It's always weird when you run into a corporate sponsored video game and it ends up actually being halfway decent, or in some cases, pretty good. Look at Coolspot for both Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. That game is a perfectly good playthrough, it stars the old 7-up logo and the entire game is designed to get you to go and buy soda. Meanwhile, on the NES there was stuff like Yo Noid, starring the old Domino's Pizza mascot, The Noid, a mischievous little claymation dude whose primary objective in life was to prevent Domino's customers from getting their pizza in 30 minutes or less. Whoa, wait a second, this game was published by Capcom and developed by Now Production who had a hand in games like Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu and the Adventure Island series? This game can't be bad. Well, it's not bad, but it's not all that great either. It's essentially a reskin of the Famicom title, common-known ninja, Hanamaru, and it was localized in the US a few months later to include The Noid and all sorts of references to pizza. The story was also changed, so you have to rid New York City of Mr. Green because John Mayer knows you can, I guess? You use your super yo-yo and various other power-ups to get through 14 levels on 3 lives and 1 continue. No saves or passwords and there's 1 hit deaths here.  Even touching water kills you. The thing is though, the point system makes it very easy to earn extra continues, so don't let that scare you off. The end of each odd-numbered level has not a boss fight, but a pizza-eating contest against that particular area's defending champion. And it's pretty much just a card game. Your opponent selects a random card, then you pick a card, one with a higher number if it's available, and whoever has the higher number wins that round and earns the difference between the two numbers in pizza. Whoever fills their meter at the bottom first wins. For example, if the computer selects a card with a 2 on it and you select 3, you get 1 pizza. You can also deploy tactics like choosing the pepper card that makes the boss's pizza taste like crap, and you can collect these items for later use throughout each level. This is a nice idea, and I appreciate that it's something different, but it drags on for way too long, and after a while I'd have preferred just a good old-fashioned boss fight. There's also levels where you're on a skateboard or floating around with this mini-propeller thing or bouncing around on the Noid's pizza crusher. There's hidden areas you can jump into where you play whack-a-mole for a while, and there's also power-ups available if you hit these scroll things with your yo-yo. You can eventually use Dark Noid, which allows you to speed up and jump higher, and there's clear screen attacks you can use as well. Just press down and B to make them happen. I should note that in the original version of this game in Japan, instead of a yo-yo, your character has a hawk that sits perched on his shoulder and attacks enemies. Your hawk also carries you instead of using that propeller thing. It's entirely cosmetic, but I don't know, it sure seems a lot cooler than, you know, some goofy pizza mascot. The boss fights are the same, only instead of pizza you're comparing weapons, I guess. It's still just as tedious, unfortunately. Most of the other stuff between the two games remains the same, they just altered the settings and the enemies in the North American version. So yeah, Yo-Noid is extremely average. It is an interesting game at times, but certain parts can really drag and bore the hell out of you, and overall the game does just barely enough to vary the enemy and level design to keep everything at least kinda sorta worthwhile. Like this auto-scrolling level here that evidently takes place on a merry-go-round, or the propeller stage, which is actually pretty tricky. Still, there's a lot here that's just the same old platforming stuff you've played through in a million other games. Yo-Noid is a great example of the sentiment, you could do a lot better, but you could also do a lot worse. And I wanna thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


SCP-374 is a French Revolution-era guillotine, made of oak with a steel blade. SCP-374 manifests no unusual properties when not in use. Any use of SCP-374 to decapitate a live human produces an instance of SCP-3741. SCP-3741 is a severed human head, inhabited by the personality of a French Revolution-era man. Ultimately 35 minutes after instantiating, SCP-3741 is able to see, hear, and speak, and to manifest limited forms of enhanced awareness, enabling it to provide true answers to any questions it is asked. Its strategic usefulness is limited by its argumentativeness, and its antipathy towards the Foundation. Since it is convinced that members and employees of the Foundation are evil murderers, it may attempt to obfuscate, mislead, or change the subject.


from the get-go, from birth, right? So since you'll always fail, you feel the appropriate guilt and shame, and that's the means of influencing control over you. You've accepted the terms, you've put yourself in bondage.  But part of that domestication means that, you know, part of the whole authority thing is about diet and exercise. We talked about that last year, but that's a big part of it too, you know. You've ever heard of a CAFO, confined animal feeding operation? You know, have you ever driven by one of those things and there's like a bazillion cattle in this one little thing, and they, it's a few weeks or months before slaughter, and they feed them with grains every day, so they fatten them up, right? That's like Walmart. Yeah, Walmart too. So that's part of it. The human zoo, you could say the human can concentrate on animal feeding operation that works. Like I said, there is valid authority. Authority is a good word, actually, actually. In fact, in fact, you should strive to be authoritative. You should be, strive to be maximally authoritative. But over who? You and why? Reality.  Okay, so valid authority, first of all, first and foremost is reality, you know. I mean, that's what we talked about at the beginning, the sunrise, the sunset, all these, all these existential truths, and there's nothing wrong with taking advice and council. That's a social sort of, you know, expertise or authority, as long as you don't have to, as long as you're not forced to, but ultimately, authority is individual and it's you in authority over yourself. Now, let's contrast, we talked about the neolithic knowledge base and all of these different thing, you know, illusions, deceptions, you know, to keep up to the antagonism and everything. So, and it may, and I talked about the paleo, it may, on some level, to you sound like I'm some, some kind of a luddite or primitivist or, you know, glorifier of the primitive. No, that's just the way things are. And we should, we should, we should look back and realize that they were successful and we should, we should determine why they were successful. They were successful because they dealt with reality, like these people, you know, the people who designed the airplanes and things like that, do you think they studied social studies? They get a, did they get an art appreciation degree? They may have went to an Ivy League school, fact perhaps. They got a degree in chemistry, they got a degree in computer science, they became a coder. They were dealing with reality, just like paleo man. Let me click down here. Excuse me for a second. So, in a sense, in a sense, the people who do this are like the people who did that. It's just a different scale, but it's the same principle. It's dealing with things as they really are. It's dealing with reality. It's, it's that. One plus one equals two. It's not a matter of opinion. There was no law ever passed that said one plus one shall equal two. No authority was ever required. No president ever got up and said, I've just, I've made an executive order that one plus one shall equal two. It's not just a truth, but it's the fundamental foundation of all truth just as Greg's syllabism. One is greater than zero is greater than negative one. It's the same sort of thing. So, so what do you think, what do you think all these would look like if instead of being based on this and on this, they were instead based on that and that? I think, I think every, and I think didn't, didn't the Soviet Union and produce some, some really crappy cars? You know, what? Trons, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the, what was it, the Travant ideology or something? That was the model, the model name, yeah. So, what's the church state domain? Politics, religion, social studies, multiculturalism, liberal arts, and to even great extent history. You know, there's good historians and bad historians. There's revisionist historians, you know, and a good historian uses many, many sources, and we still, it's still, since nobody was really there, it's hard to tell what the real story is. So, even to some extent history is highly manipulated now. And we could probably go on with the list of things there. So, and I've already mentioned this, we'll go through it quick. What's the, what's the purpose of all this? The purpose of the whole thing, of the way that they act and why it's not like, like, tech knowledge, e, did you catch that when we hit that slide? And remember, tech knowledge, e, and what are we talking about when we're talking about knowledge? We're talking about the quality of the knowledge. The purpose is to support the general political antagonism, because if they've got you all antagonized about one another based on lies and deceptions and delusions, and one more that I'm just going to get to here in just a second, coming up next. I love this quote. In fact, in fact, every presentation I've ever done in my life starts with this slide, and then I build a presentation around it. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.   You know, I was introduced as Richard Nicolai. My mom has always hated the nickname, but I am known by the nickname in connection in the paleo movement as Angry Dick. I kind of like it actually. I called some, I called some, I called some, well, I used the C word against some particularly awful women.


Okay, so the the title of this particular talk is why capitalism needs losses, too And you know, this is something that I think even a lot of big fans of the free market a trap they fall into where You know when we're defending capitalism in the way that free market lays a fair economies work There is this tendency where we we just focus on Profits and we say that oh, you know that this is great the entrepreneur is Profitable and that's sort of a noble thing again if he's he or she is earning it through voluntary market transactions and not by as Peter talked about running to the government and getting special favors and privileges and and that's certainly true and that's that's an important component of the story but We don't describe the market economy as a profit system It's one way to describe me is a profit and loss system and it's important to focus on the flip side Because then that in a sense underscores what it is the profits do right? So if you understand what a loss is and why that's undesirable Then that sheds more light on why a profit per se is a good thing and why you want to encourage that now And so going along with that mere not merely just looking at the government sort of Crippling the earning of profits and the profits in the in the good sense And why that could be a bad thing so just to give you an example of what I'm talking about If the government has what's called an excess profits tax Okay, so some of you may be familiar with that term and that's something that politicians a lot of times will recommend and on the face of it it seems like well How could that be a bad thing right that if they need to raise money somehow in excess profits tax and those they put that That word excess in there to make it look like you know someone who's earning more profits than he really even needs You know so who could be against an excess profits tax? Well as an economist you can walk through the logic of why that's not a good thing or at least what the downsides would be to that and It goes back to those things that Peter and I have been talking about so remember How do you earn profits? It's when you forecast the future better than other people And I may have given you the impression that the successful entrepreneur You know knows it's gonna happen But of course in the real world nobody knows the future for sure They could be wrong And so if you're gonna be an entrepreneur and take a risky venture if you're gonna do something put up your money or your Shareholders money you're gonna borrow money from people in the bond market or whatever and Take a chance on something it could go right and it could blow up in your face Right and so if the government comes in now and and says we're going to have a very high tax rate Uncertain activities that we're gonna classify as the earning of excess profits It's not correct to think well in the grand scheme. That's not gonna hurt anything because if somebody makes a Million dollars off of something and he only gets to keep half of it Well, he still made 500,000 so he's still gonna do it no one's gonna turn away $500,000 right and that's that's the way some people think about it and even if you're familiar with Warren Buffett You know he makes jokes about that in front of the press or whatever to make it look like he's just an average guy like you Or me Saying things about you know, oh come on I've never looked at a business deal and thought I was gonna earn 18% But then because of taxes I'm not gonna earn 14% or whatever and so I walk away But you're not guaranteed you're gonna earn 18% 18% right you might lose a bunch of money too And so that's and he knows that that means I think that he's being coy there with it with his audience And so that's the problem just to give you a concrete example I mean suppose There were you know a pharmaceutical company that had millions of dollars in its research budget and it had you know And I realized okay, we're gonna fund research for 15 different types of drugs to Fight certain diseases treat certain illnesses or so forth and maybe develop a cure for them And we're gonna spend I'm obviously making up numbers here we're gonna spend $200,000 on each one and You know, we think that one of them might hit probably most of them We're gonna be duds and we're gonna spend that money and get nothing back for it But one of them we might hit a home run and on that one once we get the thing up and running and we're selling it in the marketplace You know if you just looked at our investment in that one particular drug in the rate of return on our investment it would be huge and So if the government comes along them and sees that and then taxes us and says you don't need to be earning that much All you need to earn is 15% on your capital and that's plenty and that should be enough to encourage you to develop drugs Well, you'd realize well that that wouldn't be the right way to look at it if they thought going into it that if any of these Takes off we hit a home run on it Then the government's looking to let us keep a little bit Well, then the whole research budget as a whole now is cast in the doubt and maybe we don't want to do that We don't want to put up millions of dollars because we know even if one of them does hit You know pay off. We're not gonna get to keep that all right So that's just one example and of course those numbers might not be realistic, but I just want to get you to see How it can be that the government coming in and putting in a so-called excess profits tax Would cripple things okay, but going back to what I said the beginning of this second talk I Don't want you merely to focus on that kind of thing It's not simply that the government distorts the market in the operation of the price system If it sort of mutes Successes right if it doesn't let you keep What you've earned in terms of profit Yes, that deadens your incentive to go do the right thing and to stick to something that's safer All right, so that's that's one aspect But let's also not forget that the government does the opposite they come in very often and they subsidize losses so you get the worst of both worlds that They're taking away what the market normally would give is a reward That's the way you want to think about it to people who see the future better than others and at the same time the government comes in and compensates people and sort of Cushions the blow when they really screw up and then and it takes the pain away from that And so it takes away the fear of doing something silly as well And that's also not the right signal you want to give so in terms of What's the right balance between those things? Well, I think Peter and I would certainly say and many other Austrian economists that the right mixture of the possibility of gain but also the worry and the fear of a giant loss and how do you adjust your behavior accordingly is Exactly what the market gives you and let people in the market determine what the appropriate Degree of risk taking ought to be so it's not that we want to encourage people to be risky But we also don't want to discourage them either let people judge for themselves whether a certain Gamble if you will is justified or not now Let me take a step back here and just give you some examples historical examples because I think even a Lot of us we might not realize How things in the market? It's not obvious. We can see something in retrospect a very successful corporation Certain business venture certain products innovation and it's oh, yeah, of course And then someone's making millions of dollars because of that or the shareholders who got lucky and People can say well, you know, why should they have that sort of? advantage over the rest of us and I think part of what's happening to the reason people think like that is they don't realize how often even big businesses make mistakes They don't realize that You know, why is it that a corporation wants to bring in a CEO? To do a certain thing and a lot of times it's because they think this person has a vision And we want someone to come in and make these decisions. So my point is it's not Just clockwork. It's not just going in and punch in a clock and everyone just goes about their daily business And that's what a giant corporation does. No, there have to be people at the helm Who make decisions about what what what's our new product line going to be? You know, do we want to push our engineers and our production staff to get this thing out in next quarter? Or do we want to just, you know, do more internal testing to make sure that, you know The quality assurance is there but then release it the quarter after right and so this is a trade-off they face and as Peter was mentioning that, you know, there's no Obvious answer to that. You got to leave that up to people in the marketplace and they might make the wrong decision So, I mean, that's you wonder sometimes to look how come when software comes out It's all buggy the first version and then in subsequent versions they fix it Sometimes you might wonder why don't they just get it right the first time and the answer is well Because then they would never release new software, right? There could always be something wrong with it and you just at some point on the margins Economist would say delaying further is not worth it that it makes more sense to release the thing knowing full Well, it's gonna get out there your customers are gonna be using it and they're gonna start complaining And then you're gonna have to start working on a fix For you know, the next version or a quick patch if it's a really a serious problem that sort of thing All right, so that's the constant trade-off that there is just to give you some Historical examples so your parents are Will recognize some of these that but then later I'll give you ones that are perhaps more relevant to the students here So there was famously this line of cars called the Edzel that was a big flop All right, and this was not some you know Poad Uncle Corporation with the giant corporation released this new thing They thought it was gonna work if it had been a home run, you know They would have said the people involved were geniuses, but it was a flop And so now that's sort of just like a joke the the Beatles right the musical band the Beatles you guys are familiar with them, right? You guys first be okay. I gotta check They Their first, you know, they went to a record before they were famous They went to and did an audition for a record label to try to sign them and they turned them down the record label said no You know your guitars that sound that we think is on the way out. Thanks for coming in Can you imagine if you were the people involved in that decision when the Beatles went on to become you know The biggest band in human history and then somebody at a record company turned them down They had the chance to sign them the Beatles would have been their band and they said nah, we're not interested all right There was something called it you guys might not read you guys familiar with the new Coke You guys remember that okay So there I actually never knew that the specifics of that So what happens you know Coke unveiled this thing to call the new coke and then they just quickly got rid of it And you know did we don't we don't ever speak of that again and what happened was and I didn't know this until recently I was just reading this book about various, you know these sorts of marketing flops and things like that and what happened is apparently they had done a bunch of taste testing and In small doses you know is given consumers and it was you know and they were scientific about it Right, they didn't want to make a dumb decision. They had lost the millions of dollars at risk You know so they did all the proper double-blind studies and so in other words, you know, they didn't They made it sure that the people didn't know what they were drinking and so they honestly were reporting and This they tinkered with the formula and the sugar content whatever from from the old original Coke to what they were calling the new Coke and It was just beating the pants off a Pepsi right and all these blind taste tests And so they were there you know their marketing guys were sure this this thing is gonna be awesome And so let's build the campaign let's call the new coke to make sure people distinguish and they realize this is a new thing It tastes even better than the old and they went through and then what happened is people said just they wasn't selling and They figured out what the problem was If you're just having a little sip you want it to be sweeter, right? And so drinking it you know just a little sip at a time the thing that's sweeter Just people said I like that better, but if you're drinking a whole can That after a while gets overwhelming and you don't want that right and so, you know If you just think about like original classic Coke It's not as sweet as some other types of drinks, but you know if you want to drink a whole can of something Coke's pretty good. I'm not getting paid by coke by the way, but if they want to send me a check if you're watching this online feel free Okay, so you understand so that was the mistake that they made that they Incorrectly extrapolated from the results of these blind taste tests to thinking we sell this thing in terms of six packs and two liters It's gonna fly off the shelves and they just they made the mistake It was an honest obviously an honest mistake that wasn't in their interest to lose millions of dollars I don't know how much they lost but it was certainly embarrassing and they quickly recovered Okay, so the point of that one is just to show you you might think that oh Coca-Cola's this giant behemoth they have all this ad I mean these marketing people that they can do whatever they want and the consumers are helpless because you go to the store And there's coke coke all in your face. Well, no in a market economy a corporation can't force you to buy anything Ultimately, it's up to the consumer and you can do what you want with your money And it's true with clever marketing and they pay sports stars or whatever to do things and you know beer commercials Make it look like oh, you just you want to start a party just pop open one of our drinks and all of a sudden you know people are dancing in your living room and It doesn't work by the way just so you guys know But the point is you Everyone can do that and Mises made that point too in his writings So he said that you can't that a bad product or a good product, you know They both have those means at their disposal and so in the long run a product that really isn't good and consumers don't like You're not gonna trick them into consistently buying it from you time and again And also the companies that make genuinely good products They can also hire, you know the spokes models to come in or to get Michael Jordan to give it an endorsement or whatever And so those things should wash out and then you would think the thing that in the long run is actually the superior product is gonna win Out all right, so that's just another example One more recently similar to the Beatles fiasco I don't know the exact number, but JK Rowling, you know the author of Harry Potter She apparently sent that manuscript To dozens I believe, you know publishers and agents or whatever and they all just nope. No, no You get rejection after rejection until finally somebody gave it a shot and then we all know what happened there I mean, she's incredibly wealthy She could be I don't know she a billionaire. Does anybody know she's certainly a hundreds of millionaire I don't know if she's okay, so and that's in pounds. So that's really that's saying something, right? Okay, so What's the what's the point point is go out and write a novel and just keep shipping it to people until it hits No, the point is that people make mistakes people in you know the business world and so it's not obvious what the right thing to do is and You need to understand it and this ties back into what I was saying about Mises critique of the socialists Mises pointed out that he said that part of the problem here is when these guys referring to the socialist academics When they think of what it is that happens in a market and what it is that the leaders of a company do he said they're They're actually not thinking of the entrepreneur. They're thinking of the manager. They're thinking of somebody who walks in Has his daily routine already structured who knows, you know, what what are we doing today?  We give him a warning if he doesn't come again We fire him and we replace him and it's a very narrowly constructed thing We know what we're producing. We know that the factory is supposed to be there And the question is just oh if the electricity bill rises, maybe we should Change our operations a little bit and use less electricity and use more or something else Okay, but you're just making little tweaks within the parameters that are established And Misa's point is in a market economy Somebody had to make the decision that we're gonna get into the business of making drill presses Someone had to decide Investors had to be willing to give money to build the factory where it happens to be it could have been a shopping mall Right. It's not it's not set in stone It's not a knowledge that we get from nature that says there should be a drill press factory right here It could have been a parking lot. It could have been a shopping mall. It could have been Something else a hospital, right? So somebody has to make those decisions or some group of people And Misa's point was that's the important thing that profits and losses do in a capitalist Market economy is they guide people in those decisions and it's precisely that that the central planners and a socialist framework Wouldn't be able to do so. It's true Misa's pointed out that on the the eve of such a transition, right? If if there was a revolution or just a peaceful Democratic thing and we all of a sudden had a socialist group put into power They could just continue to do things the way that had been done under Capitalism and so, you know if the revolution happens on a Tuesday Wednesday They could just say to everyone just keep doing what you were doing yesterday Just go back to work wherever you were and then we'll just start tinkering with the plan But the point is over time You know the relevance of what the market had been doing on that Tuesday under capitalism and then the transition occurred That relevance would die off over time and so 20 years out in the future The socialists really would have no idea of gee What would the market economy have been doing with this in this situation and they would have to sort of from Scratch be deciding. What do we do with our resources here? What do we where do we tell these workers to go? What should they make? You know this plot of land right here Should there be a hospital or should there be a factory cranking out drill presses and again? The point is those are not merely technological questions They couldn't just ask their engineers and their chemists and their physicists Tell us everything you know and then we'll the answer will pop out because it involves Consumers valuing things and that's a that's a crucial part of the equation and that's precisely what they wouldn't have without Something analogous to what the market economy is the profit and loss system okay, let me talk a little bit about Specific example of how the government can come in and Subsidize losses and sort of chop the knee chop the market economy off of the knees in terms of the normal operation of the profit and loss Mechanism so specifically it's I want to talk about tarp The troubled asset relief program you guys you at least are you vaguely familiar with what that is or was okay? so This was back in the and I like talking about this also because this happened under The the Bush administration is when this thing went through and so what happens a sort of hazard of my occupation is if If there's a Democrat in the White House and you write stuff against the federal government You get all kinds of emails, you know saying where were you when you know George Bush was in power? And I can send them articles of me criticizing George Bush and I was right here, you know That's that's where it was and please send your contributions to the Mises Institute, but And then by the same token of course when George Bush was in power And I would write something critical of the federal government intervening in the market economy and get all these things You know what you liberal lovers don't don't realize it such and such and you know again so What happened other the Bush administration was remember there was this big Housing bubble this big boom in certain asset prices and the collapse and then a lot of financial institutions if the government and the Federal Reserve had just state stepped back and done nothing would have gone under and People were telling us. Oh, that's that would be the end of the world or at the end of the financial world We couldn't possibly contemplate that horrible outcome and so the federal government came in and Effectively nationalized a lot of these banks in a move that if some Latin American dictator had done it You know the American public would have easily been persuaded that that was fascism or socialism or something But since it was the free market bush administration, it was a necessary move According to what we were told so Whether you know a lot of people didn't like that because of the unfairness of it all Right that here we have all these millions of homeowners who are underwater people are getting foreclosed on And then a lot of the people who lost billions of dollars in terms of their bad investment decisions They get bailed out either from the federal government or the Federal Reserve sort of a backdoor channel So yeah, of course just in terms of common sense and our everyday notions of morality that that seems kind of unfair But in terms of just the operation of a market economy and just not being not making a moral judgment one way or the other Just being neutral about it that is is bad or because it cripples the ability of the economy to allocate resources effectively so you know what What is the argument in favor of unfettered Financial markets where we don't have the government coming in and regulating everybody in telling them You know, these are the capital requirements you need to if you want to do certain investments The government's going to have a list of guidelines for what's safe and what isn't is free market economists You know, we're not in favor of that. We don't want the government micro managing investment decisions We don't want the government telling firms. This is what you can do with your money and this is what you can't do But the only way that works is if when a firm screws up, they're allowed to fail All right, that that that model doesn't work if you reward profits by letting people keep a bunch of money But then if it blows up in their face, you come in and bail them out with taxpayer taxpayer money Or when the Fed does it basically with Everybody who who uses us dollars with their wealth because by printing more money it dilutes what everyone else is holding Okay, so so that's um That's the other side of that argument So it's not simply just the sort of populist anger that's justifiable about why is wall street getting bailed out when Everybody, you know, ordinary folks are getting laid off and getting foreclosed on and that's certainly a legitimate gripe But beyond that it's that it's It's difficult to Say the free market can work when they don't Uh Allow losses to do what losses are supposed to do in a market economy and it's sort of ironic because the the interventionists Who you know were for tarp They they cited the whole episode as an example of why see we can't have just unfettered markets because look what happened But the way you know that that's sort of odd because The the business people involved Many of them knew or at least strongly suspected that if things ever really did get bad The fed would come in and rescue us and so that's why they were During the heady days of the boom period like 2003 to 2006 When a lot of these firms were making a bunch of money as housing prices kept going up And the executives were all making hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in bonuses It was easy for them to sort of overlook the fact that well, you know, what if what if housing prices just collapsed? Wouldn't we be in trouble that maybe we want to pull back and not be so aggressive? And it was quite rational for them to think well if that were to happen You know the fed's not going to just sit back and let and let the whole financial sector go down That would be crazy and they were right in thinking that uh now Just to give a little more flavor to that let me mention I I did after that, you know after the the blow-up and everything I called some people I talked to Analysts who worked at Ratings agencies you like Moody's and Fitch and standard and poor because there was a lot going on there. So I'm certainly My point is not to say The everyone in the free market or in the market economy Just a bunch of angels fluttering around and then the government came in and screwed everything up And that's why we had the housing boom and bust. That's not what I'm saying There certainly were greedy people who were myopic and made what in retrospect were awful decisions but again the point is The market economy doesn't require having flawless individuals to work What what you need though is accountability where yeah, if people make the right call then they Earn profits and get to keep it whereas if they make a horrible decision and they aren't suffer losses Well, you have to let that result stand as well if you Sort of nullify that result. Well, then that's excuse things and leads to situations like we saw So there were firms Financial institutions that were less aggressive during the housing bubble where their internal analysts or just their CEO or whoever Said, you know, these these home prices are ridiculous. This this can't last We're not going to get into this as heavily as some of our competitors And in a market economy, what would have happened is they would have ultimately been justified So yes, their returns that they reported to their shareholders During those housing boom years Would have been less impressive than their competitors But they could have, you know told their investors and their other clients Just stick with us. We think that this is a mirage and trust us, you know, you'll be glad when the when the Roof caves in on these other guys. You'll be glad you stuck with us Whereas now they they can't say that as much because the other people, uh, you know, we're partially rescued So what happened just to fill you in a little bit on the details of that is there was Partly an intellectual mistake Like I said, I've talked to some of these guys and they said partly the problem was These these things that were called derivatives Um, they were based on it was basically you take a little bit of thousands of different mortgages from around the country and put them in this one thing And so then all the the homeowners would make their mortgage payments every month They would all flow into this thing and then you'd sell off pieces of this To various investors and so depending on the rules of who gets to dip into that pool of money first Those things appear to be very safe. Like if you were drawn from the very bottom You know, if you were an investor who bought a slice of this pool that was getting funneled by thousands of mortgages from around the country The idea was in order for me to not to miss out on my payments And that's what i'm paying for right now is the right to earn this flow of payments It would take, you know Homeowners from across the country would have to start defaulting and so the bottom of that thing was very safe Whereas the top piece of that pool was very risky and that's how they were priced accordingly. So that was That was what happened. That was part of the intellectual Um mistake that these guys at these rating agencies, you know, they had fancy computer models And the one guy was telling me on the phone This was this would be like in 2000 middle of 2009. I was talking to him asking them You know, what happened like did did you guys know there was going to be a blow up? I thought you'd get bailed out because that seems kind of implausible and he said no, it wasn't so much that but it was more That these things were so complicated barely anybody understood them You know, we had a bunch of physicists down the hall and they built the computer models And they knew how the things worked and the rest of us didn't really even know how they worked And so that was a problem And specifically the computer models assumed That all real estate was local So they so yes the computers knew Home prices in tallahassee florida could go down 10 percent in a year. They knew that was possible And they had you know, they looked historically Movements and prices to figure out what's the chance of that happening and they knew the same thing could happen in vegas And the same thing could happen in sacramento But they thought those would all be independent events Statistically so they thought if we're building this derivative product from mortgages all over the country and put them in this one pool The chance of them all dropping all those real estate markets going down 10 percent one year is infinitesimal That's like an event that'll happen once every million years So that was the intellectual mistake So the point is you know, is that good or in retrospect we can say those idiots But at the time, you know, they thought this is inconceivable that the home prices across the country would all drop simultaneously And so there's no, you know beforehand, you wouldn't know what's right or wrong But the point is in retrospect, well, they were clearly wrong And so in a market economy with genuine profit and loss where the government and fed don't bail people out Those people would have all gone out of business where they would have suffered greatly And those ratings agencies would have taken a huge hit in their credibility And we would now probably be, you know, turning to other ratings agencies But we can't because those are ones are locked in Based on government regulations that say if you're a financial institution You need your bonds to be rated AAA by So-and-so ratings agencies and that those big ones are listed, right?  Go ahead that that doesn't count Right, so I'm just saying a lot of these things that people these need your reaction You guys Peter Klein and Murphy you guys are nuts. Look what the market did for us Well, look at all the host of government regulations that cripple and neuter the sorts of mechanisms we're talking about so again You got to have a balanced approach We're not saying somebody who earns profits per se is necessarily a good guy Because there's all sorts of interventions, but it's important To realize the function of profits and losses in a genuine market economy Okay, so now we'll open up to the general q&a. Thanks


Hi there. This tech talk is on implementing and using groups in your Moodle course. Oftentimes, an instructor tells us they are teaching more than one section, more than one CRN of the same course, and they oftentimes assume that they need more than one Moodle shell, one for each CRN. Well, if you think about it, that's more than one set of resources and activities to be managing, where we can oftentimes show them how within one Moodle shell to have more than one group, more than one CRN, let's say, enrolled in the shell and also divided up into groups within that shell. So I'm in a Moodle shell right now, one of the least popular courses on campus, by the way, in the administration block down to edit settings. It's in this settings area that we turn on the group functionality. When I'm in any settings page, I usually just by habit click expand all on the right side, and then here I can scroll down to the groups area. And under group mode, if I click the little question mark first, I can see that the default setting of no groups and there are two group settings, separate groups and visible groups. Usually instructors, when they understand these two settings, they decide on separate groups. So that's what we're going to go with today. And just a quick little indicator here under forcing the group mode, you can if you want to have the course level group mode, in this case separate groups, implemented across all of your activities. So regardless of how an activity itself is set for group mode, you can indicate if you want to force at the course level these separate groups or the visible groups settings. So we won't worry about that right now, but that's just a setting in case you decide you want that feature. And at the bottom of course, save and display. And so now that groups are enabled in the course itself, we need to go a next step to administration block down to users down to groups to create some groups and then enroll students in those groups. So on the groups page here, we have no groups in here yet. And so to create a group, we want to click create group. So the two most often uses of the group name are basically say a CRN or maybe even let's say one class meets Monday, Wednesday, Friday. You have the class meets on Tuesday, Thursday. So let's create this first group of Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We'll save changes down here. We'll make another one for the Tuesday, Thursday class. Create group again. I'll call this Tuesday, Thursday. So now on the left side, there are the two groups. So let's select the Monday, Wednesday, Friday group and click add and remove users over here on the right side. And then we're going to see all the students enrolled in the course. And so let's just say I've got my banner roster here and I've got the two CRNs handy in front of me. I can click on this student and this one and this one. Let's just pretend these are in my Monday, Wednesday, Friday class. And by the way, clicking these non-contiguous users in this list can be done by clicking the, holding the control key or the command key on a Mac while you click. And then once these are selected, I can click the add button and they'll be moved over here or add it over there, I should say. So now my Monday, Wednesday, Friday group consists of the Monday, Wednesday, Friday CRN. Click on back to groups at the bottom and I'll add some members to the Tuesday, Thursday group. Select it over in the groups area. Click on add, remove users. Now I'm able to see by these numbers within the parentheses that these are, the students are already in one group of my course. So let's just go with the other students. Of course double checking on my banner roster. Who's that weirdo? And click on add. And now my Tuesday, Thursday group will be populated. There we go. I can go back to groups at this point if I want to. And I can just verify at a glance that my Monday, Wednesday, Friday class has got these people, and my Tuesday, Thursday has got those people. So one of the most popular requested reasons to be using groups in the first place is to keep students divided up in the grade book view. So I could if I wanted to go back to the course start page, but I always have the administration block available to me. And over in course administration, I can go to grades directly into the grade book from here. And here's where you'll see some of the power behind using groups within the same Moodle shell. There's different groups. I can view all the participants, or I can view them by separate groups. Now there's a lot more you can do with the groups in your Moodle course, but this will get you started setting them up and getting the groups created and getting your students enrolled in them and using it from there. Thanks for watching. Have a great day.


I never rush into divorces. Never. I'm actually very pro-marriage. But most attorneys that come in, listen, if you're not happy, why are you wasting time?  Right? There's some lawyers that do that. Lawyers make money. The more contentious the situation is, the more contentious your life is, the more money they make. Right? And judges, who are judges? Judges are lawyers with a robot and that's all they are. There's no special training.  You have a feminist up there? Guess what kind of rulings you're going to get? It's going to reflect feminist ideology.


In 2023, the face of the war to liberate Ukraine's occupied lands begins. Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine Alexei Danilov said today. In a Facebook post, Danilov noted that the world's attitude towards the Ukrainian war has shifted. In early 2022, we were talking about guerrilla war. For this reason, Ukraine was supplied with NLAW anti-tank missile systems, as well as Javelin anti-tank and Stinger missile systems. In June, Western partners started talking about defensive counter-offensive war. Humor's artillery missile systems, M777 Haute-Sers, Harpoon missiles, GMLRS missiles capable of hitting a target at a distance of 80 km, Excalibur missiles, IRIST air defense systems, Cesar Haute-Sers, AHS crab self-propelled Haute-Sers were supplied. There will be an offensive war in 2023. Ukraine should acquire Bradley, murder infantry fighting vehicles, bastion armoured personal carriers, AMX-10 RC armoured vehicles, and Patriot air defense systems, Rod Danilov. He concluded that the fourth stage of the war will be the stage of justice and revenge.


Welcome folks, we are the Dow Industries Up 3, NASDAQ down 228, S&P's off 25, Gold. Gold contract up $11 trading at $16.69 an ounce, we had Silver up 13 cents, $19.48 an ounce, LightSuite crewed up $2.83, $88.15 a barrel, notes and bonds, a 10-year note, up 15 ticks trading $1.1101, a 30-year up a point and a half at $1.2118 in $Kingdala, $Kingdala down 1241 ticks, $109.711, the Euro one-to-one, Pa, the Yen, $146.36 to one U.S. dollar and the British pound, $116 to one U.S. dollar.  That 94 is going into 106, but that's a good number man, you're pushing with volume inside the spy and let's see where the NDX is looking out here, we take a look at the NDX and that was the same as yesterday, so that's a little bit different, the NDX yesterday 59 million today to 59 million, not bad, not great, but the bottom line we'll see where this baby is shaking out. We go take a look at the gold market, gold wants higher price, as the dollar wants to move to lower price. We take a look at gold, what do you have with gold out here? We closed at 1669, up 11, I still want to see more volume, I'm just curious as we took out that little swing from Monday, so, well, we did that, okay, so we have 10,000 more contracts, which is good. The first swing had 171, 171,000 today is 181, which is good, bottom line, we'll see if we can get price going with us. We go to the silver market, we take a look at silver, silver should be moving more than it is, that's the bottom line out here, 53,000 contracts, silver likes to move at a lot more than 53,000 when this thing really gets going, so let's see what it had on Monday, yeah, see that's 61, silver needs more buyers, my take is that they're both going to go to that swing point though, and if we get to the bond market, we take a look at the bond market, the bond market folks, the counter trend balance, that's the bottom line, you can see as you're going higher, volume's contracting, and you know, meta is going to be coming out with numbers, and let's see, they haven't come out yet. Have a great night folks, have a safe night, come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning, kick us off 9 in the morning, great show folks, we'll get him folks.


So the central problem with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and U.S. war policy generally is that it is in fact a crime, aggression, to attack or invade another country. The judges at Nuremberg called aggression the supreme international crime because as they said it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. None of the other crimes committed in the war would even happen if somebody had not started the war in the first place. So they held Germany responsible for all the destruction and all the crimes committed in World War II and in the same way the U.S. is responsible for all the death and violence and chaos in Iraq. If there is any question that the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq is in fact a crime of aggression, we can thank the Iraq inquiry in the UK for declassifying a number of documents in which the senior British legal advisors including Sir Michael Wood, the senior legal advisor to the British Foreign Office repeatedly and consistently warned Prime Minister Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw that to invade Iraq would in fact be a crime of aggression, which they called, quote, one of the most serious offenses under international law. And when we come to other war crimes in Iraq, which generally fall under violations of the Geneva Conventions, we have extensive documentation that senior officers in some cases going all the way up to the White House issued orders to U.S. forces in Iraq to commit war crimes. These generally fall under rules of engagement issued to the troops on the ground and they include dead checking, which means killing wounded enemy combatants or resistance fighters, orders during some operations to, quote, kill all military age men, orders in at least one case to use 360 degree rotational fire if a platoon was, you know, hit a mine even on busy streets packed with people. It was standing orders for many infantry units in Iraq to call for fire, which means to call in airstrikes on any buildings from which they received incoming fire, regardless of whether that was an apartment building full of civilians or a village full of civilians. Fallujah and other areas was designated as weapons free zones, which was simply an updating of the terminology used in Vietnam where they were called free fire zones in which any person, civilian or otherwise was regarded was to be treated as a legitimate target for U.S. troops to fire upon. Torture in Iraq was much more widespread and systematic than media reports about Abu Ghraib or U.S. officials ever acknowledged. The best documentation of that is a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross from 2004 based on 27 visits to 14 U.S. prisons in Iraq documented horrific tortures, a wide range of different techniques that, you know, too many to list in this short testimony. There all of this is documented in the written testimony, which I submitted. Human rights first commands responsibility investigation. Looked at 98 deaths in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan. These included at least 12 people who were definitely tortured to death, 26 other cases of suspected or confirmed homicide and 48 more that escaped any official investigation altogether. Human rights first found that no officer above the rank of major was charged with a crime, even though torture was authorized from the highest level. The most severe punishment handed down was a five month prison sentence, even though the U.S. War Crimes Act defines torturing someone to death as a capital crime. So documents already in the public record appear sufficient to convict President George W. Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld and many other officials under for what are capital offenses under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Another under reported aspect of U.S. operations in Iraq is that the U.S. recruited, trained and deployed at least 27 brigades of Iraqi special forces commandos who detained, tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere in 2005 and 2006. At the peak of this campaign, 3,000 bodies per month were brought to the Baghdad morgue alone, and an Iraqi human rights group matched 92% of the corpses one month to reported abductions by these U.S.-led special police commandos. This has been reported in U.S. media as if these forces were not under U.S. command and control, but they were. U.S. special forces officers were assigned to special police training teams and then special police transition teams. None of these units ever operated independently of U.S. command and control, and they were controlled through a high-tech command center set up by U.S. forces and staffed by U.S. and Iraqi personnel. So throughout the reign of terror that they conducted in 2005 and 2006, they were under direct U.S. control working hand-in-hand with U.S. special forces.


your ball down and then approach it and hit that ball into the spot. I want to give you a few tips on penalties because if you can be a confident penalty taker, you're going to increase your goal tally instantly. If you don't know about me, I used to be a huge underachiever, but through obsessive self-improvement, I found my success. Earned a college scholarship, played for my national football team, a YouTube channel with over 100 million views. I've helped players worldwide and I'd love to help you improve faster and achieve more. So number one, you want to take the penalty. As soon as the foul is committed, you're the guy who steps up and says, yes, I am confident I am going to score this thing. When everyone else is looking around saying who's going to take it, you're coming to get the ball. Okay. So number one, you have to want to take it and two, believe that you can actually score. So when you put that ball down on the spot, in your mind, you're not thinking about missing. You're not thinking about everyone being upset. You're thinking about being confident. You're thinking this is a goal. This is another goal on my stats. This is another goal that's going to help my team win. Okay. Everything that you're thinking is about putting the ball in the net. Traditionally, people will tell you, come up, pick your spot, know where you're going to go, hit it there with pace, hit it there with purpose. Okay. So if I'm approaching the penalty and I want to hit it, don't miss the net like that. And that's the only problem I have with that. You're bowled down and then approach it and hit that ball into the spot. Okay. Now, the problem that I have with that is I've missed too many penalties doing that sort of thing. I take a different approach to penalties. Okay. I set up like I'm going to do the exact same thing. So I set up like I'm going to whip it into the top corner or whip it into the bottom corner and I'll come back like I'm going to do a big run up and I'll start sprinting at the ball. But then at this second, I'm right before I hit it, I look up and I see what the keeper is going to do. And if I see that he went to that side just a little bit, if he just took one step, then I'm just going to calmly pass it in the other corner. So I want you to be cautious when you're taking this advice because if you don't have the presence of mind, if you don't have the calmness and the confidence, I will send the better in one day soccer blueprint to anyone who comments hashtag soccer on this video. We're going to miss. Okay. So don't hesitate. Again, put the ball down.  And then I see that his body position went a little bit that way. So I just put it in the other corner. So number one, confidence. You want to take the penalty. You want to score the goal. Number two, everything going in your mind is saying positive things about, yes, this is going in the net. I'm going to score. I'm going to win this game for my team. The next thing is your choice. So I want you to do whatever is comfortable for you. However, for me personally, I've hit too many posts. I've missed the net a couple of times where I've hit a really hard shot, but the keeper made a great save. And I feel taking this new approach by looking at the keeper and reacting to what he does. I increased my chances of scoring the penalty. So one thing I want to say when you're doing this, the reason I can get away with this and other players don't is because I act like I'm about to run up and blast as hard as I can. There's no hesitation in my stride until I'm at this point. And then I react to him. What some people do is they have a very hesitant, very slow run up. So their run up is more like this. And they're watching the keeper, but the keeper knows that he's waiting for him to dive so he can react quickly. Maybe not today, but on a different day. Okay. So when you're doing that, if you're going to choose that method, act like you're sprinting at that bowl, you're going to hit it full force.  If you want to improve faster and achieve more this season, use the soccer success planner. It's 100% free. Players all around the world have already used it to improve. You can download it right now. There's a link in the description below. For moving up divisions to making national teams, players who use the online soccer academy get results. Access elite level coaching and training become a complete player, make a difference on the field and get noticed when you play. Limited spots available, apply today, start improving tomorrow. Link in the description below.


So, Watch Me Work is a show, right, where we talk about your work and your creative process. That part is very, very important. So, you guys might know, I'm a writer and I write a lot, a lot, a lot of different things. We have been doing this show from live from the lobby of the Public Theater for 11 years. And now because of the whole coronavirus thing, we're doing it live. I'm doing it live from my apartment and HowlRound, who has been helping us live stream for many, many years, is kind enough with the Public Theater. Big thanks to HowlRound and the Public Theater for helping make this live stream thing happen. We're going to be doing Watch Me Work five days a week, Monday through Friday at 5 p.m. So, five days in a row every week at 5 p.m. Because what else could we do except get together and talk with each other and give each other good, positive, supportive, loving energy. So, that's why I'm here and I hope that's why you all are here. This is how Watch Me Work works, okay? It's my timer. Yeah, I know. Now I'm at home. I have so many of these timers. It's kind of sad. Uh-oh, something happened. Something, something, something happened. Oh, well, whatever. So, here's my timer. We're going to work together for 20 minutes and you're going to work on whatever it is that you work on. You know what I'm saying? So, it can be a writing project. Again, as you guys know, I'm most versed in talking about writing stuff. But it can be anything you need to work on to get your work done. The timer is going to go off. And after we've, I'm seeing someone's calendar here. This is kind of weird. We're working on it. Okay, great. I'm doing a screen share with somebody. I don't even know. Okay, but after we work together for 20 minutes, the timer goes off. And for the remainder of the time, which is going to be 40 minutes, we're going to be talking, giving love to Elaine. I'm giving love to Elaine Avila. You know what? I'm looking at you and I'm like, I know you. And these people I've known for like a hundred years and now here they are. But after we work for 20 minutes, I'm going to be talking, you're going to be asking me questions about your writing process and I'll be offering answers. Okay, we don't have time for people to actually read from something they've written. You know what I mean? It's not like offering a critique about a specific piece of writing. We're talking more about process questions like, I don't know how to start or my characters aren't talking to me or how do I know what I'm done or how do I keep going or how do I set up a schedule, especially in these crazy times or whatever. Okay, we'll be talking about your writing process, your work process. All right, anything else? And so Audrey's going to help, to Audrey, one of our awesome moderators is going to help with the nuts and bolts. Take it away. Hi, everybody. Thank you so, so much for joining us. This is so cool. So as usual, you'll be able to ask questions during our question portion after we write for or work for 20 minutes. You'll be able to ask questions in four different ways. One is you'll be able to raise your hand. There should be a raise your hand button, I think in the bottom of your screen. Let me know in the chat if you can't see it and I'll help you figure out where it is. And if you're watching the stream online, you can also tweet at us at the Public Theater Twitter or into our Instagram messages. And then the final way is that you can tweet at us at Watch Me Work SLP with the hashtag HowlRound, which is H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D. And that is that. And when you raise your hand on the Zoom, if you're in the Zoom portion, I will unmute you when we're able to answer your question. I'm laughing because my husband was just dancing off-camera, off-camera. OK, so yeah, I'm sorry I'm leaning over to get my notebook. It's all very organized over here. How many of you are homeschooling? Yeah, I. OK, it's a real challenge. It's all a challenge. And then those of you who are not, it's still a challenge. OK, so we're going to we're going to get ready. Everybody got something to write with and on and all that. I'm going to use a notebook today. Usually use a typewriter, but good. You got something to write on. There you go. OK, ready? So we're going to start. I'm going to turn it up so we can all hear it. OK, here we go and go. Yay. All right. So funny. There was 20. That was that was 20 minutes. It's good. It's good. So now we've done the the writing part. Or as I say, when we do it live, that was because this is like a show. So now we've done. Now we've done the action together of the show or of the play. And now we're going to do the dialogue together, which means that you're going to ask me questions about your creative process. So. Audrey and Miranda, you guys are ready with the OK. He's got a question. All right, Kiki, we got you. Yay. OK, so my question is how. Do you start your 10 minute plays? Ah, my 10 minute plays. You mean I don't know if they're 10 minutes. How do I start like a short play? You mean? Yeah. OK, how do I start a short play? What do you like to write on, Kiki? Um, mostly feminist work. I feel like. That's great. I meant like pencil. Oh, oh, um, usually pencil journal. Great. Great. OK, great pencil journal. OK, so and you have your topics that you love, feminist topics. Sometimes mostly cool, cool. Yeah. So you just like pick it up and put it down. You can what what what what's what seems to be, you know, it sounds like there's something to keep it all holding you back, slowing you down. What's what's the trouble? Um, well, I guess once I start writing, I just hard to explain, like I I have a. I have an action that I see in my head. Uh huh. Yeah. And I. When I'm writing, I'm either overwriting it to where it becomes something totally different and it doesn't make any sense anymore. Right. Or it becomes what I want, but it's too short for like, it's not that. Ten minute. It's not. I don't know. It's OK. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, that's the cool thing about like. Writing it's it's it's hard. It can be difficult, right? And that's OK. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It just means that it actually is difficult. Like, have you ever run a marathon? No, yes. Yes. Country. Me too. Cross country. Have you ever climbed Mount Everest? Never. OK, well, that's hard, too. Right. It doesn't mean like because it's your experience and difficulty that you're doing it incorrectly. Right. OK, so the first thing you do, she said you start writing and you find that your your writing is not expressing the thing that you wanted to express, right? But you do get to an end point. Is that correct? Yeah. OK. And then you find that correct me for my you find that it's not long enough. Is that correct? Yes. OK. So first of all. You when you write it down. It's great. Pat yourself on the back. You did it, right? OK. That's writing. Now you can do your rewriting, which is bringing it, making it make sense and making it make better sense. You see what I mean? So oftentimes the first time we write something, it doesn't say the things that we wanted to say. So we have to do some rewriting.  OK. And the thing about it not being long enough. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. So you time it, you read it with actors, and it comes out to nine minutes and 12 seconds. Darn, I didn't make it a timid thing. I don't think I've ever consciously written a 10 minute play. I don't think. Maybe I have. Maybe I'm just. But I write plays of varying lengths. Yeah. Sam Shepard, you know, the great writer playwright Sam Shepard, he has his essay on time and he says time doesn't matter. Don't worry about it. OK, so if you have at the end of your writing period, a short play and you rewrite it and make it kind of address the things and the themes that you're interested in, you've done a great job. If it's seven minutes and 12 seconds, if someone holds that against you, I haven't come on here and we'll have a conversation. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that makes sense to everybody. I mean, a 10 minute play, usually when people say 10 minute play, they just mean not an hour long or a 30 minute.  Like submitting, though. So, like, like when theaters want to do the 10 minute play festival and they think you're playing, they are going to reject your play because it's seven minutes and 12 seconds. Definitely shorter than that. It's weird because usually my like when I do 10 minute plays, they're around 10 to 15 pages, I guess. And this time my play was eight pages and it was three minutes long when we read it. And I was like, so read it slower. No. Give, give, throw a long speech in there. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, bring a soap box.   OK, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, great. OK. But the main thing is you keep writing, Kiki, OK? Yeah. OK. Anybody else? All right. Amara has her hand up. I'm going to unmute Amara. Thank you. Hello. Hi, Mara. Hi, Susan Louie. So I'm working on something it's called Manic Pixie Dream Girls Aren't Black. And I don't want it to be a musical, but I think it's a musical. Can you talk a little bit about the difference between plays with music and musicals or what you think they are? So you don't want to be you don't want to be a musical, Amara, but you but it has music in it. So on the stuff, great. Well, I think the difference in the play with music in it and a musical is like, I don't know. I mean, all I know are examples for my own work or or no, much better. Like there's some Shakespeare plays with music in them, right? So, OK, there's some Brecht plays, you know, like Mother Courage.   So I do you know the difference between a play with I'm asking you, do you know the difference when you play with music and musical? I have a theory. Uh huh. What is your theory? My theory is that like musicals, the songs must serve the plot. Like they must move the structure forward, but plays with music. It doesn't have to serve the plot in the same way. Like what I'm writing into the thing now is a bunch of smaller performances, open mic sessions that where the music doesn't necessarily move the plot forward, but it might tell us something about where the character is, which is kind of why the lines are blurring about whether or not this is a musical or not. But that's my theory. There's a whole bunch of conversations about what's a play and what's not a play, you know. I think I think or you know, I mean, we live in the age. Hello, everybody. We're like gender is fluid and you're worried about this. Yeah, it's OK, you know what? Write, write your thing, you know what I'm saying? One, if a producer loves it and they call it a musical, then it's a musical.  Right. I don't care if you think it's a play with music. I think you're I would agree with you because you're writing it. You know what I'm saying? But I wouldn't get too hung up on the label of it. Especially if the label is keeping you from writing it. It's not.  Well, musicals are plays and plays are musicals. They're it's the same thing. Yes, I understand. Yeah, like people are humans or whatever that that relationship is. But yeah, does that make sense? I don't think you're going to get again. I don't think you're going to get slapped on the wrist for writing a musical when you were commissioned to write a play. Cool. You will get in trouble if you wrote a laundry list or a grocery list. Fair enough. Right. Right. I think I think you're going to be happy. I think they're going to be happy. You did your writing. Fabulous. It sounds like it's a great show. They're going to love it. Thank you. And if they don't again, come on here. We'll have more people who will have in the comments question, you know, all those people over there. Fair enough. She didn't write a play. She wrote a musical. Mm hmm. Thank you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Who else we got? Sina, I'm so sorry if I'm singing you wrong. Has a question. I'm going to unmute you. Oh, maybe not. Try it again. Oh, there we go. Hi. Hi. Yeah, it's it's Sina, but thank you. Sorry. Hi, Sina. Hi. Where are you, Sina? Where are you, Sina? I'm I'm in Virginia. I grew up in Virginia. I'm in my backyard in Virginia. Oh, very, very nice. Yeah, it is. It's awfully gorgeous. Yeah, it is. It's I'm lucky. I'm glad to be here. Get some fresh air. I guess this is a question more about maybe your process. But do you. So I guess maybe this is a little bit a little bit about me. I'm in grad school for acting at Columbia. And I'm working on this play right now. And and when we were just writing, I kind of I kind of found this thing of like, maybe it's like the actor part of my brain can't really turn off, but like of maybe like meandering. And I was wondering you yourself, do you go into a scene that you're about to write? And do you know like what these what? Let's say it's a two person scene. What these two people want from each other and then write? Or do you figure that out while you're writing? Or is this even something to think about when you're first just getting it on the page and just kind of like splurging it out there. So so you're excited to make you're an actor, studying acting at Columbia, but you're writing your. Yeah, yeah, I'm just writing myself a nice part, but it's also just a story that's like a nice. Yeah, it's like a personal story that I've always wanted to write. I've always written stuff. And so I would say at this point, I mean, you're working on it right now. Yeah, and it's like a first draft. And I'm kind of like, I'm not even writing it linearly. I'm kind of just like, just thoughts that come into my head. I'm just like, oh, this is a scene and just writing it. But I have like the structure of it in my head, like the beginning of the end and kind of what happens throughout. Well, I mean, there are different tactics for different times, you know? So right now I would say, Sina, if you're enjoying, I mean, which would you, which tactic would be more enjoyable to you right now? Would it be, I know what the characters want from each other and then you write the scene or would it be kind of just enjoying the process of writing, which is, which would be more enjoyable for you right now? Oh, that's, it's kind of hard to say, I guess without trying both, I think, I think, I think it's pretty like there's some catharsis I find with just like, like pen to paper, just writing. And what you were talking about earlier, expressing the thing is that we want to be expressing and like exploring them. I think, I think I'm dealing with that. Great. Great. Yeah. And if it, so just, I mean, you're, you're, you're trying out writing, you've always been writing stuff. Right now it sounds like it might be helpful if it's an enjoyable process. So if you find that that is very cathartic and you're enjoying it, stick with that. But if you find that, gosh, I'm having, I might be having a hard time right now, you know? Then ask yourself, what does character A want from character B? Or maybe more specifically, what does character A want more than anything? And what are they doing in this scene to get it? Okay. It might not be something they want specifically from character B. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. And that might, a lot of times when we, you just kind of narrow your field of focus a little bit, that kind of narrows the field of focus. So you're not just writing anything. You're getting a little more focused. And sometimes that helps. It actually moves the distractions out of the way. Okay. You're still in writing mode. You know, I tell people that students or myself too, that there are two kinds of, there are two curages in writing. There's writing and there's rewriting, right? And in writing, it's anything goes, everything grows. Doing your thing, right? Yeah. And in rewriting, it's, you take the sword of discrimination, you all know what that sword is, right? It's like, it's not, it's just like, you know what is and you know what ain't. Yeah. So with that discrimination, and you're cutting everything that does not fit. So that's a second kind of curse. That's a curse of rewriting. They both take incredible amounts of courage. So, you know, you're going to be doing the writing, you're just letting it flow, but sometimes it's more helpful to narrow our focus. Like for you, Kiki, you ran cross country, right? Kiki ran cross country. So cross country, long distance runners, there's a path, right? There's a track.  You're not just running anywhere, right? You're running on a track on a path. And so narrowing your focus, Sina, sometimes helps doing that, getting in that flow. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So it could help, but if it doesn't feel good, right now, you might just want to feel good and feel that catharsis you get. So just write anything, put a couple of characters in a scene and just go. Right. The most important thing is that you are creating situations where you are welcoming your process and you're feeling welcomed by your process. So at the end of the day, you can say, yeah, I did a little bit of something and I feel, I feel okay. I feel better, you know? Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. All right, Jo-Ann has her hand up. If you, and just as a reminder for everybody, in the participant tab, there's a little button. You can click to raise your hand. It'll put a little blue hand on my screen. So I see you guys. You're doing a great job. This is fantastic. Thank you. I can't believe it. Oh my God. I know, I'm like in shock. Now I've lost Jo-Ann after all that. Oh, here she is. There we go. On you. Go ahead, Jo-Ann. There she is. Hey, you can hear me? Yes, we can hear you. My question is, is that how do you, cause I see you just writing, you're writing, you're writing, but how do you keep, make your characters round? That they don't, that they're not flat. What do you mean? What's the difference to Jo-Ann between round and flat? What's the difference? Me, there's more depth to them and how to create that and make that happen within the character. So it's not, they're more interesting. And I find is sometimes I may get one character but I feel that it's interesting and then the others are not. Really, to, trying to, to make the play more alive for me, you know?  How do you start that? Yeah, that's a great question. That's a great question. Cause sort of creating your characters and how, how do we create characters? One thing I do is I dig deep. Okay, that's one thing I sort of, and I'm not just interested in the characters who one might say are like me. I'm interested in every single character in the play or the novel or whatever it is, the screenplay, whatever it is I'm writing. I'm deeply interested in what some people might call background characters or what some people might call secondary characters or tertiary characters, the less important characters, right? Right. And that comes from, I mean, and I like, I'm not the first right.  That mofo was deeply interested in all the characters, deeply. You felt like Shakespeare was listening in. What do you have to say, you know? That's why all the characters are like, wow, they're all remarkable and interesting, right? It's not just the main person, woman or man, whatever. Okay, so for us when we write, a lot of times the main character can be like, I'm just gonna do it up to my screen. It's hard to do it, I'm just gonna, you know, right? They're like, and you can't really see around them, right? Yeah. They just taken up all the view, okay? But you really have to start looking, who's that? Who are you? Get into a conversation with these characters. Get to know them, right? Get interested in them. I mean, like when you go out, well, we don't go out much anymore, but, but when you do have to go out or how, okay. Well, when you go out to the store, on that one day you go out to the store to get you two weeks of groceries or when the kind and very generous delivery person brings things to your doorstep. Take a look at them.  But think about them. Spend some time, Joanne, thinking about them, taking them in. Not necessarily into your home, but into your heart.  What would it be like to walk around in her shoes? Think about it. You see what I mean? I am constantly taking people in, you know, right?  I'm empathetic. And I think empathy, feeling for others, right? Makes for good writing, I think. Even if you don't have to get all into their business, you know what I'm saying? But just consider the lives of others. Okay. And the last question, go ahead.  Is that law? It's a suggestion that has helped many. Okay. But I would say it is helpful. Like if I'm saying, you know, well, we can't travel anymore either if you're in New York, but look, I'm in New York, but I'm saying, if I were to get in the car right now and say, I'm going driving, right?  I'm just going around in circles. Okay, great. But if I say, I'm going to drive to Virginia to visit Sina. I'm going to get in my car and I'm going to have a map. It does give my project a kind of energetic motion. Do you see what I'm saying? Okay. So what I offer you, Joanne, is you don't have to know for sure where you're going. Okay.  You see what I'm saying? Yes. So you can say the end of your play might be, and they live happily ever after. That's the end. And they live in a yurt happily ever after the end. You know? Okay. But by the time you get there, it might have changed. Okay. And that's okay. But that was helpful. I'm glad. Thank you. That's why I'm here. No, really. Thank you. Thanks, Joanne. Okay. All right. We've got Brianda has a question. Hey, Brianda, where you at? Yes. And you pronounce my name right. Thank you. You're welcome. So I'm really interested because I love diving deep and I'm really interested in your process, whether you have a process for determining whether research is a distraction or whether it's like fear and disguise, whether it's no longer serving the process, like whether you have like a litmus test to decide whether you keep diving into research or whether you just go back to just writing and rewriting. Right. That's great question, Brianda. When you say, I mean, you know, one could say research is a distraction or a fear after a certain amount of time, right? One could say not wanting to research is a distraction or a fear because what you're afraid of finding out something that you didn't know before. So it can go either way, right? So I would suggest if it's a topic that you know less about, you know, and you feel like I got to research because, you know, right? Like when I started writing this thing about Aretha Franklin, I didn't know anything about Aretha Franklin, so I did some research. But there came a time when I said, okay, you feel a feeling, you feel kind of filled up, like you're eating dinner and you go, I'm full at that moment, stop, right? You want to stop and start writing, okay? Because you can, and this is the truth about research, you can always go back and do a little bit more. I know, that's where I think I get into, because I nerd out about things. It's like, oh, I find this out, and then I find this out and I find this out. And I think it's all helpful. Like, oh, I have to know the whole story and dive in deep and pretty soon. I'm like researching the book that inspired the, you know, all the source material. And I don't know like when it's too far. So I like the idea of feeling full.   Stop, when you're researching the book that based, that with the book you're researching, when you do that, when you're doing that second level of researching, you've gone too far. Because your job, I mean, I'm not sure what you're specifically, what you're writing, but our job is to weave together. Okay, hi, yeah, okay, goodbye. Sorry, my child play on video games today.  But our job is to fabricate, right? And to fabricate, we take a strand of what's factual and lay it against the strand of what's fictional. And we weave it together, right? Okay, we're not the, well, not even the history channel is historically accurate, but we're not doing that, we're weaving together the fictional and the historical, okay? In a beautiful fabric. So when I say dive deep, what you need to dive deep in is not the research necessarily because that's your go-to, right? You like research, it makes you feel good. Okay, good, good, stop. Stop, stop, put those, get off the internet, put those articles down. Maybe give yourself a time limit, like I'm only gonna research for three weeks or something like that. And then I'm gonna start to write. And do you do a lot of research first? Sometimes I get ideas and then the research starts and I'm like, oh, maybe I should have just gone in and get the idea and start writing and wait till a problem comes up and then research. Yeah, I mean, like I said, for the Sarita Franklin project, I had to do some kind of research because I didn't know nothing. I knew very little, you know what I'm saying? And I was working for National Geographic Channel and they're fact-based. So I had to do something just so I could have a meeting about her. You know what I'm saying? Because I knew very little. I didn't know enough to have a conversation about her. So I did a lot of research, but I also didn't overdo the research. I did just enough to build, to fabricate, if you will, I'm mixing metaphor, sorry, to fabricate a raft that I could put in the water and start to float on. Yeah. And the other pieces came to me as I needed them. You know what I mean? Just enough to create that raft, okay? Yeah. And so you have to be brave. You have to be brave in your writing and your rewriting.  Just give yourself enough to go on. Just enough to create that first rock to get yourself across the stream. Yeah. You know? Then activate your creative mind. You've got to.  Yeah. Okay. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. All right, we have about seven minutes left. So Atea, you are up next. There you go. Hi. Hi, Atea. So my question is, I'm right in a play that's based in Jamaica. And of course, characters who live locally on the island, they speak with an accent. So I'm just concerned about how to best represent the everyday vernacular, especially having characters that are of different generation and depending on like when you were born, how old you are, you might say certain terms that a young boy who's in his 20s in Jamaica now, he wouldn't say those things. So I'm just concerned about how to best represent each character using the context of who they are and where they're at in life. And then also making it, I guess, digestible to whoever reads or watches it. That's a great, that's a really great question. So here's a side question I have.  Do you know the characters?  I think I have about 70% of the characters fleshed out. I've been with them for a long time. The story that I wanna tell, I have it all in my head up until the first act. Now I'm slowly working through the construction of Act Two. Right, I would say, and this is gonna be a radical suggestion, I would say do, sounds weird, do whatever. Cause what I hear behind that question is I'm not sure about what I'm writing about. So maybe this dialect question might be getting in the way of it a little bit. I would say have the 20 year old young man speak as a 20 year old young man would. Spell it however you think is appropriate. You know what I mean? It's not ever, it's not a, what do you call it? What people call a patois, it's not that. It's not a pigeon, it's not that. It's not a lesser than form of another English or another language, it is the English they speak. So write it anyway phonetically or whatever that you feel like is appropriate. You've got different generations, like you said. You've got different classes, different people in different classes speak differently. You've got different, all kinds of differences. Write it anyway you can, okay? I would say for right now, don't sweat it being digestible to whoever might read it. Your job is to write it down, get it done, right? And then if you've got the story flowing along, then you can maybe go, okay, maybe I can modify this dialect or this way of speaking so it can be better digestible. But if you're worrying about that right now, you understand what I'm saying? Write it any way you can, okay? Yeah, I guess my obstacle was getting through the spelling of it, because it's not necessarily something that has like a formal written form. And I'm spelling how I hear it and how I'm used to hearing it as I was raised. So that's really where my hiccup was. Like, how do I even spell this out?  Like death of the last black man in the whole entire world, aka the Negro Book of the Dead. Those are dead people.   And what I know, I'm sorry, Kiki, I'm scandalized. Sorry, I mean, I thought this was an adult show. If there are any children, put them in their rooms and make them play video games.  Don't let those hiccups stop you.  Just write it down. You got to get the story out, okay? All righty, thank you. You're welcome, you're welcome. Great question. We've got about two minutes left. Okay, my answer will be really fast. Okay, the next person we have was Crystal Adams. Hi. Crystal from New Jersey. Yeah. Hi, girl. How are you? Happy to see you. Happy to see you too. Hi, your kids. How are you, kids? They're in a different room, so they didn't hear any of that. Okay, okay. Okay, go ahead. Sorry, your question. Just a quick question, just because just with everything that's been going on, like, I find that there's a huge wall and that it's been very hard to hear any new voices, like a new story, a new something to be inspired by something. So I feel like even writing now, it's like, it's just, sorry, it's dry, it's very dry and I don't know what to do to kind of get into a new place of finding something that brings me passion to keep going, to keep writing, to keep a story. I feel like I don't have a story right now. I hear you. And I think a lot of us are there. How about, I think we have to give ourselves a little space to hear it. Cause we always have a story. You know what I mean? Even my kids are in the other room and my dog just got up on the couch. You know, that's a story. We always have a story. Just, I don't think we always have time or make the time to hear it, okay? So we gotta make the time. We gotta promise each other and this is why I'm doing this five days a week to make the time to do it, okay? Even Crystal, if it's just writing for 20 minutes a day with me and the rest of everybody for five days a week, you're gonna make the time. I know you've got kids. I know it's tricky and you're probably homeschooling and all that, you know? Five days a week, 20 minutes a day, that's a start. Okay? Okay. We can find other times during our day where we can piggyback on that five minutes. I mean, 20 minutes, I'm sorry. So the 20 minutes you do with us at five days a week, maybe you can also find yourself 20 minutes in the morning, right? Or 20 minutes before five o'clock, you know? And then you see what I mean? And just rewrite in your notebook for starters because the process, the practice of just allowing yourself the time to listen to your story is what we all need to be doing for ourselves and for each other right now. Right. Okay? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Great to see you. So great to see you too. I mean, Avila, great to see you. These people, Molly Murphy, these people I've known, Rob.  It's wonderful, it's wonderful to see you guys. It's wonderful to see all of you guys here and we'll get, five days a week we'll be here, you know? Ryan, is that Ryan in the dark? Yeah, hi. Hi, Ryan in the dark, but you know, we'll be here five days, just keep coming back. We're here, it's free, you know? Just to note, there's a different link every day so make sure you sign up for each day so I'll send you the correct link. Okay. I love you guys.  We love you. Carl, come back. Thank you. Okay, okay. Bye. Thank you. Thank you.