supposed to be on their side and Well, how am I supposed to care about that? These are these are awful people and I don't want them to succeed the only likeable character in this entire show is Yasker the Bard and the reason that he's so likeable is because he does things other than brood You know, he smiles and laughs and sings and makes jokes and he is a decent guy Yes, he does help out the his friends and he helps out the good guys Saving people and all that but in addition to being a heroic guy. He is just likeable He's nice like the scene where he's singing just some rats or excuse me We're singing to some mice in his prison cell is the best scene in this entire season Gordon you're amazing talent recognizes talent. Let's go again three four Now here's the thing the modern trend of dark fantasy was largely inspired by game of thrones and Game of thrones was a very dark show. Yes, there's some awful awful things that went down in there But we still had characters make jokes, you know, Tyrion was still really funny We still had characters do things for fun, you know, they weren't just sitting around thinking about how awful life was and getting drunk And we saw them care about each other, you know, we saw them care about their romantic partners or their family and Even the bad guys when they did bad things often did it because they were attached to people they love like a Probably the best example of that would be in the pilot episode When Jamie Lannister tries to murder Bran Stark like he just straight up pushes a child out a window and He winds up surviving but he tried to murder him and he did that to protect not just himself It wasn't just that self-preservation, but he's trying to protect his sister Cersei and because he loves her It's a weird incestuous love, but he does love her and so he's doing bad things out of love Even though he's the one of the bad guys for most of the show What I'm getting at is that the world and some of the people in it even though they were pretty dreary a lot of the time the world and some of the people in it still felt worth saving the Witcher just straight up doesn't have that and Finally my last real point here is that the fight choreography is bad Which is weird because in the first season I thought the fight choreography was extremely good That was one of the highlights of the show and the only one that I really disliked was in the final episode when Geralt is fighting all those ghouls I believe and That that one was just it didn't work And the reason for that was because they had to make Geralt look like a cool monster-slaying hero who could take On hordes of enemies with no sweat But they also had to get him hurt so that the plot could move along and trying to combine those two things It just made the whole fight look stupid and in this season though the fights range from being like okay like Average what you would expect from a television show to just not good like the climax the fight in the climax is Not good. It's not well choreographed and some minor spoilers here, but Basically the climax is the last remaining witchers versus a couple of giant dragon lizard things and Part of it is the choreography part of it is the editing But this fight just goes all over the place like both sides or combatants on both sides rather Switch their targets a bunch like they never seem like they're just Trying to actually kill each other it feels like they're trying to put on a show almost and so they'll be like I'm fighting you for a minute. Whoa now. I'm over here fighting you for a minute And this guy's just kind of standing over there not doing anything and I mean, I know it's kind of a cliche for Kung Fu movies or whatever where the heroes will just fight one guy at a time because the others will not do anything but it feels even weirder when the good guys are doing that because the the witchers that are fighting these dragon things do that several times and I don't know when you get to the End of the of the whole fight It just makes the the other witchers feel kind of incompetence and it just feels like Geralt and the like major major characters only win because the plot demands it so I don't know that's That's about it. You know this was Definitely a downgrade from season one I don't know if my opinion is very popular and that a lot of people seem to be enjoying this season more, but I Don't don't really care. That's I have always just spoken my opinion here if that's the problem and we'll Get over it. The witcher wasn't very good. It's not a good show and that's all good. Bye If you watch this far, thank you so much by this point Most people have just taken to the comments section to tell me to kill myself I wouldn't be able to do videos like this without all my patrons whose names you see here and a special thanks to my $10 and up patrons oppo Savalainen, Aris Targaryen, Olivia Rayon, brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan and Silevich Dark King, Echo, Great Griebo, KartKat Katsune, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Madison Lewis Bennett, Marilyn Roxy, Matthew Bordrow, Michael Weingartner, Microphone, Pipa Toad, Return of Cardamom, Sad Martigan, Silear the Vixen, Tom Beanie, and of course, Vaivictus. All of you are just absolutely the best. If you want to get your name on here, consider becoming a patron if you don't want to do that You could always support the channel here on YouTube or just like the video comment and subscribe to my channel. All those are great and That's all for my takes for today. Goodbye