I'm Rusty Komori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game are about leadership, character, and creating a superior culture of excellence, which is what this show is all about. My special guest today went from being an orphan in Ukraine to becoming a fitness champion in the United States, and much, much more. He is Michael Vitaly Vernon, and today we are going Beyond Fitness. Hey, Michael, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Well, hello. Welcome, and thank you for the introduction. Michael, I know for a few years now, and you have such an incredible story. I mean, I'm so excited to feature you and to have people just really know where you were and where you are now, but let's start from the beginning. Can you tell me about some specific experiences that you had as an orphan in Ukraine? Well, Rusty, I was kind of born as an orphan, basically. My mother, she was a drunk and prostitute, so she abandoned us early on. I was four or five years old, so at that age, early on, I learned to survive, survive for myself, and part of that survival was stealing food from the neighbors and looking back on the hindsight, I had to do what I had to do to survive, but day in, day out, it was quite obvious that we didn't have food, so I would always be stealing food from the neighbors. That's just what you do. The challenges was that I didn't have an adult figure, so I was raised with my two sisters who were also orphans. They ended up going to orphanages at the age of six. When my mother abandoned me, my father died, I went to the orphanage, and at the orphanage, there was a good amount of kids there as well, and amongst those kids, I made friends, and part of that is that we would talk about our parents who weren't there for us, so that really made us bond as people. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what else to tell you other than that it was tough. No, Michael, when you're saying that food, just basic survival, that you actually had to steal food to survive, that really says a lot right there. I'm not proud of it, but I had to do what I had to do to survive, and that character, at that time, it really, moving forward as an adult, it created a mindset of survival. I'm not saying, don't steal. I'm not saying steal, and I'm not condoning stealing, but what I'm saying is the mindset of survival that I have today is there, and it's been able to help me throughout my life. Michael, tell me about you being adopted at age 12, and your brother at age 10. Well, first of all, when I was adopted, it's a miracle really, Rusty, because it's unheard of to get adopted at that age. You were quite old. I know what helped me was the fact that I looked like I was a seven-year-old, so that helped a lot. Obviously, I didn't have the nutrition to look like a 12-year-old, but that was a miracle. My brother and I, we were both orphans, we were raised together, we're close, and my mother, who's a big figure in my life, she went to Ukraine with my father. They had cash on them on each side of the, like the raincoat, the raincoat, when I had to travel to be concealed, and at that time, that's what they had to do. Looking back at that, I realized the sacrifice they made to go to Ukraine at that time, a third-world country, with all that cash to adopt us, because it's a cash society. Looking back at that, being a 12-year-old, get adopted as a miracle, you know, with my brother. No, that's truly extraordinary, and it says a lot about your mom, and can you tell me how Arnold Schwarzenegger has influenced you? Yeah, as we were talking earlier, being in the United States, the culture is different. I had the language barrier, the culture barrier, so I would often find myself in the library looking at books. I would look at a lot of pictures, and one of the books, early books that I found was a book by Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he had pictures, and that paved the way for my career today. He's a very inspiring and very active individual at that time. And in Ukraine, at the gyms, we had a lot of posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger, so I kind of already knew what to look for in the USA. Now Michael, you became a United States Marine in 2010 to 2015 for five years. Why did you decide to join the Marines? That's a great question. I've always been in the mindset of doing something that's difficult, and at that time, I wanted to start my new country, USA. And I thought that joining the most respectable force would be the way to go. So I joined the United States Marine Corps in 2010, three months after graduating high school, graduated high school, and off I was to boot camp. And I haven't looked back since. So what are some things that you learned during your time as a Marine? Well, I'm grateful to be out. But the Marine Corps really taught me discipline, farther discipline. It taught me to grow up very, very quickly. And it taught me that brotherhood is everything because there's a lot of young men who are going through the same hardships that we are in the military. The Marines get two types of people. There's people that come from the affluent families, and there are people, young men joined who are from troubled families. And Marine Corps, it doesn't discriminate. Everybody is one. And people are able to really bond over their different diversified backgrounds. And for me, I kind of fell in between.  And this is what I've learned from the Marine Corps. I'm seven years sober today. And I've learned that that behavior in the military was really, if I was to get out, it was really kind of holding me back as an athlete, as a professional, and as a friend. So I did learn that I don't need to drink to cope with life. And Marine Corps really creates that foundation with the hardship that a lot of young men, they drink and they're to cope with, you know, with the military industrial complex. And I was that story. I drank through military, but today I'm sober, I'm seven years sober, and I'm grateful for that. But that's what I've learned as well, is that I don't have to drink to live life. No, that's great insights, hearing, you know, those things from you, Michael.  You won the Paradise Cup. Tell me tell me why you wanted to or how you got into these competitions. Funny story. One of my dear friends at that time in the Marine Corps, he I've always been fit, you know, ever since I picked up that Arnold Schwarzenegger book at the age of 12. So I've always had that fitness foundation. And that's that's my medicine. But I remember a Marine approaching me in the gym and he said, Hey, Michael, you should join this competition. You'll be very good. I bet you'll do very well. And I said, I'm good. Thank you. I'll stick to what I love to do. And that is workout. Then he approached me again and he said, Listen, I'll pay for the entrance fee. I'll pay for for you to compete. It'll be worth it. Well, sure enough, I signed up and it was a novice bodybuilding middleweight. I prepared for about three weeks, you know, and I ended up winning my division. So that was in 2014, as I was transitioned out of the Marine Corps. And I went on to win another show in 2015, physique. And then I went on in 2016, a classic physique. So I ended up winning three, three fitness shows on Hawaii back to back. So that was encouraging. And then as I went on into California, I won a show over there in California. And then the somebody said, Hey, Michael, you know, you should try fitness modeling. Okay. I went and did that, ended up, I ended up going to a fitness modeling search at the Olympia is in 2015, 16 ended up placing top seven at the, in the world for the modeling search. But my height wasn't there, you know, all those, all those guys are very tall. But that didn't discourage me, you know, I didn't win, but that didn't discourage me. And I didn't win with, with just working out and, and having living a healthy life like that.  I mean, you have muscles in places where I didn't think muscles exist. And you're, you're also a very highly sought after personal trainer. Can you tell me about that? Well, thank you. I work with clients today who are willing to change. I don't, I'm not chasing anybody today. I have one client, Brian, who, who has lost a hundred pounds. And I really work with them closely. It's, it really is like raising a child, you know, it's, it's mental, physical and emotional supportive as well.  And that's my philosophy, just be consistent. But this gentleman, he, he is willing and anybody that is willing, Rusty, you know, I'm there to serve them really, I'm there to serve them. I'm not there to make money. I'm there to serve them. I'm here to serve people. No, that's so, that's so good to hear, Michael.  I remember in, in 2015, I met, I needed a, as I was going into college and in college and getting established as a young athlete and model. There's a lot of, a lot of the attention goes all over the place. And a lot of things come to you, right, on the path of success. And I needed to have, I prayed on having a holistic life coach. Right. And it was shout out to Brandy Kiana Joe, who is wonderful. I've worked with her for five years now. And she's, she's a great role model, very professional, and she's really paved the way for me to really be vulnerable when, when, when sharing my story. And she was that first professional person who really paved the way to, to be able to open up and share the story, paint a picture with others. And that led me to go into acting school as well. So I can be more vulnerable and share the experience. And that's a whole different conversation there too. No, Michael, and you and I met each other because a few years ago, we were guest speakers at one of Brandy's amazing events. And what's, what's, what do you feel is one of the biggest things that she helped you with as a life coach? You know, Brandy, she's, she's really taught me to, to tap into that spiritual side of the, as beings, really to tap into that spiritual side of us.  Right. This pineal gland and really to see the world in a bigger picture. So I'm really grateful for that. No, that's great to hear. And I want to ask you, Michael, about my books, you know, earlier, you mentioned about how important consistency is. And I definitely talk about that. And, and what are some, what are some other things in the book that really stood out to you? You know, early on, you say, you mentioned this, you know, this and I see this from all the successful coaches and you're, you're just an anomaly, Ross. You congratulations on the 22 championships. That's, that's unheard of waking up. We all have a choice and that is when we wake up, I would kind of make the better or not. It's a, it's such a simple analogy, but it goes very, very far. You know, in life, in life, we can either look at our failures, or success, right? We can, you know, one failure can define us, right? And the 99, 99 successful things will be ignored, right? So it's, as a leader, it's important to, to continue evolving, continue looking at all the, all the, you know, all the mistakes we made and grow from them, you know? And I, you know, you mentioned that it's, it's the key to learn from the mistakes and continue evolving and don't let the mistakes create your future, right? Don't let that bad experience define you in the future, learn from it. Yeah, no, for sure.  And I talk a lot about mindset in the book and choices that you make. And, you know, for you, as, as a successful fitness champion, as a model, as a successful entrepreneur, you know, talk to me about what your mindset is and how you have discipline to do your workouts every day. Yes, the mindset, the mindset is huge. The earlier example, I use making that simple choice, making the bed, that is, that is the commitment every morning we wake up, we're committed to making the bed, right? And, and for me, I'm committed, whether it's my client that I'm training, I'm committed, whether it's my blockchain business that I'm involved in, I'm committed, whether it's the TV show that I'm involved with, I'm committed. The discipline has a lot to do with it. Obviously, being an athlete, the discipline is big element in the mindset, as you know. So with that being said, the mindset, the mindset has, has a big, is a big foundation in being disciplined and committed. Now, Michael, you're, you're also a producer of a show. Can you tell me more about that part of your, of what you're doing? Well, in 2018, I graduated Hawaii Pacific University with a finance degree, an organizational change in development. And three months later, I went into acting school. Joanne Lee Strasberg, Fillman Theater Institute in Los Angeles, prestigious theater. A lot of legends are made there, including Marilyn Monroe, Danza Washington, I mean, any name, they all went there and studied there. So for me, being there, surrounding, be able to see, smell, feel and touch some of the pictures of the past great artists and who are currently acting in the industry, that really created a foundation for me and created a legacy. So I feel like I have a legacy to live to. So right away, there was an opportunity presented with, with a TV show called Sungra Negra. It's up and running on Tubino and Amazon Prime. And being, having that business background, education and being a Marine, the opportunity presented itself. And I made a choice to get hands-on involved in the production right away. There's no, no better teacher than being involved hands-on right away. So I've been with the TV show for two and a half, three years now, called Sungra Negra. It's a political crime drama, a film in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. And I'm an executive producer on the show and I have a little cameo later on, and later on in episodes. So that's, that's pretty exciting as an actor too. So yeah, it's Sungra Negra. It's called Sungra Negra. Oh, that's fantastic, Michael. And earlier you touched on, you know, that you're, you're part of a blockchain cryptocurrency company. And, and, you know, you're on the cutting edge of that. Can, can you tell me a little bit more about that part? Yes. Well, the, I've been, I've been surrounded in the, in the blockchain space. I've known about it since 2012, since the military.  What I'm going to do for the career as far as the, all that education I got. Blockchain and cryptocurrencies is a big factor in the finance and the way the economies can move in the future. And I started studying that in 2018. And I've been involved with a company called the Duo Blockchain Solutions that is focused on their remittance industry, mobile payments. And it's, and it's on blockchain runs on the blockchain technology.  And, you know, it's, it just seems like, you know, to be where you were at the beginnings of it and learning more about it, a lot of people really don't know about cryptocurrency because it's so, so new. What are your thoughts about that? I laugh because I, you know, you ever have a, I'll give back to you, to your question, but just to, to give insight to the audience who, who may be watching and involved in sales. I'm, I'm sure I'm that guy that's on my, you know, on my social media that's always posting about blockchain. And they're always saying, oh, here goes Michael again, posted about blockchain. What's new? Here goes Michael again, posted about blockchain. Consistency, right? My, my thoughts on that is that it's, it's going to be the future, Rusty. It's the future. We're seeing health industries. We're seeing, we're seeing finance banking sectors. We're seeing big retailers utilizing the technology, the blockchain, which is an blockchain is very simple put in layman's terms. It's a, it's an open public ledger that's transparent and it keeps records forever. That's what basic definition of the blockchain on that sense. Well, no, it's it, you know, people are, are afraid of the unknowns, right? And then that's, that's just normal. But to see the, the immense growth that, that part of the market has had in the last few years is just mind blowing.  Well, going to Mars is, is going to be, is I'm going to put that on my bucket list. But getting, getting grounded, right? Back to the earth. One of my goals is, I have a nonprofit and one of my goals is to open up a blockchain as a 21st century employment opportunity.  I want to do that in Ukraine, my home country. It's, I feel that would be the best way to get back to my people. That's something that I want to do. I've been visiting Ukraine the last seven years. Go over there, volunteer, give my time and resources to kids. I love doing that. It's every leader, every influencer should have some sort of a philanthropic cause and I do that and it gives me, it fulfills me, it gives me purpose. But if I had a wish list right now, I would love to build a school there and empower the next generation youth to, to, to empower them to be sick with getting career. That's kind of makes sense in the 21st century. Michael, okay.  How many times have you been back to the Ukraine since you got adopted? And what, what has been the response from the kids?  I've been in back for about, you know, six, seven times now. This year, you know, the COVID, the travel restrictions would have been my seventh time. The kids, the kids are amazing, by the way. They're just, I mean, if you could go adopt, adopt, you know, I'm definitely kind of adopt.  And that's how they are over there. When they, when they see a former orphan, when I get to share a store with them, they're really uplifted and inspired and motivated. And my message to them, love one another. Let's not, let's not compete. Let's not divide, but love one another. Because as a, as a team, together, everyone will achieve more, right? You know what I'm saying? It's been really wonderful, Rusty. It's been wonderful in the sense that I can just, you know, anytime I'm there, I get it, I get bags of groceries, right? Bananas, fruits, all the healthy things. And what we do, we'll go out in the park and we'll exercise and we'll eat the fruit and we'll just, we'll just chat and we'll share messages, good stories and good messages. And being a role model is, is, is great over there. Well, you know, Michael, it's amazing. You're, it seems like you're following the path of your idol, Arnold Schwarzenegger. And I wouldn't be surprised if you become governor someday as well, right? You never know. I am involved, I am involved here locally with the sustainability modeling. So there's, the world needs a lot of help, you know, and, you know, I would complain early on, especially in the Marine Corps, in the culture. And what I've come to realize to learn is that if you want to see the change, you've got to be change. You've got to be that change, you know, it's very simple. Yeah, no, I like hearing that. And Michael, I want to thank you for taking time to be on the show today. I mean, you are someone that definitely goes beyond the lines. I mean, you're very inspiring. And I know you're going to continue to impact a lot of people in your life. Well, thank you, Rusty. I'm grateful to be here. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to be on your wonderful show beyond the lines. Thank you, Michael. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com. And my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Michael and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.


Welcome to Toffey TV, it is the Everton News Daily. Everton are interested in Caledw Cooler Barley, the Napoli Defender according to Gazeta Dello Sport in Italy today. They say Carlo Anciolotti has set his heart on bringing a 28-year-old Napoli centre back to Gooderson Park this summer. Anciolotti called Caledw Cooler Barley the greatest defender in the world when he was managing Napoli. If that's what I've used him then it's no surprise if he's interested in bringing him to Gooderson Park. Cooler Barley has said that Anciolotti is a great coach who he respects enormously, so it would be interesting to see whether Everton actually do go for him. I guess he'd be worth a lot of money. He is a fantastic defender, powerful, great and strong in the tackle, would obviously improve Everton's defence. But whether Everton could afford him or whether he'd want to come to Everton is obviously up for debate. He may want Champions League football throughout the wait and see, but good to be linked with these kind of players. It is a day for being linked with Napoli players, though Everton also linked to Dries Martens, the 32-year-old Belgian striker. Today he scored this week against Barcelona in the Champions League but he is out of contract in the summer and the links have started between him and Anciolotti and Everton. Alan, the 29-year-old Brazilian midfielder, also linked heavily to Everton today in the Italian press. He's only played 11 minutes since January, so the paper's obviously saying he's out of favour with the Catoosoan. Everton is a possible destination for him. Elsewhere Everton, apparently interested in Trabsonsport, goalkeeper Ergen Cachia, according to the Turkish press, the 23-year-old Turkish keeper was subject of a €13 million bid by Sheffield United, which Trabsonsport turned down. The press say that Everton are very interested in bringing him to Gooderson Park, but Southampton, Tottenham and Leal also credited with interested in the 23-year-old as well. Today marks the four-year anniversary of Farab Meshiri, he became the majority shareholder at Everton. He's plowed in around £350 million of his own money into the club since then. Also brought Caller Anciolotti to the club, a truly well-class manager, and is the driving force behind Everton. It's been an eventful four years, one that has seen significant investment from Meshiri. It's been a few up-and-down moments, of course there has, but he's always remained steadfast in wanting Everton to be at the top of the Premier League, fighting for titles and fighting for trophies and stuff like that. It hasn't happened yet, there's been mistakes, hopefully we can learn from them, but with obviously Marcel Brands coming in having the director of football who's done it before, Carlo Anciolotti, a well-class manager like you said, another stadium as well as improving the playing squad, hopefully things are moving forward with Everton and they can get closer to being a team. That is challenging, certainly for champions league places every year and that is down to Farab Meshiri, so who knows what the next four years will hold, hopefully a trophy and a new home at Bramley Mordoch with Big Alashe, as well spending his money. We'll have to wait and see. Finally, the Everton women's team are taking part in the Goodersham Park Sleep Out, organised by Everton in the community of course. That takes place a week on Friday, March 6th at Goodersham Park. If you want to take part in it, get in touch with Everton in the community, you can sign up and raise some money for a fantastic charity. Or if you can't take part in it, maybe you've got a few extra quid that you could sponsor or donate to that night, the Goodersham Park Sleep Out. It is brilliant, we've done it, it's fantastic, great turnout and it's great to see and the Everton women's team taking part in it. David Underwood, under 23, side of taking part in it in the past, not sure whether they're doing it this time but Everton will have at least one team who are taking part in it, so fantastic from the Everton women. That is it for today, make sure you subscribe, give the video a thumbs up and join us on page if you want more videos. See you later.


Hey everyone, my name is Victoria and I'm here with Columbia Animal Services to tell you about a really fun event we're doing tomorrow, Saturday, February 10th at Beer Keller off of 600 Canalside. We're going to be doing an adoption event out at the field and we're going to be highlighting this event with a meet your match Valentine's Day speed dating theme. So plan to come out and spend a few minutes at each booth meeting dogs. Once you meet all of your dogs, which may take roughly 45 to 60 minutes in total, then you can select your perfect match to go home with. We are doing same day adoptions as always at that event and we are going to be waiving the fees for those adoption pups at that time as well.


All right, what's up everyone? Today is, wow, May 31st, 2022. Today's the last day of May.    So let's do that. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna show you guys, show you guys the watch list. Okay, so let's start here and then I'm gonna go over everything one by one, okay? So come here, we go to the watch list. Okay, so this was today's watch list, guys. So what we did today is we actually went pre-market and made a whole webinar from 8 a.m. to 9 15 a.m. on how we create this watch list and that's gonna be available for the MIC members. If you guys wanna watch it, it should be uploaded into the video library very shortly. So we showed you guys our exact process from beginning to end and I'm gonna show you that right here. So if you go to the video library, it's this exact video, live pre-market prepping, right? So we basically spent about, still processing, but we basically spent an hour going over everything so that you guys don't have to, right? So I'm gonna show you guys even right here of how these things executed, right? So, RDVX. RDVX, the plan was to short around $8. It got pretty close there around 7.85, right? I hope you guys can all see it, 7.85. So that was pretty much dead on. SIGA, this one, we were expecting a big SSR bounce to happen on it. And we got, actually got pretty solid trade on it right here, just a small scalp right there on SIGA, which was really, really solid. And then let me actually show you guys over here one second. So basically, I wanna kinda go over it a little bit more in detail for you guys, but one second, let me actually move this around. Things in here. So basically on something like this guys, what I'm trying to explain is everything is pre-planned, right? So at 9-11 a.m. is when we make the plan for the day. By this time, we have already narrowed down the top stocks of the day to trade, right? So what we do every single day is we find the highest probability setups and make a plan and execute based on that plan for the highest probability setups. So pretty much where I made most of my money and where everyone made most of their money today was on this AMC and GME. So AMC, we wanted to bounce towards 16, 1650 and 17 to short. And if you look right here, 16 was the dead top before it went all the way down to 14. So you could have made $2 a share there. What about GameStop? GameStop, the plan was short around 138 and 140. 138, right? 138, 140, right? 138, 140 all the way down to 120. And these aren't posted after the market opened. This is posted pre-market before it even gets to these ideal key levels guys. So all this stuff is pre-planned. Even Husa, Husa was 520 to 550, right? 520s, 550 came all the way back down to five. What about INDO? INDO, 19 to 1950, 19 to 1950, back down to 17 and ADVL didn't hit. So every single morning before the market opens, before the market opens, we have a list of three to five high probability stocks to trade. So I basically traded SIGA, AMC, GME, Husa, INDO and all of them. Look, 9-11 AM, all of them before market open were planned.  That's how much I paid in commissions. That's how much I paid in ECNs and there is it. So pretty much guys, pretty much every single morning, it doesn't matter if it's a bull market. It doesn't matter if it's a bear market. It doesn't matter if it's a monkeypox market. Every single day before the market opens, we are finding the highest probability stocks and we are trading and making a plan based on it.  They just say, watch this stock. If it goes up, I'm gonna buy it, right? There's nothing to learn from there. There's nothing to get from there. And to be honest, that is the worst way to trade because all you're doing is following someone else's pumps. At MIC, we do not pump. We do not alert. I am pre-planning my trades 30 minutes to one hour before the open. And as the market opens, I am guiding and mentoring you real time on these exact trades. And today was the day where the watch was paid out incredibly, made $7,000 in less than an hour. And now here I am walking away, right? So a lot of people ask me, how do you make money in these bear markets? How do you make money in this market? The truth is, number one is stock selection. Knowing what stocks to trade, right? If there is a stock that you're watching that is not on my watch list, it's not because I forgot it. It's not because I missed it most of the time. It's because it doesn't have an edge. I want to trade stocks every single day that have an edge. I want to trade stocks that every single day I know I can make money on. I don't want to trade random stocks. I don't want to trade stocks with no volume. I don't want to trade illiquid stocks. I only want to trade the best possible setups only. And that is what I put on the watch list and exactly what I put on the watch list every single day is what I use to execute on. Last year, I made $3 million with the watch list. This year, I'm up well over $1.5 million in a year where people are losing millions of dollars. So it always goes back to the same thing, stock selection. So if you have any questions on stock selection, go back to this YouTube channel and write my Investing Club stock selection. If you are an MIC member, go to the video library and get the member-only videos that say stock selection or watch today's webinar with Joe. We spent almost an hour and a half pre-market today making the watch list on video and then we traded the watch list at the open, right? There's nothing, we're not hiding anything. We're not giving you a watch list and trading something else. We're trading the same things together, right? So today was the picture perfect day for the MIC process and that is what I want to come on here and showcase to you the watch list, pre-market made and at the open executed $7,000 in profit and now walking away. Do you guys have any questions on that before I continue? And again, guys, this is a live video so I'm reading the chat over here. You can even see over here is the shorts I located. So today was pretty self-explanatory day. I mean, what I tell people is all you gotta do is join MIC, watch the accelerator course, watch the beginner videos and just use the watch list. If you can't use the watch list to make money, then I can't help you. I mean, the truth matter is I'm using the watch list every single day and today was pretty solid.  What was my conviction to short GME? It's because AMC was tanking. GME and AMC are sympathy plays. They trade together. So when AMC was tanking and still up 6% on the day, GME was red. So that means it had relative weakness to the stock. It was relatively weaker, which meant that it would unwind bigger if AMC tanked and that's exactly what we got. When AMC was tanking and still green, GME was blood red, blood red, right?  You guys could say that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, but I just came on here, showed you a watch list that was made 30 minutes before the market opened, executed and done within an hour, right? This is what we do every single day at MIC. We've been doing this for the last four years. Last four years, we don't pump, we don't dump, we don't scam. We make a watch that's like professional traders.  GME was 140, now it's 120. AMC was 16, now it's 14. We are in a bear market. That does not mean go look for longs. It means go and look for shorts, right? So that makes sense, guys. AMC and GME were niche stocks. They were in our process, guys. They're just meme stocks just like to trade a little bit more irrationally, right?  So that all makes sense, guys. If it does, I want to move on to the next topic of the day. I'm gonna move on to the next topic of the day, guys. So here is the next topic of the day.  So if you go to the My Investing Club website, there's gonna be a new button on top that says Tab Referral. So click on Tab Referral. So now, guys, we want to introduce our MIC Referral Program. So the normal price of annual is about $3,995. But if you are an MIC member and you have a friend that wants to join MIC, we are now starting to open up a referral program for you guys. So not only will they save $1,500 on their membership, which makes their membership $2,500 for an annual, you will get 10% of their annual. So pretty much as long as they stay a member and as long as they renew, you could get 10% of their membership in perpetuity. So this is our way of helping our members earn some passive income, right? So if you refer, I don't know, 10 people, this is how much you can make. So this is only for MIC members. This is not some affiliate stuff for non-members to do it. This is for members to refer their own friends. Now, how do you do it? Again, come to the Tab Referral page on top and all you gotta do is I made a video here that explains how to create an account. But pretty much all you do is put your first name, last name, email password and create a unique code. And if they sign up within 30 days of you sending them that link, you will get 10% of their membership. So right now, this is only for annual memberships. We don't really do the monthly membership and we don't really do the lifetime membership. So if you have a friend that's been interested in trading or you have a friend that's been interested in MIC, this is your opportunity to earn some passive income. I mean, shit, if you refer 10 people a month to annual, all of a sudden you could make $30,000 extra a year by just referring 10 friends a month, right? You could create content around it, you could do whatever you want. But basically this is gonna be for MIC members only to refer other friends. So all you gotta do is come up here to the tab referral program, click the button, create an account, watch this video to learn a little bit more details and yeah. So this is our way of helping members earn some passive income, right? So we're starting off with just annual memberships for now, maybe in the future we'll do lifetime memberships. And hey, if you start referring 10 or 15 friends a month, maybe I'll even give you a higher percentage than 10%, right? So this is something that members have been asking for for a very long time. Members have been asking for a way to earn some supplemental income. And I mean, shit, it really makes a lot of sense for us to, we help to grow the community, your friend gets pretty much like 30% off if they sign up. So yeah guys, the annual membership if they use this link is 2,500 instead of 4,000, right? So yeah guys, if you guys are interested, sign up and it gets paid out pretty much every month. So hopefully this is a great way to earn some passive income, right? It's pretty simple. All they gotta do is sign up with your link, right? Very easy to track. So if I was you guys, I would sign up for an account right now and just start posting your link and telling your friends about it. And yeah, that's basically it. So now is the section for the YouTube live where I open up to a Q&A. So obviously this is a live video. So this is your opportunity to come on here and ask questions to a seven figure trader. So let's go through a Q&A guys. If you guys have any questions, post it in the chat here and let's get on it, right? Also, if these videos are adding value, please leave a like on the video. Please subscribe to the channel. We try to keep this very education format and obviously there's no lambos, there's no fancy cars. We pretty much like to show you and show you proof with our numbers, right? Let me go through these questions. Being a new MIC member, studying the jumpstart accelerate, would you recommend to go ahead and trade already using your watch list? If you've completed the accelerator, right? If you've completed the accelerator, your next step is to paper trade using the watch list. So paper trade for a week or two weeks till you get a handle on it and then you could start to trade live using the watch list. You guys saw today how powerful the watch list was. So paper trade first to make sure you understand the concepts and then you could use real money. Any other questions, guys, let's go through it. It's gonna be a very nice Q and A session now. Hopefully you guys are excited about the referral program. I mean, we put a lot of work into that, but yeah, I mean, members refer their friends, their family members all the time, so. How do I get my beard so fabulous?   Any other questions, guys?  Also, one more thing is I have a notepad here. We're gonna be doing a live trading event for MIC members on June 22nd. So mark your calendars. We're gonna be trading live on June 22nd altogether. Yep, GME is minus 13% from the highs and the highs were the watch list levels. You could make 13% in one day on GME. Again, everything is in the watch list. Do you think that the watch list would be a good thing if a person using it has a small account? For example, GME.  There was GME, HUSSA, INDO. There was a bunch of different stocks to trade from, so you didn't have to pick the most expensive stock of the day. You could have traded even, I don't know, two, 300 shares of INDO, made a dollar a share and you would have made like 8% on your account in one day. Hey, Alex, MIC member, this morning INDO tanked while HUSSA stuck around for a bit. Do you ever see trends with lower price sympathies being easier to manipulate? If HUSSA was the head of the snake and INDO was the side play and the side play was acting weak, that is relative weakness. The same thing with AMC and GME. AMC and HUSSA are the heads of the snake, right? AMC and HUSSA, heads of the snake. GME and INDO are the sympathy plays, so if the sympathy plays are acting weaker, that's where you focus your money. And for example, Joe was trading the options today on AMC, so I traded the GME stock and Joe traded the AMC options. MIC member here, how come you prefer to trade GME over AMC today? It's because when AMC was green and selling off, GME was red and selling off and when a stock is red, it usually has more profit taking happening on that day. So GME was significantly weaker than AMC, so I chose a significantly weaker stock. Do you care about institutional owner percentage? If yes, what percentage do you not short? If anything is over like 50% institutional ownership, it just means size the hell down because the big money, the institutions are holding that stock, right? Doesn't mean avoid it. Sure, you could avoid it, but ideally want to size down and be a little bit more careful on those stocks because they don't have as much of an edge, right? Think about it, if big money is holding the stock, big money's probably not gonna sell the stock and that's what high institutional ownership shows. Any other questions, guys? How do you know when the stock is the head of the snake or the leader? It's usually the stock that's up the most in the sector. HUSSA was up massive, AMC was up massive, but INDO wasn't up too much and GME wasn't up too much, so those are the sympathies. You never say to short into weakness, can you explain why you short GME? GME, the plan was to short 138 and 140. It hit 139.90, so that's not shorting into weakness. Yeah, today was a great start to the week. How do you keep track of the sectors while trading? I mean, the last sector run was INDO and INPP, the oil stocks, so I just remember it. And I remember the meme stocks were GME and AMC, so when you've been trading for long enough, you remember which stocks were moving together and if I don't remember, there's gotta be at least one person in the 2,000 member community of MIC to remember it and that's how we remember it. But don't overcomplicate it. You are in the community to learn from us and you are in the community to see it from us, so don't think that you have to remember every single sympathy. Someone in the community is gonna remember and then we lean on those people to help us all together until when is the smart cap market gonna remain slow?  We're still making money. What's gonna happen is there's gonna be a massive short squeeze that changes the tides for these stocks. I thought it was gonna be SIGA today, but when that massive short squeeze happens, the tables will flip. So that's it guys, I think I'm gonna wrap it up here. Pretty much showed you guys the watches today, showed you guys the trades on the day, showed you guys the profit and announced our new referral program. So this is a great way to earn some passive income guys. It's a great way to grow the membership. It's pretty much a no-brainer man. So if you guys have any questions, let me know. If you guys want to leave a comment about one lesson that you learned on today's video, I will pick someone to win a free MIC t-shirt. So like the video, leave a comment, subscribe to the channel, and I will pick one person to win a free MIC t-shirt. So hopefully this video helped guys. I did a webinar pre-market, I did this video today, I traded today, I'm a little bit tired, so I'm probably gonna take a one hour rest before I get back to helping members in the room guys. So thank you so much for showing up. Thanks so much for everything and I will see you guys back in the room.


Hi, everyone. My name is Ryan Hazen. I'm an Instructional Technologist and Moodle Administrator from Carroll College in Helena, Montana. Very quickly before I get started, I'm going to be taking questions for this session via Twitter. Please use the MootUS15 hashtag and then hashtag 4P for four pillars. I tried to keep the characters down so you could make your questions as verbose as possible on Twitter. Go ahead and do the questions via Twitter. I've got a bag full of goodies from our mountain moot that we hosted at Carroll College. We just did our fifth one this year. I've got some t-shirts and some neat stuff to give out to people who pose great questions and get cognitively engaged with the presentation that I'm giving here. This is about research, but it's more about an online course about online teaching that I teach to Carroll faculty based on the research that I did that other people have done. I wasn't actually doing research myself. I was aggregating research and trying to create a course on this. The academic department at Carroll came to me and said, hey, we need an online teaching course about online teaching so we can certify teachers and know that they're creating quality content when students go to access their courseware online. I said, okay, let's do this. The course that's eight weeks long, it's divided into four cycles, and each cycle is two weeks. I had five readings, four activities, 12 discussion posts, four assignments, four evaluations, and four journal entries. Of course, that really is an understatement of how much engagement this course creates. So you might ask, what literature? Here's the list of the literature. These slides are also on my presentation course on the U.S. 15 Moodle site. So you can go through and you can get a closer look at this bibliography. But the first thing that I noticed was that everybody who was talking about online teaching seemed to want to reduce best practices in online teaching to a set of principles that were easily digestible by professors as they were going to teach. It kind of makes some sense. So I thought to myself, you know, we've got this literature by Reagan, identification of competencies for teaching success, a big long list of principles, nine principles for excellence in web-based teaching, ten principles in effective online teaching. This principles paradigm seemed to really emerge when you go out and look at the literature on online teaching. So what emerged for me? Well, I wanted to make it even simpler than that. I thought nine or ten principles was too much. I had four cycles, so I said, let's reduce this to four principles. And what I came up with was be present, be engaging, quality content matters, and know your tools. So let's talk a little bit about being present. Here's what Lawrence Reagan had to say about it in this article about online teaching. Show up and teach, practice proactive course management strategies and establish patterns of course activities. Henry and Meadows had some very similar stuff to say. Sense of community and social presence are essential to online excellence and sometimes the little extras go a long way. And finally, I'm a little bit nervous about quoting Martin Dougy Amis when he's in the room, but I'm going to have to do it anyway because, well, his research was really good. So he's talking about the instructor, Peter, was doing close readings of student journals and started kick-starting discussions with carefully crafted questions that were designed to tease out what those students were already interested in. And this is a really good explanation of what I mean by being present online.  Where the student has an assignment, they toss her book aside and head out to a party. Well, one thing that you can do to try and combat this is have really clear expectations, view by times, and patterns of course activities. So that was the reason for the cycling of this particular course. And you can see this emerge in lots of other literature about this. So once you have view by times and your students have clear expectations about what they can do, they finish their assignment before they head out to that party. Now, you're not going to stop your student from going out and doing whatever they're going to do, but you can give them a timeframe that makes them engage with your material in a responsible way. And it's important for you as the online instructor to model this for them. This is, I think particularly, let me get back to that, precise clear expectations. I noticed this trash can is like right over there. And I noticed that precise clear expectations are just as important in the real world as they are in the online world. Does anybody notice what's going on here? Trash only? No trash? Have you ever wound up with a contradictory statement in your online course that you restore it time after time, you can find this happening really easy and you have to pay attention because if you're not clear with your expectations, your students don't know how to engage appropriately with your courseware. And this is what one of my professors, a theology professor at Carroll College, had to say, first I was skeptical of the view by times. I shook my fist at E. Ryan. Then I found these view by times helped me. If I actually viewed by a certain time, I inevitably began reading and reflecting a bit, giving me more time than I otherwise would have had to engage the material. I believe it also upped the quality of my appropriation of the material. I take back my initial fist shaking. Now aside from my professor shaking his fist at this E version of me who was out there causing him consternation when he wanted to be doing something else, I was enamored with this idea of myself having an, I wasn't present. I was somewhere else doing something else while Eric was shaking his fist at his laptop. But I was present in his mind because I had established my expectations clearly up front and I had followed through with those expectations with him. That created presence in his mind of me when I was not there. That fascinated me. So that's what I mean when I say be present. Not just get in there and engage in the discussions, but be present enough to have your students know what you would be telling them if you were standing next to them right then. So let's talk about how to be engaging. Now this is something a little bit different than being present. Again, I'm going to quote Martin from his 2003 Ed Media article. For each topic, students were required to read two, sometimes three papers and make journal entries. Reflecting on the professional implications was reserved as the main subject of these discussion forums. So students are not just reading, they're reading and doing some reflection. This is these feedback cycles that Martin was talking about in his keynote. Getting you involved and getting you engaged, doing something with the material rather than just being a passive recipient. You have to be active. You have to be engaged to really truly learn something. Henry and Meadows also had a lot to say about this. These guys from the University of Lethbridge. In the online world, content is a verb. This is a great principle. In the online world, content is a verb. Do not forget that because content has to be active. It can no longer be passive. Also, sense of community and social presence, this is going to come up almost every time. I'm going to talk about that a little bit more. Sometimes the little extras go a long way. I encourage you to read this article and contextualize some of these principles in terms of engagement. Here's what Lawrence Reagan from the Penn State World Campus had to say about that. Help maintain forward progress with little nudges. Finally, in the core competencies document, encourage active learning. Give prompt feedback. Emphasize time on task. Engage in learning activities. That's verbatim what this principle is. I think of engagement as being two basic categories. There are a lot of more categories of engagement, and you can get really specific with this, but I'm going to try to stay broad here. First, I'm going to talk about cognitive engagement. What cognitive engagement is, for those of you who may not be familiar, this is my favorite definition. Bonwell and Eisen from this 1991 Higher Education Report. Students must do more than just listen. They must read, write, discuss, or be engaged in solving problems. More important to be actively involved. Students must engage in such higher-order thinking tasks as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Anybody know blooms? We're going to talk about that in a second. Active engagement can be defined as instructional activities involving students in doing things and thinking about what they are doing. I really want to focus, first of all, on these two parts. Read, write, discuss, or be engaged in solving problems and getting students involved in doing things or thinking about what they're doing. So how do we do this? Well, it's not as simple as it seems. You can say that, yes, but let me give you a concrete strategy that you can use. We call it chunking. Carol, I've heard other terms for it. Basically, you break up knowledge and comprehension activities into smaller chunks and insert engagement activities in between those chunks of content. So you might give a student, say, an online video, and then they look at that for five to 20 minutes, and then you want them to engage in something about that video, where they either write an essay or maybe do a multiple-choice answer question or a matching question that's carefully designed to help them engage with that content.  Maybe a web article or some other sort of article that you want them to look at. And then, again, after about five to 20 minutes, you need to engage them in some sort of activity that's going to force them to think about it. Because if they have to respond to a multiple-choice question or to an essay question or to a draw it question or to whatever sort of question format you're using, they can't just ignore that material. They have to run it through their brain. They have to do some work with it. And there's really good cognitive science research to support and prove this. If you're interested in that, read Daniel T. Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School. Very, very good book. So, yeah, you need to chunk your materials, especially online. Also, automated feedback for formative assessment. Remember quizzes in Moodle? I think Diane... I can't remember Diane Dell. Dr. Diane Dell was talking about this earlier in Apachakucha. And she was talking about using quizzes for formative learning activities. Not just summatively, how much do you know? Can you prove it to me? But to get you involved with the content. And the great thing about Moodle quizzes is it gives you this automated feedback so the student knows right away if they're getting it or not. If you structure that quiz well, it's a learning activity, not just an assessment activity. Another thing, here's what Maria Brosnan, a nursing professor at Carroll, had to say about this. It's been a great opportunity to experience the role of a student. She gained a better understanding of the types of learning activities available on Moodle, as well as how these activities can be implemented to achieve different learning outcomes. Enjoyed the short videos, followed by the various activities. I've noticed how much better I understand the information after completing these activities. That was really positive when that came up naturally, organically in our forum. So I'm back to the two types of engagement. Now I'm going to move from cognitive to social engagement. These sort of act in two different places. I'm going to quote Martin one more time. If you want people to be socially engaged in their learning, you have to privilege a focus on collaborative discourse, encourage individual development of meaning through construction and sharing of texts and other social artifacts, and apprentice learners into communities of practice which embody certain beliefs and certain behaviors. I want to stop here and point this particular thing out. You can be a mediocre online teaching about any subject except for online teaching. In this course, I had no choice but to walk the walk. You have to walk the walk because you have to apprentice your learners into communities of practice by embodying the beliefs that you're trying to teach them. This is paramount to remember for people that are teaching pedagogy online. You have to walk the walk. So targeted messaging is another way to engage students. Perhaps you guys have seen this course participation report in Moodle. You can tell when a student has or has not posted to a particular activity, and you can send them a message based on that. You can say, hey, I can see that Ryan Hazen and Billy's student did not engage in this activity. I'm going to send them a message and I'm going to say, hey, something like this right here. Let me show you my targeted message that can get connected back to my... Here we go. So after every assignment and after every due date, I sent a message to the students in the course. If you did not complete, you got a message like this. Hi, I see you didn't complete your evaluations for evaluations one. I had to put a zero in the grade book, though you have three more chances to improve your evaluation grade. And I go on to discuss how important it is that we're socially engaged with one another, that the other students in the class are relying on you to give feedback to them for their own growth and learning process. And then I wrap that up with a reminder, hey, thanks for reading. Don't forget, this is the next assignment that's coming up in our course cycle. But equally important is to send messages to those people that did complete the assignment. Perhaps even more important that you send messages to people that did complete the assignment, telling them they did a good job in thanking them for being there for the other students in the course that need their support to learn as much as they can. And this came from... My pedigree is in K-12. I was an eighth grade English teacher for four years. I had a paperless classroom and iPads, a learning management system and all that stuff. And one thing that I learned about when I was in the K-12 environment was a ratio of positive to negative interactions with students, a ratio of positive interactions to corrective interactions. And this graph that you're looking at right here, it's hard to see from there, but this is from a 2011 report where they had a baseline, which was at the beginning, the gray line is the amount of time students are disrupting the class in the K-12 classroom, and the black line is the ratio of positive to corrective interactions. So what you see is an inverse relationship. Now, a positive interaction can be as simple as, hey, you brought a pencil to class today. Nice work. That's an expectation I have for you. You remembered your notebook. I'm really proud of you for doing that. I know it's difficult for you to get to your locker from third period to come in here for fourth period.  That's what I like to see in my classroom. And what you notice is when you start doing even these little things, students start to seek more of them. We are hardwired to want positive feedback from our people that are in our lives. And if you as the teacher take the role and do that online, this works just the same way. You send those messages out when people have completed their activities in appropriate ways and say, I appreciate that. That's important. This class is not as good as it could be without you. That matters. And that's social engagement. So this is what a couple of professors had to say. Ryan Howes from Spanish, I particularly appreciate the emphasis on social engagement. Sam Alvey, who's an amazing biology teacher. Social engagement is really valuable in helping students from various backgrounds and preparation work on material groups and learn more effectively. It's your job to make your online class a place where people can make these social connections with their peer groups. It does matter, especially in places where people come from diverse cultural, socioeconomic, and ethnic backgrounds. So that's being engaging. Let me move on to quality content. Lawrence Reagan in his 10 principles document says quality counts, and I particularly like this one, number 10, double click a mile on my connection. That's important. You can see what students are seeing. That's why we're doing this online teaching course where the professors are the students. They have to do this. So, Henry and Meadows, this is a good one. Technology is a vehicle, not a destination. And great online courses are defined by teaching, not technology. So I want to talk a little bit about some basic pedagogy here. I'm going back to this Bonwell and Eisen definition, and I want to focus in on this part now. Students have to engage in higher-order thinking tasks, such as synthesis, analysis, and evaluation. This is a direct reference to Bloom's taxonomy. And for those of you who are not familiar with Benjamin Bloom, he and a bunch of other people came up with Bloom's taxonomy, which was a hierarchy of cognitive activities. And they came out with this in 1956, and it's still relevant today. That is an incredibly long shelf-life for any academic pedagogical theory. This has been in the academic lexicon for over half a century. We should be looking at it and paying attention to it, whether we're teaching in person or online. So it wasn't just Bloom. It was Bloom and all these other guys, and I bet if they knew how long this theory was going to last, you know, Crattwall might have said, hey, let's call this Crattwall's taxonomy, alright? And in 2000, Crattwall actually did get together with this guy, Anderson, and they reworked it. They put synthesis at the top of the pyramid. And let me give you my quick and dirty on what Bloom's taxonomy is. Okay, so if you can know something, if you have knowledge, you can tell me that 2 plus 2 equals 4. But if you don't comprehend it, you can't tell me that, by extension, 2 plus 3 equals 5, and 2 plus 4 equals 6. Comprehension is a global knowledge of an idea, whereas knowledge is just the ability to repeat back to me what I tell you. Application is your ability to take that arithmetic and complete, like, a word problem with it. Two trains are traveling. One's coming from St. Louis, one's coming from Cincinnati, one's going 40 miles an hour. When are they going to run into each other? That doesn't give you a math problem. You have to come up with a way to figure that out using what you know of arithmetic. Analysis is your ability to take apart someone else's application of arithmetic and understand what they did. If you do that math problem, you can look at it and work backwards to figure it out. Evaluation is your ability to say this solution to the problem is better than that solution to the problem. This one's more elegant. This one's tighter. You did extra steps you didn't need over here and you got the wrong answer or something like that. And then, finally, synthesis is your ability to have applied, analyzed, and evaluated so many times that you come up with something totally new, like algebra. If we're talking about arithmetic all the way up, everybody at some point had done so much algebra that they synthesized a whole new idea out of their experiences with arithmetic and moved into algebra. This has happened a few other times in mathematics. That's the end of my mathematics knowledge. I was an English major, so keep that in mind. Moving on from Bloom's taxonomy, how do I apply this? How do I tell my students to engage in, quote, higher-order thinking activities? Where this wheel that indicates verbs that you can use to direct students to engage in particular cognitive tasks? So if I wanted a student to analyze something, I might say, I want you to deconstruct the new deal. That means take it apart and explain why each part comes together. And then I want you to maybe critique the new deal based on its effects after they implemented it. That's your ability to say, hey, was it good? Was there something else that could have been better? Was there something particular wrong with it? And then finally, if I wanted you to synthesize, I might say develop a different economic plan that would have addressed the United States' needs during the Great Depression. So all of these questions imply knowledge, comprehension, and application, because they're above them in the hierarchy of cognitive tasks. You can't analyze the new deal you can't evaluate the new deal if you can't deconstruct it. And you can't synthesize a plan that would have done something different for the United States in the Great Depression if you hadn't evaluated the new deal for yourself. And if you don't have that whole pyramid, you're not really understanding the topic in the way that you possibly could. So when you privilege those higher-order thinking tasks, your students are doing a lot more than just answering that question cognitively. There's all this sort of deep knowledge and comprehension and application activity going on. So that's really important with quality content. And coming from this particular professor, Jamie Dolan, a sociology professor at Carroll, this is a tremendous compliment. I've been surprised at how much one can really do with an online course in terms of pedagogy. I had really thought that it would be a lesser teaching and learning method. I am actually thrilled to realize how much I really didn't know and how much I have learned and can learn in regards to online teaching. Again, organic discussion post. This wasn't in an evaluation or anything. And having seen the course that she put together when we finished this online teaching course is just thrilling, absolutely thrilling. The student evaluation data has been overwhelmingly positive, a ton of engagement, a lot of good stuff getting done there. So finally, I'm going to go last to know your tools. In this course, Lawrence and Reagan would say quality counts. Again, double click a mile on my connection. And then finally, Henry and Meadows up at the University of Lethbridge. This is a good one. A great web interface will not save a poor course, but a poor web interface will destroy a potentially great course. It's not so important that it can make your course great, the web interface, the tools that you use. But it is so important that it will ruin your course if you don't construct it appropriately and use the right tools. So again, Martin was talking about this in that 2003 paper. Tools for peer rating were added to forums. The separate ways of knowing, separate and connected was added as a scale. And this was at the very beginning of Moodle. So they're starting to add functionality. They're starting to throw in tools based on their experience teaching in this new tool, Moodle. So some of those tools that we have looked at in this course include lesson, quiz, workshop, schedule, or wiki forum, glossary, database, questionnaire, and choice. And the way that the course was structured is we would do the reading. We would have an engagement activity with the reading, a quiz or a lesson module where you had to do things while interacting with the reading. Then we would have a discussion about that. How might I use this in my particular discipline? And then we had a workshop where you submit a link to whatever the module of that particular cycle was in a different course that you had made. And we used a common rubric based on the reading from that week to evaluate each other's modules that we created. And then you look at your evaluations, you do a personal reflective journal entry to try and ingest that and look back at it when you're done with the course. So those are the four things. Raging quality content matters and know your tools. I invite you to go on to the US MOOC 15 site and look up this presentation because I just restored my online course on to the Moodle for you guys to look at. It's got the lessons, it's got the discussion forums, it's got my little video tutorials in there, it's got links to all of the literature and the full bibliography, the syllabus and all that. I really hope that you guys will take a look at that and benefit from it because I've benefited from so much that the Moodle community has shared with me. So thank you guys a lot for everything. Should I get out of here, Michael, or do I have time for questions? I was going to look at Twitter here and see if we've got any... Don't project Twitter. Was there somebody else who's using that hashtag? Oh, okay. That would have been... Hold on, let me see what's going on there. We're all adults here, come on. Is anyone in the room got a question for now, though? Hello? All right, yeah, we'll do it live. Go ahead. You may have already said this, but how many faculty went through your course? Oh, I actually forgot to say that. The first iteration had six faculty and then I went and did a presentation about it to our faculty assembly and the word of mouth got out and then for the next iteration I had to go west to be part of the course. I had to break that into two separate iterations of the course with 15 each and I'm halfway through the third iteration altogether right now. So I've got students doing stuff right now, too. Any more questions? We actually gave them a $200 stipend to take the course. The first thing, and they're not required, although I think academic wants to go that direction, and the stipend does not justify all the work that you do. I first said to the professors, expect about four hours of engagement per week. I think I based that on a slightly quicker words per minute than most people use, so I had a lot of professors who said it took me six, eight, or sometimes even 12 hours a week to do the work, which was great and I'm glad that they engaged at that level. But at the same time I was trying to keep it slim to do it during a semester when they were also teaching. So yeah, I've got some things about that, but it was a stipend and voluntary, but after this iteration we'll probably have a requirement before you teach online. Any more questions for Ryan? Did you find any from that Twitter feed that were mentionable? I hope that's not too long-winded. Is Jason here someplace? We've been going back and forth about the whole issue of engagement and I was trying to get at the question of does formative assessment with automated feedback free up time for instructors to do more engagement because of the whole problem of online teaching taking more time than face-to-face generally speaking? I think that at the outset, no, because you have to construct that feedback and do intelligently designed questions to provide relevant feedback at the right time. So once you have the courseware constructed in your second iteration, I found with this course, I took maybe 30% of the time of the first iteration of the course because I had that courseware already set up and it was just a matter of tweaking it. So yes, it can, but I would be wary of telling a professor it's going to save you time out of the gate. I would say this is going to require some serious investment up front and a really heavy maintenance of the social atmosphere as well. It takes a lot of instructor time. So the place where I think online teaching especially helps with efficiency for professors is the workshop module. You can't feasibly assess assessment, assess student assessments of other students work in a way that the workshop module does. So that saved a whole lot of time and just augmented the output of the students. Yes and no. And it allows you to do more as what's more important. You're engaging your students more intensely. You'll be happy to talk about that more later. We've got time for about one more question after this. For the course content we know quality control is very important. I'm wondering whether you use any guideline checklist like quality matters to double check the content? I didn't. The main checklist that I was looking for is essentially the four principles that I was talking about today. I didn't deploy any out of the box quality checking like quality matters. But the check that they have here at the University of Minnesota I think that was circulating around is an excellent document. I took a look at that and I would use that in my institution any day. So that can be useful. As far as targeted messaging that's really neat what you were doing both for those who didn't and those who did participate. How is that different than just giving feedback in like an assignment or grading spot as well as you must use some system for making that happen like automating it or copy paste or something? Well the course participation report can only send two messages. There's the did complete and the did not complete and for the students that did not complete there is no feedback box next to the assignment because they didn't turn it in, right? So and also course participation can give you views so I would say have you viewed the reading, have you viewed the activity because I didn't just have a complete the activity by Wednesday at 11.59. I had view the activity by 11.59 on Monday and then complete the activity by 11.59 on Wednesday. So that reading activity you have to look at it two days in advance which emphasizes time on task and if they have not viewed that activity by the view by time then you send them the targeted messages and say hey I see you didn't view it. You've still got two days to complete it but you're slipping, you know jump back on the on the Moodle train. So do you just copy paste those messages I copy and paste them or modify them or write them. I keep a list of the ones that I sent in the last iteration of the course in a separate document. I can copy and paste them in and it also helps if you put in specific things about the course like the activity says something that Billy student talked about this week in the discussion and think about that. Making connections between the cycles was a really high priority for me in that targeted messaging and in the discussion forums as well. Alright, thank you very much Ryan. It was an excellent example of taking theory and testing it in real world situations with data.


Hey y'all, this is Kyla Denigow and you're listening to a bonus episode of the UR Lawyer podcast. You might also be watching it, but more on that later. This is a special bonus episode to wrap up season four of the UR Lawyer podcast. So first of all, I want to thank you all for listening to the most recent 16 episodes. I had so much fun. I talked to data privacy We talked to life coaches, travel bloggers, college professors, and financial experts who are also lawyers, okay? Because lawyers can do absolutely anything and lawyers are doing any and everything. And I am sharing all of their stories with you. So as you know, in the past, we have talked to yogis. We talked to filmmakers. We talked to health and beauty executives. We also talked to people who owned a law truck where they would travel around and meet the people wherever they were. Okay? So again, if you know anyone with an exciting hobby, interest, or non-traditional job who happens to be a law school graduate, send them my way. I want to talk to them. I want to share their story. I want to make sure people know that they can do absolutely anything with their law degree. Okay? So there are two really big announcements that are happening in this bonus episode. The first one is if you haven't noticed or if you're new to the podcast, let me let you know that you, our lawyer podcast, is now a weekly podcast. You heard that right. I have pushed myself out of my comfort zone and there will be weekly episodes released every single Thursday. Does that mean Thanksgiving? Yes. Does that mean the Thursday before Christmas? Yes. Every single Thursday we're putting out an episode. I never skipped holidays before. I'm not skipping holidays now. Okay? So for the past two years, two years and some change, I was releasing bi-weekly episodes. So every other Thursday there was a new episode of the You Are Lawyer podcast. I'm not doing that anymore. Weekly episodes because I like to work ahead. Okay? I typically have at least six to eight episodes recorded at any given time. Why am I sitting on the content? Get it out there to the people. And the second special announcement, drum roll, there are YouTube videos that correspond with most of the podcast episodes. Most because like I just told you, I have a lot of content recorded in advance, which means that there are some episodes that I have already recorded and I did not ask the guests if they wanted to record video. If that happened, I apologize, but I did not record the video. And that's because the fun of podcasting is that you can look pretty crazy. You don't got to put on lipstick. You don't have to put on a clean shirt. You should, but you don't have to, right? Because you're only hearing my voice. You're only listening to the questions and my preparation. But people have been asking for the video, but people write me in my DMs, which are direct messages on social media. People respond to the bi-weekly newsletter. And if you're not receiving that, I don't know why not. Go to urlawyer.com, subscribe to get the bi-weekly newsletter. You get to hear about the life behind the voice of the UR Lawyer podcast.  Can I find UR Lawyer in other places? Yes, you can. So if you are interested in watching the videos, please go to Kyla Denango on YouTube, or you can just search Kyla Denango and you will find that you are a lawyer video. I've already released one YouTube video that was corresponding with episode 56 of UR Lawyer, which is an interview with Sam Olay, who is the founder of Legal Funnel. If you're interested in that, go watch it. And in the future, you will be seeing additional YouTube videos that come out with the podcast episodes. Okay. You'll hear us talking about it. We'll say, hey, if you're watching us, we're doing this or hey, if you're watching blah, blah, blah. So I'm pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Season five is all about new things, stretching, changing, expanding. And so there will be weekly podcast episodes. And in addition to most of the episodes, there will be a YouTube video that you can watch, including this bonus episode. So thank you for listening. And I really hope you enjoyed season four of UR Lawyer and season five starts next week, November 17, 2022. Okay. And I will talk to you next week. Bye.


As the title suggests, I clean up subways for a living. It's not a glamorous gig, but it pays the bills, and it's not all bad. You get to see a lot down there that you wouldn't elsewhere. Talented musicians busking for pennies, proposals, and quirky street art. That being said, I've seen a lot of awful stuff as well. Just the other day, I cleaned up some remnants from a suicide that had splattered all over the platform. Then there was this one time where a pair of bums had gotten into a knife fight and spilled most of their insides across the off-white walls. That was pretty bad, to be honest. Yet, everything I've seen paled in comparison to what I encountered during the lockdown. I'm not going to string out a long-winded tall tale of elder things or skinwalkers, nor is this going to be one of the stories my granddad told me when I was a boy after he'd had one too many whiskies. No, I'm just going to tell you all about a particularly miserable, rainy New York night and the strange man I encountered on a deserted subway platform. So here's my story. An awful gloom had set in over the city, enshrouding all its silvery towers and bright vivid lights under a thick black cloud. I was practically drowned by the downpour as I scampered down the slippery subway steps. As you can imagine, I was eager to hang my damp jacket up and slip into my oh-so-glamorous gray janitorial outfit, if only to get out of my sopping wet clothes. Then, after a quick chug of coffee, I unlocked the cleaning cupboard and got to work scrubbing. Nothing was too out of the ordinary to begin with, just your usual mess really.  However, generally it wasn't too bad. Having said that, there was this really odd glop of God knows what that really turned my stomach. It was smeared along one of the platform edges.  A smell I can only describe as a cross between rotten fish and green furry meat. However, as I scrubbed and scrubbed at it with a mop, that's when the most wretched thing came slipping out from the gelatinous slush. Coated in white and black fur, I realized immediately what it was. It was a cat, or what was left of one at least.  As awful as it was, I'd seen things similar after rats had chewed through wires. Yet sadly, this was the first animal I'd mopped up after being reduced to a furry soup. Still, there was something about this squishy cat gunge that seemed different. Firstly, cats aren't likely to chew through wires. And secondly, all the times I've found piles of rat soup, they've been further in the tunnels close to wiring around the tracks. Speaking of rats, that was something that was missing. It was only when thinking about those gloopy mounds of rat slime that I realized I'd not seen a rat for weeks. You may be thinking, so what? Well, anyone who works down here, beneath the city, will tell you the place is crawling with rats. Roaches, too. But always rats. Of course, I didn't expect to see a swarming, rodent, tide come washing through the station, but I expected to see your odd rat in the bins. They were always picking out on someone's leftover Big Mac. And yet, there wasn't a solitary specimen at all. Anyway, as unusual as that was, I just chalked it up as odd and got back to work. Time rolled on and as it got darker outside and the cold air was starting to creep its way into the dingy subway, the place was uncharacteristically empty, save for myself and a pair of regular vagrants who would come down to get away from the unforgiven elements above. The pair were like an old married couple inseparable and they had been on the street for as long as I had been scrubbing them. However, the pair didn't keep me company. They abandoned me in favor of the warm subterranean tunnels. I know I should have stopped them, but the subways weren't running as frequent or in some cases at all. So I thought, what harm could it do? Let them have a warm night away from the biting chill of the city. If you hadn't already guessed, the reason for the oddly vacant platform was the recent pandemic. We'd only just gone into lockdown, you see. And for the most part, people did as they were told and stayed home. So it didn't unsettle me that the place was practically empty. Having said that, I'd be lying if I said that the lack of sound wasn't a little eerie. I'd gotten accustomed to the bustling crowds, the amateur musicians and the sound of running subway carts. For a moment, I thought I heard something. A noise coming from one of the tunnels up ahead. It sounded something similar to a rattle or a tapping. It sort of went clickety-clack, but rapidly. A little confused, I called out to see if anyone was there. But no one replied and I didn't hear the noise again. So I just wrote it off as my mind playing tricks on me. Anyway, you remember that homeless couple I mentioned? Well the fella in the relationship had become a bit of a mate of mine.  Still, the bloke wasn't too bad.  Well, I'd just finished emptying one of the bins when I saw him come stumbling out from the tunnel. It had only been 30 minutes or so since I had previously seen him enter with his girlfriend Ellie, or smelly Ellie as the lads call her in the watering hole I frequent. Strangely, she wasn't with him. And I remember thinking how odd it was, because like I said, the two were always side by side. However, I wondered if maybe he was going out to score for them and thought I best mind my business. He didn't rush up the steps and back into the cold for a score as I imagined. No, instead he started approaching me. Closer his dirty wet shoes squelched and I continued to scrub at a very stubborn brownish stain on the floor. Sorry, no sigs today Harry, I told him, without looking up. The wife suddenly decided after 25 years we actually needed our lungs. I laughed. But none of Harry's usual jovial banter came pouring from his mouth. Instead, all I could hear was his panicked, heavy breathing. Looking up, I saw an unfamiliar sight. Harry's bearded face was sheet white and soaked in fear. Harry, are you okay? I asked, I, I, he stammered. With his wide eyes and his spooked demeanor filling me with worry. What is it?  I joked, but he didn't laugh. He didn't say anything. He just kept looking around, glancing around the green painted pillars as if he was expecting someone. I've seen him. He blurted out with a cold sweat running down his face. Who? I asked the Grinner.  The Grinner, for those of you who don't know, is an urban legend of sorts. Been going around since I was little, up there with mole people and surrogators. Anyway, the story goes, a pair of electricians were working on the lines down in the subway. And they said they saw a man with a ghostly white face peering out from the darkness. The two asked what he wanted, tried to speak to him. But all he did was grin an unsettling smile towards them. Anyway, one of the men got in his face and told him to go. When all of a sudden, he was dragged into the darkness by the Grinner. The other electrician ran for the hills and refused to finish the job.  There was one in which a group of teenagers went on some urban exploration of abandoned tunnels, when the Grinner appeared and killed all but one of them. Then there was a tale where a sewer worker was snatched by the Grinner and never seen again. You get the idea. Basically, anytime a druggy or one of the homeless disappeared or went missing down in the tunnels, they blamed it on the Grinner. I never put much stock in the stories to be honest, and I was quick to scoff at Harry's tale. Oh, Harry. Come on. You're as old as I am, man. We've seen enough of this world to know that ghosts and boogie men aren't real. We've got enough real life monsters to deal with. I told him. Ignorant and dismissive to a story, I turned to finish cleaning the gunk on the floor but he grasped hold of my arm and spun me back around to face him. No, listen, please. Harry snapped, squeezing my arm tightly. All right, Harry, calm down. Tell me about it. I said, Harry looked right, then left, and scanned the area for someone or something before leaning in close and telling me he took Ellie. He took her into the dark. Harry whispered in a hushed tone as if worried that the Grinner might hear him. What are you talking about? I asked now genuinely worried for his girlfriend. We came down here, went into the tunnels for warmth and everything was fine. Suddenly there's more of us down there, but tonight we were the only ones. He began recounting anyway.  When we heard it, the clicking, the chattering, it's hard to explain. It was a strange clicking sound. That's all I can say. Gradually, the clicking got louder and louder and we could tell it was moving towards us.  Harry said, his voice trembling on every word, Ellie being fearless, stormed up towards him. She told him he should leave if he didn't want her to slap the smile from his head. But before I had time to react, he snatched her up and they both disappeared into the darkness. Jesus, where is she, Harry? Where's Ellie? I urgently questioned. I don't know. I tried to get her back, but I couldn't find them. It was dark and her screams. They were everywhere. I couldn't.  Don't worry. I'm sure the police will be able to get her back. Just stay here. I'll call him. Try not to worry. I said, as I left my mop and bucket and began rushing towards the cleaning closet. For a moment, I thought I heard a clicking sound, but pretty much ruled it out is just my imagination playing tricks after hearing Harry's tale. We should go. Harry mumbled, but I assured him everything was going to be fine. You just wait here. I'll get my phone. I told him. It wasn't far. I had just left it in my jacket, which was hanging in the cleaning cupboard, not more than a few steps away. I thought it would be okay. I thought he would be safe. How was I to know what would happen next? Opening the door, I made sure to leave it a bit ajar so I could keep an eye on Harry. Then I dialed 911. Speaking to the woman on the other end, I recounted Harry's tale about he and his homeless girlfriend were sleeping in the tunnels when a man attacked and abducted her. The dispatcher let out an audible sigh and asked if this was a prank. When I said no, she then asked if Harry was on drugs and was quick to close down our conversation by telling me she'd send someone round in a couple hours. Then the line went dead, but as the tone rang in my ear, I noticed another sound. That strange clicking noise was back, only it was a little clearer than before. While my fingers began dialing 911 again, my eyes wandered across to the crack in the door, though only partially open. I could see Harry, but to my surprise, he wasn't alone.  A man, I think. Then Harry's voice became raised and his words became more aggressive.  Is this the grinner I thought? No, it couldn't be. That was just a ghost story, I told myself. Oh, Harry shouted and yelled so loudly in fact that I couldn't hear the 911 dispatcher pick up my call. I was fixed on him and the strange man grinning at him. There was something about that smile. It was haunting. His whole pale face was ghostly in fact. The way it never changed its expression as though it was frozen or made of stone. I tried to talk to the dispatcher, but my attention kept drifting back to watching Harry point his finger and spit profanities at the porcelain faced fellow. What did you do to her? Where's my Ellie? Harry screamed, thumping his fist against the unmoving smile. At this point, I half expected Harry's hand to pass straight through the stranger and prove all those spooky stories true, but it didn't. Harry's hand just struck his face and bounced back. Relief washed over me. At least this proved it. The guy was flesh and blood real, not some ghostly boogie man as Harry thought. But then, just as I was about to open the door and tell the strange fellow that I was calling the police, it happened before my eyes. The porcelain skin face of that smiling man split apart like the petals on a flower. The rest of his body did the same in a matter of moments. All his shabby clothing, his pasty ghostly skin had retracted into the crevices and fleshy joints that segmented his chitinous true form. Horror swelled in my stomach and a total bewildering fear washed over me, drowning me in dread. For what lay before my eyes challenged everything I knew to be true about the world. The thing outside, standing before Harry, was not human at all, but a charade. That man, that grinning man and his shabby clothing was some kind of camouflage. It was like a grotesque imitation of an orchid mannus, except instead of imitating the favorite flowers of their prey, this thing could assume the shape of a man. How a thing like this was possible, I do not know, nor do I seek to know why, though I suspect it is to blend in, to get close to its prey, to get close to us. Beneath the flickering halogen lights, it rose up. What was once a man had become a six-limbed, nightmarish, chittering horror and amalgamation of arthropod qualities. The grinner was long-bodied and similar to a roach. Although unlike a roach, it was silvery, like the silver fish that infested my grand's house, and even more strange, was its posture. For its form was separated into an upper body in thorax that vaguely resembled a humanoid shape while its lower body was more akin to a centaur, albeit with scuttling insect legs and a plated abdomen in place of hooves and a horse's body. Standing six feet from the ground upon four spiny haired legs, it loomed over Harry. Gone was its false smile, now in place of that porcelain grin was a mouthful of bladed mandibles. Beneath the fluctuating gloom, I could see its chitinous carapace clearly. It was painted in a strange mottled swath of greys and whites, covered in silvery spines and wispy hairs that jutted out from all angles. The poor vagrant stared on, mouth agape, and legs trembling. I wish I could say I had more bravery than him that I raced out to his protection and fought the beast off, but I didn't. I too shrank at the sight of it and all sense of courage drained out from me as its large oval compound eyes moved down to face Harry. He let out a cry and fell away from the giant bug, but its sickled arms grasped hold of him and pulled him in close to its plated chest. I wanted to help him. I did. But I froze. Even as the dispatcher asked for a response, her voice chirping hellos into my ear, I couldn't muster a word from my lips. I couldn't do a thing. All I could do was look on and watch as that thing opened its mandibles and began dining on Harry. Pieces of him were pulled apart like taffy as it raked and gnawed at his features. Last I'm churned at the sight of its sucking up strings of red ribbons from his gaping face. I covered my mouth, holding in any sound or distress that would pique that thing's curiosity. Still, I couldn't flee. I had to just watch and witness the fate that I knew would befall me should I exit the closet. Gurgling screams and squelching moans cried out as the insects hug tightened. There was a loud crack as its sickled arms sank deep into Harry's back and folded him up like a sheet. In mere moments, Harry's dirty brown beard chipped yellow teeth had been chewed up and blended into a red mush by the curved guillotine mandibles of that ashen beetle. Slowly, I backed away from the door, hoping it wouldn't see me. When by accident, I knocked over a broom. That damn broom almost cost me my life as it struck the floor. Not an audible tap sounded out and like the death bells tolling in a churchyard, that sound surely sang out my swift and immediate end or so I thought. To my relief and surprise, the insect though immediately aware of the noise did not come scuttling over to devour my face. Instead, the creature, whatever it was, chirped out a sound with its flesh draped mandibles clicking away. I obviously gave no reply to its strange language. I couldn't even move let alone speak. All I could do was just about stop my bladder from emptying itself all over the closet. Lucky for me, the sound of the broom must have startled the bug or at least worried it. As I glanced out through the crack in the door, I saw its crawling legs and ashen-plated body scurry off into the darkness, disappearing with Harry's body limply hanging in its clutches. I remained still and motionless, near catatonic with fear for hours and didn't move from the closet until I was certain the creature was gone. So, admittedly, there wasn't a moment where I was 100% certain that it wasn't watching and waiting in the darkness for me. Eventually, though, I managed to convince myself that it was safer to run than to remain in the closet, so I left the safety of the cupboard and sprinted running up the stairs and into the biting cold winds. With a safe distance, I phoned the police again, but by this point they well and truly thought I was just pranking them. Still, I tried to get them to believe me, to do a search for Harry and Ellie, but they already knew their names and had little concern for the vagrants. One officer who did come out, he shined his torch down a tunnel for a few minutes, remarked that those two were always getting into trouble of some kind and told me not to worry. Afterwards, I told my manager what I saw, but he just laughed me out of the room. Like a broken record, I tried and tried again to get people to listen. I called a pest controller and he angrily slammed the phone down after I told him the size of the insect. I wrote to the CDC, the City Hall, the governor. Those that replied told me that I should seek psychological help. Even my wife told me to stop with the story, reminding me that there were real problems in the world. So you see, no one believed me, or perhaps they just didn't care. They all just thought I was some sad old janitor who would huff too many cleaner fumes and hallucinated the whole thing. I wish that was the case. I wish that Harry was still alive, and that thing was but a figment brought to life by ammonia vapors. But most of all, I wish that I didn't still hear that clicking echo out from those dark, dank tunnels late at night.