This is the delayed start of the one o'clock hearing on Thursday, May 20th, and I'm Tim Brigham, the chair of the House Energy and Technology Committee. We are very pleased today to have a group of Dartmouth students who I had the fortune of meeting. Gosh, I can't remember how long ago it was now, but it was many months ago. And they had approached me with a question about a public policy class that they were taking and were there any research projects of interest to this committee that they might be able to dig into. We talked about a number of issues in particular that this committee has been interested in broadband issues and also being the energy committee talking about some of the convergence between broadband expansion in the state and also how that's of interest to energy utilities, electric utilities essentially in the state. And they have produced a paper, a research paper where they've looked at some of the things going on in a number of states. I believe that paper is posted to our website today. It's called Expanding Rural Broadband Access in Vermont. And I want to welcome the three students who worked on this to our committee today. Monisha, Ian, and Miles. And I understand that in taking us through some of the findings in your paper, you're going to share a PowerPoint presentation. So I'm not sure which one of you is going to do that. But I'm going to hand the mic over to you. And thank you very much for being here today. If you can expand that a little bit, Ian, that would be great. But can everyone see that? Yeah, can you put it on and present it? Yeah, it looks like you're going to. Yeah, perfect. Terrific. Thank you. Hello, I wanted to take a minute to thank you all for having us today. We're really excited to be here. And we've learned a lot throughout the course of this project. So as Representative Briglin has mentioned, we've researched and compiled about a 30 page report that's available, I think, on the Vermont state website as well as the Dartmouth Rockefeller Center website. It's just sort of a compilation of all of our research, our background studies, and case studies that we want to interview that we did for this specific project. So we are a team of students at the class of 1964 Policy Research Shop at Dartmouth College, and we wanted to give you an overview of our report today focused on expanding rural broadband access in Vermont. As mentioned, hi, I'm Monisha. I'm Ian. And I'm Miles. Good, so just right off the bat in this presentation and in the report, we talk a lot about broadband and just so we're all on the same page. Broadband, we're using the FCC's definition, which is internet speeds of 25 megabits per second, download speeds in three megabits per second, upload speeds. And that's sort of the baseline, but we're seeing increasingly demand and then necessity for higher speed rates. And so, you know, overall in Vermont, we have a, you know, serious problem of lack of rural internet access. So Vermont's a largely rural state with about 60% of its population in rural areas. And over 22% of Vermont lacks home broadband access. And that's concentrated, particularly in those rural areas. And, you know, we've seen it a lot in the past year with work from home, remote learning, and those sorts of things. But there's also, you know, a lot of other important reasons why broadband is a necessity. You know, for example, in those rural areas, having access to telehealth is, you know, a really important issue, as well as there's, you know, very important energy implications because some stuff we'll get into later. But the ability for broadband to allow for sort of more efficient energy use. And one potential solution of offering this broadband in rural parts of Vermont is through electric utilities cooperatives, which are member-owned in the state and provide electric services to their members. Across the country, there are about 900 electric utilities cooperatives. And many of them are already offering internet services or are looking into offering it in the future. In the map on the right, you can see that the areas in gray are areas with electric cooperatives that are offering broadband services. And the areas in blue are otherwise electric cooperative areas that are not offering broadband currently. There's an interest in ensuring broadband access for consumers of cooperative electric services because it provides another service to their members in rural areas. And it also, as Miles did, creates a more efficient system that allows the electric cooperatives to have a more efficient infrastructure and save costs. There are two cooperatives in Vermont currently, Washington Electric Cooperative and Vermont Electric Cooperative. So why does this convergence matter? First of all, broadband allows for more efficient metering and better use tactics from the electric grid and from those electricity providers. And that's going to allow to reduce and keep costs down for producers. And that can be used to pass on that reduction or prevention of an increase in costs to consumers. So there's a benefit to both sides there as well as there's a climate benefit associated with reduced energy use through more efficient energy. Furthermore, there's also a significant benefit in terms of the infrastructure side of this. So in rural areas, it's timely and inefficient to go send multiple trucks out to service the same area. And we can send one truck to service both cables that will reduce the costs of broadband expansion. And that's really key because right now one of the biggest barriers to providing broadband for rural areas is the fact that they have low population density. And that low population density means that it's not economically viable in many areas with the upfront costs of installing infrastructure to meet those back over time. So by tying these two services together, we have the potential to lower that break-even point and make it more viable. And this is furthermore another part of this is the fact that utility providers already possess assets like the poles and electricity that are already needed for this service. So that can further reduce the costs. There are some concerns, though. Number one is that electricity is a heavily regulated industry and that while there are these long-term benefits associated with tying broadband to electricity, in the short term, these are large costs that aren't going to see direct benefits to the energy consumers. And the other thing that came up again and again in the interviews we conducted with experts is that while they sound similar in practice, broadband and the electric grid are actually quite different in terms of the sort of infrastructure and technical knowledge aspect. And that's something that makes it a lot more difficult in practice and is sort of deterring the providers from wanting to get into this. In our report, we provided a pure state comparison with four pure states. We identified these states by three factors. Like Vermont, all four states were ranking in the top 10 in the country in terms of the percentage of their population living in rural areas. We also looked for states that had highly available broadband, especially in rural areas relative to other states. And third and finally, a presence of cooperatives that are offering these broadband services. The four states that we found were New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Alabama. And while we went into all four states in our report today in our presentation, we'll be focusing on South Dakota. Yeah. So South Dakota is a very rural state yet it has some of the best broadband access in the nation in these rural areas. So about 75% of people in rural areas have broadband compared to 60%, which is the national average. And I think one of the really interesting aspects is through all the sort of different entities in this space, there's a long history of cooperation rather than competition. So there's sort of two key groups. One is the South Dakota Telecommunications Association, and the other is the South Dakota Network Communications. And so these are sort of large groups of smaller providers like cooperatives, some tribal providers and municipal providers that work together. And this allows these providers to sort of have their own regional service areas yet rely on some of the same infrastructure. So SDN communications is sort of like an interstate highway almost for broadband, where it's some large, a large system of wiring of fiber optic cables that sort of go across the state and connect to all these different smaller networks. And that sort of, and it's owned by 17 different smaller providers. So that allows for sort of cost savings and coordination. Additionally, the states also done a really impressive job of using sort of federal funding to take advantage of different programs and expand broadband. So we go into a bunch of different numbers in the report, but some of the ways that they've done this is by having sort of some assistance from the state. So the Economic Office writes letters of support for these grants, and they issued their first ever state broadband report to get more points on some of the USDA reconnect funding grant applications. And these federal funds have allowed areas that would not be feasible to otherwise service to get broadband access. So there's one area that we came across in our case study that has about 70 people, about 70 different subscribers living in an area of about 150 miles of wiring. And so normally that would not be, you know, even for a non-profit cooperative, not be viable because the break-even point is about 12 subscribers per mile. With these federal funds, they've been able to service that area with less than one subscriber per mile, which I think is pretty incredible. And, you know, finally, the state has made a really large funding commitment to rural broadband. So the governor just announced a program to spend about a hundred million dollars between state funding, some money from the CARES Act, and some public-private partnerships. And they're anticipating about five to one returns, but that's obviously over a long-term period. So it's a pretty significant upfront cost from a state that's not necessarily known for, you know, big government spending. From all these case studies, including the South Dakota case study that you just heard, we identified in our report some key steps to improving rural broadband in Vermont, the first of which is encouraging cross-sector collaboration, including and especially collaboration between the state government and providers such as cooperatives. The second is to deal with potential changes to the regulatory framework to make it easier for groups for non-traditional internet service providers to enter into the internet service provider space. And the third is to figure out a means of addressing some of the fiscal challenges, whether that be through regulatory changes or through fiscal support for these non-traditional service providers. So to briefly delve a little bit further into our first takeaway, which is related to cross-sector collaboration, what we found is a key theme throughout the case studies and our own interviews that we did in ground research within the state of Vermont is a hesitancy among individual actors to sort of take the risk and investment associated from either moving away from the electric utility sector into the broadband sector or sort of this convergence or just making any sort of risk or investment associated in general. Naturally, there's a lot of money that would go into this, a lot of resources as well as personnel, so it makes sense that individual actors are worried to go into this kind of project by themselves. However, what we do see as a possibility is leveraging the unique strengths and weaknesses of various actors across the state to create the outcome that we're looking for. So if we look to the map on the right, we see Green Mountain Power in Light Green kind of has a really broad reach across Vermont. It has infrastructure for telephone poles and all of those locations and it has a lot of capability and reach that can become really useful in a project like broadband expansion versus when we look at something like the electric cooperatives which are concentrated in the dark green and the dark gray on this map, we see a lot of community buy-in as their owned by their members and that's really powerful and kind of propelling forward projects that people are truly invested in versus when you look at the communication union districts, they have what we've mentioned as the non-profit advantage as a legal governmental entity. They don't have to render the same type of profit that a private investor owned utility like Green Mountain Power has to do. Working at these unique strengths and accounting for the weaknesses can allow these actors to work together in a really powerful way and encouraging this cross sector collaboration can be key sort of improving broadband access across the board in Vermont. However, this is also dependent on improvements to move the legal landscape as well as various funding paths. So when we look a little bit towards the state of this legal landscape and looking to various regulatory challenges and solutions, we can learn a lot from various adaptations that our states that we looked at in the case studies have made. For example, one of the main barriers that we see in Vermont is regulations against cross subsidies for non-electric services. For example, this prevents things like cooperatives and other actors from subsidizing broadband activities which can prevent them from moving into the sector as a whole. This regulation is very effective for preventing potential upward rate pressure. However, in the long term, lifting this ban against cross subsidies can have a long term benefit to both the electric utility sector and the broadband sector that can lower rates across the board. Another concern that we found among actors when we were interviewing key players in these Vermont sectors was concerns about right of way policy. So various land ownership regulations and management concerns were incredibly confusing to a lot of the actors, but in addition to that added a layer of complexity that created really tangible concerns for who owns what when it comes to telecommunications infrastructure. So as potential next steps on how to address this, we could potentially amend cooperative chargers just to support to require support for broadband expansion, sort of in the way that when there was demand for electricity in rural areas, cooperative swarms, we can amend the chargers to kind of address the same need for broadband in these areas. While this might create a short term upward pressure on rates, this has the same long term additive benefit that's been discussed, and we could potentially mitigate that short term upward pressure through the expanded subsidies. Furthermore, we could also allow utility providers to cover costs of make ready improvements, which are just minor adjustments to infrastructure. This would enable the internet service providers to put fiber on existing polls, allowing the ISPs to bear the cost of installations, but actors like Green Mountain Power or the Cooperatives to cover the upfront costs, which would then allow the ISPs to build out networks in these more rural areas. Green Mountain Power has actually already petitioned the public utilities commission for this change, making this one that could be making this a change that could be potentially very beneficial. There are also fiscal concerns that need to be dealt with in order to expand broadband access in rural Vermont, the first of which is dealing with the low profit margin. There is already a low profit margin for traditional internet service providers where they usually do not go into areas with less than 20 to 30 subscribers per mile. Nonprofits such as CUDs or cooperatives have an advantage because they don't need to maintain the same profit margin as traditional ISPs, yet even then they're limited by the costs of infrastructure in the lack of guaranteed territory, meaning that in order to break even, they often need to have a bare minimum of, as Miles said earlier, about 12 subscribers per mile. There are also large upfront investments that are needed, as well as new technical expertise that needs to be brought on, and that needs to happen before in order to build out the infrastructure, and any recouping of those investments only happens after the infrastructure has been built. Some ways to deal with this problem are through federal funding programs, such as those through the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Agriculture. There are some problems with this, including an award from 2010 to Vermont Telephone that provided federal funding for a large service area in Vermont and has since prevented federal funding in that service area in that protected area. This has been a major barrier to federal funding for broadband in Vermont since, but there are other opportunities that seem likely to increase in the future, but it's still important to address these concerns. There's also the potential of expanding state programs like Act 79 to provide fiscal support for nontraditional ISPs, and cooperatives can also issue bonds or work with municipalities to raise funds for this expansion. Again, we really wanted to thank you all for taking the time to listen to us today, and if I can't imagine how busy you all are, but if you have the time, we do encourage you to read our report. We do delve a lot further into the overview that we presented today, but to sum up, we were able to touch upon the insufficient internet connectivity that's present in a lot of rural areas in Vermont, and then also address the realities of a convergence between the electric utilities and the broadband service sectors, which have both positive and negative outcomes. We're able to do this through four case studies that led us to the key conclusions related to cross-sector collaboration and regulatory and fiscal solutions. Thank you so much again, and we're happy to take any questions you have now. That was outstanding. Thank you, Manisha, Ian, and Miles. That was great, and we just passed a bill yesterday that I'm happy to say incorporated some of these ideas, so I feel like you were working in parallel with us. Ian, if you don't mind taking the slideshow down, then I'll see each other. That's great, perfect. I do have a question, but I'm going to hold on to that question and first defer to members of my committee who have questions. First, Representative Sebelia, and then Representative Rogers. This is excellent. Thank you so much, and thank you, Mr. Chair, for ensuring that we were able to see this work before we adjourned. I have one question, something that caught my ear actually listening to you, and then I went back in and I've been looking and can't quite find the reference. So you talked about the South Dakota investment and the return of five to one on that. Can you and I couldn't quite put my finger on the reference. Could any of you speak a bit more to that? Yeah, so I believe that that's the, like just the long-term economic sort of projection that they're anticipating in terms of from the sort of added value of the broadband investments in the long term. So like an added property value? I think that's sort of total economic output that they're anticipating from all the different things. I can try to find the exact wording of that. That'd be awesome. If you do, if you can, you know, forward it into our committee assistant, I would be really interested in looking at that. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Representative Rogers and then Representative Yantacha. Thanks for being here. I also had a question about the South Dakota example. Do you, I don't know if it was within the scope of what you looked at, but did you delve into kind of the nuts and bolts of, you know, what type of, what technology of internet service was being provided and how they actually went about that? Like fiber, DSL. Yeah, I mean the biggest one is fiber because it's, right, future proof and, you know, a lot of the other kinds of, you know, DSL or other satellite, anything like that. Just don't offer the connectivity speeds feasibly to like be a worthwhile investment. So, you know, a lot of experts are anticipating that the definition of broadband is going to increase in the next couple of years and that within, like, especially if we keep moving in a direction of, you know, everyone in your family is taking four Zoom calls a day that most, you know, gigabit download speeds might be the standard soon. So, I think anything sort of other than fiber is generally probably not worth it. And that's what most of these expansions in South Dakota are, like the Dakota Carrier Network is basically this, like, big fiber highway. It's like the way the experts there told me to think about it, like an interstate highway literally of fiber that like is running across the state now. Representative Ian Tuchka. I'd like to add my thanks for a great presentation. I think you guys did a lot of good work there. Definitely deserving of some academic credit. I managed to get through about half of it reading before your presentation. And one thing, I just want to clarify, SDN and SDTA, the South Dakota Network Communications and South Dakota Telecommunication agencies or whatever it is. Those are telecoms, right? They aren't utilities, electric utilities. Yeah, that's correct. So, I think that some of the other case studies are actually cooperatives that are electric utilities cooperatives. These, we sort of still looked at because they have kind of a, obviously there's a difference, but they do sort of follow a similar model and path for cooperation that we think Vermont could use. But that's correct there. In that case, they were existing telecommunications cooperatives. Okay, thanks. And I think the work that we're doing, I think reflects the same sort of ideas that were presented in your paper, as Chair Briglin said, that we're working with more federal funds, which I think South Dakota took advantage of. And we're trying to integrate a number of different entities and helping to build this out. So, I hope the model is as successful as South Dakota's was. And more so because we want to get to 100%. If I can jump in really quickly, I think one example of a case study we did that was specifically electric cooperatives and very recent was New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, which I think is their main electric cooperative, just piloted broadband projects for I think it was 900 citizens across like four or five towns. And they were able to run fiber through their cooperative directly to households across New Hampshire, which was really interesting because they are specifically an electric cooperatives and they had to amend their charters about two or three times just to get to that place. And a lot of it was due to the urgency created by the pandemic. So it's definitely very exciting to see where states are headed in this case in particular. All right, I saw that. And I also saw that they established communication union districts as well, which modeled after Vermont's to learn from Vermont. I'm going to call on Representative Pat next, and I'm going to warn our witnesses that Representative Pat is the former managing director, executive director. I can't remember what his title was of one of Vermont's electric co-ops so so caution to you. I just really I would be happy to talk with you folks. I don't want to take up time now, but we're happy to talk with you folks separately at some other time about both the similarities and the differences between the co-ops and their history and the regulatory structure in Vermont versus New Hampshire and South Dakota because they're quite different. And in New Hampshire's cases, you probably know that co-op is really huge, both in territory as well as members compared to the two co-ops in Vermont. So I don't want I don't want to get into that now, but if you're interested, I'd be happy to talk with you further. We could set up a separate Zoom meeting. That's great. So I will tell you that my question already got stolen, so I can't even ask it now. Unfortunately, I do want to share with you to geek out a little bit on the statistics. As as our student witnesses probably know, there was a significant amount of federal stimulus that was that has come out in the last couple months and that Vermont is going to take pretty active use of for broadband. There was treasury guidance that came out as to how that money could be used, and it's very relevant to some of the things in your report. But just statistically, I thought this would be interesting to the committee. In that report, it says that prior to the pandemic, in the fourth quarter of 2019, the average ISP subscriber, and this was done at a massive survey, used about 344 gigabits per month. And in the fourth quarter of 2020, when we're well into the pandemic, and I'm guessing this actually is going to continue because so many more people are working at home now, but that that amount increased by about 40% over that year. And it kind of goes to how the need for speed has massively increased in the last year. Because, you know, as you mentioned at the top of your report, so many more people are working from home, getting health care from home, being educated from home, those types of things. So, you know, your point about the likelihood that the FCC would increase the definition of broadband from 25 three to something higher, probably 100 over 100. I think it's quite likely in the next year. So I'm going to bring this discussion to a close, really appreciate the work that you've done, and sharing it with us. And, you know, if you continue to be interested in these issues, to stay in touch with me, to take Representative Pat up on his invitation, he has encyclopedic knowledge of how electric co-ops work and actually just the electric world works in Vermont. So again, on behalf of my committee, thank you for presenting us with this information. And we posted it to our website. So appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for having us. If you guys have any questions for us, I think Representative Briglin has our contact information. And we definitely learned a lot through this process. Thank you. Great. Thank you. And good luck to the rest of the academic year. For representatives on the committee, our academic year is almost over. And we have hopefully another, I don't know what, 36 hours to go here. And we have one bill left to see itself through. And this is a bill that Representative Sims reported back in March. It's miscellaneous energy bill that we talked about yesterday and took some testimony on. That bill is going to be up for action tomorrow on the floor. The Houseways and Means Committee took a fair amount of testimony this morning on this actually. I'm just talking about some of the new tax things that are in there. They took a straw poll in support of the bill. And I believe that vote was unanimous. I think it was 10-0-1. But it was interesting discussion if anybody wants to tie into that. I think it was this morning at 8.45. So what I am hopeful we can do in the next 20 minutes, maybe it doesn't even take that long. But I'm in hopes that we can have some committee discussion. Any advice for Representative Sims as she's the reporter of the bill? And I would like us to take a straw poll to give an indication as to where our committee is in support of concurring with the Senate proposals of amendment. Representative Sims, I'm not sure. Oh, I see Representative Pat's hand up. I also want to ask Representative Sims, which is anything she wants to share with the committee. But go ahead, Elmer. Actually, my hand was up from before, but I was about to put it up. Couple things. First of all, based on the discussion and testimony we already had, I would support concurring. I'm just curious whether I'm assuming the bill probably passed the Senate with what I think was a one-sentence amendment from Senator Purchlick clarifying that regarding storage, we're talking about electric storage and not other types of fuel storage. So that amendment was not made, and I don't know why. It was in the calendar, but the bill ultimately wasn't amended with that. Catherine, I don't know if you heard why that happened or why they dropped it. I heard some mention when Senator Pearson introduced the bill that there was not consensus on that language from Senator Purchlick, whereas the rest of the tax stuff really represents a consensus of the myriad stakeholders that are involved in this important issue. Okay. Great. Any committee discussion or questions that people have? Again, I feel like I've listened to a lot of testimony online about this in the last 36 hours. Mike, Representative Natashka? Yeah, since that was brought up, that makes me be a little bit concerned that that definition of energy storage facility could pertain to fossil fuel storage. And I don't think we really want that to apply to that. Yeah, I agree. That is certainly not the intent of the bill. And the other thing that I would say is that much of this storage language is requiring a rulemaking process. So there's certainly an opportunity for that to be clarified in the rulemaking process. But yeah, so I'm not sure what the circumstance was of that process. I don't know of how... Well, actually, I'm going to get over my skis pretty quickly on that question. So I want to say more. So in the limited time that we have, assuming that we're going to adjourn tomorrow and on Saturday, we will be hard pressed to propose an amendment to this amendment. Yeah, I think that train has left the station. I certainly think that it is possible to work on this issue again unless the PUC closes that door in the rulemaking they do in the next six months to get some consensus on that issue. And is it the PUC that's going through rulemaking or department? PUC. PUC, okay. So what is the timeframe for their rulemaking? I don't know that off the top of my head. I think that they have a rulemaking, actually it's open right now. On this, on energy storage facilities? I don't have the answer for you off the top of my head, Mike. I have to look. Okay. Well, I guess just to finish up my comment, we can always come back to this next year if we think that needs to be more restrictive. Absolutely. Any other thoughts or questions from members? You know, as we talked about yesterday, I think the changes to this bill in the work that we did are de minimis. I mean, there are, you know, I think that 30 day deadline for the PUC to issue a CPG or it being deemed having been, having been issued, that was stretched out to 45 days. I think there are a couple other definitional things that really were de minimis. I think that the real change here is the, is the clarification on the battery storage taxation. I'm sorry, Representative Sims. Yeah, thanks. Just getting a little bit more info from Senator Pearson. That sounds like Department of Public Service couldn't agree to that language on the amendment and the amendment doesn't maybe really fully address the issue. So it sounds like really something to probably continue to look into next year. In terms of the additions to the Senate, you know, glad that we got to hear from VEC and Rev yesterday and the ways and means was able to take more testimony. I think it seems clear to me that, you know, our companies want to pay taxes on energy, large energy storage facilities and this provides them with really important like clarity and I think as Ann Margolis said, like rules of the road that this is an opportunity to provide, you know, clear formula for how state and municipalities value and tax storage based on the energy storage capacity. And, you know, we certainly didn't have a tremendous amount of time to process all this, but I think they're they're good additions and would like to see us move forward with supporting the amendment. And I would also say something that I had forgotten because of kind of the flurry of activity on this bill in our committee in the last day or two was that we did take testimony kind of at the end there where there was interest in multiple stakeholders in taking this type of action. But I think there was also an acknowledgement in our committee with crossover kind of looming that we were not going to get to this issue in time to get it into our bill before we pushed it over to the Senate. So I as much as I would have liked to have had this two weeks ago to chew on it a little bit, I appreciate that the Senate did put this in because I think it was something that was sought by, you know, everybody involved here from the regulatory to the Department of Tax as well as, you know, the folks who are who are going to be putting these these types of facilities in place. So if there are any other questions or oh, I'm sorry, Catherine should I hand up still? Sorry, Mrs. Dribbling in here. Also hearing that, you know, that section around the definition around energy storage in the aggregator piece is yes, maybe it might be open to fossil fuel, you know, energy storage facilities that are capturing energy produced by fossil fuels, but all that really means is that they're subject to a CPG. And, you know, that's probably not not the end of the world. So maybe just a little additional sort of context about what that would mean. Yeah. Good point. I would like to simply do a straw poll of folks. I don't think we need to take a formal vote. And I think I can see everybody except Representative Sherman if Heidi is still here. But I'm just going to ask, okay, I'm just going to ask for hands for those who would support concurring with the Senate proposal of amendment. Great. And I saw that as unanimous with one absentee.  Are you good? I was raising my hand.  I got you. Good. Excellent. Okay, well, I'm going to adjourn our committee now and give you 15 minutes for lunch and appreciate your attention and questions and stay tuned for what we might have on the calendar for tomorrow as well. And Representative Sims, we are right behind you as you are offering up your report tomorrow. Fortunately, I believe Representative Elder from Ways and Means will also be there with us so that I can yield all tax related questions.


Please describe your program. I am the chair of the Northwestern Ontario Aboriginal Youth Achievement and Recognition Awards and this will be the 14th year that we're celebrating the awards this year, May 2nd. It started though as a career fair, it was called the Neganta Gay Career Fair and it's actually held in LU quite a bit but it started out as a career fair to address the issue of retention for Aboriginal youth in school. So we bring kids out from the communities to experience different career paths and explore what they can do in post-secondary education. But the career fairs kind of came deluded, there was a lot of career fairs happening, everybody started doing career fairs so that it was just too many going on at the same time. So we decided to focus on recognizing the accomplishments and the stories of Aboriginal youth which is how the awards came into conception. The age group, we recognize youth between the ages of 11 and 29 that's considered the youth for our programming. There are various categories that we go through in the awards for nominations, everything from academic to athletic to artistic. We have community leadership and volunteerism. Two of the ones that we're very, when you relate to Indigenous studies per se, we have the Sandra Cackaway Cultural Award. So we recognize youth who have showed a dedication and preservation to understanding Indigenous Nibbian culture, so whether it be their language, learning syllabics, the art of keeping tradition going, so we recognize them that way. Heritage keepers as well, so again the same thing, they do things that they're trying to carry on such as fishing, hunting, moccasin making, dog sledding, tanning, traditional arts and crafts and of course the language. So we try to recognize the youth because believe it or not there are a lot of younger youth who want to learn that, so getting them to come up and show everybody that they are trying to preserve that kind of stuff is really important to us as well. The recognition part of our awards is for anyone over the age of 29 because everybody is still youthful whether they're based on age or not. The recognition part we like to recognize community members who are going out of their way to assist youth in obtaining their goals and achieving all that stuff, so anyone like we have had school counselors, guidance counselors, people who have employed a lot of Aboriginal youth, so people who just go out of their way to recognize that Aboriginal youth sometimes need a little extra helping hand and they go out of their way to help them, so that's the recognition part of that. So what is the aim of your program? The aim of our program is just to celebrate the accomplishments of our youth in the community. So we span across Northwestern Ontario and that just doesn't mean anyone who is born in Northwestern Ontario if there's somebody who resides in Northwestern Ontario and calls it home, they're eligible in the ward as well. So we've had winners that come from as far east as James Bay area and then we have people of course in our region up to Fort Severin and then as far west as we have Kenora region and that kind of stuff, but we've had winners who have come from Manitoba but reside in Northwestern Ontario because that's their home. So that would be the extent of our audience. Why would your award program or recognition stand out from others? Well we are unique. I don't see any other award programs like ours in Northwestern Ontario. What makes ours unique however is we're not always recognizing the smartest student. We're not recognizing that student that already has a decorated portfolio of awards. We're recognizing those youth who need that extra helping hand. There could be a youth who gets recognized. We have a category called personal achievement. It could be as something as a youth that started school and was very shy when you talk and then all of a sudden you know they came out of their shell and they started participating and they started you know joining a club or a sporting event. We recognize the youth that kind of need that extra little recognition so something that's going to make them feel really proud that somebody noticed that they stood up and and took note that they did something. So it's not always about the best. It's always about those who need that extra help and that they all shine but these ones kind of appreciated a little bit more and and they could be that one award that makes a difference in their life that somebody recognized it something that I did really well and I'm going to take this and move forward with it and show other people that you know I can be a mentor to them as well. So last part of that is how do you measure the success of your program so it could be how do you guys know to keep doing this every year. So this is our 14th year and we have strong sponsorship by the community and support so we have all the school boards public school board, Catholic school board, Lakehead University, Conn College, they're all sponsor awards. We have the City of Thunder Bay, we have the Thunder Bay Police, we have private companies such as Wasea, we have Hydro One. So we have the support of the community because what happens is the day of the event we have three to four hundred people and to be up in a room like that and see all these youth come forward it just really touches everyone's heart and then they can't wait for the next year to see the new youth that are coming across the stage and I think that with the support of the community and the people who are nominating all the youth and everything like that just shows us like every year we're growing and growing so there's a huge support for our community and I think that measures our success that everybody really appreciates and enjoys that kind of event for the youth. From your perspective what is Indigenous education? From my perspective Indigenous education is being able to take content and materials and being able to present them both in a formal education and informal ways that promote success for students that may not be able to succeed in a formal you know regular kind of contest like you have like Oshki which kind of helps the people in the North came at that kind of stuff so formal informal being able to make sure that everybody can take their potential and succeed with it. That would be my view I don't work in education but so what is your vision for Indigenous education or youth over the next 10 years? I would say we continue to recognize them to be able to support them have lots of different programs and supports that they can access to achieve their goals I think it's really important different organizations come together and be able to bring those to fruition like whether because a lot of times people have great ideas but they don't have any sort of monetary backing to it or whatever so if you can get good partners together to help youth achieve and succeed I think that's the most important thing and you know if our awards can help some youth by giving them a stepping stone to go on to greater things that would be great for us as well. So what information materials resources would you need to achieve this vision aside from funding? Well funding is our main one we need to the continued support of the community so we need all our partners to be on board with us and to recognize that it's a great event and that honoring youth for accomplishments it's one night for us but for them it's something that could be effective for a lifetime there are youth who will come out meet five years later and they'll say oh I won one of your awards I was so excited and after that I did this so I mean that's a huge thing for us to see as well and we actually bring back keynote speakers of previous award winners who will talk to the youth and you know kind of be like a role model and a mentor so you know it really works for us that way so we just need the continued support of the school boards of our sponsors we need them teachers and guidance counselors to continue to nominate their youth to take note of who who could use that extra little special push in their life and that kind of stuff so the support of community is the main thing for us I would think yeah yeah it's spreading the word people word of mouth is huge so you know once one person here is voted then let other people know was there anything else you wanted to add about your program what you guys do your vision um I think for us just being able to tap into new new sponsors new partners people who've never heard of us I mean we are a big event but there are still people who haven't heard of us so I mean being able to get the word out to make it even bigger and better would be great um and if you're you know this helps in any way that helps us as well won't be great thank you thank you


How to increase engagement on your YouTube channel. Hey, you wanna do it, right?  How do you get it? I know in the beginning I wasn't good at this. I screwed up bad. I'll share with you what I did at the end of the video and how I really screwed up my channel. And I got it fixed now, but doing that one thing really kinda messed me up. So I'll share that with you at the end. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. Thank you for coming to my channel and watching this video. I really appreciate it. I've sold millions of dollars about digital and physical products online over the years. Been doing this since 2009. So a couple years, a little bit of experience, and on this channel, it's your channel. That's right, it's your channel, because this is the channel you can come to where you can ask me questions about selling stuff online. I've sold digital products, physical products, coaching courses, you name it. I've sold it online, affiliate marketing, you got it, all of it here. And if you have questions, ask me about it. As a matter of fact, put it in the comments below and I may do a video on it. If you've had some successes, share that with us below too, so you can help other people. If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you do so, and turn on all bell notifications. That way I can tell you about any new videos I do. Anytime I go live, you'll be part of the Fisher family, the VIP group, it gets notified before anybody else. All right, let's get into it. We want more interaction. Why do we want more interaction? Well, we want it because the more interaction we get, YouTube algorithm looks at that and says, hey, that's a good channel. That's a good video. And since it is, and people are interacting, we wanna show it to more of our audience because maybe more people will actually watch that video. And we can keep them on our platform.  The number one principle, and this is not an exact science, but this is just what I figured out from looking at thousands of videos, from making hundreds of videos myself. The optimum time you wanna make a video is 10 to 14 minute long video. Now, there are people out there that will say, hey, make a minute long video or two minute long video because more people will watch it. That is true. You will have more people watch it. But let's say you make a two minute video and your average watch time is 50%, okay? So you've got a two minute video and people watched it 50%. You've got a minute of watch time. Now, YouTube actually looks at your total watch time and the watch time on the videos. Now, if you make a video that's 10 minutes long and people watch 50% of that, what have you got? You get five minutes. So you got one minute or five minutes. Which one would you rather have? The other thing, and the other reason you wanna have 10 to 14 minute videos is that YouTube can put four or five ads on a video. They can't do that in a two minute video. They can't hardly put any ads in a two minute video, guys. So if you're making these super short videos and you're getting a lot of views and you think you're doing something, you're not because they don't wanna show your videos. They wanna show videos that they can actually put ads on and that they can make some money. That's how they make money. If you're doing videos that are super short, they can't make money so they don't wanna show your videos. So it hurts you two ways. It hurts you because nobody's gonna see your videos and it hurts you because you'll never make any money on those videos if you decide to monetize. You don't have to monetize, but if you don't monetize, your videos won't get shown as much. Think about it. Why would YouTube wanna show a video they can't put ads on? They don't. They would much rather show videos they can put ads on. So I will tell you, along with this length of time thing, I would tell you to monetize. A lot of people say, I don't wanna monetize my channel. I don't wanna ads on mine. Maybe you don't, but your videos will not get shown as much if you don't. So it's super important that you do that. Number two, employ basic SEO and marketing principles on YouTube. This is super, super important. Understand that your webpage or your video are very similar in as much as the way people find it. They search YouTube, like this particular here video that I'm making right now is engagement on YouTube videos. They may type in how to get more engagement on YouTube videos. That has to be optimized in my videos. So that means the title has to have those keywords in it. What else? The keyword optimization has to also be in my tags. So I gotta put tags in there that have those same keywords. In addition to that, the description has to also have those keywords.   Your video can't come up because it doesn't have the needed information. So you have to have the title. You have to have the tags and you have to have the description. If you don't have those three things in place, your video can't come up. So you're wasting your time. You would do better to do fewer videos and work more on your SEO than to do tons of videos and no SEO whatsoever because they can't get found. Super important that you do that. Number three, encourage viewers to comment, share, like your videos. Super, super important to do that because that is engagement. Now, we are watching this video and I'm making this video because you wanna get more engagement. The way you get it is through likes, shares and comments, but if you're not telling them to do this, they don't know to do this. They don't know to share and comment and like. And you say, well, I know that, surely they know that. No, they don't because they're not making videos every single day. They don't understand that there's an algorithm. They don't understand that, you know, if they like and share and comment, that's gonna help your video. So you gotta tell them that. Tell them in the actual video. Now, I'm gonna share with you that embarrassing mistake I told you I made. When I first started doing videos a few years ago, I didn't know what I was doing.  And matter of fact, you could go back on this channel and see the beginning ones are terrible. Please don't go back and look at them. Please don't do that. But if you went back and looked at my original videos, you would see I didn't know what I was doing. And the other thing I didn't do was I didn't respond to comments. I looked at them as irritating. I would say, oh my God, these people are asking me all these questions. I don't have time to answer their questions. I don't wanna do that. I just wanna make videos. When in fact, what I should have done is answered their questions and make fewer videos. And that way I would have gotten interaction on the ones I did. So after I woke up one day and somebody said, hey, do you know that interaction and comments can really boost your video views? I was like, no, I didn't. In addition to that, having those comments there, other people see them and they may comment on them. Now, when you comment on somebody's comment, so they may say, hey, I liked your video. It was really good. You wanna make sure you thank them and then ask them another question. Super important you do this because if you thank them and ask them another question, they may comment again. So you turn that one comment into four comments. So at the end of whatever reply you put on there, you may say, hey, I'm glad you liked this video. Did you think the SEO part was better for you or the SEM part? And put that question in there. And if they answer again, you've now tripled the amount of comments that came off that initial comment. Super important that you do that. Number four, this is also very important. And I went back and answered some comments from three or four years ago recently. I waited too long, I think, yeah, I think. Number four is respond to viewer behavior in a timely manner. So if somebody comments, somebody asks you a question, if you could respond that day, all the better. Now you may not be able to, but try to. Don't say, well, every 30 days I'm gonna go through and answer comments. Don't do that. Try to set aside some time every day and if you can't do it every day, maybe every week, but make sure you answer these comments as quickly as you can because they forget about them. They forget they even put anything there. And if you respond in a timely manner, the odds of them responding back again when you ask a question go up against. That's gonna also help your engagement. Number five, be consistent, being consistent. Very, very important. I just did a video on how to get subscribers and this one here is on engagement, but both of them, both of them require consistency. And what I mean by that is you need to spread your videos out because there's an algorithm at YouTube that looks at consistency. So if you were to make 20 videos and post them all on Monday and Tuesday and not make videos for three months, your channel's not gonna do well.  And what's the point anyhow? You know, let's say you got a subscriber and you upload 20 videos in two days, they can't watch 20 videos in two days. Not for the most part, they can't. They need little bites of information. So if you've got that 20 videos, you'd do better to do two a week for the next 10 weeks and then YouTube would see the consistency of it. They would be more likely to show your videos to other viewers. They would be more likely to make them suggested videos. So you wanna spread this out and be consistent. Number six, use call to actions. And what do I mean by call to actions? Well, you can put something on the screen where they can actually click and go somewhere. You can put in-screen cards where there's other videos and at the end of this one, there's gonna be a great video. You don't wanna miss this. It's gonna be up there, up right here or here. I can't remember which. It'll be one of these places. But you'll wanna click on it if you really wanna improve your business. And if you put those there and you instruct people to click, because a lot of times they don't know. You know, I could put an in-screen video up here on each side of me and they may see it go, oh, looks like he's got other videos. But if I say, hey, click here right now, they're more likely to click on that video and I'm gonna keep them on my channel and I'm gonna get more watch time. So utilizing those CTAs, super important guys. Number seven, use the tools that YouTube gives you. They give you a thing called analytics. You wanna go into analytics on a regular basis. And don't do it in the beginning. If you've got 20 videos posted or 30 videos posted, it doesn't matter. Don't even bother. But once you've got 50 or 100 videos posted, you wanna go in there and you wanna see which videos are doing well, which ones are getting clicked on, which thumbnails are working. You've got to learn your own channel. These things are a process of growth over time. So you need to actually go in there and see what's working, what's not working. You just gotta test the waters. There is no one way to do things. It's different for every single channel. Now, here's the truth. Patience plus strategy and effort are gonna win all the time. You have to have patience.  It's not gonna happen. Now, I'm not saying that hasn't happened. I know of a channel right now that has four videos on it and it's got millions and millions of views. It's a subject matter that everybody was interested at the time. He did a good job on it. But the odds of you doing that are not good. It's better to follow best practices like what I just went through here in this video. It's better that you make a good video that's 10 to 14 minutes long that they can put some ads on. It's better that you do a video that doesn't have a lot of flash on it and stuff going on and loud music and all that stuff. It's better that you have good content that somebody says, hey, I watched that video and now I know this, now I learned this, now I can accomplish this. Or if it's entertainment that they feel entertained that they wanna get more of it, that's another way of going about it. But the point is you gotta follow all these best practices. If you don't follow these best practices, you're not gonna get engagement. It's not gonna happen. And like I said, it's not gonna happen overnight. You can expect it's gonna take months, if not years to build a channel. Now, some of you will say, well, gosh, I don't have months, I don't have years. I need some money right now. Well, you can make money now on your videos by putting links in the description that lead to a download that get people on your list so you can email them and sell them whatever you got. You can do that. But as far as getting ads on your videos and all that stuff, it takes a while. You're gonna have to have a thousand subscribers. You're gonna have to have 4,000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months before you can even qualify for advertiser dollars. So that's gonna take time. It just is. And it's true, it will take months, it may take years. But the point is months and years are gonna pass anyhow.  So a lot of people say, well, I don't wanna invest the time in that, I don't have that much time.  And it's an investment. It's something that once you build it up, it'll be there and it can produce money for you on going. Working on any, any, any online business is gonna take you time. It's taken me years. In the beginning, I wasn't making money. I tried a whole bunch of different products. I started off selling cell phone cases. They didn't work. Then I sold some camping items. Some worked, some didn't work. I never really made any money and then I hit upon some survival food and it worked and then that supply went away. So I was out of business again and then I got my own survival food and I've had that one for a number of years now, about 10 years. But the point is it doesn't always go smoothly. It's not always easy. You see these YouTubers with big audiences and a lot of watch hours and all this stuff and all this money coming in and this lifestyle. They've worked, man. I'm telling you, they've worked. And if you watch the videos really closely, you're gonna notice they put a lot of effort into the videos. I watch a lot of different food bloggers and when you do a video, you have to do edits and edits take time. They do, to zoom in, zoom out, have music, have B-roll, whatever. And I watch some of these guys and the edit is every two or three seconds. That's hundreds and hundreds of edits on a single video. So take some time and watch some of my videos on my channel. Spend the time to learn doing this stuff. That's really super important. But the other important thing is once you've learned this stuff to start putting it into practice, don't try to learn everything there is before you start. You do better to hit that record button and start doing a video. Just hit the record button, start doing a video, put it out there, see what reaction you get, make corrections on it, make corrections on the next one, do another video and consistently do this. You will get better. I promise you'll get better. When we started doing videos, I didn't even know how to focus the camera. I'm embarrassed to say, I literally did not focus the camera. I didn't know about how to do that. You say, well, that's basic stuff, Jay. Everybody knows that. No, everybody didn't. And the funny thing is my wife didn't either. She was, you know, doing the videos and we did blurry videos and put them out. So that's embarrassing and you can go back and see those on this channel. I don't want you to do that but you could go back and see how blurry they were because we did not focus the camera. That's pretty sad. That's pretty sad. But the point is you will learn. You will learn from your mistakes. You will learn, you will get better. And if you consistently try and you consistently put in the effort, you will get better. I promise, I promise you will get better. Thank you so much for listening to this video. I do have a $97 course. You can get below. All you have to do is click and learn. You don't need to put in a credit card or anything like that. You can grab a $97 course absolutely free. So make sure you do that. In addition to that, there's a link down there to Cartra. That's how I do all my marketing. People ask, you know, how do you send out emails? How do you make sales pages? How do you do these downloads? I use Cartra. Cartra is all in one. My courses are there, everything. You only need that one piece of software. You don't need email providers. You don't need course things. You don't need page builders. You don't need any of that. Get Cartra. You can watch the video if you click the link below there. If you like what you see and you don't have to put in your email or credit card. If you like what you see, you can get a $1 trial to Cartra. That's a pretty good deal. She got to use my link below. Thank you so much for listening to this video. Don't forget to comment below. Don't forget to do that. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all notifications. Tell me what you've tried. Tell me what's worked for you. I want to see that below. Or if you have a question, put that below. Thank you so much for watching this video. I'll see you in the next one. Don't forget, check out this video here. It'll really help your business.


Our guest right now in all-American linebacker at the Ohio State University, and we'll get to that at two-time pro-bola for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Here's a new podcast called Don't Call It A Comeback, and it's truly one of the most inspirational people you will ever meet. Ryan Shazir, how are you? I'm doing good, how about yourself? I'm doing good. Listen, you're doing those media rounds. I know you got a heart out. You're everywhere, and we love to see it. But first, let's talk Ohio State.  Congrats on making it into the college playoff. A lot of chatter, though, and I'm not a college football gal. A lot of chatter about how they sort of backed in. Tell me why they deserve to be in the top four. To me, it's crazy how people say we backed in. When Alabama did it and when Georgia did it, they didn't say they backed in. But hey, at the Ohio State University, there's always a little bit of hate. The reason I feel like we deserve to be in there is because we lost to the number two team in the country, and we were the number three team. And then pretty much everybody else on our schedule, we have beat up on them, and we have a better, we have a better win than anybody else that is after us. Quality win. Yeah, a big quality win versus Penn State, who only two losses are to the number two team in the country and the number four team in the country. You know Taylor Luan really well. I know you guys chatted recently. He's on our show tomorrow, and Ohio State might face his Michigan Wolverines in the championship. What's the message you wanna send to him? We'll play it on the show tomorrow. So Taylor was talking a little bit of smack on our podcast, and we talked before, we figured out how state was gonna make it in or not. And all I gotta say is how you like that, cause I definitely think we're gonna beat Georgia. I know nobody thinks that, but I think we really have a shot to beat them. We have the team to beat them. And I just, I hope they make it there as well. I hope they do too. And I'm wishing you lots of success on your podcast. Don't call it a comeback. You launched in October. What has it been like? What sort of stories are you telling? Let us all know. So it's been an amazing experience. You know, the podcast is through, it's a Wondery original podcast. So it's been a great, me and Dave Demonshack, we talk about amazing comeback stories when it comes to player resurgence, to franchises that's selling dwellers that defines all the odds. So like we talked about Geno Smith this year, nobody expected Geno to be where he's at right now. We talked about Justin Verlander. We talked about a lot of different guys and teams. And like we even talked about the team up north from Michigan, how we, you know, we went on a eight year streak of beating them and now they got us the last two years. So we talked about a few different things. I mean, and your comeback is one of the most inspirational achievements ever. And we all watched it collectively and we're with you through it. So when you talk about your story, what is the biggest single takeaway you want people to have and take away from it? So one of the biggest things that I think from my story that I always talk to people about is just understanding that we can overcome pretty much anything to make it to the NFL. Most, pretty much everybody that's made it had 90% of people telling them that they're not going to make it. You know, they always tell them that they're 1%. And it's kind of the same thing when it comes to life and just where we wanted to be. You know, Kay, somebody probably told you, hey, you would never be as big as you are when it came to me. And to me, just to tell people, hey, if you really put your mind to it, if you really put the work in that, you know, even walking is possible. I could talk to you forever. I know you have to go. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions about your Steelers. So you're talking about nothing's impossible. Put your mind to it. And I'm just thinking Tomlin's probably saying that to his guys in that locker room. And the Steelers are not mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.  Kenny Pickett looks good too. So the biggest thing for me is, I understand how Coach Tomlin coaches, he does a good job of just bringing the best out of his guys. He might not be, you know, how Belichick does it or how, you know, Sean McVeigh does it, but Coach Tomlin does it the way he does it. And he's had years when they started off bad and still had an 88 season, you know, or a positive season. And to me, I made a bet with one of my friends and I was telling him, hey, I bet the Steelers go nine and seven to finish.  So the Steelers finish, like they win nine of this. They're going to finish with a positive record. So I was like, we're going to win seven of our next nine games. You know, and we already won two in a row. Yeah, we already won two in a row. And the biggest thing is that Kenny, at the beginning of the year, he didn't really had a chemistry with Deontay. The only chemistry he had was George because they was in the same lineup. And now he's actually gained a chemistry with the guys. He's not turning the ball over. And every single week, we constantly see him get better. We constantly see him get better every week. By the time the playoffs come, I think he's going to be on a good level. They got the Ravens next, last one for you. This is the first of two, Steelers-Ravens. Take, when I say, when I say Steelers-Ravens, where does your head go, Ryan Chaser? Give me the moment that sort of defines that rivalry for you personally. So the moment that defines that rivalry for me is, it's two moments. So my rookie year, we make it to the playoffs and we played them in the playoffs. And so this is what I got a bad taste of my mind from the Ravens. We went like 50, like we won one game. We lost one game in the playoffs at home. We had home field advantage. I mean, not home field advantage. We had the home game. And Justin Tucker hits like a 58 yard goal. Of course he does. Yeah, like they're like to win the game.  Come on. But then, and then the year I got hurt, we were on a, we was on a roll. And like before the game, I was like, Hey, if I, if I get a turnover, I'm doing a Ray Lewis dance. So I catch it in a second or something. And, and I end up doing it. And it to me is just like, I feel like there is a level of respect, but there's also a level of disrespect because how much we don't like each other. And it really reminds me of Ohio State, Michigan. That type of rubber.  When I was mentioning that, you of course also have the Ryan Shazier fund for Spinal Rehab that we, you know, I'm sure you're working on something with that. Anything you want to plug about that before we let you go? Oh yeah. So the Ryan Shazier fund for Spinal Rehabilitation is a fund that it helps individuals with spinal cord injuries. So before I got injured, I didn't know really much about spinal cord injuries. If I seen somebody in a wheelchair, I just wished the best for them, but I never really knew how they got there. A lot of people that end up in wheelchairs have spinal cord injuries.  People fall on the stairs, people slip in the ice, you know, playing football games. And I started to notice how people weren't getting as much care as I was getting. And I just wanted to be able to provide that same care and allow people to get independence again. So I started Ryan Shazier fund to be able to help with that. Ryan Shazier fund for Spinal Rehab. We appreciate all of the work you're doing. And I love the podcast. And we need positivity in this world. I'm wearing my, I know it's a rival, but I'm wearing my Joe Burrow do good sweatshirt today. Ryan Shazier, check out and download his podcast. Don't call it a comeback and prepare to be inspired. Now, Ryan, what's next on your schedule?  Oprah, what's going on? So I'm actually about to go on Rich Eisen right now. And then go to a few of the, I'm going to NFL network studios. And we're going to talk to them a little bit about don't call it a comeback. Talk a little bit about football.  And there's a lot of comeback stories every single week. And we talk about it every single Thursday. So I'm really excited about talking to everybody about just how, you know, what we're talking about on the podcast. Yes, you getting into the media as a thing that we love to see. Tell Eisen, we say, hi, I'm sorry. You're late for that appearance. We appreciate you, Ryan. Talk to you soon. All right, see you. Bye. We got to work on this dropping people. What, Derek, why?  We got to say bye. And I'm the worst at saying bye. Who's ever been on the phone with me? I'm like, done, hang up. And everyone's like, wait, that's what we do to these guests, I feel like. We'll be back. We've got a lot to get to. Lots of fun, so many guests and more to come. We're doing the playoff picture. And we're getting spicy after this.


hey guys last minute video before I go I'm on my way to the airport right now to get on a plane to Chicago and then to the UK I'm finally gonna see a fucking computer I'm finally gonna see London and Scotland for the first time I'm very very very excited admittedly I know that with the Queen's passing it's gonna be quite interesting over there but I'm finally getting in again on the plane I just wanted to say something to you guys before I left hope you guys are doing well I actually do have Supernatural Season 7 videos on my phone so I will watch them intermittently and I might even do some on-the-spot reviews over there to add some flavor but yeah I hope you guys are doing well I'm just very very excited I'm very very I am so anxious because I've never left this continent I'm finally going to get to see castles I'm finally going to get to see parts of history that my family has a little bit like my half of my family is English so I'm gonna get to see that side of history and I'm I'm just stoked guys I'm so excited so um yeah I I'm definitely gonna do a video contemplating of a contemplation of all of the things that I see with my drone and my camera and all that stuff but that will obviously be when I come back but anyways until then I will uh I'll see you guys in about three weeks or so so apologies again for no videos over this time but like that's where I am I am away on an adventure so until then I'll see you guys when I get back