Next talk will be by Kristin Sarcher and she'll be talking about how to fight our own demons and how to deal with all of the problems that we have in world press all at once. Thanks very much. Let's see. How's this? How's that for sound? Okay, good. I'd just like to say that the first person to correctly guess the number of AI generated images in this presentation at the end will win this fish. So who is this person you're looking at? My name's Kirsten Sarcher. I've been working on the web since there was a web. I've got about 25 years of experience and been working in WordPress for about 10 of those years. I call myself a front end developer, but I also like doing a lot of other things too. I really enjoy professional photo shoots. This is not really going to be a technical talk. I'm not going to show you any code. This is more about the mindset and the approach that has helped me for the last few decades. And if you're running into the same problems again and again, or if you're new to this and you're running into the new problems for the first time, it might help you. So this is going to be more of an advice column. I'll go through some of the scenarios and approaches that I keep in mind. And once we get through all that, then we can kind of make this more of a conversation. So you're part of a team setting up a new WordPress site for your business or your art or your dream. Maybe you're the client, maybe you're the developer or the designer, maybe you're tackling the whole thing all on your own. You've got all these great ideas and WordPress seems like a terrific way to bring them all to life. Maybe your site is already up and running, maybe it's still in progress. But then, drama, something has gone horribly wrong. This one is really obviously AI. Count the fingers, count the noses. So here's a selection of some of the more common demons that you might find yourself battling. The site is down altogether. You're getting a 500 error, you're getting some sort of critical error, you're getting a message saying Chrome can't find your domain. It's just gone. Your site is just doing weird things. Your code is buggy, something is glitchy, something isn't working. Your site has been hacked or defaced. The site's up and it's running, but it's just slow. Your site is running fine, but nobody's coming to it and the traffic is kind of disappointing. Your client isn't very happy with you or your boss. Your colleague is really getting on your nerves and very difficult to work with or maybe a contractor, someone that you have working with or for you. So what are some of the things that we're going to do first in all of these circumstances? We're going to stay calm. That's something we'll come back to a bit later. You're going to retrace your steps, understand the context of what is happening. You're going to look for the root of your conflict and then troubleshoot. So I'm going to go through each of these. So let's stay calm. Everything goes more smoothly when you're not freaking out and that will help the people around you also not freak out. So let's first deal with the feelings of anxiety or panic when there is something terribly wrong going on on your site. Whether you're dealing with a minor CSS glitch that is really hard to track down, a site that's completely broken and you've got people yelling at you or maybe a confrontation with a colleague, the same thing is going to apply. So remember that this isn't personal. It's not happening to you. It's just a thing that is happening. And once you can kind of a little bit dissociate yourself and your ideas from the problem that you're having, detach yourself a little, it gets a bit easier to deal with. So often we start generating these stories about how terrible this is and I'm never going to figure this out. I'm no good at this.  Now they've broken it and I never should have hired them. Everyone is going to hate you or them. You've made a terrible mistake. So this is a thing that your brain is doing in response to stress signals. It doesn't necessarily all mean that it's true. Your brain is trying to be helpful, trying to give you what it thinks is going to get advice that will get you out of this situation, but just kind of look at what your brain is doing and go, okay, thank you. That's, I see what you're trying to do. That's not actually helping right now and bring your attention back to the problem at hand. So now that you're calm enough to think clearly, you can start looking into the issue. Sometimes it's really obvious what caused a problem. Like you just updated your plugins and suddenly you have no sight. When it's not obvious, you have to retrace your steps, like looking for your lost keys. So when do you last know that it was working? Have you made some changes recently? Did you perhaps update the plugins last week and a problem is only now starting to show up? Could someone else on your team have started making changes? Has something about the environment changed? Like maybe the hosting company did some server updates or maybe your client didn't renew their domain name. There's also the possibility of a hack, in which case you aren't the one who made the changes. And in that case, your job is to find out what changed and how. And you're retracing someone else's steps and hopefully erasing them. So troubleshooting is the process of investigating until you find out the root of your problem. If you're dealing with a WordPress issue, the conflict might be between bits of code or it might be more of a conflict between what it's doing and what you expect it to do. So it's faithfully trying to do what it's being told. You just might not be telling it the right thing. If you're dealing with human conflict, usually that means at least one person has a need that is not being met. So we're going to break this down into smaller, bite-sized pieces. So often we get anxious messages from users or clients that are like, there's an error or the site is down and that on its own is not always all that useful. You need to get complete error messages and the exact behavior that leads to the problem. So does the problem happen on every page of the site? Does it only happen when you do a very certain thing on certain occasions? Narrow it down as much as you possibly can. If someone else is telling you about the problem, make sure that you can also replicate the issue yourself because it's very, very hard to troubleshoot a problem you can't see. As anyone who has ever had a site that worked on 12 computers near you but not on your client's computer will tell you. When the pressure is on, there is a temptation to jump in and just do everything that you think might fix the issue all at once. But if you change too many things, you still won't actually know what the problem is and what you fixed. And it has the effect of introducing new problems as well. If you make five changes and one of them fixed the problem, you might now find out that you have a new problem because one of your other four changes tweaked something unexpected. So, yeah, that can have, you can get more issues coming out of that. I consider restore backup to be one thing that you can change if you're really in a crisis. And you do have backups, right? Because out of everything that I'm saying here today, that might actually be the one takeaway that you definitely need backups. If you're new to coding, you've probably already discovered some of the things that can go wrong. So typos, that evil missing semicolon, everybody gets hung up on a mismatched parenthesis or a missing semicolon once in a while. If you're not running on a live site, make sure that you've got PHP errors turned on so that it'll tell you what line is breaking and you don't have to angst over it forever. Bad logic means that the code is running, but what you think you've asked it to do and what it's actually doing are different. So you might be feeding it the wrong variables, or you might have put a critical statement in the wrong part of the process. So leave yourself breadcrumbs along the way to hone in on where you're going off track. You know, output your variables, see at what point things are changing, see if it's actually getting to the part of the code that you think you're executing. Sometimes you even find yourself working in the wrong file, and you've been trying for an hour to make something work and it isn't working and the problem isn't going away and you know you've got the code right.  So programming languages are written by humans and humans need to be able to describe what's going on. If you're not sure about your logic, look at it and read it out exactly what it's doing line by line, like you're reading a story. This won't help you with any of your syntax and semicolon errors, but it might help your brain trace through what's happening when you actually start reading through it as if you are the computer. You'll see, oh, now I'm actually being told to run this bit of code and I thought I was going over there.  Don't actually worry about your function calls and whatever it is that you need to do. Just make sure that your brain knows where you are trying to direct the procedures. So getting a little bit more specific about site crises. So your site is down. First, there is that staying calm bit. So our people actually in danger of dying. Probably none of us working on WordPress are running life support systems or power plants. Anybody? No? No? Okay, we got one. All right. Well, are you sure you're not running Drupal? Oh, okay, that actually is kind of like, so this, this, this might not apply to you. Yeah, it's true. That's, that's one thing that bonds us all here together today. So 99% of the time it's actually not going to be life threatening. Your client might think that it's, you know, that the world is in imminent danger because they, you know, might not make sales for the next five minutes while you're trying to figure this out. But this is kind of what comes back to the staying calm bit that the staying calm is going to be also relevant to how you deal with the client. So we'll get into that a little bit too. You need to be familiar with what specific types of problems are most likely to appear at each level. So you've got the themes, you've got the plugins, you've got your server, your hosting, and you've got your domain. So if Chrome is telling you it can't find your site, you don't even need to think about whether it's a theme or a plugin thing. It has nothing to do with it. You know you're looking at the domain, possibly the host. So as you get more experienced with WordPress and get more familiar with what, what is going to pop up where you'll, you'll know how to hone in. And then you can eliminate the suspects. So if you haven't found the culprit immediately, so what can you rule out? Can you prove that it's not the theme or not the plugin? Or if you've narrowed it down to your theme, can you hone in on exactly what bit of code is causing the problem? So if you can't find the answer, find everything that isn't the answer. So you might try deactivating plugins one at a time and seeing if that resolves the issue, commenting out sections of code that you think might be interfering. You can check and see maybe the problem occurs on one page, but not on another. And then you hone in and go, aha, what is different about this page from that one? So what is a plugin conflict in the first place? And a lot of the times too, if you run into a problem with a plugin and you report it to the plugin author or maybe the theme author of the theme that you're using, they will tell you, well, it's probably a conflict with another plugin that you're using and it's not our fault at all. So there can be a lot of different reasons why a plugin might be causing you problems. If it's not immediately obvious, turn off each one at a time and see if the problem disappears. Sometimes you can't do that because the functionality that you need to test is a part of the current plugin. Sometimes a problem won't appear unless you have two particular plugins activated together, so keep an eye out for that. If you're getting a white screen of death and you can't get to the dashboard, you can temporarily turn off a plugin by renaming its folder using SFTP or the command line. So it's kind of like pulling the emergency brake on that thing. Now, if your site is buggy, you've kind of got the same situation, the same approaches. It's maybe just a little less panicky and alarming. You're still going to try to break the problem down into smaller parts until you understand the root of the conflict. So this could be something as simple as a form that won't submit. That can often be a problem with the JavaScript that is running the validation for the form. So where is that JavaScript coming from? Is it coming from your theme or is it coming from a plugin? What message do you get in the JavaScript console in your inspector, which is also one of the most important things that you need is your browser inspector? So can you track it down that way? Just keep honing in on it. So if your site is slow, a lot of the times it's just some kind of temporary issue on the server and if you ignore it, it'll go away. Not always, though. Sometimes you have a really terrible host. I once ported a site I was working on to a separate host because I needed to prove to the client that the website wasn't the problem, that it was their host and it ran two or three times faster on the other server. It could be that you're overwhelming your host with traffic if you're lucky. In either way, that's where you need to start focusing your attention. It could be a particular plugin or a theme that's just hogging a lot of resources and slowing everything down. So once again, you have your plugin culprit and you deactivate until you can hone it down. Does anybody remember this 90s movie, Field of Dreams? Yeah, yeah. So there's this whole thing. And a lot of people have that approach to their website. They're like, okay, I have made my website. And they have no plan whatsoever. And for some people, that doesn't actually matter at all. A lot of the sites that we build are just meant to show that a company exists and has some credibility and is competent. It's more like a business card and maybe they're not actually looking for business online. They just need to show, hey, I exist. So that's fine. But if you are actually trying to actively get traffic, you need to have a plan. If you have no SEO strategy and no marketing plan, you're not going to get results. So then you need to take your troubleshooting steps and start applying that to your marketing strategy with someone who knows how to do that properly, which is not me and is outside of the scope of this discussion. So those are some of the more technical issues that we're likely to run into. Now we can try to apply some of the same principles that we've talked about to dealing with conflict that we're having with other humans. Now the caveat, this doesn't work quite as reliably because unfortunately humans are more complex and nuanced than WordPress sites. So and also sometimes two people just aren't a good fit and you can't just swap them out like you can with plugins, which is frustrating, but that's can be just how it is. And so here are some thoughts on how to make the best of working together. So what were our steps again and how do they apply to dealing with people? So stay calm. Make sure that you are grounded and calm enough to be able to listen and hear what the other person is trying to tell you, as well as being able to convey what you need to tell them in a reasonable manner. If you don't think that you can do that without getting upset, let them know that you're going to need a moment. Find a better time to have the conversation when everybody is in a better headspace. Maybe wait until you're not in the middle of a site being down crisis to talk about how you always do blah, blah, blah, blah. It's not going to help. We tend to react more extremely when we're under stress and it does not help us get through the situation without unpleasant residue. So retrace your steps. It's a little different here. It's more about what is the context? What is happening? What is the setup that has led to this moment? Does it even have anything to do with you? Sometimes a person may be reacting because of a situation that they had in a prior job where the person was irresponsible and did blah, blah, blah. It might not actually be related to you. So try to have an understanding of what the context is and look for the root of your conflict. Don't assume that you know what's going on for them. Understand that they may have a need that isn't being met right now. And think about your own response. What need are you trying to meet?  Or do you need space to be able to solve a problem without somebody breathing down your neck? Consider what your need is and what the other person's need is and how they may can maybe both be met. And just like in technical troubleshooting, try to understand the situation before you start tinkering with it. If your client is panicking about a problem with the site, let them know you've heard them and you understand how important this is to them. Give them a realistic time frame in which you expect the problem to be resolved and then stick to it. If you guess wrong, just keep updating them so they know you're on the case. So why is your client unhappy? Is it because the site is down or broken? Is it maybe because of your communication, your response time or your style or your availability? Have you been very clear on what you are providing? Maybe they expect you to be doing something that you never thought was part of the agreement. Did you over promise and under deliver? So a lot of this is about setting expectations, which we'll get to in a moment. So maybe you're dealing with a frustrating employee or a contractor. So some things to ask yourself, have you been moving the goalposts? One of the most frustrating situations for anyone building anything is when the parameters keep changing. It's really disheartening to have to redo work that you're proud of or to have to change direction when you thought you had a clear picture. Are you clear on what you're asking for? Make sure that your project has thorough and clear business requirements so the people working on the site know exactly what they're building or you may get unexpected results. Are you listening to what they have to say? If someone is warning you that there are going to be problems, they're not going to meet the deadline, they don't have the skills or the time to do what you're asking. And if you don't take that to heart, you will be surprised when the project doesn't turn out quite right. Keeping track of progress is important. But if you get too involved, you can actually interfere with that progress. So set dates for check-ins in advance and try not to hover. So setting expectations is best done right at the start of the relationship. Let the person know when and how they can expect to hear from you. If you like to block out chunks of focus time while you're working and you can't be reached, let people know that that's a thing that can be happened. Maybe you don't like talking on the phone and but you will answer emails quickly. So let people know that. So a lot of the frustration that happens is just from the expectation that maybe you'll always be available all of the time. And if you let them know upfront, like, no, I need a certain amount of time to just do my work and I don't answer calls during that time, then that's something they're aware of and they can kind of relax knowing that you're on the job. Leave some wiggle room when you're doing quotes in estimating time because if you run into trouble, then you have that little bit of extra buffer space. People will be delighted if you come in under your estimate. They will be thrilled, but they will be upset and angry if you go over it, even if it's the same number of hours. It's all about the perception coming into it of, you know, am I getting what I'm paying for? So be realistic about what you can and can't do. If you think you're likely to run into trouble in a particular part of the work, let people know so they aren't broadsided. If you come back saying you're going to need a few more hours or weeks or have to buy an extra plug-in to make something happen, just make sure that all of those possibilities are laid out upfront so that they're not a shock if if they pop up. Sometimes a person who is upset just needs to know that you heard them and it can be really hard to not immediately jump into explanations and defenses if you're under attack. But if you get it right, you will feel the other person relax or their tone will change. So the first thing is dropping the defenses and getting to the root of the matter. So that might look like, I'm hearing that you're really, really worried about the site loading slowly. So at this point you're not, you're not just kind of blamming out explanations for well this and this and this has to happen and then this and it's your server and it's like your host just like oh, yeah, yeah, no, I can understand that's a concern. Are you getting frustrated that the development site isn't looking exactly like the designs yet? Yeah, okay.  So maybe you're the one who's angry or concerned. Take a collaborative tone, putting things in terms of we instead of you and I helps reduce the sense of confrontation and it brings the focus back to the goal that we have in common. So you're bringing this back to how is the situation going to impact the project or perhaps the budget of the project. Usually in nonviolent communication we learn ways of describing our emotional state to the person we're having conflict with but in a work scenario the person you're dealing with may or may not care and getting too much into your emotions may not be appropriate. So you want to maybe bring it back to the project again. I completely understand that seeing another round of revisions would be really helpful but in order to fit that in we were we would have to delay the launch and I know that launching on time is really important to you. If you bring up a problem but you don't make a request or a suggestion that leaves the other person hanging and it looks a bit more like a confrontation that they have to resolve. If you make a constructive suggestion it's a good way to show them that you're interested in finding a solution. So maybe you're having a difficult discussion but if you can suggest some steps that you can make towards changing the situation then that kind of shows a certain goodwill. Be prepared to hear and know and to adapt your own plan because if what you're asking for isn't optional it's not a request it's an ultimatum. Ultimatums can work to get the job done if that's all that you want but they can also seriously damage your relationship with the other person because you've just taken away their sense of agency and autonomy. So maybe that sounds something like can we agree on a time for a weekly meeting to check in on the site's progress. I could say a whole lot more about the communication side of things but if you want to look into it look into nonviolent communication by Marshall Rosenberg it's a good tool to have in your toolkit for all things in life and just ways of approaching conflict, approaching difficulties and negotiations, mediations in a way that is a bit more satisfying for everyone involved. Another book that I really, really like and a fellow I've done a couple of courses with is the book is Say What You Mean by Orin J. Sofer. There's also this link that I kind of liked for nonviolent communication in the workplace. So we got tinyurl.com slash NVCWP and it just breaks it down as a little summary but things that are a bit more specific to work whereas a lot of NVC is kind of more personal relationships. What I'd like to do at this point is turn things into more of a conversation. I'm thinking that at least a few of you might be thinking about something that you're stuck on or some issue you keep running into that you could use a little help with.  So does anybody have sort of questions or nagging doubts or scenarios that we can help with here? Wait. Da, da, da, da, da. Can we get us on that sort of line for YouTube? The question, if you can't hear it, was on upgrading to the latest PHP versions and what's the best approach to that. Staging sites. Do you have any things set up where you can test things out on a staging site? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm doing that currently but I've only just searched for all. And when I need to update it. Oh, great. Oh, so it works when you do it on the staging or not? It's not on the staging. Oh, OK, OK. So it's not on the staging, sure. Great. So it works on the staging or it breaks on? No. It doesn't work on staging. It's a little better. Great. That's great because the worst thing is when it works on staging and then you do it on the production site and it breaks. At least you have a consistent problem. So you're off to a good start. So turning on your PHP errors is going to be the biggest thing or looking in your PHP error log because that will tell you exactly what what line of what plug-in or theme made it break. So I know my theme or not data today almost so it has to be in order. Do you update it or try to fix it or just create more? It very much depends on the theme. Is it like a commercial theme? It's going to be the password. Is that a weird thing? Yeah, yeah. So that could go one of two ways. It could be that there's one line in it and you fix the one line and that's the only problem that's in it. Or it could be that it's a systemic problem through the whole thing. So that would be breaking it down to the root of the problem. You've got some dated code. I would start off, find that first line of where you're getting an error, find out what that is, do a little research. Because the other great thing is that any problem that you are having, 12,000 other people are also having the same problem. So pretty much if you can be really specific about the error that you're googling or search on deprecated PHP this function, whatever the thing is that you're finding, you will find somebody who's telling you exactly how to swap that out. And if you're lucky, maybe you only have to do it once or twice in the whole thing. And if you're not lucky, you're going to also learn a lot more PHP in the process. So it may totally be salvageable. But it could take some hours of digging. It depends how committed you are to this theme. It might be super easy. I would definitely say, have a look at it. It might actually not be all that bad. Hi. Hi, I'm just going to say this. Oh, hang on. In recording, if we don't speak in a microphone, he's not going to do that in your home. He's not going to say one. Something that might help is switching to one of the newer themes like Astra or Genesis and then seeing if you can recreate the theme. If your old custom theme was well built, then they're not going to have functional code built into it. And the more modern themes often will let you get all the benefits of those older custom themes. And if nothing else, if it doesn't work, you can always go back. It's the cool thing about WordPress themes. But try that. That's one of the things that I do with clients who run into older broken custom themes. And it's one of the reasons why I'm so fond of custom do-it- yourself themes. What else? What else have we got? Let's solve all the problems. All of them. Oh, OK. You got a comment. And a problem. Next time, say, add clear the caches. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And check for runaway cron jobs. Those are the two things that cron jobs can run away and slow down your site. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. And clearing the cache, it's like if it looks like hair, very often if you clear it, and you run an update and it looks bad, very often it's because maybe the CSS isn't matching the new update. So if you clear the cache, then it will all get refreshed. Yeah, that does happen. And sometimes it's your browser cache, and sometimes it's the site cache. And the cron jobs are sort of specific to slowness on sites. And it's, yeah, it's certain. It's a little edge casey, but it does happen, yeah. But that's also something that if you end up talking to your hosting company, they will kind of be like, you've got this cron job that's doing this thing, and we had to shut it down because blah, blah, blah.  All right, what else we got? Nobody has any problems? Why are you here? So I have a small but sort of recurring problem of clients, especially through agencies, that refuse to do upgrades. I have some on version four. WordPress 4.7 kind of thing. So any suggestions for anybody on how to encourage, you know? Yeah.  Because that usually scares the bejesus out of people. We've talked to them, explained to them the potential risks. And this one particular case is very odd, where they have almost like a self-hosted server. And they just, I don't even have access to it, to the back end properly, like the files. So somebody else is doing that. We're just more doing the marketing and the content and pages. So when they want something to happen on a friend, we do it. But at the same time, they're not upgrading. And they're, I think, sort of tech people, whoever they're working with, aren't also doing it. So this is a very kind of extreme case. But yeah, we've talked to them and other people, just in general, some of them are a little bit hesitant to, you know, let's say, get into a place where we're managing their site rather than just doing content. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. Yeah. So maybe they're seeing you as the content people rather than somebody who can actually give technical advice? Maybe. But I find that they just we've presented, actually, a few times to numerous clients and here, you know, we'll do all these things, you know, upgrading and whatnot. And they just sort of push us off maybe because they're paying the agencies to do marketing. And so I think it should all be one package of deal that may be part of the problem. Yeah, I can understand that they might see it as well. Our technical guys should be doing that. And it is really hard to come into a situation when you see a site where somebody has been horribly neglectful and you don't want to trash their tech people. But also you kind of need to let the client know that there is actually a liability here that their site is very much at risk.  And they've budgeted it. And their budget is all going to this other guy who's not doing the work. And but if you if you've written all this down, at least when their site does fail and it will, you can be you might be the person that they reach out to.  Nobody's listening to you. But at some point when the thing actually happens, then they'll realize that you were the person that who actually had the knowledge and the expertise. And maybe they come back to you and treat you with a bit more respect for it too. I would also just make it clear that, you know, they're even that you have your own concerns about working in the site due to its age and instability and you know, kind of that you don't want to be liable for things that are happening in this site that are due to that. So yeah, I guess all you can kind of do is lay it out for them. And it's going to be there decision and they may make a bad decision. I mean, I usually find at the start of working on a project with someone, but I mean, I'm coming from it more of the development side. Like I do some design, but I do bits of everything. And so because I have the development background, if I say once your site is launched, we're going to need to talk about a maintenance plan for, you know, security and stability purposes. If you're up for it, you could take this on yourself or you can have me do it. And most of the time, they'll say, oh, I'd rather you do it because they are not technical people. So yeah, I guess it's probably harder coming at it from the content perspective because people aren't expecting you to have that expertise. So yeah, I mean, I think you can just put it out there and ultimately that decision is up to them and just try not to let yourself be held responsible and be available for help when they will eventually need it. Hello. OK, so my question is, if you're working with a client in the beginning, you agree that they're going to provide all the content and they don't.  This is one word press problem I cancel.  And I will have a talk with a client about that right at the beginning that the content will take you longer to work on than you think it will. And if we are going to hit these deadlines, then, I mean, having a very clear schedule and the dates that their receivables are due is really important so that when they blow through their deadlines, you can adjust the launch accordingly. So having in your contract, that can happen. If there are any delays on the client side, then the launch date will be adjusted accordingly. So you can say, this is what you agreed to. I also tend to have a clause in the contract that says if the work, if there is nothing received for a certain amount of time, it could be a month or two months or three months, whatever you feel comfortable with, the contract is basically considered closed and completed and a new contract is needed to start it up again. I've also known scenarios where there's sort of a kind of a holding charge that, OK, for every month that you're delaying, you've now thrown out our project timeline and all the other work that we're trying to do. So if you want your project to stay in the queue, you need to pay this fee. Those are difficult conversations to have with a client, especially if they're struggling to get their content done and then you tell them that now I'm going to charge you more money for not doing your share of the work. So that is a delicate conversation to have.  Let me know how you're doing with that. If you want me to have a look at it, you can also get something. You know, if you have the sort of client that is always kind of tweaking the little things a little bit, you know, they've got content, but they're just not quite happy with it. You point out to them that, well, have something that we can launch with and you can continue to tweak after the launch. So at least, you know, you kind of set a stake in the ground for we'll get super close. You don't have to make a big announcement about it until you're happy with it. But but at least we'll get it up and running. And from then on, you can change whatever you want. That's why we use WordPress so that you can do it and have total control. That's another good selling point for WordPress. So those are those are the ways that I go about it. It's I don't I don't know if I've ever more than once or twice had a client who didn't regularly miss deadlines, though. So just prepare for it, especially also in your own personal budgeting and so on. Yeah, just those are all really fantastic points. I would even add a couple more things. One, I tell clients you've got if you don't hear from you content wise for six months, there's a minimum thousand dollar kind of like penalty fee just for administration, just for starting up your project again. Also, sometimes when I see that clients are too busy, I say we can take care of your content for you, drop like an addendum to the contract and say, look for like a couple thousand, a few thousand more will take care of that for you. And a lot of clients will say, you know what, I'll just pay this because three thousand dollars to save me a huge headache that I can never and I can never get to this work. They'll pay it.  Yeah, that's a that's a good suggestion to thank you for the talk and the resources and the breaking down all the steps. I love the two resources. Well, I haven't looked at the third one yet, but the first two are great. I'm wondering if you have any specific tips for managing a toxic contractor who isn't under your contract so that they're contracted directly with the client. So you're like, you have to work with them. You can't really like, slide them off.  You just, you just have to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in what way are they being toxic? I don't want to get into super specific things, but it's some words that have been thrown around where emotionally abusive, very accusatory, inflammatory, both in person and in like leaving comments for other fellow contractors. Just kind of generally, general comments are like, yeah, difficult to be around. And, you know, very skilled at what they do, but difficult, very difficult to work with. Yeah, yeah, that is, that is, that is tricky because you can't sort of call it back to them, you know, jeopardizing the project if they're actually doing a good job on the project. And I'm guessing that they're probably not respecting your time and abilities and are being dismissive and does... Called everyone else incompetent in some way or form, yeah. This is actually exactly the sort of stuff that that NVC material is for, is Rosenberg has this great way of, he's got these two puppets and one is a giraffe and the other is a jackal. And so the giraffe is kind of the person talking in the sort of reasonable NVC type of thing and then the jackal is the one. Yeah, well, you always blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And kind of has these interactions where when you're dealing with somebody who just has no interest in being reasonable, there is still something going on for that person and something that they need, however obnoxious and abusive it may be. They may not be feeling that their abilities are being respected. I don't, you know, and I mean, it's entirely possible that they are, but that's just what their impression is. They may have some frustration about their circumstances that again has nothing to do with you. And it's not necessarily your problem to fix it or resolve it that actually is more the issue of whoever it is that has hired both of you to provide that work environment. So, I mean, one of the things that I would suggest to do is to talk to, you know, like has, have these concerns been raised to one level up to, you know, you're finding it difficult to work because this person is making your environment tense and unpleasant. Yes. So the client, and I quote this, is reluctant to part ways with this particular consultant for, you know, their own reasons, but. It's, sorry, I couldn't quite catch that. The client is reluctant to part ways with this contractor. Okay. Yeah. For unspecified reasons. Oh, so wait, so they've parted ways with them? They have not. Oh, they have not, okay. Yeah. But they, they aren't willing to. They are, yeah, exactly. Okay, but they're also not willing to talk to them and say, you know, things are actually, you're making things kind of difficult for people. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can, you can do your best to sort of minimize the interactions. You can do your best to kind of understand what is going on for them.  And it doesn't mean it's justified. It doesn't mean he's right. But sometimes just being like, God, man, I know it must be really hard for you sometimes working with us, with the rest of us.   So sometimes that's one thing that you can do is just see him, respond to him where he's at. Not in an aggressive way. Not in a battling kind of way. But like, God, man, yeah, like, geez, I don't even know how you put up with the rest of us where you must be used to working with like the cream of the crop. Like play it up a little bit and sort of just see how he responds to that because he might actually kind of, oh, we might do a little double take and back down. I don't know, it's something to try, try something you haven't tried before. I'm getting little wrap up signals and I'm also realizing that I haven't yet given away the fish. So, can I hear numbers? This is how many of the images were generated by AI. Yeah, who said 10? You win the fish. This amazing fish is brought to you by AliExpress. It unzips into a pencil case in which the inside is also fish. All right, well, thank you guys very much. This was a lot of fun.


It's a great feeling working besides joint nation partners. It's always a good time We always have a laugh about the different things we eat in the different way we say things This is another occasion to work together and strengthen our ties. I really appreciate learning different perspectives African Lion 21 provides a foundation and a structure for cooperation and future regional security You're gonna see a multi-domain multinational exercise that involves air Ground and maritime assets with service members from multiple countries all participating together as one African Lion 21 demonstrates the capability of the joint and total force To include integration of the reserve component by building and testing strategic readiness to deploy fight and win in a complex multi-domain environment I really would like to say that I'm really pleased and happy. This is my first time that I Participate to African Lion. I think it's the biggest exercise I ever ever participated in my life I'm really pleased and are to study chance to participate We are stronger together


Okay, good morning everyone. How's everybody doing today? Trying to regroup here this morning, yesterday was just a bizarre day because I had such a great trade in that TSRO and it really just pushed completely back and I just wasn't focused enough yesterday. And to be honest with you, I was tired. Scalp the CELG later for 15 minutes said you could do the same thing with the TSRO but overall yesterday could have been so much better than it was for me and a shorter day. Today I'm forced to have a short day which I actually don't think is a bad thing. I really think the fast trades are the best and that trade I called in TSRO was fast, blows didn't work which was not a big deal. We missed HTZ but I really would like to get more participation from the regular room members in here with ideas in the morning. Some of you give me ideas now and then but I'd say 95% of you don't and there is just sometimes my scanner doesn't get everything or there's things that happen at night that don't get picked up by the scanner in the morning. And we missed HTZ yesterday and it was the fastest mover out of the gate. There's nothing we can do but I had a poor exit on TSRO. I mean to have that stock move to dollars, I just wasn't focused. So today I'm very focused because I have to close the room early. We must do a quick trade. I'm going to be on TV in two places today and it's a very busy day because everyone is discussing the market. It's a hot topic, it's big news. I did not expect us to fall like we did yesterday. Today isn't that big of a deal. I did think we'd hold yesterday but we were in a very weird area and any news now is going to create scariness in the market. I still think the market is higher. I'm not going to worry about that today and I don't think we need to worry about that today. I don't think the play is long, I think the play is short. I do like MNST though and I do like PDCO and the problem is that this is very spreading down a lot and I'm just trying to decide which one we're going to watch first or maybe two. Eric, I did the equity trades. If you want to do an option, you have to look at it yourself and decide this is really going to. Let's watch two things. Just to make sure we get something. I'm going to watch MNST and PDCO at the same time just in case this pushes back. Although I must be honest with you, Dubai's pointed out about the other week, to be honest with you, I have amnesia. I don't even think about those things and it wouldn't set me off from doing this today. There's quite a lot to look at today and I want to make sure we get the fastest mover out of the gate and the biggest mover out of the gate. So I'm going to be very focused. I will answer questions when we're done. If you're here in a trial, I suggest you just watch because you really don't know how I call the trades and you should just observe. I will watch MNST simply because this might break before PDCO. PDCO may rally first and I want a quick trade but PDCO might work and just because it reversed that other day, it doesn't matter.  If I have time tomorrow, I'll give a lecture tomorrow. I don't know my schedule tomorrow. It comes and it goes. Actually I think the fact I'm busy has helped me be focused but yesterday it took a toll on me. I was very tired from the previous night. Doing a webinar on TV on Wednesday was just too long of a day for me. Target on MNST is 56 and PDCO, I don't know yet. It depends where it backs up. Good luck. I don't care about the fact it's touching the 200 and they both might work. Wow, it's very spready though. It's very spready. I think this is going to work but it is very spready. Okay, MNST. Stop is going to be 5830. This is going to be a big stop. 74 by 30 and I think it rocks and rolls. 74 by 30. MNST. Here, take it if you want it. Just get in late. Put the stop in. It's going to roll over. I told you I like this. I get the stop in 30. 5830 is a stop. It's going to roll over. Here, I had a feeling about this. I just did. Here. 56. 56 is the first number. Although I think it breaks at 55. MNST. Bigger stop than I thought. It doesn't matter. Now it's starting to tighten up. Here it goes. 56. Thank you for cooperating today. All right. Here we go. I wanted to click one. 56. 55. 55 today at MNST. But I don't know if that works out for my schedule by 10 o'clock. Let's see. Here, you had to be in it and don't worry about the fact if you got filled with the number here. MNST. And maybe the more things I have to do as long as I'm rested, it's okay. Here. Here. MNST. Yay. You could have taken some out there. Hold on. All right. No PEs today. 56. 01. Here. My hand is on the button if this bounces at all. Because I really missed that. What should I call it one yesterday? Here. Hold on. Let's look at the market. Market is a crapshoot here today. Here. This worked too. This worked too. You could have done them all. All right. Let's go back. PDCO went, but I didn't give the call. This is going. This is going. And did anyone actually, this is a huge stop too. Nothing was a baby stop today. This is working. This went down to the first target to 24. Did anyone do PDCO? Okay. I'm in this and I'm waiting for one more break, which I think it gets. And PDCO worked to the over. Here. Under 56. MNST. Trade and done. We'll see if we can get a second set up. PDCO worked. And if you don't want to take it out of this, you can put the stop maybe at 56.15, but I'm not sure if that holds. I still think this is lower. It's my schedule today. And also yesterday. Let's look at this other one here. Here. This is working, but this was a huge stop too. And I would have never sized myself probably for this in my mind. MNST is different. More expensive. Double the price. This was more than above. Yes. Very nice. Here. I didn't tell anybody this yesterday, but Wednesday night, no, Tuesday night, Tuesday night I got woken up in the middle of the night by a smoke alarm. And it wasn't in my apartment. Called the concierge.  Is there a fire in the building? I did not have a good night's sleep besides the fact that I had a long day on Tuesday. He's like, no, the one of the alarms is just going off. I'm like, where are you going to turn it off? Are you sure there's not a fire in the building? It went off for an hour. The amazing thing is that I would hear an alarm in someone else's apartment. So that's the positive sign that it would wake me up out of sleep and it wasn't in my apartment. Here. PDCO. If it sets up, I'll call it for anybody that wants it. If you did it, you did it on your own. PDTLA. 100% in this one. Walmart is dropping like a brick. Did anybody keep the option of Walmart?  The one that I originally called is Filling Up a Planet. It broke 90. Is anybody still in this? 87 bucks Walmart. Is anyone still in the option on Walmart that I called? It is good. Out of both good day. Thank you, Gypsy.  I can do a lot, but I have to have sleep. And if I don't, and it has to be a good sleep.  This... Oh, look at that. And this was good for a quick one later. Did anyone do this? I sent out the email. Didn't pull it around in the day, but this helped with something. Better than nothing then.  Could have done the Disney. No, this isn't over today. Disney was insane yesterday. Totally forgot about it. I saw it later. Could have done Disney. Forgot about it. We should have a rolling list, but I don't have time to make it, so I don't have one here. MNST is still going. Anyone still in it? Again, I got out of it because I have to be on TV today and close the room early, but this is a great trade. 55. I told you, here it is. It's going right now. This even would have worked out with my schedule. Somebody's getting this whole thing. Is anyone still in this? Anyone still in the MNST? I can't believe this is a 55 right now.  In fact, let's just look at this exactly to determine. Looks like it's going to even break 55. Hilarious. Is anyone still in this? Is anyone still in MNST? Is anyone still in MNST? It's dropped another buck. Looks like it's going to get there even early. Qualiver's still in it. I could have done this again, but I'm not sure I would have. Again, happy for the cooperation today and everything amazing. Let's look at HTZ. Qualiver's out. Let's look at what's out for tonight. There was a lot of data this morning, but I don't know if there was or is at 10. Hold on. Today's Thursday, right? Yeah. All right, let's look. We do have some things at 10. 10, 10, 1030. HTZ completely reversed yesterday. I didn't see this. Wow. Look at that. AOBC is out tonight. Oh, my God.  JWN is out tonight. It's all about the focus people. And that's all I see that's interesting. This worked. Went there. I liked it. Best trader. It went to 55. Did anyone get it all the way down? I'm not sure why you were concerned about the 200 per move on average. Some of you need to retake the class. Did anyone do anything else? I actually could have done that twice, but this is trying to go again. You're welcome, Madge. This is trying to go. Did anyone do the first trade in this which you would have had to take it on your own? I didn't call the exact entry. PDCO, I did like it. See, don't get hung up. I don't like this one because of this one. Don't worry about it. Rate every gap on its own accord. This rated well enough to do today. I know this didn't work here.  Amnesia. PDCO. I'm not going to call this here Kuala Bear because I just think everyone should stop for the day. And this setup is an ideal. It looks like it's trying to set up, but it's kind of like 50-50. I'm very surprised about the size of the stop here though. I would have never, never figured that.  What's the symbol for Delta? Somebody tell me because I got to talk about it today. Dow. That's right. What about the NRA? No more NRA discounts. What else is going on with Enterprise Renekar? Is there something else with that? What's the symbol for that? I think I have to talk about that too. Is this all gun control stuff? All these airlines are in uptrends. What's the symbol for Enterprise? That's the market. Somebody write that in the room please. Market's falling. And what are the areas that we got to watch? Let's write them down. And I'm going to have to buy a laptop because a good one. I have one, but it's not a good one. To have charts on to be away because I don't I can't see everything on my phone. That's a chart only the price. So 264.30. That's the area here that's really needs to hold. And we're a long way away from that here. 158. 158. And it will not be good for the market if we break these areas. 245. Which are far away now, but as you know selling happens very quick. And let's just look at these. If the market does fall red, this is probably going to set up again. This is setting up if you want to do this now. You can short PDCO if you want put the stop at 2490. Don't be tight with it. It's a big stop. This looks like it's going to try to roll over again and it's stop is far away and it looks much better now than it did 5 minutes ago when Koala Berry asked me about it. It's going to go. You got the market with you. There it goes. You can take that if you want it. This is falling and I don't know where we hold now because the problem is that if the queue start rolling over and we drop all the way down, let's look at everything that's important. Apple's green. I don't know if I'm calling any options trades anytime soon. If you're in Walmart you're rolling with that. Oh pal is talking again today. Here, let's find out what time. I just got an alert. Well that makes perfect sense now. The market's not just falling. It's scared of him talking. Apple isn't green. It's red. Well that was weird. Okay, Apple though is still near the highs. 180, 61, we're not that far up the highs here. Let's look at Amazon. When is he talking? I can't find the time. Does anyone know? Is it 10? Or is it around lunch? Or is he talking right now? Because the way the market's acting looks like he's speaking now. 10 a.m. All right. Ew. Be out of everything by 10 then people because I don't know. And definitely don't be in any long. CRM I liked but what did it do? Had one shoot up and then dropped. And I don't want to call this long because market doesn't look great here right now. What's the symbol for enterprise, please? There's some company. There's some company asking me to talk about it. It's not enterprise. What's one of the other car companies? There's some car company that I have to talk about today. Other car rental companies. I'm so bad. I'm crying. What's the symbol for Riddick? Avis? No, Avis. There's no symbol for that. There must be some symbol for a car company that I need to investigate but I'm not sure what it is. I need to find out. Is anyone in anything? This is studying up again. Oh, it hurts. We went over that yesterday. Yeah. All right.  You could do 59 by 65. MNST if you want another play. I won't be aggressive jumping back into this here but shorts are in vogue today and I'm very happy about what I did in this and I did like it and this just popped up. This was the best one. Up in this if you want to do it 55-60 I think you wait to the 5 minute but it looks like it's trying to go right now if you want to take a little bit. Enterprise is privately held. Car is Avis's. That's right. I need some ticker symbols in the market that are car companies. So hurts, car. Is there any others? I got the airlines. All right, so let's take a quick look at the market. Market I still think holds today but again I forgot the power was talking either way. Cures have a farther way to go down in here today and the problem is if that starts to get going and we have this area here which we're closer to in the doubt than any of the other ones then I don't know what happens because I feel like we should not get through the Valentine's Day. It's Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day was a big buying day for the market in a very weird area that could have fallen and didn't and got bought and I think that's important. In fact that is the only area that's important. People are looking at this 200-perimum average. That's really not important. If we break this we're going to go down here and if we go down here I think we break it. So I'd rather us hold this area. We're not near it. It's far away in every chart but the point is though that as you know selling comes in very quickly and if the queues drop down this will start to get going this will start to get going and we did everything right today. Here here this triggered. If you wanted to redo this you could. If I didn't have to leave and go somewhere today I would have probably held this a little bit more. Don't think I would have held it on a 55 but I might have held it for another 25, 30, 50 cents before that bounce but it just set up again and I'd say for those of you that are there yesterday maximize your days when things are running red. DTG DTG I don't know what that is. It didn't come up. I have no idea what that is. I got car. I got Hertz. I got the airlines because they sell guns too. Oh DKS that was the other one. Hold on. Any questions about anything at all today? Everyone should be up. Everyone should make money. If you did either one of the two topics I had you were good. If you did the call and get an MSU you're good. First one, second one everything looks great. I think we have a strong close to the week you know I was one of these things maybe next time I'm tired like yesterday. I just have gyro on the rim and close it down. I thought about taking off today but I rested last night I said you know what I just need rest. I need rest. I need a good sleep. If I get that I can be fine even with all things I'm doing but without it it's hard and there will be times probably where I can't run the rim and neither can gyro because he's in career right now. He's on vacation it was hard for him. When he did it the other day he wasn't himself. He told me it was midnight so I think he just didn't want to do it yesterday because of the fact that he was tired too and he missed a good trade here today but it's just very late there. DTG didn't come up anything so I don't know much. Any questions from anyone about anything at all? Very important to have amnesia when you have a day where things don't go right and just be honest with yourself was it the stock or did you make a mistake? Were you tired? Were you sick? Do you need a break? I think I do need a vacation but I'm not going to get it anytime soon here. Does anyone want to go over anything whatsoever at all? I did look a car, yes I looked at this. These things do not look as good as the airlines but I mean they're holding they're not holding great but they're trying.  I didn't think anybody was.  I didn't think anybody did it. Nobody wrote anything in the room.  You would have been stopped. I still like it lower but like I said I really didn't want to do anything else and if you did, you just got stopped out. I didn't think anyone did it. No one wrote anything. It still looks like it's going to go. Debots did it. If you did it, you could do it again in the 15 minute because I still think it goes but it just had a big pop. Looks like it just had a pop here and it slammed down right through this. Look at that. I don't think anyone did it. Nobody wrote. I think you got to wait for the five minute to trigger again in the 15 minute but I must tell you that this looks very sloppy now considering it just ran up and then broke again. I still like it lower. I especially like it lower if the Fed chairman talks and the market starts to fall but anytime he's talking, stocks could be very, very whippy which is why I said maybe don't do anything because of the fact that they could whip around. I mean CRM looks like a good long but I don't think anyone should do anything over the time that he's speaking and actually look, this did work. I could have called a trade in that. We could have done it. I had time. I saw this right here before it just lifted again and now look at it. It's selling off. Expect volatility during the time he talks and I would be flat and not in any trades. It's worse than almost Fed minutes him talking. This we could have done. I saw it. We had time and now look at it. I wouldn't do any other trades. We made money this morning in one or two things. I think you should be happy. I said today no piggies. No piggy targets. And this worked to 55. I think if you're really going to do something else today then you wait till he's done talking. And he's not going to talk all day. 15 minutes half an hour an hour. Wait till this afternoon. What do you want to go over? Let's regroup here. Tomorrow's the room. I don't know what we get. Monday is the wealth class. For those who either signed up for the room for the year that are paying paid members of the room you get the wealth class free. Email me if you want to do it or if you want to retake or if you've never done it. If you want to sign up for it you can email me. I don't have any really options going on right now. Unless you're still in this which I don't think anyone is. And Netflix. Let's take a look at it. It was the only other one. I've been to Butter one time Gypsy. I thought it was overrated. It was like a huge massive thing to go there and get reservations. I went there one time with a girlfriend who was visiting. She was wanting to go there so bad. I thought it was overrated. Personally, I like restaurants that have a view or atmosphere. That's very well known downtown. I didn't think the food was spectacular. It's not my favorite restaurant in the city and to be honest with you I wouldn't go back. But this actually still looks good. Well there you have it. $297.36 is still looks good. I think it's overrated. There's so many good restaurants in New York you can get sucked into places that are popular that aren't that good. And they're all expensive. Listen, how's everybody doing? Is everybody good? I think I'm going to let everybody go today because I'm not doing anything else. I gave him my take on these stocks today. If you want to do them, I'd wait till after Powell's done talking in reference to the market. I don't know what it does. I really don't know what it does today because of the fact that it's falling and I didn't expect that. But again he's talking and it could fall harder with him talking. I don't think it rallies with him talking. So we either hold with him talking or we drop some more. He's scaring everybody with the interest rates. Either way as long as we hold Valentine's Day low it looks okay to flip around which could happen any day. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen Monday. But if we go down there and break it, we'll go all the way down to the 200 per moving average and if we do that I don't think we bounce there. I think we break that tail and we'll still be in an uptrend but it will scare a lot of people. Koala Bear, I think yes.  Email me please and everybody else have a wonderful day and I will see you tomorrow morning. We did everything right today. We were perfect. And for those of you that got this down to $55, congratulations. Alright, have a good day.


Hey everyone, welcome to Nintendo Prime and I am so flabbergasted at the moment. The story that broke late yesterday is one that I think Nintendo is going to be concerned about, especially when you consider some of the things we have gotten from the partnership between these two companies, but also maybe not so surprising when you consider what the hell Sony has been doing with this company of lately and the company we're talking about is Square Enix and it looks like Sony is attempting to buy Square Enix and that Square Enix has been making moves over the last year to acquiesce to Sony and what exactly Sony wants to purchase from them. This is deeply concerning of course for Nintendo fans because we've been getting really big support from Square Enix. Think about some of the games we have gotten from Octopath Traveler to Triangle Strategy, Final Fantasy, Crystal Chronicles Remastered, oh and by the way, Live Alive. That's right, we just got a game last week from this partnership so to consider that Sony might be swooping in and buying up Square Enix is obviously something that we need to be paying attention to. The whole industry really needs to be paying attention to now. How do we know about this in the first place? Well, before we get into it, I would appreciate if you would drop a like on this channel, subscribe and hey, editor, roll that intro baby! Alright, so as you can see over here on GameRant, although you could pick whatever website you want, this news is everywhere and it says a rumor, Sony is interested in acquiring Square Enix, the Eidos Montreal founder. Hence, Sony may be looking to swoop in and purchase Square Enix or at least one of its developers. The last few years I've seen Microsoft and Sony take major steps in expanding their respective rosters of in-house developers with Microsoft making ways with the acquisition of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard. Sony has not been as aggressive given the roster of studios already under its umbrella such as Sucker Punch and Insomniac, surprised they didn't mention Naughty Dog, but hasn't been shy about adding to it either as with the recent purchase of Bungie shows. Sony may not be done as the founder of Eidos Montreal, which was owned by Square Enix, indicates Sony may have its eyes on Square Enix or at least one of its central studios in Japan. Eidos Montreal founder Stephanie Dostos touched upon this possibility during an interview with GameIndustry.biz where he spoke on the possibility of a Sony purchase, along with the general state of Square Enix and recent sales of Eidos Montreal. He said the sales of Eidos Montreal, Square Enix Montreal, and Crystal Dynamics to Swedish company Embracer Group was due, in part, to mounting pressure from Japan on its foreign developers to produce better results commercially. He described the situation as a train that is slowing down and in need of a fresh injection of cash. Regarding Sony, Dostos said that he is aware of rumors that it was interested in bringing Square Enix into the fold in wake of Square selling three of its biggest Western developers to Embracer Group. However, Dostos says the caveat to this is Sony may only be interested in acquiring Square Enix Tokyo studio rather than the larger company. I heard rumors that Sony said they are really interested in Square Enix Tokyo, but not the rest. GameIndustry then, so I think Square Enix CEO Yasuki Matsuda-san put it like a garage sale. When players take a look at the list of titles Square Enix Tokyo team has worked on, it becomes clear why Sony would have interest in trying to purchase this studio. The team's most notable credits include multiple entries in the Kingdom Hearts series, namely the Mainline 3 series games of Kingdom Hearts 1, 2, and 3. However, it's not known if they are the ones working on Kingdom Hearts 4. That said, the team's pedigree would fit right in with Sony's roster, which is regarded among critics and players as delivering some of the best AAA single player titles in recent memory. The one point working against the Tokyo team though is they have shared the development load with multiple teams rather than heading up a major game studio on their own, so they don't just develop them solo, they involve other studios at Square. It then begs the question of if acquired would the Tokyo team be expanded to lead a major titles development or continue to bring in support team for games such as God of War Ragnarok or Marvel Spider-Man 2 etc etc etc. Now there's not a whole lot of clarification from this and naturally this person has heard these rumors from inside the company. So these rumors aren't just coming from some random people on Twitter, this is coming from somebody who founded the company and heard these rumblings while working there and being inside of all of this. So this is obviously rather interesting. Tokyo team makes a little bit of sense, they could try to maybe get some exclusivity with Kingdom Hearts if they can get the Kingdom Hearts IP included with that acquisition. I also think that it is something for Sony to say consider buying the whole of Square Enix in Japan because think about this, think about this. Sony keeps paying for exclusivity on what big IP? Final Fantasy which is another massive Square Enix IP and literally Final Fantasy 16 is only going to be available on PlayStation 5. I mean they might allow it to be released later on PC but it won't be on Xbox, it won't be on a next gen Switch. It's only going to be coming to PlayStation 5 because Sony is writing fat checks and maybe Sony is tired of writing fat checks and instead would just like to buy the company on the whole. Now Nintendo has previously spoke that they wouldn't really get involved in all these acquisition talks unless one of their major partners was about to be acquired then Nintendo would step in and obviously try to make their own bid and make their own noise. Now does Nintendo have enough money to even purchase Square Enix? Well if we actually look at what Square Enix is worth today, you'll see the Square Enix has a market cap of 5.45 billion. This means it would cost about 5.5 billion dollars to buy Square Enix as it sits today. Now Nintendo does have actually 10 billion, I think a little bit north of 10 billion dollars sitting in a bank so Nintendo could literally outright buy Square Enix should Square Enix and their major shareholders be willing to sell it to Nintendo. So absolutely Nintendo does have the money to make such an acquisition. Now this would obviously be a major flip turn of events and bring a lot of Final Fantasy and all that stuff over to Nintendo's side of the spectrum. Now this assumes Nintendo would even get involved in this. Sony on the other hand absolutely could afford to make this purchase. They are technically a bigger overall company. However Sony doesn't necessarily have the cash on hand because like most major companies they actually live in a world of debt and they're always repaying that debt so they would just go further in debt to make this purchase. It wouldn't really be that big a deal. Now somebody would go why wouldn't Microsoft get involved in these acquisition talks because hey look what they spent on Activision Blizzard why wouldn't they just chalk up another 5.5 billion. Well one they're still waiting for Activision Blizzard to fully be approved and go through and two it's much harder for a American based company to purchase a Japanese company due to Japanese law. It'll be much easier for Sony or Nintendo to make this acquisition should Square Enix actually want to be purchased. Now it's not sure if Square Enix is looking to sell off different studios you know like Banda Namco I think they're the ones that had Monolithsoft and they sold them off to Nintendo. We're not so sure that they're you know going to just sell one. Obviously Sony still pays a lot of money for Final Fantasy. I could see Sony looking at this as 5.5 billion is a worthwhile investment for them to boost the PlayStation brand. This would naturally also hurt competitors. You're not going to see Square Enix games on Xbox which we don't see a ton of them on Xbox anyways but you definitely will start seeing them cut off on Nintendo and a lot of these Square Enix games these Octopath Travelers the Live Alive this kind of stuff sells really big numbers in Japan on Switch so this would actually hurt Nintendo and boost Sony in their home country. So this could end up being an absolutely banger acquisition for Sony and obviously for us Nintendo fans really really suck. But again the market cap is at a point that Sony or Nintendo could make this acquisition. It's not out of the question and as Shantara Furukawa said in the past if a major partner company of theirs which we presume Live Alive and Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy that they would consider this to be one of their major partners that Nintendo would get involved in some way and maybe how Nintendo gets involved is they buy the studio that's making those games bring that studio onto Nintendo and let Sony buy out the rest of the studios that there is possible that there could be a split like that so maybe Sony doesn't try to buy the whole of Square Enix they buy the major ones and then Nintendo comes in and buys the other teams that they want suddenly Triangle Strategy Octopath Traveler and games like that in the future become exclusive and Nintendo you know they basically become first party IPs at that point so we'll have to see we don't obviously know what's going to happen here it's just a rumor but this isn't your typical rumor this is coming from somebody who actually worked at the company and heard this information from inside those hollowed halls so what are your guys's thoughts on this would you be excited for Sony to buy it up remember Sony already pays a ton of money to get Final Fantasy 7 remake and the rest all exclusive Final Fantasy 16 so we're already seeing where Sony's chucking hundreds of millions of dollars to make these things exclusive to their platforms already obviously Kingdom Hearts you know we just got it on switch but it's not here natively so it really doesn't feel like we have that full support obviously anytime we talk about an acquisition of a beloved multi-platform company there's going to be opinions going in all directions Sony fans being stupidly excited Nintendo fans probably being worried Microsoft fans going I don't really get the games anyway so I don't know what to think about this so yeah it's going to be rather interested to see how this goes to me this is really a Nintendo versus Sony thing when it comes to Square Enix because Square Enix is such a massive partner with both companies in different ways and Square is benefiting from being a partner with both these companies however hey a straight up buyout a straight up buyout that's cash that's that that makes investors happy they can walk away a billions of dollars and Sony gets to walk away with a ready made team of developers so it also is interesting because it does note later in that interview that apparently Sony was not interested in any of the western studios that that Square owned and Square in the last years now sold off every single western studio they have seems like they might be preparing to be acquired there so thank you guys so much for tuning in let me know your thoughts on this down in the comments below and I'll catch you in the next video