And it's history lens. I'm John David and professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University, and we're here to talk today about Middle Eastern politics and US Iranian relations. And it's great because I have with us today, a real expert on this, my colleague Dr. Brian Gibson, who's also a professor at Hawaii Pacific University and Brian, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me, John. Yeah, so you take the time to speak to me. Yeah, it's excellent to have you on because you know a lot about this region and it has been a lot of course, we just went through a period of pretty serious tensions with Iran and the United States I mean, missiles were fired. And, and so you know this is a really serious topic and, and it's, it's kind of there's there's a level of volatility here that I don't see this disappearing much at all in the next, you know, next five, six years, unfortunately. So can you can you give you know, your, your, well, first of all, Brian studied the Kurds right you wrote your dissertation on the Kurds and have a couple of books. Yeah. So my best piece is the kind of triangular relationship between the United States and its policy towards Iran, Iraq and the Kurds. Okay, so my, my work folks is mainly in a historical context, but I've also gone and, and done a lot of work on like the Iran nuclear deal for example I wrote a report for the London School of Economics on that in 2015 and that that took about three or four years of research and writing to complete. So, I've been working on this topic for a long time. Iran is a course, sorry is a subject that I'm intimately familiar with Iraq I'm also equally as familiar with it and the Kurds are my particular area of expertise at this point. Yeah, so I mean, give us some background on sorry give us put first of all, bring us up to date on what's going on in that region between the United States and the Iran Iraq the Kurds. Well, of course, you have the situation where a Shia militia group that the Iranians have been backing for a long time were hit with air strikes. So these guys have been targeting the United States for quite some time, and they were hit with some air strikes by the United States government. They, this group called Hashdashabi, then attacked the US Embassy and but only got kind of in the first, like the consular services area, and you know caused a bit of a ruckus, and no one got hurt in that process. But in the aftermath of that the United States assassinated Kasim Soleimani, who is arguably the second most powerful figure in Iran. So we're talking. Some people have equated him to the Vice President but that's not quite accurate because that position doesn't really exist the Supreme Leader of Iran. He is the most powerful and there's no named successor to him right now, but Kasim Soleimani led the Kurds force which is essentially the Iranian equivalent to the special forces in the United States. But he was extraordinarily popular like most people couldn't name the head of JSOC right now, but it would be much more along the lines of someone of fame along the lines of, say, Mike Pence. So you know who he is, he's a regular feature in Iranian politics, but unlike Mike Pence who isn't particularly popular, this guy was massively popular. And the United States killed him in a drone strike. And this resulted in the Iranians retaliating by launching a series of missiles at an American military base in Iraq that now sounds like about 50 American servicemen ended up with traumatic brain injuries. The number has creeped up bit by bit, but at first Trump, President Trump downplayed the significance of that and said a couple of people had headaches or at first there was no one got hurt. And then it was a couple of people might have some headaches. The Pentagon was like actually a lot of people got hurt pretty bad. They may not have gotten killed, but you know, when you smash a cruise missile into the ground, that's going to create an immense shockwave.  So he tried to downplay it, but the military has been standing great firm on the significance of it. So let's go back and let's talk about the history because the big question is why, why all this tension. I mean, you know, I argued in a in a recent history lens that these that Iran and the United States are naturally should be natural allies and yet they're sworn enemies.  Yeah, okay, so the thing that the way that this is best understood is the idea of a mortal wound, like something where we're once you've inflicted it you can't really come back from it. So, in the case of the United States, the first mortal wound was the 1953 coup which saw the overthrow a democratically elected government that was trying to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, and to essentially regain sovereignty over Iran's natural resources. Now, I think a really important thing to understand in the broader context of Iranian history is that the Persians and the Iranians which are the same group of people just a different name the name changed in the 1930s. But they have had a history of foreign interference in their country. So, it's been typically the British and the Russians the Russians that were always kind of coming in from the north, and the British were coming in through the south through the south and we're always seeking to gain concessions and gain control over Iranian resources, of which Iran has a lot. Now, this history of tension is really important because when the British kind of fell off the map in the 1960s as being significant like a significant international player, and the United States had emerged as being the, you know, global superpower, and with the Soviet Union being the rival. At this point, the United States just kind of in the eyes of Iranians, the United States just took over Britain's role. The 1953 coup is really important because when you're looking at that particular instance, a democratically elected government of Mohammed Mosaddek was overthrown and it was replaced by an autocratic monarch who is deeply tied to the United States during the 1950s, the 1960s, and especially in the 1970s. And this is really important because the United States helped train its military and sold it an absolute ton of arms. The United States also trained its intelligence service, which was notorious for kidnapping and torturing people. So from the Iranian people's perspective, the United States is complicit in the torture of thousands and thousands of Iranians, a lot of whom were just disappeared in the night and never seen again. Okay, so if you're a family member who lost someone in this process, the United States is an enemy of yours. Not only did they overthrow your democratic chances in the 1950s, but then you were complicit in torturing their people. Yeah, that's really interesting. That's disturbing, man. It is disturbing. I'm trying to paint how the Iranians view this because the American perspective is a little bit better understood, but I'm going to get into that as well. So then you have the, the revolution in 1979 and what's really important about that was that the Iranian people were actually very enthusiastic about the election of Jimmy Carter, because Jimmy Carter ran on a campaign platform of basically tying American weapons sales to human rights records of which Iran had an absolutely abysmal one. So they thought that the United States was going to limit its arms sales to Iran. And they're like, this is fantastic. This is a guy that we can fully support. He's going to back the people. This is couldn't be more the type of president that the Iranian people wanted. But then right after the election, Jimmy Carter, so on New Year's Eve, 1977. So 77 to 78. Jimmy Carter goes to Iran and spends New Year's with the Shah, Muhammad Revza Pavlavi. Right. And he gives this speech where he describes Iran as an island of stability, ostensibly in a sea of chaos, which was the Middle East at that point. So why did Carter do this anyhow? I mean, you know, because Iran was incredibly important as an American ally against the Soviet Union. The United States also had established listening posts along its board because it had a very long border with the Soviet Union, of which the United States established intelligence posts all along it, which allowed them to monitor communications going on inside the Soviet Union. In particular, keeping track of its nuclear developments. So hugely important place strategically for the United States. And it's one thing for a candidate to campaign on something like human rights, and then they come into office and they're like, yeah, this guy is really important to us. So we have to placate him, we have to maybe not follow through with what we said. So not long after this meeting in Tehran, Carter approves a massive arms sale to the Iranians. Okay. And the Iranian people are like, what the heck. Right, right. So you're supposed to be, whatever happened to your campaign pledge. The enemy of my enemy is my friend all of a sudden, right? Exactly. And so the Iranian people protested. Some students went out and protest and were mowed down by the Iranian military. And then in Shia Islam, there's a 40 day cycle of mourning. And so 40 days later, protesters go out in the streets again, and they get mowed down.  And so you get this cycle of essentially funeral cycle of 40 days that then culminates in September 1978, where a million people march through the street of Tehran and the government opens up, unleashes the military against them, and it's a bloodbath. So this is a horrific situation. The Shah, who we now know was dying of cancer at the time, is kind of doesn't know what to do and he's asking the United States for assistance. The American ambassador in Tehran, William Sullivan writes a cable to Washington saying, you know, we need to actually rethink what's going on here. We need to start thinking the unthinkable, which is the Shah is going to fall. And we need to be prepared for that. But the Carter administration kind of dismisses this. Okay. And doesn't pay a lot of attention to it. And the whole situation escalates over the fall of 1978 and into 1971 and the Shah eventually. 1979. This is sorry, January 1979, and the Shah abdicates and hands over power to a provisional government and leaves. So this leads to the return of Ayatollah Ruhala Khomeini, who's then imposes the system that he came up with known as Valletta Faki, which is essentially the idea of having a religious scholar, the supreme leader, essentially, of Iran, vet any legislation passed by the the Majlis, which is the parliament, right, to ensure that it aligns with Islamic principles. In reality, what this is, is you're taking the Shah who had dictator autocratic power, and you're replacing him with an Ayatollah who has Okay, okay. But it is true that Iran has a democracy today. Right. I mean, they do have. Yes. Yeah. A very vibrant one. In fact, one of the more vibrant democracies in the Middle East, next to the Israelis. Turkey would have been higher on that list, but Turkey has declined into. Yeah. Right. Right. Turkey is still a democracy, but it's it's much more autocratic democracy Turkey, I'm referring to. Yes. Iran is is an autocratic democracy as well. But right. They do have elections and the elections often return results that the government that the supreme leader doesn't necessarily want. Right. For example, in the 1990s, a guy came out of nowhere named Mohammed Khatmi. And he won the election by landslide 67. So a super majority. Sure. 67% of the vote. No one saw this coming, not even the CIA. Right. This blew everyone's mind. This was a moderate. Yeah, right. So, and he was not liked by the regime. The regime did not like him and try to sideline him as much as he could. Right. And which is one of the interesting things that, that happened. Right. So, Brian, Brian, hang on to that thought we're going to have to go to break. Okay. And then we'll be back with more from history lens. Aloha and welcome. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of think tech Hawaii's law across the C program. Every other Monday at one o'clock. I am here on deck with various guests talking about different topics of the world and the ocean and international law, different areas where we all have seen and want to travel to and learn about. Please join me for my next law across the C program. Aloha. I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's vegan world, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant based diet is. So do tune in every second Thursday from 1pm. Aloha. All right. We're back and we're live with Dr. Brian Gibson, who's a professor, assistant professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University and a specialist on the Middle East. And Brian, we were talking about the Iranian Revolution actually of 1979, the rise of the Ayatollah and the situation in Iran. And so can you give us a little bit more information because this causes a tremendous transformation in Iran and really impacts the entire Middle East. Yeah. So in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, what's really quite curious is that the United States didn't think all was lost. They thought that they could potentially still maintain a relationship with the Iranian regime, with the new Iranian regime and establish a fruitful beneficial relationship to both sides because as you said earlier on, they're kind of natural allies. Right. Much of the problems in the Middle East at this stage were actually stemming from Iraq, which the Iranians don't like and I'm going to get to that in a moment. Okay. So in the aftermath of the revolution, the United States sought to cultivate a relationship. Now they had two points of leverage. The first one is that under the Shah, the Shah bought billions and billions and billions of dollars of American weaponry. So that meant that they had an arms supply relationship where the U.S. could leverage its arms supply relationship, the sale of weapons to Iran because all of Iran's weapons were American. And if they need spare parts, there's only one place to get it, the United States. That's not real. Yeah. Yeah. Now what gets really quite curious here is that the second one is intelligence. The United States had a pretty good read on what was going on in the region at the time and had good intelligence on what was going on in Iraq, particularly through its contacts in the Kurdish minority that lives in northern Iraq. Now, in the early 19th, throughout 1979, things are kind of quiet. The United States is trying to pass intelligence. One thing that it passes on through the provisional government was that the Iraqis were actually planning on invading Iraq. Now, Iran is imploding at this point. You see situations where the military is being purged, where people are being killed and hung in the street, people who are concerned, collaborators. It's a violent, violent revolution, which a lot of revolutions are. Yeah, interesting. Now, the situation with the United States changes dramatically on November 4th, 1979. And that's when a group of students storm the U.S. embassy and seize control of it and take 55 Americans hostage for 444 days. Now, one of the curious little sidebars to that is that they actually let go all of the black Americans that were in the embassy at the time because they didn't view African-Americans as being American. If you white people as being Americans, like our problem isn't with you, you guys can go. And one of them happened to be a very senior intelligence officer. Oh, that's really interesting. Their own kind of racism, which worked out to the benefit of the black guys who were in the embassy, black guys and women, ended up getting rid of a very important individual. And then, of course, there's the whole Canadian caper that involved the spiriting out of a bunch of Americans, which we saw in the movie Argo. Right. Now, this situation is devastating for the Carter administration, like just devastating. They spent 444 days trying to get the Americans hostages out. They tried a dramatic rescue attempt that failed miserably with resulting in the deaths of a number of special forces. And that was in April, 1980. And things escalated. Meanwhile, things were escalating with Iraq all along its border where by April, 1980, they're shelling each other regularly. And I told Khomeini had announced his intention to export the revolution abroad. Then you start seeing assassination attempts against Iraqi officials. You see the seizing of the grand mosque in Saudi Arabia. And everyone in the region amongst the Arabs, especially are deeply concerned that Iran is exporting its revolution and is trying to overthrow everyone. Yeah, right. Saddam Hussein, however, had just seized control of power in Iraq. Now, he had always been the shaker and mover behind the scenes from 1968 to 1979. And in 1979, he overthrew his uncle in a quite daring coup. And his story is quite crazy, essentially. He walked in with a bunch of guards into the president's palace and was like, you're stepping down. And he was like, what the heck? Hassan al-Bakr, the president's son, who is Saddam's cousin, pulled out a gun and he said, just so you know, we have your families right now.  It was a family affair, apparently. It was a family affair. And so Saddam seizes control. You know, we know Saddam to be a megalomaniac, and he's not someone who is going to just let go of power. Right. Which is an important theme throughout this in the next eight years. And so he has seized control of power, and then you see Iran trying to overthrow him. And so Saddam launches an invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980. And this war is essentially first world war style warfare, but with modern weapons. Okay. Okay. So it's wave after wave of soldiers just going and getting mowed down. But so the Iraqi side was very heavily fortified. So they invaded Iraq and got bogged down very quickly in their campaign. So they made it, you know, not even in the hundreds of miles into Iran, they did not make it particularly far before they, they slowed down because of the winter rains. And then over 1981 and then into June 1982, Iran regrouped and managed to get a lot of people who are very, very passionate and very dare I say suicidal. Okay.  You're going to heaven. That's why there's suicide bombers and things like that, which are prevalent within as a means of Islamic warfare. Now, so they would have where does the United States stand in this I'm just about to get to that. Okay. So the Iranians regroup and they launched these offensives with like 300,000 people armed with handguns, cocktails and AK-47, well, M16s, and they started throwing themselves at the Iraqis and they managed to secure a series of victories. And by June 1982, they are on the border with Iraq and they are ready to invade. This spooks the Reagan administration because the Iranians have built up 300,000 troops outside of Basra, which is in the southeastern corner of Iraq. But it's also really close to Iraq's largest oil fields. And worse, it's really close to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia's oil fields. Okay. And so the concern was that if Iran hammers through at Basra, seizes control that establishes a Shia puppet state that's beholden to Iran. Right. If it pushes further south, takes the oil fields, well, then you're adding Iraq's oil to Iran's oil, which makes them the largest producer in the world. Yes. Then even slightly further to the south, they have Kuwait, which has one of the largest oil fields in the region. And if they push further beyond that, they have all the region's oil. Yeah. Right. So now from an American perspective, that's unacceptable. Right. They would dictate the global price of oil. Right. That, and they could raise it as high as they want, tip the United States into a massive economic recession in Europe. They would have everyone in the world, you know, by the marvels. I can't think of them better. Yeah. Right. So to speak. So I know you've done some research in this. And so did the Americans, did they acknowledge the whole strategic situation? I mean, there is a lot of oil and it's concentrated right in that area. Right. So do you see this in the cables that the Americans are sending back and forth? You see it much more in the National Security Council level diplomatic, well not like traffic. Okay. So the big concern was exactly what I just described is that they could seize all of this. Yeah. So the real concern there was not that they would seize all of that was that the United States was going to have to go to war with Iran. To protect it. Like think of Saddam taking Kuwait and the response that occurred to that. Right. Magnify that by a lot. Right. Okay. So the United States didn't want to have to get sucked into a Middle Eastern war in 1982. That was going to be absolutely brutal. Right. Right. So this led to a lot of discussion and debate to try and figure out what to do that wouldn't involve the United States sending troops to the region. Okay. And what they concluded was that providing Iraq with intelligence that pinpointed where the Iranian troops were just deployed and what kind of military hardware they had. This would allow the Iraqis to then build really strong defenses in those areas in preparation for these offensives. Oh, okay. And so this led to an intelligence sharing program that lasted through to 1986. Oh, really? Iraq and the United States sharing intelligence. Yes. Yes. The United States provided them. It's a bit scandalous in and of itself. It is, but it makes sense from a geostrategic point of view. When you're looking at the American perspective, this makes sense because Iran is posing the greater threat. Right. And Iraq is on the defensive. Now, so for the next several years, Iran launches a spring offensive every year and the United States tipped off the Iraqis where that was going to come. Right, right. But in the mid 1980s, the Iranians begin kidnapping Americans all throughout the Middle East and not just American, French and British and Germans as well. Yeah. So this creates a hostage crisis. Right. And this led to Israeli proposal to trade weapons to Iran. In exchange for the release of hostages. Now remember, Iran needs American weaponry. They need hardware. Right. And so the United States agrees to this. This ends up being the basis for the Iran-Contra scandal. This is the Iran-Contra affair, right? Right. So, Brian, we have a little more than a minute left. So can you give us, kind of draw this up to the present and how these historical events actually are playing into the present-day relationship? So towards the very end of the war, the United States backs Iraq to the hilt and gives them intelligence on how to defeat Iran. Okay. At the same time that Iraq starts to launch a series of offensives, which ends up winning the war for them, the United States engages in a naval engagement with the Iranians in the Persian Gulf and ends up shooting down an Iranian plane, killing 298 on board. And this is another one of those mortal wounds. But this time the United States inflicted it on Iran. Right, right, right. So this is kind of retaliation for the hostage crisis. So by my count, you've got two mortal wounds inflicted by the Americans and one by the Iraqis. Is that fair? The Iranians, yeah. Yeah, the Iranians. Yeah, so far. Right. So, okay. So we're ahead of them in the mortal ruin department. Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, Brian. We'll bring you back again and we'll have more discussion on this such important region of the world. And, you know, we just, we really appreciate you being on the show and thanks again. No problem. Okay. Take care.


I like you're giving us some positive energy. First, let's start with the Dallas Cowboys who are minus 156 to make the playoffs. The Cowboys went six and 10 last year. They lost their starting quarterback, Dak Prescott to an ankle injury week five. How come you believe that the Cowboys are going to make the playoffs this year? It kind of goes what to you said where I do think that the injuries getting the guys are getting back not just Dak, but also the offensive line, the entire offensive line. Effectively, that's going to bode well for them. They are plus one 10 to win the division. I think that's also a pretty good number. So if you want the plus juice, go there. But this number does give you some leeway in case we see a team like Washington leap up, make a good run across this new year with Ryan Fitzpatrick. But right now, my win total projections have Dallas at 10.1. Nobody else in the NFC is at 8.0. So it's a pretty healthy cushion. So getting Dallas at minus 156 just to make the playoffs in general to me is a really good number. We're they're going to get some competition at West because there are a lot of teams there pushing for the playoffs. But at minus 156, I think the Cowboys here, given the health of their offense, given how good Dak Prescott is and given how many points they're likely to score, I'd expect this to be a very advantageous number that I want to get now before we realize how good that offense is when helping taking advantage of some closing line value. Also, the Cowboys best odds in the NFC East at plus one 10 to win the division.


Hello everyone. This is the Circuit Python Weekly for September 5th, 2023. It's the time of week where we get together to talk about all things Circuit Python. I'm Jebler and I'm sponsored by Adafruit to work on Circuit Python, which is a version of Python designed on tiny computers called microcontrollers. Circuit Python development is primarily sponsored by Adafruit, so if you want to support Adafruit and Circuit Python, consider purchasing your hardware from Adafruit.com. This meeting is hosted on the Adafruit Discord server. You can join anytime by going to adafruit.it.discord. We hold the meeting in the Circuit Python DevText Channel and the Circuit Python Voice Channel. The meeting typically happens on Mondays at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, except when it coincides with the U.S. holiday. Yesterday was the U.S. holiday known as Labor Day, so we are holding the meeting on a Tuesday. If you're watching the final video, the notes document will have timestamps for you to use so that you can seek to the part of the video that interests you the most. The meeting tends to run anywhere from 45 to 60 minutes, but it is pretty highly variable. After the meeting, we post a link to the next meeting's note doc in the Circuit Python Dev Channel on the Adafruit Discord. Check the pinned messages so you can update your notes at any time during the week. If you wish to participate but cannot attend, of course, you can leave your hug reports and status updates in the document for us to read during the meeting. This meeting is held in five parts. Next up will be community news, a little review of the Circuit Python and Python on a hardware newsletter. Yeah, it's a fun little glimpse of great stuff people are doing. The second is the state of Circuit Python, the libraries and Blinka. We'll take an overview of the entire project by the numbers and get a sense of how things are going. Next is hug reports, the opportunity to highlight the good things folks in the community are doing, whether it's coding, whether it's helping, whether it's making a cool project, just whatever you feel is worth recognizing that has been done by the folks around you. Then fourth is status updates, an opportunity to report on what you've been up to as an individual. Please take a couple of minutes and talk about what you've been doing in the last week and what you'll be up to over the next week. And if you don't make it every time, you can increase those time bounds to encompass the work that you have been doing since we last talked. And then last, if there are some items, we have a section called in the weeds. If we need to discuss something and it's not just a quick sentence or two, then this is the place for it. That can be something that we realize during status updates or other discussion or something you've identified ahead of time as just being too long for status updates. And that covers how the meeting will go. So, community news. First up is driving large LCD displays with circuit Python. Adafruit now has the expressive ESP32S3 talking to large dot clock displays like the 7-inch 800x480 display above. There will be a display driver board with the S3 soon along with a selection of displays including rectangular, circular, and square. And there are links in the note stock to a Twitter and a YouTube. And I think you can also check out the store. We've got some at least pictures of boards that are similar to the ones I've been testing. It's pretty cool. Next up we have projects. We have lots of pixels. So, next is driving five LED displays with Python. Tim Moroney writes, what if I told you this 96-centimeter-wide 5-panel 160 by 32 interstate 75-powered pixel display can be started for just 105 pounds and driven from Python running on a Pi or a desktop PC for impressively smooth demos. And there are also fire animations and Conway's Game of Life. Check out the thread on Twitter, currently known as X. And then the last pixels I promise you are DJ Devin's feather weather on four matrix panels with a STEMMA BME 688 sensor. And there is a link to the code on GitHub. And DJ Devin 3 also joined us on Show and Tell last week. Talked about stuff like bit depth, showed interactively how that changes things. It looks like a cool project. And DJ Devin is someone who encounters a lot of weather. All right, so those are the few extracts I picked from a much larger newsletter. Let me tell you about the newsletter. The CircuitPython Weekly newsletter is a community-run newsletter emailed every Monday. The complete archives are at AdafruitDaily.com slash Category slash CircuitPython. That link is in the note stock. It highlights the latest Python on hardware-related news from around the web, including CircuitPython, Python, and MicroPython developments. Do you want to subscribe to the newsletter? Just go to the front page of AdafruitDaily.com. Do you want to contribute to the newsletter? There are a number of ways to do that. You can edit next week's draft directly on GitHub because like a lot of what Adafruit does, we do it out in public. So that's github.com slash Adafruit slash CircuitPython dash weekly dash newsletter. And yeah, you can put in a pull request. You can also tag your tweet with hashtag CircuitPython on X, formerly known as Twitter, or you can email cpnews at Adafruit.com. And I can tell you 100% for certain that Ann will love getting whatever you're contributing, whether it's your own project, whether it's somebody else's project that made you go, wow, we love to see these things and spread the news about them because it shows what you can do with Python on microcontrollers. And so next up is the state of CircuitPython, the libraries, and Blinka. So this is a look back at seven days of activity, both in the core, in the libraries, and in Blinka. And this is actually a report from Monday. So it excludes things done during the day on Monday or so far today. And I chose to do that instead of Tuesdays just because then we don't miss a day that we didn't report on because the meeting was moved. And Scott and Ketney and Melissa let me know if you cannot read your normal sections, otherwise I will hand it off to you. So overall, across every GitHub repo, we had 18 pull requests merged from 16 authors and six reviewers. And I want to mention a couple of those authors whose names aren't super familiar to me. We had M. Monitol, Phonix232, ClevverCA22, and BJAP, excuse me, BJAP, who wrote pull requests that we merged over the last week. So thank you to everyone, but in particular to those folks who are new or less frequent contributors. And thank you also to our six reviewers. We've got a lot of the usual suspects, but I also want to say thank you to Bill88T, as well as everybody else. Issues-wise, we saw five issues closed by 14 people and 12 opened by 10 people. Issues numbers do trend up over time, and that's just the way it is, but it's nice to see the large numbers of people who are participating there among the issues. And with that, I will hand things off to Scott to tell us about the core. Hello, Scott. Thanks, Jeff. It is echoing there. Yeah, is it? A little bit. It's fine. I'm going to get a couch and a rug in here at some point. So update for me is that I'm in a new space, hence the echo. There's construction outside too, so yeah. We'll work through that. Numbers for the core, we had 14 pull requests merged from 12 different authors. Phonix232, BJAP, ClevverCA22, BrainBoards are all relatively new or infrequent, so thank you to them. We had four reviewers, including Maker Melissa and Bill88T, so thanks to them as well. We had 28 open pull requests. A number of those are getting long in the tooth, so please take a look at those. It is above the 25 benchmark that I tend to like to keep, although it's been a long weekend. I'm sure we have some that we can fix and close on this Tuesday. Issues-wise, we had three closed issues by two people, and seven opened by six people, so we're up four. So we crossed a 700 mark to have 703 open issues. You can check those out at github.com. We use milestones to track prioritization for folks who are funded by Adafruit to work on Circuit Python. We have six active milestones. We have 2x, which is our stable branch, that will probably keep us going until 9.0 is released. We have seven open issues there, and then we have 50 open issues on 9.0. We have seven issues not assigned to Milestone, so those likely came in over the weekend and need to be triaged, and will be triaged. So that's the state of the court. Thank you, Scott. We now need to tell us about the many, many, many libraries. We do have many libraries. So this applies to all of the Adafruit Circuit Python libraries, as well as all of our community libraries. And across all of those repositories, we had two pull requests merged over the last week. Not anybody knew in the authors or reviewers. And it leaves us with 50 open pull requests. We had one issue closed by one person, and five opened by four people, leaving us with 640 open issues. Twenty of those are labeled good first issue. If you're interested in contributing to Circuit Python on the Python side of things, check out circuitpython.org slash contributing. You'll find all of this information and more, including open pull requests listed out, the list of open issues, and you can check out, if you're interested in reviewing, check out the open pull requests. If you're interested in contributing code or documentation, check out the open issues. Leave comments in both places and let us know what you think. And if you're new to everything, good first issue is a great place to start. As well, we have a guide on contributing to Circuit Python using Git and GitHub, and we're always available on Discord to help out. We want to make sure you can contribute in a way that works for you. In terms of library PyPI Weekly download stats, we had 129,910 PyPI downloads over 312 libraries, and the top 10 libraries are listed in the notes. Library updates in the last seven days, we had four updated libraries, it looks like, but no new libraries. If you're interested in those, they are also listed in the notes. And that's where we are with the libraries. Thank you, Katny. And last, but definitely not least, we'll tell us about Blinka statistics. Hello, so Blinka is our Circuit Python compatibility layer for MicroPython, Raspberry Pi, and other single board computers. This week, we had two pull requests merged by two authors and one reviewer. There are currently three open pull requests amongst other repositories. There was one closed issue by one person and zero opened. That leaves a net of 102 open issues. And there were 10,335 PyPI downloads in the last week, 9,527 PyWheels downloads in the last month, and we are 119 boards correctly. And that's it. Thank you, Melissa. Next up is Hug Reports. And if you are participating with us, a general reminder, just be scrolled to the right spot so you're prepared to read off when I call on you. All right, so I have a group hug, but I have some individual ones as well. One for Scott for keeping my standards high in the dot-clock TFT pull request. Another for so many community members submitting PRs, especially on the core. It seems like we had a really good number of non-atifruit people doing core PRs this week and in the recent past. And finally to Dan and Brent for continuing to work through the issue with the Nenafirmware certificates. And Dan, thanks in advance for the 8.2x update that should be coming out soon, so it is resolved for our users. Next, I've got notes from a couple of folks to read. Anecdata writes that they have a hug for Todd Bot for identifying my serial port in use when trying to update an NRF bootloader. Then, from Cgrover, I have a hug report for DJ Devin for the weather livestream during Hurricane Idalia using a very creative approach to layering desktop and development board images. It was very helpful to see all the data and images on one screen. As well as a hug for Todd Bot for the Synthio foundational and invaluable hints and tricks page. It made it easy to start from scratch and get something special running right away. And next up is Dan. Hello. Hi, so I'm back from vacation. Thanks for mentioning about the certificate issues and I'd like to thank Brandon Justin, who I just talked to this morning, about the details of fixing the certificate issues and also thanks to Clever, who's been doing ongoing work on the Broadcom port in various ways, which is nice. Okay, that's it. Thank you. And next is DJ Devin 3. I have a big hug for all the CircuitPython developers dealing with the ESP IDF merge issues. And it seems like you all just need a big hug as things start breaking and all the issues start piling up, heading into 9.0. All of your efforts are appreciated and seen. A hug to Retired Wizard for uploading a 9.0 alpha build for the Matrix Portal S3 dealing with the SSL handshake bug discussion on GitHub. I was able to get my project on Show and Tell this week thanks to your kindness, so thank you. And a hug to SeaGrover and Todd Bot for stopping by and saying hello during my Hurricane Diya livestream and a group hug. All right. Next I have notes from David Glode, who is missing the meeting today. A group hug for all the organized streamers and participants on CircuitPython Day. A hug to Naradok for the work on non-QWERTY non-US keyboards. I've used that for HID Output and also for HID Host Keyboard Input. And a parenthetical for me. I'm glad you did that and it worked because I wrote some of that code but relied on Naradok for like the really heavy lifting in parenthetical. Finally, David has a hug for FoamyGuy and whoever else contributed to the CircuitPython HTTP server library. Very interesting PR review stream in the presence of the PourQuest author. And that brings us to Ketny. Hello. Hello. I have a group hug today. Thank you. I have notes next from Kmatch who has a hug for me, Jebler, and Retired Wizard for sharing your binaries for the ESP32-S3 dot-clock display board as well as hugs to all. Next is Maker Melissa. I wanted to give a hug to you, Jeb, for creating a pull request to remove the present libraries for the .2.x branch. One to Dan for answering a question I had while he was out. I'll hug to Brent for reviewing a PR I made while he was out in the group hug. Thank you. Next is Michael Pokusa who writes a hug for FoamyGuy for their deep dive and review of a PourQuest on Adafruit HTTP server. We are in the home stretch now, but Paul Cutler, you're up next. Thanks, Jebler. I've got a hug for Todd Bot for helping me out with some code for my new Matrix Portal project, and a big hug for Tyeth for helping me and a lot of others this past week with Adafruit IO. The help has been invaluable. Thanks. Thanks, Paul. Hello, Scott. Hey, Jeff. I'm doing memory map support for the RP2. There's a pull-up request out for it right now. And then a late minute, a last minute hug to FoamyGuy for filling in for me on deep dive last week. All right. Thank you. And last up, a hug report from Todd Bot to Seagrover for the really cool Circuit Python Chime Library that's doing interesting Chime algorithms in Synthio. And that rounds up hug reports. Next is status updates where, as I explained earlier, we want to hear what you are up to in the world of Circuit Python and slightly beyond. So take a few moments and, yeah, when I call on you, let us know what's up. So I have been working on the dot-clock displays as my main thing. At this point, they work really well within Reason. However, there are some limitations. In particular, when you're working on the pixel clock and you're doing lots of things that access the PS RAM or the program flash, the display can tear and shift. We're hoping that that will get better when we update ESPIDF. Otherwise, we will, you know, just figure out what we need to do to get it up to the level of performing like we'd like it to. Other than that, I have to check that two more displays work and address some PR comments and after that I think it's done. One of the things that are potentially changing for this is how PS RAM is shared between Circuit Python and other stuff in the ESPIDF. Traditionally, we just took all of the PS RAM for Circuit Python. Then when we added cameras, we added a way to return part of the PS RAM back to ESPIDF. And that doesn't quite work with the ESP LCD library. And so there's a different way just requires a little organization of the early startup and I added that to the pull request this morning. And that means we won't need to make any changes in the ESPIDF to make LCD displays work, which is great. And then in the future for this week, number one is finishing this PR and number two is some planning with Scott and Dan. I had hoped to do the 1.20 merge, but I will be unable, I will be, sorry, unavailable in October. Scott and Dan and I will be meeting soon to discuss our options on that. Next, I have notes from C Grover who writes finished the windless IoT weather chimes project after an intense session with physical garden wind chimes to develop a realistic wind speed effect algorithm. Learned a bunch about wind chime physics and the influence of the breeze. And there is a link in the notes doc to the weather chimes repo on GitHub as well as a project video on YouTube. Next, need to repair a few more wind petty of chimes before characterizing the scales, overtones and strike envelopes later this week. We have a lovely sounding copper chime and some nearly percussive ceramic bells that would be fun to model. Given our local weather, wind chimes and wind socks, flags, garbage cans and trampolines get quite a bit of wind related abuse. Thank you Scott for dropping those links in the chat. Alright, still with C Grover's notes getting interested in continuing along the chime voice path to develop realistic synth voices in synth IOs such as plucked string instruments particularly the banjo and the upright bass as well as flutes and clarinets all without resorting to waveform samples. The next experiment will be to use a note envelopeed object to adjust a notes filter as the note is played in order to create more complex sounds. And finally my spouse observed that I was spending a lot of time on physical and electronic chimes over the past few weeks. That's not a secret message that needs decoding is it? The project did get me out on the patio for a few hours. Okay next up Dan let us know what's going on with you. As I mentioned I'm back from my vacation, had a nice break and also as mentioned I'm working on our circuit python release hopefully like today or tomorrow that has a fixed roots.pm that's a list of all the root certificates so that some problems we've been having getting to certain sites on when you're using SSL could be fixed. So I'm working my way through that right now and then as Jeff mentioned Scott and Jeff and I will be talking I hope that we will be talking about the version 1.20 merge this week and also the ESPIDF updates. Okay Alright next up is DJ Devon 3. Hello I have six matrix panels now working with the matrix portal S3 for a display size of 128 by 96. I'm very happy with six as it makes a nice big display for my wall you can do you know sticks with the 2mm pitch panels but then you get like a smaller display so I have the 5mm pitch panels and now I have this rather large display array display and I would like to get more to try and find out what the maximum amount is that I can drive you know the 5 volt serpentine through all of that and blid it all out because apparently I thought six would be four would be the max but I've now added six so we're up to six with the matrix portal S3 thing that shows all six I live streamed Hurricane Adalia data Friday night used the Pico DVI BME 280 and OBS with overlaid data from NOAA, local radar and my own Adafruit IO dashboard this was the main reason I purchased the Pico DVI from Florida the next hurricane is just a matter of time so it was kind of a neat thing to be able to stream that using Adafruit products and Adafruit IO that's it Thank you. Next up I have notes from David Glode who is missing the meeting a keyboard and doing nothing weak I did not do much or I don't remember anything I investigated Naradak's keyboard library documentation and generation website I tested native support for keyboard on the USB host port keyboard workflow the previous attempt failed because you have to power with a GPI toggle to the USB port on the Feather RB2040 USB host I could not locate documentation on how to detach the keyboard if you don't want it to output to the REPL and how to change the keyboard mapping. Any hint in the chat is welcome and that brings us to you, Katny Hello so I did a guide last week for the iSpy Pi beret which is a tiny little Pi adapter board that allows you to connect iSpy displays that uses Python obviously because it's on Raspberry Pi but that guides in moderation and should be live tomorrow at the latest and then I'm starting this week on the Metro M7 Micro SD board guide and that should be out in the next week and a half or so so if you picked up one of those it's going to be very much like the Metro M7 Airlift board so if you have one at the moment and you're interested in any information check out that guide but this will cover obviously how to use your specific board when it's good to go and that's where I'm at Thanks Katny, I know a lot of people depend on those guides coming out to even know what the stuff they bought is. Alright, next up is maker Melissa Let's see, last week I finished up the Matrix Portal S3 message board guide I went through five home assistant guides and updated them to use Secret Python 8 and updated the home assistant syntax on them and then I tested each of those projects I also started going through GitHub issues and this week I'm going to continue going through GitHub issues That's where I'm at Next up is Paul Hello again Hello, I finished my first S3 Matrix Portal project when I choose an album on my Python web app it downloads and converts the cover art including Gamma Correction for the album and sends an MQTT message that the Matrix Portal downloads and then displays on a 64 by 64 matrix I even blogged about it to link in the notes document Starting my second S3 Matrix Portal project I have a mic plugged into a Raspberry Pi that listens to the music I'm playing and records a sample and sends it to Shazam IO to identify it I wanted to then send the song and artist data to another Matrix but I'm having some issues with MQTT blocking and don't have async working quite yet Thanks Alright, more work to do and to round out the section of status updates it is you, Scott Hello Like I said earlier I moved into a new office space that's nice and echoey I'm not fully settled but the computers are up and running so I'm going to be doing some more organization Besides that I'm getting caught up after the long weekend going through emails and reviews After I do that I'll be continuing work on the ESP IDF 5 update In particular I'm still getting the SDK config update which is very improved it actually reads the K configs now which is cool and only writes back the settings that are different which means that the SDK configs will hopefully be a lot more concise which will be good It also reworks how flash and ram settings are done with the idea that we can actually be more aggressive in those settings It's taken a little while though because I'm updating all of the like making tweaks to the updater as I do it to minimize if I missed a particular setting that a particular board has and doing all that sort of stuff That's what I'm up to and I'm looking forward to having a discussion about the micropython merge as well Thank you everybody That concludes status updates For In The Weeds we have one topic I was just wondering what it looks like we will be able to create a circuit python 9 alpha and that's it So from my understanding and Dan and Scott please chime in if I get this wrong we want to wait until the most disruptive changes are kind of in the rear view mirror and those are the IDF 5 update and the merge of micropython 1.20 Okay And those are kind of a when it gets done but that's what we want to concentrate on right now Okay Thanks Scott do you want to say I would say it's not even IDF 5 it's really so we don't have MPY format merge format churn because MPY format is going to change twice it's already changed once now and so we don't that's the main thing Yep Okay so we're not holding it for the IDF 5 update just for the 120 merge Yeah because IDF 5 is it's not going to be a visible well I mean it may be invisible in some sense it may be visible in some sense but it's not going to provoke an incompatibility necessarily I don't think I'd do betas until the IDF churn is finished but I mean there's things that you want we just want to put a lot more stuff into the 8.2 releases so if there's a back port of a board or something like that we're encouraging people to PR things against 8.2 Okay rather than against main I mean it's conceivable that we might even have an 8.3 so far we don't need that yet if there were some you know notable api change or something for me it's mostly about the circle python bitmap tools Is that an 8? For the alpha version of change Yeah for instance Yeah I think that'll have to wait for a 9 alpha to come out because that did involve an incompatible change to my recollection That works? Alright thank you everyone who had things to chip in about that item and I will go ahead and wrap up the meeting. This has been the circuit python weekly meeting for September 5th 2023 Thank you to everyone who participated to support Adafruit and circuit python especially those of us that work on circuit python consider purchasing your hardware from adafruit.com The video of this meeting will be released on youtube at youtube.com and the audio version will be on major podcast services it will also be featured in the python for microcontrollers newsletter visit adafruitdaily.com to subscribe the next meeting will be held next monday that's the 11th at the usual time of 2pm eastern 11am pacific the meeting is held on the adafruit discord which you can join at any time by going to adafruit.com adafruit.it to be notified about the meeting and any changes to the time or day you can ask to be added to the circuit python easter's roll on discord we hope to see you all next week thank you everybody


It's a little comic, Chicho. How long until the switch to digital money by US? Oh, man, the digital front, what's going on is insane, right? From what I understand, Coinbase, right? Let's go into the crypto world for a second, right? So Coinbase is huge, right? And from what I understand, it's Coinbase or some other platform, right? Because Bitcoin, you can track every single Bitcoin transaction through the blockchain, right? What's slowly being rolled out is that if there's any record of any amount of crypto, Bitcoin specifically, that has made its way through the dark web and come back out again, then they will not process that order, right? So that means they're taking all the crypto out there, all the Bitcoins out there. I believe this is happening for Bitcoin right now. I don't know if it's happening for all the altcoins yet or not, or Ethereum. Well, there's an attack on Ethereum. We'll deal with that later. But with Bitcoin, if for all the Bitcoin out there, if there are any coins, any Bitcoins out there that have gone through the dark web, there's going to be exchanges out there that are not going to process that order, right? So they're basically going to deem any crypto, any Bitcoin that has gone through the dark web to be counterfeit or drug money or untouchable money, right? So you'll have to launder that money. But how are you going to launder those cryptos if there's a track of every place that the crypto, the coin has gone? Right? This is so dangerous. This is so dangerous. That means that even through Bitcoin right now, what's going to happen is when digital currencies are rolled out, then centralized state can say, oh, any digital money that has gone through any place that they deem to be bad, right? Is no longer considered to be money. It's garbage, right? So what's going to happen most likely is there's going to be a secondary industry popping up to support all the cryptocurrency, all the Bitcoins out there that have gone through the dark web, right? That people can use outside of these exchanges. So there's going to be money laundering, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin laundering, platform set up so people can launder their Bitcoins, right? I don't know how it will be done, but there's got to be a way to be able to do it, right? To mask that signature. And what's going to happen is the value of those cryptos, those Bitcoins are going to be dropped, right? Because to launder counter currency, like if you have any counterfeit money, you know, if you're lucky you'll get 50 cents on the dollar for it. If it's really dirty money, you get 10 cents on the dollar for it, right? If it's government money, CIA money, FBI, they're probably getting 90 cents on the dollar for it by going through Wall Street, right? So there's different levels of laundering money, right? And there's going to be disruptive innovation coming up, not disruptive, but I guess support of innovation coming up to be able to launder any cryptos that have gone through the dark web, right? What? This is insanity, right? And this is a test run to roll out digital currencies, right? To eliminate cash that way our whole lives are controlled by the central state. I've said it before and I'll say it again. If your country is going to go full digital currency, no cash, plan on leaving that country, okay? Or setting yourself up in a way where you got a total barter system set up within a community and your mobility is going to be decreased, okay?


Bradford City vs. Traveller always wins together, 15 against the 9th in Scotland, with 2. Branton's going with a big check and taking past a half-century of points for the season. Traveller always still with significant lock here on missions. Just one point off Newport, 7-7. And they're going to score a spot. To win this year last, they'll be 8-0. Life's straight, the loss is here before we see Neymar Torrance-Newport. Just comes in and drink. Back towards goal. And another chance. What a header that was! Parfret from Jamie Walker. Just inside the opening 20 minutes. Excellent looping header. Using the pace on the ball. Just a second lead goal since joining on goal from Harts in January. Good city in front. Too much to sing about in recent times. He's got home all, both winners in their last four games. Taking 2 points in that time. Traveller through. What a wrestling match here, and that was well. It was all a bit unnecessary initially. And then what reacting as well against Foley? Decision to make here for the referee. The yellow card to the round. Reaction. He's frustrated about the initial foul. That's what, he's gone in there again. And this could be a second yellow. It is going to be a second yellow. And Elliott Watt is sent off. Bradford down to 10. Two bookings in as many minutes for Elliott Watt. The midfielder has to walk. Of course from the home fans, very kind. Definitely not what they'd have wanted. It was late, it was rash. The one surprising reaction from the referee. Into itself, really. That's it all. First goal of school, Watt conceded him in the first half of the game in the last six. Might have an equaliser here, Tramir. Over the bar from Foley. Watt's just involved in Watt's first yellow card. At that time they had it right. First goal. It's got properly cleared. Watt for Bradford. Watt's back in. Walker! Walker's shot was saved. Watt worked by Murphy. Had to be really a light here. That was definitely dipping in. Watt and Walker. Accused. They overtake him away. They must face it's taking over in February. They have five straight losses from Watt to late February. They overtake him. Watt's got the positions for next season after the expected hit with the squad overhaul in the summer. Oh, that's great skill. What's the cross line? What a bad one. Headed just wide. The way it's all equalised. That's a two-on-big-true. We get soul for the long time to go now. And you have to do it the hard way after. Watt was sent off inside with half an hour. use that the American advantage spreading the pitch making it big support across and just over lots of power not quite enough precision almost this wasn't getting anywhere near this if it was on target to do for Marcus who came back to win it would be a first away win in eight since the 1-0 winner poor losses in two draws and it's that poor waveform that's had a big role in champion not being able to get right up into that playoff mix. Killy's here so they go Bradford looking for a second chance not far away doing a threat on the break despite being down to 10 something did that here and a good save needed by Murphy passing cross on the substitute point look at this moment proving the playoff push with Mannemann's firstly goal for Tranmere since joining from Melbourne victory last summer they're trying to win it they did win the reverse six to two one quite a way to win this game in the context it's with Mannemann again but Mannemann's cross headed over that's a really good chance for Bowling couldn't get it on target he's pushing that's the 10-minute Bradford all over the top can Bradford win it incredible late drama here stoppage time instead Tranmere's turn to attack both sides clearly willing to risk this one point to win it but neither of them will do so Bradford City down to 10 ever since the 28th minute when any of what was sent up they were so close to winning this one thanks to Jamie Walker's goal early on the 89th minute equaliser from Callum McAnerman it's both sides in our win this in their last five games and you should see Bradford City won champion rovers


This is the greatest opportunity right now for real estate agents to go out there and make a million dollars. I'm going to break all of this down. I'm going to show you market data that will prove to you how solid this really is in terms of a game plan. And I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to be doing to go out there and make that million dollars. And this is mid 2023 right now. We're in the middle of your 2008. And I'm going to explain that in just a second. But even if you're watching this video towards the end of 2023 or even into 2024, 25, 26, whenever you watch this video, all of these principles and everything I'm talking about in this video will still apply. I've been doing this for 21 years now. I built my business up to a million dollars a year. And I did it with exactly what I'm going to share with you today. So get ready because I'm going to break all this down. It's going to be very simple, no overcomplication. And no, there's not going to be any kind of coaching program that I'm going to upsell you to at the end. Everything I do is 100% free. I'm actually the first completely free coach in the real estate industry. My goal is to simply do one thing, reduce the failure rates in the real estate industry one agent at a time. And we're actually accomplishing that. I've been around doing coaching for six years going on seven now.  And I appreciate each and every one of you and I'm here to help. So let's dig into it. First off, I just want to show you my numbers here and this is not to brag. This is simply to give credibility behind what I am saying and to give you encouragement that you can go out here and do the same thing. This is not about me. This is about you. This is about you going out there and accomplishing your dreams and your goals. So, but I just want to show you that I have accomplished mine. And if I can do it, I promise you on everything that you can do it. Here we go. This is a screenshot right out of my local MLS. It's got me there at the top. This is a stretch of eight years from 2014 to 2021. I was the number one agent in terms of volume closed as a single agent. And there's teams on here that I crushed. The next person there is a 20-man team. There's teams here that I crushed during those eight years, not to mention all the single agents. And this is out of every brokers. This is every agent in my county year after year after year. I was number one for eight years in a row. And it was everything that I did during 2008, 2009, 2010 to prepare for the market resurgence. So, let's dig into that. This is actually a just an illustration. This is definitely not exact, but this just gives you an illustration, something visual to look at here that shows you my business in 2008. And it just kind of, you know, I was just kind of treading water there for 2008, 9, 10, 11. But then in 2012, it picked up a little bit by 2014 at like nearly doubled or tripled. And by 2014, I was closing 100 properties a year. That was the first year I did 100 deals as a single agent. I did 100 deals every year since 2014. And it was because of what I did back in 2008 to take advantage and really expand my market share. I'm going to get into all this. But if you think about the activities that I did between 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, nothing changed. I didn't do anything different in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 12, 13, 14. I didn't do anything different. What happened was is I built a snowball. I continued to build the snowball. And when the market rebounded and resurged, my market, my business exploded with the market. And that's what I want you to understand here is that if you can take advantage of what's happening right now in the market and be prepared for that resurgence, your business is going to explode. And back in 2008, the rebound happened really slow. It took it from 2008, really to 2012 for prices to start coming back up. That's not going to happen like that this time. We're already seeing prices going up over the last 60 days. I'll show you right here. This is medium home prices in America. We started out the year about 350. It was still coming down from last year. But as you see every year, it's kind of trickling down. In 2022, it was trickling down. Even back in 2021, the year of the boom, it actually trickled down a little bit there. And it levels out about the same time as you can see every year. Then it rebounds and starts coming back up. But look at where we are. We're at $376,000 on a medium price. And this is Redfin data that's very up-to-date. It goes back. It gets you to about two weeks before, whereas K. Schiller, Realtor.com, National Association of Realtors, Mortgage Bankers Association, all those places, they're like a one to two, even sometimes three-month lag on their real estate data. Redfin's very up-to-date. They get all their data from the MLS. And so we were at 350. And now we're at 376. We are positive on the year from January 1st. Now, we're not positive year over year. As you can see, we're below 2022. But guess what? Look at this wall right here that 2022 put up as prices dipped in June last year. I was thinking this line was going to continue right through and cross the black line in June and go positive year over year. But it's already inching up. It's trying to get there now. We may go positive year over year sometime in July, if not for sure early June. I would imagine we're going to go positive year over year. And then what are all the crash brothers going to say? And by the way, a true crash is a true crash because it scared everybody. It caught everybody off guard. There's panic out there. And that's something that you just can't predict. It comes from something that's totally unpredictable that throws everything off track and out of whack. The people that try to predict crashes, you know, the 2008 one, there were a few people that predicted that one. But, you know, for those smart people that were looking at those that happen to be looking at those metrics, they did a good job. But right here, it's really hard to say we're going to have a pricing crash. Now, prices are going up. Even Kevin Barber Cochran here from Shark Tank, she said she wants a bloodbath that's coming for the real estate sector, for this real estate sector. What she's talking about is commercial, which I agree with her. And I'm looking to pick those deals up. I'm buying a lot of single family homes right now, but I'm just waiting on commercial to come down a little bit so I can pick up some nice commercial properties. But she says in this article, residential could see a rebound. And if you read this little part of the article here, and down at the bottom, she said everybody's afraid of high rates right now. It's hard to really find a house because of inventory. But the minute those interest rates come down, all hell is going to break loose. And prices are going to go through the roof. Well, you can see on our last slide here that they're already pretty much through the roof. We're almost caught up to 2022 and we're about to go beyond. And this is national. You can look into your local, go to Redfin and look at your local data. You're going to see the same thing. Prices aren't going down, guys. They're going up. Why do you think I'm buying houses? Right? And in the midst of all this with prices going up, okay, we've got realtors leaving the business. Okay, look at this. We're down 60,000. Now look at every year. Every year we have a wave. And I think that's because January 1st, you know, we get caught up on people who aren't paying their dues. And we see that drop off.  I think we see that through the year in different months that there's different dues that are owed and people that aren't paying. I think that's what that wave is. But we lost 60,000 agents. That's a net number. We've probably lost around 80,000, I would think overall. Probably had about 20,000, something like that. Join. We don't know those net numbers or not. We don't know the overall numbers. We know the net numbers. We're down about 60,000 agents. But why are agents leaving the business when in fact real estate prices are going up and real estate seems to be doing extremely well? Well, it's because of this. Last month, we did the, you know, NAR came out with their, you know, existing home sales data and it showed 4.2 million transactions on an annualized basis. Right? We're on track right now to do 4.2 million transactions right now. That number is wildly low. Why is that wildly low? Well, if you go back to 2008, right here, you'll see that in 2008, we did 4.1 transactions. We're not too far away. It's actually 4.12. We're not too far away at all from the 2008 number in terms of number of transactions. That's wild. And so that's why I'm trying to tell you right now that this is your 2008 that you need to take full advantage of because you could not only be the next Ricky Careuth. You could be the next 10X of Ricky Careuth with today's technology and what you can do and the damage you can do in the market in terms of expanding your name and your brand, you could be so far ahead of anything that I have accomplished. It's not even funny. But look at what happened here. It was kind of a slow creep back to 5 million. By 2013, we hit 5 million again. Then we were around 5 million again. Then it kind of got to 5.5 by 2017. We had that incredible year in 2021 of 6.2. That didn't really compete with the 2005 7 million transactions. That was a heck of a year, huh? But what I'm trying to say is that we are at 4.28 million right now. If the year ends up on the same track that we are right now, I think it'll pick up some because I think rates are going to come down. We're going to have a wave of buyers and then we're going to have a pick up. But the problem's going to be, I'll show you in a minute. But we had a slow recovery here. That's not what's going to happen this time. And listen, right now it's better than 2008 because the difference is prices, right? Prices aren't down 50% like they were in 2008. Prices have held solid and they're going up. So if we have about the same amount of transactions as 2008, why are prices staying where they are? Why are prices not dropping even at all? You know, why are they continuing to go up? Well, it's because of this right here. Total housing inventory, the number of homes for sale. If you go back to the 1980s, you'll see that we stayed between that 2 and 3 million mark in terms of number of homes for sale at any given time, the entire decade, between 2 and 3 million homes. And then through the 90s, we stayed around that 2 to 3 million mark. And then boom, it shot up during the housing boom right before the Great Recession in 2008. Around that mark, we had 4 million active homes on the market. And then after that, inventory dwindled and it just continued to dwindle all the way to where we are now, which a report came out. We've got around 550,000 active, 550,000 active homes for sale in the US. And so comparing that to the 80s, when we had 2 to 3 million, we have 500,000 homes right now. And that's why, ladies and gentlemen, that prices are not going down. And if we look right here at the Redfin data with active listings, we can see this shows right here that we are negative 0.86 year over year from 2022. And you can see at this point in the year, we were lower than 2021. And now we just went lower than 2022. So guess what, ladies and gentlemen, for May or June, we are the lowest. And this data was actually for May, up to May 21, which was the day I turned 42 years old. Up to that day, we hit the lowest amount of active homes for sale that we've ever seen in history, all right?  Now, if you look at 2022, we can see that we dipped even lower earlier in the year. So we did get lower than this, but not in June. When it comes to June, we're the lowest that we've ever been. We'll see what happens the rest of the year. We'll see what happens going into 2024. But right now, we are at the lowest that we've ever been in history. And a lot of the problem is people are locked into rates. We see a problem for the housing market. People won't quit their cheap mortgages. Fewer homes are available because homeowners are hanging on to their 3% and 4% interest rates. We can see right here that at the end of 2022, 62% of mortgage holders had a rate below 4%. 82 had a rate below 5%. 92% had a rate below 6%. And so the people that are hanging on to the rates, it's doing two things, okay? It's hurting supply, it's hurting inventory, but it's also building demand because you've got these people, these homeowners who are in their homes and they're dying to upgrade, but they just don't feel like they can or maybe they just can't because they can't afford the higher rates or they don't want to pay the higher rates. So they're basically forced to live in the house that they're at, even though they might not like it, even though they might need a bigger house, they're just not in the position to, they want to wait till rates come down. Well, that demand is brewing every single day. Not to mention that millennials, Zonda did a study, 98% of millennials want to become a homeowner if they aren't already because they want to build their equity instead of someone else's. And so the average age of a first-time home buyer is between 33 and 36. It was 33 in 2021 and it was 36 last year. So between 33 and 36. So if you go back 50 years worth of birth rates, you see in 1990, 33 years ago, that we had a massive spike in births and that massive spike holds true for a good decade and a half. We've got a good decade and a half right now of 33-year-olds coming into the market. And not only after 15 years from now, on the 16th year, you still got people that are turning 34 and 35 and 36 and 37. So this is going to continue. We have more demand. If you see the birth rates before 1990, how low they were compared to where they are now, we're sitting in a position where we don't even understand how much demand that we have from existing homeowners who want to move but can't or won't. We've got more 33-year-olds who are the first time home buyers entering the market than we've seen in decades. And you also have immigrants coming into the country and they need a place to live. They can buy houses. There's no law that says they can't buy houses or rent. And even the ones who are renting, that still affects home prices because the higher the rents are, the more investors are willing to pay for homes. So this is all tied together and it is a just no-brainer when it comes to, okay, where a home price is going to go. Yeah, transactions could do something, mortgage rates could do something. There's some factors there, even if unemployment. And if we see negative GDP, but the fact is that home prices hold steady. We can see right here, this is through recessions, right? The shaded areas are recessions and this is home prices. And you can see they just keep going up through the recession. They keep going up. 2008 is the only time they went down. They just keep going up, right? And this is the most interesting slide on the entire presentation here. This is the percentage of appreciation going back to 1942. And you see the green is positive appreciation years and the red is negative. What does this chart tell you? Back in the mid-40s, we had five years of double-digit appreciation. Everybody said what goes up must come down. Home prices got to come down. They didn't. They held firm. They never went negative. Okay, you fast forward to the mid to the late 70s. We had six years of great appreciation. Four of those were double-digit. And everybody said what goes up must come down. This is, by the way, when rates went up to 18-19% that everybody talks about, that tries to scare you to death about. Okay, the year after that, 1980, it didn't go down. It went 7%. Then it was 5%. Then a flat year at 1%. Then 5, 5, 7, 10, 8, 7. Okay, what goes up must come down. Not home prices. Not home prices. We had a negative 1% over the course of two years, 1990 and 1991. Then you come to the early 2000s. We had four double-digit or positive appreciation years leading up to the great recession, where the mortgage meltdown took us down. And we had those years of negative appreciation that one time because of that. And here recently, 2020 and 21, we saw two years of double-digit appreciation. Neither one were records. And everybody's saying what goes up must come down. No, we had 6% last year. And this year, as I showed you, we're up from 350 to 376, with nothing in sight of home prices going down. Now, if something comes out of nowhere, a world war, another pandemic, you know, something crazy that's blindsided and something weird happens, I still don't think home prices are going down. Okay? But I'm not saying it can't happen. Anything can happen. Anybody that tries to predict or tell you they know what's going to happen, they're just trying to sell you something. The fact is, is that no one knows. But I can show you these charts and I can say, this is what I think. But this chart's very interesting, right? So we know this. We know that the market always surges back 110% of the time. That's what we know for a fact every single time. And we're at 4.28 million transactions. To go from 4.28 to get back to the 5 and the 5.5 is going to be voracious. It's going to be unlike anything that you ever seen. Barbara Cochran said it, that prices are going to go through the roof when mortgage rates come back down and she's right. There's so much pent-up demand of homeowners of 33-year-olds. It's ridiculous.  We learned that a long time ago in 2008 when closings never stopped. So you have job security forever if you do what you're supposed to do and get out there and help people buy and sell and don't lay down with the market. When the market lays down, don't lay down with it.  Keep moving. Keep grinding. Keep calling. Keep trying to help people because there are people that need help. And if you can squeeze through in the down times, like the agents right now who are doing, you know, they're getting by. They're selling two or three properties a month. They were selling eight to 10.  I'm like, bro, if you can make it during this market, you can make it during any market. You are good. And if you keep going like you're going, when the market resurges, your business is going to explode. It's going to be double what it was before the downturn. I promise you. But if you lay down and you quit, then you're not going to be there. So there's that to think about. The next thing is, there was an agent that he's doing, he did about 10 million so far this year. He said, Ricky, how do I get to 30 million or 35 million? Whatever he wanted to do. And I said, number one, quit trying to get to 35 million. That's the first step is quit thinking about 35 million. Make the goal, look at the goal, but don't put so much weight on the goal. You can't control it. I said, if you did the same thing you did in 2021 and 22 and 23 and the market kept going and from 2021 it kept going the same as it was into 2022 into 2023. Would you be selling 50 million this year? He said, hmm, yep, I sure would. I said, but you're not doing anything different. Your activities aren't different. You're not doing anything different. You're doing the same stuff. It was just the market that came back and made your business explode, right? Right. So you can't control the fact that the market took a downturn. You can't control that. So if you can't control it, why are we going to put so much weight on the goal at the end of the year? Put more weight on how many people can I help today? How many people can I talk to and ask them what in the world I could do to help them buying and selling real estate? When you woke up January 1, 2020, I bet you were like, oh, new decade. Let's get after it. And March rolls around and boom, there's a pandemic. I guess you weren't expecting that one. I guess you didn't figure that into your business plan? No. You didn't put into your business plan in March of 2022 that interest rates were going to start going up and that things were going to start slowing down a little bit, were you? No. In 2023, you probably realized that we're in a slower market than we were in 2022, but you didn't put in your business plan that by the end of the year rates are going to come down and we're going to have this explosion of buyers and end up the year amazingly strong, probably catch up to what you wanted to do and end up 2024 off like a rocket. You can't control all this stuff. You have to take it day by day and do what you can do every day and max out. And I don't have a $10,000 program I can sell you to solve all your problems. See, that's the beauty of being a free coach. I want to tell you exactly what I think. So what do we have to do to go out there and make a million dollars? We have to do exactly what I did and that is this, market share. Increase your market share. Market share is simply this, the percentage of people in the market who know and never forget you, period, end of story. It's not how many listings you have, not how many closings you've had compared to the rest of the market. That's a piece of the puzzle, but it's not it's not where I live in terms of building my business. I live in a world where everyone needs to know who I am, what I'm about, that I'm here to help and never forget who I am. That's what market share is. So how are we going to increase our market share? We've got our three buckets here. We've got lead generation, follow up, and nurture. That's it. All of the how to write contracts and how to work MLS and set up CRMs and search and properties and showing etiquette and all that stuff, you're going to learn all that stuff in the field as you go. I'm not here to teach you all that. I've got tips and tricks every single day on Instagram and my videos, all kinds of little details that if you go there and follow me, you're going to get all that kind of stuff. You can also reach out to me if there's anything I can do to help. I'm happy to give my two cents on any of your situations, but I'm here to give you the overview of what it takes to build a million dollar a year business. That's it. Period end of story. So we've got the three buckets, follow up, lead gen, follow up, and nurture. Lead gen, okay? Everything works. Again, I'm not trying to sell you my coaching program. Everything works. I'm not going to tell you that not to do social media, not to do cold callings, not to do open houses, networking, sphere of influence. Whatever you do is fine with me. The fact is, is that you got to figure out what works best for you and then go all in on whatever that is. If a Zillow leads, great. Do the Zillow leads. I don't care what your lead gen is. I just need you to be in a position where you've got something that works best for you and produces enough people in the market. Remember market share, how many people in the market know and never forget you. I need whatever your lead gen is to produce enough people that you're creating a big enough brand quick enough, right? Which means you need to be talking to and creating at least five new friends a day, which for me, if I'm cold calling, I'm probably going to, you know, talk to 10 people to create those five new friends, which means I probably made 100 dials. I got a 10% pickup rate, 100 dials. I'm going to talk to 10 people. I'm going to make five new friends out of that call session that takes me an hour, okay? That's all I need to do to build a million-dollar year of business. That's most of it right there. That's most of it. But again, lead gen, what works for you? Great. I can tell you what works for me. And in this tight market, where there's no listings, we've got to be smarter and we have to stack our listings. The name of the game right now is Stack Listings to the Moon. If, you know, I'd love to see you guys taking overpriced listings, honestly, overpriced because if you don't, another agent will, and then they're going to sell it. Take the overpriced listing. Prices are going up and the market will catch up or the seller will come down. But relationships over transactions is the key. You take overpriced listing, that's fine. It's not about the sale. It's about creating the lifelong relationship with that seller. I'm looking at sphere. I'm looking at absentee owners. I can tell you how to get those. For sell-buy owners, are normally not at the top of my list, but they are in this market. Because it's so tight, they've raised their hand and said they'll sell. I've got an agent with 26 for sell-buy owner listings. He's closed in five a month. New and old expireds, gold. We're finding gold is anywhere between six months and a year back. I've got an agent that just put one under contract in Georgia for $3.6 million. She sold 500 acres to the state of Georgia. Off an expired listing, she called and said, hey, you want to put it back on? They said, yep. Boom. This is not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen. But again, I'm not big on social media for real estate in terms of Lee Jinn. I like it for brand building, but everybody's got their own thing. Get out there and figure out what your thing is. You can get a discount here to get expireds, geoledes, absentee owners for sell-buy owners at redxdiscount.com, but I did a full demo on this a couple days ago. I'm going to put a link in the description of the video right now where I show you screen share, how to get the absentee owners, how to go back 10 years worth of expires with drones and cancels in your market. You get the email addresses, the cell phone numbers, everything. Call, text, email, and hit them on social media. That's what you guys need to be doing. I mean, every Lee Jinn source leads right back to the same thing, talking to somebody and creating a relationship and helping them buy or sell. So why are we doing all in my world? I'm thinking I'm a get it done kind of person.  It's really that simple. And if you use my scripts, we're not calling them to sell them. We're just calling to get to know them and see what it is we can do to help them. So use my scripts. You can download them in the description or you can go to rcscripts.com. That's rickiekeruthscripts.com, rcscripts.com. Okay, nurture. Okay, nurture. We're going to nurture them with the weekly email. If you want to see all my weekly emails going back to last November and just steal my template, I'll put a link in the description or just go to startmyweeklyemail.com. I made this really easy for you. Now you can scale your business. Here's a screenshot of some of my most recent emails. You can see I'm sending out to 29,000. 10,000 of those are bouncing and 75 hundred or so are open to get every single week. And I sell 100 properties a year right off that email. You can build the same snowball in your business. Now, the daily goal is going to be to create five new friends a day with property owners in the market. Okay? Over five years, that's going to equal 6,000 property owners that you created friendships with in the market. Okay? If you create that weekly email to your entire database on the same day of the week forever, to those 6,000 people plus whoever organically came into your database, how big is your business? You're making a million dollars a year. Okay?  New listings, pendings, clothes, expires, all that stuff. Stay on top of that. Every day, you're going to be a market expert within a week or two. And then you continue looking at it to stay on top of the market. It's going to create so many opportunities for you, just knowing that information. We're going to make our calls from 9 to 12 every day. And you're going to do social media and all your other marketing stuff and your handwritten letters and, you know, your weekly email and all that after lunch. I've made this really extremely simple for you. Okay? If you want to do one deal a week, you need 15 to 20 active buyers and sellers at all times. If you want to do two deals a week like I have eight years in a row, you're going to do what I did. You're going to have 25 active buyers and sellers at all times. You're going to close 1% of your database a year with no prospecting. So, once you build that database up to, say, 10,000 people, you're going to be closing 100 deals a year off of that weekly email with nothing else going on. Isn't that what you want? A residual business where deals just fall in your lap. If you prospect your heart out for a few years, you'll get to the top of the mountain where you don't have to prospect anymore. That is the goal. The longer you push that out, the more you try to run away from making calls, the further and further that day is that you don't have to prospect is from you. Get there as quickly as possible, guys, so you can walk away from prospecting. Still make the million dollars a year with very little effort because these people are calling you and not dealing with any other agents.  That is the dream, ladies and gentlemen. So, again, here's my business. I just took you through exactly what I did to build the snowball up to the point. It wasn't necessarily what I was doing. I was collecting emails. I was gathering data. I was sending weekly emails. Yes, I was building the snowball, but I didn't do much different. Anything different, activity-wise, any of these years, it was the resurgence of the market. And we're going to see a resurgence in the next 12 months. This is the moment right here. It's not after the resurgence happens to take advantage of it. It's before. And that's now because this one's going to happen a lot faster. Now, the power of four is this. Every time I go out there and tell a group of people, no matter how many thousands it is, here's what you need to do. Now, go do it. The next week, I get together with them and say, okay, how many of you actually accomplished this and went out here and did that? You know how many actually said that they did it? Four. Every single time. I don't care if I'm talking to four, 10, 100, 1,000, whatever. Four people said, yeah, I went out and read the book or did the fitness challenge or made my calls or whatever it was. So, my question to you is, are you going to be one of the four that go out there and take this information and do something special over the next decade? Because that's what it's going to take. So, there you go, guys. I gave you the blueprint from top to bottom. I hope you enjoyed it. You know, this is just my thoughts on the market. I really, I hope you can tell, I just really want to help you in your business. So, if there's something else I can do, feel free to shoot a comment. You know, message me on Instagram, whatever it is. Reach out to me. Let me know what it is so that I can help you and outside of that. Keep going. This is your year. This is your 2008. I don't want to see you shine. See you in the next video.


Hello, this is Nick from Laptop Media, and today we will show you how to open the HP Elite Book 640G10. To gain access to the internals, you need to undo just five captive Phillips-head screws. Then, lift the bottom panel close to one of the top corners to create a slight gap between the chassis and the metal piece. After that, pry the corner with a thin plastic tool. The rest is easy. Just work your way around all sides of the device. Please remember, it would be of great help to us if you just hit the like button and subscribe to our channel. That would motivate us to make even more and better videos for you. The battery is a 51.3 watt hour model. To take it out, detach the connector from the main board, and undo the four Phillips-head screws that keep the unit in place. It got us through 12 hours and 30 minutes of web browsing or 9 hours and 5 minutes of video playback. To achieve that, you have to select the HP-optimized modern standby power plan that can be found in the Control Panel's Power Options tab. Also, you have to apply the balanced preset in the Windows Power and Battery menu. Make sure that the Max DC performance option is turned off in the BIOS. If not, this will harm the battery life because the Turbo Boost technology will be turned on even when a power adapter is not connected. Storage-wise, there are two M.2 slots. The one on the left side of the battery fits 2230 SSDs or a WAN card for optional LTE connectivity. The second slot is compatible with 2280 Gen4 NVMe's. For memory upgrades, you get two sold-ins for up to 64GB of DDR4, 3200 MHz RAM in dual-channel mode. The thermal system comprises one large fan, a heat pipe, one top-mounted heat sink, and a heat spreader.


Question five, we're going to compare the scenario in which we've reduced the fossil fuel reliance. That's this magenta one. So that we're using 5% of coal, 5% of oil, 5% of gas. Here's our standard control case. We're going to compare this scenario where we reduce fossil fuel reliance to one in which we change the per capita energy. So the first thing we do is to turn off all the switches like that. So we're disabling that. And now we're going to change this per capita energy graph here. I'm going to make this something as close to a straight line as we can. So I'm just going to click on all these little boxes there. It's about pretty close to a straight line, close enough. So now we run the model again. And we see the green curve is the emissions that would result from that scenario. So you can see that the emissions in the year 2100 here are significantly higher than the case where we have reduced our use of fossil fuels. So the answer is to get a better, bigger reduction in emissions from reducing fossil fuels in the way that we outlined in question number four.