Well folks it's been a long time coming but today we're digging into the mainstream trajectory of gaming NFTs How the battle lines are shaping up and a big challenge that traditionally closed loop gains will face as the future of ownership within game Worlds comes into focus and that's not even getting into the inflation aspect But before that introductions, I'm Adam B. Levine and this is speaking of Bitcoin for today's discussion We're joined by the other host of the show Stephanie Murphy. Hi Jonathan Mohan. Hey and Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Hello So on today's show, we've got a lot of ground to cover in a relatively short period of time I'm pretty much ready to call it though, although we haven't seen the first mainstream AAA game that uses NFTs in them roll out We have seen a flurry of announcements from the industry giants on whether they're on team token or prefer to maintain the status quo For those of you who understand the games industry the results are pretty much what you'd expect But it's worth talking about anyways on team NFT We've seen statements over the earnings season that started in mid-October from Ubisoft Activision electronic arts and epic games to name a few on team status quo We've got Microsoft's Xbox lead and valve operators of the steam gaming platform I think more surprising to me than the specific names are the simple scale of the players These are arguably the biggest companies in gaming both on the platform and e-commerce side with epic valve and Xbox Along with some of the biggest cross-platform game companies like Ubisoft Activision and electronic arts I'm pretty sure that I'm our resident gamer here to the extent that I have time to do that anymore Although Jonathan, I know that you dip into this a little bit too. I'm becoming a gamer now, too. Oh, are you Stephanie? Oh, yeah Thank you. I just got my PlayStation 5 a month ago. Oh I have been refusing to buy one because I can only find them from scalpers. It's ridiculous I feed the scalpers. I Admitted there's now a non negligible chance if you're playing online with a ps5 you might be playing with Andreas Antonopoulos Oh, my my PlayStation idea is a Antonop. So it's it's not gonna be Docs in himself everywhere it goes. Oh my god. Yeah, and by the way, I Will die so fast in multiplayer games. I am not I'm not up for shooter games I don't know. I prefer cooperative and world-building if you see a Antonop on ps5 Be sure to white knight him as hard as you can and carry him Okay, so I mean seriously though like the the kind of world of NFTs has obviously Exploded since I would say about this time last year in November of 2020 is when things really started to pick up steam and just the FOMO has been growing and growing and growing and growing so I guess in a lot of ways It was inevitable that we would hear from sort of the big players in the space simply because of the pressure that's being put on them And I think also like, you know little upstart game Axie infinity has done a really ridiculous amount of revenue right pulled in just a ridiculous amount of money Over just the last couple of months by really leaning into this whole play to earn powered by NFTs type of model So again as publicly traded companies, which pretty much everything we're talking about is valve is not valve is still privately held But I mean it just seems like this was inevitable So how much do we think that this is virtue signaling versus something that we're actually going to see start to get deployed in the kind of foreseeable future call it the next six months to nine months Is there a difference between the two because as far as I can see in our industry Every wave of real adoption is preceded by a wave of adoption for the sake of marketing and virtue signaling first Which then just turns into reality through sheer inertia and success So whether that's corporate treasuries or it's adopting Bitcoin as a national currency legal tender or various other moves we've seen with commercial and retail companies accepting it or PayPal Selling and buying it all of these started very much as virtue signaling and marketing campaigns Mostly and then gradually became a trench reality until until you could no longer get a marketing premium from them Can you really call it virtue signaling though if it's done ultimately to make the company's money? I thought virtue signaling was just to show how great you are. I Guess it's really just signaling. Sorry. I think I set us up there with the virtue part I think it's just signaling right and that's what we see kind of over and over again It's people kind of taking these moments, you know, and we talked about this before You know, like the the the amount of time that passed between the bees brothers in 2013 announcing that they were accepting Bitcoin for their, you know Family produced honey products to PayPal announcing that they were accepting Bitcoin was only like eight years, right? It was not a long period of time and with NFTs It just seems like that has gone even faster, right as a concept is something that's been around since 2014 in very very Basic terms, but they've only really been popular for a couple of years with kind of non hardcore crowds And really mainstream is something that was elusive until call it six months ago, right? So the pace here has been accelerating significantly Well, I would also say that it's the corporate equivalent of what we as individuals did many years ago I would say that 99% of every individual I've ever known to I'll buy an alpaca sock was a bit coiner Yes 2015 I can't remember a single person giving a shit about alpaca socks until they had to prove that they've at least spent Bitcoin once as a Transaction So I mean this is just the corporate equivalent of that and as Andreas was saying it is it is a healthy step forward I also think that when you're as big as a company like Ubisoft or valve You kind of need to do a blockchain and name only play first to get the signaling out there to see if there's any regulatory Hammer that drops so that you can fall back on what we were only signaling We actually didn't do quite yet just to sort of see How liberal you can be with actually executing and so there's just there these like step functions towards actually doing that You have to get through when you're you're risk managing a company as large as they are That's a fascinating perspective Jonathan. I'm glad you brought that up hadn't thought of that, but You know if you if you think about it As you rightly point out the regulatory implications are pretty huge We've seen in the past that games have been used extensively for various nefarious purposes covert communication channels in game chat Various types of money laundering Through even closed in game currencies and so it wouldn't be surprising, you know early adopter criminals will also use these kinds of things as money because they are money and that means that effectively gaming companies are becoming banks if they enter into this space not just but banks central banks and And And that has some various serious implications and it also would likely make regulators rightly anxious because it opens a huge hole in their regulated industries all of these are Almost completely international markets without borders and much much more popular than weird and strange crypto currency Well, you know, they say that the the I think it's the 18 to 35 or even 25 demographic is is the most valuable from advertising perspective Because once you've established brand loyalty After 30 you very rarely spend any time changing your brand loyalty And so it would be amazing if you know go after the children, right? Once video game companies become central banks kids are gonna just already have their established brand loyalty to the central bank They prefer and then you know, they may stick with Blizzard over the New York Fed. I Think that there's a really interesting conversation to be had there But just to kind of back up for a second It's worth noting that steam is one of the companies that has taken a somewhat hard-line approach against NFTs and games that include blockchain in general and this is again I think that there's two sides to to that position that sort of make it make sense on the one side steam is very much an Incumbent right steam has the dominant distribution platform when it comes to you know when it comes to PC games So they have kind of not a lot to gain from this type of move And then on the other side of things steam as a company is kind of an odd company, right? It's not publicly traded It's privately held and I was just about to bring this up next. Okay. Go ahead Yeah, yeah, and well, and it's got this flat structure, right? Yeah, exactly.  It's like they don't have bosses non hierarchical That means that on the one side They have been very kind of driven to do lots and lots of really weird things and they've actually gotten in trouble for some Stuff before that is very like tokens, but which is not actually using tokens And it I mean in some ways you can make arguments the tokens would have made their prior problems better But just a recap for people who have not been paying attention to that saga So counterparty very very very popular game produced by steam and released primarily through the steam platform One of the later versions of the game introduced the ability to have skins for your weapons and characters and stuff like that I think it was actually just weapons and basically what would happen is that people would Buy these skins in game and then they would go out to a secondary site where they would then gamble with skins And it was a way that people who were not old enough to gamble could then participate in gambling The reason they got in trouble was while a third party was actually having the gambling marketplace The assets were custodied on valve and they were expressing the balance changes through using the valves API, right? Yeah, and so valve valve is a digital bank, right? And so when people are like valve should use crypto It's sort of like going to a bank and they go well, this is why you should use Bitcoin It's non custodial and a bank goes. That's literally the opposite exactly word bank means And so when people say well, I can't wait till we have NFTs on valve They're missing the point that valves entire existence is on the basis of unilaterally custodializing your digital goods So they would have to break up the it's it's the entire antithesis to what they do but more specifically with the That that that legal case they got in trouble because they custody their own Digital assets and had they not if they weren't the framework that people were calling the out, you know balance transfers from They would have been fine because it wouldn't have had anything to do with them But that's core to their business model The reality for valve as you were kind of laying out there is that they have very little to gain from this type of move And they have a lot of risk that could potentially come with it So they're just not the kind of player who is really well positioned to want to take that risk now You look at their kind of I would say primary competitor in the space Which is epic games right now epic games operates the epic game store And of course they made a whole bunch of money off of fortnight among other prior successful titles before that But fortnight has really been their cash cow. They've since been pouring a lot of that profit Into their game platform and for a long time. We're literally giving away, you know free games every week Just to people who would use their platform. They do it every Thursday today is Thursday before you mentioned them I literally have them open. I'm downloading never alone right now. It's there you go There you go, I mean like I so then they've been doing that for like what 18 months at least like I haven't picked up A game for them recently, but like that's Thursday. Yeah, so I mean like that's not cheap They're doing it because they're trying to get market share and so again as the kind of well-funded contender They're very well incentivized to take whatever the opposite position of the incumbent is so long as that position can be kind of viewed As empowering the users right it makes it easier for them to make an argument Against the incumbent platform even though they have less network effect overall It's also worth noting of course that Epic Games although they're not banning this stuff in the way that steam has basically indicated that they are They're also not really kind of embracing it either They're just being open to it and again that's something that as a kind of up-and-comer contender You can do in a much more easily in a much in a much more comfortable way than if you are the incumbent Who has to defend sort of that against both the regulators on one side and the users on the other side We've talked about this in the context of how second-tier banks Can use cryptocurrency to compete much more Effectively against first-tier banks where first-tier banks will try to insulate themselves from Innovation and second-tier banks can use it as a competitive differentiator as a weapon as an asymmetric Weapon that the first-tier banks they know cannot use to fight back same thing happened with telecommunication companies in the ISP game the second-tier and smaller companies were able to more aggressively adopt internet technologies and use them as a competitive advantage against first-tier Telecommunication companies that were late to the game and cable companies did the same to Beating the telcos at their own game So it wouldn't be surprising to see second-tier game companies Using these things knowing that they're going to get less of a backlash from regulators They're going to be able to move faster and they're going to be able to deploy this as a differentiator that the first-tier game companies cannot just as easily do I was going to say when you guys are talking about Valve trying to avoid having anything to do with looking like a bank. I don't know how they can really avoid it though because if they're going to have games in their platform and they're going to compete with competitors There's they can't really control like the content of the games That creates items of value that are going to have a secondary market And so they're going to end up being involved in it somehow. I think Well, the question here really is what is the defining characteristic of a bank because I think the argument that valve can Rightly make is that a bank is something that you keep stuff in that you can then take out of right? Well, you can remove your stuff from the bank and as far as valve is concerned and frankly as far as any of these legacy platforms are concerned That's not the deal right when you buy a game with valve You don't own the game everywhere you own the game with valve, right? And so if you can't withdraw like that's how that's why they got in trouble was because when they allowed these asset transfers to Happen then somebody else could take and build a system that used that to do something that was against the rules potentially And then they get they're on the hook for it, right? Because they're actually enabling these transfers of value which has all kinds of implications around it So it's a reasonable position to have but again like in this new world. We're talking about where NFTs are pervasive I agree with you the difference between you know a game company that's storing your game assets and a bank is much more kind of Like hand wavy than it is in this era where you know you have your music on Apple music, right? Like as soon as you can take your music out of Apple music and exercise it anywhere and sell it and whatever Then is Apple a bank because they're holding your music collection I think the argument can be made that they they potentially are yeah What about PayPal when they're selling crypto on their platform, but you can't take it out Are they a bank but PayPal really is a bank though as far because they do before but with respect to the crypto They're kind of not because you can't take it out, right? Right and and it's interesting because in the long run that strategy ends up getting you Many many of the regulatory disadvantages of the bank without any of the advantages of actually being able to trade on these assets so So how long does that strategy work? It only works for a short period of time because the regulators are not going to go Softly because you've decided to try to hide behind your thumb and pretend not to be a bank, right? If others can use you to evade or avoid various regulations in their jurisdiction and Therefore use you to do the bad things that you can do in a bank the regulators are gonna want a piece of you So you're gonna end up suffering all of the regulations of a bank without getting any of the benefits And so for the game companies that are trying not desperately not to be a bank You know, this is only a short-term strategy eventually The ones who bite the bullet and end up doing the whole thing it can get some of the Benefits of that move and not just the disadvantages So I want to move on to the next topic that we're going to discuss But there is one other element here that I think is quite interesting which we don't have an answer to Which I think will be actually somewhat important as we move forward So as we mentioned, you know Ubisoft, you know electronic arts And Activision have all basically announced that they're in as far as these NFTs are concerned the thing I don't believe we've seen from any of them though is what blockchain They're going to use because again one of the big challenges in doing stuff on kind of the traditional most popular blockchain You know Ethereum when it comes to all of this type of thing That's not something that's going to scale to even a single game from even one of these companies It would absolutely crush it in its current state I've been saying for some time that most people don't realize that Virtually no one in the Ethereum community cares about the Ethereum execution environment They care about the EVM and so like in the past couple of years You've seen all of these you know EVM forks that offer superior execution environment. What is the EVM? Sorry, Jonathan. The the Ethereum virtual machine Oh, yeah, is the is the like domain specific language environment that Ethereum smart contracts get executed within and then the Ethereum protocol is One instantiation of a framework that can execute EVM scripts But so is Binance and you know Solana and Cardano and a whole bunch of these other Systems that are trying to do more or less the same thing in more or less compatible ways When we talk about money, we're talking about trustlessness But when you talk about video games and you talk about monopolistic services, which no slight against You know World of Warcraft, but like it's not money It's not you know saving the world It is a unilateral service provided by a single party that you have full faith in because it's their unilateral product And so the trust environment is so fundamentally different that you may not need a Nakamoto consensus Execution framework for the virtual machine that you're using to begin with and so I would be shocked if any Major video game company uses what we would consider a traditional public blockchain in order to achieve what they do with smart contracts They may very well just run their own copy Because it's it's so much easier to just fork and run a private island that runs Ethereum That's completely separate from everything else. So they just launched on network Well, I mean, yeah, that's literally called a video game server, right? I mean, that's how video games are detected Right, so they're not going to run it on a public blockchain They're going to run it on the EA gains blockchain the Activision Blockchain the Ubisoft blockchain all of which are most likely going to be Code forks of Ethereum, right? And then and then maybe the process by which you net out of the video game is via a bank back onto a primary Protocol right via something like a Twitter or a Coinbase or a PayPal I guess the point that I'm making with this is that However, that winds up working out again like to the extent that you have one of these triple A games that have You know hundreds of thousands tens of millions of players depending on really what you're talking about That's larger than most blockchains that are out there as far as their actual network user base is concerned And certainly they're active network user base So if this is something that really is built in at like a architecture level to these new game worlds Then you're going I just think that it's an incredibly powerful Thing that will come to anything and I think again like if I was in the business right now of running one of these You know Ethereum killers, you know That's already on proof of stake and that already has the ability to do the scaling and already has hundreds of millions of Dollars in a lot of circumstances I would be banging down the doors of all these game companies trying to convince them that they don't need to build Their own thing they just need to do theirs on mine And I think that there's going to be an enormous amount of business development going on behind the scenes That is trying to accomplish exactly that goal And I think that when we see it We will know who kind of invested the time or had the connections in order to get in there And I think that again like this is going to be an incredibly powerful trend probably not this certainly not this year And maybe even not next year, but at whatever point these worlds start to come out I think that it will be very significant as far as the trajectory of non primary blockchains becoming Closer to primary real players Yeah, but beware what you wish for because all we're doing now is replaying the same kind of History that we've seen before so back when Ethereum fans started talking about flippening bitcoin My warning was you're going to start looking over your shoulder, buddy Because if you think you could do that to bitcoin, there's at least 10 other people who think they can do that to ethereum And of course then they appeared But they don't actually have As easy a time doing that either because you still run into the same basic scaling network effect development innovation trade-offs That all of the primary blockchains have already run into and you end up trying to reinvent the wheel and solve these problems The difference, of course, is that you don't have any of the goodwill any of the existing investment and any of the developer affinity that these primary chains already have Ultimately, I think the build a blockchain for each game company strategy fails And it fails for exactly the same reason that private blockchains have failed in the past that it fails for exactly the same reason The closed innovation ecosystems fail However, that failure may come 10 or 15 years down the road and in the meantime It can be a very lucrative vehicle for those riding it There's this idea that ethereum killers or bitcoin killers or any of these sort of incumbent killers Can be better because they are better right can actually beat the incumbent because they have some type of technological advantage What we have found at least so far in the history of cryptocurrencies that is actually not true What winds up happening is you get this sort of here's the incumbent and it's not perfect But it has network effect and by nature of it having network effect when people come into the space and they look Around for where do I want to you know, what do I want to use where do I want to put my money? They have basically two options One option is they go with the incumbent and the other option is to go with one of the killer options The problem with the killer options is that there are so many of them because the incumbent Became the incumbent because it was the first one to do it right and build the network effect based around that Well, you know 50 percent of them might go to the incumbent and 50 percent of them might get split up between 25 different platforms that are all trying to be better It's very hard to stand out from that pack Grand Theft Auto, you know six comes out and they're like, hey, we're doing everything on Solana or we're doing everything I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Grand Theft Auto 6 is never coming out. Just let let it go. Let it go. It's never it's been 13 years It's it's not happening. It's just Grand Theft horsey to three Okay If if the if the next dlc for Grand Theft Auto 5 came out I will continue you get my point here Which is that we're talking about enormously important cultural kind of artifacts that if they pick a side in that That's going to be different than anything that we've ever seen before when it comes to a challenger trying to overtake One of these sort of built-in network effect incumbents And I actually I don't know if if the incumbents could actually survive that or if this is really just a way to Create new incumbents without displacing the existing ones This might be a big enough market That you could actually survive as an incumbent challenger by sheer number of users But the opposite of network effect is fragmentation effect. And in this industry, there is no defrag This is the fundamental problem Which is all of these Attempts to unseat the incumbents feed the fragmentation that in itself Ends up feeding the incumbent I mean if you look at just the the game store effect, right Where steam came out and then a couple other came out and then every major studio came out with their own Darn installer It's gotten less bad than it was a couple years ago But there are some games Where you install it and you have to install the dumb ubi soft thing just to play a game, right? Or you have to install the dumb ea thing on top of the steam thing in order to play a game And I cannot imagine A good five to ten year period where they're not doing the exact same thing with their own evm and you know protocols Okay, so let's turn the conversation and talk briefly about this thing that happened with amazon's new world product As I understand it amazon new world is a cursed mmo that breaks your laptop. Is that Yeah, that's that's basically the gist. Okay, so I'm taking this from an article that andreas found from ars technica So amazon has shut down wealth transfers in new world for the second time in a month Hobbling the in-game economy in an attempt to limit the damage from yet another item duplication bug in the popular mmo Apparently this is a game where you can kind of have these virtual cities But you're expected to pay taxes and people couldn't pay their taxes And wait, wait, wait, wait, wait amazon created a game where they have to pay taxes Taxes they don't pay taxes Okay, go on go on. Yeah. Well, you couldn't pay taxes because the entire economy of the game was shut down There were no transfers of wealth allowed amazon shut down wealth transfers on november 1st when the the bug was Discovered but then a couple days later. They also announced that they were banning People that they determined to be cheaters What amazon is saying is that the socially acceptable punishment for cheating on your taxes is to be executed? Is that the idea? Something like that and they are the judge jury and executioner Or just to have your ability to buy and sell completely taken away arbitrarily I guess everyone's ability is taken away when they say so This was like a big deal for this game because it's a virtual world and without an economy What are you supposed to do? Someone was quoted as saying Basically, the effect of this was to penalize the people who were kind of Following the rules and not taking advantage of the duplication exploit The reason I really love this article and wanted to bring it to everyone's attention is because the fundamental flaw in here was that supposedly unique In game items. Um, there's a word for that unique in game items. Oh, uh, non fungible tokens Were being duplicated And then spent twice now if only there was a technology that allowed you to control the double spend Uh fungible or non fungible tokens in a in an economy If only and and that's the irony right there. They're basically running into Even an essentialized system even without the trying to do this in a decentralized way They're running into the fundamental double spend problem. The solution is out there. It's just that that solution isn't as profitable as Whatever it is they're doing Turning off an economy is actually not a thing that is terribly unusual in games It does happen duplication bugs have been a thing for a long time. I think it's didn't the u.s. Government do that last year Yes, that's not a game. That's real life But if you can do it in real life, right, you can do it in the game So anyways the kind of the upside and the downside about this type of approach is that it has been done lots in the past Duplication bugs are not new things at all and they've messed up game economies in the past The thing that's different here is the real money aspect of it Typically or at least in the past typically when you created a game economy people had to exploit your system Basically and find ways to kind of ferry value into and out of your economy Because otherwise the way that you gained it was simply by playing the game, right? And if you play the game in the way that you know maximizes that Now, you know or or you hire people who live in lower standard of living countries To play the game and click farm type of environments or gold farming type of environments Then that's kind of the way that you monetize it So turning off the economy So to speak wasn't really a big deal because it really only impacted people who are already bridging between In the game and outside of the game against the rules of the game typically So the thing that's different here, of course, is that the economy is very much part of the game, right? Amazon creates this game and has created it in a way that gives people ways to put money into the economy That then become assets within that actual game that then actually have value that in a monetary sense, right? So that's kind of the thing I think that's really different about this and that's where kind of the Connection into these nft worlds and these other companies that we were talking about right that are now sort of getting into that It's going to be a question of how we see these games develop, right? Are these games being developed with this type of you know quasi uncontrollable economic circumstance in mind? Or are that we just really going to see these types of assets grafted on top of existing games with all the problems that that entails I think what we see here from the amazon story is that they just grafted it on top of kind of the old way of doing games And turns out that doesn't always work so well This is going to be so much worse in the metaverse. Well, let's wait to see what facebook does It's almost like this Glorious piece of performance art because they've created an open world that beautifully mimics the real world Now as someone who's grown up in greece the idea of an incompetent authority rife with corruption Messing up the in-game economy so much that they eventually they have to impose currency controls and then various forms of authoritarianism In order to shut things down Because they have enough power to do so and the captive audience really doesn't have any alternatives That's beautiful. They they've managed to recreate such a vibrant simulation of real world Environments in this in-game economy down to the corrupt authoritarianism. I don't know. Is this performance art? I don't know if most people get the irony The best forms of parody are the ones where you don't get it because you think it's just a comedy not parody And in this case I think that what we're going to see is this happening at a bigger and bigger and bigger scale because ultimately all of these systems as they become Simulations of real economies that are bigger and bigger bigger scale They run into exactly the same kinds of problems that real economies run into But these problems just get magnified at bigger and bigger scale And so what I'm hoping for is the next chapter in this performance art story because Once you have the the dictator Acting in an authoritarian way to shut down the economy The next chapter is a peasant revolution by the gamers by the players to overthrow the dictator in their game I don't know how they do that. Do they take over the game servers? Do they raid the offices? I actually think Andreas we're we're we have an intermediate step in the parody of life there Which is something I don't think we've really dug into that deeply which is play to earn Based video games. I don't even necessarily think I have like a hard side on it It's just you know to the extent that people think child labor is a thing It's going to be fascinating to see how play to earn Plays out in this cross-section of metaverse currency and you know employee rights I I can't wait for the conversation about your 14 year old Being about whether or not he's owed employment benefits Or if what he's doing should be illegal to begin with when he plays his amazon based new world video game Mom they tried to classify me as a contractor. It's clear. I'm an employee under california labor law Yeah, every every 14 year old in the state of california is now an employee in the mfo god I've heard of some kids, you know, we're on that age making a lot of money on roblox No, it's an incredible time So we're we're just about out of time for this episode But I actually do want to take us in a slight diversion here, which is actually into the inflation area It's something that we've talked about a lot. We got there a little bit before it was cool It's not transitory And it's not just the us thing. We're now seeing especially in the european union. We're seeing Real headline inflation rising So even the things they do measure with the jury rig statistics are going up But also all of the hidden forms of inflation and things like real estate and rent and various other bubbles that are going up all across europe So inflation is really happening now. Let me tell you my experience of this When inflation strikes and it starts Hitting ridiculous levels what people do and I remember this in greece from when I was growing up Is they go out and they buy what they consider to be more durable assets than cash So they try to dump as much cash as possible And load up. Um, so they front run a lot of their Expenses that they might have They buy a new washing machine. They buy a new car. They buy even a second hand car second hand markets are exploding all over the place in automobiles, but also In boats and planes and anything else that you can use for transportation People are acquiring Durable assets and durable assets is a very vague term When cash is suffering from inflation almost everything is more durable than cash And so people go out and try to spend their way out of inflation Which brings an interesting point Are nft's durable assets in that environment? Well, they're unique. They're non-fungible and they're rapidly appreciating in value I'm not saying that's a good thing. I don't think it's necessarily a smart investment I'm simply observing the fact that this is already happening. What happens when you add inflation to that mix My prediction Things are about to get crazy Things are already crazy. It's worth noting that I mean just talking about kind of blue chip quote-unquote nfts I think we saw a post Malone and And jimmy fallon both by board apes for you know, again hundreds of thousands of dollars To add insults to injury in the more obscure side of things a rare pepe called rare pepenopoulos And uh sporting a receding hairline on a green frog Was auctioned at sullabies for three and a half million dollars two weeks ago No, how did I miss this?  And I didn't get a penny. I have no idea who this rare pepenopoulos is It's it's just bizarre a world. It is absolutely bizarre a world Can anyone get roger veer to tweet about this? Oh my god, see they are not joking. That's a bit of an inside joke jonathan But those who've been with us a while will get it What it's worth it does not have a receding hairline, but it does say great blockchain educator and it has a Let's see 100 hard and it has my stock portrait wearing a suit from the early days of doing bicoid education I mean, it was literally a copy of my stock Portrait 3.65 million dollars is indeed the uh the the thing that was sold that is that is well If if anyone Greek in an obscure industry like really if whoever bought that nft is listening and would like andreas to digitally sign Their digital piece of art. I am sure he would be open to offers to do that If a three and a half million dinner on a bubble bath, seriously Okay folks, that's all the time I have for this episode of speaking of bitcoin Thank you very much for listening today's episode featured andreas m antinopolis stephanie murphy and jonathan mohan And uh, it's also myself adam beloved with music by gertie beats Uh, you can send us an email at adam at speaking of bitcoin dot show until next time. Thanks for listening


A church roof collapsed during on October 1 mass in a northern Mexican city killing at least nine people and injuring 40, authorities said, with another 30 people believed to be trapped under the debris rescuers and volunteers were seen removing debris such as wooden pillars with their bare hands as a priest gave instructions, while others raised their fists to call for silence as they tried to hear survivors under the rubble. Military personnel supported emergency services into the night using rescue dogs and earth-moving equipment to identify and dig out survivors from the ruins of the church in Ciudad Madero, a city on the Gulf Coast near the port of Tampico. Footage on social media showed the moment the church roof caved in as puffs of gray smoke billowed into the air, followed by the toppling of yellow brick outer walls.


Good morning, this training is for those of you that are interested in applying for the Fiscal Year 22 Listo California Statewide Target Grant Program. My name is Cindy Logan. I'm the division chief over the Listo Grants Unit at the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. Today, we have William Chan and Katie Hardaway, Program Representative. Before I start, I'd like to go over a few housekeeping items. Number one, the presentation is being recorded and will be available for on-demand viewing later. Everyone who has joined should be on listen mode. We can't see or hear you and the raise hand feature is off as well. All questions concerning the RFP, the process or programmatic issues must be submitted in writing by email to listosgrants at caloes.da.gov. We have two presentations for you today. The first one is the request for proposal overview training and the second one is the grant proposal training forms training. So, first up is Katie Hardaway and she's going to present on the request for proposal overview training. Good morning, everybody. I'll be going over the request for proposal overview. Let's get started. Our agenda today is Listo's Grants Unit contact information, program overview, the purpose of the grant, eligibility criteria, funding for the LS program and funding for the LG program, preference points, programmatic components, reporting requirements, proposal rating sheet, checklist of required Cal OES forms. I'm going to apologize up front because I'm going to be reading the slides through but I want to make sure that you have the detail of the information that we're providing. The Listos Grant Unit is responsible for the overall grant management of the Listos California statewide grant. This is the LS program, Listos California target grant LG program, Listos California tribal grant LI program and the Listos California support grant LC program. Questions concerning the RFP, the process or the programmatic issues must be submitted in writing by email to listosgrants at caloes.ca.gov. Cal OES staff cannot assist the applicant with actual preparation of their proposal. Cal OES can only respond to technical questions about the RFP during the period of time between the publication date and the completion of the RFP process. The program overview for 2022-23 budget act included a 25 million ongoing federal fund appropriation for Cal OES, 8 million for the Listos California statewide grant LS program via a competitive process. Applicants can apply for up to 500,000, 6 million is for the Listos California target grant LG program via competitive process. Applicants can apply up to 300,000. The sub award performance period is between June 1st, 2023 through December 31st, 2024. Please make note of this date submission deadline is Monday, March 20th, 2023 by 5pm via email at listosgrant at caloes.ca.gov. The purpose of the grant for the LS and the LG programs is to support the organizations through California that serve populations with key social vulnerable factors located in areas at moderate to high risk from natural hazard. CBOs can work independently or sub grant with local CBOs to provide disaster training and resources to vulnerable and diverse populations. The goal of this work is intended to increase their community's disaster preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation capabilities. The definitions of these for social vulnerability, the potential negative effect on communities caused by external stress on human health, such stresses include natural or human caused disaster or disease outbreaks. Reducing social vulnerability can decrease both human suffering and economic loss. Another issue is social vulnerability populations include those who have special needs, such as but not limited to people without vehicles, people with disabilities, older adults and people with limited English proficiency. The eligibility criteria for the leases target grant must be a non-profit organization with a 501C3 status with a service population of less than one million people in a given area. For the statewide grant, the LS program must be a non-profit organization with 501C3 status with a service population of more than one million within a single county, multiple counties and or multiple vulnerable communities statewide. And both the LS and LG programs must be registered in current and reporting with a general, excuse me, Attorney General's Registry of Charitable Trust, have an unaltered grant subaward program narrative and grant subaward budget narrative in accordance with the instructions on part two, Section B of the RFP. Cal OES cannot accept alternate or modified forms without undermining its neutral competitive selection process and will not read pages more than the maximum allowed. One proposal must be emailed to leasesgrantsatcaloes.ca.gov by 5 p.m. on Monday, March 20, 2023. Forms must be attached as a single PDF and contain the forms outlined in part two of the RFP instructions. Emails should identify the name of the RFP in the subject line. An example is LGRFP-MyBrothersHouseOrganization Funding for the target grant LG program is 6 million is available for this program. Applicants may apply for up to 300,000 award amounts are based on the number of engagements an applicant commits to accomplish during the 19-month performance period. Subrecipients may request an advance of up to 25% of their award funds. There is no match required for the LG program. Subrecipients cannot sub-grant to other CBOs that have been awarded Listos California Grant program funds. The tiers are CBOs commit to engage more than 75,000 or more may receive up to 300,000. CBOs committed to engage 50,000 to 74,999 may receive up to 250,000. CBOs committed to engage 25,000 to 49,999 may receive up to 150,000. For the statewide program, 8 million is available for the LS program. Applicants may apply up to 500,000 award amounts are based on the number of engagement an applicant commits to accomplish during the 19-month performance period. Subrecipients may request an advance up to 25% of their awarded funds. There is no match required for the LS program. Subrecipients cannot sub-grant to other CBOs that have been awarded Listos California Grant program funds. These tiers are CBOs committed to engaging 500,000 or more may receive up to 500,000. CBOs committed to engage 350,000 to 999,999 may receive up to 400,000. CBOs committed to engaging 250,000 up to 349,999 may receive up to 300,000. Preference points will be given to applicants that have communities that reside within the perimeter of a city or county that has received a local state or federal disaster declaration within the last five years. Applicants must describe how they are eligible under the declaration and what they are doing to improve their planning preparedness and recovery to similar possible future disasters. Programmatic components, first being managing sub-grant funds to local CBOs, Listos California Grant program materials, communication requirement, training, establish and implement a peer-to-peer engagement approach, identify gaps and propose solutions, host a conversation to identify emergency preparedness needs of the community for integration into the local emergency plans and capture stories of impact. Managing sub-granted forms to local CBOs, the sub-recipient may sub-grant funds to local CBOs who will provide disaster training and resources to the vulnerable and diverse populations and have the ability to serve as a physical sponsor for the selected local CBOs. The number of local CBOs selected should be informed by the regional picture of variable populations the applicant intends to reach. These local CBOs will engage the greatest possible number of vulnerable members in the applicant service area to reach the statewide objective of connecting more than one million Californians to culturally and linguistically competent support. Listos California Grant programs materials and communications require Listos California Grant materials is required and will be provided by the Cal OES vendor. Further information will be provided once a vendor is selected. If the sub-recipient chooses to produce their own materials with the Listos California Grant program funds they must receive prior approval from Cal OES including Listos California logo. The sub-recipient must respond within five business days to all Cal OES required programmatic requests. For training the sub-recipient must incorporate the materials and the resources developed for and provided by Listos California Grant program. In any emergency preparedness response recovery and mitigation training conducted with grant funding the sub-recipient must attend monthly Listos California instructional training offered by Cal OES or a Cal OES designated vendor during the first six months of the grant sub-award performance period. The sub-recipient must attend monthly training classes and meetings to receive updates and resources throughout the grant sub-award performance period. We're going to talk about establishing the implement to peer-to-peer engagement approach. CBOs who request and connect to the region's most diverse and vulnerable populations will create and implement a peer-to-peer approach to engage and educate the community that reflects the needs of the target population. Each CBO must organize their community to establish a tailored approach by hosting monthly engagement activities to ensure their community. One is knowledgeable about what to do during a disaster and consider engaging community partners such as the faith-based communities, schools, and community centers, etc. Two has emergency preparedness materials and access to information they need before a disaster hits. Three is clear on the steps to take to increase their community's disaster preparedness response recovery and mitigation capabilities and keep themselves their families and communities safe. And four shares final approach and results with the Cal OES Leistos California support team. To identify gaps and propose solutions, the sub-recipient must identify gaps raised by the community input into the peer-to-peer engagement and organizing process and purpose propose solutions to strengthen local community emergency plans. Share the recommendations on identified gaps in the solutions with the Cal OES Leistos California program support team. Host a conversation. The sub-recipient must host a conversation to identify disaster preparedness response recovery and mitigation needs of the community for integration into the local emergency plans as a joint effort with the local leaders across the sectors and the county emergency manager. Share outcomes of the conversations with Cal OES Leistos California support teams. Capture stories of impact. The sub-recipient must capture stories of impact highlighting outcomes and results of the local strategies and the connections made as part of its effort that illustrate the purpose and the intent of the LG and LS program and provide the stories to the Cal OES Leistos California support team. These stories may be submitted in written articles, videos, and photos. Please ensure that the formal permission is granted for all stories. Reporting requirements. There are five reporting progress reports required for the program. As you can see below June 1st through 2023 through September 30th 2023 gives you a due date of October 31st. This due date is 30 day grace period. This grace period should be adhered to but I recommend that you try to turn in your reports at the first of the month so this isn't forgotten. Engagement reporting. Sub-recipients are required to submit data directly through an online database immediately after an engagement activity or training commences or no later than the end of each month. Engagement reports are based upon direct public engagement activities. To determine what constitutes an engagement refer to the primary guidance for defining and tracking engagement's link listed in the RFP. The link will direct you to the document that outlines what is considered an engagement. Examples would be events, outreach programs, or demonstrations. Best to review the link to make sure what qualifies. Here's an example of the link for the engagement tracking. It spells out the detail of each one of the engagements and how they're viewed. I suggest that you look at the link. The proposal rating sheet is a competitive grant process meaning that your applications will be ranked in comparison to all other applications received. Each of the above categories contain questions assigned to point value. The point scale is divided into five columns labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The applicant's response to each question is evaluated on the following criteria. Absent. The response does not address the specific question or response was not provided. Unsatisfactory. The response does not completely address the question. The information presented does not provide a good understanding of the applicant's intent, does not give a detailed information request by the RFP and or does not adequately support the proposal or the intent of the program. Satisfactory. The response addresses the question and provides a good understanding of the applicant's intent. The response adequately supports the proposal and the intent of the program. Above average. The response is above average and provides a clear detailed understanding of the applicant's intent. The response presents and presents a persuasive argument that supports the proposal and the intent of the program. And then there's my favorite. Excellent. The response is outstanding with clear, detailed and revelant information. The response presents a compelling argument that supports the proposal and the intent of the program. Here on the next page is your proposal required documentation. These are the documents that will be required for your application. Please remember this is to be included and combined in one PDF when submitting your application. The recommendation for the award decisions are made by the director of Cal OES. Funding decisions are based upon the following. The ranked score of the proposal. Consideration of priorities and geographical distribution specific to this RFP. And prior negative administrative and programmatic performance if applicable. Once the decision has been made the applicant will be notified in writing. To those not selected will receive a denial letter and information on the appeal process. Remember this date. The proposal package must be received electronically no later than five p.m. specific time on Monday, March 20th, 2023 to least those grants at caloes.ca.gov. A reminder questions concerning the RFP the process or programmatic issues must be submitted in writing by email to leasesgrants at caloes.ca.gov. Cal OES staff cannot assist the applicant with actual preparation of their proposal. Cal OES can only respond to technical questions about the RFP during the period of time between the publication date and the completion of the RFP process. This concludes the training on the RFP. William please take it away. Hi my name is William Chan. I'm the program specialist with the leases grants unit. Today we're going to give a presentation on the grant subboard proposal process. So today we are going to provide guidance on the components that are required in a proposal and we are going to review those forms that we referenced just a moment ago and familiarize you with some tools that are available. Process of submitting a proposal begins with a request for proposal being released. This is our competitive process. Within the request for proposal you will find fund source information, the background of the program, requirements and expected deliverables and instructions on how to apply. So where do you find a request for a proposal? It can be found on the Cal OES website at caloes.ca.gov and on the upper right corner you will click on initiatives and from the drop down menu selection you will select search for grants. So once you're on the search for grants landing page there are a couple of ways to search. You can find the leases california RFPs by scrolling down on this page or you can use the search box. I can use the search box when I know which request proposal I am looking for. You may type the name of the program in the box or if you know the two letter program acronym you may type that in instead. Although we are talking about a request proposal we'll have to draw your attention to the mailing list. When the Cal OES releases the request for proposal or competitive process for funding we send an email notification to anyone who has signed up for our mailing list. Please know the only time you will send an email is when we release a new request for a proposal sending a solicitation to fill a position for one of our advisory bodies or when we post in public meeting notice. If you are not signed up already we strongly encourage you to do so so that you can receive these important notices. Cal OES released the leases california statewide grants program and leases california target grant program request for proposal on february 8th and our applicants have approximately six weeks to put the proposal packet together from that date. Once complete applicants will need to email a copy of the proposal packet to the leases grants unit at leasesgrants at cal oes.ca.gov. The same applies for the leases california cert support grant lc program and the leases california tribal grant ally program. Let's talk about the request for proposal or rfp itself. The rfp has three parts. Part one is what you have to do. It explains the public records acts, the submission deadline, eligibility, grant subboard performance period, funding, and programmatic requirements. Part two refers to policies or administrative requirements and includes references to the sub-recipient handbook, components that are required with your proposal, policies concerning the budget, administrative requirements, and required or additional forms that may apply towards your proposal. Part three is a checklist that includes a list of the documents that are required with your proposal and links to the most current forms. This is an example of what the checklist looks like. It includes all the required components and links to each form. Under the additional form section, these forms may or may not be required depending on what you have in your budget. For example, if you do not have out of state travel, you would not need to include this form with your proposal. Once we receive your proposal, there is some status verification that the program specialist will do right away. For those of you who are who are community-based organizations, we would need to check the internal revenue service website and the california department justice website. The next two slides all go over what exactly we are looking for on each of these sites, but the purpose of this is because this data california accounting system requires information on these sites to be consistent and current in order to pay you when you submit your report expenditures and request for payments. One of the first things your program specialist will do right away is check your IRS status, but those of you who are community-based organizations will need to check your IRS status. Furthermore, your program specialist will verify the DOJ verification through the website listed in the slide here. It can be a verified user FEIN number, your employer identification number, or your organization name. We will have to select Charity Registration after the registration type. As a reminder, the state california accounting system requires information on these sites to be consistent and current in order to pay you when you submit your report expenditures and request for payment. When you check your registration status, we are looking for it to be current. This makes us happy because we can continue to review and process your proposal. If we see reporting incomplete or delinquent, this makes us sad because we will need you to update your status so that we can continue to process your proposal. If the program specialist contacts you to update your status, please make sure you address this immediately as we do not have control over the length of time it takes to update your status and we do not want this to affect our ability to process your proposal or make payments to you if you are selected to receive an award. There are eight forms that are required of every request for a proposal, regardless of the program type. Please note that most programs will require additional forms, so read your request for a proposal thoroughly. In the next slides, we're going to tell you about some of the more common mistakes that we find with these eight forms so that you know what we are looking for when we review your proposal. You can find these forms at the very end of the RFP in the checklist section with a hyperlink to each form. But first here are a few helpful reminders. Number one, read the entire request for a proposal to understand what is required for the program. Two, please note that all forms have instructions, so if you have instructions about the form, look at the instructions, sorry if you have any questions about a form, look at the instructions first and then email your program specialist for help. Number three, use the current forms. Cal OES updates our forms often. If you're using one of the forms that you've saved on your desktop, it's possible they may have been outdated and you'll be asked to redo the form, which may delay the processing of your award if selected. Okay, let's start with the grant subboard face sheet. The instructions are on the left and the most recent version of the face sheet is on the right. A few of the most common mistakes we find on the grant subboard face sheet include, last four digits of the zip codes are often missing. Please be sure to go to the US Postal Services website to look up your plus four and include that on your face sheet. DASTER slash program title needs to match the name of the program you are applying for. This could be found in the request for proposal. For example, if you're applying to the Leistos California Statewide Grant LS program, then write Leistos California Statewide Grant LS program on line five. Indirect cost rate and federally approved ICR. This is where you will indicate whether you are using the 10% demented rate on your or your agency's federally approved indirect cost rate agreement. A copy of the approved ICR negotiating agreement must be enclosed in your application if you are using a federally approved ICR. If you will not be claiming indirect costs under this award, type in N-A. Okay, this is a table that appears on the face sheet. We zoomed in so that you can see easier. This is where your funding information will go and you can find this information in your request for proposal. Please note that the grant year and fund source are now dropped down boxes and columns A can be typed in and column G will automatically be totaled for you. In your request for a proposal in part one section F, fund information, you will find information needed to correctly fill out the face sheet. This is an example of a grant sub-word number. There is no need to fill in the grant sub-word number in the areas on the quest on the forms requesting it. The sub-word number is given once an applicant has been awarded grant funds. This is the grant sub-word contact information form. The instructions are on the left and the most recent version of the form is on the right. Here's a list of things to keep in mind. Remember to use the most updated forms from our website. Don't forget to write the entire nine digit zip code number. Do not use white out to fix corrections. On lines one and two, make sure the number one grant sub-word director and the number two financial officer are different. They cannot be the same person. On lines two and five, make sure the number two financial officer under number five executive director are different. They cannot be the same person. The number seven chairperson cannot be listed again in any of the other positions, numbers one through six. Leave the grant sub-word number section blank. This will be filled in for you if you are awarded. And lastly, please make sure the official designated by the governing board on line six is the person who signs the grant sub-word face sheet. This is the signature authorization form. The instructions are on the left and the most recent version of the form is on the right. When we review the signature authorization form, we compare it to the contact information form to ensure the grant sub-word director and financial officer are the same authorized personnel. You can list altered individuals to have the authority to sign on grant sub-word on behalf of the grant sub-word director and financial officer, just like the grant sub-word director and financial officer cannot be the same person who cannot have one person being authorized signer on both sides of this form. It is best to have at least one authorized signer for each position. If someone is unavailable and you need to request funds or make a modification, it is easy to do so when you have a different authorized signer for each position. If not, there's nothing you can do until they return. If you want to change authorized signers, you must submit a grant sub-word modification to Cal OES as soon as possible because it takes approximately two weeks to process, so it is important to make modification requests immediately when the change has been made internally in your organization. This is the current list of certification and restraints of compliance documents we have. Common mistake is signing and submitting the wrong one. You must receive the one that is tied to the fund source for your program. The checklist in part three of the request proposal will tell you exactly which one is needed. Another mistake is using an old version of a document. The way to ensure you have the current version is by downloading it from our website. Again, the checklist will have the link for the correct and current version. Please be sure you are reading this document in full so you know what the requirements are because when you sign this, you certify that you are compliant. The red arrows are some areas that I want to bring to your attention. Number one, sub recipient is the name of your agency. Please have this match what is written on the face shields. Number two, the applicant should complete the Cal OES program name and grant sub board performance period. The grant sub board number should be left blank. Your program specialist will fill this in for you. Number three, ensure appropriate signers have signed the documents. This will be the official designate by the governing board. Number four, for community-based organizations, it must be the governing board chair that signs the section. The budget is normally the next document in your proposal. This is form 2-106B, grant sub board budget pages single fund source. The Cal OES has three budget categories. Category A is personnel cost, category B is operating cost, and category C is equipment cost. All three categories must be submitted with their application, whether or not you have items in that category. For example, if you do not have equipment, you can write none requested in that category. All three categories must be included in your application packet. The budget spreadsheet template will automatically add columns on each tab. And please show the equation on each line item as to how you got the total. The personnel category is where you'll want to put salaries, benefits, and overtime for people you employ at your agency. This is also where you will want to put your volunteer hours. The operating category is the meat and potatoes of your program. This is where you want to put just about everything else, including rents, travel, training, supplies, etc. The equipment category is where you'll put non-spendable property, having a useful life of more than one year, and the cost of $5,000 or more per unit. Just to be clear, if you're buying six laptops at a cost of $1,000 each or a total of $6,000, you put those laptops in the operating expense category, not in the equipment because the laptop's per unit price is less than $5,000. Now let's talk about the information we need to see on the budget pages. The goal bubbles you'll see on the next two slides contain the elements that need to be included in each calculation for each line item. In this example, we have a program advocate position that's making $4,000 per month. Please note that the salary cost can be shown as hourly rates, a monthly salary, or an annual salary. Then we want to see the duration. In this example, the program advocate will be paid for 12 months, which probably matches the length of the performance period. And then we want to see the full-time equivalent for the position. In this example, the program advocate will work 15% of the time on this program. Then finally, you will want to include a brief description of the line item and explain how to further the goals and objectives of the program. For the benefit calculation, you will need to include the benefit rates. In this example, the rate is 22%. Multiply it by the total salaries all employees in the budget that receives benefits. In this example, it's $200,000. And finally, you'll want to include a brief description of what benefits are included. Unless you're paying the volunteers a salary, you should have it in the operating section. Volunteers are also captured in budget category A. The first element needed is the rate that you have valued your volunteers at. Please note that this rate can not see what it costs your agency to have a staff person doing the same job and that you can include both salary and benefits when calculating the volunteer rates. In this example, the value of the volunteers is $12 per hour, multiplied by the number of hours to be charged to the grants. In this example, $1200 hours. And then include a description of activities that the volunteers will be doing. Then we're going to show you some operating expense examples. So operating. Volunteers that are charged for the following per diem gas and mileage should be titled as shown in this slide. Title of the volunteer, title of what they are being charged for. In this example, they are charged to per diem and the name, number of training they are attending. Again, the elements in the gold bubbles need to be included in each calculation for each line item. For this example, we have postage. The amount for postage is $250 per month, multiplied by the duration. In this example, it's 12 months, which probably matches the length of the performance period, multiplied by how much of the postage will be charged to the grants. Rent is another very common operating expense. For rents, you would need to add up the full-time equivalents or FTEs in budget category A, personnel services. In this example, we have 4.5 FTEs. Then multiply the 4.5 FTEs by 125 square feet per FTE, which is what is allowed as per the subrecipient handbook. And then multiply that by the amount you pay for rent per square foot. Please note that $2 is up to the amount and you should use your actual rates and your calculation. If your landlord charges you $0.65 per square foot, that's the rate you need to use. Finally, you will multiply by the duration. In this example, it's 12 months. If you are claiming indirect costs under this award, please make sure you are calculating the total correctly. Common mistake is multiplying the total awarded amounts by the indirect cost rate. That is not how you calculate the indirect cost. You will first need to calculate your total direct costs. To do this, you add up any personnel salaries, wages, benefits, operational costs, and up to $25,000 of your second tier subawards. But do not include any starting costs such as equipment, rents, capital expenditures, and second tier subawards beyond the first $25,000. In this example, after doing the calculation, they got $233,215. Once you figured out your direct costs, you simply multiply the total by the ICR or federally approved ICR. In this case, 10%. Please make sure the ICR matches what you entered in section seven of the face sheet that if you are claiming a federally approved ICR, you must include a copy of your federally of your approved ICR negotiating agreements in your application. So final reminders about your budget. Please be sure you refer to the RFP to identify required and prohibited expenses that you build your budget accordingly. Be sure to use whole dollar amounts only. Often when your budget is off by a dollar, this is due to rounding errors. So please be sure you're checking the amounts entered in your budget columns. Please include expenses in the correct category. And lastly, all budget line items require justification and calculation. A request for polls requires a budget narrative, which allows the subrecipient to provide details about their budget. The budget narrative typically includes how the budget supports objectives and activities, the need for administrative costs, and the necessity for subcontracts. The most common mistakes we see with budget narratives are that sometimes they don't match what's on the budget pages. For example, let's say you submitted your provostal packet and during the view, your specialist determines that several corrections are needed to your budget pages. You make those changes for your specialist, but now your budget narrative doesn't match. But please remember, every time your budget pages are updated, your budget narratives must be updated as well. They must match. Next is the program back narrative, where you provide details about how you will meet the objectives of the program. Please be sure you're reading the RFP and that your narrative addresses each of the questions from the RFP. We have often seen applicants use the same narratives that they used the previous year or even perhaps for a different grant that did not address any or all of the questions from the RFP. Next is the grant management assessment form. For Title II, CFR section 200.332, Cal OES is required to evaluate the risk of noncompliance with federal statutes, regulations, and grant terms and conditions posed by each subrecipient and pass-through funding. This assessment is made in order to determine and provide an appropriate level of technical assistance, training, and grant oversight to applicants for the award reference above. The questions are related to your organization's experience in the management of federal grant awards. This questionnaire must be completed and returned with your grant's proposed materials. For purposes of completing this questionnaire, grant manager is the individual who has primary responsibility for day-to-day administration of the grants. Both keeper slash accounting staff means the individual who has responsibility for reviewing and determining expenditures to be charged to the grant award. An organization refers to the applicants applying for the award and or the governmental implementation agency as applicable. We just spent a significant amount of time talking about the eight required forms. For every request for proposal we release but sometimes additional forms may apply. Be sure to check part five of your request for proposal to find out if additional forms may apply for your organization. So final things to remember, all forms have instructions. Use the forms on the website, those will be the most current version. The checklist that comes with the request for proposal will tell you which forms are required. Email list those grants at leastosgrants at caloes.ca.gov. If you have any questions, if you're here to help, use the checklist in part five of the request for proposal. Okay, thank you William and Katie. This concludes the request for proposal and application overview training for the leastos California statewide and target grant programs. This presentation has been recorded and will be available for on-demand viewing later on the Cal OES website. And I just want to say thank you all for attending today and good luck on your proposals. I look forward to seeing them. Goodbye.


from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Seattle. It's theCUBE's three days of coverage of our day two of the KubeCon CloudNative Conference. This is the rise of the Kubernetes, the ecosystem behind it, the CNCF, the CloudNative Computing Foundation. I'm John Furrier, Kube host. Stu Miniman here this week, analyzing everything. Our next guest is Cheryl Hung, who's the director of the ecosystem for the CNCF. Cheryl, great to have you back. We interviewed you in Copenhagen. Thanks for joining us again. Of course, I'm really happy to be back. Really happy to see you again. So you got a new role. Last time we talked, you were working for, I think, Storage IO? Storage OS, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now you're full time with the CNCF as the director of the ecosystem, which now is massively growing. What's going on? Tell us about your job and what you're working on. So the CNCF's overall mission is to support the development and the adoption of these open source projects. And I really focus on the adoption side. So I really care about talking to end users and making sure that they can be successful and productive and happy as they transition to this new world of CloudNative and Kubernetes and open source infrastructure. So it's a massive change. If you compare this to five or 10 years ago, where we are now, it's so different, but it's really exciting to be a part of it. One of the interesting things I remember speaking with you about in Copenhagen in Europe at KubeCon there was, you have your background at Google, and so you're CloudNative, the way you've been working at Google, and then now out here, this whole world is moving that way. And the CNCF is end user driven. It was really started by end user contributions, and they're all here. Now you have vendors coming in. So you have a dynamic ecosystem. You have contributors that are end users, vendors that are contributors, and now the consumption of Kubernetes and the related technology is growing. What's your take on it? What's the most important thing happening? What are you focused on? What's your focus? So I think it's, I don't want to, I think vendors do make a big contribution to the projects as well. So I definitely want to recognize that, hey, vendors are kind of part of our ecosystem as well. But I think it's really important that, at the end of the day, all of this good work is so that end users can be successful with what they're doing. There's no point in building these projects if you don't take into account what the community needs out of them. So I've talked to a lot of companies now, and there's three levels of engagement that I see about why they want to join this CloudNative world. One is that they have some concrete technical problems that they just need to be solved as soon as possible and they need to figure out the best way to do it. The second is around building engineering organizations that can handle this new culture where you're not talking to a vendor who can give you six months of products roadmap in advance. You have to interact with open source communities directly. And then the third set of technical executives who really want to put all of their business strategy behind CloudNative and Kubernetes. And they're really fully invested into making sure that this community succeeds because it ensures that they will succeed as well. And the end users also, we've seen a lot of recruiting here too, as well as contributing. This is a number one demand that we certainly see from the CUBE content side of the house here is that there's demand and a thirst for educational content for how-to's. The role of a cloud architect now is becoming a clear persona in enterprises. You've got an IT impact, you've got developer impact, you've got open source kind of all kind of coming together. Where is the action for the end user right now? If you look at the trends, obviously Kubernetes stability and naturalization is key. Is DOCs be hot? What are the kind of things that are emerging up from end users that you see demand for feature-wise and or just general trend?  And the CNCF is not like that. You know, we're very neutral. We want companies to choose the best things for themselves. So we're not going to go out there and say, pick this product over this product or this vendor over this vendor. What we do try and do is create a community where companies can talk to other companies who are trying to solve the same problems. Because that's what community is. Let's do this collaboratively. Let's do it out in the open. So we're not all trying to solve the same problems over and over and over again. But right now I see a lot of questions about how do you, how do you work in more mature, not more mature, but say the finance industry or how do you work in heavily regulated environments where you have to deal with a lot of compliance. And then also, yeah, how do you deal with this explosion of tooling? You know, okay, we all kind of agree that Kubernetes is the way to go. But now there's another 500 tools that you could evaluate out there. And what's the best way to figure out the path through that for your company? That's a community guide that too. Let that be the part of the process. The community really is a driver. Yeah, yeah. Cheryl, I'm wondering how you bake that into the show itself as well as the community. Are there vertical places that, you know, I've got a Slack channel or I've got a community group that I can participate with. We know the whole way track is really bumping at a show like this. But you know, there's all of the project specific stuff. But right, how is it that I have that paradox of choice and there's so many different ways I can do it. I bet it would be tough for us to find two companies that have chosen all of the pieces and deployed it in a similar enough way. So yeah, how do you sort through that? It's something that I'm thinking about a lot for the next KubeCon where I hope I'll see you in Barcelona or perhaps the San Diego one after that. It's how to make sure that there is a place where end users can actually come together and do that face to face interaction with each other. So the moment like, especially KubeCon is now 8,000 attendees, it's insane, but now you have to have a more structured place where people can find each other. You talked to a lot of customers. I know you moderate panels with customers. You know, where are they today? It's, you know, I've talked to some people that were like there's 8,000 people here and half of them are really, really new to Kubernetes and need some of just the 101 stuff as opposed to last year, a lot of the users I talked to were like, oh, I'm just pulling down the stuff and I'm building all my components and I'm contributing.  You know, what are some of the big issues you're hearing from customers to help them move forward? So, a set put from, I'll come back to this in a second, but even before I joined the CNCF, I ran the, and I still run the Cloud Native London meetup group, which gets about two to 300 attendees each month. So obviously not the size of this, but a fairly healthy, sizeable community. And people ask, you know, and I thought about should we just focus on a particular segment like the people who are just getting started or the people who are actively contributing? And I actually think it's okay to have a place where you can have that mix of levels. Actually, I think it's really important that the more experienced or people who are further along that journey have a chance to talk to people who are at the beginning, kind of mentor them through it. But at the same time, we want to do things. So I'll give you a little teaser for next year. We're planning to run smaller, local, more regional events for places that don't necessarily have the ability to come to these huge giant conferences and want to talk to each other in a single day, single track. It's a regional, more community events where people can participate, not feel remote. You guys had a lot on the waiting list, 1500 people on the waiting list here. For this event. For this event, I mean, it's a demand. There's tons of demand. Like, this is my secret thought. If in a few years time we get to huge, huge sizes, I think we should get a cruise ship. Put everyone on a cruise ship for three days and just be like, let's go and sell together. We're seeing a lot of those crews on the cryptography side. ICOs, the much of Bitcoiners went and then watching their prices go down. But you guys could literally fill a ship. Yes, seriously. The pace that KubeCon is growing, it's getting hard to find a place that can hold this many people. Community is super important to you guys. We know that we've been watching it from the beginning. It's really kind of, I won't say sacred, but it's really a key nurturing point. What's the vision for enabling the community? Obviously, regional events would create sub networks in the community, allow for some interaction, face-to-face and contribution-wise. What else are you guys doing on the community side that's interesting, that's important, that people should know about? So I think, so I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about this and talking to a lot of companies. And I really think that there is no substitution for the face-to-face stuff. At least initially, there's actually a lot of online that you can get involved with now through the mailing list and Slack and GitHub and all these things. But I really think that if you don't know somebody who's already part of the community, it can be quite hard to know where to even begin. It can feel a bit overwhelming, just how to stay on top of it all. So I would really like to establish more places where people feel like they can talk to their peers and feel comfortable and not feel like they're being sold to from vendors or being... Genuine and authentic, basically, a place where it's not going to be sales pitch, they can dig in and learn. Yeah, exactly. I think it's really important to hold on to the technical quality and the excellence of what the CNCF provides as well. Without that, everything else, I love this community stuff, right? It's fantastic, it's really good fun, but it comes down to the technical, does this actually solve a technical and business problem? Yeah. Yeah, great social component, but you've got to keep your eye on the prize. Get the code out there. Yeah, well, I mean, it's not to say that code is the only thing that matters, but we want to make sure that people come to the... How many people here today spending three days of their lives with us because they get actual value out of what's happening here? And as long as people keep coming, that shows that there is value there. And then the success of the ecosystem, we want to look back and say, okay, these were startups, these are ecosystem partners, big, small, medium, and large. They've been successful. That success outcome is really key to what you're working on, making that successful. It's hard, right? You guys are growing so fast. Give a peek behind the curtain behind CNCF. You went from 4,000 people. I know you just was, the team was just in China, which is exploding with growth in China, open source, contribution, and consumption. You got that exploding. You got the event, 8,000 people. Is the team busting out at the seams right now? I mean, share some inside baseball around what's going on inside the CNCF. Are you guys running hot? I mean, what's it like? It's crazy, right? Nobody could have predicted how fast this has all grown. And the team is, so the reason that I joined the CNCF is because number one, yeah, the growth is there, but number two, I really think the team have really good intentions. And even though there's a lot of work to be done, I think people really have their heart in the right place and are trying to do the right thing for the community. And China is definitely an area that we're investing in on a personal level. I'm taking Mandarin classes to try and improve my Mandarin so that we can, I can actually go over to China and make sure that these companies are part of this as well. There's so many things in China that are really advanced and mature, but really sophisticated communities. They're doing amazing things there. Yeah, but it's so separate from, or it feels very separate from the stuff that we see in North America. So China's definitely an area that I'm looking out for. But in terms of the team, I really think that we want to do a lot, but at the same time, the CNCF is never going to be like a thousand person organization. Let's talk again in like 50 years time. Maybe it will be a huge organization. But at the moment, I don't believe the CNCF is going to be a huge organization. So we do rely really heavily on our volunteers, our community, the goodwill of partners, exactly. Well, we really appreciate the support of CNCF. Dan has been fantastic to work with. We've seen the vision from day one. We saw him in China at Alibaba event last year. We saw the work you guys doing. They're doing the work and it's shows. So congratulations and good luck in your new assignment. Thank you. Dan is my boss and he's always been incredibly, just an optimistic and energetic and has so much belief in what we're doing. He's smart. He gets it. Very smart. He's agile, bringing a little DevOps agility to the table. Exactly, exactly. No, he's great. And Chris as well is a super community minded. You guys got a great team. Congratulations and thanks for coming on and sharing your insight into the CNCF ecosystem. The ecosystem, the open source communities, is the key persona, the key target. But this is impacting IT and developers. This is why Kubernetes is rising. You're seeing real impact with cloud computing, cloud scale, cloud native. It's really interesting time and this is proof in the ecosystem. We're here in theCUBE coverage here in Seattle. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.