We have a great question here on procrastination if this is an issue you struggle with. I'm going to go through this question that was sent to me about procrastination so I'm hopeful that it will help you if you're struggling with this too. This person wanted me to make a video response to their question. So there's a little bit of a preamble to it. I'm just going to come to the part that is specific to this person's question but it says the name of this email is procrastination is destroying my life.  So my issue that I want thoughts on is how do you deal with the regret for getting behind in work? I feel so bad that I got behind and now I feel this sense of impending doom that I'm going to be found out. Interestingly enough, today I got a letter from an agency at work to me and my boss that I am 30 days behind on some reporting that I was supposed to do. I feel horrible and I am going to be so embarrassed that I allowed this to happen. I also have a problem with my self-worth and a lack of self-love. A lot of my worth is wrapped up in what I can do for others. My worth is what value I bring to others like my work. I also have a major problem with people pleasing and feeling like a victim. All of these problems contribute to my procrastination and depression. And finally, even though I know I am behind, I have so much trouble trying to get myself started. Your videos on things like doing, things like 30 minutes of work have been helpful, but I still struggle. Any thoughts you might have would be greatly appreciated. Maybe this will be a video I am interested in your thoughts. Okay, great question.  So, one thing that might be helpful here is, one thing I noticed was this idea that I feel so guilty because I fell behind. And one take on this is that that is cause and effect is actually something we need to look at there. The idea that you feel guilty because you fell behind is actually not what's happening. The guilt was there to begin with and led to this procrastination, which is a coping strategy. And that's what's happening. You don't feel guilty because you didn't do the work, although what absolutely seems like that's what's happening. The guilt was there first. So, you'll notice when we feel guilty, or carry in guilt, and you mentioned that there are very, very great self-awareness that you mentioned about the lack of self-love and the self-worth issues. That's really where we need to be focused here. Because when we feel guilty, there's all sorts of issues come up with that. I feel guilty unconsciously I'm going to need to be punished. Who in society do we view as guilty? Criminals, prisoners, and what we do with them, we punish them. So, if I'm running the narrative of guilt and unworthiness inside myself, unconsciously I'm going to look for proof. I'm going to be the most manifest proof in my lived experience that look how bad I am. Now, the problem too is when I carry that guilt, it's an unbearable feeling, right? And what we do is we start to scramble. We start to rush everything. Rush, rush, make up for it, compensate for it. Now, when do we ever do anything well when we're rushing? Not very often, right? So, I think the main thing in your question is how do you get over this regret of being behind? And the short answer to that question is, once you understand why this is happening, it is going to be such a relief to you.  In fact, that's the only thing I have to stop doing. That's such a big deal that it's like, well, I'm on the other side of it now.  To get to that insight, to that realization that I'm not this bad person and I'm not incapable of just engaging with work, it's like you don't even care. It's so valuable that insight about yourself. You don't really mind what you had to go through to get it. Now, I would prefer anyone watching this that you get there sooner rather than later, right? I don't want you to have to struggle for a long period of time until this sinks in, this message.  This is primarily a self-worth, self-respect, self-trust issue. So, notice that it's made, the guilt narrative is there, right?  And the solution is actually not to do it. The solution, because you're under all that pressure, is you feel all this anxiety and you feel rushed and rushed and rushed, you can't actually execute anything. So then it becomes, the solution is, well, do it later or soon. That's the solution to the problem, which doesn't work, okay? So, what the solution really entails is changing that inner narrative around guilt, changing the story about who you believe yourself to be. We start to question this thing about it must be done now, I have to hurry up, it has to be done, it has to be done, and which exchange that for. Now this is, when you hear me say this, anyone who is struggling with procrastination when they hear me say this, the solution for procrastination is to slow down. When you hear me say that, you're going to feel a reaction inside yourself like, I can't, did you not understand me? I have a deadline, I'm in trouble here. But that rushing, rushing, rushing extended back weeks and months prior to this. It's what has led to that situation. So the solution is to, because of the guilt, we feel this incredible anxiety inside us, right? And that anxiety means we rush, we rush, we rush to compensate. So the solution is, slow down, take some time to attune, to reflect, to just figure things out. Some journaling, some attunement to what your needs are. Because that's another thing that goes out to window with this guilt. When we have guilt, notice how you're not having much fun. Notice how you're never actually restful or at peace. And that's because you may be doing things that are restful or fun, but they're always kind of a little bit tainted by that underlying feeling of guilt that's there in the background. So it's the worst case scenario where you're doing fun things, you're not actually enjoying it, and you're not doing the work. So it's like you're in no man's land. So when you're attuning to yourself, what you do is you realize, okay, those needs I have are actually valid. The need for rest, the need for play, the need to take care of my physical needs, the need for meaning. Because quite often it's the busy work in life that we struggle with. It's the responsibility stuff. It's the stuff I'm not really crazy about doing that we procrastinate about. I'm in that cycle of procrastination there, and we never get to our other needs. Like, what's more meaningful work to me? Or those other needs like rest, play, reflection, taking care of yourself physically, those types of things. So the insight here is to first of all accept that I don't feel guilty because I didn't do the work. I felt guilty and then didn't do the work. This is reversing cause and effect. This is really what's driving procrastination. Something's wrong with me. I'm a screw-up, I'm lazy, I'm defective. Right? That's all. And all it is, it's actually absolutely categorically untrue about who you are. I can tell you that. That's a spoiler there. That is not real. It is just a story. Now it's based in other people's stuff probably that you picked up on. Other people's stories about themselves, maybe were projected onto you and you interjected it. The only thing you're guilty of is not questioning that. But that's not even true because how would you question it when you're younger? There's no one around you to explain to you. Hang on a second, you might want to just reanalyze what that person just put into you. Cause that's dangerous and it's not true and it's not going to serve you. So even that you're not guilty of. But your awareness is growing here. You're like, you're saying to yourself, something's up here. I've tried the force. I've tried to push myself. I've tried beating myself up and it's not really working. So the work will come when we slow down, when we attune, when we put, here's a big word, when we put boundaries around this really important work. Right? When we are working with procrastination. One of the things that becomes obvious pretty quickly is, you know, you'll say to somebody, well, okay, this is really important work that you're struggling with here. How much time are you going to dedicate to it? And one of the things people often say is, I just have to do more. It has to be done. It has to be done. What do you mean like a boundary? So notice how that means this work is so important that it has the right to overtake my life completely. That's how deeply we are trying to compensate for this guilt narrative.  So we have to set boundaries with work. And that comes, so that's basically how much time and energy am I going to permit to take care of this task? And we have an upper limit of exposure. So you have to attune to that for yourself. So we say, okay, no more than two hours on this thing today. That's called a boundary. That's an upper limit of a boundary. And you can have a lower limit of a boundary. I'm going to aim for at least 30 minutes. If you're struggling with 30 minutes, it might even be less than that. But how you figure out what your lower limit of exposure is, is you look back on your behavior the last few weeks and say, what was the least amount I did on any given day? What was the least amount of work on this project I did on any given day? And you might say, well, days went by when I didn't do anything, even though it's important. So we say, okay, anything above zero is now your minimum level of exposure, your minimum boundary. So that could be 30 minutes. It could be 20 minutes. It could be whatever seems easy enough to remain consistent with. And so we would aim to have that as our standard. And then we may continue up to the upper boundary, which might be say two hours, right? But once you hit the two hour mark, under no circumstances are you to go beyond that. That's what an enforcement of a boundary looks like when it comes to this stuff. The anxiety in there does not like the idea of it having a boundary. It wants, it's so big and important and scary. It must be, how long am I going to do this for? How long is a piece of string? Infinite time until this is done. And your nervous system is going to look at that and say, mm-mm, not going to happen. Because your nervous system doesn't want you to do any of this work. That's not a bad thing. Your nervous system's strategy is to do not expand energy. That's not a bad thing. That's just human nature. Stay on the couch. You're saved there. Don't do a lot. It doesn't like the idea of you. Certainly it resents the idea of you allocating infinite resources and time and energy into doing this task. So it'll resist that. So boundaries will help with the anxiety. So then we're working on the boundary. We're working on changing the narrative about ourselves. We're working on slowing down. We're working on validating your other needs that are separate from this maybe responsibility job. You know this thing that's kind of you don't want to do. I just call that responsibility. So it's slow down. Slowing down looks like I once had a person I spoke with and they were kind of in this similar situation. Where I've been by the way. I know exactly how this feels to be in that situation where procrastination has led up to this really, really intense scenario. But I spoke with somebody and we decided that what they need to do is slow down. And we came up with this thing where instead of like jumping into emergency mode to get over the line on this thing that they were going to spend the week just chilling out. Spend the weekend just chilling out and just journaling and just reflecting, reading some materials on this. My book is good. Neil Fiori's book is a good book on this. Really any literature that will advocate, you know, develop self-esteem and feeling good about yourself. And changing. So instead of like going into the emergency panic mode about how to deal with this really serious thing, I was like, no, slow down for the weekend. And that person did that. And they were in such a good place mentally at the end of that weekend that they had that panic situation resolved by Tuesday. So and it was not until Friday that they were going to face this thing. Had they not done that over the weekend, it would have been a week of procrastination leading up to the Friday. One of the remarkable things you'll find when you start to relate to yourself in a different way and you start to question all this stuff about laziness and not good enough and, you know, all that stuff is you'll realize you'll get a big surprise and it'll be that taking care of all this stuff that you've struggled with is actually incredibly easy to do. There was a big surprise to me when I realized this is so easy. How have I struggled with this for so long? It was just so easy. Once I figured out why it's happening and how to proceed in a healthy, supportive way. And I just watched the work get done. No big deal. No resentment towards it at all. Not always enjoyable work maybe, but that's okay. Some of it is fine. Part of life is doing some things that we're not always totally eager to do as long as it doesn't come at the expense of other things that are important. That's the real difference. But there's no resentment. So the final thing I'll say is having gone through this and been in this situation that you're in if you can change this and you can start to understand yourself now, right? You will not care that it led to this situation. You'll see it as thank God I went through that situation to get to this insight. So I want to extend the invitation to anybody here is that this issue is not solved by forcing and pushing yourself and beating yourself up and hurrying and rushing yourself. This issue is resolved. The invitation is to do anything in your life. Watch my videos if they're helpful. Watch anybody else's videos. Read materials. Be around people who are not in this bully yourself mentality. They're in a mentality of slow down, prioritize self-care and rest, have healthy boundaries with the work and keep it in perspective. Be around people like that. Also take on self-empowerment and that I can start to work on my own narrative, my own story. I can start to question a lot of this guilt. I can go into stillness more. I can connect to that inner compassionate voice that is there and it's a much more helpful voice and a much more helpful mindset that you do have access to through being willing to question and sit with some of those emotions that are around that. So that is an invitation and I think it's a very, very useful thing. I want to thank this person. I'm not going to say their name here for that question and I know an awful lot of us are dealing with this but there are very, very easy and useful, helpful, positive ways to go about dealing with this issue to help you do the things in your life that you want to do and to feel good about yourself. Not only will it be more productive the much more important thing is that you'll be developing more self-esteem, self-love, self-compassion, self-understanding and self-respect too which is really, really important and self-trust. Guys, I hope that's a useful video. If you want me to do more videos on this procrastination issue let me know if you find them helpful and in the meantime, take care of yourself and I'll talk with you in the next video. Bye for now.


First question is from Zach D. P. How detrimental is alcohol to weight training? How much is too much? You know, this is a Very common question as a trainer that we get all the time Right you guys you guys remember getting this all the time from clients like, you know, I have this goal But how do I how do I look at what I can't get past this point? I'm sorry I have to point out the help in the room Zach D. P. Come on guy probably not what it means, but it's fine. Let's let's move on Yeah, no all the time I would get clients and people asking me about I used to get this one a lot like, you know Oh, you know, I definitely want to lose weight this and that but make sure that you know I have five glasses one a week. No, I used to how many less clients that would say that was there That was their thing was like listen, I'll do whatever you tell me to but I'm not but the wine Yeah, I'm not giving up my wine at night, or I'm not giving up my my scotch or whatever it is And it's like, you know, uh I don't know if I I don't know if I've even figured out or the best way to answer this to clients but I do know this like if you have that attitude of You know that you need to be drinking or you have to be drinking Normally that person is not very successful at Achieving their fitness goals. Yeah, it's not to say that there are not people that have found ways to integrate Alcohol into their lifestyle and still maintain it. It's I'm not saying that what I'm saying is the people that come in that attitude That exactly that have that attitude from the gates that say I'm not willing to give X up or I'm not giving these days up And how do I figure out a plan to integrate that if you come in with that? 99% of those people failed at getting to their goal now if you were Open to hey, I can totally get rid of it Whatever it takes to figure out or get to my goal and then hopefully one day I can start to integrate it into my lifestyle Those people have some success. Oh, it's always yeah It's I mean it may not have that big of an effect overall, but like I've noticed the training people It's always like one thing it's it's that one thing that is on that list of like untouchables We yeah everything but this and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna You know give up that those snacks because I live and die for those every day when in fact like That was the one key that if we finally addressed that like a couple years later Like they're finally okay to do that and then they had like this crazy transformation It's not even it's not even necessarily the alcohol itself I think it's the attitude because I will say that look for the most part for the most part alcohol consumption is going to reduce Your body's ability to build muscle burn body fat adapt all that other stuff now. There are small There's a small percentage of times when some alcohol is going to actually be better for your health Now I'm not talking about the physical physiological health benefits of alcohol there's some studies that suggest Maybe there's some of that I don't believe that what I think what I think is If you use alcohol occasionally because you're connecting with friends and family It's part of a religious ceremony It's something that you're doing with your spouse and you're enjoying You know, it's your it's your anniversary That is good for a segment of your health, which then can contribute to general overall health, but that being said Physically speaking There's no benefit from alcohol and when it comes to building muscle. It's mostly Detriment well, I look at that there's a there's a few reasons for this and one of the reasons is It's completely empty calories. It's just it's not there's no benefit There is no benefit for it towards you burning more body fat or building more muscle And the reality is that most people don't get enough of what they need as it is Right.  That's great Never yeah, you never did in fact We always we always advocate for before you take anything away from anybody's diet No matter how shitty their diet is is to start to add things into the diet that they need So if you already are lacking in nutrients and then you're adding something that's taking up potentially 200 to 500 calories depending on how much Alcohol you're drinking you make it really really difficult to get what your body needs and then You add in the behavioral things that happen with it Normally when you drink you have a tendency to want to eat foods that are also not As advantageous for your goals and then the after effect of the next day the next day a lot of times I feel like trash because of how because I drank and I was Ingesting something that didn't serve my body and then the motivation that I lacked to exercise the next day You know, it's funny too. The more the harder you have challenges with food the more you have to willingly Prevent yourself from binging or overeating the more likely you are to do those things when you drink alcohol because alcohol is a classic Classically reduces inhibitions This is why the jokes about sleeping with people, you know that you normally wouldn't when you're drunk or oh I did that crazy thing or I I did karaoke when normally I wouldn't go up and sing on stage It lowers your inhibitions. And so if you have this Relatively if you don't have a great relationship with food and if it's always kind of a struggle You're probably more likely to eat really crappy food When you drink alcohol because it lowers inhibitions and now you feel like hey, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna stop myself anymore. I'm gonna do whatever I want or whatever So it tends to do that. I'll tell you this. Okay, that all being said, okay If you have a healthy relationship with alcohol, you're using it appropriately. It's not an abuse or whatever One thing you could do is you can you can really mitigate A lot of the negative effects from it by chain bite by kind of manipulating how you use it And one of the biggest things you could do one of the most important things you could do Is not drink late at night That is a big one because what you're doing by drinking late at night is not only are you drinking alcohol But now you're interfering with sleep.   Yeah. No sleep. It's terrible for sleep And I and I think um, there there's a high majority of people that use alcohol after work as a way to cut the edge off And to kind of relax and it's sort of like it becomes a bit of a ritual Even if it's just one or two glasses, you know, which then can kind of uh, you know Compile later like you could start, you know that that could be the start to that Um, but you know like looking at that as like a potential This could become a habit that you form like this is my go-to to relax And so that's the behavior side of that Uh, you know that I always like try to pay attention to and it's not it's not benefiting you Uh in terms of anything else like it's gonna take away from your sleep It's gonna take away from your performance in the gym So I I try to look at alcohol as something that I use as a treat So it's like a like I'm looking forward to it, you know, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna hang out my friends I'm gonna celebrate something like like that's where I want to use alcohol No, we we all openly admit to to having an occasional drink In fact, we we partnered with a company like zbiotic Do you think Sal that the what is what makes the zbiotic so impactful Is the fact that it helps with the sleep. Do you think that's what a majority because I that's what I notice when I use that Right, I don't drink that. It's not a sleep aid. Uh, so it's not that it makes you sleep better It's a it's a it's a genetically engineered bacteria that produces an enzyme That breaks down a a negative byproduct or build-up that's caused from alcohol metabolism called Acetyl aldehyde and what this stuff does is it builds up and typically your liver Creates the enzyme that can destroy it or can break it down But what happens when you drink alcohol is you build up more than you can break down So you get this over you get this build-up of this byproduct of alcohol And what are the symptoms of acetyl aldehyde build-up? inflammation Headaches, you know terrible sleep bad gut your gut is throwing all this stuff that we would Classically label as a a hangover So ziba and look I'll tell you what right now when I when this company We I initially heard about this company through an article that I read about this product And how the author tested it and other people tested it and thought it was amazing I talked about on the podcast the company heard that we had talked about it and contacted us and sent us some samples And I was extremely skeptical. I'm like, okay, whatever. Let's see if this actually works It is eerie. It is eerie how well that it works I mean, we even did a video where adam justin Myself and dug played a drinking game and like idiots we modified the rules thinking it would be better In reality what we went to the absolute extreme. We yeah, we was done. It was very what we did was irresponsible We went way too far. I had never been that drunk. I don't think I've been that drunk in 10 years or longer And we did but we did the zbiotics and the next day Normally the way I would feel would be like I need to stay home from work sick like really really bad Instead I felt like a little tired I didn't I noticed I didn't feel and it had to be because and I've used ever since then I've used zbiotics a few other times. So, you know, I'd said drinking during the day instead of at night Zbiotics is the first product.  There's an issue there And I mean, I don't care if it's we're talking about alcohol right now, but it could be talking about anything We've talked about this before if you have a problem. It has control over you. You don't have control over it. Yeah


I'm a nigga from the block where they hardly make it. I don't pay with little kids when I'm chit-chat.  Rapper Drake with the Ruler's new album Thank You for Choosing GTL has some of the most graphic and lyrically interesting wordplay you'll hear in a 2020 rap album. Tell you the truth, I don't even know these niggas. Tell you the truth, I think you're the police nigga. Tell you the truth, all that kind of sound like snitching.  Pitchfork called the album Mesmerizing, and The Washington Post called it the most urgent rap album of the year. What's most astonishing about Thank You for Choosing GTL is that it was recorded entirely from a prison telephone in Los Angeles. Thank you for using GTL. With criminal justice reform in the spotlight, Draco's new album may help bring attention to the story of how he ended up in prison in the first place. At his first trial, prosecutors used Draco's lyrics and videos as evidence that he had committed a 2016 murder at an LA party. I think many people find it difficult to imagine that these young men are doing something complex, sophisticated, that could be considered literary, artistic. Eric Nielsen is the co-author of Rap on Trial, which chronicles the growing phenomena of criminal prosecutors using hip-hop music as evidence. I think many of them understand that they are misrepresenting rap lyrics. They're doing it because they want the jury to see this stuff that is, you know, salacious, it's profane, and therefore you're compromising somebody's right to a fair trial.  During his trial, Caldwell maintained he had never been in a gang, and that his lyrics were art, not meant to be taken literally. The jury wasn't convinced and convicted Caldwell on only one count of illegal gun possession. LA's district attorney refiled charges on criminal gang conspiracy and shooting from a vehicle. Because of California's harsh gang laws, he could face life in prison. Draco talks about this experience in one of his new songs. Because phone calls from prison are recorded, Caldwell refers to the fact that law enforcement is on the line. Nielsen has worked with a rapper killer Mike on the issue, collaborating on an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court. In the midst of recent police reform protests, killer Mike has made prosecutors partially a point of his activism. As prosecutors become bolder in the ways and strategies that they're using to put artists, rap artists in jail, I do think that we are reaching a point at which many people are going to have to weigh their desire to engage in this art form. You know, to master this art form, they're going to have to weigh that with the reality that it could get them in trouble. As these cases continue to grow in number, I do think that that is absolutely possible.


I think America is going through a real crisis, a crisis of identity, a crisis of trying to figure out what it is, what it stands for, what it actually represents. For a very long time, the ideas, the founding of America, the ideas that made America what it is, I think the greatest country in human history, I know that might not be popular in this audience, the freest country by many, by many measures, and certainly the most powerful economically and militarily in human history. The ideas that made that America possible have been a decline now for decades, one could argue, even a century. And that decline has reached a real pivot point. It is now a reality that nobody in the political spectrum of the United States represents what were the ideals that made America great. There is no political voice for if you will the founding fathers of America. There is no voice for the concept of individual rights, the concept of freedom, the concept of liberty in the United States. There is a struggle and a battle between a left and a right and who will control our lives and in what way that control will manifest itself. One of the striking things about this midterm election is that while the economy will dominate, yes, I agree, that this is going to be determined, that the Republicans will probably win, certainly in the House, possibly even in the Senate, primarily because the economy is doing so badly under Joe Biden, the certainty of that is that nothing would have been different if the Republicans were running things right now and many of the inflationary pressures that exist today were caused by Donald Trump's policy of writing massive checks to everybody, bailing everybody out during COVID, and generally increasing government spending throughout all four years of his administration. And the Donald Trump argued for an infrastructure bill far, far greater than anything Joe Biden actually passed. And one of the things that is true globally today and true, you see, you're living in it right now in the UK. There was a complete consensus about economics between left and right. You know, a trust tries to cut taxes a little bit, tries maybe to bring in a little bit of markets into the UK political establishment, and she gets crushed for even proposing such a preposterous idea of maybe cutting the top marginal tax rate of 45%, which makes imminent sense as you go into a recession to cut the top marginal tax rate if you care about economic growth ultimately, which you can't defend it because the consensus among the people, the consensus among intellectuals, the consensus among everybody, is we need big government involvement in the economy. And that is true in the UK and that is true in the United States and then it's true in Europe. There's complete consensus about economic issues. We're all way to the left of center on economics. Everybody is, even Elizabeth, even trust now, this trust has been brought to her knees. Now, she is going to be left of center on economic issues. So what's the difference between the Republicans and Democrats? What is the battle about? The battle is about cultural issues. That's how left and right are defining themselves. And to a large degree, that is true of the United Kingdom as well. Here, the big difference between the left and right to a large extent is around these cultural issues. The popularity of Boris Johnson in the last election was not due to his revolutionary economic plans. It was due to his nationalism and his conservative cultural views while shifting left on everything economic. And we're seeing that in the United States, exactly the same phenomena. We're seeing the cultural issues as defining the two political parties. The cultural war as defining war between the two political parties. Economics, in a sense, is irrelevant. Economic outcome might be relevant. That is the swing based on how the economy is doing. But economic policy of the Biden administration and the Trump administration is almost identical. It's almost no differentiation. And I would venture that whether you vote for labor, whether you vote conservative, in the short run, at least, there's going to be very little difference in terms of economic policy. Yeah, and I wanted to put this one in its quantity. She's talking about, you know, Americans, still ordinary Americans, if not their politicians, still are very favor of their rights and their arms. I mean, you can give another example. A lot of them, in certain states, didn't tolerate lockdown, not going to tolerate the government busting them about. Isn't there some optimism there to be found? Not for me, anyway. No, I mean, the very idea that there were lockdowns in the United States of America is so horrific that, yes, about a year after the lockdowns were started, a few people rose up and protested over it. But the very idea that Americans, Democrats, Republicans, anybody, would allow the state to lock them down over a virus is so shadowy that it turned me from optimist or pessimist about America. Because I couldn't imagine, if you told me that there was going to be a virus that primarily kills old people, right, does, it keeps the young people pretty much safe, that we would lock down the entire society, we would lock down everybody and lock them at home, and that Americans would just shrug and go, fine, that's okay. And maybe a year later, they would remember, oh, maybe we have some liberties, and maybe we have some freedoms, and maybe we should reject, is just, I would have never predicted that. And indeed, the CDC never predicted it. And it's why, in not a single plan that the CDC had prepared in advance for pandemics was ever a lockdown ever considered. And in that sense, the West didn't use the CDC manual, they used the Communist Party of China's manual to deal with pandemics. We all became China like that. China has won the cultural battle like that. We're economically moving towards China, and we dealt with the pandemic like China, and it's, I know this is not a popular view in Europe, but that's pretty horrific. The fact that our individual liberties can be taken away by the government like that by scamming us into our homes. And look, I'm not a denier of COVID, I'm vaccinated fully, there's three, I've done four, yeah. And not a denier that this was an awful virus, but this is like the worst way to deal with it possible. And the fact that of all the individual rates that Americans possess, the one that they are most adamant about is that they can hold on to their M16s is not inspiring me. If they held on to their first amendment as strongly as they hold on to those M16s, I would be a lot more inspired, but you're seeing an attack on the first amendment, a dramatic attack on freedom of speech.  But in the United States, we're seeing it both on the left and on the right. Clearly Donald Trump was egregiously hostile towards freedom of speech to the extent of going after Jeff Bezos because he owned the Washington Post, because the Washington Post brought the story that was negative towards Donald Trump. The left, with its walnuts and its canceled cultures, clearly does not believe in freedom of speech. There is a real attack on freedom of speech in the United States today. And I wish Americans would be holding on to that, I think, and not to mention separation of state and religion, which I think brings us back maybe to abortion, which there's not particularly a strong, powerful constituency to hold on to that. The left would like to impose their kind of religion on us, and the right would like to impose their kind of religion on us, but impose religion on us both parties want to do. Is it worth thinking about the fact that most Americans are surely not die-hard Trump-Easters or blue-haired woke horrors either, and you're probably not going to want to pick up a gun to defend either of those positions? Most people are normal, and have normal idiosyncratic views on range of issues. Definitely most people are normal, and the fact that we color these states red and blue, but in every red state there are big pockets of blue, and in every blue state there are big pockets of red, and a civil war is not between the states, because as somebody said, Austin, Texas, which is in many regards kind of the heart of Texas, is very, very blue, it's very, very democratic. So the civil war would be within the states, it wouldn't be across the states. I don't see much prospects for civil war, because I will say with regard to the scary part is that such a large percentage of Republicans who support Trump are willing to reject the election, right, are willing to overthrow an election in order to bring them back in power. That is the one, when Trump, out of the equation, I agree civil war is very unlikely. On the other hand, nothing too optimistic. On the other hand, I think America's decline is an ember, that is, I do think America is declining, and this relates to the question about cultural war-related economics. I think it certainly does, because I think the cultural distracts in the fact that America is in decline economically, economic growth in America, everybody cheered when Donald Trump said we had the greatest economy in history, because we grow it 2% again? That's all I can say about that. American economy is a decline, and the only good thing one can say is the Chinese economy is in decline even more so, right, so I think global economy is going to be troubled for the next few decades. And again, this is all kind of distracting from the real challenge which we face, which you mentioned regarding the civil war, which is, what is America? Is America the principles of liberty and freedom and individual liberty and so on, which is supposedly one side, I'm not sure which side, because I don't think that is represented at all in the American political map today. Or is America woke? Or is America, as what's her name, the congresswoman from Georgia said, is America a Christian nation, you know, a fundamentally Christian? So you've got tribalism on the one side, left tribalism and right tribalism on the one side, which is a demonstration of what publicants both are now tribal and collectivistic and anti-American constitution of the Bill of Rights. And I, by the way, would be willing to fight for the death of the Bill of Rights. You know, it's important, yes, you might find one aspect of it to be irrelevant, but there are a number of aspects that keep the country alive and keep, I think, Western civilization going. But both those aspects, both left and right today are tribal. And there is no representative on the political map today, or on the cultural map, not just the political map, the cultural map, for the individualism represented by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There's no representative for the kind of individualism represented even by somebody who I consider relatively mediocre, Oana Reagan. Oana Reagan could not win in the Republican Party today. And that is a travesty. Now, Oana Reagan's not my ideal, right? But he's sure is better than anybody else in the Republican Party right now. Well, that country of West is going to stay. Oh, yeah, let me just say something about that. Unify it. I mean, country of West, it's sad, because I think country of West has real mental problems. No, this is not funny. I'm not meaning this as a joke. This is documented. He's got bipolar or whatever it is. The guy is mentally not there. And the fact that we idolize him and put him on a pedestal does not help his mental problems. It would be good if you got treatment and we didn't worship him.  I don't get him, but as good as he might be, he thinks about anything. Why do we care about singers and movie actors or sports figures? Think about politics. They're irrelevant to the political debate. I mean, they're relevant because people admire them above and beyond anything reasonable. But, you know, they are not shaping the world. We're shaping the world of the intellectuals. We're shaping the world of the professors at universities and public pundits. And even the politicians, though, shape the world. They just, in a sense, they're just mom pieces for the intellectuals behind them. So, if you want somebody to object to it, if you want guidance, it's always been the intellectuals. It's that's where it comes from. And these celebrities, I couldn't care less what anyone said. Some of them said something rational and reasonable. That would be nice, but given that they're almost always, whatever side they happen to be on the political map, unreasonable and completely, you know, completely nuts, why would I care? Gary? So, let me just clarify. I am very opposed to Trump by being opposed to Trump from 2015 on. The fact that he didn't concede the election wasn't surprising at all. He told us he wouldn't concede it in advance. He is the worst thing to happen in American politics, maybe ever. He has destroyed the Republican Party as a credible alternative to the Democrats. I'm almost as anti-Biden and Clinton as anti-Trump. So, it's not like I'm for these others because I'm anti-Trump. I am for an alternative to both. I disagree with my fellow panelists here because I think that what Biden has done is took the worst of Trump's policies and doubled up on it. Globalization is one of the greatest things that's ever happened to the Western world. We have benefited massively from globalization and I know this isn't a popular view today, both on the left and right. But we all are far better up because of globalization and the move, I guess, away from globalization is one that we are going to regret for a very long time. So, it's not that I am ignoring 40% of the population who support Trump. I'm ignoring 90% of the population who support Trump and the people who support Biden. I think they're all wrong. And this is the point I was trying to make and I'll end with this because we're running out of time. Ultimately, the fundamental question for America is, is it the land of the Declaration of Independence? Is it about individualism? Is it about liberty? Is it about freedom? And there is no political voice today for that perspective. At the left and the right are the same when it comes to their collectivistic view of what America is about. It's all about tribes. It's all about groups. It's all about identity politics. I agree completely whether it's white or alternative. And there is no voice today for the core ideas that made America what it is today. And in that sense, America will suffer economically as it evolves away from the land of entrepreneurs and the land of individuals. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Brook 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 iranbrookshow.com. Slash support by going to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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. 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.


What is going on everybody? Welcome back to another video. Today we are going to be looking at data quest. Now a few weeks ago I did a review on data camp and a ton of people were commenting saying I needed to review data quest. And so of course I'm going to do that for you guys. I checked it out. I have a, what I feel is a pretty good review, pretty good feeling for the platform, the website and who I think it's for, who I don't think it's for. And I might compare it a little bit to data camp because I've already done a video on that one. So without further ado, let's jump over to my screen and actually start checking out data quest. All right, so as you can see at the top, I have not purchased this. They still want me to buy it, but it's billed annually. And so I don't want to pay like $200 plus just to do this review. Although I care about you guys, I am just very cheap. And so I'm not going to do that. And just so you know, this is not sponsored in any way. Otherwise they probably would have given me some type of free subscription or something. But you know, I do this for you. I want this to be 100% transparent and me not having any type of bias in this. So let's jump right into it. This is the dashboard that you're going to be seeing right when you come in. During the actual signup process, and I didn't want to show all that because you know, it's kind of lengthy. During the signup process, they kind of ask you several questions about yourself, what you're trying to learn, what kind of path you want to take. And then they kind of set you up on your dashboard. And so I chose the data analyst with Python. So that's my current path down here. But I was checking out some other courses and different things. The last one that I was on was this introduction to SQL. I can just click this resume progress. But since we're here, this is the path that I'm on. And so what it does is it kind of walks you through all the steps. As you can see, I've already done a few of these. I wanted to get a good feel for it. I'll show you that in a little bit. Since I'm doing the free version, of course I don't have all the, I guess you could say courses, but this is, I guess course. These are like the individual lessons. I don't have all the individual lessons so I haven't checked all of them out. But I have gotten a pretty good feel for it. I wanted to show you a little bit more about the actual user interface before we jumped into one of the courses and I showed you what that's like. If you saw my video on data camp, data camp has all their things on this left hand side, all the courses, all the skills path, all the projects, all those things in one place. On data quest, it is not like that. It takes you to this homepage. But if you want to go to other places, you kind of have to click over here. And so you can go to the course directory and the community. And that's really the only other places that you can go. But let's head over to the course directory real quick. You can either click this course directory or you can click this little magnifying glass. So we'll click that really quick. And it goes to explore our catalog. And so you can kind of search for any skill that you're wanting. So real quick, let's do SQL and SQL fundamentals, intermediate SQL, intermediate SQL and R. All of these things pop up and you can kind of search for it. If you remember from data camp, again, I'm gonna be kind of comparing it to data camp because it's pretty fresh still in terms of when I last did that review. I feel like the user interface for data camp was a little bit better than data quest. And the reason for that is because when I searched on data camp, I would have different columns come up with pictures and a little bit more description of it. Whereas with this one, it kind of just says SQL fundamentals and it's really quick thing. You know, that's just personal preference. I kind of have to click into this and then look through other courses and it takes a little bit more time where I can get a little bit better description from the data camp one. Again, that's just my personal opinion. Something that immediately stood out to me right away is I didn't think that data quest had projects. And that was concerning to me because I really liked that about data camp. They do have projects. It's just set up in a little different way. If you saw the career paths or the learning paths, they have the projects in them. And so the projects are kind of built into those learning paths. You can also search for them here. It just doesn't have its own, I guess, section. But if I search projects, different projects do come up. So machine learning project, data cleaning project walkthrough. And so they do have projects on here. You just have to, I guess, search for them individually rather than there being their own little section where then you can filter on SQL or Python or R like in data camp. With that being said though, let's actually jump into a course and see what it's like. Currently I am doing the data analyst in Python path, but they have a few different paths. They have data analyst in Python. They have scientist in Python, data engineer, data analyst in R and SQL fundamentals. And this is a new one. And so they don't have a lot of paths at the moment. If you remember data camp, again, I'm gonna be comparing to data camp quite a bit today. If you remember data camp, there were a lot of different paths. I mean, I'm thinking there were about like 15 or 20 of them. But remember data quest is fairly new. They're still building these out. And I genuinely think that they're pretty good paths and we'll look at that a little bit more in depth in just a little bit. Let's move on really quick and look at some of the courses that they have. So the first course that we're going to be looking at is SQL, of course. Group summary statistics is what we're gonna be learning. One thing I wanna note is I have not seen any videos in here. If you remember on data camp, they actually had videos. I haven't seen any videos at all on data quest as of yet. And I've used it quite a bit, or at least enough to know that I don't think they have videos. Not something I'm super happy about. I personally like videos. I do not like reading and reading and reading. It can be a bit monotonous to me. I enjoyed the videos and I felt like it was kind of a nice break to just be able to watch it instead of having to read, which is what data quest does, all that is is reading and kind of figuring out yourself. I like someone to kind of walk me through it so I can understand the concept a little better. But if you don't like the videos, then you will really like data quest. So looking at this course, it has 14 different sections. This is just the introduction, kind of walking through the table that we're gonna be working with and all that. I've already worked through some of these things, so you'll see some of my answers over here. But something you should notice is that this display is quite familiar. It's very similar to data camps you have on this left side where you read and you learn and they kind of walk you through and then at the very bottom, way down here, let me get there. They're gonna walk you through or ask you specific questions that you then need to answer. If you at any time have any issues or any trouble, you can either get a hint and they'll just give you a small hint or you can actually see the answer and they will just literally give you the answer and you can copy and paste it over here. And so they make it really easy. There's no points, you have to pay 30 points to get it. It's just if you want it, it's there. And so they make it pretty easy to learn these things or get the answers if you're stuck. So that you can move on to the next section. One thing that I really like about DataQuest is they have a very good way of walking through these topics. I've looked at a lot of different topics now on DataQuest and every single one of them is done very well. I actually like it quite a bit more than data camps. I felt like data camps was good. I have nothing against it. I just feel like DataQuest does just an even better job. I like the way that they do the graphics. I like the way that they kind of organize things and kind of present it and talk about it. I'm just a big fan of it, to be honest. I really liked how they taught each section and gave you lots of examples. I prefer that and so that's just me, I really liked it. Really quick, I'm gonna take you to one that I have not actually looked at or I haven't done yet. And let's look at it together and walk through it and see what it looks like. So in this one, we're learning multiple summary statistics by group. It looks like we're basically looking for total number of employees, average, maximum, minimum, aggregate functions using the group by. And so that's exactly what it's showing us. Then we have our output. Down here at the very bottom, it's going to give us our problem. So I'm just skipping to the bottom. We know what we're gonna be learning. Then it's gonna say, write a query for each major category displaying the following in this order. And so we're doing the total number, average, and then multiplying the total number of graduates by the average proportion of women with the alias estimate women. So really, of course, useful topic, this stuff you'll use all the time. I'm not gonna actually write out everything but I'm gonna use this to get help really quick. I'm gonna get the answer and I can just copy this and I can paste it. This is what it's gonna look like when you write it in here and you can run this code to make sure that it works. And then after that, you can check it out if you'd like. You can also just submit your answer and it's gonna tell you whether it's right or wrong. Of course, I got it right because I just copied and pasted it. But if you got it wrong, it would tell you and then it'll give you a little hint or say here's what the error was and then you can go back and fix it. So really quick, before we start talking about the price and my final thoughts on data quest, I wanted to look at one of the projects. So this is the data cleaning project walkthrough. If we go down here, these are the courses and they break it up by courses just like they do kind of any regular learning path that they have. So in this, you're gonna do some data cleaning, combining the data, and then you're gonna be doing some visualization and then it gets the actual project. So it kind of teaches you the stuff first and then it gets you into the guided project. What I will say is I can't tell how they're gonna do this guided project. If you go into this data cleaning walkthrough, it is the same as kind of a basic regular course. And so this part at least is still gonna have this format where you run the scripts on the right side and you learn on the left side. I'm not sure if that is how it is in the guided project but I hope it isn't. What I really liked about data camps projects is that it put it into a Jupyter notebooks, something that a lot of data analysts will eventually use a really good IDE to be familiar with all of these things into the Jupyter notebook that you could download and use as a project. And so I cannot verify if DataQuest does that. If somebody who uses DataQuest and has paid the money to use DataQuest and done a project, please comment below and let us know. I'm genuinely looking to you guys to answer this one. I don't think it's a deal breaker for me but I really like the fact that I can then go and add that to my portfolio and I can't verify if that's how it is on DataQuest but overall I think that what they're teaching and the projects that they have on DataQuest are really good. All right, so now let's look at how much it costs. Of course, they have the free version. That's what we were using. We kind of got a sample, a little taste of the courses and so we did get to learn some things for free.  For the premium, they're having a, what I guess is a discount. I believe that's just their normal cost which is 24.50, that's 50 cents cheaper than DataCamp. So you know, you're really luckin' out there. But that is per month billed yearly. If we go over here and actually, whoops, I already had this pulled up, the yearly is 24.50 per month and so I don't know, what is that, like $300 or something like that but if you do it per month, it actually goes up to $49 and that is quite expensive. To me, $50 a month is a high price to pay. That is not something I would've paid in my early days of learning data analytics and all those things but for you, that might be a totally reasonable cost. I do think that's just a little bit on the higher end at least from what I've seen but again, that's what it costs. Do I think it's worth $50? I guess this is a good time to get into my overall thoughts because I wanna tell you if it's worth to pay those $50 per month or $300 upfront in order to use data quest. So here's my overall thoughts on the platform. I think it is a very good platform. It's well-organized, it's very easy to find things. I think when you actually go into the course to learn, I really like how they do the learning. The only thing that I don't like is that I don't have videos. I personally like videos. You guys know I love Udemy and Coursera and that's all video style and so I can kind of listen and watch while I'm typing and kind of taking notes. Whereas in this one it's all text and so it's all reading and then replicating that and learning it that way. I do think it is very well taught though. The concepts are very well done. I like the graphics that they have. I like the way that they teach and so overall I really do enjoy the platform. I have nothing against the platform at all but $50, $50 to me again is just expensive. Whereas other platforms are cheaper. Some are like $35 or $25 either build yearly or monthly and so there are cheaper options out there. Datacamp had the career path as well as a skills path where data quest does not have that and they didn't have many to choose from. I think there's only five or six and so they're obviously still growing. They're still building out their website and so they're not gonna have everything like Datacamp has and they have just a lot more options which I of course personally liked because there were a lot of different ones that I was like, man, this looks really good. Again, that's nothing against data quest. They're still growing. They're still building out their website but Datacamp had a lot more to offer on that front. So who do I think this is for? I really think if you are trying to learn Python, SQL or R, this is a really good place to start. It looks like the SQL was still being built out. It was still in beta. So I don't know how extensive that goes into that skill but if you really don't like videos specifically, if you really like reading and you like doing all that stuff without the videos, I think this is a perfect platform for you. Me personally, I know I maybe have said this twice now, I like videos and so I kind of would miss the videos if I started using this platform, I'd be like, man, it's a lot and a lot of reading. I love reading but I also really like videos because I can take notes at the same time. That's just me. I think this is really good for beginners. I don't think this has a lot of intermediate content. I look through a lot of the stuff and they have stuff on pandas and they have stuff on NumPy but it doesn't go super in depth. Datacamp I think goes a little bit more in depth and I think they cover a few more difficult topics which is a really good thing in the long run but if you really just wanna get the basics down a lot of these skills and I will say they covered almost every skill in R and Python and kind of the beginner stuff of SQL that I think is extremely important. So they cover a lot of the really important basic concepts. Overall, do I recommend DataQuest? Yes, I think that DataQuest is a good platform. I really enjoyed a lot of the things that I saw. It just wasn't as built out as I was kind of hoping or expecting especially for $50 per month but there is a lot of people who are watching this and are thinking, man, that's really something that I like that I enjoy and there's a lot of people out there who I know have already messaged me asking me to do this review who really like DataQuest and so don't just take it from me. I'm just one source, do your own research, look at the platform, test it out yourself and see if it's something that you enjoy. Again, there were a lot of people who were saying I had to review DataQuest because they like it so much more. It's more project-based, it's more hands-on and so if you really do like that project side, that's what a lot of people have said that they liked about DataQuest. So not something that I really dived into in this video but something that a lot of people mentioned and so take their experience over mine and if you really like the project side of things which I'm a huge fan of, I just didn't get to personally try it because I'm cheap and I didn't do the paid version. I didn't want to spend $50 for one month. Do that and do the projects and learn that way. I wholeheartedly agree that if those projects are good, you should be using them. So with that being said, I hope that this gave you a good glimpse into DataQuest as a whole. I hope that you either liked it or didn't like it. I either saved you some money or this is a good place to invest your money. Thank you for watching, I really appreciate it. If you liked this video, be sure to like and subscribe. I have so many videos coming out soon and I will see you in the next video.


12.03 PM. We'll mention that because we have remote participants, we should, we all need to identify ourselves. This is Jack McCullough, District 2 Council Member. Donna May, District 1. Harry Brown, District 3 Council Member. Connor Casey, District 2. All right. Is everybody, the first item on the agenda is to approve the agenda. Are there any proposed changes? Okay. Next item on the agenda is general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to be heard to mention anything that is not on the agenda. The comments be limited to two minutes and the mayor is now here. So I will turn the chair over to the mayor at 12.04 PM. I just announced the opportunity to do business and appearances. And the mayor should introduce herself. Yes. Great. Thank you, Anne Watson here joining you remotely. My apologies for being a little late here. I have somebody here helping us get some new internet, which is very exciting. So just took, took me a second to, to transition here. So, so we've just opened general business and appearances. Okay. Any, any one for general business and appearances? I guess I, I do have something that I want to recognize. I got word that Warren Kitzmiller has passed away and just want to extend my condolences to his family and I just want to let them know that we are, we're thinking about them and we're grateful for all the work and service that he did on behalf of the city of Montpelier. I'm really grateful for him and his work. And he's just such a wonderful man. He's so kind. So just very, I just wanted to, to at least acknowledge that. And we've lowered, if I'm not mistaken, Bill, we've lowered the city flag to half-mast in recognition of his passing. Donna, did you have something you were going to say? I was going to bring up that I thought we should send a card, but maybe we can't all sign it, but at least I've got something official from the council besides whatever we do individually. Is that appropriate? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, that should be fine. Great. Okay, great. And to be, to be clear, I asked this may flag be put in half-mast. I haven't actually gone on to see if it is yet, but it will be. If it's not already, it will be. Great. Okay. Thank you. Anyone else for general business and appearances? Okay. All right. So we will close that. And so now we are on to our just check. We do, we do have a quorum. There's a quorum of us. So that's good. Okay, so to the consent agenda, is there a motion regarding the consent agenda? I go ahead. I move the consent agenda. Second it. Okay, motion and a second for the discussion. Yes, Jack. I just want to say good work, thumbs up on getting energy efficient hybrid for this, for this purchase and consistent with our energy efficiency policies. Yeah, I agree. Okay. So there's been a motion and a second further discussion. They all in favor, please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay, so I said that passes. So we're on to the municipal tax rates and the water sewer benefit charge and sewer separation charge. Is there a excuse me. Is there a motion regarding the tax rate? I move that we I move that we approve it, approve the tax rates as as proposed. Also. Okay, motion and a second. Further discussion. Okay, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay, so it passes unanimously and I believe that is it. And I don't think there is really another we've listed mayor's report council reports, etc. Does anyone have anything they'd like to report? Nope. Okay, same. Bill or John, anything you'd like to report? Nope. Okay, great. All right, well with that. Yeah, we'll see you see you next week. All right, thanks so much. All right, thank you all. Without objection, we'll adjourn 1209.


enough launch our show and get going and have a really interesting discussion today that's coming through our news feeds about Title IX and so I think it's going to be a really interesting discussion. So I'm Julia Patrick. I'm the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I've been joined by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared Ransom. We are delighted that you are here with us today for another episode of the nonprofit show. We want to thank all of our presenting sponsors who have joined with us on this March to getting out a daily show, which is no easy feat. Blue Moran, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy, Nonprofit Nerd, Your Part-Time Controller, Nonprofit Thought Leadership, and Staffing Boutique. So Jared Ransom, this is a really interesting time for us because we are not only on Roku and YouTube and Vimeo and Amazon Fire TV. We have been taking our podcast and I say we it's our it's our executive producer Kevin. It's our Wizard of Oz. And he has put us on to all these platforms, you streaming platforms. Did I see an email that said we had just surpassed 1500 downloads? You did. Yes. Yeah, it's fantastic.  I even start my day with podcasts. So the fact that now we are a podcast is pretty, as you would say, ding, ding, exciting. And I've also heard from so many people that they will start an episode even, you know, on Roku or Vimeo. And then five episodes later, they're still watching the non-profit show. So we've become the new Netflix binge series. And I love that. Oh my god, we should like partner with a pizza company or something. We should. We absolutely should. It's a really cool technology. And I know that you from the get go have really been a champion of the podcast. And so it's really been fun. I know that you are invited to be on a lot of podcasts. I do that as well. And so it's been interesting to be a part of that as a guest, you know, on the other side of the table. And so we remember we had a guest on and I'm forgetting his name, but he had mentioned that the average podcast episodes are like super minimal. And so we thought, are you kidding me? The fact that this is a daily show, we of course have the content. So, you know, looking at bifurcating our information and our episodes to not only webcast, which, you know, that that's our mainstay. And also, you know, putting it on to podcasts, we were like, sure, let's do that. And for us, we're like, you know, it's just the blink of an eye. But I know that Kevin does a lot more to it. Kevin has to do a lot. But, you know, I think the thing of it is, is that his number was 10, that most podcasters can't get past 10 episodes. And we were like, well, hell, that's two weeks for us. So it's kind of an interesting way for people to consume, you know, content and navigate their lives. And so we're just thrilled. But today, we really want to do something different. And we want to navigate something in a different way. And that is, through the American Nonprofit Academy News Feed. We have a news feed that is 24 seven, that is absolutely remarkable. And it's always pulling in news from around the world.  And as we are talking today, it will change even more. But one of the things, and I, this is a go to news source for me. It's not just my company, but if you get somebody else on my team does this.  But one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about today, Jared, is title nine. We are now celebrating the 50th year of title nine, which mandates that the same amount of attention in space and time that is given to boys sports are given to female sports, girl sports.  I want to tell everyone, and this is a clutch, the pearls moment. You know, Jared and I have a 20 year, I know, 20 year age difference. I'm older. Bless your heart. But you know, in my day, you had the opportunity to be a cheerleader, cheer on the boys. Right. You could play tennis, or you could play volleyball. And that was it. That was it. I mean, as I got older, track and field started allowing girls. But for the most part, that was it. And then title nine came. And it was just so revolutionary.  And that I'm really curious to think, to ask you like, did you ever think that girls couldn't play sports or No, never. Well, first of all, I was, I was raised in an athletic family. My mom was the cheerleader in high school, you know, dated the basketball star. So she cheered on her high school sweetheart. They're still married. I want to say like, gosh, 58 years or something. It's astronomical.  And I was just kind of like raised in that environment, naturally athletic, naturally tomboy, naturally, if my brother does, I do. So I grew up playing with the boys. And I also grew up in a very small rural town outside of Columbia, South Carolina. And, you know, when you brought this topic up today, I had no idea that title nine has been around for 50 years, because honestly, I thought it came about when I was in high school. Yeah, I had no idea because even for me in a very rural town, like, you know, I would have to try out for the boys teams or I would have to play coed teams. Again, I would play pickup ball with my brother and his, you know, guy friends. So for me, that that's what was normal. But I also realized that that also is what challenged myself because I was, I was like naturally playing with more talented athletes, more skilled athletes. So for me, title nine, when you said 50 years, I was like, are you kidding? That's phenomenal. Well, you know, I think it has an incredible nexus to the nonprofit sector, because I think that it allowed a lot of women to learn about leadership through sports that is so common in the for profit in the nonprofit sector. And talking about sports and thinking about all of the different sports avenues and channels that have a nonprofit tie. That's right. You know, I mean, it's it's something that we think about all of the sporting, you know, support groups and parent groups and in all of these nonprofit kind of issues that that blanket the sports community. And even as we have seen in the last 30 years, the athletics, the professional athletic community, having and embracing and managing their own sports nonprofits, you know, their own charitable arms. So it's really an interesting thread that I don't think we could have ever seen. It's starting to move 50 years ago. Yeah, you know, we talk about this often, Julia, that there's 1.8 million nonprofits that are registered in the US. And I just want to acknowledge many of these are sports teams. And, you know, I think we hear a lot about Pop Warner football. We hear a lot about baseball teams. My sport was soccer. So growing up, I was actually, you know, at the 96 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, when the women won gold. So that was, you know, a fantastic opportunity that ironically was my senior summer when I was moving into my freshman year playing on a collegiate soccer team. So that was that was just I my family could have never planned that better, right? Right. And then looking at, as you said, the nexus of sports with our nonprofit community, the leadership of that. And you look now at the female leaders that we're seeing.  We have so amazing female leaders that are, you know, standing up, speaking up, speaking their truth, being who they are. This is Pride Month as well. And also just like embracing who they are and who they love. And I think that's super cool to see that in the leadership, not to mention the pay. Yeah. I mean, the whole women's soccer issue. And then that's, you know, an amazing, again, nexus to the nonprofit sector because a lot of times that we've looked at these organizations and we still do to this day, you know, we don't talk about compensation and we don't talk about, you know, getting a fair wage because we're like, well, you're doing the work of the angels.  And that's just not sustainable, nor is it appropriate. So I can see so many ties to what we've been seeing on the newsfeed on the American Nonprofit Academy website with this title nine.   So the opportunities for boys, they got called out so that girls could then, because they didn't just like boost up the budgets and say, okay, yeah, now let's, you know, make it even for girls. That wasn't a possibility. Had to call down things for the boys, so everything from wrestling to baseball to football, all of those things they had to take cuts in their budgets and then take those funds and move them into girls programming, which was hard because there weren't coaches. I can remember in my grade school, a big call going out to all the dads, not the moms, but the dads, said, we need a badminton coach. We need a volleyball coach. We need, you know, it was like, how do we then push up the support mechanism for leading girls in sports? You know, it didn't exist. It didn't exist. And it's funny you said that because, again, going back to my hometown, very rural community outside of Columbia, South Carolina, our, well, for me, soccer in high school started my junior year. So you can imagine, I mean, I was already, you know, well into my teenage years. Now granted, I had a mindset and strategy for the game, because I grew up on the sidelines watching my brother.  That was it. It was like, Hey, you're athletic, you're the basketball coach, you're now going to coach the girls. And similarly, Julia, our men's soccer coach was the same. He was our wrestling coach, but he was a coach. And so he kind of got tapped on the shoulder and said, look, you don't know anything about soccer.  Now you become the soccer coach. So it's been really interesting to see that shift. But it's also been interesting for me to see as we go back to the leadership and I think you and I would be remiss if we didn't talk about our community leader, Diana Tarrasi. Oh my God, the goat. Yeah, what she does for, you know, for the women's mercury team, I was watching the news the other day and the coach was talking about how there's so much on your plate to lead the team to lead through these pandemics. She's married and she has two kids at home. Yeah. So really at navigating that. Plus, of course, what I should say, of course, but for us, we know this. Another really big teammate of hers is not available currently for, you know, for the team. So she's, she has this other drama crisis happening where she's been detained. And so Diana Tarrasi is really, she's got so much on her shoulders right now as the female athlete, leader and mom. Right. You know, and we're really privileged. We have Ann Myers Drysdale who was the very first woman ever to receive a professional contract. And it was with the NBA and it was a very short term, somewhat PR oriented thing, but she was the very first woman. And that really was part of that title nine thing. She's a mother. She's an athlete. She's a leader. And she actually works within the NBA as a color analyst. And she works in management as well. And she's in our community. A very powerful dynamic, lovely, lovely woman who you've got to believe that title nine moved her and the trajectory of just how we were looking at women forward. And again, I would just love to have this conversation in another 25 years, let's say, to know, like, what is the thread with, with that type of inclusion, allowing women to then become leaders in other areas? Because again, as you said, there's such a tie to sports and sports organizations at all levels, community levels to professional levels, and the nonprofit sector. They all have to raise money, you know, in order to, to navigate their, their sport. Yeah. And I love that you pulled the screen up. So for those of you that are listening, we encourage you to go to the americannonprofitacademy.com. That is a live news feed that has culminated across the nation, pulled into regional sections. And so what we're looking at here for those of you watching, you can see, but you know, it's opposed talking about title nine 50 years, we won't stop until girls and women are equal everywhere. You know, it makes me think about also Julia, how sports are the vehicles to empowerment. And one of my clients that I've been working with is tied to the LPGA and it's called girls golf. And it's a national organization, they have local regional chapters. And truly golf, the sport of golf is the vehicle of empowering these young girls and youth of, you know, our future. And so there's, you know, there's many opportunities there we, we know, and we hear and learn often about after school programs and how that is provided to, you know, underserved communities as well as a nonprofit service line. So providing these vehicles of empowerment, encouragement, anti-bullying, you know, like all of this, this is, this is amazing programming that is often provided through our nonprofit umbrellas at either low to no cost. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Exactly. I mean, really using human capital. Using human capital. I just was listening to an NPR piece this morning that was talking about the crisis of coaching in America and how there's just so few coaches available at the community level. And this is from like, you know, an after school league to a church league to elementary, high school, everything. And one of the comments was, is that the coaches are generally under the age of 25. A lot of times they're, you know, at the lower level, high school, college students, kids just out of college, and that they're leaving because it's so vitriolic on the sidelines with parents and the whole tenor of how sports are being conducted. And I got to thinking about that in relationship to our discussion today about, you know, it's, it ties back to civil discourse and, you know, this explosion of anger and behaviors that are certainly not civil. Going down all the way to the to where our children are competing. Oh, absolutely. We've seen it, right? And we might even be a part of it sometimes. I can't did ballet.  Well, there, so I went through a coaching certification as a soccer coach. And so I am a trained youth soccer coach. And it was through the AYSO organization, American Youth Soccer Organization. And there's different levels and classes. And I will absolutely tell you, maybe not now, but when I was doing this, probably 15 years ago, I was a hot commodity, because there was, you know, for and for me, I really wanted to train and coach young girls. That was that was my jam. You know, also being a mentor and advisor to these young girls to be there and play a major role in, you know, in their life was a privilege of mine. But huge hot commodity. And I could have almost gone to, you know, any organization to say, this is what I want to do. This is the age group I want, because you're right, that certification and that that opportunity is slim. But I remember going through that certification, Julia, and learning the statistics, I forget them now again, 15, probably plus plus years ago, the amount of kids, youth that drop out in their preteen years. And the reason they drop out is because they're no longer having fun. They're no longer having fun because of that discourse on the sidelines, because of the pressure from their parents, because of the pressure from the coaches. And so that is a very pivotal age for our preteen and teenage youth. You know, and again, I'm a very competitive person, I believe you are as well. But really looking at how do we maintain fun for our youth so that they can enjoy, you know, and maintain that enjoyment? Winning is great, but sportsmanship is better. And I do think that the way sportsmanship takes on into our leadership, into our professional lives, into management opportunities, right? It's all about how you manage through a crisis. Absolutely. And I think it's just an amazing opportunity to look at how, you know, our nonprofits can glean leadership skills. They can move people up. We are, we talk about this pretty much, it seems like every show, you know, this hold the great resignation and the reshuffling of our labor force and leadership and management are central to that. And so how do we create teams? We talk about that all the time. We talk about team management. I mean, and in thinking about Title IX and how we took an entire segment of our population, an entire gender, and said, okay, we're going to now put you into that mainstream and allow you, allow you, because it was not allowed before, the opportunity to learn. It's not all being about becoming a professional, you know, athlete. It's about learning to be a team member and all these things. It's pretty, it's pretty phenomenal. And so I just really wanted to kind of take this, this time to, to chat about this in a way that we haven't, because it's, it's really been an interesting, interesting time for all of us. Hey, you know, we are really thrilled that you could join us today for another edition of the nonprofit show, not our intended path today, because our guest will, that we will reschedule, Andrew Olson, was actually caught in a travel whirlwind. I'm sure he's somewhere in the Midwest, but not where he intended to be. And we will get him back on and, and we'll be able to, to ignite that interesting conversation. Again, Jared, we need to give a shout out to the team that plays with us every day. And those are our presenting sponsors. Bloomerang, American nonprofit academy, fundraising academy, nonprofit nerd, your part time controller, staffing boutique, and nonprofit thought leader. These are the folks that really are part of our team. And without them, we would not be having these conversations. Okay, sister. So great. Tomorrow's going to be great. Again, thanks for all of you listening, watching. If you have not checked out the news section on the American nonprofit academy website, please do yourself a favor. You might want to bookmark it. This is like, you know, equivalent to the Wall Street Journal. It pulls, it does, it pulls all of this fantastic information across the nation. So if you live in South Carolina, you can look at your region there. Julie and I live in the community of Arizona. We can look at our region on the opposite side of the country.  So do yourself a favor, your team a favor, share this information. And, you know, thank you for giving us grace and for giving our guests grace. This happens. This is, I think we can all kind of empathize with knowing the stresses of travel, whether we're going, you know, across, across town or across country. There's a lot happening right now. So thank you for joining us. Julia, I will see you back here tomorrow. I hope that we see all of you back here tomorrow. And we will wrap up this 564th episode by saying, please stay well so you can continue to do well. Thank you. And we'll see you here tomorrow.


I'm thinking I may have to adjust my staffing schedule at our outlet store on the first floor. I know I need to have more checkout staff on Fridays and Saturdays. I'm wondering if the need for checkout staff is constant across the rest of the week. I collect a data for the number of transactions each day for the last two months. Here is my data. I could run multiple t-tests to see if the mean number of transactions differ across the days. But that would be a lot of tests to run. Instead, I am going to run an ANOVA, an analysis of variance, to see that the means are statistically the same. Or, another way to think about this, is that the test will determine if the daily samples came from the same population. My null hypothesis is that all the means are the same. The alternative hypothesis is that at least one mean is different. Because the consequences of making either a type 1 or a type 2 error are not severe, I will use a 5% level of significance. Although I know how to do this using my calculator, I am going to do it using Excel. Okay, here is my data in an Excel worksheet. The green area is how I capture the data and is how most data files are arranged. I have one record per row, and the values are the three variables in separate columns. But to use the data analysis tool pack in Excel to perform the ANOVA, you have to rearrange the data into the format in the blue section. You need one column for each of the groups. Here the groups are the days. And there must be no gaps between the columns or rows. Notice, you do not have to have a matched set of data. Here, I have 9 weeks of data for Monday and Tuesday, but only 8 for Wednesday and Thursday. Left click on the data ribbon, and go to the right side to find the data analysis tool. If you do not see the data analysis option, you will need to activate the package in your Excel. Left click on data analysis to open the tool dialog box. Scroll until you see the ANOVA, single factor option. I have just one factor, the number of sales transactions. Left click on ANOVA, single factor, and select OK. In the dialog box that opens, click inside the input range window on the up arrow. Select the complete range of data, including the empty cells. Click on the down arrow to go back to the dialog box. Click on grouped by columns. Check the labels in the first row. If you do not have labels, the names of your variables in your data, leave this unchecked. Enter your level of significance, alpha, if it differs from the default 5%. I want the output on this worksheet, so I am clicking in the output options to put the output beginning in cell J1. Then click OK. In the output, I can see the F statistic of 3.24 is greater than the critical value of 2.92, which tells me at least one mean is different. The p-value of 0.035 confirms that there is at least one mean that is different because it is less than my alpha of 5%. Although I could now run t-tests to confirm which mean is different. I think I can just go with my gut and conclude that Monday's average is substantially higher than the other three days. So, I will consider adding more checkout staff on that day. ANOVA is a very useful tool to have, in your manager's belt. Sue, what did you decide to do to reduce the long lines at our checkout stations? Joe, I analyzed the data using a single factor ANOVA and decided that Monday was the real problem day.


Your Excellency, Prime Minister and Minister of Interior of the State of Qatar, Excellencies, Ministers from Interpol member countries, Director General of Public Security, Qatar, Secretary General of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, Interpol Vice President for Europe, Chiefs of Police, Senior Government and Law Enforcement Officials, Participating International Organizations and Private Sector Entities, Heads of Delegations, Ladies and Gentlemen, Sa'idati Sadati, Assalamu Alaikum, Good Afternoon. This is my second visit to Doha in my capacity as Secretary General of Interpol. And the hospitality experienced is a reminder of the known generosity of our hosts. Your Excellency, Mr. Prime Minister and Minister of Interior, Interpol thanks Qatar for hosting with such detail and perfection this first of its kind conference for International Police Corporation. Indeed, as this event begins, let us reflect on the reasons for such a conference to be called for. Why is it so that security of attendees is a key consideration in preparing all major events such as this one? Because of the harsh realities in our operating environment, the world over. Time and again, organized and cyber-enabled criminality and terrorism have targeted large gatherings of civilians. Besides causing heavy damage to public and private resources at major events, innocent lives have been lost. From a law enforcement perspective, I must highlight that the matter at hand is a complex one. Grave threats of terror such as those issued a fortnight ago by ISIL Daesh against the FIFA World Cup in Russia next year need to be objectively monitored. Similarly, as for other domains of challenge for police, the cyberspace requires a concerted effort spanning borders and sectors. Some years ago, Interpol had realized that there is very often a transnational dimension to crime when it strikes major events. And thus, to counter it, police needed to make use of existing linkages across borders. To this purpose, Interpol put forward its existing platform to bring together law enforcement expertise from around the world on countering threats to major events. Some capabilities had existed at Interpol for years, such as its major events support team deployment, while some others needed to be developed. In essence, it was time for Interpol to innovate. At the same time, the state of Qatar was advancing its preparations towards hosting the FIFA World Cup 2022. Certainly, securing such an event from criminal threats is a high priority for the host country. A common need was thus identified in establishing Interpol Project Stadia to help member countries with policing and security arrangements at major sporting events. Initiated in 2012, in partnership with Qatar, Project Stadia had a clear aim for creating a center of excellence that would assist law enforcement worldwide. Through the project, over the past five years, ample interaction at an expert level has contributed to the development of a knowledge management system for Interpol's membership. And to address the wide-ranging threats to major events, Project Stadia has been designed to work with all three of Interpol's global programs on counterterrorism, cybercrime and organized and emerging crimes. Importantly, Project Stadia has created a ready network of specialists around the world on shaping future efforts for securing major events. This network is a model example for the increasingly recognized role of Interpol in combating international crime. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, in the 21st century Interpol strives to support its 192 member countries through not only its communication system, but indeed with a robust network of police forces, security agencies and experts across the globe. In effect, collectively, our networks serve as an early warning system against global threats. Such can also be said of the distinguished audience here today. We have over 350 participants from more than 65 Interpol member countries and more than 60 organizations attending. The agenda presents opportunities for some very important discussions. In closing, let me recognize the support provided by His Excellency Mr. Prime Minister and Minister for Interior and the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy to Interpol Project Stadia. We are thankful for the initiative undertaken by Qatar and the partnership we have developed. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Interpol is grateful to you for taking out the time to participate in the first major event safety and security conference. I wish all of us a very successful two days here in Doha. Thank you. Shukran Shazilan.


Hi, I'm Susie from Just Crumbs and I'm a product made simple ambassador and I'm here today to talk to you about potatoes. Today we're going to talk about how to reduce food waste in the kitchen as well as a few simple tips using potatoes and a really great recipe using potato skins to make a really delicious treat. When you need to peel potatoes for a recipe, don't waste the skins. You can make delicious chips instead of composting them. While you're peeling, look for bruised or green areas and compost any blemish spots. Put the skins in a water bath to keep them from discoloring while you work. When you're done peeling, give them an extra rinse to remove any debris and drain them. Next, lay them flat on your baking sheet. Pat them dry with a paper towel or a clean tea towel. I like to use a combination of melted butter for flavor and a bit of olive oil to make them crispier. Drizzle the mixture over the skins evenly and use your hands to work it in. Then season them well. Don't be afraid of the salt. In culinary school, we're taught how important it is to enhance the flavor of food. So begin with salt and pepper as the main spices and then add what you like. I've used oregano and paprika. Space the chips out evenly to bake. If your pan isn't large enough and some are overlapping, be sure to watch them while they cook and toss them after 10 minutes to ensure that they crisp up. If you have a lot, use more than one pan. There really should only be one layer. Then enjoy. Together with ketchup or your favorite condiment. So imagine we made this great snack using the peels of potatoes that would generally have gone in the garbage. It's a wonderful snack. If you'd like more information, please visit the Proudness Made Simple website for more tips on potatoes, how to use them, different varieties. So please like, comment and subscribe for more Proudness Made Simple. See ya. Yummy. The recipe using potato snacks. Great. Perfect. Perfect. Sorry. No, okay. Sorry. They're on that. It went perfect. Like, comment and subscribe.


This paper presents a novel deep learning framework called by CLSTM for automatically extracting spectral and spatial features from hyperspectral images, HSICE. The proposed network uses a recurrent connection operator across the spectral domain to address the issue of spectral feature extraction, while a convolution operator is incorporated into the network to extract spatial features. A bi-directional recurrent connection is also proposed to capture the spectral information. In the classification phase, the learned features are concatenated and fed to a softmax classifier via a fully connected operator. The bi-CLSTM framework outperforms six state-of-the-art methods, including 3D, CNN, by improving the classification performance by almost 1.5%. This article was authored by Qin Shanlu, Fom Zhou, Ra Longhang, and others.