Joanne Kozarev is the Vice President of Design and Development for a partner of ours, Western Governor's University, and we're really excited to hear what she's got to say about design and all the cool things they're doing at WGU. Thank you. Welcome, Joanne. So I first, there's a poll that is not, there are three poll questions in the poll, and so if you want to download the, I think they call it the Hoover app, although spelled with a who, W-H-O, which we're really excited about because we of course are the night owls at WGU. So there are owl jokes, you know, throughout the organization because Sage the Night Owl is our mascot. And in the spirit of sports, I'll point out that because we have no sports teams, we are still undefeated, so in everything. So I want to start out with a poll that's not in the app and ask you just to kind of get a read of the room, how many of you feel that you're fairly familiar with WGU's competency-based model and faculty kind of set up? Okay, most of you, so I won't go into a lot of detail because that's not really what I'm here to talk about today, but I have had a couple of people say to me, so do you guys even do alternative credentials? And because we are competency-based, our students move at their own pace, our tuition is what is sort of, it's not my favorite term for it, but the all-you-can-eat subscription model where students can go as fast as they can, but they also have a disaggregated faculty model that allows them to slow down and work with mentors at the point that they most need it. And so alternative credentials isn't something that we're particularly well-known for, although we have built CompTIA certificates and other certifications into our IT program and our curriculum has been designed in teachers' college in ways that allow students to add in endorsements and we've sort of woven some of those things together. But the real answer to the question of do you do alternative credentials at WGU is isn't it obvious that we should? And so it's something that we've been working on and thinking about and it's something that I worked on and thought about in my prior position at University of Texas system. So that is what has had me thinking about these questions for the past four or five years, really. And so just to get a start, and in my poll questions I asked poll questions that I really just want to know the answer to. They're not setting up that much. I'm just really curious. So if you could grab your app and answer the first question which is it's kind of a yes, no, maybe question, the title of one or more of my degrees or credentials is similar to the title I have or the field in which I work. So if we could pull that up and see what people had to say about that, I'm just madly curious. So I'm going to have to walk over here and read it to you. Number one, yes, we had 11 votes that said yes. My degree and my current career are aligned pretty closely. Sort of. 10 votes. And then we had, not even close, I was going to go, girl, please, but then I decided that was appropriation and I should just say not even close, which is where I would have voted if I'd have voted. My degree, I have a degree in Russian and English and teaching English as a second language. I mean, I guess teaching is in there. And then the last one, seven votes for, it's complicated, which might be where I actually belonged. And we've had a few people add, it looks like we have kind of the same trajectory or the same basic split that it's about a third, a third and a third, and then a number of us for whom it's pretty complicated. So that's not a surprise, but it's interesting to see. So let's take a look at the current state of affairs and do you have to switch me back over to the other? There we go. That's the title slide. And higher education today is kind of like a box of chocolates. And that's because I think people appreciate their education. Most people enjoy the process of learning to a greater or lesser degree, but one of the things that happens is once you sign up for a course or a program or a course of study or a certification, lots of times you don't really know what's inside until you're too far in to get out. And so we have students who are getting marshmallow or peanut butter when they really needed Nougat or caramel. And so I think that there is a lot that we can do, and I'm of course here speaking to you today from the role of educator, but I'm going to, or provider, I'm going to try to look at it from a 360 point of view as we go through. So what do I need to point at? Oh, there we go. So what if the future were just as tasty as a box of chocolates, but we actually had a state of affairs where the value of a credential is clear. The cost in terms of time, money, effort, and achievement were evident to us at the outset. And the significance of whatever it is that we've achieved in terms of the impact that we could have, the potential passion and contribution that we can make as a result of that experience or that accomplishment were clear. What if the relevance of whatever learning we're doing or whatever experience we're having was evident not just for the present, but also into the future so that we could make predictions so that students and policy makers and employers and educators and even the inventors, the organizations that make the technology and that make the tools and make the experiences that we put together to help build this future. What if we could make predictions because we could actually see into the relevance of what it is that make up these learning experiences. And then what if the personalized pathways and progressions towards goals were also clear. And this is also important for remixing, which I'm going to talk about several times today, the idea of mixing old skills to make new skills. And just as a quick aside, while I was doing some research for this, I know very little about massive multiplayer online games, but I have some cousins who are really, really into it, like really into it. And so I started poking around some of the things that they do because every time I looked up skills, these would come up. And I was like, what is this all about? These things are built in the ways that I think we need to start thinking of skills because, for example, you can mix them and match them to make whole new skills.  And that is a little bit, I mean almost exactly, like combining communication skills and technical skills to become a social media manager and make sure that your conference is trending in your region. I mean, it's almost exactly the same. No? I think it's close. But I think it's interesting that once again, gaming has kind of found a way to take something that's very complicated in the real world, simplify it, and make it really, really relevant to a lot of people so that they will go after something that they need and build a whole professional, if you want to think about... I mean, my cousin has kind of turned this into a sidekick. And it is worth looking at, I think. I just discovered it three days ago, so I could be totally wrong. But I think that that idea of, like, remixing and putting together those pathways for ourselves is interesting, and once again, the gamers are ahead of us. And then finally, what if the future had an academic and skills-based transcript that could show us the present and the future? It could show us our certifications and our skills, or as one of my colleagues called it yesterday, belt and suspenders. So that's the future I think we're talking about. And just to pause for a second, is there anything about this future picture that's missing that was discussed yesterday or that you've had on your mind that we should also consider as we go forward here? You didn't know I was going to talk to you. That's fair enough. Fair enough. I might do that one or two more times. But for now, let's take a look at the credentialing economy. So in this ecosystem, people are already sending signals, right? Students are sending signals to employers. Employers are sending signals to the market. Education providers are talking to telling students what they can offer. They are trying to find out from employers what they need to offer. All of these things are happening. But it's kind of like the barter system, right? I kind of have my, like, basket of beads and somebody else has their basket of shells and I'm trying to make the connection and say, this is what I need and I know you need that. And we're kind of in the early stages of this economy. And when I showed these slides to one of my colleagues, they said, you know, those gears wouldn't turn if they were really gears. And my first thought was, why did I hire an engineer? And then my second thought was, actually, I kind of like that. All right, because they're not really turning as well as they could, right? That's one of the things we're all here to talk about today is to try and figure out how to make these gears turn a little bit better. Now, when I show you the slide again, they're still not going to turn, but I want you to imagine them turning. So, let's start out. We have another poll. And the question is, how do you define currency? So, if you haven't answered yet, please do. And if you have, we'll pull up those answers in a minute and I'm going to walk over here so I can read them, because... So, we have 21 votes for a medium of exchange and we have five votes for approved... 28 votes for a medium of exchange, approved and accepted, and then a couple of people helping me out with new or up-to-date and in-circulation and then we have 16 for all of these. And that's the notion of instrumentality. Instrumentality communicates or signals what can be purchased with that thing, what can be obtained through that thing. So, it's instrumental in obtaining something. So, for example, if I have a Groupon coupon, I can get something such maybe a kayak trip down the Shenandoah River and I can get that for a much lower rate. It's the instrumentality. It's not just the currency. It's not just the exchange. It's not the fact that it can exchange. It's what can you get in exchange for that thing. So, there's a dimension here that I think it may be looking at different quadrants. So, how friendly is it and how exchangeable is it? How mobile is it? And there's another aspect of this. It might be another vector which is saying, what is the thing that can be obtained by what is its instrumentality? What can it obtain because of that? Just a thought. And again, you know, one of the things I learned, a little garden path. I'll take you down a little garden path. One of the things I learned working with, we did, one of the things we did at the University of Texas system was a, we did all 120 units, including the general education courses through the lens of biomedical science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, traditional university students with, underserved in many ways. And that meant working with the faculty across eight or 10 different academic departments. And what I learned was that for those of us who came up through academia, our discipline is our identity and it is our lens through which we view the world. And so I walked up here looking at this as a linguist, not an economist. And so what you're going to see from me is a lot of talk about, you know, how I think that we may be, I do think currency is the right word, but I think there may be an even better word than we realized. And you've added a dimension to the concept of currency, which I suspect comes from economics. That's mostly what you're going to see here, but I think there are multiple dimensions to each of these definitions. And the more I worked on this, the more I thought, well, it is the perfect word. It's not just a good word. It is the perfect word for the problems that we're trying to solve here. So the first one we'll look at is the most obvious one, which is this idea of a medium of exchange, the official currency of a country. And there are some signals that it sends, and there are some... This is the problem with note cards. They don't keep up. There is this idea of aligning supply and demand. There is also this idea of value and fluctuating value, right? One of the garden paths I will not take you down that I went down was this whole idea of barriers to entry and trade barriers and currency valuation. And I think all of those things are true about any kind of credential. There are credentials that gain and lose value over time. What we really need to do is we need to remove some of those barriers and find ways to efficiently allow that sort of trade to happen. So I think that is one of the reasons that we've started to talk about credentials as currency. But another reason why I think it's really important to look at all of the meetings of currency is another one is the currency of the information. It means up to date. It means new. It means fresh. And I think that that is one of the things one of the messages that credentials send is this idea that somebody who has one is always learning. They are always developing. They have not sort of completed the old model where I'm done with education and now I am fully formed. I was talking to a former partner, I guess. We worked together on a number of projects. He's at AT&T now. And we were having a conversation about this about six months ago. And he said, I'm surprised to learn that I find myself much more interested in people's micro-credentials than their degrees. And he says, you know, I kind of look at the degree and I'm like, good, they have that. But it's really the micro-credentials that he finds himself kind of gravitating to. And I thought that was interesting. Now he's looking at, I asked him where he's seeing them. And he said, usually it's just the traditional resume or sometimes it's in a portfolio. But what that signals to him is that this is someone who's out there kind of staying up to date and staying current. So I think that's another reason why thinking of credentials as currency or the currency of our credentials is an important thing to consider. So this next one is a bit of a stretch. Bear with me. But currency comes from the word current, which can, you can use current to talk about electricity. You can talk about water. You can talk about air movement. You can talk about movement and flow. And so there is an inherent idea in currency of that kind of flow and what's not happening with my picture of the gears, according to Rob. So I think the signal that is being sent here is the idea of progression. And what I think is really important to consider when talking about progression is this idea that we can see where someone has come from but we can kind of also see where they're headed. And that is something that I think more and more it would be wonderful to signal to employers to say this is what I've done so far and here are my plans. But I think it's also important, it's especially important for us as educators to be able to surface pathways to students and perhaps illuminate pathways of which they were unaware and help them see that there are other options out there. And I think that, so, you know, what the student is sort of saying, I know what I can do. I know what the possibilities are and I know how to do them most efficiently. What the employer sees in this idea of circulation or path or flow is I can see what potential student journeys will intersect with my needs so that I know where to use the concept of mining that we heard about yesterday. What do they say fish where the fish are? And I don't know about the rest of you but sometimes when I'm hiring I'm not sure where the fish are. And I think these pathways can help us to coalesce a little bit more about where to mine to find the talent and where to find talent that is currently hidden from us and it's very clear that there's a lot of that. And then for providers, for people who make learning or who offer learning experiences, we know how to make those most valuable because the days of offering learning and expecting people to show up just because but I have the degree and I'm worth listening to if they aren't over they will be shortly. So the last one is this idea of approved or acceptance. That idea has gained currency or that trend, that habit has gained currency. People are doing it, it's happening all the time. And I think that when I made the slides I said that it's signaled official but I've decided that what it signals is authenticity.  I think it's the validation, it's the communication, it's the transcripting piece. There's a complexity to this because we change over time and that first polling question kind of proved it, right? We start out on a path and then we encounter things, we meet people, we have opportunities and we change our direction. Society changes, it has different needs, we fill them and that can mean that if we are actually officially transcripting many experiences that in the past were just resume food it can become a kind of cluttered set of data or information that we need to curate about ourselves. And my favorite example of this is I worked with someone who was a highly competent information technology professional and he happened to also be a highly competent and he told me I am supposed to say it this way classically trained percussionist. But what he really was was a drummer in a rock band and he wanted to be sure that both of those identities could be curated separately and communicated separately because the people that he wanted to think of him as a classically trained percussionist were not necessarily the same people that he wanted to consider him for CIO positions and he didn't necessarily want to broadcast both identities all the time. So I think there is an interesting element there of determining what is in currency with particular audiences as well as this idea of authenticity. So those are the four ideas that as you consider this idea of currency that I think it would be interesting to include in the conversation and I know we'll be continuing conversations about this today so that I would just throw these four ideas out here and maybe that would enrich the conversations we'll be having through the rest of the day. To conclude a little bit here, let's take a look back at our ecosystem. The gears still don't turn. Let's imagine that they do. What I have added here are some ideas that it's not just the three senders and the three types of signals. There are a number of problems that we need to solve here. And I realize if you're in the back, I couldn't read this if I were in the back so I'm just going to read it to you. The learners and employers, the learners need to be able to show their pathways towards goals and they need to be able to curate those. The employers need to better communicate the desired knowledge, skills, and abilities and right now this is a place we're really not super good at, right? We go out and we ask, we might put together a panel of 12 or a panel of 30 or a panel of 40 but we're still trying to put our finger on a moving target. We have data that we can kind of look at the past but it draws on imperfect job descriptions and I think this is an area that we all know there's a lot of growth that could happen in but this may be the first time in history that we've been able to actually believe that we can do this. And then, well, maybe since the guilds when pretty much jobs were go make this and go learn how to make this from this guy. You know, we may kind of be getting back to that space only the scope of what we're making is so much broader than just the leather guy, the metal guy, the house guy, you know. Well and the jam woman and the bread woman and the, let's not leave them out. They were part of their own guilds in a way. Credential definition and verification. This is another area that we need to continue to work on but there has been a lot of work in this area and a lot of really great starts so that we can start to use common languages around these things. What I think is on us and by us I mean those of us who are on the learning experience provider side of the equation is modular, updatable, remixable curriculum. I've been talking to the folks at Skills Engine and some other places that study skills and are really trying to get to skills and they say, you know what? There aren't that many new skills. Yes, I mean you can get super granular and say well, nobody knew Ruby on Rails 15 years ago but 15 years ago people did know programming and maybe you can say well nobody knew a certain type of technique but it's really based on the technique that came before it. What is really different, really different is the new remixing of those skills. The ability to take technical skills and human skills and analysis skills to turn that into a certain kind of decision making. And I certainly feel that that even in my sort of mid-career state has changed significantly in the past five to eight years. Things that I felt like I was born to do now require me to put on new glasses, new lenses and look at things in new ways and tap new individuals that I would not necessarily have had to partner with before. So I think that that idea of making the curriculum modular and remixable so that people can add in what they think they need kind of in real time. I think that that's what's really squarely on us. And then assessment and evaluation because we do want that authenticity piece and we do want our learners to be able with confidence to say this work that I have done has value and we want our employers and our hiring managers to say these people that you have sent us are exactly who you've told us they would be and they have exactly what you have said that you have assessed. So I do think that this ability to assess and evaluate is on us as well but it's also important as much as our learners may hate it it is the important thing that we offer them. And then the personal progressive profile. This actually drives so much of it because right now, let's do something interesting. How many people in the room have one transcript or more, one or more transcripts? Two, put your hand down if you've only got one. Three, four, five, six. I have seven. Eight. Anybody, anyone higher than eight? Did I hear a nine? I thought I heard a nine. And I'm old, that's just me. That doesn't even count my Udacity, it wasn't Udacity, it was Coursera. That doesn't count anything except for I picked up, I took Japanese when I was at Ohio University and I did something else over here. So for today, the effort that it would take to document someone's learning experience under the old system not to mention the number of $25 fees that go along with that, it's a little staggering and so that ability to have a profile that I can keep and that I can curate and share the elements that are most important to whatever story I need to tell about myself I think is an important element to make sure that our learners can not only chart their course but tell their story. Because that's ultimately what I think we want to do about ourselves and about our professional lives. So, all we have to do is identify all of the pathways towards possible goals. We have to identify knowledge, skills and abilities in ways that are easily communicated between multiple sectors and multiple contexts. We need to create modular, remixable, updatable curricula. We need valid accepted assessments that are race and class neutral and that signal true knowledge, skills and abilities. And all of this needs to both point to and draw from a personal progressive profile. And we have to do it at scale. That's it. But, you know, at WGU, I think if we haven't surpassed 100,000 students we have definitely surpassed it but it kind of goes up and down because we keep graduating them, which is awesome. But, you know, there are laboratories out there where we can work on this and there are smart, connected thinking people who are making these connections and there are plenty of students whose future depends on it and who are going to demand it. And if we've learned anything in the past 20 years it's that when the market demands it, someone somehow figures out how to deliver. So I have very little doubt that the next time we're talking or one of the next times we're talking the gears are going to turn. We have one more poll. And again, I'm just madly curious. I have a list of things on the poll. There's six or eight of them. What do you think will most need to change to bring about the credentialing revolution? And so, like I said, there's a whole list. So job descriptions. Will job descriptions need to change? It looks like we have... I've gone suddenly blind. Nine votes for job descriptions. Five votes for technology tools and options. Two votes for definition of competency or mastery. Nine votes for verification and trust tools. Twenty-one votes for concepts of ownership. Oh, I'm backwards. So it's nine votes for credential classification and definition. Six votes for job descriptions. This makes a lot more sense. Two votes for technology tools and options. Eleven votes for definitions of competency or mastery. Twenty-five votes for verification and trust tools. I differ a little bit with you on that one. Two votes for concepts of ownership. Three votes for concepts of ownership. Five votes for other. Maybe we can... I don't know how much time we have left. We've got ten minutes, which is perfect. Okay. Well, that's right on schedule, right? All right. And then one vote for nothing is just going to happen. Hey, a lot of things have just happened. I didn't put that on there by accident, because I think it's a possibility. And then seven votes for bring about the revolution. The revolution is here. So, yeah, that's all I have to share today. I'll leave this slide. I have a beautiful question slide, but we'll go back to this one. What would you like to talk about? And as a former English teacher, I have, like, an endless wait time. So, yes, sir. I was a teacher. Oh, thank you. I was a teacher in my hometown of Winnipeg, Canada, and I moved down here to do grad work state. But I also became a teacher in Hampton, Virginia. To teach in Hampton, Virginia, and I don't think it's changed much now, I had to hire a company in Boston, Massachusetts to go through my transcript and map every course from the University of Manitoba down to what the standards were acceptable in the U.S., knowing that the systems are almost identical. But for most of us, we think, well, you got a bachelor of education, you're good to go. Unless you're not from the United States. So I only bring that up as an example saying, again, when we're talking some technology competence, that's one thing we can put in a box. But we also have to think it on the larger level. But what does it mean for these other occupations that are, dare I say, a much larger thing that still do have the competencies in it? They have to be broken apart. We're just going to have to consider that. So I don't have to pay companies in Boston to look at my transcripts. Well, at WGU, we prepare teachers across the United States, all 50 states and several territories. And my team spends an extraordinary amount of time just making sure that we hit all those requirements. Now, there are ways around a lot of it, but there are, at the end of the day, the states must be honored, right? And so there are multiple sides to that coin. Because on one hand, it's true. Populations differ. Community involvement in education matters, and communities want certain things. What's trending in Nevada in communication right now is family collaboration. So I have to make sure that that's in there. Now, I don't mind having family collaboration in education of teachers, but what's trending in Missouri is different. And you need to sort of honor all of those things if you're going to do things at scale. So when it comes to the complexity of teacher education and medical education, because we have many medical professionals in the United States who cannot practice and yet who might be very competent because of that process of bringing the international credentials over, what did they call it yesterday, a cartel? Anyway, so I think it's a good point. The liquidity of the currency is we're in a pretty non-liquid state once we get past the critical mass. I think we had a pretty compelling argument from people who either were employers or were working with employers that the verification of the actual competencies is the thing they are so desperate to do that they're either doing it themselves as with Michael Saylor or inventing companies and getting business to show how it can be done. So I was interested that you didn't emphasize the importance of new forms of verification that are transparent, that are where we can all see what's in the box and we know what the basis is of the claim. I guess it depends on how you define verification. I've had a lot of conversations with people outside of this area of interest. Whenever we come together, it's a big topic of conversation. But then as soon as you start talking to people who are not... It's entirely possible that they are just not woke yet. They just don't realize how important this is. But when you get outside of the people who are sort of into and excited about the technological possibilities of this, I get a lot of, you know, kind of the... Really? I'm actually... It's good. I mean, I do want to know... I want people to have those credentials and be able to communicate them. But whether or not it's got a stamp of it came from this source and it's unaltered and it's written on the blockchain and all of those sorts of things, that sort of thing they're less concerned about. Now, look into the box and know, am I getting marshmallow or peanut butter? That people are definitely interested in. And the quality of the marshmallow and the peanut butter. I mean, you spoke as an employer a few minutes ago and I was a hiring employer too. The fact of the matter is there's a whole lot of people coming out with credentials without competency. I guess I would argue that that is one of the strongest things. For this revolution to make a meaningful difference, to talent, to opportunity to the future of our society, I think we have to do a whole lot more about making new forms of assessment and making them transparent. And I am absolutely there with you on assessment. I think maybe what's interesting is we could do another study like I just did on currency of the meaning of verification, right? Because there are people who have gold stamps on their certificate and then they get to their workplace and the workplace retrains them. And, you know, that... It's verified. It's authentic. It's verified, but it might not be authentic, right? So I think that's an interesting problem we still need to solve. Yes, sir. I want to follow up on Carol Snyder's good points just made. I think the word currency is a little problematic. You know, it has... It's out there. It's current. It's in currency. It's trending, but I think that, you know, currency, one, it should be good in any shop and they really don't have a right to refuse it, right? And you can sort of tell two nickels equal a dime and so on. There's a metric. There's a pretty common metric throughout that currency. But we take our credentials and they mean different things because they are black boxes because each university has its degree in criminal justice or this or that, and what's inside that box can be very different from one to another. And so we have huge variations within the same so-called credential. And what we need is some sort of verification and you have your wheels up there for the different gears and if you look at where you have assessment and evaluation, to me, that's part of the verification. That's part of the credential. The credential is an attestation. It's not a currency. It's a claim. It's an attestation that says the holder of this credential has these knowledge, skills and abilities and they have been assessed by so-and-so. Maybe there's a third party validation or approval. Maybe it's an accreditation. Think about certifications. There are credit certifications. 90% are not accredited. So just to push back a little bit on the way we use currency, which is a pretty standardized unit of exchange versus credentials as signals that are pretty unreliable right now as to what a person knows and can do. So that's speaking about currency from the perspective of, you know, here it's true, currency is all of those things. My first experience abroad was in the crumbling Soviet Union where the currency did not have those things. It was not hard currency. It could not be traded outside of certain environments. Sometimes you couldn't get Russians to take it for certain transactions. And it had things stamped on it, but they were constantly in fluctuation and that got worse from the time I was there in 1990 until 1995. Over a period of five years, every time I went back, there were more or fewer zeros and I could not figure out whether what I was buying was of solid value. And so I kind of agree with you. It's an academic game to talk about, like, is it the right word? Is it the perfect word? I think there's a reason why it's trending, but I do think that if you've had experiences of emerging economies, which is kind of what we're talking about, it feels a little bit the same. Just having kind of navigated that, fortunately, as a relatively young woman who was kind of like, I don't really understand it anyway, so... What you just described feels very much like what that was like. And if there are people here who've been through areas of inflation and deflation and kind of the lopping off of zeros on currency, you can tell me whether it felt the same way to you or not. But it might be more of a parallel than we realized. We're just in a different place in the economy. And I'm not arguing for that. I'm just throwing it out there. Well, we've got a... Why don't you pick? I don't want to be the one who picks, so... Okay. I just wanted to say that I think that many of these things that we're talking about, verification, understanding what you're getting in the black box, transparency, I just wanted to give a shout out to all the people who are doing really important standards work so that we have a common vocabulary for at least trying to define the currency, the credential transparency description language, the interoperability of being able to understand what's happening in the credential registry, the standards work on comprehensive learner records from IMS Global and, of course, open badges. So if we can at least all get a cursory understanding of what those standards are and why they're important and help other people understand why a community of people adopting those makes a difference. A perfect ending. Thank you.


Welcome. I'm Commander Mark Yale, the Deputy Director for the Naval Staff College and International Programs at the Naval War College, and I've been asked to speak on the upcoming 20th anniversary of the USS Cole attack. On October 12, 2000, I was a Lieutenant on HCL 42, debt one, flying from the USS Hawes in the Arabian Sea. We unexpectedly received a call to return to the ship and shut down. We were told the order came from our commanding officer. The Hawes received tasking to assist the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, after experiencing a refueling casualty. We were familiar with Aden because we had conducted a brief stop for fuel there in August. During our transit Aden, we learned of the attack, the mounting casualties, and the damage to the ship. We arrived the next morning and my task was to take the rib, the rubid rigid hull inflatable boat to the Cole and assess the aviation facilities in case we needed to medivac personnel or fly equipment or personnel over to assist. I remember the size of the blast hole as we went by. When I came aboard the Cole with my lead air crewman, I was taken aback by the look of shock still on faces and in the body language of the crew. You could sense the weight of the situation on every crew member. The other surprising thing I wasn't expecting was how moved the crew was simply to see the small ones flying on the back of the rib. Many were nearly brought to tears by the sight. During the time on board, which was maybe one or two hours, there are many things, too many, that are still vivid memories in addition to those already mentioned. We spoke to numerous ships company and they recounted the brave actions taken by their fellow shipmates to save their fellow crewmanship. The horrific injuries suffered and how they were painfully pulled to safety through the twisted metal that seconds before had been the Mestex, their workspace or burden. There were also reports about those that were known to be killed by the blasts and a few whose whereabouts were still unknown but believed to be deceased. Reflecting back upon that visit, compared to other visits to other ships and squadrons, was the use of the pronouns we and us. Speaking to the crew of the Cole, everyone's comments were wholly inclusive. There was no mention of divisions or departments, simply we, us or the crew. After speaking to the crew, I was introduced to the Cole's commanding officer, Commander Kirk Lippell. After passing on our COs, reading and condolences for the loss of crew and the injured, he simply invited me or directed me to, I can't remember which, go see the whole. Haven't you only been inside a DGG once before? I had a vague idea of how it's spaced and conveyed. The devastation was beyond description. The light streaming in from the blast hole gave it the look of an indoor pool, the light shimmering off the overhead, which was actually the overhead from the deck below. Beyond the carnage surrounding me, I was struck by how calm he was. As he pointed out where we were actually looking at and the remains of the crew members that hadn't yet been recovered. The smell of explosives still saturated the air. Coming back topside, I started inspecting the aviation facilities. The crew were sleeping on the flight deck. The forward warp rep spot was littered with debris, which couldn't be moved until the FBI forensics team arrived and analyzed it. A midships directly over where the attack occurred. There was a section of the weatherdecks that was bubbled up nearly a foot. A watertight door facing aft and entering the forward superstructure was pushed out against the dogs as it was made of rubber and hardened. The force required to create this damage was unimaginable to me. During my cursory look at the aviation facilities, my lead crewman was being a true shipmate in every good sense of that word. Eddie Bowen, Dave Cross and Super Dave were just super to the deck. Just quietly going around to the crew, having them write down email addresses of their friends and family that had no idea of their thing on anything he could find. Knowing super, I'm sure he found a way to make them laugh as well. He came back to Haas and emailed every address telling them that their sailor was okay. The Haas then set up an email address that families could send messages to. Those emails were printed out and taken to the coal every day. Two of our other pilots also helped out with efforts on or around the coal. One pilot, a converted surface warfare officer, served as a boat officer on a rib which brought a security around the coal. The other, a part enlisted GSE, helped with damage control efforts inside coal. When I reflect on the coal, I'm amazed and proud of the honor, courage and commitment exuded namely by the coal crew and by all the others I played a small part in keeping the coal afloat and eventually getting her back into service. As a 20th anniversary of this tragic event years, please join me in a moment of silence to remember the 17 sailors that made the ultimate sacrifice of that day.


What is going on everybody Astos here welcome back some other videos so in this video We're gonna be doing an overall market update looking at the Dow Jones the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq We're gonna be talking about one trade that I made today on the 1st of February in 2019 as well as taking a look at some other stocks ETFs that performed well or poorly today and Some that I see potential in for this upcoming week But before we do get into this guys if you find value in these videos Yes, you I'm talking to you on the other side of this computer If you find value feel free to smash that like button guys It really really does help support the channel and help the channel grow and I forever Appreciate all you guys out there for rocking with me subscribing like in the video So smash that like button guys and let's get right into the topic of today's video so we have about 13 minutes left today, you know in the market and Needless to say guys in terms of the indices right here the SPX the Dow and the Nasdaq It was a pretty boring day in the stock market. We can see literally guys The SPX is not even up any amount of percentage points right now It's literally up one penny now is down about 15 cents So not much movement in terms of the SPX today guys at all honestly the Dow Jones is up around $31 right now with about 12 minutes left in the market up around 0.13% barely any movement at all But the Nasdaq honestly has the most movement out of the three major indices. It's down about 0.5% down about $37 and 25 cents as of right now So what is this telling me guys, you know in terms of the overall markets right now? Pretty much what these technicals are telling me is that we're gearing up for a little pullback in the overall markets Right, we've seen a lot of the major stocks over this past week do very very well We've seen Tesla come back up. We've seen Facebook do absolutely phenomenal Apple did very well You know a lot of the big-name stocks out there did pretty well this week, right? And you know all these earnings, you know pump some optimism into the market Honestly guys and we saw a lot of the indices fly up a good chunk this week just to give you guys You know a little bit of context here. We started off this week. What what date was this? We can see we started off this week the 25th Let's say the low point was at around 26 24 in terms of the SPX, right? We can see the high point of this week was that was at around 27 16 So overall guys this week we had about a 3.5 percent gain in the S&P 500 Which is absolutely fantastic for just a week span remember guys, you know the S&P 500 Historically brings around 8-10 percent something like that. So the fact that we did 3.5 percent in one week, right? You know, that's pretty big considering we do 8 to 10 percent on a yearly basis Historically in terms of the SPX, but you know For judging on these technicals right here guys, we already know we broke out of that resistance I've been talking about this in the past couple of videos the resistance of the 180 S&A Which has been a resistance over the past couple of months since we did start selling off in the beginning of October We had three separate occasions that we struggled to get and we failed to get above that 180 S&A in October in November and of course in December right before that drastic decline that we had all the way to the bottom here Which occurred right around Christmas time in 2018 and since then guys Of course, we know that we've had about a month a little bit over a month at this point of Straight recovery in the SPX and the overall markets the SPX in particular guys is up around 14 13 14% from this bottoming out point right now Giving us, you know a great start to the year of 2019 in the stock market If you're a long-term investor if you have a long-term portfolio There's a really really really good chance that you are green overall in the year of 2019 but like I said earlier on in this video guys, you know, we are gearing up for a slight pullback here guys We have you know a slight negative day today It looks like we pushed to that higher high at around 2716 and now we're slowly starting to pull back so in terms of next week guys You know, I'm gonna be waiting to see a if we are gonna pull back and of course we can judge this by the futures What large caps are looking like pre-market hours, right? If they're red if the futures are red obviously We're starting to pull back and I'm gonna keep a close eye of attention here on this 50s To may on this 20-day one-hour chart which has been a support over the past couple of weeks really since that bottoming out point You know back in December at the start You know of 2019 roughly, right? So let's say we do end up pulling back here and we get to this level at around 2675 keep an eye and see if we're gonna hold that old resistance at around 2675 as a new support right on top of this 50s in May But let's say we break it right which there is a chance anything is possible, right? That is gonna be the first step the first You know really the first point of confirmation that we're slowly starting to decline and Start to downtrend in price honestly guys if I'm being quite frank with you here This is the you know the support that we're gonna have to keep an eye on for that But let's say we pull back we end up holding the 50s in May and we start to push back up You know, that's gonna be a good sign that we saw a slight pullback And we're continuing the uptrend guys, so that's pretty much it, you know, we are flat right now I am expecting a little pullback due to the RSI being a bit overbought right now We had a lot of great earnings reports that popped up a lot of stocks this week, right? And I do expect some short-term money some short profit taking to be taken, you know This upcoming week potentially causing that pullback so in terms of the Dow guys, it's very similar, right? We're overbought here on the RSI. We broke out of that 180 SMA resistance That's been our resistance over the past couple of months We've been talking about this in every single video and we are still holding that uptrend on the 20-day one-hour chart here If I can get you know, get rid of all this jazz here You guys can see it a little bit excuse me a little bit better and this is not the 20-day chart This is the 20-day chart. So take a look at this guys, you know That uptrend is still intact We pushed to that higher high at around 25 193 that we can see here and now we're gearing ourselves for a pullback So keep an eye guys on this trend line on this 50 SMA on the Dow Jones Are we gonna break below it? Possibly continuing that downtrend possibly getting back into that downtrend that we were in a couple of weeks ago Or are we gonna hold this as a new support? Are we gonna start curling back up here which could give a good dip buy on some of the Dow 30 companies? You know some that I already see potential in including J&J That's just a quick little you know tip there J&J is you know looking pretty good right now in terms of the stock The technicals if it does end up pulling back, you know That could be a good entry point in terms of J&J But we'll talk about that in a couple of minutes here But you know the Dow guys just keep an eye on this and of course if we break it just like the SPX That's going to be a continuation or the start rather of a downtrend that we haven't seen You know in the month of January and in the year of 2019 at all right So the Nasdaq on the 20 day one hour chart We broke that resistance at around 68 20 that we've been talking about over the past couple of videos And for those of you guys that don't know or haven't been watching the videos or just a new subscriber here You know the Nasdaq has been trading in this horizontal channel really from the 18th of January All the way up to around the 30th so 11 days in a row guys the Nasdaq was playing in this channel We can clearly see the support being at around 66 20 and the resistance being at around 68 20 So there was a $200 window that you know the Nasdaq was bouncing up You know holding in between right and the fact that we broke out of this I'm pretty sure this was um, you know obviously due to a lot of the big name stocks doing pretty well this week It pushed the entire market up We broke out of that resistance and now we're trending below this other Resistance from a couple of weeks back. Let me actually show you that one here So if we can zoom in a bit we can see this resistance stems back from 1116 November 16th back in 2018 We were selling off. We held this point a bit and then we broke below it So that's making it a resistance point right here guys and we can see clearly guys You know, it's been a resistance from where the the fact that we got rejected by it again Back here in the middle of December and now of course we're testing it right now So if we do end up breaking out of here guys, which again, there is a chance if we break out of this We're gonna be trading in this other horizontal channel between 68 20 ish 68 50 up to around 7100 so if we do end up breaking here guys, there is a chance we run all the way back up to around $7100 in terms of the Nasdaq Futures so guys, what did I trade today? We got the market analysis out of the way the gist of it is that I'm waiting for a pullback some short-term money Possibly coming off the table next week in terms of profit taking and some of these large cap stocks Now let's talk about what I personally traded today on the 1st of February And if you guys read the title Cron was in the title and that's exactly what I personally traded today for a 1.5% Profit and for those of you guys that don't know Cron is a marijuana stock This is a stock a company. I should say that just got invested into by What's the ticker MO? Altria right Altria the big tobacco company they invested around What was it like 1.8 billion dollars taking a 45 percent ownership in this marijuana company and literally guys ever since this happened? Cron has been on fire. It's been ridiculous guys I read that in the year of this year that we're in right now in 2019. The stock is literally up nearly 85 90 percent at this point actually did it double guys we can see honestly Yeah, I'm mistaken it doubled it went from 1070 all the way up to 21 79. I'm pretty sure if my math's right Yeah, that's that's a double guys. The stock has doubled literally in the past 30 days So the stock has positively reacted to this acquisition The 45 percent stake into the company and honestly guys, I've been talking about Cron over the past couple of weeks I made a video, you know right around here as it was curling back up and calling this one out and ever since then guys You know, of course the deal with Altria pushed it up I'm not some kind of magician some god that just knows when things are gonna happen when things are gonna happen But it kind of worked in my favor a bit here, right? We started to see the cup and handle right or not really the cup and handle the cup pattern starting to form and then once We broke that 14 level guys. It's like we broke out right because from there from this point That was a resistance from the past right we can see multiple different occasions where it broke and from there It's been constant push literally from that resistance break. We've saw another eight seven eight dollars Run in terms of the shares prices. So overall guys, you know Cron right now. It's looking absolutely Insane and where did I trade it guys? Well, I traded traded it this morning as We were popping above this 50 SMA. I did not get in this original pump up from 19 or $20 rather Although we up to 2150 I ended up getting in on this second pullback this pretty big pullback Honestly, and I called this one out in the chat as it was pulling back We saw a nice profit margin open from 2150 down to around 2090 at 3.16 to be exact and from there guys all I was waiting to see guys literally all I was waiting for is the Hold above this 50 SMA Support rather to start off the day and there goes the markets ding ding ding and we saw you know This was a support to begin the day at around 2018 we held above it and honestly all throughout pre-market hours We held above it and we bounced very nicely We pulled back and we held above it again literally some candlesticks were right here consolidating This was for about like eight minutes of consolidation Then we started to see a pump back up and that's when I ended up getting in guys I believe I got filled at around $21 and six seven cents roughly and from there I did not add more money to my position because this was really a quick scalp trade It literally took about a couple of minutes to get out of this one But from there, you know, I wrote it up for 1.5% profit ended up selling off at around $21 and 35 to 36 37 cents right around there in the trade literally lasted me about like 20 Maybe 15 10 15 20 minutes So not really long of a trade at all here. Honestly, it was more of like 10 minutes to be completely honest because we can see You know from 2107 when I got in ended up selling off right around here That was literally you can see the clock here on thinkorswim. That was about a 10 15 minute move in terms of cron Ended up taking my profits there and calling it a day because for those of you guys that didn't watch yesterday's video I advise you to go check that video out I didn't trade yesterday because I didn't see any opportunities open up to me And I do get a lot of questions about should you trade every single day? If you guys want to know that if you're a new subscriber that has not seen my answer yet Go check out that video, but you know, I didn't trade yesterday So I was being very cautious and patient today to see a setup that I liked We got it here 1.5% profit very very solid day in terms of Cron so guys in terms of chronic now, there's really no telling when it's going to pull back We can see here, you know, it's completely oversold But it has been oversold over the past couple of weeks and the stock market traders investors Really haven't given a crap right because they got a big investment from Altria this is honestly huge news for the cannabis company Cron and That's just stop the stock up 100 percent literally 100 percent in the year of 2019 So when are we gonna get a pullback guys? You know probably soon probably soon because we're gonna see some profit taking at some point guys, you know You got to understand there's investors out there There's some short-term traders out there that are up heavily right now on Cron They're up heavily on either call options or you know on actual shares And they're gonna at some point take their profits off the table and if enough people do this, right? If a lot of people started doing this, especially if we get even more overbought Let's say it pushes to the 22 23 dollar level, you know people start taking their profits. What's that gonna happen? Well, the stock is gonna sell off pretty aggressively, you know similar to what we've seen here guys on a smaller scale You know Cron shot from five dollars all the way up to twelve dollars And then it pulled back all the way back to seven dollars and this is something that's happening right now, right? We see, you know a pulled back to ten dollars just like it did here It started off the run at five dollars, right? We doubled in price Literally we doubled in price right now we can expect maybe a pullback back to like 13 dollars, right? That's not too out of the you know out of the loop in my personal opinion because in the back You know the back couple months we see here, you know, we pushed up doubled our position, right? Then we pulled back on top of that previous resistance So if we pulled back all the way to this previous resistance at 13 dollars again, you know I wouldn't be too surprised and that's a huge move. I know that's a pretty bold statement But again, we've seen these stocks do it in the past and honestly guys, you know marijuana stocks They're extremely extremely volatile and I would just would not be surprised if that ended up happening So let me take a look at some tickers I want to talk about it very quickly at the end of this video and then I'll send you guys off on your way and also Comment down below. Let me know what you guys ended up trading today this week How did this week treat you in the stock market drop a comment down below? Let me know did you buy any long-term positions? Did you you know trade any stocks? Let me know down below. I would have loved to know so a couple of stocks I want to talk about today one being Sony. We saw Sony reported their earnings I didn't dive too deep into what they ended up reporting in terms of their earnings But we saw their stock actually took a huge pullback today a very very big pullback It's down about 8% right now and this opens up a potential play This upcoming week in my personal opinion, right because we always see not always But sometimes we see stocks that get pummeled one day Sometimes they have a bounce back day the next day right and this could potentially happen in terms of Sony guys, right? We saw literally it was at $52 and we backed down all the way to $45 that obviously opened up around what like a 12% margin So on Friday guys, especially or not Friday on Monday if this consolidation continues And if we slowly start to push up maybe into the 46 $47 range This could be a potential play maybe back to $50 maybe $48 who knows But the whole idea here is to potentially catch a bounce back up play in terms of Sony So let me quickly set an alert here. I want to be notified. Let's say is at or above We could put one at $47 so Sony guys, that's one that I'm watching heavily We saw micron has been doing pretty well over the past couple of days as well today up around 3.6 1% and for those you guys that don't know Micron is one of my holdings in my long-term portfolio and the fact that we're breaking out of this downtrend Makes me very happy because I was down around 30% on this long-term Investment in micron and you know now that we're starting to gain some ground I'm liking this in terms of my long-term Portfolio but talking about it on more of a short-term trading basis. It's looking very good right now, right? We broke out of that 180 SMA We're pushing up higher highs higher lows all that uptrend stuff that we like to see But what I want to see now is a potential pullback to bring that RSI down a little bit to get a better entry point in My swing trading portfolio Maybe we pull back down to around 38 dollars, which would put us right at that 50 SMA I think that would be a pretty safe bet for an entry point and a potential swing trade in micron picker symbol and You we already talked about Cron. Let's talk about Tesla guys because Tesla Has been doing pretty well ever since it dropped down a couple of days ago So we see Tesla dropped all the way down here This is when they reported that 7% job cut we hit around 280 and now we're trending all the way back up to $315 guys So what am I waiting for in terms of Tesla if we can see here on the short-term chart? It's nothing but nice uptrend higher highs higher lows over the past couple of days So what would be nice here guys is to see a potential pullback Maybe back to 305 308 ish for a nice swing trade because we've seen Tesla do this a lot in the past They sell off heavily end up finding support end up pushing back up right literally this pattern that we see right here Has been done in the past we can see here You know we got that pattern again here as well here as well here as well You know there's a bunch of different scenarios where Tesla has pulled back found support curled back up And then ended up filling that entire gap So that's what I'm waiting for in terms of Tesla and I do see a lot of potential in Tesla for Next week so to end off this video guys Let's talk about one more and that's going to be based on the gold futures We see here are the gold futures. I've pushed up J. Nug has been doing very well But I actually want to talk about JD ST Which is the bare ETF for the gold futures meaning whenever the gold futures are going down in price JD ST is going up in price so we can see here guys You know we pushed up to 1330 and now we're slowly starting to sell off So if we do end up selling off guys, you know, maybe back to 1310 1315 bringing that RSI down a bit this could open up a nice margin on JD ST and of course guys if we do end up, you know getting that pullback We can play JD ST on the upside right and then once we find support on the gold futures If we find support to continue the uptrend right we can hop into J Nug which at that point would be a pretty good entry point So that's pretty much it guys for these couple tickers that I'm watching I'm gonna be covering more tickers on Sunday's video. So keep an eye if you're new subscribe to the channel for Sunday's video I talk about different stocks ETFs that I'm looking to buy invest trade-in every single Sunday For that upcoming week and we'll get into more depth on more stocks and ETFs then so if you guys enjoyed this video Feel free to smash that like button leave a comment and subscribe Follow me on Instagram as well as on Twitter join our discord group chat as well as our Facebook group all of those are linked down below In the description box, I'll catch you all in the next video. Thanks for all the support all the love. Peace out


I just discovered this this afternoon. I wish I'd heard about it earlier. But it seems like The Washington Post has launched a smear campaign against Alex Epstein. Now, I think you all know Alex Epstein is a good friend of mine. He's been on the show several times. He's about to come on the show again in a few weeks to talk about his new book. He is the author, of course, of the Marquis of Fossile Fuels, and he's got a new book coming out next month, which we will be promoting on my show. He is somebody that I hired that I met when he was still a college student at the age of 21, I think, or 21 or 22. He became, he was my co-author on several essays that I wrote that are published. I hired him to the Iron Man Institute. I pursued him. I actively recruited him and then hired him into the Iron Man Institute. When he was very young, I can't remember if he spent, I think he spent six years or eight years, I can't remember, at the Iron Man Institute working for me writing, speaking, and getting trained. He then decided to focus on energy and leave the Iron Man Institute to do it himself, which I thought was a courageous and ambitious move. He became an intellectual entrepreneur. He has done phenomenally well. He's written this amazing book. And he has really changed the debate within the energy industry about fossil fuels, about climate change, about the political intellectual philosophical efforts to destroy our civilization by shutting down fossil fuels. Alex is courageous and incredibly smart and articulate and thoughtful. He really has a way of engaging in a way of thinking about problems that is fresh and original and new. And I am one of his fans. I'm one of his fans and fan of the work he does. The Washington Post picked up some kind of comment he made or something he wrote when he was 18. And they've interpreted it in a way that suggests that Alex is a racist. That is bizarre.  That is insane. Alex is not a racist. Again, I've known him since his early 20s, since his college days when I visited Duke and gave a lecture there. He has worked for me. We have had, I don't know, hundreds of hours of discussion, debate, disagreement, agreement, work together on essays. And never could you think of Alex as being anything close to a racist. He's the exact opposite.  Action by the Washington Post. It is just an attempt to character assassinate Alex because of his political and because of his philosophical positions. It is an attempt to make him out to be something he is not in order to try to discredit the truth that he is writing about. It is an attempt. And this is where I think you guys can help. This is a clear attempt to destroy the launch of his book. This is a clear attempt to smear him so his book does not do well and does not become a bestseller. You can help. If you don't like what the Washington Post is doing, if you think canceling people because of their point of view, particularly a true point of view, is wrong and evil and character assassination in the name of a political ideology is wrong and evil. Then the best thing you can do is buy the book. I don't get a percentage of royalties. I'm not doing this because of percentage. I'm doing this because it's the right thing to do. Go to Amazon right now and pre-order Alex Epstein's latest book. The title alludes me right now. I apologize. It is midnight after all in London. But just go and search Alex's book and search the latest book that is coming out now. And by pre-order it. Let's defeat the Washington Post by making Alex Epstein's book. It's called Fossile Future. Fossile Future, thank you Scott. Called Fossile Future. Thank you Pablo and thank you all the rest of you. You can pre-order it now. You can help make it a bestseller. You can stick it to the Washington Post. You can stick it to all of our enemies, all the people who want to silence me, want to silence Alex, want to silence anybody who has a rational perspective and wants to present new ideas, true ideas, ideas that challenge the status quo, ideas that challenge the establishment. You can stick it to them by going right now, right now to Amazon and buying the book. You should buy the book anyway because it's a great book and you'll find it really, really interesting. There's a blurb by me. I don't think it's on the black cover. Maybe it's on the inside, but I did write a blurb for the book. So the book is excellent. I've read it. So go, you can pre-order it on a Kindle, you can pre-order it on, you know, but get a hard copy, Alex will sign it. You'll enjoy the fact that you have this physical piece of an important book that might change the world. Because suddenly if we don't listen, if the world does not listen to Alex when it comes to fossil fuels, then the world is gonna be in a lot more shape than it is today. Cancer culture, we can fight it. I said this yesterday at the event. The way to fight cancer culture and the way to find wokeness, the way to fight wokeness is to ignore it in the sense of tell them, screw you, I'm gonna continue to talk. I don't care what you think.  I don't care if you wanna silence me. I don't care about your wokeness.  Your methods is wrong and your content is wrong. And if everybody who had an unpopular idea, if everybody who had an idea that wanted to be canceled, and we're talking about mainstream people, because this is not, they wanna cancel so many of us. If all of us stood up, it all of us said no, just like J.K. Wollins does. Now, J.K. Wollins granted is doing it from a position where she has a lot of wealth. But if all of us did it, if we just said no, if we just in a sense ignored them, if we just continue to speak, if we just continue to present, if we just continue to write, and if we supported the people we value, like buying Alex's book, then they fail. They lose, we win, and it's over. That's the reality. That's the reality. Don't cancel the cancel, the cancel cultists. Don't cancel them. No, we don't, you know, there's no reason to. Ignore them. Keep speaking, keep saying what you believe. Don't cower is the point. The reason cancel culture is successful is because too many people cower to it. That's what makes it possible. That's what gives them energy. That's what gives them prominence is that people cower to it. Don't cower. Speak, speak, speak, speak. Todd, thank you, $100. He says, just pre-ordered the book, excellent. Through Amazon Smile, providing a donation to ARI. Excellent. We'll be using Amazon Spine for this. So don't let them get to you. Screw them. I mean, they want to protest, protest. They're not gonna silence any of us. They're not gonna silence Alex. I know Alex. They're not gonna silence the other objective assistants with the ARI. They're not gonna silence me. They're not gonna silence us. We will continue to fight. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran book show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. You get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support.  Also, if you'd like to see the Iran book show grow, please consider sharing our content and of course, subscribe, press that little bell button right down there on YouTube so that you get an announcement when we go live. And for those of you who are already subscribers and those of you who are already supporters of the show, thank you. I very much appreciate it.


Welcome folks, we have the Dow Industrial trading up $165, Nasdaq's up $153, S&P's up $26, Gold Gold contract flat at $19.46 an ounce, you get Silver Dow 33 cents, $23.69 an ounce, LightSuite crude up $1.5, $79.48, a barrel, notes and bonds, 10-year note, down 8 ticks, trading $1.419, $30.08 at $130.05 in Kingdala, Kingdala trading up $90.16, $101.930, Euro at $108, yen is at here, at a price point of $129, the British pound is at $123 to $1.00 US. Let's get over to the cues first because this is lining up so nice folks, it's pretty amazing. The cues, okay, the ABC structure in the cues is $298.24, to be exact, okay. We've hit $297.65, we're $297.65 right now, I expect you're going to get it right into the clothes man, this is about as cool as you can get because you're over the swing point, the swing point here is going to be the $296, you're not going to have the volume, it's not even close man, the swing point is $80 million, you're only at $39 million right now. So bottom line is that this thing is setting up for next week to sell, sell, sell in a monster way. We take a look at the spy, same setup in the spy, bottom line with the spy is going after the higher swing, the highest swing out in the spy now is $410, we're $407. Go to the gold contract, we take a look at the gold contract, gold contract out here today's flat, bottom line you got a high out here that was generated at a price point of $19.52, you got a low of $19.33, bottom line you got a sideways move, you got light volume. It's going to be all about the dollar next week I suspect. Why? Because the dollar almost got a bid this morning, but this has been happening all week. The bottom line hasn't been able to catch a bid. We take a look at it intraday, what you're going to see when we start it off, all bad news, futures are basically not up like they are right now, and all that took was that dollar to back off from the 102, 189, which it did, it backed off just to understand this, bottom line only 200 ticks, but yet that was enough for the broad market to go finish these ABC structures on the way up. So pretty cool man. And then inside of the NDX, if you want to see something that's wild folks, it's all the dead, it's the worst stocks in the world that are running the NDX, well not Tesla. Well Tesla's coming off the bottom too, Lucid is up 46%, Tesla's up 12, Rivian's up 10, that's what's shaking it man, shaking it and baking it. Stay right there folks, come right back.


y libraries were used and a big space opened up in that library because computers had gotten teeny and the demographics had gotten small and we don't have as many teenagers, would the town then have a stake in how that building could be used because we partly owned it? As a taxpayer, I feel a little odd. I understand I really benefit from the Jones, but on the other hand, I feel a little odd outright giving that much money in taxpayers. Tell people you were born here. I was born in Amherst. I've spent a lot of years paying taxes. I've used the Jones Library. I love it, but so that's basically my question. How do we make sure that the town actually has a bigger stake in that if we're going to finance it to that extent and it's a nonprofit? Thank you. Thank you. Ken Farber, you have your hand up, I assume you would. Yes, thank you very much. I can't speak authoritatively about this. Perhaps Paul has already started to talk to the town's lawyers about it, but I have looked, this is not the first time this issue has arisen and it was successfully solved in 1993 because the same transaction occurred by a series of documents which clearly protected the town's interests but without giving an ownership interest in the property. And I think you should feel reassured that the same kind of documents can be drawn for this occasion also. Thank you. And thank you for referring to those previous documents. Are there any other questions or comments from the audience? Not just questions, but comments, statements, anything. I just wanna point out that I think at our high point tonight, we had 73 people in attendance in the audience and we now are still have 32. And I wanna thank all of the consultants who have joined us today and the trustees. Austin, would you like to adjourn the trustees? I would, but I wanted to say a special word of thanks to Athena whose efficiency and skills are remarkable. Thank you Athena for making this happen and for keeping me from being outside for three hours on a Saturday. So thanks Athena for that. So I'd like to move that the Board of Trustees of the Jones Library adjourn. Is there a second Bob Pam? Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed say no. Jones Library Board of Trustees are adjourned. Have a, have a. We would, the council would like to thank all of you for being here, but also Athena for keeping us on track and online. The town council is adjourned.


All right, I think we might as well get started. It's 11.20, we have 30 minutes, which is not a lot of time, so we're gonna get started. My name is Felix. I work at Slack as a senior staffer on Slack's runtime team, which is responsible for co-maintaining Electron. I mostly focus on outreach and education. The actual engineers are sitting down here. But I'm gonna talk a little bit about what Electron is, why it is, and we'll show a little bit of how you would build your first teeny tiny app. I'm gonna build a tiny code editor. It's not gonna be anything advanced, but just so you get a feeling for how someone would build something with Electron. And before we get into this talk, I usually want to motivate the whole thing a little bit, because one of the biggest concerns I have today is that there is this notion of JavaScript being inherently slow, or Electron apps being inherently slow. And I have this feeling that JavaScript today works a little bit like CGI, in the sense that it's bad when people notice it, but I'm convinced that most people don't notice in how many places JavaScript can actually be found. And I've brought just a few of my favorite examples. This one is the one that surprises people the most, but the user interface in Battlefield 1 is a TypeScript and React application. The little ammunition counter, that whole thing, it's all React. It's actually backed by MobX with about 1,000 observables. And the thing that I always like to point out here is that as someone who comes from native development, I've been beating this, we should do web technologies from for about 10, 15 years now. Obviously we're at a JavaScript conference, but there's this understanding that JavaScript is supposedly easier and maybe not as good as native technologies. I can assure you that the people working at DICE do know a thing or two about native development. They're quite good at building complex native applications. But there's a reason why they chose TypeScript and React to build a user interface, and that is that the web really is one of the best technologies we have today for building user interfaces that contain information. It's just really, really good at it, right? That's a very important point. And the other example I have is from a similar point of view, it's the NVIDIA GeForce Experience. If you have a Windows device that has an NVIDIA graphics card, you have this application installed. It comes with the drivers. And the NVIDIA GeForce Experience comes with not only web components, but also Node.js. Every single NVIDIA driver contains a version of Node.js. And it's used for communication between the GPU and applications and NVIDIA tools. So things like the NVIDIA in-game experience, where you can record things, all of that is handled via Node.js. And this is an interesting use case for me because we often talk about Node.js as being cross-platform or JavaScript being cross-platform. NVIDIA doesn't really necessarily care about all of that. It's just a really convenient way to write this kind of stuff. And again, I love this NVIDIA example because the NVIDIA people, too, have a whole plethora of coding languages to choose from.  If only there was anything else we could use. They've chosen this tool because it is really the best one for the application. And then lastly, the Adobe Creative Suite, which is sort of in the way that they designed their cross-platform solutions a little bit like the grandfather of Electron. Because the Adobe Creative Suite was one of the first applications that shipped with the Chrome content module and Node.js embedded.  It's not the whole application, but they do power the plugin experience with those two tools. And the reason they did that is to allow plugin developers, including Adobe itself, to build cross-platform experience that can hook into the native experience. That was the idea, right? We didn't really have a solution for building semi-native code that could hook into the operating system and also build some kind of user interface for plugin developers. So they chose those two technologies. And then lastly, a few latest, a few latest came all the electron applications. There's a few famous examples that you may have heard of. Visual Studio Code is sort of our poster child. Slack is the one that I work on. But there's also ones that I find personally more interesting as an ex-Microsoft person. The install of a Visual Studio itself, the big Visual Studio is written in an electron application, which is one of my favorite stories. But there's so many other ones, right? WhatsApp, I personally built a little Windows 95 emulator in electron. There's dozens of applications out there. And chances that you're running an electron application on your notebook are actually pretty high. I just want to do this real quick. How many of you are running either Visual Studio Code, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, or Adam on your device? Nice, cool. See, that makes us very happy. Isn't that exciting? So whenever you give this talk, and it's gotten better over the years, but it's certainly at the beginning, did I just lose the display? All right, that's gonna be difficult. What do we do? Any ideas? Do we have any AV people here? Yeah, yeah, they're coming. Yeah? There they are. Howdy. We just lost our presentation. Okay, cool enough, that was easy. Literally just press one button. Thank you. Okay, so whenever I give this presentation, the reaction isn't great. And it wasn't great before we started working on this electron thing. Before that it was Windows JS, this notion of running Windows applications and web technologies. But there's a real reason for why we're doing it, right? And the primary reason that I wanna point out is that most of the people working on electron and even the people using electron today would gladly choose something else. On electron itself, we have a bunch of native developers. The Slack runtime team is made up entirely by native developers who then learn JavaScript. We chose this tool, not because we didn't have anything else available, but because we tried everything else and everything else is terrible. There's really no other way to say that, which pains me, but especially if you wanna build a cross-platform application that is supposed to run on Windows 7 and up, which is a big one, Windows 7 was released the same year as the iPhone 3, which by the way had the headline feature of copy and paste and sending pictures via text messages. That's how all this operating system is. So if you wanna support that operating system together with the modern Windows systems and Mac OS and Linux, there really isn't much. And there certainly isn't much that doesn't require for you to build a bunch of native applications for each platform. So with that being said, what is Electron? Electron is a combination of three major components. The first one being the Chrome content module. This is in your head basically in an analog to Chromium, right? It's the anything Chrome deems necessary to build a browser minus everything that is Google specific. So no Google profiles, but everything you need to turn JavaScript, HTML and CSS into pixels. And then we have Node.js, the V8 runtime we all love dearly, right? And then we have a very thick layer of C++ around it.  Those are things like interacting with a native window object or sending native notifications or interacting with a touch bar, whatever you might need. There's a pretty thick layer of C++ that Electron comes with that allows you to do that cross platform. So how do you actually use all of that, right? That's the demo part.  And because Visual Studio Code is essentially a poster child, what I wanna do is I wanna tell you about Monaco Editor, which you might already know. It's very possible, but Monaco Editor is a thing implemented in Microsoft a bunch of years ago as Visual Studio Online, which didn't really work out and eventually became a part of Azure websites.   And at that time, someone made this joke of, oh, if you put that in a window and give it to people, they're gonna use it. Which was a funny joke, but then they did it. So that's how we have Visual Studio Code today. So we're gonna do the same thing, right? This is how many electronic applications begin. They start as a website or a web application that is extremely powerful. And then eventually someone goes, oh, this could be an amazing desktop application if only it could do X, right? And X could be whatever you want because Node.js allows you to write in whatever you want. If you wanna write C or C++ or anything else, we have a lot of objective scenes like desktop applications. You can do that. You have native Node add-ons. But that's usually how it begins. In the case of Visual Studio Code, the most obvious thing that happened was this would be a great text editor if only it could read and save files, which is one of the basic features of a text editor, which in 2019 you can actually do with a browser, but certainly when Visual Studio Code started, you couldn't. Right? And if you think about the editor today, it has a native debugger, right? All kinds of features that you can't really do in a website. So let's actually do that and go through the motion. What I have here is the most simple of, the most simple of index files in index.js. And we're gonna start by turning that into a Node package. There we go. So now we have a package JSON. And in this package JSON, what we would normally do if we were to build a Node application is that we define the start script, right? And for most applications, that would be Node. Node is sort of the runtime that runs our JavaScript. Right? So when we execute this application with an NPM start, what happens is that Node reads our index.js, which right now only has a console log, and then eventually executes it. So to turn this into an electron application, the first step we take is extremely simple. We NPM install electron, which will install electron as a dependency. It's a fairly straightforward process. We download electron for your current platform. And then in the package.json, we replace our Node with electron. When we execute this application, with that correct writing on start, what happens now is that more or less the same thing happens. When you boot up electron, we start something called the main process, which to you might look and feel a lot like a normal Node process. There's one important difference. The first one is that you can now see electron down here. We are an actual application. And the other one is that the script doesn't immediately exit. But otherwise, this is basically Node. If you want to require Fs, you can do that. And you can use this, any given Node script will basically run here, right? You have everything else that you have normally available. And this is our main process. Once we've started this main process, we also boot up everything we need for Chrome. So those are typical things like the GPU process. And then eventually we can start additional renderer processes, which for us are Windows. So when you want to build a desktop application, one of the most important pieces of primitives you have is the user interface, the window that you're going to start painting things in. And the way electron solves that is that it should feel very familiar to anyone who's used to Node applications in that you already know the Fs module, you know the Utah module. We have one additional one that is called electron, right? So you can do this.  The first one being the app module and the second one being the browser window module. And those are the ones we're going to use for a second. So the application object allows us to interact with the application's lifecycle on your operating system. What I mean by that is when you start an electron application, this main process never has any user interface. It's always invisible on Windows. You don't even have anything in your task bar. But we also boot up a GPU process and various services and eventually those services are going to be ready and ready for you to start doing UI stuff. So we're going to say application on ready. We're going to do things now. And what we're going to do is we're going to make a window just like so. And now when we start this application, we get an empty window. Nothing super exciting here. In fact, if you open the developer tools, they crash immediately because they do expect some kind of content which is currently not present. But that's fundamentally how we open up a browser window. And we're going to start doing user interfaces here. But one cool thing about Electron is that we can combine the powers of node with the power of Chromium. So as specification, I can say web preferences don't integration true. And now it's the next step. I'm going to make an HTML file. Something small prepared here, right? It's a little HTML file that contains some very bare bones content. And then my index.js, I'm going to load set file. So that brings us one step closer to an actual application in that we now have a window. We have a dock icon and in the window we have actual content. But the thing that makes this very quickly, very interesting is if I zoom in here is that we have all of node available here including native modules if you want to. So if I want to read anything, this works. This is here in my window. So that allows you to combine the powers that you know from the DOM, CSS, with everything you know from node, right? So if you have a piece of native code, say SQLite or something, you can load that here. That actually works and you can combine those two things together. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to install monocle loader and monocle editor. These are modules that are normally consumed with Webpack or some other common.js and port turn into web stuff kind of tools. But I'm going to go ahead and add a renderer.js. And because in here, I already explained that we have node available. Speaking about Miles Universal JavaScript, I can just do common.js in my browser. That works because it's just node, right? I'm just doing node things here. So in here, if I do a quick console, console.lock.hello, we run this again. If we open up the console, you will see my little hello right there. So taking that one step further, let's actually start building our editor. Few things I'm going to do. I'm going to start by actually including the loader itself. And this is not electron specific. This could be any Node.js code. It's just that this is fairly simple and straightforward code. Therefore, good for demonstration. And now I'm going to get my diff. Constiff, document, get element by a D, container. And this is cool. You know how you sometimes need to do some canvas stuff in Node? And then you install 50,000 modules because implementing a canvas in raw JavaScript is kind of difficult. We have the full DOM available here. All of it. Whatever you need. So now that we have our diff, I'm going to create a little editor. And this is Monaco specific code. But what I'm doing is I'm saying, hey, dear Monaco editor, please create a new editor in the diff. Language I want JavaScript. And as theme, I want VS dark. When we start this, it's going to look terrible.  Looks like this. Little fin. Not a worry though, you know, like a good chef. I prepared some CSS. It's not overly complicated. What I'm doing is I'm saying no margins, no padding, no overflow. Make sure the editor itself has a 100% width and height. And then I'm using, I'm giving the container also full width and height of the viewport, which is an interesting point for me because depending on which browser that is a variable you couldn't use on your CSS. Viewport height and width is not crazy new, but if you consider supporting something as far back as IE 8 or IE 9 because you have an enterprise communication tool like Slack and you need to support enterprise environments, those values would not be okay. But since I'm shipping on browser engine, I don't really have to worry about that. And getting a new browser engine into an enterprise environment is a lot easier than convincing some super secure environment to install an entirely new browser. So we've done that and we can start this application again. And now we get something that looks a little bit like Visual Studio Code itself. Let's move this over here and this over here. And if I wanted to, I can now load my actual app in here. You can't zoom in yet. We didn't build the whole zoom thing yet. I can but I don't think it's actually gonna work. Oh no, it does. Just a keyboard. There we go. And believe it or not, this is pretty much the bare bones version of Visual Studio Code, right? Like most of the things we use in Visual Studio Code every single day are not available in this teeny tiny application. There isn't really that much more that people did. The first version added local loading and saving using the FS module, right? Just read it in, save it out. And more or less, that's everything that happened here. Which is an interesting point to talk a little bit about the challenges, right? I promised in the abstract that we would talk a little bit about what makes this difficult. And there's one very common pitfall that many applications fall into right after realizing all these powers. So what Electron essentially does is that it takes web developers and gives them all the powers of node or it takes node developers and gives them all the powers of user interfaces. Sooner or later, someone is going to have the really clever idea of doing all of that and then loading something from the internet, right? That would be a very straightforward process. It would be like, why do we even ship all our HTML? We could just load it from the internet. And that is probably the biggest challenge because that is a terrible, terrible idea. And that's a terrible idea because again, you have all of node available which has the same rights as you and it has a child process. And if you want to spawn things, you can do that. So the way Electron is used today by modern applications is one of two ways. The first one is the Visual Studio Codeway where you do actually ship all of the application code and you trust that code and you have node code that you trust, right? And then the alternative is a model that Slack is currently following where we do load web content but we don't really trust that web content. And we say, okay, this web content might have a write on two more than the actual, than in a browser but we control very neatly and very narrowly what kind of features are available there. And the way that is usually managed is that the renderer process and the main process can communicate via something called the inter-process communication module which is a little advanced and sometimes new for node developers and also web developers because most of us aren't actually used to multi-process coding, let alone multi-thread coding. But fundamentally, the idea here is that you sort of choose your poison, right? You either don't trust where you're loading and then you need to control what kind of things that application can do or you ship everything with your application and that is probably the biggest challenge. And now that we've built this application, the next typical step for people would be that you go ahead and try to turn that into an actual binary, right? And there's various solutions available for that. One of the things that is great about Electron is that tons of applications depend on it because tons of applications depend on it, the ecosystem is extremely rich. To date, there's more than 1,500 modules available to NPM that do something electron-specific and usually that thing is turn Electron into a certain application package, right? If you wanna ship your Electron application to the Snobcraft store that is available, if you wanna notarize it with Mac OS, that is available. And one of the tools that does it extremely well is Electron Forge as built by Sam who's sitting right there. So if you don't like it, please annoy him immediately. But what Electron Forge does is that it allows you to take your application and immediately turn that into a binary without having to worry about anything too much. It's very straightforward and very quick. So if you wanna see that in action, one of the applications I would recommend to look at is Electron's own little application called Fiddle, which also lets you play with Electron itself. Fiddle is sort of the thing that we just built except that we kept going. Fiddle is a little code editor that allows you to build little teeny tiny Electron experiments and play with them and you can check out various tools in there. So if you wanna see something like the desktop capture, which is a tool that lets you, just install Catalina, shouldn't have done that. There we go. Yes, fine, okay. Nothing is allowed anymore. Gotta ask for everything. So anyway, as I was saying, if you wanna see something like the desktop capture in action, you can run this little application and the desktop capture is broken, which we will debug later. But it's a little application that's not only open source. It's also using Electron Forge so you can sort of see how we turn this application into actual binaries. We do all of that in CI. Building a complete new version of this doesn't really require for me anything else in a little iPad. And it's also a little tighter and neater than Visual Studio Code itself, which is also open source, but might be a bit of a mouthful if you start there, right? Because obviously that application has been in the works for a while. All right, we have about five minutes for Q&A. If anyone has any questions, while we do that, I'm gonna leave this open. If any of you wanna get started with it and haven't yet, recommend Fiddle, recommend Electron.js. Fiddle also allows you to export your little experiments as a Forge project. So you can build something tiny, just export it as a desktop app. Send it to your parents, right? Which is honestly one of the big benefits if any of you write NPM modules, you can send your little NPM modules to your grandma and she can run it, which might be more difficult than NPM install instructions. All right, if there are no questions, you can find me on Twitter. You can find Electron on Twitter. You can also find many of us here today. So if any of any questions that you don't wanna ask here, just find us later. Thanks to you all for coming by. Thank you.