Of all the people who have died in the pursuit of manned spaceflight, only three have actually died in space. It was the crew of Soyuz-11 in 1971. Technically speaking, space starts at the von Karmen line. This is an imaginary line 100 kilometers or 62 miles above the planet. Yes, it's sort of arbitrary, but it has to start somewhere, right? Not only is this kind of a nice round number, it's also a point where most of the atmosphere is beneath you. So when we're talking about space and human survival in space, anything above the von Karmen line, you're exposed to the vacuum of space. And that is the threshold that matters when we're talking about Soyuz-11. But let's go back to the history of the mission first. On April 19th, 1971, the Soviet Union launched history's first space station, Salyut-1. This was going to be the Soviet's main artery into space. Not only was a space station going to be an on-orbit hub for technology experiments and human experiments, much like the ISS is today, it was also the first step towards a space station that could be used to launch deep space missions to other planets. Just days later on April 22nd, the first crew launched to rendezvous and dock and actually board the space station. The crew of Soyuz-10 was supposed to spend 30 days in space, but there was a problem with the docking mechanism on the spacecraft. The crew was able to dock with the Salyut, but they couldn't actually open the hatch to board the station. The mission unfortunately failed and the crew was brought home early. Soviet mission planners were unwilling to just let Salyut lie up there in orbit with no one going up there for the rest of the year, and so scheduled two more missions to go to the station at least within 1971. Up next was Soyuz-11. The prime crew of Soyuz-11 was Soyuz-10's backup crew, but there was a problem. Just days before the planned launch, medical examiners found swelling in cosmonaut Valerie Kubasov's right lung. As per Soviet Ministry of Health rulings at the time, they didn't just swap out one man from the crew for his backup, like what happened on Apollo 13 when Jack Swigert replaced Charlie Duke at the 11th hour. Instead, they swapped out the whole crew. Now, Georgiy Dobrovsky, Viktor Patsaev and Vladislav Volkov were on deck. They launched under the call sign Yantar on June 6th. The launch was fine and the crew was able to rendezvous dock and board the Soviet Space Station, and then they began their science-heavy mission. They ran cardiovascular experiments, did tests of visual acuity, and measured exposure to radiation. They ran experiments on tadpoles, algae, and even cared for small plants in a greenhouse built into the station. They also did observations, mainly telescope observations of the Earth and other celestial bodies. In total, the crew ran more than 140 experiments, but the mission wasn't without its challenges. Not only were there technical glitches, the crew was tired after their grueling schedule, and there were some near emergencies, namely one day a strong smell of smoke permeated through the main cabin, and the crew didn't exactly react perfectly. There was discord among the men, and so Soviet mission planners decided to bring them home early. They would spend 24 days in orbit, not 30. On June 29th, the Cosmots left the station and boarded their Soyuz. They said goodbye to the ground as they did their seven-minute re-entry burn and began their fall through the atmosphere. Now, the Soyuz is a modular spacecraft, and it's only the descent module that actually returns to Earth. The descent module has to separate from the instrument module early in the re-entry phase, and all of this is automated. The descent stage separated cleanly, the parachutes deployed on time, and it landed smoothly and safely on the ground. The problem was, controllers in mission control couldn't re-establish communication with the spacecraft. But still everything looked fine. Recovery crews in a helicopter near the landing site saw the parachutes, saw the landing, and saw that everything looked perfect. They landed their helicopter and went to go recover the crew, excitedly welcoming them to Earth. When recovery crews reached Soyuz 11, even though everything looked great from the outside, when they opened the hatch, they found all three men unresponsive. They all had blue patches on their faces, and were dripping blood from their noses and ears. Of the three men, Dobrovolsky was still warm, and they were able to actually take his body out of the spacecraft and attempt to give him CPR and artificial respiration to get him breathing again, but it was to no avail. All three men were killed. And the question was why? There was speculation in the immediate aftermath of the Soyuz disaster that prolonged exposure to weightlessness had been the cause of death. There was still some question of whether the human body could actually be in space for prolonged amount of time. Some biomedical results of the Gemini program saw that astronauts' heart rates slowed down the longer they were in orbit, so there was some question whether the cosmonauts' hearts had just stopped because they'd been in space for so long. But this was ultimately not the case. All three men were found wearing flight suits, not space suits, and still strapped into their couches, exactly as was procedure for descent in a Soyuz. It looked like nothing had been wrong until something suddenly went wrong, which would be the case with decompression. On July 12th, the Soviet Special State Commission investigating the accident released a report confirming that decompression had been the culprit. Reports from the spacecraft suggested that the likeliest culprit was two valves at the top of the spacecraft, both controlled by the same circuit, were accidentally opened. The body's position suggested that Dolbrowski and Patsaev had tried to unstrap themselves to shut the valves, but couldn't act fast enough. Biomedical data supported this. All three cosmonauts' heart rates spiked moments after separation when they first became aware of the leak. In less than a minute, all three showed dangerously low heart rates, indicating a lack of oxygen. And in another minute, all three had lost their heartbeats altogether. The official investigation report and the autopsy results are not publicly known. But from what we know about bodies and how they work in space and explosive decompression, we can figure out just how bad this was a way to die. All three men would have experienced pain in their heads and abdomens. Their eardrums would have burst and then they would have bled from their noses and their ears. And this is exactly how the crew was found, supporting that it was in fact decompression that killed the crew of Soyuz 11. But like every major accident in space flight or dealing with any big technology, there's a legacy of safety that comes from every disaster. There were changes made to the valves in the Soyuz descent module to make them safer. And it's now a mission rule that cosmonauts must wear their flight suits, their proper space suits rather, during descent as an added protection against decompression. And not a single cosmonaut or astronaut has lost their lives to decompression since 1971. So aside from it being a historically very important incident, I wanted to cover the story of Soyuz 11 because I found a really interesting artifact online the other day and I wanted to share it with you guys. There are stamps made for missions all the time. I'm sure stamp collectors out there actually have stunning collections that would make me jealous. I'm just beginning mine. And I found these very odd stamps from Equatorial Guinea celebrating and commemorating the crew of Soyuz 11. So first we have a stamp of Soyuz 11 docked with the Sallie 1 space station in orbit when everything looks good. There's also a stamp depicting the launch of Soyuz 11. You can see the R7 rocket in the background that's launching the flight. This stamp is showing the crew of Soyuz 11 healthy and happy in orbit on board their mission. This stamp is showing the Soyuz 11 re-entry but the heat shield glowing showing more or less that it is a nominal re-entry to use the preferred spacecraft vernacular. And then this is the stamp that I found researching this mission that caught my eye that made me actually go hunt down the stamp set and buy it because it's so bizarre to me that this exists. This is the crew of Soyuz 11 as they appeared in the spacecraft after landing. You can see the three cosmonauts lying in their couches with a member of the recovery crew looking into the spacecraft. It is one of the strangest depictions of fallen heroes on a stamp that I have ever seen. And I also find it interesting that equatorial Guinea of all places chose to put this image on a stamp to commemorate the mission. But as you guys know, I have a definite soft spot for especially the weirdest little relics of the early space age. So of course I had to add this little stamp set to my collection. If you guys have other questions about Soyuz 11, the Salyut space station, disasters in space, or Soviet space mission specifically, leave me those questions as well as anything you would like to see covered in future episodes down in the comments below. And let me know too if you guys would like to see a little bit more about the early Soviet and American space stations, the ones that preceded the ISS that we know and love today. Be sure to follow me on Twitter and on Instagram for daily vintage space content. And if you like this video and want weekly vintage space videos, be sure to give this one a like and subscribe so you never miss an episode.


My fellow Americans, over this Memorial Day weekend while most of us turn our thoughts to picnics and family outings, an annual summit meeting is taking place in Williamsburg, Virginia, one that's important to our future. It takes place at an appropriate time. A bipartisan majority in the Congress has just demonstrated its support for the recommendations of the Scowcroft Commission to modernize our strategic forces and carry us forward on the road to genuine arms reduction. This is a reassuring signal to our friends and allies meeting in Williamsburg. Here in this old colonial capital, the cradle of so much early American history, the leaders of the major free industrial nations are meeting to discuss the problems, the challenges, and the opportunities that our countries and our peoples share. Since the last summit in France a year ago, we've made important progress. Today, America is leading the world into an economic recovery that's already being felt in many of the other countries represented here. Another encouraging development is that more so than any other time in the recent past, the economic policies of the individual summit countries are converging around low inflation and improved incentives for investment, a good sign for a sustained worldwide recovery. We still have our differences. Friends always will, but they're fewer and less critical today than in a long time. I think most of us are agreed on not only where things stand today, but what we must do in the weeks and months ahead. All of us seek the same goal, a healthy, sustained economic recovery that will revive troubled economies in North America, Europe, and the rest of the world. That means more and better jobs, and the way to achieve this is to ensure that the new recovery does not rekindle inflation. We're doing this, and we're seeking trade between our countries that is open and free of protectionist restraints so that both industrial and developing nations can profit from an expanding rather than a contracting market. We're also encouraging responsible domestic economic policies in all of our countries which will make for greater productivity and more stable exchange rates. Here at home, our economy is already strongly on the mend. The rising tide of recovery is also beginning to reach to many of our friends and allies. But to keep it going and to extend its benefits to others still in the grip of the worldwide recession, we must all stick to anti-inflationary, high productivity policies that adapt new technology, retrain workers, and increase efficiency. The worst thing that could happen now, and one that could stall or at least slow the recovery that's currently underway, would be a political resort to quick fixes that could trigger a new round of worldwide inflation and rising interest rates. Now I know that all of this sounds like economic shop talk, a little remote perhaps from the everyday concerns of the average American, but while this is an economic summit, the topics it is considering have an impact on almost every phase of our lives, jobs, low inflation, and the opportunity for a better future for ourselves and our families. For when you get right down to it, freedom is at the base of the enormous productivity of the industrial west, a freedom that has spawned more progress, more individual rights, and more security and opportunity than are enjoyed by any other people living in any other system. And it's our shared belief in freedom that is the strongest bond uniting each of the seven nations meeting here in Williamsburg this weekend. Each of our nations recognizes the rights and dignity of its citizens, we all believe in the words of our founding fathers that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That's a simple enough phrase, but it represents an incredible leap forward from the tyranny and injustice that still haunts too many other parts of the globe. And because we, the nations meeting at the summit are united in our love of personal and economic freedom, our common commitment to maintain peace and defend liberty is that much stronger. There's been a lot of speculation about what will come out of this weekend's summit. I'll leave the detailed analysis to the Monday morning quarterbacks, though for this one they'll have to wait till Tuesday morning. But I'm confident that we and our friends and allies will leave this meeting more, not less united, that we'll leave it with fewer, not more differences, and that while it will have been a good session, much will remain to be done. For the issues we address here in this beautiful and historic setting in the spring of 1983 will still be with us for many years to come. The Williamsburg Summit is not the end of our work, but it marks the beginning of a new, more stable period of the free, developed world learning to work together, devising long-term strategies to meet the problems we face and handing over a better world to the successor generation, the young people born in the post-war era who must carry and protect the torch of freedom as America approaches the 21st century. Until next week, thanks for listening and God bless you.


It's Wednesday, it's 11 o'clock, and that could only mean one thing. Trump week. I'm Tim Apachella, and I'm your host today, and I'm here with Jay Fidel, who's another host. Jay, welcome. How are ya? Thank you, Tim. It's great to be here with you. It's very important that we discuss Trump week. This is the week that was, man. I'll tell you. Were you watching? I have been watching not as much as I want to because I have another job at the time, and so that's getting the way of me watching history being unfolded before the history of the live TV, and it's being unfolded, and guess what? I'm missing it. Yeah, and that's okay because the flavor of this is already established, isn't it? The flavor of this seems to be that everybody's in lockstep. I think I'm going to have a tattoo on my arm. He's going to say 53-47, 53 votes with the Republicans, and 47 with Democrats. It never changes. They went through eight possible amendments, all of which were valuable, important, valid, and every single time the Republicans voted against it, 53-47. What does this mean? What do you take from this? Well, I mean, you've already said it. They've been in lockstep, and this actually is a holdover from the House hearings. I've seen no crack in the veneer, so to speak. Bottom line is one of the more important votes that was taking place yesterday, which was denied, 53-47, was the idea that John Roberts would decide whether or not something would go or not, and they voted that down. So they don't want an impartial judge to look at the proceedings and whether or not it's valid to bring in evidence or not valid to bring in evidence. They don't want John Powers, Justice Powers, to make that decision. Now, isn't that odd? It is, and I think that was directed mostly at Bolton, and the reality is that Bolton was right there with Trump. He's a very good witness, and he definitely should be testifying here. He refused to testify in the House, in the House proceeding, and there were all kinds of misstatements and lies about that, I must say, in the remarks made by the Republican lawyers. But now he's not going to get a chance to testify in the Senate either. I'll bet you five bucks right now, he never testifies in the Senate. I wouldn't make that bet at this point. Let me ask you this. So yesterday we had more than 11 hours of both sides stating their case. How do you think they did, particularly the introduction with McConnell and Schiff? How do you think they did? Well, I didn't see the whole thing as you and other things, but I did see a lot of the arguments made on the motions in general by the Democrats, by Schiff specifically, and also Nadler. And Schumer, he didn't argue so much, but he was involved in the effort. And I must say that I thought they were brilliant. They were right. They were correctly stating the points that needed to be stated. They were speaking in the right tone to the country, and they were speaking beyond just this Senate trial. They were speaking about the future of the Constitution and the country. And I happened to agree with what they were saying. So I think it's very important that they said those things. Regrettably, the Republicans did not do nearly as well. They made really cockamamie arguments, and they were wrong, and they were mistaken. And in many cases, they were obviously lying, lying about things that we know they knew about. So it was very hard to listen to that. It was hard to listen to the Republicans. I really zone out when somebody's lying to me and making it sound like it's truth. It's the alternative facts again. So if you ask me how the Democrat team did, I would say they did really well. And I said to my wife over and over again, these guys are top, top fight. Well, I think first class lawyers, yeah. I think they took the time to lay it out and lay it out in a way that not only are the senators going to understand it, because you do have two audiences here. One is obviously the senators. But the bigger audience, the most maybe the more important audience is the American public. And whether that's going to come into play here for this this trial or come into play 10 months down the road for the election. But that is the audience that we have here. And I quite frankly think the Republican senators are taking note of that. And also, I think that as they laid out the case yesterday, I think the Republicans were flat footed. I don't think they prepared well enough to respond to how well the Democrats, Schiff and Schumer, how well they laid that out. They don't have any arguments and they don't have any evidence. So they don't have a lot to work with, I must say. So they come up with these cockamamie arguments that go nowhere. And the question is whether people watching because a lot of people are watching, even though McConnell tried to put this in the middle of the night. Fact is that a lot of people are watching. It's hard not to watch, at least for me anyway. But one of the most interesting elements is that somebody, I guess it was a news reporter or someone asked Schiff, why go through all these motions? Why try to amend the McConnell's rules for the proceedings? Why do you when you know the result is going to be the same each time? Why do you do that? And Schiff's answer was very core. He said, because we want the public to know what our evidence is. It's like an offer of proof in court under the federal rules. It's an offer to say, if we have a chance to submit evidence, this is what the evidence will show you. So let us submit the evidence. But in the meantime, he's telling them, he's telling the Senate and he's telling the public, he's telling the world what his evidence is and what will come out. And that was his methodology, that was his strategy. And I think it was really good, really well done. Well, and I think what's interesting is if that is the crux of the argument right now, that evidence is not going to be submitted either in the form of witnesses or documents. And it seems that the Republican response to these two articles of impeachment are not disputing that which is laid out. They're just saying it's a nothing burger. Don't look this way. There's no, there's been no crime. We don't disagree with what's been laid out. We just disagree the fact that this is not an impeachable offense. So if you if you follow that line of logic, OK, so why not allow the evidence? And if you already agree that the the evidence isn't really the issue and it's just the overall charge, then why not allow the the evidence into play? And I don't know if that's hitting its mark. Well, it's Mark isn't the Senate because the Senate is all under Trump's control, and a lot of this goes to the obstruction point. You know, because if you did look at the evidence, especially the GAO determination that what he did was against the law, that's a government agency saying that a government agency well equipped to say that, you know, I don't think there's any issue, but that he broke the law and he should be acquitted on what rather convicting on what he did. However, however, what we are seeing in the Senate is a continuation of the obstruction. This Trump is the guy that is telling all of them, you know, to not take evidence, to not hear witnesses and to vote in a block fifty three forty seven on everything against the Democrats, against the case, against the impeachment. This is just another expression of that obstruction. Now, the question to me is what about the guy in Middle America? Let's say he's either independent or moderate and, you know, he's not he's not committed to one side or the other. What effect does this have on him or her? And I think the answer really should be if we still have a sentient population, a sentient electorate out there. I'm not sure these days, you know, that it would be my God.  They don't want us to know what happens. They are obscuring the facts, the evidence, and they're lying about the, you know, all the events that took place. And so I would I would be outraged about that. I would be outraged about that now. I would be more outraged if and I think this will happen. The Senate votes to acquit. And finally, I would carry my outrage forward through the elections in November, not only for Trump, but for every senator who did this. This is such a violation of good order, of morality, of the Constitution, of all of the things we hold dear. These guys, 5347, it should be emblazoned on their mind and memory. They should be living in this 5347 world for the rest of their lives, unless their careers in the Senate, which I hope will be short. One of the interesting things that occurs to me is the thing about the mystery witness who, you know, said he would testify. He's not so mystery. Bolton, who said he would testify for the Senate if he was subpoenaed. And then the Democrats make a motion to have him subpoenaed and the Republicans vote against that. So Bolton will probably not be called or at least that motion has been tabled and they'll vote against it later and 5347. And he won't he won't testify. And now Bolton, we know Bolton is motivated by book sales. He's writing a book and he wants to, you know, get that book out. And this is every time his name is mentioned in these proceedings. And it has been mentioned many times. It's more likely that he'll sell copies of his book. So the question really is, how does his book play on this? He's not going to publish his book until after, I think things are over. Absolutely. Yeah, that's until this is all done. Then it's going to be popular. I mean, I I wouldn't buy it as a matter of principle. I don't want to hear what that man has to say. Well, I think a lot of people in the country will buy it and he'll have big book sales and it'll have a big effect. And there'll be others too. You know, evidence is going to come out after this is forthcoming acquittal. Well, it's coming out of the draps and draps. It's it's it's coming out as we speak. The Freedom of Information Act is kicking in and all these documents are rolling in. But the argument that Republicans are stating is, well, you should have asked for this stuff when you were having the impeachment hearings and you didn't do it. You didn't you didn't get the you didn't go through the courts to to get Bolton and Mulvaney and and Giuliani here as witnesses. You should have gone through the court system to resolve that. And that's what the courts are set up for. But let's forget the most let's not forget the most important element of that. It takes months and months and months to actually get a decision to have this adjudicated and it's not being adjudicated quickly. So therefore it it would be well after the election before this these decisions would have been rendered. So the argument is we would love to but we don't have time. We don't have any time to do that. And then the second thing that I thought was a travesty is the fact that they're trying to do a trade, if you will.  What is that all about? A Biden son has nothing to do with the direct implication of Trump's guilt or innocence. Right. I mean, it's a distraction. It's a Trump a Trump is a Trump distraction, which actually brings us to Trump because he's he's behind all this. He's got a nose. Absolutely. He's behind the machinations that went on during the House hearings about how they refused to appear and testify. No government agency gave documents. All these people were acting terribly in violation of the Constitution and the clear separation of powers in the Constitution. I don't know how they can live with themselves. They should have the fifty three forty seven emblazoned on them on them, too, because they participated in this cabal. So so so now information will come out. It is coming out. And after the forthcoming acquittal, we will we will see it leak out in which ways. Books and who knows documents. How will Trump react? I mean, he's he's had a full court press going on for a long time to stop anything from coming out. He knows he's guilty. He knows he should be impeached. But he drills down and he, you know, is on a full, full tilt campaign to stop the proceedings against him. So now soon he wins in the in the Senate, if he looks like he's going to do that, actually. And it's after the acquittal. And on the one hand, he's going to say, I was vindicated. I was exonerated. I am innocent. That call was just perfect. Perfect. You you hear me? And then, OK, he's going to try to do the same things.  Now, he's always felt that way. But the government has not, you know, agreed, admitted that that he can do that. There's still resistance, at least to some extent, not in the Senate, but at least in the House. Once he's exonerated, once he's acquitted, he's going to be, you know, much worse. He's going to be liberated to do this every day and nobody will be able to stop him. This will change our government, will change our country. It's hard to imagine all the things that he is going to do. And it's hard to imagine how they are going to affect you and me and all our friends and neighbors. We're going to be living in a different place when he's acquitted.  I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I my question to you, if you don't mind discussing it is, what is he going to do, if anything, to stop this information from coming out? Because obviously this is the tipping point. He's acquitted. The information is inclined to come out. People are outraged when they read Baltimore's book and other things. And, you know, it doesn't look good for him in the election or in the reelection of those senators. So what does Trump do? Because he's not going to sit quietly on the side at that point. He's going to have a strategy to deal with this information and how to put it down. So it doesn't affect the reelection in November. What do you think he's going to do? Well, it's a two-part answer. The first part of the answer is going to go to something you said a little bit earlier here. And that is I don't compare this his ability to say I'm exonerated. I'm not guilty. It was a perfect call. He's not going to get away with that as easily as he did. Remember when the Mueller case was squashed and he said I'm exonerated and, you know, I did nothing wrong. It's very easy to counter his argument by saying you aren't exonerated. This trial was a sham because no evidence was ever admitted. We weren't able to bring in witnesses or documents. Therefore, your victory lap dance, it's not valid. So I think he's going to have a hard time with that counter criticism that he's innocent and it was a perfect call. I don't think that goes easy for him. Number two is he's going to get these again, this flood of new documents from between now and the election. And I don't think he's going to be able to stop it. And I don't think he's going to be able to counter the books that are going to come out. I think he'll do what he's always done and that is name call somebody come up with a nickname that you normally come up with in third grade and just repeat that nonstop and get his agents, if you will, his lackeys, his loyal lackeys to do the same and just drum that in day in and day out, name calling and say how no credibility, false information, fake news, witch hunt and they'll just keep on that bent. But at some point that gets old and even the Trump supporter may go, you know what, there was a lot of smoke and I saw some fire here because I didn't see a trial. I saw a sham. I keep waiting for the people to rise up. But, you know, they really haven't. And 5347 shows you that no senator was impressed with constituents who told them not to do that. They all operate under McConnell and Trump, ultimately Trump. So he's been successful.  You know, even his trip to Davos and Switzerland, talk about economics was only a distraction. It's part of his way of dealing with an impeachment. You know, you have an impeachment trial, go to Davos, go to Switzerland, ignore it. But the fact is his agents and his lackeys, as you said, are working on it. So I think two things are gonna happen after the trial is over. And I'm assuming that it'll be an acquittal because there's been no defections so far, really, at all. One is that, remember, he has commandeered all of his agencies. There's nobody pushing back anymore, seems like to me. The State Department, he owns it.  And he's got a secretary of state who is behind him, full tilt. The Department of Justice, same thing. It's been hollowed out. You know, even FEMA has been hollowed out. There's no actual director of FEMA yet. And of course, we have scandal after scandal about how Trump has dumped on Puerto Rico. And then you have the Department of Education.  Ah, they go along with him. Everybody's intimidated. So that's one thing. And he's gonna continue the same policies, immigration, homeland security, same thing. He's gonna continue the same policies with the people who respond to him and who he can intimidate. And so we're gonna see more of the same, but worse because he's gonna know that nobody will stop. The other thing, and this is what I really worry about, is that as you said, the risk for him is this information coming out. Whether it's coming out by newspapers, books, it'll come out on the media, CNN, MSNBC, what have you, Washington Post, the New York Times. He's been attacking them and attacking the press. And successfully so for a lot of medium-sized media around the country. He owns the FCC. Anyway, what is very troubling is he's gonna have the opportunity to attack the media. And I'm telling you now, in my opinion, he will attack the media. He'll spend a lot of time attacking the Times, the Post. He'll call them the same names he's called them and worse. He'll take action against them through his attorney general and one trumped up lawsuit or another. He'll be fighting with them hand and fist, try to undermine their credibility and their business model and their connection with their readers and viewers. So that's gonna be a big problem. And that leaves critical thinking on the part of American voters. Many of which who have been disenrolled thanks to the efforts of the Republican Party. Well, let me react to that for a moment. And that is, yeah, he's gonna criticize the press just like he has for the last three years. But at some point, it's an old song sheet and the effectiveness of that criticism starts to lose its power. And we're actually, between now and the next 10 months, the hearts and souls really is the independent voter. And they haven't made up their mind about Donald Trump yet. In fact, they're starting to lean the other way. I was watching some independence in Arizona. You know, that's a highly contested state. It's a critical state for that Senate race and independence are being interviewed and they all said the same thing. It's obvious that he's scared and he's concerned and that's why he's not letting evidence in on this trial. And they were acknowledging that he's got something to hide and for good reason. And they're also acknowledging that the protocols of the Constitution are not being followed. Congress has been stripped of its authoritative powers and they're seeing the reality of that. So it's the independent voter that's gonna make the difference here. And I don't think by attacking the media day in and day out wins any points for those independent voters that will probably get out of their armchair and go to the polls in 2020. I sure hope you're right. And that is the bright spot here that maybe in this formerly great country of ours there are enough voters who see clearly based on what's happening. And maybe Trump's calculation and McConnell's calculation is all wrong. They're trying to make this into a sham trial successfully but it's so obvious what they're doing. 53-47 over and over again even when these motions to amend McConnell's rules are so reasonable and so appropriate that the guy sitting in his armchair in middle America will see this. He will watch this thing in the middle of the night and he will see this and he will remember this and he will use critical thinking to find to realize as you say that this president, this administration is all wrong. They are guilty of sin and they have to go including all the senators who backed them up. We have really, we got a hope on that. I don't have a lot of confidence but hearing it from you, Tim, it sounds like something that actually might happen and that would be the light at the end of the tunnel. Well, before we get to that light let me ask this question. Given after most likely Donald Trump will be acquitted here in this impeachment trial what does that do regarding the further divide of our national population? Republicans versus Democrat what does that do for the national divide? What does that look like?  I admire them very, very much. They're a journalistic organization and they make documentaries for PBS mostly. You're gonna look at their documentaries on the web for free. And they made a couple of documentaries, each one, well, it's one series, two hours long, two separate documentaries they call the America the Great Divide and it's sort of an examination of how this divide appeared during and connection with the Obama administration and how Trump saw that and took advantage of it and he's exacerbating it during his administration. I think it's very good reporting is very, I hate to use the word balance because balance sometimes is a way of favoring one party or the other, but I think it's well done. It's factual, it's thoughtful and this is something that every American ought to watch. And what it says in large part is that the divide in this country has existed for a long time. It has emerged during the last few administrations before Obama where people really, you know, they go after each other. They don't respect the views of the others and they're supremacists. They fight like hell about everything. They lock up in these contentious discussions. They're bigoted and they're not helping anybody. And Republicans and Democrats is one divide but there are many, many divides. Putin would be happy to see how many divides there are because divides in the country, in any country and he's trying to do it with other countries as he is trying to do it with us, I'm sure. Divides make a country dysfunctional or non-functional and that's exactly what's happening in this country. And I don't think people realize how dangerous and destructive it is to have these arguments about everything and never give up not even to obey the rules of the courts and to have Congress ignore its separation of powers and its power to oversee the president. So what we have here is a general decline and it was emerging during Obama. He kind of gave up at the end. You have to watch the frontline series and Trump who takes advantage of it and makes it worse every day by making people hate each other. It's an administration of hatred. We can't continue that way. The country has to come together. The fabric of this country is based on the social compact where we all agree on fundamental principles that are in the Declaration of Independence and that are in the Constitution. You wanna tear that up? Oh, we'll all pay a terrible price. And I think unless we do something, we all of us every single one, unless we do something we're gonna have to pay that price and it will be awful for every one of us. We have lived in this, you know, all of our lives that lived in a country that was largely dedicated to the Constitution, the rule of law and a certain morality, a certain fair and equal kind of, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution and in the amendments to Constitution. And now we seem to be ignoring turning our back on that. You know, where you go from here, this is a great concern. It goes beyond Trump, it goes beyond this trial and it is revealed now. And all I'm saying is this is a moment in history beyond what people are saying it is. It's not just throwing a president out. It's not just changing the guard in the legislature or in the courts, it's saving the Republic. Well, I think the first two hours of today's trial Adam Schiff laid out your points very, very well that this was beyond today's trial and this is beyond President Trump. This is the, this could foreshadow things of things to come with other presidents. And I think he did an excellent job laying out those points. Well, I could see a whole bunch of more information that are a whole new topic that we could discuss next week or in the week after that, just on that point alone that you brought up, Jay. I'm concerned too. But until then we'll have to discuss it next week. We're out of time. So I'm Tim Appichella. I'm here with Jay Fidel. This was Trump week. Come and join us next week, Wednesday at 11 o'clock. Aloha.


Today I purchased a massive PSA 10 Starlight Rare Yu-Gi-Oh! collection and we're about to show it in this video What's up guys? We're back with another insane collection video I purchased a Starlight collection from a viewer of over 30 cards in PSA 10 But before we hop into it, he sent us a note. So let's open this thing up. Hey, big bro Rux, thank you for everything you do in this box you will find 34 So that's the exact number PSA 10 first edition cards one Asian English card PSA 10 and one Japanese PSA 10 giveaway card Very exciting. We've got a giveaway. I'm looking at the card. There seems to be an issue here This is a PSA 9 or move this sleeve. Okay, so maybe I think he just meant to put nine So I think that's the only thing there. So very very cool. This is gonna be awesome I'm super excited shout out to the guy who sold me this. This is super fun And obviously we've seen the giveaway here. So this is the Japanese card the Platinum Oracle Mahod Let's open this thing up. He said take the sleeve off for whatever reason. I don't I Don't know why we need to take the sleeve off, but we did okay So here's the giveaway all you have to do is like the video be subscribed turn on notifications Let me know down below your favorite card in this video These cards are gonna be going up on ruxon34.com. So if you are interested in any PSA 10 star lights we show here They're gonna be on my website. Go check out ruxon34.com. They will be available until someone buys them They won't be available, but sometimes people ask me are they still available? I'm like, no It's old unfortunately, but I'll try to leave it up as like zero stock if it's sold So if you see it and it has zero stock that means it sold if you don't see it I might have deleted it, but I'm gonna try not to do that. Okay, so we're gonna go through these all 34 cards here There is another one that he labeled this one as Asian English, but this is not technically Asian English This is the card that we searched for the blue eyes white dragon star light That's actually a Japanese card So I guess he said that because it's any it means like Asian English like because it's you know The English on the front and Japanese on the back like Asian English, but they actually released this in a Japanese set So it was just a Japanese card that they made English on the front So this is one of the first ones I do have a PSA 10 of my own that I graded the one that we pulled. I guess that was a year and a half or so ago Something like that's crazy. It's been that long. So that is one that we have gotten these are all PSA 10 So PSA 10 PSA 10 there's gonna be a lot of them. All right, and I did sleeve up the rest of these We have a ghost bell and haunted mansion This is one we never pulled out of dimension four So you guys remember that was the one where is that there was that crazy situation where some store ended up with a bunch of Star lights in their packs. They're getting like four per pack Something crazy like that happened. So I'm guessing this one isn't like super rare in PSA 10 But maybe it is I haven't checked the pop or anything, but it's very nice card I never pulled it though It's still very hard to pull if you don't get those crazy cases. The next card is a PSA 10 Heavenly Zephyr Miradora, so if you are I think I feel like if you're like a big starlight PSA 10 collector There's a good chance that one of the because we have some random ones We have some nicer ones there might be one that you're looking for so keep an eye out for that on my website Plus I have a ton of other stuff on there as well including the current box break Whatever it is which they've been selling pretty quickly recently in the current box break So they may be sold out But I've been doing them pretty weekly trying to keep that up So keep an eye out on there for that and if you do want to do box breaks Don't forget you can get a discount by being a member down below join button And you can also become a patreon at $10 level you get your money back every time you buy a pack So if you buy like 10 packs you 10x your investment on my on my thing per month. So investments the wrong word there It's not really an investment. It's more of a support thing, but then you get like a bonus back for it Okay, the next thing is albolinatis the abyss dragon This is a card that when it first came out people thought it was gonna be crazy good in the TCG Turns out it wasn't the thing about it though It's a really cool artwork and the starlight wears first of all, you know way better than 25th anniversary In terms of the look you can actually see the car the artwork the name I just think it looks better and then the cool artwork on this one is really really awesome The card itself not that playable or anything, but I really like it All right And by the end we're gonna do a little probably a little shot of all of them You know just kind of go over be like whoa that's all those 34 starlight PSA 10s black wing armor master This is one they made a PSA 10 and crystal revenge and then immediately made it 25th like right after that So there's both options for this but as I've said, I really like the starlight crystal revenge Secret starlight whatever you want to call it I don't know. Yeah, I want to call it a secret rare because it's like more like silvery than the quarter centuries They're more ultra E with the Goldie. They're more ultra E with the gold lettering Okay, the next one is a shooting majestic star dragon I didn't have one of these for sale on my website for a while and I think someone ended up picking it up So we've had one of these before and now we have another one the dawn of majesty We pulled all of these if you remember starlight stardust Yeah, it was a lot of effort starlight stardust took a long time this one on the other hand We pulled pretty quickly pretty nice looking card though. All right a lot of nice stuff We have tier limits rule close this one. Yeah, man. It's so funny because all the star lights I have like some sort of connection not all of them, but a lot of them I have some sort of connection with I was trying to pull this this one out of Dabble yeah dark wing blasts which you open a lot of we pulled this one with CMO at YCS Pasadena maybe I think that's where that was in a hotel room We were like, yeah, let's open a gold series I have a couple extra packs we could open and there happened to be a starlight rare in there That was so amazing wasn't this one obviously because we just bought this Okay, the next one is exo sister's Magnifica this one Diffo yeah dimension force We didn't really pull a lot of starlights because I wasn't super excited about any of them like ghost bell I was like, oh, that's a pretty cool one But it was kind of I think think it was around some other bigger sets So I didn't really go too crazy on that one. So we didn't see too much speaking of new sets though It's been forever since we've had one and next week We finally have a new set coming out legacy of destruction which is pretty exciting So we're gonna be opening up for I don't even know what the cards are in there at the time of recording this So something fun. Hopefully exo sister Magnifica very cool All I remember is that exo sisters that I did play against them on master drill for a little bit didn't like them So they're pretty tough. So yeah Divine Arsenal a Zeus sky thunder. That's a nice card. That's a nice card. I once had Think we had a PSA 10 of this at one point I pulled one I don't think I ended up grading mine because I think it wasn't gonna get a 10 or something I don't remember what the deal was with it, but that's a nice PSA 10 I mean Zeus honestly one of the coolest cards They've made it a while super meta relevant for a long time. It's still pretty good. It's just a really awesome artwork The name is just intimidating. I mean, there's a little bit too much It doesn't need to have like six words in it, but it is a good name. It's a good name. It sounds great So that's got to be a fan favorite right there Utopia this is just bringing back bad memories of the fact that Baddest the legend Armageddon got reprinted and they just reprinted the astral artwork Fortunately, they did it in ultra not in like starlight or anything or whatever you call this Astral rarity, but yeah, it's still a cool card I mean utopia very iconic very classic then we have cashier a rice heart another crazy card That was like I'm cashiers were really popular for a while and my popular I mean really good not necessarily popular I think people kind of hated them, but it's a very very cool looking card out of fan a photon Photon hypernova. I want to say phantom nightmare then phantom then photon nightmare photon hypernova all these names They're very similar So you got to kind of work through to get to the right one photon hypernova though Was absolutely cracked when it came out really good set super popular cashier. Yeah, the cashier, you know, they're they're good They're kind of iffy, but whatever. Oh, and here's a nice one Here's one that we have never pulled and we still want to pull I still have some burst of destiny I think still want to pull this thing man for some reason this looks like it looks a lot different I mean because the effect monster, but it's also a little bit older So the starlight print could have changed a little bit throughout the years But it actually looks like kind of subtle almost compared to some of these other ones very beautiful card Okay, elemental hero stratos. That's one of my favorite ones I mean the ulti is great and it looks better to be honest, but this one honestly it gets a lot of hate It looks almost as good.  I think it looks almost as good Okay, next one is Dragoon, which is a really awesome one. I graded some wine and I only got nine I maybe was only one but I got a nine We ended up giving it away because it didn't quite get the tin I was just like I might as well just do a giveaway because if you're really awesome giveaway We ended up giving it away very cool card red eyes dark Dragoon PSA 10 brothers of legend This point is kind of crazy how long ago brothers of legend was all these 2022 sets feel like yesterday and it's like we're two years later It's nuts red eyes dark Dragoon. I mean gotta be the best starlight I mean, is there a better starlight than this just because of like red eyes dark magician put together in a fusion That was also playable for a long time and really really good. Is there a better card than this? I mean name it in the comments if you have one, but that in my card I mean starlight is there a starlight rare that's more iconic than this I don't know you could argue stratos, but people like to ulti better. So it doesn't really count We have the Leviathan dragon this one. It's crazy that this PSA 10 is like the same price as what we paid for the raw card in our investment Yeah, it's bad. It's bad bad bad how much we spent on that rock hard this card It just not gotten much love. I think it's really cool Leviathan dragon kind of random in terms of like cards to pick for you for astral But I mean it's a sweet card. So I'm a fan of it. All right, still a lot of cards left We have the gorgon empress of the evil eye. This is a I already had one of these So we're gonna have two of these available because I think one of them is still available on my website This is a card from one of the very first starlight sets chaos impact So second set ever so that's all we really need to say about that. It's no IP mask arena This one has Mirage aid the ice blade dragon This is a classic for all of you branded fans out there They are never gonna give up on their branded decks and Mirage aid is you know a big part of it It's a very very good card in that deck really beautiful starlight rare pretty much the only one I was interested in vote on hypernova because the other ones like cashier and stuff like that But this card was pretty awesome and we pulled it pretty quickly which we can't always say for these starlights So that was cool dark the dark charmer gloomy this one this one used to be way more expensive I think it kind of got I guess it's less good now because it used to be crazy expensive just rock hard But not so much anymore still pretty expensive But compared to some other ones not so much dark the dark charmer gloomy at Jimminton. All right Area of the water charmer gentle so very similar it's from etco eternity code You know, this is a big one because etco had you know a feck failure This is one of the big ones has a lot of really nice cards in there So Jimminton area of the water gent charmer gentle It's confusing how they have like the water charmer than they add a new one and just says like an adjective after it Very strange same thing with the dark the dark charmer very weird Speaking up, we have a heat of the fire charmer comma a blaze. There you go. It's it's a blaze That is a nice looking one out of phantom rage. That's the same set of Zeus right phantom rage. Yeah, I think so Okay, moving on the next one for instance seaworse. This is from rising rammage the very first set with starlights So this is the literally the original starlight. There was four that came out at the same time So for original starlights, this is one of the four that makes this pretty crazy Even though it's more incest seagor. It's not as interesting as something like opalosa It is still really classy because he's literally the first one if you I mean, it's tied with three others But still literally the first one. I mean you could say like oh, but the number is based on what's the first one So I don't know which one it is based on that but he in zero zero three So this is up there. I mean the other one might be zero one two Yeah, it might just be the fourth one actually, but I don't know if that's how they did them or not dark media, okay, I Was arguing for dark red eyes dark jagoon earlier. This one has an argument the dark magicians I mean as dark magician girl and dark magician on it So that's a that's a big rival for the red eyes plus dark magician fusion either way though Very good choices the dark magicians battle of chaos is very cool This one's not as strong as red eyes dark jagoon though. It is good in the dark magician deck So it's pretty decent there, but you know, it's a dark magician deck. So that kind of hurts it very beautiful card PSA 10 we still are like barely halfway through. We have try brigade arms boost cephalus, too I think I pulled this one. I'm pretty sure I pulled this one one time This is from a photon hypernova as well Yeah, I randomly pulled this and like a we're doing one of those openings where we're trying to get the points I think maybe is when I pulled this so that was pretty cool Not a super high-end one, but pretty awesome actually pull it I think actually pulled it put it one of my decks because it was like a side deck card or an extra deck card I should say obviously after that gets a link, but it was an extra that card in one of the decks I was building so I think that's where that is I haven't even thought about that card a while because sometimes my decks I build them and they kind of just sit there for a long time So maybe I'll find it eventually all right more cards time thief perpetua. This is one that was actually Surprisingly scarce like I wasn't finding a lot of info on online. It is for my guys So it's a little bit older, but time thief perpetua actually pretty decent. I think that was this one, right? I know when I was looking I'm not I feel like it was now. I'm second-guessing but pretty cool card Then we have the starlight stardust dragon and this is this is one of the top ones This has an argument with red eyes dark dragon with the dark magicians.  I don't remember 10. It was a lot. It was a lot of cases. I didn't get to PSA 10 on mine though I got the nine unfortunately Illusion of Chaos is another one. I really really like it's just an iconic magician card Which is really cool and the artwork on it is some of the best I think in Yu-Gi-Oh, I think it looks great and the coloring on this card with the green background just an awesome card I really love this card. I own one of these myself. It's surprisingly cheap This card is very very cheap in PSA 10. So, you know, it's an affordable one. I think it's like 200 or something It's very low. It's like that's like a price of a raw starlight a lot of the time So very cool on that one. Here we go another adjective card also the earth charm or a movable PSA 10 We have the effect of ailer. So here I think is the biggest and most expensive card in the collection This one valued around a thousand bucks something like that very very expensive one from tourney deco Which is a 2021 set almost three years at this point very very I mean you playable card I mean, it's great. It's so it's not now But playable card is what what made it so iconic and then it's been around since duals revolution the original print So it's had many years to become like a fan favorite and stuff like that And then of course being an echo and a pretty rare one. Yeah, very expensive. So I remember trying to get echo Walmart I went to a Walmart in like Florida or something trying to find it And I remember there being some packs of attorney code and I was so pumped I bought like a bunch of them the Walmart was absolutely packed because I guess people I don't know somewhere in Florida and those people were everywhere like I wanted that Walmart There's just people everywhere. I was like why are there so many people in this? I think it was a neighborhood market, too But for some reason they had Yu-Gi-Oh cards, so it worked out pretty good, but it was it was wild I don't know why I guess I just remember that because Edko was so hot at that point. Okay a few cards left We still have arm dragon Thunder level 10 a pretty classic one I mean arm dragon Thunder didn't really catch on it's like an interesting archetype or anything like that the arm dragon stuff It's pretty old and classic, but not really that interesting in today's meta But honestly pretty cool artwork, you know pretty cool to see those classics come back and get high rarity cards So PSA 10 on that one, of course Then oh, no, this is the one I was thinking of the trap tricks Alla Maris was the hard one that to find this one was not the time thief perpetual this one was Surprisingly, there was like one nine available for like six hundred dollars And I was like that doesn't make sense Some of the sales were a little bit iffy on some of them, but I think it's a pretty expensive card I'm not sure why I don't know if it had to do with the trap tricks deck last year But I don't know why it would because the PSA graded card and then I looked up to pop I think it was like 20 so it wasn't like that low So I don't know what's up with this one This one's a little bit mysterious. If you have an info about this I mean at echo. I guess it's the only thing now I've talked about turnity code being hard to find maybe I don't know But maybe it being playable like some of the other ones they're less available and rock hard Maybe I don't know here. We got a little adjective car Lynn of the light charm illustrious We invest in this one in our TCG player video. That's not gonna go. Well. I'm sure then we have a Paticell Call what's your that there's probably supposed to say I was some kind of accent I don't know I don't have it PSA 10 cool a few more four more cards actually chamber dragon made this is probably a Top-end favorite for some of you people that are dragon made fans so dragon made also edco So it looks like we have like all the edco That's like three or four of them wait there might have only been four netco No, no because effect failure was in there. That was the fifth one. Okay, so maybe we have we might have all the edco I haven't paid attention chamber dragon made Jim meant and that is a really nice looking card very popular three cards left We have protecting spirit low again This is from dawn of majesty if you guys remember we opened this thing up many many times We've mentioned it already trying to get that stardust so we pulled that pretty quick. We have a Win the wind charmer verdant so that is from rising rampage is the original So this is an original starlight as well. There was no apolo son here. Unfortunately. That would have been pretty crazy But there's a win the wind charmer So very cool starlight rare there and our final card if you guys have enjoyed the video Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and make sure you check out ruxin34.com if you're interested in any of these cards any other Cards have a lot of raw cards. I have sealed product like sealed tins sealed boxes PSA cgc cards all kinds of stuff on there. Go check out ruxin34.com and the final card is Access co-target is a good one to end on originally in eternity code And then it comes out as a starlight battles legend crystal revenge Really awesome classic card Really really nice. So pretty crazy PSA 10 collection of starlights I know the person who put it together took a long time and it costs a lot And I know some of them have gone down quite a bit, you know, because it was like back in 2021 Some of that some of the stuff's come down So I know it took a lot of effort and time and cash to get that together So shout out them for selling it to me It's very cool very excited to have these and show them off to you guys And of course now you guys can be a part of it and grab some yourself So go check out my website and it was really cool to see a lot of these in PSA 10 Because I have never owned a lot of these in PSA 10 Shout out to ToFo Show, Puffin Studio, Mernester, Deanne, America, Deutsche, KK Beats Another side show, Ian Moosey Jr., Barney, Robert F., Thomas McClain, Changeling And Al Delso, Galicia Jr. Thank you guys for supporting the channel and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace


Great. Great to see you. How about you? India is not only adapting technology, but it's actually leading the way. My name is Ajay Prada. My name is AIB. I'm using my number app. This is my photo booth. You can take a selfie with it. Wow. Wow. One of the themes I think India brings to technology is that it should be available for everyone. Everyone. In the village, the women will ride the buffalo, the cow, the cow, the cow, the cow. No. I use the technology in their hands. I talk to these women. They are so happy. They say that they don't know how to ride a cycle. Today, we have become pilots and we are riding a drone. Well, India brings to the climate change a rich history of caring about the environment. This jacket is of recycled material. We made the parameters of nature climate friendly. Today, all the parameters of our nature are anti-climate. During the pandemic, it was fantastic that the vaccines got invented and India made a lot of those. How did you manage the communication? You educate people and take them along. This is not a virus versus government. This is a fight between life and virus. You're one of the hardest working people ever. When you do want to relax, do you have a game or something that helps you to take time off? I liked it a lot. I got the chance to talk to many people.


Ah, this is a really cool stage. It's awesome to have you, Mark, over here. Like, I know that you got a fever last night, so thank you for making it to the stage in any case. How are you feeling? I will say that at about three or four a.m., I thought there's no way I'm gonna be speaking at Slush today, so I'm just happy to be here. And it's a real honor to get to participate in this and it is amazing that there's a conference of 20,000 people in Northern Europe at maybe the worst time of year. I guess you're proud of that. And that you all, we all share this passion together for entrepreneurship and I think you should all give yourself a round of applause for being here today. No, thank you for coming to Helsinki. And it's your first time in Helsinki, right? Yes. Excellent. Welcome. Maybe next time I'll visit in summer. But it's an awesome honor to have you here because Finland, where we are currently, is known for its mobile games. And you guys with Zynga were the ones that started kind of the social gaming revolution on Facebook, where we see hundreds of companies across the Nordics working on like different platforms from Facebook to mobile. But let's start with actually that. So you guys started Zynga in 2007. So like, how did it get started? What led to the founding of Zynga? What was kind of the thought in your head that led to you guys actually starting working on the company? Well, it may be hard for us all to remember today that in 2007, gaming was, the games industry was mature and declining. The web game industry was really pretty terrible. I mean, it was not considered a good business. And as an entrepreneur, I think for so many of us, it's great to pursue an industry that is mature with the insight that maybe this industry hasn't even started its real growth phase yet. And you think about Google was like the 56th search engine. And similarly, there was no, the gaming industry was really focused on serving a much more hardcore market and the opportunity that we saw was to bring games to a mass market of easy adults. So like everyone can play games in a way. And the idea that the kernel of the vision for us and for social gaming was to say, what if gaming could be part of this cocktail party? What if gaming, what if social gaming could be its own social medium for people? And even if they weren't hardcore gamers, they could actually use games as a way to connect with people in their lives. Yeah, so in a way like people were already on Facebook, but they were not doing things like games together. So your first game with Zynga was actually a poker game. So like your background that you've done like a different startups in the past you're a serial entrepreneur, you did a social network before that. So how did you got like, you were one of the first people to actually start working on Facebook games. So what happened? Well, first of all, it's kind of funny that I started one of the first social networks that I'm pretty sure nobody here has ever heard of called tribe.net. And it was pretty amazing to manage to fail as a social network when that it was just a new concept and people would get an email saying you have a friend request or whatever and they'd actually open the email and do it and I still managed to fail with tribe. And the big insight that I got that I brought to what I did with Zynga was that as entrepreneurs we are on this journey to try to isolate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. And with tribe I stubbornly stuck to one instinct and one idea and never tried anything new. And I was determined with Zynga to really not be attached to any one idea but to say how do I get a lot of shots on goal and pursue a lot of different angles against this social gaming. And the first was poker and luckily it worked. The only innovation was we had this realization that people were hanging out on Facebook and I realized from tribe that people just wanted to hang out there. They wanted to connect and there wasn't an easy way to connect but by giving them a poker game it was like an always on bar. And so people really responded to that and resonated. And then we started to try a lot more games and the irony is most of those games failed and we hit a point where we were supporting like 10 games and poker was just one of them and we had to kind of retrench and say wait, let's make this one game much better at the expense of the rest. And we actually killed most of the other games and we really focused in on how do we go vertically deep and how do we make this into more of a franchise and a forever service. And that poker game is still one of the top games 10 or 11 years later. And it's just a reminder that consumers want us, they don't want to try lots of new things. They don't want to move from app to app. They want the one thing they're in to get better and better. Yeah. And like when Facebook opened its API you were just one of many developers that are kind of thinking about doing games on Facebook. And yet like Zingna today is worth of three billion and it's a publicly listed company and most of the other players were not able to grow such a big company or ultimately failed. Like what was it about you guys from the start that allowed you to actually build one of the winning companies? I've thought about that. I think that the prevailing wisdom in startups and product making by 2007 in the Valley and probably everywhere else was this idea of fail fast. And I think John Doar was famous for saying it. And the problem with building this MVP minimum viable product and then trying to fail or succeed in a binary way was that you were building products in a vacuum. And the idea that we got to very early on with Zingna was instead of focusing on this fail state we needed to be in a learned state and we needed to quickly have a game out with a live audience and then iterate. And we had such an advantage versus the game industry because at that time and it's a little bit like that again today the game industry might spend two years making a game before they brought it to an audience we might spend four to six weeks. And so the number of engineering days that you've wasted is much less. So at the end of the day you're thinking how do I maximize the amount of engineering days I'm spending on things that my customers really want. And we were probably testing a hundred different ideas a week and the game industry was probably testing for a year. Yeah. And that takes us to an interesting topic like you've been characterized as a product maker as an entrepreneur.  So when you're building a company like it starts very much without data with creativity and ideas. And then it leads to actually getting data and improving things that you're building based on that. So how do you actually balance between this creativity and getting to scale and building this big company where you can't be as attached to all the things anymore. Well there's a lot of answers to that. It's a tension that we all face. We hopefully we all face it as our companies do really well. And there's this question of should I as a CEO if we got here because I had some good instincts and abilities around making products that people like now all of a sudden as you're scaling we're spending our time on things that we're not necessarily great at and we're not making our products better but we're spending time on scale.  And I said what I want to do is make sure all that matters and people say that micro management is this terrible thing. I think micro management is a beautiful thing in the eyes of our customers. So if we're at McDonald's or a single restaurant we want to have a perfect experience every time and we don't care how many people they're serving today we just care that our experience is great. And similarly when we're making products we've got to care at the pixel level. We've got to really care about quality and it's very hard to do that when we're spending our time in management meetings and not product meetings. So in a way even though you were scaling as a company you tried to stay very close to the products and very close to the customers not kind of get carried away and leave this kind of business world and fundraising on all these things so stay very true to the customer. Yeah and I think that the best consumer product CEOs have their hands deeply in the details and the current CEO of Zynga who's awesome, happy to say, he's deep in the details and that makes me feel a lot better. So let's talk about games. So one thing that's very harsh about the gaming industry is that it's a very creative industry. Like if you're not creating new things and going forward at some point you will run out of people playing your games so you constantly have to recreate yourself. So how do you actually think about new gaming concepts and you're trying to evaluate a new product idea that whether this is going to be something successful or not? Do you have any methodology or philosophy how you think about this? Well, there's a lot of answers to that again. So the first answer is we came upon this idea that we wanted to run a game as a live service and we wanted to treat it as a franchise and we wanted to grow our audience and our business by growing these franchises not by going horizontal and creating more games and features but vertical. And a mantra inside our company was this idea of bold beats and a bold beat is a positive disruption in the consumer experience. It's some, it can be dumb in Farmville an engineer spent a half a day making the animals move and all of a sudden the players started to imagine these new dimensions of gameplay and my friend Bing said, you know, it's an idea that might make people want to play for three more months. So I think that it's really important that we focus on what the consumer wants and not try to force them to go a lot more. And I guess this is one like a trap for most product people that you want to make everything better and you want to create something new for the world but I guess like people mostly they don't want everything better and everything new. So how do you have some sort of a way that you actually think about this when you were making games with Zynga? Yes, thank you for reminding me of that, Mickey. So I taught this class on product making at Stanford Business School and the core concept that we really use the framework at Zynga and I think you can use this concept not just in thinking about game making and I know that we're kind of in the capital of game making in the world in Helsinki and I'm happy to say Zynga has a studio here now. But is this idea of proven better new? And when Steve Jobs came back to Apple he said the problem with the company was that they were trying to make every feature 10% better and the whole product was getting 50% worse. And we have to put our egos aside as product makers and realize it's so hard to make a product or a feature better and it takes so much polish the way we can de-risk our new company, our new product is by saying how do we isolate the new idea, the innovation you wanna test from the ideas you're not testing and to take those are proven and Mickey was at Supercell. I was so impressed when I saw Heyday, I thought they did such an amazing job of taking the innovations that we had built at Farmville too and on the web and taking that to mobile and you said backstage that they had this one idea of hey, what if on an iPad the main gameplay is a swipe? Yeah, they're looking like this when people play it would look like this. So tap, tap to swipe. It sounds like a small idea but it turned out to be a huge idea that was the germ that we get seed of an entire company. In a way like having something new or making something significantly better but that should be like only a couple of things maybe 20% of the thing and then having 70, 80% more of a proven concept. The irony of this that we kind of sometimes forget is if you can make a new product that has no new idea in it but the only thing that's new is hey, there's never been a farming game that's easy to use on mobile and we're gonna have no new ideas other than that. That's awesome because we already know people like farm games. Let's not try to barrage them with a whole bunch of other new ideas at the same time because people don't love new ideas. Talking about ideas, like looking at Zynga you have an amazing portfolio of games that over a billion people have played globally like coming from Farmwill and Mafia Wars to draw something, words with friends, so forth. So where do you actually get ideas like both as an individual and as a company because you constantly have to be creating new concepts and creating new creative ideas? Well, I kind of have two answers to that. The first is I love to see mashups. I used to call it Frankensteining the game and saying, what would happen if we had location check-in and dating and farming? Like let's throw those all together and see if that's cool or bad. And so I think constantly trying to mash up a lot of things that you're seeing, like oh, Pokemon Go, that's cool but what would it be like if Pokemon Go met married Farmville or words with friends? So the first point is that we want to try these mashups but the second point that I don't know about you guys but it's on my mind a lot today is we need an environment that makes it really easy to take our ideas and quickly test them and it feels like it's getting hard on mobile. It feels much harder than we had on Facebook web and I'm wondering what's next and how are we going to get to this open environment on mobile that lets us iterate on our ideas with live audiences again very quickly. Do you see like when you started seeing that cocktail party was Facebook? Like what are the cocktail parties you're looking at today that you think might be kind of the next big platforms where games will thrive? Yeah, so Facebook served as this amazing cocktail party and it allowed us to drop games and apps in in a way that enhanced that experience instead of needing people to come to that. On mobile today, we're excited about, I'm excited about Facebook Messenger opening up and allowing HTML based games and we're doing a lot there and we can move quickly. We're wondering if Snapchat's going to open up but I feel like as developers, we shouldn't just wait for these platforms to open up and I'm curious, I'm inspired by what we're seeing in crypto technologies and the public blockchain and the way that there's a whole ecosystem that is now working together that feels very open the way the internet felt open in 1994 and I'm wondering if there's a metaphor that we can take to mobile that we can stop all working on our own and start being interconnected. So more like a community of companies learning from each other and building games and having a gamer community instead of everyone building their own thing on the app store. Yeah, something like that. Talking about inspiration, so we're talking backstage about your favorite book. So could you actually tell a bit more about that because I think that's a very interesting topic? Well, at this point I think it's nothing new but I've been inspired for years now by Ready Player One. Has everyone here read that book? Has anyone heard about Ready Player One? Less than I thought. It's going to be an amazing movie I think, Steven Spielberg's making, it'll probably do really well. I tried to buy the movie rights, that didn't work. But Ready Player One, I think did a better job of pointing to this near future and what these virtual world experiences might be like. And I've had an idea that I'll throw out to all of you and maybe you'll do something with it. I've had an idea that I blogged about 12 or 15 years ago called DotEarth. And I thought, what if there was something that was like Minecraft meets Second Life? But it was an open platform where there was software that anyone can go use. Any entrepreneur or developer could add a server to DotEarth. You could add a whole virtual world. It could be DotSpace. There might be a common data transfer protocol so that the consumers could bring their avatars and virtual goods and currencies from game to game and all be interconnected. So that was completely inspired. I blogged about before there was Ready Player One and then Ready Player One kind of put even more focus on it. So in a way like having a game where you're playing as an avatar with other people but you can be playing World of Warcraft or something completely different inside the same world. And that's something that like, do you want to be a part of building that? Are you seeing someone building that right now today or are you still waiting for that to happen? You know, there's another related idea that I'll throw out to all of you that I'm wondering about a lot. I feel like our experience on this phone and I wanted to get a picture of all of you but I don't know if this will really work. I'm gonna do it while I talk. Yeah, it kinda works. Sorry. The experience on the phone. Yeah, thank you. I'm losing it. I'm wondering if we are on the verge of a new metaphor for how do we browse our mobile experience because this feels like Windows 95 and it used to be packaged software and now there's an app store which is awesome but there is no metaphor for us as consumers. We open this and we have to stare at it and say which app will I use? And the browser is just one area. What if Google Maps became a new browsable surface and Canvas page and ecosystem? What if we as developers could offer apps that our users could instantiate on Google Map? What if you might find words of friends? You might navigate your Google Map by social. You might be interested in where our friends are interesting people around here and what are they doing? Oh, I wanna connect with them around a game that they're playing or Pokemon Go, AR. I think we need that as consumers and we definitely need it as app developers. We need this new metaphor. So in a way we're using Alta Vista when Google is still to come but we think that there's not gonna be anything like after this. Yeah and I'll say my, what makes me so optimistic is at every one of these moments, and I'm dating myself but going back since the beginning of the internet whether it was AOL or Yahoo, we think it's over. We think it's all been played out and we wish we had had the idea for Facebook or whatever I did, I failed. And then you have this realization with history that the growth hasn't even started yet. And so we have, I think you can have this instinct to know that there's so much more ahead of us and there's so much more that this experience could really deliver and we're really waiting for the next platform to open that up. But I'm hopeful that maybe it's not housed in a single company and where I'm inspired by, again by what I'm seeing with cryptocurrencies is I'm curious whether there's a new model that might get to this kind of post capitalism, post investor moment where there could be a much more pure alignment between us as makers and our users where we're just trying to create more happy super fans and we're not necessarily trying to siphon off energy and profits to send back to an investor. So the users and the consumers would own the companies instead of like someone owning the company, the company making users for products and at the same time trying to make profit. So direct ownership of a company. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if people here know Blue Bottle Coffee, they were just acquired by Nestle, which is an amazing outcome for them and their investors, but it's not obvious why Blue Bottle's product is going to be better now that they're owned by Nestle. I'm curious if it was a couple years from now could they have floated a Blue Bottle coin where all they had to do is try to make more happy super fans of Blue Bottle and that was all that they were focused on and accountable for. So no more exits to investors, exits to, or not exits, but continuing the story with users. Our customers aren't really looking for an exit. You know, if you love a product, you hope it's there forever. Yeah, and we'll continue on those topics in the Founder's Studio. So thank you very much, Mark, for being here in Helsinki, being on stage, even though you're sick, and we'll continue in the Founder's Studio. Thanks, Mickey.