This is Jojo, who is our Associate Executive Director, and Gwinnian, who is in charge of this project, which is called the New Play Exchange. Gwinnian, I want to talk to you about the history and development of it, but we've been working on it for more than a year now, and we are in the beta testing phase, headed for a full public rollout in January. We've been traveling across the country doing these type of introductory sessions, gathering information about what the field wants this product to look like, and we're very excited. You guys are one of the first groups to get to see it when you're all mixed together. We've been doing sessions specifically for playwrights and sessions specifically for readers. Jojo, we'll explain in a minute. We're actually leaving tomorrow. Tomorrow we won't be with you for the rest of the weekend as we are headed for the Literary Managers' and Drawers' Association meeting in Boston where tomorrow afternoon we'll be presenting it to the L&DA members. So, yay, congratulations. Glad you're here. Glad you're here to share this with us. You're going to have a bazillion questions. We're going to have plenty of time afterwards to do that, and like I said, we'll be around the rest of the day. So, city rights, welcome to the New Play Exchange. Awesome, I can hear you. That's great. Thank you all for coming. This is way more people than I thought we're going to be here. I love each and every one of you, and I hope you love me and us by the end of what we're going to say. This is NNPN, and we're here to talk about the New Play Exchange, which is a new technology platform built for the common good of the new play sector to connect plays and producers. And I'm going to unpack that really weighty statement for you with about 45 minutes of my time, and then you're going to have so many questions, you're going to want to kill me with them, and I'm going to sit here and we're going to have a great dialogue. So, a little bit about what this is, a little bit of context. This is not just an initiative of NNPN. We have partners all around the country who have been working with us for a long time. Some of you are here. Haley, a fan is here from the Playwright Center. LMDA has been a partner of ours, a Playwright Foundation in Chicago, Groningen. So, this is a sector-wide initiative. This is not just being, you know, we're not just going rogue, trying to transform how everybody does their work. This is the sector coming together, joining hands, building a new platform as one. And you see that we've got theaters represented, and playwrights represented, and literary managers and troublemakers represented. We've even met with agents. We've met with people from Publisher. We have met with people in every single part of the new play sector in the American theater. This is the wisdom of crowds coming together to build a new solution. We're also not just doing this ourselves financially. We have partners. The work we've been doing is built on a major cornerstone grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and very recently a very large grant from the NEA. So, again, this is a foundation, major foundations are behind what you're about to see. We're not just in this tech startup to make a quick splash and make a profit. We're not about profit. We're about helping to transform and stabilize the sector. So what have we done so far? Until about March of this year, as Nan mentioned, we went around the country interviewing people to help understand how we could build a technology platform that actually served the real needs of practitioners in a variety of roles. We engaged a development team and we built the prototype, which you're going to see later. We are now in the beta testing field, so we are going around the country signing people up for our beta platform, specifically people affiliated with our partner organizations. And they're in there and they're testing the platform and using it and finding all the mistakes and the things that we can do better and the things they love and they're writing to emails all the time and we're having great conversations because then we're going to go into redevelopment at the end of this year and release it to the public in early 2015. So what you're going to see later, you will have a chance to access before long and use. So I want to talk about exactly why we are doing what we are doing. The context for how things are working now in the American theater. There are about 15,000 playwrights in the Americans. A lot of research on that number is in approximation and they're producing on average one new play a year that they consider finished or ready to go. At the same time, there are about 1,500 world premieres every year. Not great math, right? And we have technology that we are currently using to filter 1,500 plays out of this pile into those slots. That technology is the submission process. Don't you love it? No, you don't love it? No, I don't love it either. Nobody loves it. It's horribly broken, right? But it's what we've got. It is the technology we've got. And we have patched it. We have used all kinds of software patches to fix the bugs and glitches that we all experience, the giant stacks of scripts and the overwhelming amount of work we have to consider and for players in places we have to send and keep track of all the work. We've got agents trying to act as a filter. We've got people who need to have the right credentials from the right graduate programs. We've got submission windows which we've opened for a short amount of time. We've got contests to pit plays against one another. We've got fees for things. We've done everything we can to try and make this process work. And it's dying. We're at the point now where many theaters have just shut down. They've admitted that it's an illusion, that it isn't working and actually bully for them, right? They've said this software isn't serving us anymore. This technology isn't serving us anymore. Now obviously we'd like to open more slots and change the math equation, but until we can actually do that, what we have done with NTN and our partners is offer a replacement for that entire technology. Instead of the submission process, we are building the new play exchange. I'm going to talk to you about what that is from three different perspectives. First, from the perspective of a playwright. So a playwright has, say at any one time, four plays that she or he is putting out in the world in various states of completeness. Actively thinking and working about. And a playwright is surrounded by a universe of theaters in the country, right? Thousands of them. Only that playwright's knowledge of those theaters is really incomplete.  And so you stand and play A there and play B there and play C there and play B there and you're just, you've got a spreadsheet. How many playwrights here have a spreadsheet where they're tracking other submissions?  I feel like, whoa, you get a picture and you don't remember sending it out. Or you get an acceptance, which is great. Where did this come from? It happens all the time, it's chaos and you can't keep up with it. And it's, the work becomes about email management instead of about actually building relationships with other artists. So what happens worse is, you might have a play, and there might be a theater that's exactly right for it, but you don't know them. They're out there looking for the kind of work you have.  And so you do, but they don't really like your work. There's a theater that you really want to work for. That's gone on a business and you have no idea because you're looking at the Drums and Source book or some other outdated information source or knowledge about where to send your play. So this is the world we're living in. This is what the technology of the submission process is doing for us. In the new play exchange, we are getting rid of submissions. Submission doesn't exist anymore as a paradigm and instead of submission, we have sharing. When a player finishes a play, she or he will share it with the new play exchange. Put it one place where it can be found. We're going to talk about what that looks like when you upload a script. You tag it with a bunch of metadata, which is the number of characters, their ages, their ethnic backgrounds, the genre keywords for the subject matter, et cetera. You put it up there and boom, there it is. It's a national database of new plays. So now, let's think about this from the perspective of a theater. So you're at the average one of the mill theater, our best friends, the people in this room, the people who have embraced new work and are championing around the world. You've got four play seasons except one is Romeo and Juliet, one is Fences, and one is Venus and Fur. But you've got to talk for a new play and it matters a lot to you and for your mission. And how do you find and choose that work? What is the process for which you choose that work? So you're surrounded by 15,000 playwrights. 15,000 of us out there in the world and your knowledge of them is imperfect too. You don't know them all, you can't possibly. There are some that you have relationships with. You've done this person's work and you've had this person as a resident artist and you've done a reading of this one and read it. So you've got some relationships but mostly there are names that are out there and names you don't even know. And then you open your submission window and you get submissions from all the people you know and a lot of people you don't know. And you end up with giant stacks and you don't know how to process it all. It's too much information, it happens too fast, you're overwhelmed, you can't value, you can't find your relationships in the stack.  So in the world of the new play exchange we have eliminated submissions, right? It's gone, that word is dead to us. You'll never find it anywhere within the new play exchange. Instead of accepting submissions we have a place you can go to discover work. The new play exchange is a sharing and discovery engine for the new play sector of the American theater.  Let's talk about this from the third and final perspective, that of the reader. Which is a term we're using to cover a multitude of people with a multitude of labels in the American theater. People whose job it is as literary managers or as dramaturgs or as directors or in whatever capacity to read scripts to think about them for the American theater. We're going to talk to LMDA tomorrow when we get on the play. These people stand between playwrights on one side and a theater on the other side. Except it's actually a little more like this, right? And it's actually a little more like this or in fact like that. So they've got a day job and they've got a passion theater that they run on the side and then they're actually reading scripts for a national contest and then while they're reading scripts they know other theaters and they know, boy, this would be right for so and so and this would be right for so. Their job is actually twofold. The first thing that a person in this capacity does is endorse the play they read. Which I mean they say, this is good. This piece of work is good. It's promising, it's beautiful, it's on its way to being transformative, it's a work of high quality on its own terms. And the second half of what they do which is where it gets tricky is matchmaking. It's not only good, it's good for you. And what we have heard from these people as we have gone around the country is there's a lot more of the former than there is of the latter. There are more scripts that they love than that they can produce or that they can then share with a specific person to produce. So we have given them tools in the new play exchange to do both of those things and we're going to talk about what they are. So what do they do with all that energy? What they do is they write recommendations. So right now what happens is they get this knowledge that they're slowly accreting as people who evaluate plays and they will occasionally get an email desperate for a play about climate change by a woman with less than five characters. Do you know anything? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. They send out emails to their network of friends. Everyone does this. And it's really hard to find. So in the new play exchange they will be able to, when they find work that they care about, find work that they value, write a recommendation of it. Now what is a recommendation? In the new play exchange it's text. It's not a thumbs up. It's not three stars out of five. It is actual written text. I'll show you some later. It is, this play is manifestly important because of blah, blah, blah. It really needs to be seen by a wire audience. It's not damned with faint praise kind of praise. It's not, this play will be great when the second act is fixed. It's not, of all the crappy work I've seen by this play, right, this is the least crappy. It's unabashed praise. So it's positive, it's text, and it's also both signed in public. When you are in the new play exchange you will see who wrote it and anyone will be able to see what you wrote. So there's no hiding. This is just praise for people whose work you value.  Again, you're surrounded by this. Right now this bizarre universe of playwrights and you don't know anything about them and your knowledge is imperfect. Well, when you've got plays in a database and they're all tagged with metadata, this one is this length. It's by an author from this state of this gender. It's about this subject. It's in this genre, et cetera, et cetera. They're ordered. And you can slice and dice them any way you like. And he finds out exactly the plays that are suitable for what they're looking for. My budget can only handle eight actors so I've eliminated in all the plays with nine or more actors. I really want to build up my, you know, presence with this kind of audience and I'm really interested in this subject matter, et cetera. So it's all slice and dice. And then, because these recommendations are in the system, you can find the ones that are endorsed. Not only by the literary manager for your particular theater and the people you've got in your email network, but by intelligent professionals all around the country. Suddenly you have the wisdom of crowds from the smartest people who think about theater in the United States. This is a radically different experience for a theater looking to fill a slot than ever before. And instead of just opening up and saying, all right, send me your work, America. And then you get 300, 900, 1,000 plays that you have to sort through. There's no opening up. I'm going to go hunt. And I'm going to decide what I'm looking for and be surprised by things I didn't know about that people that I value have recommended. I'm going to find things I'm looking for that I didn't know existed in ways that were never before possible. In addition to recommendations, we've given people who read plays another tool that's also the first time they'll ever have this before. And that's the ability to write private notes about the plays that they are thinking about and keep those notes. So we can think again about what this experience is like for the reader of plays. A person reads a play for that theater, writes a note about it, and it gets stored in some database that that theater keeps. Some awful database that they hate, that they paid a lot of money to build and to maintain. Or maybe it's a spreadsheet like us playwrights have. It's a small theater. That's all they've got. Then the reader is writing notes for another theater, changes jobs maybe. And now that first theater has access to the note that was written but the reader doesn't. So right now the theater that you write coverage for as a literary manager or dramaturg it stays with the people you write the coverage for. In the new play exchange you will always have access to your thinking about plays and playwrights in the American theater. So as you move through your career as a literary manager or dramaturg or anyone who thinks about plays you will accrue knowledge that you can always access. You will always be able to search through what you thought about a specific artist and her or his work. This is again a track record. You've only had that up here before or if you stay at one theater working for 20 years you always have access to their database. Now you're a free agent for that. So we've gotten all these features and functions built into the new play exchange and then we added another layer that we're calling the social layer. Not social like Twitter not social like Facebook. But social like this if you are a theater or a reader of plays and you have favorite playwrights whose work you want to stay abreast about you can watch them in the new play exchange. So that the next time Steve Yachty adds a play to the new play exchange I get a bing in my profile alerting me that he's added a new script. So I can know immediately when there's new Steve Yachty work and read it and be aware of what he's doing in developing his career. There's no like waiting and haunting and being passive waiting to be passively told the work is there. I can decide that's a playwright whose art I value or playwright whose relationship matters to me. Likewise, if you are a theater or a person who evaluates plays you can also watch people who are reading plays. So I may not have Liz Engelman on my staff of my theater but she's a genius right and I want to know what Liz is thinking about the new play she's encountering her daily work in the theater. So I watch her and every time she writes a new recommendation I'm made aware. There's a bing in my profile that says hey take a look Liz said this about Steve's play so I am benefiting on an ongoing way staying abreast of the work and maintaining the relationship with the artists I care about and leveraging the thinking of people beyond my immediate circle and as I move through the system and encounter plays and encounter other people's thinking about plays I find other people who think in interesting ways to me about plays I can watch them and slowly grow my network of people who are supporting my mission of my theater without actually knowing that that's what they're doing right they're working on my behalf passively just by expressing their love for plays that they find when they're doing their daydream so that's the new play exchange what does someone ask you for playwrights at the end of the day is it the platform on which you can share your work instead of submit your work on your own terms so right now you've got one theater who wants this kind of query packet, one theater who wants to submit but only on Wednesdays and only before 5 p.m. and you have to carry there by dog sled and you've got one place to watch a ten page sample and one place is eleven page sample and none of your name doesn't need to be on any page except page three right, it's just crazy your name now you put your materials on the new play exchange you are responsible for being savvy about how you talk about your play about how you write a synopsis about what kind of samples you put up there whether you put up the full script or not it's up to you whether you write a savvy description whether you use the right keywords how you talk about your work and that's it your job is to make your play discoverable and that's exactly what you do when you add it to the new play exchange your work becomes discoverable in a way that it isn't right now it's hard drive no one who works at the theater is searching on your hard drive for place but if you put all your work in this one share place and there's one place for them to go and instead of emailing their five friends who email two other friends on their map they can go to one place and find work and if your work is there and you tag it right it will be found it still has to be good but it can be found in a way that yeah that's a catch it's gotta be good so what is the new play exchange for theaters well it's a smarter way than ever to discover new work you know right now the way you have to discover new work asking our friends, flying to conferences seeing shows in other cities networking and the submission process all of that is inefficient right no one is happy about the 1500 plays that make it to that other side no one is happy about the process of getting them there the other thing new play exchange is for theaters it's a cloud based someone else maintains the database for you script research and evaluation platform for small theaters trying to build their own little databases where they store thinking about place the new play exchange immediately can take the place of that effort more on the capacity bigger and bigger theaters will eventually decide hey we can run our platform on the new play exchange as well and then for readers it's an easy way to finally support the plays they're most passionate about that they can't do two sentences, you write two positive sentences about a play and then when someone else looking for a play like that finds it there's some nice words about that play I want to read it it's also a permanent archive relationship between plays with plays and playwrights not the archive isn't just here anymore gee I remember I did a reading with that guy what was that play like again I don't remember it's a permanent digital archive of their thinking that they can access forever what is it for everyone I said this at the beginning and now I'm going to repack it up for you it's a platform for connecting plays and producers built for the common good of the new play sector we didn't build this for playwrights we didn't build this for theaters we didn't build this for drama jerks we're literary managers we built this for all of us that's why we're going around in places like this to talk about it to all of us and answer every question that is probably now simmering in your brain and you're dying to ask because we want to make sure because we're not perfect not far from it we're doing the best we can we're acquired from people around the country but we get smarter every time we do one of these presentations we get tough questions so I want your tough questions when the time comes and if you think it's a tough question I've probably been asked before nine times out of ten you're right but it's a tenth time out of ten that is important because that's what makes us smarter and it's a lot better so look at it let's see if our technology will allow me to show it to you pardon me for one minute are we already on the network did you make that happen can someone get me on the network please if you would get on the network and then launch that page newplayexchange.org I'll start taking questions so questions while we get this loaded up oh let's see I'm going to go to I'm interested again to make sure I understand so the endorsers are people who are people who are reading for theaters actually any member of the newplay exchange can endorse any other play anyone who belongs right so you, me, Jojo, Steve Yackey anyone in this room who joins can then endorse another play but doesn't that then create a new elite if your mom can endorse a play does that, is she a member of the elite well she's dead actually well that's all I'm asking is do you see any problem in no this is a super democratic platform it is meant so that anyone can join not in the American theater anyone who wants to join can join so we have actually made a basic membership that's free that allows you to go on look up a play by the play title or by the playwright's name and if you care to read it and if you care to write a recommendation of it and then the pricey not pricey, the priced memberships are the bar is so low that we want to set the bar so low that no one should reasonably say I can't afford that so we're talking about $10 yes so yes copyright protection what about copyright protection how are you ensuring copyright protection of a play the United States of America ensures the copyright protection of a play not the new play exchange if you are worried about anyone stealing your play I wouldn't add your play to the new play exchange generally we have found that I when Ian Sullivan at 45 years old seemed to be the mind anyone younger than me is like put my play up there I want people to find it download it do it anyone older than me is like a little worried and I can see both perspectives because I'm right there I can only tell you that I think that's the way things are going and I understand your concern at the same time but you don't have to put the whole script no you can it is up to the playwrights to decide whether they want to put the whole script just a sample of the script or not it's up now hey a whole script that's what I think but that's just me not all the images are loading but I'm going to log in first I'm going to show you me those of you on HowlRoundTV I hope this is scintillating something if your connection is not very fast in here for some reason or this is a super old version of I think this is actually a super old version of Internet Explorer yeah so this is not actually what it looks like you would normally see my big old handsome face in the upper right hand corner but essentially if that's up here playwrights name playwrights bio and then plays that playwright has uploaded adding another play my agent's contact information my website, my twitter handle just the contact information I've decided to upload Georgia if you click artistic statements so you'll see that if you want to get to know me in other terms you can talk about my work globally as an artist if you go back to pick any one of the plays I actually picked one that has a recommendation on it so yeah and that's a ten minute play so perfect you just see the sort of my synopsis about the play I've added a few other things because it's published I added a link to the publisher recommendations that have been written about it Georgia was very kind to give me her password so I could write one you see the development history of the play you see the production history of the play and then you see all the metadata I'm talking about the genre, the keywords the length of the play, the cast size the breakdown of the roles by gender the breakdown of the roles by race the age level the appropriateness of the play all sorts of stuff so if you go up and click Georgia on library you will see that as I have moved through the system there have been this one play that I added to my reading list and that's it because I'm a playwright I'm here mostly to share my work but as I was wandering around I found a play I wanted to read so if you see you will see that I have that it's telling me that Bayes of Primandell added this play and that's the only playwright I'm watching at the moment so if you log out under profile and log in please as yourself I don't know why the images are wrong it actually looks really pretty normally it's really gorgeous actually that's the thing people are saying universally like sexy so Jojo is in the system wow it's really bad on this browser Jojo is in the system as an administrator of a theater I'm going to show you what that's like Jojo is in as the administrator of the welder which is a playwrights collective she might come to an NBC and which you can hear more about sexy sexy sexy you win we're bringing sexy back to technology we're definitely going to have another round of questions there you go there's Jojo's base okay so you see again Jojo's bio Jojo's website and her twitter handle and here are the recommendations that she wrote by the way I warned Steve that we were doing that it is a smart piece of work it is really I know so you see all the recommendations she's wrote now I did a bunch more stuff for her so if you click under profile actually see that she's also the administrator of the welders you can see that she administers the theater profile within the system and again all I put in there was a bio and sort of general nuts and bolts about the theater click on library we'll see that in her library she has the reader powers she has plays that she has set aside to read and then you click on private notes she has written she has written two private notes about two plays that she's written and obviously this gets a lot more robust and more worth that you do click on activity she's watching five playwrights including Mr. Yankee and has written a bunch of playwrights so spots what is somebody she follows so she got notified when he uploaded Wee Tyreseus again when he uploaded sister's Valerie Hollow and this play etc so again when there's more people in the system this is going to be a robust feed of stuff that's happening you know the stuff that people are doing people who have decided to watch so go to the search because Jojo is a theater in the new play exchange she has more than just look at play by play title and playwright name she has this robust set of filters that she can use to search plays so if you scroll down you see genres and she can add keywords and she can add her cast sizes and get into some great details about what kind of cast she's looking for kind of work she's looking for she can look for work just by women for those of you who have been following the list you can just click that box and then boom the only result she'll get will be plays by women so if you just go up and just type the letter A immediately all of the plays and play titles that have A in it that's it so add any other letter next and see what happens so it's slowly winnowing down the plays until there you go the one play she was looking for so it's like this dynamic immediate search and actually it had filters she can add the filters, remove them so it's like when you're looking for flights on kayak and you're like yeah these dates and these times and then you get four flights and you're like oh maybe I could leave a little earlier and then all of a sudden you've got 38 flights you know like let me start these play prizes because you're trying to find exactly the work you're looking for these are the tools that we have given people looking for plays to find them so I just went in and did only female playwrights and at least a cast size of 8 that have the letter A in them and this is with only about 170 or 180 playwrights in the system look at how many came up, I'm curious alright so more questions than you first I just wanted to ask does that provide a form for the actual play to be seen is it and in what way well for example I came back from a workshop with the Rodway and within their workshop they have something similar I think it's an international alliance of theaters where they have an opportunity to come to the event and actually do their performance so it's seen amongst different other playwrights and writers and producers and I'm wondering if your forum has a platform where they can actually see the play it's just technology so now so it's basically like a website where you can access all these things can network with all these different genres of people but then the play itself is not seen it's just kind of like to show your I'm just curious it would be wonderful if there's a way for like a video for example so if you click on sorry any play actually you might have to log out and log in with me to do that solid in that email at the same password part of the things you can add to the profile of a play are any links to supporting video links to supporting PDF so if you're writing a musical links to mp3 recordings of the song you can put up cheat music you can put up other supporting material my place didn't have any of that but I can show you what it looks like are there any part credentials that you have to have to put it on the website so if you scroll down you can see that I could have added this is my play hot and cold no down there you go sorry you can see I could have added a lot I have only added the draft of the play I could have added a sample I could have added a blind version we're going to implement the ability to do blind searches down the road I could have added a score I could have added links to mp3 files and I could have added links below that to video we're going to be adding more we don't have a link right now to the published version of the play and that's a known thing we need to do there's a lot more than that I'm going to take a few other questions from other people it's accessible to everyone yes that's that everybody can see it what if there's a comment that's so negative that you have to dispute and talk about it and eventually we are we want to be ahead of trust the community but also provide the policing mechanism to so if I were to if you catch a lot of editing this play and go to the one year crack I'll show you Jodo's recommendation if I were to read this and go wow that's terrible you see that report button I or anyone else in the system who finds a I can flag it and then that enters it into a system where by me or Jodo or anyone else in the MPN can remediate the situation anyway so we want to give the community the tools to kind of police itself but we're there to step in as necessary okay so here's my worry if I were a professional player here and this is human nature I love Jose Rivera he's awesome he's one of my favorite everybody knows he's awesome and so me and a whole bunch of my colleagues are the minute that he publishes a new play or puts something up I'm going to totally read that new play but let's say my capacity is I can only read 10 plays a week or only comment on 10 plays a week it means all of the playwrights who are already nationally known highly the high name recognition are going to be immediately shot up and shoot up in recommendations whereas playwrights who are just breaking in are not no one's going to know about them it's it will be very hard to discover them you saw when Jodo did the search that there's just a list of plays there's not the ones that are most recommended or higher at the top there's just a list of plays that meet the criteria there's no way for her to say there's no selection filter that's only showing me the most recommended plays it's just when you find the play you might see some thinking by people but you really care you really care about the work right and the recommendation is a way to make you feel more comfortable to understand it more one follow-up question the search mechanism means that if I type in A there's going to be like a play that starts with A always at the top it will always be seen which means I should name all my plays Arvark Arvark 1 Arvark 2 I'm going to answer your question I'm going to answer your question more generally speaking I'll say that as with Google any time you build a technology there are going to be people who try and gain the system and find ways around that I know that and I can't predict what they're going to do pay ten friends to join and write recommendations in plays I don't know what it is I know that we're going to pay attention I know that we're going to watch what happens I know that we're going to do what we can to address and fix those things I also think another one that people go in and add a hundred keywords to my play so that I always come up with keywords such as I think what happens to a play like that is that when someone finds it and sees the hundred keywords they're going to say this person does not know their play very well and I don't want to work with a person who can't be an interlocutor for their own work so again I don't have a specific answer to what you're saying but I can't tell you that I'm here to pay attention to those problems and fix them when they arise I can't foresee them in the future I'm going to go to the way back because I have ignored them you on the right yes it doesn't actually have like in Facebook your own sort of network so people that can follow right yes but it's a Facebook is a two way relationship this is one way so if I follow them they don't know I'm following them right I'm sort of alert so I only get alerted by them when they upload something I'm not alert right if you watch me when I add a play you get an alert that I add in a play you will get a notification that I wrote a recommendation okay so that's really cool so if your friends would say Rivera he wouldn't necessarily know that she's their friend exactly because what would be so cool if he did because then he can read her play and then recommend it yeah I mean I think here's the thing in general with the tool we built less stuff into it than we might have wanted to on thinking that we should do a small number of stuff and get it right and figure out where we didn't get it right and then get it right rather than try and build all these complicated interactions and then do it all wrong so we're just going to do little successes and grow from there it reminds me a little bit the LinkedIn recommendations algorithm is really really complex yeah you end up with the black yeah that's how they find us for our plays but how do we find the theaters you don't because your job is not to find them and submit your work to them anymore your job is to put it in one place right here on the new play exchange that they find your work so we are taking the standard paradigm when we're trying to find them we're not doing that anymore we're saying here's my work come get it that's not here now I will say having said that we are working on what we're calling an opportunities module so you guys should all hear this okay again right now when someone wants to run a contest they open the gate and say we'll take any piece of work that meets these criteria from July 1st to July 31st and what happens is they'll say we want only plays by authors in Kentucky and then come on some of you will say I used to live in Kentucky no or was it about Kentucky or was he buying turkey fried chicken when I wrote and so we overwhelm them with plays that really do not actually meet their criteria and then they have 900 plays to read instead of 100 I'm exaggerating from our point of view how do you find all the places And how do you find all the opportunities to do that? There's the official playwrights of Facebook, which announces its list of opportunities. There's the Amazing Playwright Center, which has the leading, if you ask me, the best database of opportunities in the country that most curated and carefully constructed database of opportunities. And so you can stay abreast of all of these sources. But it's still hard to know if you've found all of the ones for which you're right. So in the module that we are building, theater will be able to log into the new play exchange and create an opportunity and say, this opportunity is only for Kentucky playwrights. And then the magic of the new play exchange will only notify Kentucky playwrights of the opportunity. But every Kentucky playwright will know that the opportunity exists. So all people who are appropriate for the opportunity because the theater set, using the criteria that we have in the system, the theater will say, these are the things that must be met. So then any playwright who has a play that is, that meets all those criteria, will get a ping on the activity feed saying, your play crack is eligible for this opportunity. Then you can click through and see the opportunity. And if you decide that it's something you wanna pursue and maybe it isn't, you can pursue it. But it is not a submission mechanism at all. We're trying to eliminate the noise for both playwrights and the people who post opportunities. Right now, people who submit to opportunities, and I do not submit to more than 80 here, submit to 100 to win three. And I always say to the people, wouldn't you rather submit to nine to get those three and not waste your time? The nine that you're really right for and still get the same amount. And to the people who are submitting opportunities, they boast about, we got 1200 scripts this year. That means their opportunity is desirable, right? But they also had to read 1185 scripts to get the 15 that they wanted. And at least 300 of those are just totally not right. And we're not gonna do anything about quality, right? But we're gonna eliminate the ones that aren't really, that don't really meet the criteria and reduce the noise.  Can you talk a little bit about what the next step is? So a theater encounters a cracker, a reader. Well, let's say a theater, and I was cracked, and they liked it, and so they downloaded it, they read it. Well, so I have my agents contacting through on my profile and they can go to her, actually crack this publish so they can put on the link, where they can copy and paste the link into their browser and go buy a copy or go to my publisher. If I don't have either of those things, they can use my contact information to reach out to me and negotiate with me directly. That's it. Okay. One quick question. I'm assuming this is gonna be available like on iPad. It's not gonna be like an issue with Adobe or anything like that, right? No, it's cross platform. Great, okay. Mobile-friendly. So now, this is a question, it's actually a two-fold. As a player, will I have the ability to read other people's work? Yes. Okay, great. Now, this is maybe a suggestion for future. Let's say right now, as a reader, you use a reader like so-and-so's work and so-and-so's work and you have recommendations, right? So does Jojo. So now, Tom Smith comes on as a reader, and he tends to agree with certain plays. So in other words, kind of like you guys have the same taste. Would it be possible in the future to have kind of like Pandora-like recommendations? So. Yeah, so that's actually on our radar screen. Okay. That down the road, we will be able to say, like when you're reading crack right now, it doesn't say other plays by Woody and Sullivan in the right column. Or it doesn't say other plays in this genre in the right column. So there's that discovery that a great radio station does for you. A great radio station doesn't play the songs that you already know or only those. It plays some of those and some that are like that and some that, and you get guided into new experience. It's discovery that sort of sponsored, that's what I'm looking for, a synchronicity that I stumbled onto this. The other thing we wanna do eventually down the road on the home page of the New Play Exchange is 10 new sci-fi plays that have been uploaded or 10 new horror plays that have been uploaded or 10 new recommendations or one random play or all kinds of things to sort of stimulate all of us to think outside of our known networks to find people we just don't know. You, I saw you first. I don't know if this is already an answer, but, because earlier somebody had asked a question about putting up like only a piece of the work, not the ones that, so then would I be writing a recommendation based on that piece or would I have access to the whole play? This is the other reason that I think people are going to put up their whole plays because people are not gonna write a recommendation of a synopsis. They might say this premise sounds interesting to me. But it may be so like someone might know my work from another source. Like so again, you've got that dramaturge who is reading plays for the O'Neill and they're like wow these are great and as soon as the O'Neill picks its finalist I'm gonna go in and pick the five that I really love that didn't make it and write recommendations for them. Now those playwrights may not have uploaded the script but the person has read it another way. So they can, the recommendation can still exist. Is that what you're gonna say to them? Yes. Blue shirt. Are these plays unproduced? Great question. No, they're not unproduced. Maybe as my next question, can you accept a positive critical reception from a journal as a recommendation? Well, again, that'll be on the playwright to decide whether they're comfortable with a recommendation or not. So again, to be clear, this is a database of new plays. That will be in some cases plays that are new to the world and some cases plays that are new to you. So people will be able to upload their work and eventually theaters will have a tool when they're searching to say show me only unproduced plays or only plays that have had one or two productions or just show me anything because I just don't care. So eventually, 20 years down the road this will be a chronicle of the last two decades of the American theater and then the work that was produced. So that's a lower answer to your first question. You. You had shown us a category for uploads for a score. You envisioned this whole network to include musicals or plays with music. Totally, yes. That's why we've got all that there. Then as a follow up, what search field do you have for the theater that says plays with music or musicals? It's a, we don't and we need to. And in fact, that is today's first meeting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Write it down. Got it. Oh, she's behind me. Awesome. The blind searches you mentioned. Yeah. I never know how many people are reading their plays. That's correct. Yeah. So this was something that we had to figure out and negotiate so players are like, I want to know who's reading my work. I want to know, I want to be aware every time someone clicks on it. And drama tricks are like, if you tell them I'm reading your work, I'm not reading their work. Then they're going to faster me for what I thought about their work. It's no longer time to say it. And they have a, Let me finish answering the question you just asked. I've got more to say. I'm going to have to follow up, yeah. So we are going to be given playwrights and we haven't done this yet. Data about the broad interest in their work. So you will be able to log on and say, 15 people have added crack to their reading list. 15 people have downloaded it. 78 people have viewed this page. So you will have some assessment of the level of interest in your work but it's not specific information that you want to have. So I'm sorry. What was your next follow up? The second question was all those people who are reading anonymous the agents, the theater, the literary managers. Do they have a fee? How does that work in terms of the system? So it's a great question. I'm going to answer it with a question for the audience. So I've already revealed that the price that we are. So let's be clear about some context. We are a nonprofit organization. We're not getting rich off of anyone. Nobody in this room has any money. Keep it. Our job is to serve the American theater. And actually I don't consider it my job to build the software I want. I consider it my job to build the software that we want. And I'm an energy and our partners are the locus of that energy. But it's you all who are going to support it. And so we wanted to give away for the people who are going to use the tool to support it in an ongoing way beyond the work that beyond the resources we get from the foundations who have supported us today. So the price is really a way to contribute to the ongoing evolution and development of the platform. To have me there to answer your tech questions. To have someone there when someone flags a recommendation as inappropriate. To have us be able to build all these other features that I'm talking about. To be able to pay a firm and build an firm to do that. So I've already revealed that we are leaning toward it. None of this is final because it's all free right now if you have the codes that we're giving out to our partners. But we're leaning toward $10 a year for play, right? $10 a year. Think about that. Two lattes. $10 a year.  And please quit. And buy one year membership. One day as a smoker. So we have two other packages that one can buy on the nuclear exchange. One is the Reader package, which is literary managers and dramaturgs and directors and anyone looking for new work. And then one is the institutional package that allows for a bunch more. Right now it's just those three packages and you have to choose one or the other. Eventually you'll be able to choose multiple. And eventually you will also, if you will buy an organizational package, you'll be able to give out five reader licenses with your. So that's all the setup and context. I want to know, are there any literary managers and dramaturgs in the house right now? OK, just people with their hands raised. No one else gets to answer this question. What would you pay to do what? To have all the things that are to show me the ability to do these robust searches for plays along certain criteria to keep a permanent archive of your relationship with plays and plays that follows you from job to job. And it's a tool that helps you do your job better. Like when someone says, have you heard about this play right, you can be like, right now you go to Google. But instead you can go here and find out more precise information. So what would you pay? Well, I'm really shoestring, so I do $30. $30 a year? Yeah. And I did have a question and then I want to get on the number from other people. Well, I think there's, in a way, there's two answers to the question. One is, and that's because there are people who are at that and they're institutional, meaning they're part of some place. And there are people that are at that and they're freelance, which is what I am. Imagine you're freelance. Imagine you're freelance. That's right. For the latter idea, the freelance idea? It's kind of phenomenal, what you're talking about, because it allows me to carry essentially all my coverage that I've ever done of anything with me. It's only talking about an aspect of the notion of let management of drama church that's about new plays, which is not the only thing that I do, but it covers that in a way that nothing else has before. So give me a dollar figure. 42 cents. It's hard to say. I mean, it seems like the right answer would be, like, compare it to an LMDA annual membership or something like that. What is it, 60? OK, give me another number. Just shout them out. 50. 50? No, just answer from this one. God, you playwrights. Every time I do this exercise, the playwrights are the worst. Can I dramaturg your question before I answer? Give me another number. I have a question. No, give me another number. I will answer your question after you give me another number. OK. Just give me numbers. No, numbers. No, numbers. I'll talk to you about your idea afterward. Do you have a number? 50? OK, so we're now zeroing in on $20 a year. Wow. For great reasons. We're enjoying this and making that 10 as well. Again, we want to set the number so that anyone can get in. Right? We want to set the number so that anyone can get in, but everyone is contributing to the ongoing support of the school. So is there anyone here who runs it? Can I jump in just for one second? So I was just going to say, it's interesting, as we've done this, to go around to different cities. When we were in New York, the people in the room, the playwrights in the room said $100 a year, because that's their point of reference, because you can only buy a latte for $8. But then you go to Iowa City, and they were more around $15 or $20. So wanting to make sure, as we said, it's across the board that anybody if you're in the middle of America, if you're in a major city, everybody can afford it. So does anyone run a theater here? OK, so now imagine the same thing for a theater. You get to maintain your theater profile. Eventually, you'll get to do opportunities in the system. I wouldn't know what you would pay. And again, just give me a number. Suzy first. What's your number? $200. $200. Going once. Go. You're still at 30. You're still at 30. OK, any other numbers? So we're angling around $50 for theaters. And again, that's a price point that allows a storefront theater in Chicago to afford it-ish if they find it useful.  It's a small amount of money. You have access to this cool thing where they can find out work about new playwrights. So that's where we're headed. Now, I know there are probably people saying, you know what you should really do? It's a point system where, for every play you review, you get X dollars is another lot. And believe me, we have considered all of those. And we have decided not to do them for now. But our minds are not closed, like down the road, that might prove to be a smoother way to do it. We might create packages of the three different kinds of profiles.  To the Get Started page. So you'll see these are the three user types. And these are the features that we've listed for each type. And eventually, there will be a lot more for institutions than for anyone else. And that's also a little bit why it's more expensive. So there are other models. Yes? My question is, I get plays from people who are set in New York. I'm never going to do it if it's set in New York. So is there, on this little search thing, the setting of the play, either it's generic or South Florida or wherever I happen to be that I need my play? Am I going to do a New York play? Do you grab that? There's the geographical criteria we have now is the authorship. So if you want an author to play, people and I will write about New York too. You know, that's new. That's actually no one has mentioned that either. So you can get a point. Chewing Man. Chewing Man. Yeah. I don't know how we tackle that. Honestly, my gut is that that wow, that's complicated. Because setting plays a multiple settings. How would I describe the setting if I'm someone else? If we just need to have a setting field and make that searchable? I don't know. That's something for us to figure out. But I thank you as much as I thank you for the mass martyr today. Thank you. Will playwrights be able to search on other playwrights? Yes, but only by name and play title. Not region, because I think it'd be good for networking too. Yes. You could see the type of people who write in at least a style you respect to create writer's group. You know, that's a cool idea. It's not there now. My name is rocking it today. I know. And it's like, oh, I don't get rid of it. No, I mean, it's not a thing you can do now. A lot of people ask that. So I signed up maybe 170 playwrights. And the most frequent feature they ask for is, I want an alphabet of a list of the other playwrights who are in there. And I understand intuitively why they want that, because they put in their friends' names to see if their friends are there or if someone they know is in there, and that's cool. And I understand why they don't want to feel alone. At the same time, this isn't intended to be a network built for the common good of the American Theater to connect playwrights and playwrights. It's to connect playwrights and producers. And so we're trying to foster that connection. And that's where our main efforts are. So maybe down the road. Monsie, I want to call on someone I haven't called on. Lojo. It's nice. Because I think that in any kind of matchmaking service we just grant what this is. The more matches you actually create, the more value it is to the people who are in the system. So I'm wondering, what kind of interest do you have from literary managers and artistic directors about how much they'll actually use this so we can determine is it really going to create a match for them? So this is really the classic question. It's my favorite question. I love this question. Mostly, as Joago said or Nan said, we've mostly spoken to people who are all of one user type in the room together. All playwrights, all literary managers, all, et cetera. And they always say some version of I know why I would use this and we all know why we would use this. Why would this other group use this? I'm not sure. Playwrights and playwrights say, oh, I see the benefit of this for playwrights, but why theaters? And theaters say, I can see why I would use this for my theater, but why are playwrights going to put their work there? Everyone has doubt about the other group. So all I can say is trust us. You trust all the groups, and they all want. However, I do think that as we build our capacity to talk about the tool, and again, we're in beta. There's about 180 users total in the tool right now. As we start to make love connections, which takes a while, like from finding a script to opening night, takes a long while, right? So maybe two years before we have a lot of success stories to share, but when we have them, we're going to use them to talk to people about why it matters, and why it works. We know e-harmonic commercials, I promise you. Yeah, yes, ma'am. I talked about notifying playwrights of specific opportunities. In order to do that, when you have something that's only for female playwrights or African-American playwrights or Asian, are you going to be asking those demographic factors from the playwrights? Yes, we are asking them, but all questions like that are optional to answer, fully in compliance with best practices I think about how people want to or not choose to identify themselves. We've also been super diligent in stretching out of our white male privileged blinders to make sure that we're looking at every perspective we can and asking people to make us smarter about things, to make sure we're being as inclusive as possible, which is really important to us. Really, really important to us. Yes? Yeah, earlier I asked about universities and I'm losing to all this going, I've been teaching a conservatory acting as director for the last seven years. I generally spent about $200 just buying new plays every year just because I'm interested in wanting to go out there and I want my students to have new work as opposed to the, I'm thinking that this is perfect for people or teaching in university to have this access because I can sit at my computer and go, oh, I've got 14 women in my graduating class and I'm gonna play for them. It was every year. I personally buy my stuff, the school doesn't buy it for me and I would easily spend $50 to have this, like I said at my computer, and go for this. So in leaving that access to you out before down the line, this would be something else on playwrights. If you're thinking of participating in this and know that you can speak to all your friends who are teachers of which you probably have 17 and say, this exists for you on the planet now, it really is a fabulous tool for my perspective. We really do think that there's a strong university theater market here and I will confess that we have not done enough research into what would be useful for university theaters. It's something we have to do and probably will do as soon as we can next year. The other audience we haven't fully, we met even with agents, right? You can see how agents might be like, whoa. I'm not sure about this. We met with like 25 of them at Abrams last year, including me, and I was like, okay, what do you think? Are you afraid of this?  And they were all like, we love it, we love it. It's gonna get our playwrights' second productions, which we can't do. It's gonna help us in a way that we never thought before. So they're fully signed on. Publishers, we need publishers, so Craig and other people here in the room, Amy and et cetera, will round you up at some point and do better for you than we have so far. Yes. Which ties into the question about the agency. As representation, is there a membership profile that would allow me to administrate multiple writers' pages? That's something that we actually proposed in New York. And they were like, not so much. It is definitely something that I have mentally considered that I have written what are called the user stories to build. I figured it would be intuitive so that you could administer all 25 or whatever of the playwrights. You could administer their profiles for them and maintain that, you know, make sure that the bios were good and that the synopses were good and consistent and et cetera. But not yet. However, if the playwrights you represent are happy, they can give you their username to password and you can log in and do that. It looks like I logged in and it was your order. She wrote some fairing next to me about it. I, yes. If the playwrights can be downloaded and read, how do you get your license? For production, if someone wants to produce your work, they have to negotiate with you and produce it. And that's part of the user agreement. When you sign on, when you join, you play exchange as a user agreement that says, you know, what you can and cannot do is material and everybody that comes into the exchange will have to sign that. Is this going to be up and worldwide or just on the United States side? Worldwide. The A in literary managers and drum turns in the Americas is world. That's North America, including Canada and South America. What about across the pond? Sure, I mean really the only thing, we've actually built the tool so that down the road we'll be able to translate it so that it could have a Spanish language version, a Mandarin language version. Technically, the foundation of the code is such that it could be polylingual. At the moment, it's just in English. So the limit of using it will be understand, the ability to understand English to know which buttons to click. But it is weekly worse. We were determined to not shortchange the future of the tool and make it English specific. And it's definitely international already. I mean, it's on the internet so anyone can get to it whose country doesn't block their access to the internet. Right, sure, go ahead. Dan, just to mention a bit about the user agreement. I'm kind of interested to hear about that because I'm sure that it'll cover something like what you said, what you do with this material. That I would assume would include respectful producers as well, like if you would just not build a writer. It doesn't actually include much about that. Okay. Please read the terms and conditions. And I'm actually very dead serious about them. Please read them if you are willing to wait until the legalese because it took me a half hours to go and I get back. But I worked super hard because I care about intellectual property. Amy here in the room, I'm sitting on a panel about intellectual property and the drop is killed in a week. I sat on one of the Library of Congress. I care about this stuff a lot. I worked super hard. I would work with lawyers to make it savvy and smart and protect everyone. But it's a software usage license agreement. All of the other copyright laws of the United States still exist and they're independent. The R usage agreement is just for using this tool, right? If you break the law that's on the books, that's bad. But there are certain rules you agree to do, like writing positive recommendations. It's like not squatting on someone else's profile and pretending to be someone you're not. That sort of thing that was baked in there. But, so here's what I say. I seriously mean if you personally, I'm looking right at you, would like to read those things and give me any thoughts. I will listen to them and I have the power to take me to the lawyer and say, lawyer, what does this mean and is there something valuable here? Now I extend that to anyone in this room. Like we do not want to be an impenetrable wall about anything, especially about something as touching and sensitive as that. We want to be as transparent as we can. So if you have intelligence to bring to bear, we accept. We've been gratitude. Great. I just want to make a comment. I think some of the writers' hesitancies might come from when they're reading something online that they think is printable, but this is not printable material. They can read it, but they can't print it. They can actually. Oh. Yeah. So I mean, again, I think this is where this dividing line is. Older than me, they're like, I don't want anyone printing out my play and reading it. And younger than me, they're like, I just don't care. The more people can print it, that's the goal. The more people can print and read it, that's what I want. Because someone will have to find it and produce it. So we've made it so that people can do what they want. And by people leaving playwrights. Yeah, so players can do what they want. And there are technologies that we have not integrated that allow only on-screen reading. Right. And for the moment, we've decided not to do that. A, it's technically super complicated and it doesn't work on every device. I think when it goes, I'm just thinking about her question going globally. I can't track what's gonna be done in Poland. So as a writer, I get a little trepidatious when it comes to that, so. Again, and I totally understand. Sure, sure, sure. And there are young people who are like, they're doing what they're doing in Poland? Awesome. They don't have any money there. Send me the copy of the poster. That's fine. So it's like, we wanted to. Sure. I mean, so then you can also write draft. You can emblaze and draft as a watermark. There are PDFs that actually disintegrate an hour or two after a certain date that they've been down. There are different technologies that are out there. In recent downloadable, what about these days? Play publishing companies, how are they, how's that going to be? So for instance, my publisher said, please do not quit the play up there to be downloaded. So I did it. I put the synopsis and a 10 train sample and I'll link to where they can buy the play from my publisher. Yeah, right. And that's my, it was already published. You should ask for a TED grant. A TED grant? TED grants. Technology, entertainment. Why not, Ted? I've given you TED talks. But do they do grants? For big ideas, I would TED wish grant. And Jojo, right there. Did you have a question, John? No. Yes, you've had your hand up for a while. Yeah. Yeah, are these... I love you. We can play. Are there downloads traceable? Is there a question in the synopsis? No. The quality of the work submitted. Because then this is open to all without a fee? There's no way to monitor quality because I can't possibly do that. It is open to all, but not without a fee. Or are you, I'm not actually sure I understand the other half of your question. I want to download, let's say in Japan. Yeah. Would they come up as like a little thing to us saying, you know, the happy Japanese company and you'll be able to just download in your play? No. Because you never know who downloads your play. It's anonymous. And in the future, is there a way for someone that'll play and download it that a little screen you pop up and say the cost of this is X? No. No. That's what we said earlier is that we, people want it to be anonymous. The people who are downloading plays want it to be anonymous and doing so. Yeah.  I mean, I'm certainly sure right now regarding the evil word submission process that some places will say, hasn't ever had a productive war or at least not a university production before. Yeah. That's another thing to put it to the filtering. So we do actually, yeah, we do what, when you're adding the steps to your production history of your play, university production is one of the options. So yeah, that filtering, we're planning for that level of filtering. We have about 10 minutes. Wow, that one. Anyone else? So even the basic free anybody can actually download these things as well. And for instance, it's for everyone or just for members. Can you just go up to the search, search for me, search for Butcher? No, not Butcher, search for abstract new, actually no. I'd like to be told that in five minutes you just wasted two minutes. Well, oh yeah, thank you, go back to Butcher. It's a great play, you will know. You'll notice that even though the script is up there, you can't download it because you're not logged in. Gotcha, okay. So only people who have created a profile can download it. Just one little thing, I feel like there's not any sort of difference between submitting your play to a company and having them Xerox it and give it to whoever. We all have Xerox copies of many plays that I don't pay for. I don't pay for it, I don't pay for it. Not what they do for Xerox, but like I'm done playing for four minutes. The other thing is, which we didn't really talk about at the beginning, but the new play exchange came out of collaborative literary tools that NNPN has had for a decade, basically, where twice a year all of our members gather and they pitch plays to each other, and they share scripts. And this happens across the country. I mean, Morgan loves the play and she knows that Liz will love it, Liz's Angleman will love it too, but she knows she hasn't read it because it just came out and Steve Diopty just wrote it. So she'll send Liz the play. And this happens right now and this is just a central place for that to happen more easily, more efficiently, and for you to broaden your circles of positivity and the people that you know to more corners of the country. There's gonna be another button that isn't here on the display, and I don't know if you can read these, just recommend, by recommendation, download and save to read your list. There was a button here that we had to eliminate because we couldn't get the features on in time for our beta release. Suggest. The idea is, well I've read this play and I know the theater that this would be great for and they're in the system, so I can just hit the suggest button, type their name and click enter. Then that theater will go to its activity page and see so and so suggested display for you. And you can ignore it or not, but it's there and so that way people can proactively hunt for praise for you. There's other features I could talk about where you'll be able to assign plays to readers to read and provide coverage for you, the stuff coming down the road. And we have maybe one minute. Do you have a rollout plan? Yeah. Oh, yes, sorry, rollout plan and then I'm probably gonna be done. Go to the sign page, go to the page where they can sign up. Oh yeah, if you go to the contact page, go down. Jojo. So right now we are going around the country rolling out this beta version to our partners. We'll be done through September doing the world tour and then we'll have some couple of months of redevelopment and we're gonna open up for the public sometime in early 2015. If you want to be notified when that happens so that you are the first to get in, go to the contact us page and just put your email address here. Don't use this form, which is really about tech support and media inquiries. Just put your email address right here and hit subscribe. So it's newplayexchange.org, all spelled out. Slash contact. Yes. I'm gonna try. You all have a jillian questions in these gender schedules. There is a breakout time later this afternoon where you can meet with these guys a little more closely and I might even recommend going up to the cabana and having a breakout and then the end of the breakout by the area of the box. Yeah, and that will be all about general information about NSBN in addition to any further questions, gentlemen. Thank you.


and then I'm gonna get started. What's up guys, today's Thursday. Usually I do these recap videos every single Monday, but I have a lot of stuff to recap and a lot of stuff to talk about. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna come on here today, okay? So a couple things is we just concluded our live trading bootcamp. So we had members, we had non-members, everyone watching me and Bao trade live. You guys saw me make 50 cents a share on FLGC after creating the watch list. So we made the watch list. I made a plan to short it at 1650. It went to 1650. I shorted it, it went down to 16. I made my money and everyone was blown away, right? I just literally made the watch list. I stuck to the plan. I followed the plan and I made money. So that was number one, that was FLGC. And then if I remember correctly, LMFA was another one.  And because we had a hot stock on the day, these side stocks were not in attention. So what I showed everyone on the bootcamp with my live trading is how to make a watch list, how to execute based on that watch list, and when the market opens, how to focus on the right stocks, right? So I walked away with a $6,000 or $7,000 day on bootcamp day. Everyone saw it live, everyone saw it executed, everyone had a great time. I think the big key about the bootcamp is I showed you guys how simple it is. I made a plan, I stuck to the plan, I followed the watch list plan and I got paid out. Another big thing that I think people realized on the bootcamp was how important it is to focus on the side stocks. How important it is to focus on the stocks that people don't care about. And that's why I shorted LMFA. So if you are an MIC member, monthly annual or lifetime, the bootcamp replay is 100% free. We are not giving out the replay to non-members, okay? So I hope you guys had a great time. We gave away a trading monitor, we gave away a lifetime membership, we gave away a monthly membership, and I just had my one-on-one phone call with Roth, who is a lifetime member. So what I wanna talk about, Roth is this. He traded options before he found MIC, and he lost $70,000 trading options. And when he signed up for the lifetime membership, he's like, bro, I did this because I never wanna lose money like that again. He's like, imagine, if the lifetime membership is $10,000, and you tell someone they could start a business with that $10,000, that might be able to generate them $500,000 one day. Everyone would say, yes, I wanna take that investment.   But for some reason, there's a misconception about online education. Yes, there's a lot of frauds out there. Yes, there's a lot of scams out there. But guys, if you could start a business with $10,000 that could eventually make you a half a million dollars or a million dollars every year, wouldn't you all take it? And that's why Roth was smart enough. Roth was smart enough to realize that, hey, I'm getting this lifetime membership to have the potential to have the opportunity to start a six and seven-figure business one day, and to make sure I never lose 70 grand on options again. So shout out to Roth. I know Roth is gonna be a six and seven-figure trader, very soon. Just the way he talks, just the way his mindset is, makes me realize he's got what it takes. He's got what it takes because he's thinking differently. He's not thinking, oh my God, how am I gonna make this money back? He's saying, this is the best opportunity of a lifetime to learn how to start a business that's gonna be a six and seven-figure business. So again, guys, the lifetime membership is by application only. We do not accept everyone to the lifetime membership. You need to have a personality like Roth. So go to the website, My Investing Club, fill out an application, and we review one by one, and we'll see. So that's that. Number two, guys, number two is, I wanna talk about the topic of the day. The topic of the day is why do 90% of day traders fail? And the reason why, it's gonna sound crazy, so the reason why I'm making this video, or the reason why I thought about this topic is, I went to five minutes.  I was in my own thoughts, man. I was in my own thoughts, and I was thinking, why are 90% of people failing? I saw a lot of people yesterday take big losses. I saw people on Twitter, people on Instagram. I saw a lot of people taking big losses, but wait, before that, we got a AMG GT here. Again, guys, I am a massive car guy. I love cars, cars are my passion. So anytime I see a nice car, I gotta stop and look at it. So if you guys ever wanna talk to me about cars, it's my favorite topic ever. Anyway, so in the very last moments of going to bed, the thought came in my head, why do 90% of traders fail? And it came in my head and I didn't wanna lose that thought, so I grabbed my iPhone and I put it into my notepad, and that's why I wanted to make this video. So here's the reason why 90% of day traders fail, guys.  Like day trading apparently is something that people try to flex on. Like, oh, look at me, I make $10,000 a day.   And what I realized, guys, is the people that are showing off and the people that are bragging are the ones that are gonna lose all their money because they're trading for the wrong things, right? They're trading with an ego. They're trading for the wrong reasons. So the number one reason, in my opinion, is that everyone is losing money day trading is because they're trying to show off to people. They're trying to show off to their friends.  But the reality is, guys, that's wrong. That is wrong. The best day traders out there, you've never even heard about. You've never even heard about. Because they don't care, bro. They don't care about it, right? The reason why you hear about me and about is because we try to teach you guys. We try to educate you guys. But I see people on Twitter. I see people on Instagram. I see people everywhere bragging.  If they had a bad day, oh, it's the algos. It's the institutions. Oh, it's the algos fighting against me.   So number one is control your ego. Control your ego. Be humble, right? The reason why I make so much money I'm not doing it to show off. I do it because I love it. It's my passion. I love trading. It's something that makes me happy, right? Yes, there are highs. Yes, there are lows. Yes, it's difficult from time to time. But I sacrificed seven years of my life to get to the point where I'm making millions of dollars a year, guys. So that's one. Number two is greed, right? Traders are greedy motherfuckers. In my opinion, greed is the root of every single evil out there. The greedier you are, the more unhappy you will be in life, okay? For example, if you want to trade, you can make $100 a day. So obviously some of my hometown friends, they see how much money I'm making. They want to get into trading finally. It took them seven years to realize how much money there is in this business. But they're like, yeah, do like I want to get started. I want to do this. And I was like, look, man, I'm going to be totally honest with you. I could teach you how to make $100 a day with your eyes closed and with your hands tied behind your back. All you need to do is take 1,000 shares and make 10 cents. I could teach anyone to make $100 a day. The problem is greed. We want more. It is never enough. Money is a drug. It is never enough. Rick Ross said too much money ain't enough money, right? So the problem is guys, in trading, you have to equate it to something real in life. If you just see $100 on the screen, it doesn't mean anything. It's like a video game. You need to compare that $100 to what that could buy you. $100 could buy me a nice T-bone steak with a side of french fries and a chocolate cake. If I equate that in my head that because of trading, I can get a steak every day, it makes it real. It makes it tangible. The problem is all you motherfuckers are greedy. You make $100, you say, why isn't it $200? You make $500, why isn't it $1,000? You make $100,000, why isn't it $1,000? Okay, and I get it. We live in the day and age of social media where everyone is bragging and everyone is showing off. But what you have to, holy fuck, do you guys see that?  Can I catch it?  Anyway, so right, let me perfect example, right? That is an Aventador SVJ, okay? The Aventador SVJ is $750,000. I have a Huracan Perfomante, which is $320,000. I saw that car and I said, you know what? I want that one. Greed, greed, greed. Greed is the bane, is the root of all evil guys. So keep that in mind, guys. There's always gonna be someone that's making more money than you.  There's always gonna be someone that has a better watch than you. There's always gonna be someone that has a girl with bigger boobs than your girl, right? But that doesn't mean anything. What you have to focus on, guys, is being the best version of yourself, right? So ignore those greedy entities. Ignore that greedy mindset and focus on being a 1% better version of yourself than the day before and you will be better. You don't know what someone else's circumstances are. Maybe that guy with the Aventador SVJ is a trust fund baby.   So he got that gift for his 21st birthday. Who knows? Did you guys hear that? That was the SVJ ripping it. I hope you guys could hear it. Anyway, so maybe he got that as a gift, right? So his circumstances are not the same circumstances as your circumstances, guys. So focus on being the best version of yourself and the rest will follow. So we said ego and greed. The next thing is no education, right? And this is why we talk about it. So I'm gonna give you an example. I'm up over $2 million this year, trading for one hour a day, okay? And it's August, August 18th, August 19th. You know, maybe I'll make another half a million dollars by the year ends. Okay, let's just say 2 million. I make more money than a doctor. I make more money than a lawyer. I make more money than an engineer. And I make more money than a CEO combined. Now we're at 90% less than that. Okay, let me ask you something, guys. Does a doctor go to school for eight years before he makes half a million dollars a year? Does a lawyer go to law school for six years before he makes half a million dollars a year? Does an engineer go to school for four years before he makes a quarter million dollars a year? So let me ask you something. If I'm making more than all these people, don't you think I need some sort of education? Don't you think I need some sort of backbone? Do you think a hedge fund hires someone that's been going to school for a month? Do you think a hedge fund hires someone that's been going to school for a year? They want the best of the best, right? They want the best of the best. So let me ask you something. If you are attending MIC, which is a trading school and you're not being profitable in one month, does that mean that school is wrong? Or does that mean that you have not earned your degree yet? You have not earned your diploma. In my opinion, guys, in my opinion, it takes a minimum of six months to a year to learn this thing.     It took me seven years to make $2 million a year, seven years. I'm not telling you that, it's gonna take you seven years. I'm telling you it's gonna probably take you one year, right? It's probably gonna take you one year. So commit to this, take it seriously and realize that because someone else is cheaper than MIC, does not mean they are the same thing but different. I mean, it does not mean the same thing, but just cheaper. If you pay for a cheaper service, you are getting cheaper quality. I mentioned this in the previous video that over the weekend, I went to every single room out there. I went to the room, the Discord guys' room. I went to the people on Instagram's room. I went to the people on YouTube's room. I went to the Asian guys' room. I went everywhere. These guys, number one, they don't show up. They show up once a week. Another guy loses money after 10 minutes. He walks away, doesn't help his members.   So all these people, guys, all these people are selling you the dream.    You guys are going to McDonald's.  A steak is more valuable than McDonald's, so you have to pay up for that steak and that is why you are here, man. You guys, that's why you guys are here.  If Bao and I are not around more than your guru, we'll refund you the money, right? So guys, I don't know what more I could do to convince you. I don't know what more I could say to help you guys. I give you guys my heart and my soul every single day. I am a multi-millionaire. If I decide tomorrow I don't wanna do MIC anymore, I don't wanna do MIC anymore. I don't need to do it. I make more money trading than I do teaching you guys. All the money we make on teaching, we put it back into marketing. We put it back into helping our moderators' families, right? So one day I could wake up and say, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't need to do this. So take advantage of it all over again, guys. Take advantage of it, because maybe one day it's not gonna exist anymore. We try our best to help you guys, but sometimes you need to help yourselves. And I hope that these videos are educating you guys. I hope these videos are teaching you guys something because the truth of the matter is MIC is way too cheap. People think that we are not valuable because we don't charge so much money. And the truth of the matter is that it might be time to raise prices so that people start to take us seriously, right? MIC is super affordable. It's $100 for your first month. And I guarantee, like I said before in the previous videos, join for a month using the half-off sale. If you go to the watch list and you cannot make money on the watch list, I will refund you your money. So join MIC for a month. Go to the watch list channel. S-O-N-N paid out today. B-C-T-X paid out today. And that would be your membership right there, guys. No one, no one helps the way we do, guys. No one helps the way we do. We are here to help. And I hope these videos are finally opening up your eyes to what is possible. If you join MIC, you guys are getting an opportunity to change your life. If you don't wanna take advantage of that opportunity, that's on you.  And if you guys don't wanna take it, so be it. I don't care.  And those are the people that I want to focus on, man. So I appreciate you guys attending. I hope this video opened up your eyes a little bit. And you know what? I had a great day yesterday. I took the day off. Bao was in Paris and he's still making money in Paris. And you know what?  I earned it. I earned my freedom. I earned a break. I earned everything. So I'll see you guys later. Have a great day.